Such was the description on a TV doco regarding how an incredibly ostentatious English mansion/estate was bequeathed "to the people". The landed gentry owners, no matter how fine their breeding, could not escape the fact it had become a noose around their increasingly debt-laden necks.
Not that I'm well bred, being a complete mongrel by both nature and nurture, but I was about to flirt with a similar scenario.
I dunno how much of my therapy you've read but if you were of a particularly self-flagellating bent you might have worked your way through all of it in, what, a couple of hours? This belies the true 9 year (at the time, early 2020) duration of these shennanigans. So while it may look like I'm throwing money around like a mad woman throwing poo, that's not quite the case, with things only progressing as time and money allow.
But it's about now the cat is hurled amongst the pigeons with COVID19 entering the frame. Perversely, my time vs money quotient was about to be turned on it's head when our offshore platform, being in East Timorese waters even though it is mostly staffed from Australia, is declared an International destination, meaning 2 weeks quarantine at a federal government facility on every re-entry. Given we have an ex-marketing slimeball as our Prime Minister what else would you call such a facility but "The Centre for National Resilience", I shit you not.
My company was also very keen to ensure we did not become Plague Island, so instituted an additional week of supervised isolation at a facility prior to heading offshore. Hmmm, 3 weeks of isolation/quarantine in a 3 week offshore swing doesn't go...so they simply doubled the length of our rotation, to 6 weeks on - 6 weeks off, with half of the 6 weeks on spent in isolation/quarantine....every. single. trip. Roughly 12 weeks of isolation/quarantine per annum.
This also meant an extra month away from home over the course of a year, in what is basically forced overtime. This resulted in a polar split in attitudes offshore: a few chasing filthy lucre weren't complaining too much but those who's life was built around hammering out 84 hours/week for 3 weeks straight in return for a month off with family and friends and properties to look after were shattered. I was (and still am) firmly in the latter camp, grateful to have a job but I'd sold enough of my soul and wasn't interested in selling any more.
The work/life pendulum had swung too far towards work, but how do you escape the Golden Handcuff's? What does an ex-oil and gas worker do in the real world?
Cutting to the chase, the previous 12 months or so a thought-worm had burrowed into my head that a flogged out old dyno might be doable. It might, just might, even be a way to earn a bit of pocket money some time down the track, the first wobbly baby steps of an exit strategy.
The catalyst was stumbling across an old Ralph Sarich designed ex-Orbital Engines eddy current dyno, completely disassembled and in storage, going for very cheap on Gumtree:
It would be a helluva project to resurrect it, but I contacted the guy from offshore and arranged to touch base as soon as I got back to Perth....only to find it had sold the very morning I got home. Shit!
But the dream was alive...
Just by the by: I come from an instrumentation and control systems background in a previous life so control loop concepts and the actual tuning didn't hold too many fears, plus we had a rough old 4m x 9m insulated coolroom that could be repurposed as a dyno cell, so I wasn't just pulling this outta my bum.
Once the thought-worm had made itself at home in my head I started doing a bit more research, even half-heartedly investigating building my own....yeah, yeah, like I needed more projects eh?! Anyway, I followed the build of this one:
Then this very dyno also came up for sale on Gumtree! Only it was all the way across the country in Melbourne...and Melbourne (along with everyone else) were in lockdown. I touched base, but given the early stages of COVID it was just too hard to make it work with everyone understandably erring on the side of caution.
2WD car dyno's were another option, with a fair number of tired old units that would do an amateur quite nicely. I didn't need anything flash or up to the minute technology-wise, just something that gave repeatable results. I found an old Dyno Dynamics unit that looked very promising: these allow for one roller to be uncoupled, reducing the intertia...perfect! Alan Evans at Dyno Dynamics was brilliant at answering my queries (giving the above info) about using such a machine for motorcycles (they can even supply a motorcycle adapter) and things to look for on the various spec older machines:
But while I was busy exploring transport options the thing sold.
There are actually plenty of motorcycle specific options out there, the difficulty is finding something affordable (for a rank amateur), with bonus points for complexity living in the most isolated capital city in the world meaning expensive transport costs. I mean, I could spend $26K AUD and buy something like this brand new tomorrow:
But that's a lot of mortgage payments....and would effectively cost half of everything we own as I'd end up divorced!
I'd actually seen a used one of these Axis units for sale, again in Melbourne (do they grow them over there or what?!), but even used it was still waaaay out of my price range.
Only for poor ol' Melbourne to be looking down the barrel of a second COVID lockdown....at which point the small custom bike shop selling it slashed the price by nearly 30%.
So this is what was on offer, plus all the electronic/sensor gubbins to go with it:
Jeezus, it was still a big spend but compared to the old clunkers I had been looking at it seemed like much better value being current technology and barely used.
But was it any good? Time to chat with Mr Google: it turns out Mark Dobeck, the guy who designed this thing is the original Mr Dynojet (which he sold in the late 90's), and he'd basically incorporated some cool advancements he'd been thinking of for his Dynojet dynos, like impellers driven by the roller blowing air into the front of the bike giving true road speed ram-air and cooling (so no external fan was required). And removable weights/discs attached to the roller so you could adjust the inertia of the roller to simulate the weight of everything from a 70kg 125cc GP bike, to a 360kg Triumph Rocket 3. Bottom line? It's a serious piece of kit.
It just made sense, even my lovely lady could see the value in it...and my extra over-time could pay for it.
So I spoke to the seller: I'd be happy to pay asking price if he didn't mind packing it up for shipping, which I would organise: deal done.
Except the thing is 3m long and weighs near enough to 600kg's once crated up. Even broken down to two separate pallets the roller section would weigh 500kg and the narrow laneway behind the shop had freight companies making that expensive whistling through their teeth type sound or flat out declining the job. I spent the best part of a week trying to find an affordable combination of pickup and delivery to a transport depot and then shipping across the country. Things were looking pretty grim, with a $300 delivery to a local depot then $1500 to ship the 2700km to Perth the best I could find.
And all the while in the back of my head is this nasty lil' voice whispering doubts that I'd just sent a big lump of cash to a complete stranger, in a locked down State I couldn't access, with absolutely nothing to show for it and no way of chasing it up. I mean everything looked/sounded above board but none of it would have been hard to fake, and even a Paypal payment would have been no protection as it it only covers items where delivery/transport is organised by the seller. Deep breath: I just had to trust my instincts that the guy on the end of the phone was as kosher as he sounded....
....so after a stressful week you can imagine my relief when he sent through these pic's of the pallets/dyno being picked up:
He'd done an incredible job packing it up (thanks Rem!), and I was so thankful, now it was up to the freight company...
My initial queries had the bigger companies generally fobbing me off or giving ridiculous quotes that made it pretty plain they weren't too keen. Eventually, and not really expecting too much, I contacted Mainfreight....only to find they were absolutely bloody brilliant: a measely $50 pickup fee and same again at my end to drop it inside my shed, plus a bargain price for the cross-country dash. All of which totalled less than half the next best arrangement I could organise, and I tried plenty. There's nothing in this recommendation for me, and I'm an absolute nobody to them, yet I was so impressed with their personalised communication (thanks Nathan!) and level of service:
8 days and 2700km later I was staring at the very same pallets sitting in my shed. I couldn't quite believe it, it literally did not compute. I was a little emotional to tell you the truth, at having this amazing thing, the kind of thing you never really believed you could actually own, sitting in my shed....and it was perfect, not a mark on it.
Unfortunately it was going into the ugliest "dyno cell" in the known universe....
As mentioned it was once an old cool-room, complete with burnt out lighting (the good ol’ “100W incandescent lamp in a 40W fitting” effect, not good when it’s set into flammable foam insulation!). No lights and no power, we just used it to store random crap that we couldn't quite bring ourselves to throw out.
It sure was fun (not!) prising/chopping out old bulkhead light fittings that had melted themselves into the insulation and cooked the cables. Rewired and temporary lamps hung so I could see what the hell I was doing:
Yup, the spray foam looks shit, and it’s double-brick underneath that (apart from the ceiling which is polystyrene panels) for an authentic Bat Cave ambience: if Batman was going to give his bat-bike a tickle up this would be where he'd take it. Basically, it's ugly as sin but there's no point trying to make it something it isn’t.
The cool-room was originally 3 separate rooms half a century ago, hence the redundant doorways and separate chiller units (which I’ve “decommissioned”, the ancient control panel and vintage compressor would give any modern sparky conniptions). I thought about using these fans for exhaust extraction but my liver couldn't handle the amount of beer it would take to convince me to tackle the re-wiring, double brick walls and fabricating ducting etc .
I patched up the old bulkhead fitting cavities with expanding foam and tidied it up as best I could before installing some Gumtree rescued LED light panels. The spray foam is just such a mongrel to work with, it's so difficult to mount anything off it.
Who says it doesn't snow in Western Australia?
You have no idea how long, and how much swearing it took to chase down every bead of polystyrene/foam, with the tiny grains flying off as soon as the vacuum cleaner approached, Faaaark, I swear I could hear the flighty lil' bastards laughing at me:
I used the excuse of sizing up some exhaust extraction options to chuck a bike on there:
Then made another huge mess cutting a hole in the polystyrene panel/spray foamed ceiling for an exhaust duct. Jeezus, the shit goes everywhere, you only had to walk through it and the size of the debris field would double. Cue more swearing from me and more giggling from the beads...sigh.
I mounted/wired a 300mm axial fan up in the roof space and with the aid of thought-juice/beer came up with this lil’ rig for the ducting. The stainless tube is left over from the length I bought to re-make the tail pipes on the 851, the hood mount is a surplus adjustable kitchen cabinetry "foot" with an extra cut-down collar to secure and/or adjust it, an old bike crash slider was turned down to make a couple of collars for the tube sliding up and down the post….. not flash, but just using stuff I had around the shed and a $30 offcut of checker plate aluminium to make the hood: Acme Engineering, lol.
The fan switch is on the LH wall and I wacked a carbon monoxide monitor on the end wall. I was worried about not hearing it hence it’s directly in front, but it's such a rowdy lil’ bastard I needn't have worried.
If you’re suckin’ air out you better put some back in and it would be nice not to cook in there, luckily an old window mount air conditioner we’d pulled out of our bunky old cottage project volunteered itself. Doesn’t look it but it’s a frikkin' monster out the other side and weighs 52kg, cue 2 x strained pooper valves lifting it into place:
The cool-room is inside a larger (equally decrepit) ex-packing shed so I was hopeful the external noise would’t be too obnoxious, but realistically the orchardists around us are far worse with their sprayers, mulchers, gas-gun bird scarers/shooting not to mention generally scrapping amongst themselves from several tree rows apart so I don’t give too many fucks.
With the 749R parked in place what better opportunity for a quick noise/exhaust extraction test even if just idling:
What do you think? Seems ok on both fronts to me but will be interested to see how it goes with the Leo Vince barking at full noise:
The seller, good guy that he is, was very generous with what he included with the sale, even some bits and bobs that he could have easily sold off seperately. But one thing we agreed wouldn't be included was a laptop to run it all. Easy enough to sort but this was about where I headed back to work: everything good to go bar the brains (both electronic and otherwise) to make it work.
I'm pretty sure there would have been some head shaking going on getting this far but I hope you've had a chuckle at my Acme Engineering, I think Wile E. Coyote would be proud!
I'll leave you with this, courtesy of Mr Dobeck:
