Quite a lot of activity on the old girl over the last week or two, and I’m 9/10 ( or probably more accurately, the bike is
) ready to race, yay!
So what have I done?
We have a quick-action throttle !
In keeping with the budget/team thrifty nature of this project, rather than waste the cost of a tyre or more on a nice blingy one, I’ve replaced the OE Suzuki throttle tube it was wearing with one from a 2017 R1, which until a couple of months back I’d had on my ZX6.
It just needed a small amount of metal removing from the standard Bandit RH switchgear housing and the outer end of the “pull” cable as the part of the tube that the cables sit within is a larger diameter and snagged a bit, but Mr Dremel sorted that out in no time
It’s a nice easy and cheap upgrade that has reduced the amount of throttle travel from the best part of 180 deg to 90, which of course was the main objective, and has allowed me to keep the standard RH switchgear and use standard length cables.
The forks are also now back in ( albeit wearing the same slightly tatty paint they came to me with), and it’s sitting on it’s wheels for the first time since I bought it.
I’ve also fitted the M1000RR front brake master cylinder ( with one of WavyDave’s nice little stainless reservoir brackets) and bled the brakes up.
I was wondering if this MC may be slightly too large a bore with the relatively low fluid capacity two-piston standard front calipers, but lever feels nice which bodes well, but I’ll only really know once I get it on track and start using it- if it is a bridge too far, then the (far less blingy) ancient OE one will go back on
I’ve also replaced the monstrosity that was the previous shark fin with a much more aesthetically pleasing cast black one, and drilled and tapped the underside of the swingarm to properly secure it- a definite upgrade over the self-tappers that the old one was (barely) attached with
And how it looked before, just for comparison- lovely eh
It also now has a rain light, wired into a switched power source with an extra little switch on the seat unit so it will only go on when it rains
And the tank, front mudguard and seat have been rattle-canned by me, which I’m not happy with either in terms of the colour combinations I’ve used, or the quality of finish, but well, as my brother Mart said, there will definitely be worse-looking bikes on the grid and I suspect he’s right, so it’s now painted and will start the season how it is now.
And now that the tank and seat etc are painted and on there I was able to run it down to my local friendly dyno men this morning to see how it ran, or of course didn’t- It was a good day and spent a very pleasant couple of hours chewing the fat with Gav and Dan and the bike didn’t disgrace itself either
I won’t be posting the dyno graphs online (walls have ears and some people don’t need to know how much it is or isn’t making
), but suffice to say I am very pleased with its performance- the motor picks up nicely, is fit and healthy and not using any oil, and nothing fell off or went bang either
We did a good few runs with the baffle / Db killer in and out, with only a 2hp difference at peak with the baffle in, which is great, and quite unexpected, but I guess it is a fair-sized can for a relatively weedy motor.
An interesting bit for me was that it was a little rich (A/F of 12.5-12.7) towards the top end so if I were inclined, there’s potentially a little more power to be had by going back down to standard-size main jets, but I’ll not be doing that as it’s making decent numbers and there is a lovely pretty much flat peak from 10 to 11.5k
So, what’s left to do then?
Sort a small oil leak from the ignition pick-up cover which we noticed at the end of the dyno sessions- at first I thought it may have been a cracked engine case as it is showing a bit of crash damage there
But on removing the cover, I can see there is no damage, and it is just a badly re-fitted gasket, it needs the gasket faces cleaning up and the (broken and bodged up with silicon) gasket replacing and the job’s a good ‘un.
One advantage of taking the cover off is that I was able to see that the motor is running the OE ignition rotor, which is good, as any non-standard ones ( the ones that advance ignition by 4 or 5 degrees apparently give really good gains on the 600s) are illegal, so is nice to know I’m legal
Apart from that, I need to set the rear sag to work out whether I’ll need to use a lighter spring (don’t think I will but until I try to set it I don’t know), and I still need to paint the belly pan and most importantly make some decent brackets to fit it to replace the cable-ties that previous owner was using.
I also want to change it to race-shift pattern for which I need to either turn the existing lever over if it’s possible, or if not, obtain an angled linkage boss for the gear change shaft so it will clear the bottom frame tube
Other than that, I’ll just be adding a few stickers, and getting on it, ride it, and see how I get on
Happy days!
)
- standard Bandit ones twist a looong way !
