Tuesday, 21 May 2013
Bumper sticker
Currently in Monaco where they are setting up for the Grand Prix. In all the confusion I managed to sneak a sticker onto the team Ferrari truck!!
Saturday, 18 May 2013
European Invasion!
Me and will got the ferry from Portsmouth last night and have completed out first day in France. 280 miles, mostly in the rain made for some very grim riding!! Anyways, we are now checked into our hotel in Issoudun and getting ready for a well deserved beer!
Wednesday, 15 May 2013
Exhaust making
Ok, so over the last few weeks I have been chipping away at making the exhausts.
I bought a load of pipe; some 1.5" 180deg bends with different radii, some straight pipe. I wanted to go larger than this becuase I think 1.5" looks a little skinny, but reading up it seems that any bigger would not be good for the 650 engine. (750cc you can use 1.75" I believe..)
For a long time I liked the idea of taking the pipes high so that they avoided the pegs and foot controls (see TC's rear brake linkage issues!!), but then they start to get in the way of other stuff like kicker pedals and legs in particular! SO after a coat of thinking I decided that I would take the pipes totally under the bike out of the way of everything (apart from the ground!), and hopefully making the routing simpler.
Anyways, where to start... I had given TC a hand with his first set of pipes on the scrambler, so I knew that it was really a case of get stuck in, and cut some pipe. I ended up starting at the end;
You can see I bought a 180 deg 2" bend that I cut in half to make the end piece look a little meatier. Also bought some eccentric reducers to link them to the rest of the pipe (no way was I turning some out of stainless!!)
Zip ties and sharpies were applied liberally. Once I had this end piece I then jumped back to the engine side and started making my down pipes.
Again I just kept moving forward a bit at a time, lots of looking and lining things up. Its almost impossible to measure and mark out the bends accurately, so generally I would use the sharpie to mark it by eye, and then wrap some making tape round it to give me a straight line to work to.
Sometimes I used a curved piece, but for little tweaks its easier to just cut a slit in the straight pipe and bend it slightly
I also welded some baffles in. Its hard to tell from the photos, but they start at the end of the 1.5" section and protrude into the 2" piece. How effective this will be I have no idea, but I went with the theory that the closer to the end the better.
Yay one pipe done!! Then its just a case of making another one, the mirror image of this one....simple.....
If anything, making the matching pipe is harder because measuring identical pipe bends is almost impossible to do accurately. So they are slightly different, but I go with the theory that you can only see one side of the bike at any time so I should get away with it!!
They are just tacked together at the moment, so I need to weld them up, and add a mounting point under the frame.
I bought a load of pipe; some 1.5" 180deg bends with different radii, some straight pipe. I wanted to go larger than this becuase I think 1.5" looks a little skinny, but reading up it seems that any bigger would not be good for the 650 engine. (750cc you can use 1.75" I believe..)
For a long time I liked the idea of taking the pipes high so that they avoided the pegs and foot controls (see TC's rear brake linkage issues!!), but then they start to get in the way of other stuff like kicker pedals and legs in particular! SO after a coat of thinking I decided that I would take the pipes totally under the bike out of the way of everything (apart from the ground!), and hopefully making the routing simpler.
Anyways, where to start... I had given TC a hand with his first set of pipes on the scrambler, so I knew that it was really a case of get stuck in, and cut some pipe. I ended up starting at the end;
You can see I bought a 180 deg 2" bend that I cut in half to make the end piece look a little meatier. Also bought some eccentric reducers to link them to the rest of the pipe (no way was I turning some out of stainless!!)
Zip ties and sharpies were applied liberally. Once I had this end piece I then jumped back to the engine side and started making my down pipes.
Again I just kept moving forward a bit at a time, lots of looking and lining things up. Its almost impossible to measure and mark out the bends accurately, so generally I would use the sharpie to mark it by eye, and then wrap some making tape round it to give me a straight line to work to.
Sometimes I used a curved piece, but for little tweaks its easier to just cut a slit in the straight pipe and bend it slightly
I also welded some baffles in. Its hard to tell from the photos, but they start at the end of the 1.5" section and protrude into the 2" piece. How effective this will be I have no idea, but I went with the theory that the closer to the end the better.
Yay one pipe done!! Then its just a case of making another one, the mirror image of this one....simple.....
If anything, making the matching pipe is harder because measuring identical pipe bends is almost impossible to do accurately. So they are slightly different, but I go with the theory that you can only see one side of the bike at any time so I should get away with it!!
They are just tacked together at the moment, so I need to weld them up, and add a mounting point under the frame.
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