Ok, we're half-way there with the clutch sorted, now to get that rear wheel up to speed.
Ant, at Corse Motorcycles, knew a guy with a Foxley roller starter, the gold standard in petrol roller starters, and endeavoured to try and contact him......without much success.
Hmmmm, how hard would it be to make one?
I had a rough idea of what would be required but it was talking over my predicament with Barry Smith, the clever guy behind the electric unit I bought, that filled in the blanks. He was great in sharing his knowledge, describing some petrol units he had previously constructed. Basically a 5 - 7hp stationary engine with 2:1 gearing (sprockets or gearbox) driving a small diameter wheel/tyre would do the trick.
Okay, Plan F it is then (I'm waaaaay past Plan B on this bloody thing): build my own.
A 6.5hp "Chonda" (Chinese Honda-copy) complete with an integral 2:1 reduction drive gearbox, electric start and battery was $350AUD delivered to my door from the Eastern States, $70 for a go-kart front rim and the kart shop were kind enough to throw in an old tyre once I explained what it was for, $10 for a remote throttle kit, I machined up an adapter for the rim.....and VOILA!
That's the guts of it, just some sort of frame to complete the job....
....when, out of the blue, an amazing act of generosity.
An online Ducati forum member also in Perth, contacted me to say he had a Foxley mobile starter he would happily lend me! Wow, it's not like these things are cheap, near enough to $4000AUD landed in Oz, and I'm a complete stranger. Kindness? Pity? Either way it was a godsend and much appreciated.
The only issue was the timing: I was heading away to work the day after we'd arranged pick up. Actually, there were 2 issues, the second being I'd had a quick demo of the starter but not started a bike in anger.
So I gave Ant, who'd lived and breathed this stuff in the BSB/WSB paddocks, a quick call. He agreed to give it a crack if I dropped it off to his 'shop, and we'd talk about the issue(s) that cropped up. So I did, and raced around with the usual last minute stuff before heading offshore. I wasn't really that daunted by the starter but after all the frustrating lil' problems getting this far I was sure there would be something else to trip me up.
"DING!" Oh gawd, a text from Ant, I wonder what the issue is:
I couldn't bloody believe it: Frankenstein's bride had breathed her first breathe!
What's more she'd fired first time, so underneath the joy at hearing her run I was quietly chuffed I'd ticked all the right boxes.
She wouldn't idle, but given the make-shift Nemesis ECU map (I just added +5% fuel to a generic 999R + full exhaust map) that's not really suprising, but everything considered, she sounded in rude health: music to my ears, although my dog fair shat when I ran it through the sound system.
For possibly the first (and last) time I headed off to work with a smile on my face.
