New Year's Eve was great.....New Year's Day? Not so much. I desperately needed a wee kip and wasn't walking 400m back to the house to do it.
It's a couple of months out of sequence but I just stumbled on the photo and had to laugh, not that I was laughing at the time....
Looking at all that concrete also reminded me of this lil' fella, every workshop should have one:
While we're on the subject of housekeeping I was getting the shits with the amount of real estate fairings were taking up when they're off the bike (see above). I could hang them up somewhere in the workshop but the soft insulating foam walls make it a little tricky and in the same time it would take to rig something a little more substantial I came up with this.....and I get to take to the track:
It took all of 30 minutes to make, repurposing some old speaker stands that have been kicking around the shed ever since the days when people uttered the words "surround sound" in tones of hushed reverence....yep, a loooong time:
A bit of unused seat foam for the top of the stand, some off-cut steel tube (from that length I bought to brace the 851 frame) and a nylon off-cut turned into a nub for the end of the post. I ended up shortening the post a tad after this pic, just to make it bit more compact. My original plan was to make the post removable for easier storage but at the time I just wanted the fairings out of the way, so that will be a job for another spare 30 minutes. As it is it does the job, cost virtually nothing and is surprisingly handy.
If you thought that was simple what do you call this next "project"? What's a simpler word than simple? I dunno, but in the dictionary wherever/whatever that word is you may well find the photo below to illustrate the point.
The 851 fairings are a pain in the arse because everything is screwed/bolted together, so it's a painful exercise to disassemble/reassemble. I'd already bought the nice titanium fairing fastener kit (up there under the title) and being pig headed/stupid didn't want to then buy a set of Dzus quick release fasteners to replace them. In my defence, at least I halved the problem by making new brackets and using Dzus fasteners to mount the assembled fairings on the bike. FYI, from the first of the '94 916 through to the last of the '06 999 series, all superbikes had Dzus fasteners as standard fitment, it was with the 1098 that more focus was put on cost savings and they reverted to bolts.
I'd already found that rather than faffing around removing the individual panels it's easier to just leave it all intact and remove it as one piece, easing it forward over the front wheel. But then what? You've got this big red fibreglass bath-tub to try and deal with, and forbid there's the slightest breath of wind blowing around the pits. But this uber-simple stand does the trick:
Just a piece of seat foam glued in place...drum roll please....voila!
Yeah, not the most impressive thing in the world is it? But it really is maximum result for minimum effort, making it so much easier at the track when you are jammed in sharing the bays and you need to remove the fairings.
Update: A lil' later on I added a hanger for the bellypan, but it's still not much to write home about:
A lil' more tidying up: the 749R engine had just been sitting on an old outdoor seat/stool frame converted into an engine stand with some pieces of timber strategically screwed to it for cushioning/positioning. I figured the thoroughbred 999RS engine deserved something a little better than my Shanks' pony solution and I started looking at various options for a decent engine stand to facilitate my hamfistedness. It can be a bit like a UFC ground battle wrestling an engine into submission as you try and torque something up without it rolling all over the bench.
As luck would have it my local autoparts chain store had a "40% Off Everything!" special so I snaffled one of these:
From memory it was the princely sum of $70AUD ($50USD). Obviously the mounts are in the wrong plane, designed to mount a car engine with bolts fore/aft vs the bike engine which are through bolted side/side. So I cut and welded the top mounts to some angle-iron off-cuts, leaving the bottom mounts to pivot, and bolted the sub-assemblies onto the main plate:
And don't that look purty?
Just the perfect height to work on and so easy to move around. I think that deserves a beer....
