BBQ

Had some friends over last Saturday to talk some shop and somehow we managed to a little work done.

Skyler adding a little Motul 20W50 sauce to his steak.

We managed to get the VFR started (on carb cleaner) I got it wired up last week, but we discovered that neither the neutral switch or the clutch safety switch were working. Had to jump the clutch switch.

Skylers 360, with all the times he's had this motor apart, he's become the 360 guru.

Check out my ABS

Acrylonitrile butadiene styrene that is. I love this stuff, if it wasn't so bloody heavy I'd make my next bike out of it. I work with ABS all day long most days, typically I'm making it into a handheld, or TV, or toy robot or something, a motorcycle fairing is nothing!  I got stuck at work tonight babysitting a mill, so I took a little time to work on the FZ600 upper.

I've already done some work to it, primarily stripping a lot of paint, and filling holes

 Here you can see one of the buttons I made to fill the mounting holes along the bottom. This will be all the fairing that the bike has for the time being, so to give it a little more of a finished edge, I cut down strips of ABS and solvent bonded them to the lower edge, built up a radius on the upper edge with dental resin and sanded it to a nice profile. In the picture the strips already on and sanded, the one laying next to it is what i started with.

Note the hole for the signals. Someone before me made a fairly nice patch with bondo, but they didn't put anything in to back it up, so it would never paint well. I knocked the one that was already cracking out....

 ...and made these...

I decided to give them a little shape to fit the space and not look quite so obvious.

Gluing:

I left the other bondo patch in. There's nothing wrong with the stuff, it's just not a good idea to bridge gaps with it. With these back plates in place everything should be fine.

Another project I was able to knock out was the drilling of the other side:

Started off with a two guide lines 

...and worked with a .5 inch strip of tape to place them all perfectly. 

I'm on the fence about the holes, I always thought they were kind of strange on the fireblade, but it's such an iconic design detail that I couldn't help myself. Especially since it's a Yamaha fairing.

rings and teeth

Working on the details

Attached and filled the front brakes... much safer to roll up and down ramps now (I dropped it the first time I brought it down, fortunately it didn't have any bodywork or anything at the time)

This though, was the most exciting thing to happen this week. I finally broke down and ponied up for a pair of serious stands for it. Happy Fathers Day to me!

 Brake side: not bad. Clutch side: toast. This needed to be done.

Picked the new ones up from a store on Ebay called Lucky Bike and I am quite impressed with the quality. The finish is killer.

Picked up an RK sprocket set from Motorcycle Superstore. I'm sure the quality's there, but the finish (which closely resembles the stock finish) on the rear is pretty nasty cheap looking chrome. I love the color of the front sprocket and wish they would have done the rear the same way. 

 

Stock sizes

 

Pretty

Lubing the threads so that I can get an accurate torque reading... As someone who likes to put theadlock on everything, this has always terrified me, but it's what the service manual says to do so I thought I'd give it a shot. By the way, you don't have to use such fancy oil, this was just one that has been sitting on my shelf since a friend gave it to me years ago.

As you may note, the pinch bolt needs to be tightened down quite a lot. I'll be taking care of that when I do the chain.

...and my next little project for tomorrow night:

Wow, hard to believe that's all that I got done this last week. My wife and daughter are down in Houston for these two weeks so I moved the VFR into the dining room where I could watch some of the hundreds of Top Gear episodes that my DVR recorded for me over the Memorial Day marathon while I worked on the bike... turns out I can't multi-task. So now the bike's back in the garage, maybe I'll have better luck tomorrow.

Speed holes

In a bid to get the bike back on the street I've pulled back my project goals for this summer. I'm thinking about just mounting the FZ600 upper and RC tail to it and running it as is for the season before I swap the R6 front end and the whole RC30 fairing in later.

With that in mind I cleaned up the upper a bit

and added some Fireblade style speedholes, just to confuse people

Also replaced the shifter cover which had been chewed up by a loose chain in its previous life

Welcome to 1989! How do I love thee

New additions

Some folks may know that a couple of months ago I became a father. So now I'm not allowed to spend as much time in the shop. I'd post a pic, but I've had pics of my loved ones misused in the past and am wary of that possibility. That being said, I did get these made:

They're made mo hold all the junk that the stock piece held plus the coils

I fear though that I may still have the angle just a little bit off, and may have to make yet another set, this bike seems to be all about wasting aluminum.

Frameup

Sub-frameup to be precise

I've been playing around with the subframe design for the VFR

This is a standard RC30 subframe, much smaller and lighter than the VFR sub

Originally I was going to go with aluminum tubing and started to mock up the design in MDF

But I think I can solve a few problems and come up with some slicker mounts if I do the whole deal in billet

This was the first mockup that I cut by hand on the band saw. The idea's sound but the angle needed tweaking.

Next was this:

These pieces will be cut out of aluminum later. I think the profile will work as it is, but I may cut the rails that mount the seat off and make them a separate ABS piece for more adjustability. Also I need to put mounts in for the regulator, fuel pump, and figure a way to suspend the battery in there. I like the billet idea because it will act as a heat sink for the regulator.