How to fuck up a front end:

1.  Buy some Mullins 35mm trees and ebay some forks.  Add to frame and congratulate yourself on having great taste when it comes to narrow front-ends.

2.  Apply ruler between forks.  Accompany ruler round swapmeets, scrouge ebay, wrangle advice until realisation that the only drum your ruler vaguely approves of is from a cub 50 scooter which has an axle diameter of about 6.734 mm.

3.  Decide:  brakes or suspension.  Or machine your own hub but by that time you've already laced a Kempton found drum to the Borrani rim even though you knew it wouldn't fit but it was a twin leading shoe and you got carried away.  Brakes over suspension it is.

Chop (all important word) the fork tubes.

This is actually the first part I ever made on a lathe.

Milling in the lathe.

Taper practicing.

Taper turning.

At this point I drilled and reamed a hole.  Actually I snapped the pilot drill half way but seeing as it took me like two days making this part and working out how to use the lathe, I alternated.  Plunged an end-mill in about 2mm (the snapped drill bit rising into the hole in the end-mill), oxy-acetylened it, hammered protruding drill bit flat, plunged the end-mill another 2mm, repeat 10 times until mad with the world then enlarge messy hole to correct size.

Make a little axle.

Trim the fork tube caps.

 

OPTIONAL:  Advise all comfort cynics that you spent everyday for the last four years riding a completely rigid bicycle with 19mm cross-section tubular tyres at 180psi around crappy, pot-holed, English roads and you only had to see the doctor about an embarrassing lump on your anus once.  This should distract them from knowing best about vibration damage, cornering-grip, and other borings.