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Showing posts from May, 2018

Getting all dressed up

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The VFR was in need of some clothes and those old plastics were not going to do the job. I had sold them anyway which surprised me but people really want original plastics no matter how grotty they might be. New bodywork was needed and Ragged edge racing were to be my supplier. After a brief conversation with Spike, he had agreed to provide the fairings with the correct shade of blue added as a pigment to the fibreglass giving them a rugged, great finish right from the start. Fitting the fairings is fairly straight forward. They are designed for an F J/K Rc24 so if you have one of those they are very straight forward but my FH was going to need some custom brackets to enable fitment of these fairings. Most of the fasteners between the panels and some holding it on are Dzus fasteners. These are versatile, quick to remove and tidy. If you want to know how to fit them, I did a bit of a write up on the NSR250 MC28 build. First to go on was the nose fairing. I wasn't planni

Pipe dreams

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Fitting new exhaust systems to my motorcycles is nothing new to me. I even mix it up a little like what I ended up with on my RC46  but this one was always going to be a bit trickier. My VFR750 RC25 GH had the standard four into two exhaust which was now mostly made of oxides of metals long since departed and exhaust repair tape.  I very briefly toyed with the idea of making this into a four into two into one system but thankfully a stainless Motad system for a FJ/K came up on ebay. Looking online told me that nobody was saying this could be done, neither were they saying it couldn't and knowing the engine hadn't changed, I went a head with the idea of fitting it. The can that the system came with however was too heavy, restrictive, low and on the wrong side. Something would need to be made to sort that out. Off with her head[ers] The first job was to get the old system off. This involved lots of heat and penetrating oils. Hammers and swearing also got into the mi

A real swinger

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Reading the rules before attempting to follow them is just boring so let us get stuck into some hard thinking and work to sort the swing arm out on the VFR. I had a small dilemma with my VFR750 RC24 6x [rep] build: The swing arm didn't look much like what it was pretending to be. The caliper was all wrong and on the wrong side of the swing arm which itself was the wrong shape and looking no better for it. Changing the swingarm was going to be a lot of work but, conversely, modifying the original for racing then upgrading again later would be a great way of throwing money away so I decided to try and find something more suitable looking. ** Spoilers** I ended up not carrying out the swing arm swap due to not being able to for CRMC eligibility. I am going to leave the process in here however for anyone else trying to do this to their own machine so they can have an idea of what will be required to achieve such a swing rm upgrade. If you're not bothered about this, then