Fast forward several months and I still didn’t have a running engine in my race bike. My procrastination was not paying off.
Did you miss Part 5? Time for a little history lesson!
For a variety of reasons, things weren’t going well with the engine in my new race bike so I ended up buying a beater street CB160 with the plan of harvesting certain parts off the race bike. Don’t worry – after the season is over I’m putting this back together and finding it a new home!
Once I got started, I realized it would be more efficient to just swap the running motor out of the street bike into the race instead. I’ve never pulled a motor out of a bike before so our shop manager Daniel helped a ton but it was a lot of fun. I learned a lot in the process and found it rewarding to get my hands dirty.
The street bike also had wider wheels so I swapped those as well.
Eventually, we had the running motor in the race frame, though we didn’t have wiring.
One of our newest clients is the GM at Ferrari Philadelphia and he sent me this comfy sweatshirt.
Daniel created a wiring harness from scratch, and he ended up using the old regulator/rectifier from my Bimota Tesi 3D. We pulled that off my bike last year when I was having an electrical issue – we had to do a bit of manual testing as we didn’t have an accurate wiring diagram so the reg/rec was something that had been replaced but it later turned out it was fine. Daniel kept the old one and now we have a place to use it:
There was a big sigh of relief when we fired it up and the motor responded. It sounds amazing…and it shoots fire:
So obviously it needs some tuning, but it’s also way too loud for the 105db sound limit at Laguna. I’m going to have to figure out a different exhaust. Daniel and I went through the bare minimum so that it wouldn’t kill me if I rode it down the street, but by the time I rolled it outside of the shop the bike would only run on one cylinder.
Ignoring the required engine/fueling repairs, as March 1st rolled around my little race bike still needed the following:
– jet kits/carb tuning
– tires
– fork seals
– fork brace: I can get the forks to easily twist when the wheel is in a chock
– exhaust: someone recommended I snag some pieces from Cone Engineering and weld them together
– tank cleaning
– coils and ignition from Charlie’s Place
– suspension bushings
– grips and a bunch of other small stuff
It’s probably a fair assumption that the suspension bushings have never been replaced.
The first AHRMA race in California is in 5-6 weeks but I have to spend two of those weeks on the east coast and there is still plenty to do (and plenty to spend). I’m having a lot of fun wrenching on the bike but it’s a slow process that I can only knock out in 60-90 minute chunks after work on certain days, and it takes up too much of the precious free time I have for Vy. I started hoping that I’d be able to find another 160 race bike that was ready to go so I could save on the amount of time needed, but I kept working on the blue bike in the meantime.
Well, last week one came up on the AHRMA group on Facebook. I spoke with the seller on the phone and we had a great conversation. He seemed quite upfront about its pluses and minuses and by the end of it I figured it was worth the risk as it could save me tens of hours of work (though I know I’ll still have to do a bunch).
I’ll leave the details about it (I don’t know why it has a Speedy Gonzales paint job) for the next post, but I’m supposed to get the bike on March 13th.
Once it arrives, we’ll see if I’ve either have successfully pulled off a Hail Mary or if I’m just as screwed as I was two weeks ago but with a bigger rush to get everything done…
On to Part 7 – turns out this racing adventure is going to be joined by a Krämer as well!