For a short while there was the possibility of it being yet another CRK cafe racer but the costs looked a bot on the high side and the lack of range and uncomfortable riding position didn't really appeal.
It had 12 months MOT on it, 45k+ miles and the previous owner said he had fettled it to get it running well and through it's MOT but hadn't gelled with so was moving it on. (What bells? I can't hear any bells!)
Anyway he brought it over and it started on the button and I rode it up the drive and nothing fell off, he seemed a nice enough bloke and he gave me lots of paperwork.
Anyway life took over over and it didn't move for a good while but I started making plans as to how I could make it less ugly, I posted previously about wanting to make it look more like this (not the brown seat obviously
) :
I'm also a fan of the Faster Sons XSR700 and there was a touch of similarity which I decided I might try and emulate.
So armed with ideas I joined a few T300 facebook groups and started reading up and looking at other peoples mods and asking a few questions, keeping my eyes peeled for spares and tips.
First thing that went were the union jack stickers - who needs 4 Union Jacks on a bike for christ sakes?! Next up was the rack, someone was looking for one on FB and it had already been labelled as unnecessary weight (which this thing has an abundance of) so that got swapped for a very nice bottle of gin. I could have held out for 2 bottles in hindsight but probably for the best I didn't.
I started using it for commuting and despite it being big and heavy didn't mid it once moving and the mid-range delivery is quite addictive. Once in the turn it felt stable but changes of direction needed a bit more planning than I was used to but put that down to my riding ability more than anything.
The next carbuncle that was irking me was the angle of the silencers, it may be practical for fitting panniers for them to angled down as they were but they are ugly and it turns out darned weighty too. Some oval Delkevics popped up on FB for cheap (£100 delivered) and they seemed to be well liked by other t300 owners so they went into the spares box. As they were first offered up I immediately realised I now had an issue and I overlooked - the mounting point on the rear footrest is different, no problem thinks I and heads off to FB to find some of the higher mount footrest hangers at which point I realised the exhausts might not be such a bargain after all. Not only are the higher mountings as rare as wooden toy animal excrement but people have realised this and decided to extract urine with asking prices. Thus began a long search. A LHS turned up for a reasonable Buy it Now so I snaffled that for £25 the RHS took much longer to locate and cost £40.
At the same time a riser bar kit with top yoke showed up for cheap so I bought that too, should fetch it's cost back easily if I didn't get round to fitting it.
Armed with exhausts and mounts I set about fitting them, all appeared well after some persuading was needed to get the old ones off and off I went for a test ride.
This is where the fuelling issues began. Now I had ridden the bike to work with old silencers on for a couple of months when it was dry and hadn't had any issues. On the test ride it wouldn't run on part throttle but would clear when fully open and would tickover just fine. As nothing else had changed except for the silencers, the old ones went back on but the problem remained, bugger what had I broken. After inspecting the headers and link pipe to see if I had persuaded something loose earlier and finding nothing I decided to bung it over to the tame mechanic and let him swear at it instead.
Picked up and after an initial stalling episode which turned out to be a lack of fuel in the tank all appeared well. Turns out the previous owner had similar mechanical ability to me and had lost various parts of the carbs whilst cleaning and rebuilding them.
As it had been away for a few weeks getting sorted (mechanic had been holiday mid - job) I had been riding the Griso a bit more and after the Sprint it felt like a tiny flickable thing. This coincided with me getting a bit more confident from just riding it further and more often.
On getting the Sprint back I started to think I might be flogging a dead horse, it was never going to look great and the handling felt more ponderous now I had been riding the Griso more for a few weeks. A bit more research on the FB groups led me to finding out it's quite common for most owners to want to speed the turn in up a little more and by lifting the forks through the yokes a you could emulate the Daytona / Speed Triple geometry. Finally got round to doing this last night and early indications are this have made the difference I was looking for
A few more rides to make sure but I think by the time Winter bites I might be looking for the other parts I need to get the fairing off ready for Spring. One of the fork seals has decided that sealing is no longer part of it's job description so a front end strip down will have to happen anyway.
So this is where I'm at for now - a long way to go ! I'll update as things progress allowing me to read back in the future just how much time and money I have wasted on something that in reality will probably end up being nothing like I wanted
