It was about now that I found myself juggling priorities, bewdy, it's obviously much more efficient screwing up several things at once rather than one at a time....
First up, I'd had a couple of wins chasing up parts and organising repairs for the 999RS engine:
- A contact in Europe had found a set of used RS valves for me. These are unique to the 999RS and worth moonbeams new so the fact they had just 150km use was ideal. They'd be perfectly fine for my low rpm "RS-lite" application and affordable = win win.
FYI, the 999RS has huge valves at 43mm inlet and 35.5mm exhaust, almost identical to the 20% larger 1198 43.5/35.5 combination, even with a 2mm smaller bore.
- Wayne/Todd Patterson down at Ducati Bunbury (Wayne Patterson's Motorcycle Centre) had come up trumps in recommending Clyde Carstairs at Bravo Resources to repair the damaged cylinder head. Clyde runs a small elite welding/fabrication business servicing the aviation industry. When his first words after looking at the head were "It doesn't look too bad..." I nearly leapt on him in a display of unbridled affection. If you remember, my head looked like this:
Which looks pretty sad, but it was positively pristine in comparison to this Cosworth head he had recently repaired:
I didn't know it at the time, but while Clyde's aviation work pays the bills, his efforts in motorcycle drag racing circles have made him a dead-set legend, building/fabricating everything from stunning individual components to complete cutting edge Nitro Harley's:
So what was a catastrophe for me was just a pretty simple repair for him. Now in the normal course of welding, aluminium becomes annealed (softened) which is bad if you still want your head to hold compression, fluids etc, so there is some dark art heat treatment/post welding hardening voodoo that may or not involve the use of chickens and a full moon, but with Clyde's background you know it's done right. (my apologies to the reduced chicken population resulting from my head repair, but needs must)
The valve seats become distorted during this process and even if they weren't well chewed would have required re-cutting, but that was the simplest part of the process.
Once the head came back, I installed all the jewellery, and bolted it up with a new set of timing belts. Everything felt and looked fine turning over by hand but my good lady had the paddock starter wizzing over for quite a while before I could make myself release the clutch to fire it up. But fire up she did, sounding just as awesome as before....and we were both grinning like a couple of idiots.
Which leads into the second issue: the track saga (Wanneroo closed to bikes, Collie extension a long way from complete) was percolating away in the back of my mind. I mean, I'd only done a handful of track days in the last 5 years, the only track available is 3 hours away and just 1.6km long: a long-legged WSBK refugee engine which needed outside assistance to start seemed like the worst possible tool for the job. We're back to Sophia Loren doing grocery shopping again, and I'd hate to be responsible for that operation!
And then I felt the pound-dog eyes of the poor broken 749R engine boring into the back of my head. Hmmmm.....if only she was healthy, she'd be just the ticket to get back up to speed...just how terminal was it?
Just to recap, the engine had semi-seized at the track a few years earlier, and pulling the oil pre-screen had found this:
But we were relocating back to Oz from NZ a month later so I just shipped it "as is". After walking into a world of hurt at our new digs it stayed that way for a year or so before I started looking at replacing it with the 999RS engine. Yeah yeah, frying pan into fire etc, I'm hearin' ya....
As luck would have it a planned painting project with (maybe that should be "for") my missus was rained off. Faced with some time I didn't know I had I partook of a fortifying lunch-time beer, girded my loins, and hooked into the wee 749R. A surprisingly short time later the barrel is off and I’m holding the front conrod, rattling it around like a rotten tooth a gentle tug away from falling out. It was quite comical, wind-milling around like an excited dog's tail rather than precision engineering that should only move in a single plane. The vertical rod bearing actually felt pretty good in comparison.
No going back now, so soon enough the engine was split and the crank out. And these were the big end bearings:
Now I know what you're thinking, but you're wrong....these are the good bearings, from the vertical rod. You want fkkd? This is fkkd, with the bearing actually extruded up between the two rods and completely eroded away in a couple of sections:
No pic's of the crank sorry, but it was obviously way more damaged more than a polish and OEM bearings would fix. Righto, pretty much worst-case scenario then (cue the tannoy: "Another beer to engine ICU....STAT!"
Time to call in the heavy artillery: Justin Klashorst at Pro Twin, who, amongst other things at an elite mechanical level, prepared Troy Bayliss' ASBK comeback Panigale. The by-product of his mechanical wizardry (and being a genuinely nice bloke) is that he's flat out like a lizard drinking so it is not easy finding a break in his shop traffic. He's a big supporter of the race scene though, and was keen to help me out…….but was it salvageable? The narrowed eyes and air sucked through teeth as he ran a fingernail over the ridges on the crank journal surface didn't bode well, but he muttered "Leave it with me...". So I did, and drove home with crossed fingers, 749R Ti rods and crank are almost impossible to find and together worth around $2000 AUD, used.
Third front: I desperately needed some track time. It's all very well getting the 851 and/or 749R track ready but it kinda defeats the purpose if I felt like Methuselah when I finally got there . So the R1 was press-ganged into service.
And it's just a brilliant thing: it sounds great courtesy of a simple de-catted OEM exhaust with GYTR slip-ons giving a nice crackle on the over-run, a later model new take-off '07/08 triple clicker rear shock was a massive improvement over the spongy pud '04/06 unit, giving much better support on corner exit (for the grand total of $100USD + shipping). The gold-spot front calipers are still good even by current standards, with a PClll+plug-in quickshifter and re-geared it has plenty of punch....it is just so much bike for so little money.
It's funny, when I mentioned doing a track day on the R1 to my better half, she was horrified, "You can't take that, you've got track bikes for that! What if you crash it?" I started to tell her, and then had to quickly catch myself before I blurted out: if I'm going to crash I hope it's the R1, it's worth a fraction of what I've spent on the other two! No, best not go down that path, it only leads to another night sleeping with the dog.
You might be wondering where I'm going with this, but an interesting thing happened....
I was having a fat ol' time on the R1, at full noise down the short back straight at Collie and....silence. What the hell? I coast off the outside of the circuit, park it, and try the starter: click...click. Hmmm, flat battery. I get picked up and for once enjoy the taxi ride back to the pits without something hurting and a bike that is pretty much intact with the exception of a few electrons. It's late in the day so I pack up and head home a tired but still happy chappy.
Charging the battery rules that out straight up, and starting the bike sees no charge getting to the battery. I had my money (literally) on a fried rectifier....but nope, no output from the alternator. Duff alternator stator? But a resistance test didn't show anything untoward. I mean, what else is there? So I pull the side cover....
....and nearly soiled my overalls in a most ungentlemanly way:
Whaaaaat? That can't be bearing material...can it?
It just didn't compute: the bike sounded fine and ran strong, how could a bearing, or whatever the hell it was, fail that badly and give no indication? You can see where the rotor has been rubbing on the built up lumps of metal, yet luckily the rotor looks fine, still fairly smooth and not really damaged...
...hang on a minute, I'm looking at the windings, I'm holding the rotor, where is the magnet bit? And then it clicked: the pieces are, or should I say were, the magnet(s)!!! One or more had come adrift from the rotor and wiped out the rest. Not ideal but a hell of a lot better than the other scenarios that had been rolling around in my head.
A quick Google soon told me this era of R1's had very few faults....apart from the alternator rotor failing around the 40k km mark. Sure enough she had 38k km on the clock....sigh. Yamaha refused to recognise what was a widespread issue but did release an updated rotor which sort of tells you everything you need to know. Thankfully it was a relatively simple fix in the end, but my heart rate was bouncing off the rev limiter for a while there.
