Track/race days have been few and far between in recent years and give rise to truly mixed feelings. I never used to give them too much thought, just enjoyed getting out. But these days they are a weird cocktail of anticipation and dread: albeit hella rusty I still enjoy that rush of accelerating out of pitlane.....but I dread what new obstacle is going to bound into my path like a drunken kangaroo.
Case in point, my local Historic club had a Test 'n Tune Saturday/Racing Sunday weekend scheduled.... the 851 was looking/feeling pretty bloody good with refurbished brake calipers, refreshed fork seals, and tweaks to suspension front and rear: reduced fork oil level up front for a more supple ride befitting my advancing years, and I'd taken the opportunity to pull the shock and reposition the hydraulic preload adjuster to drop the rear ride height and get rid of that "tippy" corner entry I'd noticed last time out.
"Optimism is the opium of the people" said Milan Kundera, author of "The Unbearable Lightness of Being". Now I wasn't feeling particularly optimistic, or light, but crashing on the now 7 year old race take-off Pirelli's would have been unbearable, so I organised with the local supplier to have a new set of boots for both 851 and 749R fitted at the Tuning day.
I knocked off my property chores in the week leading up, leaving me a couple of days to faff around and give both bikes a cruisy service/going over. The 851 in particular needed the mineral oil I'd run for bedding in the new piston rings (remember that?) dropped and replaced with synthetic. Allegedly someone was seen on a "similar" bike having a run around our country back-roads, maybe to try out new brakes....which (I imagine) felt not quite "modern" but much improved, and a few hard stops might have had the fork leg travel marker well clear of bottoming despite the lower oil level = all good.
Pre-service I'd just run it for a few minutes to warm the oil prior to draining, as you do.....except she was pretty sluggish turning over. Flat battery. Bugger, but a quick charge will sort it. Nope, still sluggish....then not quite a grinding, more a dragging noise, like two metals very reluctantly moving against each other. Then no rotation at all, just the clutch chattering in a peculiar way. It could really only be one thing: the fuckin' starter sprag clutch had shit itself.
A couple of hours later (Thursday afternoon, before needing to be trackside Saturday morning) I had the the thing apart:
The fact I had to use a (soft-faced) hammer to separate the starter gear and flywheel hub told me everything I needed to know: the starter sprag (bottom left above) was absolutely "kangaroo-edward' (roo-ted). Note the contact surfaces of the hub and gear scored by the jammed sprag below:
A quick ring-around confirmed I was as kangaroo-edward as the starter parts, no-one remotely close (it's a pretty short list, even including some non-retail suggestions) having parts to suit the early 6 spline hub (later models are 12 spline) so the 851 was scratched from the weekend.....again.
The 749R was serviced and good to go though, right? After arriving track-side early I'd prioritised getting the wheels off the bike to effect the tyre change ASAP, only to find the promised tyre change would be "later on". Getting properly set up while waiting, I found the rudimentary pits were struggling to cater for all the warmers and had run out of power outlets....insert sock-puppet face here!
I had the perfect generator for just such an occasion though.....it just happened to be sitting in my shed 2 hours away. I'd only been there a couple of times and with no issues previously I just hadn't thought to bring it: lesson painfully learned.
Now my very first paid job 4 decades (!) previous was changing/repairing tyres at a service station after school, and I could still fumble my way around the available tyre changer couldn't I? Well, I could, but the raw steel "foot" and steel tyre irons had my Magnesium rims cringing like a beaten dog at the pound. Most bike specific machines these days have a plastic coated foot to avoid exactly the damage I feared.
"Fuck....just, FUUUUCCCCK!!!" I screamed inside my head.
Basically I was screwed. I didn't want to run my current 7 year old race take-off tyres even if they had been sitting undisturbed in a cool dark shed for most of that time, I didn't want to damage my rims changing tyres, I didn't want to waste new tyres on what was looking like half a track day, I didn't want to spend a few laps warming up said tyres without running warmers and putting them through unnecessary heat cycles, and I didn't want to head into a race day at a track I barely knew without a half decent run beforehand.
Fuggit, I've got better things to do, so everything (including my new unfitted tyres), went back in the trailer and I dragged my sorry/angry arse back home. If nothing else my rims were mightily relieved not to go through that sort of corporal punishment.
It didn't really form part of my decision, but it occured to me driving home that I actually did have better things to do: it was literally 12 months to the week that we had put in a planning application to build another shed. In the mean-time I was making do with a couple of metres at the end of a 2 car garage, with as much shit as I could fit piled roof high on shelves crammed between the cars, forcing a "limbo" type manouever to enter/exit said cars. Just getting to the beer 'fridge was an exercise at an Army obstacle course, shimmying under, over, and around things, then back again: by the time you got back the doorway you needed another beer! Not ideal....
....and the new shed was just that week completed! (minus power, lighting and a few other things I'd knock-off myself) I finally had a decent space to work/play (the original 2 car garage) and could get a heap of stuff out of expensive storage.
So part of the previously mentioned chores was moving all non-bike crap to the new shed and liberating my new-found space in the old shed. But there was one kinda ugly, kinda exciting, job hanging over it: the floor.
Eh? A work buddy, being a single bloke of similar vintage, with no "other-half" to apply reason to his folly, plays with cars....like 10 of them kinda playing. Everything from a resto-mod '70 Mustang, to a '56 F100 truck, to a '77 Honda Civic. He'd just bought an industrial unit in a new development to house it all. Early days, he has some great plans for it, but has just had a stunning white epoxy/polyaspartic floor laid, going out to white painted walls....it is literally like being in a photographic studio as from some angles you can't tell where the floor finishes and the walls begin.
It's a very cool thing, but I'm a bit more of a "function over form" kinda guy. Plus the concrete floor in my shed displays traces of efflorescence at the edges, meaning a slight amount of Winter moisture is present and moisture is what leads to most epoxy/painted floor finishes failing. Even with sealing I'm not prepared to risk (or pay for) an epoxy floor coating. But the slightest drop of oil/brake fluid etc stains/marks the concrete floor no matter how quickly I clean it up, and it just irritates the bejeebus me. So while I didn't really want an epoxy floor (ok, just a lil' bit), it did prompt me to explore some options.
My much cheaper, faster, more easily repaired solution, albeit nowhere near as spectacular, was plastic floor tiles. Hmmmm, doesn't quite have the same ring to it, does it? But it is what it is and if I wanted to make laying them as easy as possible I needed to lay them now, before I dragged in even more crap from storage.
Laying them is super easy/fast, with no fiddly bits you could smash out a simple double garage in a day, allow a weekend if you have framework etc as I do. The hardest part is actually making space to lay them if you're already setup in the space, especially when you're talking about moving industrial shelving laden with "stuff", milling machines, lathes etc and don't want to damage the tiles you've just laid.
My better half was pretty keen to help out, enjoying belting the tiles to lock 'em together (I'm sure I heard my name muttered more than once). Aaaaand, we're into it:
Note, I've only roughed out around the framework here, trimming-in came later.
Designs are only limited by your imagination, but I kept it fairly simple. Black/White checkers seems like a classic motoring combo and sounds good in theory but looking at various photo's on the 'net I found it absolutely dominated the area, all you can see is the checkers, everything else pales against them. So the above looks like Grey/White checkers, but is actually Dark Grey/Light Grey to sit a little more in the background, and realistically white just isn't practical for a grot like myself..
I used a contrasting black edge strip (also comes in tile colour) to finish the door entry edge:
For the money and time involved I'm pretty happy with the result and at the end of the day it's a work space not a showroom:
The proof is in the pudding: as you can see the 851 is sans fairing with the other side of the engine gutted, waiting on those starter parts. In moving her around she left a drip trail of race coolant (non-glycol) from disconnected hoses in her wake and it was sheer joy to simply wipe up. The only thing I hadn't considered is the noise: it is noisy to walk on, like hard shoes on a timber floor. But it's super-practical and looks a lot better than a stained concrete floor, so I'm quietly stoked. Line the walls and you've got a true multi-use space that could be used as a games room or anything....well, that's how I justify the spend, anyway!
FYI, this original shed is the lowest spec possible, not even the roof is insulated so a typical sunny 32degC Summer day results in this sort of roof temp:
The bare tin North facing wall is much the same, so come Summer even your ears are sweating. So while they were insulating/roofing the new shed we got them to pull the old shed roof and install insulation. Yup, a painful financial exercise but it's just a better all 'round result than trying to retrofit insulation with the tin in place. Insulating/lining at least that North wall will be something to do before next Summer.
Back on to more important things! The 851 starter parts arrived, courtesy of the awesome Jan De Vos at Red Fox Import/Redfox-Grinta:
What a treat to do business with such a guy! Not only does he know these bikes like very few in the world, he bent over backwards to help me out and ensure I had the correct increasingly difficult to find parts for the old girl, there are a few pitfalls with various splines, gear width, bore size, number of teeth, and sprags over the years.
He has an incredible range of hard to find original and amazing quality replica parts but was most apologetic in only being able to supply a lightened and superfinished starter driven gear, offered a great deal on the beautiful thing who was I to refuse such hospitality? Thanks Jan!
So here's the comparison of heavy old vs lightened new:
Sorry, I did weigh them but I forgot to note the difference. It wasn't huge (approx 100gm?) and the gear only spins when the starter is operating so it's not rotating mass in normal operation, but it all counts...and...and...just look at it, lol.
On the other hand, something very noticeable was the superfinishing, the gear feeling sublime in your hands, almost slick even though it's perfectly dry. I can imagine a gearbox full of such gears would be a very special thing.
A comparison of old and new sprag clutches:
The Nichols alloy "flywheel" basically weighs the absolute minimum (280gm) to support the ignition triggers, replacing the monstrous solid steel flywheel (1860gm), and a narrower/lighter 400SS alternator rotor (the Corsa unit is slightly lighter again but a magnitude of 10 more expensive) substitutes for the wider/heavier OEM 851 rotor, so a big chunk of rotating mass has already been eliminated. All of which made the OEM flywheel hub look/feel like it should have a John Deere part number on it, just such an agricultural lump of a thing.
Now there's talk of going too light on the rotating assembly, and hurting "driveability". This may be a thing for road bikes easing through city traffic, but on a race bike of moderate hp, with an innately heavy non-Corsa crank and inherently good V-twin traction I'm not sure it's possible.
I mean, have a listen to Casey Stoner's GP08 being started up and ask yourself if it's something I need to worry about:
So many words when I could just say: "I've had a fiddle with the flywheel hub". Not a lot, I just skimmed a wee bit off the centre boss:
The bolts securing the flywheel are counterbored/recessed so you could easily take a lot more weight out of the back of the mounting flange, and being from the periphery would have more centrifugal effect, but I figured it's a lot easier/cheaper to take more off at a later date than put it back on:
Just to be clear, this is not all about how quickly the engine spools up, or responds, or less parasitic hp loss, this is also about reliability. This is a snippet from Ben Fox, one of the crank experts around the world, talking about lightening crankshafts and it equally applies to reducing the flywheel mass:
"Let me illustrate something for you: Do you ever remember holding a bicycle wheel in your hands and having your buddy spin it? Remember how hard it was to try and turn the wheel? Remember the opposing forces it put into your hands?
Now picture this, The crankshaft is the spinning "wheel" and the bearings in the engine cases are the "hands", what happens when you lean the bike over in a turn? The crank wants to stay upright. Think about the forces that are being applied to the engine case halves and bearings.
****Benefit #1: A lighter crank will apply less force into those bearings and engine cases."
But enough yappin', let's wack it back together....and soon enough it's beer o'clock:
Cover back on, fluids replenished and she wizzed over, firing straight up. And wouldn't you know it? That bloke with a very similar bike was seen/heard in the vicinity again! I'd put money...no make that another beer...on him returning with a quiet smile on his face.
