Tire failure

It looks like Rossi and some other riders experienced a major tire failure at the MotoGP Assen round last week. Front and rear tire are literally missing some rather large pieces.

Adjustable paralever arm

With the raised rear end, the paralever arm has become too short. This little arm is originally designed to keep the shaft arm's angle constant (more or less). Depending on the year and options (some bike came with the sport suspension option), the paralever arm came mainly in 2 lengths : 385mm for standard and 365mm for sport and BCR. Well it's a really simplistic shortcut as it also depends on the shock length, but one can easily observe how different a standard, a sport and BCR are when it comes to suspension equipment and ride height.

With the new rear shock length (325mm), even the shortest arm could not make shaft arm as straight as it it used to be, making the bike's tail not as high as expected. A quick discussion with the nice people at MV Motorrad showed their adjustable paralever arm could be made to 355mm. Just what I needed.

Below are the new and old arms : 

The adjustable item is really easy to install and makes the rear end just the way I wanted.

Naked glories

I just love those old superbikes. They're literally oozing with race history and glorious memories.

Kawasaki ZXR750RR

Honda RC45

Ducati 888

Honda RC30

Sanding time

Took some time the other day to sand a spare seat unit found on eBay. These 955i plastic parts are rather rare to found nowadays, let alone in good condition, so when these popped up I clicked the "buy it now" button. 

As often on bikes of this era, the seat is made out of three parts that fit into each other using thin lugs. None of them were missing, but the paint had serious rashes on both side panels. I'm not sure what to do with the seat unit at the moment, but whatever the plan it's going to need a clean surface and that's what the sanding's for.

First for BMW

It had to happen one day and this was finally last Sunday at Donington : the first ever WSBK win for BMW. The team even went to make 1st and 2nd place in race 1 with Melandri and Haslam ... before they spoil the party in the race 2 where both would go down (Haslam hitting Melandri) in desperate pass moves in the very last bend of the race.

Bad luck for Guintoli

For once, I could watch a WSBK race (Monza round). For once, Sylvain Guintoli was on the 1st place on the start grid. For once, he had a good chance to win by far thanks to soggy conditions. But then, fate falls on his head and while he was completing the warm up lap before the race starts, his Ducati's electronics fried so he was forced to stop with no chance to make the bike's engine restart.

NOOOOOOOOO !!!

Better luck next time Sylvain. Keep the hard riding up !

Have you seen this bike ?

It's been a bit more than 3 months and a half now that Greeny left home to the Triumph Dealer for what was supposed to be a simple administrative task. Triumph France is known to be taking ages to deliver proper paperwork where Yamaha, Honda, Suzuki (these don't even charge the work) and BMW only take 2 to 3 weeks.

Now, I've been to the dealer last week to know where this all was heading, but mainly because now that the BMW is fixed and properly set up (more on that later), I have some spare time for the Triumph project. Add to that a couple of days off work and I was eager to give the project a full restart. With a promised remaining process time of "only" about 2 weeks, I've been advised to let the bike there rather than bring it home and start a proper track conversion. "Mind, if you had to bring the bike home today, you'd have to haul it back here in 2 weeks or so", said the dealer. Alright then ... I guess I'll have to wait with no guaranteed result of getting a full road agreement in the end.

Struggles

The face of struggles this year.

In the meantime, while not being as fast as the prototypes, the new CRT rule seems to have brought a whole bunch of new bikes on the rows. This could be the future actually.

Nice T3

Spotted this nice T301 the other day. Credit is on the pictures.

R1100S winter rebuild - Epilogue

It's been 3 weeks now since the rebuild is complete. There were only a few things left to do like the exhaust bracket and a bit of parts cleaning and fitting here and there.

That's how the fake O2 sensor looks once finished and fitted

 Both grips were worn and cracked and have been replaced with fresh ones while saving their heating wires

The exhaust bracket is now fixed

Once put back together, it seriously needed a test drive (or was it me ?). Overall, I'm rather happy with the result but it really needs some adjustments in the suspension area. The sag is much too big and there's way not enough compression and rebound damping for both front and rear. It's going to take some time to find the proper setup, so I'm keeping the adjustment keys with me on every ride.