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Anarchy

· 999RS,799RS

"Anarchists did not try to carry out genocide against the Armenians in Turkey; they did not deliberately starve millions of Ukrainians; they did not create a system of death camps to kill Jews, gypsies, and Slavs in Europe; they did not fire-bomb scores of large German and Japanese cities and drop nuclear bombs on two of them; they did not carry out a ‘Great Leap Forward’ that killed scores of millions of Chinese; they did not attempt to kill everybody with any appreciable education in Cambodia; they did not launch one aggressive war after another; they did not implement trade sanctions that killed perhaps 500,000 Iraqi children.

In debates between anarchists and statists, the burden of proof clearly should rest on those who place their trust in the state. Anarchy’s mayhem is wholly conjectural; the state’s mayhem is undeniably, factually horrendous.
 Robert Higgs

Hmmmm, some sobering stuff right there, but I'm desperately clinging to the theory that supposed anarchy can't be any worse than State-sanctioned reality given what has gone on recently. I say this by way of explanation/apology if I've given you cause to scratch your head recently, and the head scratching to come should you dare to read on: there has been some shit going down and just when I needed the "State" to step up they've been completely MIA. (you know where the scroll wheel is, don't be afraid to use it...)

Storm clouds gathering in more ways than one...

Our multi-generational Italian heritage orchardist neighbours have always been "problematic" to anyone and everyone in the area, basically treating what is a small horticultural precinct as their own fiefdom, whether they actually owned a property they wanted to use/abuse or not. Anybody who argued the point was just a problem to be pissed on, with history and anecdotes from their own screwed-over extended family proving they could piss higher and play nastier than whoever disagreed. We were aware of the horticultural activities required to make a living when we bought into the area, have lived amongst farming properties before, and fully respect the effort that most put in. But then there are those you read about in the 'paper: screwing over workers on entitlements, abusing the environment, shooting endangered species, dumping chemicals/waste etc etc.....yup, these are those guys.

But while we shared a common unfenced boundary we gritted our teeth as they turned their industrial spraying/mulching/picking equipment on our property and tore branches from our London Plane trees lined along the 400m sealed driveway we had laid in place of a dirt track. They were stoked to use that sealed driveway in Winter and didn't care about the damage they inflicted dragging equipment over it; during the driveway construction they were happy to let us pay to repair a previously broken drainage culvert that benefited them, basically turning what was a quagmire into usable land. They didn't give a rats arse about dragging glyphosate spraying equipment onto our property and killing great swathes of our paddock grass, or bogging their vehicles in our paddock and just leaving the bloody great mess, or rough-sorting their picked fruit and leaving piles of rejects on our property etc etc. We had some "conversations" with them about the above (and more) but when they casually (illegally) walked onto our property to shoot not just Lorikeets (declared bird pest) but also endangered and protected red-tailed black Cockatoo's we said "Enough!" in no uncertain terms.

Red-tailed black cockatoo's,  they're like a bunch of rowdy school kids, just so bloody cheeky!

To which they responded by heading out at 10:30pm, full of bourbon, and started shooting whatever moved in the night alongside our house. This passes for a mating ritual for the men-children, dragging along any female seasonal workers they haven't harrassed into leaving. Cue the dulcet tones of David Attenborough narrating a nature documentary: "and here we have the lesser-brained Ghillarducci in it's natural habitat, performing an elaborate mating ritual....note the exaggerated weaponry in contrast to the diminutive genitalia, the proferring of alcohol and rabbit remnants in desperate hope of finding favour with a prospective mate..."

Now bear in mind the plot next door (one of several they operate) is tiny for a commercial operation, has no house, is barely 50m wide at this point, with the boundary only 35m from our bedroom, and my wife was home alone while I was away at work. The police were next to useless, giving us some "helpful" guidelines on correct use of firearms (we don't need it you plonker, they do!) basically advising us to call our council ranger should it happen again....which would be great if the council were open at 10:30pm.

A while later our neighbours on the other side (same extended family, but great people) decided to get some stock in to manage their (similar to ours) ex-orchard patch: a few sheep and alpaca's. No prob's, very cute and all that.....except our normally beautiful natured dog (our cats boss her around, for chrissake) thought they didn't just look adorable, they looked bloody delicious! Next thing, she's done a Neo/Matrix move through the rickety fence and latched onto one of the sheep......FAAAAARK! And again, I was away at work, getting a panic'd message from my better half having to deal with it.

Luckily the sheep only suffered relatively minor wounds before my good lady showed her Kiwi upbringing, rugby tackling our dog in an effort an All Black would be proud of. Good people that they are, the folks on that side were very understanding of the temptation for a dog. We did our best to ensure it never happened again by upgrading the fence, and felt we had no option but to fence the rest of the boundary just in case, including the shared boundary on the other side. It was our dog, our problem, so didn't even request them to contribute half costs as we were entitled to do....

....but still they sooked like toddler's denied chocolate at the supermarket once they no longer had convenient access to our property.

Come Winter and we had an extraordinarily wet lead-in to Spring. The orchard precinct exists because it is one long shallow valley following an acquifer, with good soil and pretty much unlimited water: quite atypical of dry/sandy Perth in Western Australia. But with heavy rain events it is a large catchment area that gets quite boggy, with the water table basically rising to ground level and even flowing water down the valley for short periods. But the orchardists, once we'd replaced the culvert, had decided it would be a great idea to use the improved land to plant a few extra fruit trees (again, narrow block, 2 short rows so they're worth/produce bugger all) right in the base of the valley, ignoring generations of knowledge and the laws of physics saying water runs downhill.

Sure enough, with an exceptionally wet period the water table rises, water starts flowing and their young trees are sitting in water. Result: I get a snotty text telling me the stormwater entering their property is my problem and I needed to fix it. This despite the fact it is collected from many square kilometers of catchment and surrounding orchards (including another of their plots!) further up the valley, before flowing through our place and on to theirs. It's ridiculous, it's stormwater, and everyone has the right to natural stormwater flow, which is what I respond with.

Next thing you know, the greasy fukker has his trained cockroach's/son's sandbagging along the boundary, building a dam and flooding our property. In short order the bottom of our driveway and adjacent mature trees are under a foot of water, with the very real prospect of damage to the drive and the waterlogged mature trees either dying or falling over.

It's completely illegal; I know it, he know's it, the council know it....but the council don't want a bar of it: "It's a civil matter", they say. Realistically, we'd spend 1000's of $$$ engaging a lawyer, things take time, the water table drops and he removes the dam, while we're left writing a substantial cheque for lawyers fees and nothing to show for it.

It's not often it happens, but it's about now my wife and I completely diverge on the way forward. This was the last straw, we have to sell and move on, no question, who wants to live like this? Now, I'm a pretty laid back guy, it takes a lot to light my blue touch paper....but after making my family feel unsafe (with the abuse coming over the fence my wife is too scared to leave the house and won't even let the pets out for fear of them being shot) you bet it's well and truly blazing now. I realise he's just a bully hiding behind mummy's business money (she's retired, he now runs it), and I also realise there's only one thing bullies understand. So I see the only option as being to get up in his grill: he has a history of scuttling away to hide in a coolroom when confronted by other people he's screwed over, so he'd fold faster than a $10 deck chair.

But ultimately my good lady would be left home alone, completely exposed when I head away to work...so I (very) reluctantly agree to "not feed the beast". So I'm out there hand digging drainage lines while he sits at the fence (in his ute for a quick escape) taunting and goading "That'll learn ya!", and as I'm pushing the wheelbarrow around repairing the damaged driveway he slowly drives backwards and forwards, shadowing me, just 3-4m away alongside the fence. The fact I (mostly) keep it buttoned seems to drive him nuts, which is kinda satisfying, but not half as satisfying as the sound of my shovel bouncing off his head would be (I made a promise not to, but a man can still dream...).

So it was 3 months hard graft preparing to sell, waiting for the London Planes and other trees to come into leaf before the property looks a treat and we can list it. He does his best to put buyers off by firing up their industrial spray unit every single day for a fortnight, but soon enough we get a cash offer for asking price, so all good....

....but there's one final twist: the buyer turns out to be the fucknuckle's accountant. No way on God's green earth would we sell to those arseholes, and once the penny dropped who he was our hackles were instinctively bolt upright....but it wasn't long before we saw the beauty of it.

Either:

  1. The accountant (who grew up in the area) supposedly wanted a "weekender", and would lease the land (10ac) to them so he didn't have to look after it and they could plant more fruit trees. But this guy pisses off everyone eventually, he just can't help himself. So sooner or later it would turn to shit and they'd be given the bum's rush, contract or no contract and have to leave it all behind. The accountant is a wealthy man and will simply say "see you in court" = sweet karma.
  2. Or, the accountant has done a deal to buy it and then on-sell to them, but that will cost the bastard even more $$$, with no way of avoiding Western Australia's substantial Stamp Duty (tax) on a sizeable real estate transaction.

Ultimately we realised if there was one person we wanted to relieve of their money it was him. So we did.

So in early December we moved on from our lil' patch of poisoned paradise.

Here's my lad taking one last look:

"Ssshhhh!  Don't ruin it, dad..."

...and the other two "kids" worked themselves to a stand-still un-packing at the other end:

"Dawg, if you wag that bloody tail one more time, so help me...."

The only part that really sticks in my throat like dry Wheat-Bix is not the crappy attitude/behaviour, you meet fcukwits every day. No, it's having them rewrite your plans. Buying property (vs building) you have to make compromises, it's not like it was designed and built by you, for you. And while my work/project is very near to End Of Field Life (EOFL) there are still three, four or possibly six months remaining, no-one is quite sure, so we had to find something that suited not just the next stage in life but the remaining few commutes offshore = awkward.

But we found a nice lil' spot a couple of hours away down on the coast, just 7 min from world class surfing beaches, wineries, and with nature on our doorstep. Except I'm not a surfer...or fisherman...or 4WD/camper/hiker...and I prefer (lots of) beer....basically, I just want to tinker in my shed. Which is unfortunate because that compromise I talked about? It was the bloody shed.

The new joint has a single 8m x 8m tin shed, enough for 2 cars....or my bikes/workshop paraphenalia....but not both:

Where do I start...?

So gone are dreams of earning some beer tokens (post-EOFL) with the dyno and/or making/modifying lil' bits and bobs for other tinkerers on the side. No, I make no claims to being an apprenticed professional, but I wouldn't have been charging $100/hr either, so I think there's a small market there? I mean, never has the phrase "Will work for beer!" been more true. But it's a moot point now, with the dyno and a swag of other equipment in storage for the foreseeable future.

But such is life. It's only simple, but our new home on a couple of lightly forested hectares meets our one and only criteria of "makes you feel good being there", and additional shedding is being planned as I peck this out.

Sorry, long winded explanation I know, I just felt a cathartic urge to lie on a couch and start talking about my mother. So this is the heads-up that you can add "spatially challenged" to my usual "aesthetically challenged" photographic limitations, because things in the shed are more than a bit squeezy.

And check out that insulation...or complete lack thereof. 35degC (95degF) ambient outside equates to about 42degC (108degF) inside and you could quite literally cook something on the tin sheeting. After the comparative luxury of my previous ex-coolroom insulated workshop walking into this thing in the height of Summer is physically confronting, with thoughts of tyres etc degrading in storage now front of mind. No joke, I don't think it's a coincidence that the fork seals on the 851 have both started leaking in the month since relocation. So, insulation, lighting, power (fork seals).....lots to do.

But the neighbours are friendly, albeit a tad stand-offish:

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Alas, there are no crackers to go with my whine, so you just get on with it. And eventually, as we've settled in, I've found myself with a few spare minutes at the end of a day to answer the lonely call of my neglected beer fridge ("Sorry 'ol mate, I promise we'll be spending some quality time together real soon"), cleared a bit of elbow room, and picked some low hanging fruit on the bike-job tree.

First up: no longer could I ignore the twitching of my epiglottis every time I looked at the front guard on the 799RS. It wasn't a full-on gag reflex, but jeebus, even in carbon that Gen 5 ZX10R fender is one ugly sumbitch! Track bike or not, looks being secondary, and the effort I'd put into repairing it etc, looking at it repeatedly in the harsh light of day I had to acknowledge my stomach was not getting any happier.

Yes, the camera angle is bad, but that front guard is worse

So I had a look around and discovered a ZX6R front guard is the same as a Gen 4 ZX10R guard, which (more research) happens to be interchangeable with my Gen 5 forks (Gen 4 are BPF Showa, Gen 5 are BFF Showa). Confused? The guts of it is: ZX6R guards are cheaper than ZX10R and will fit my forks, so a carbon ZX6R fender soon sat atop the mountain of boxes in the shed.

Not only was it good value, but I was stoked to find this used Leo Vince guard (who knew Leo Vince made carbon parts?) was the usual superb LV quality, with reinforced mounting points and even though gloss is not my preference I had to admit it was beautifully finished:

ZX6R front guard fits BFF forks
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Even the steel brake hose brackets are "proper" (OEM?), but pretty much doubled the weight of the thing so were soon consigned to that "I don't know what else to do with it, but can't bring myself to throw it out" tub that everyone has in a corner somewhere:

The steel brake hose brackets weigh nearly as much as the rest of the guard

And compared to the Gen 5 guard it is a thing of simple beauty:

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I'm buggered if I know why they've made the Gen 5 unit so Brazilian butt-lift broad:

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Whatever, I'm just glad to see it gone so I can ease up on the "Kuells". Fighting my urge for functional looking rather than decorative carbon fibre I've even left the gloss finish for the moment until I decide what, if anything, I'm going to do with the fairings. Do I really want to add 0.5kg of paint? Or (insert sock-puppet face here) clear-coat? I think I'll be discussing the options with my good mate, Mr Beer Fridge, at quite some length:

I know, it's too glossy for a junkyard racing project, but I'll save that for another day.

Next up was tackling the last of the issues around fitting the RS "water tank" (Ducati's description, not mine). Remember this?

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At first glance it looks quite promising....but closer inspection, and later parts, show it is riddled with issues:

  1. The Pierobon fairing brace/dash mount is not only jammed up against the water tank, but is fundamentally incompatible with the AiM MXS dash electrical connections.
  2. The filler cap on the CDR radiator was later found to be exactly where the RS intake air duct needs to pass. Hence the need for the tank, which is part of the pressurised cooling system - not an overflow - and the unit up on the water tank is the radiator filler/cap.
  3. Look closely and you can just make out the bolt for the RH clip-on clamp is fouling against the water tank.

So after initially thinking I'd simply do away with the tank and all it's inherent problems, I've had to change tack once I realised the tank was non-negotiable.

I've found another fairing brace that, with some modification, will work nicely with the dash. A "proper" filler/cap-less MB Motorsport radiator has sorted the intake duct problem. Leaving the clip-ons as the last pebble in my shoe.

The clip-ons are Robby Moto, machined from billet, and ordinarily the clamps being to the inside would have them tucked nicely out of sight, but in this case positions them perfectly to clash with the water tank.

The easiest way out is to simply transpose the clamps and flip them over, putting the clamp to the outside (the logo would be upside down but it's hard to decifer even the right way up, lol). But if you recall waaaay back, I "made" some carbon fibre tubes for the 749R clip-ons?

Carbon tubes in Renthal clip-on clamps fitted to the 749R

I was planning to do the same here, only the Robby Moto tubes neck down into the bar clamp:

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I'm comfortable with the 22mm OD x 18mm ID carbon tube being strong enough as is (the clamped area is filled with epoxy), I can lift the front of the bike off the ground by one carbon bar, but not so comfortable with a stress riser machined into it. I could machine the clamp instead of the tube, but the following convinced me otherwise....

The Robby Moto are nicely Italian made/machined from 6082 aluminium (stronger than your average 6061 series). So, given the high inherent strength of the material, I was surprised to to find they have been out in a very good paddock: they are beefy.

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The Renthal units are light and nicely made, but again the clamp is to the inside, so some simple/inexpensive Vortex clip-ons were sourced instead, with clamps to the outside, and straight tubes that will be super simple to replace with carbon:

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And it's a pretty interesting comparison:

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FYI, both measurements were taken with the appropriate Ti bolts fitted.

Doubling that 153gm difference for a single clip-on = 306gm saving. Add in the carbon tubes and I'll be saving a good 0.5kg (over 1lb) vs the original Robby Moto setup. If a championship depended on being able to crash and remain rideable I'd go for the Robby Moto every day of the week, but there is no trophy at stake and being a sooky-la-la I'll be quite (un)happy to crash and have a limousine ride back to the pits while I try and regather what's left of my shattered confidence.

This next was surpisingly fiddly: the RS tail looks, and is, quite unfinished without the grills fitted to the various apertures. So some aluminium mesh was sourced and shaped to suit, with compound curves and in-built flanges around the openings doing their best to exhaust my patience...but with a beer-cooled temper I got there eventually:

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The OEM 749/999 has an aluminium heat shield above the muffler and some folks have gone to the effort of replacing it and/or taking a mold from it to make a carbon equivalent like this:

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But nothing is as light as nothing: why make a lighweight version of something you can completely do without? This is something I'd done on the 749R and that tail seemed to be coping just fine, so I rinsed and repeated with adhesive aluminium tape:

Adhesive heat shielding tape applied

So that's it, we're about done at the bum end? Not quite....

The 749/999 seat is super comfortable for a road going sportsbike but it is a little unusual: designer Pierre Terblanche must have thought if a lil' art deco train (his admitted design inspiration) was looking good then throwing in a bit of vintage tractor would be even better. So the 749/999 seat is actually pretty close to what you'd find here:

It's even the right colour, it must have been quick!

Like the above, it's all-day comfortable, but also like the above you aren't supposed to hang off the side lest you end up with the edge of the wrap around seat/tail wedging your butt cheeks apart in a way that is difficult to ignore.

I'm obviously not alone in thinking this is a little...ungentlemanly...as they devised various seat pads back in the day, such as this unit on Neil Hodgson's AMA-spec 999F05:

AMA-spec 999F05: the AMA stipulated all bikes must have a functioning starter motor, so these are the only RS/F0 bikes that had a crank drilled to oil the starter parts.

Reproduction items are available:

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.....but are crazy money for what they are. So I had a crack at making something similar from firm closed-cell neoprene foam. If the above tasks were in the "fiddly" technical difficulty category, trying to reproduce the complex shape of the centre tail section in negative form so the foam could be properly bonded would have had the scoring panel furiously flipping pages until they got to the "complete ball-ache" section. But it's only foam so pretty much only cost time to come up with this:

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I know, it's a tad too angular, and looks huge thanks to my crap photographic "skills". I need to soften the edges a bit more, but at least it no longer feels like a preparatory chair in a proctologist's waiting room.

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