A few hours more...

...and we’re very nearly there!

The weekend was very fruitful, and now with a little bit of faff (oil, fuel, tyres, lockwire, and check fasteners) its testing time.

This is how it was on Saturday morning:



We needed to push a new stem into the yokes, and buy some new bearings. It then became apparent that we had 2 different cups in the steering head- one metric, one imperial! So another favour was pulled in and DBR machined out the lower one to size.

Back to the shed to put it together. On its own 2 wheels, we did those little all-important jobs :

Front and rear brakes, engine and tank breathers, (with a non-return valve in the tank breather). We decided that for the present, we’d use the 5litre tank under the cover, with the under-seat tank and on-going project. Fuel lines, positioning of bars, controls, steering damper and fairing, rearset link rod and rose joints. We fitted the Scitsu tacho, and then decided about placement of the (few) electrical components.

Sunday morning saw a trip to Maplins to buy a small (1.3Ah) battery. You can see it’s a good bit smaller and lighter than the 3Ah one I had planned on. I will just have to keep an eye on charge etc. I think a spare would be a good idea for a race weekend!

We put the Silent Hektic ignition unit under the battery at the front fairing stay, and the coil beside this.

It was decided that it was (reasonably) out of harm’s way, and would be kept quite cool. The problem with carrying the oil in the frame is that it quite quickly gets rather warm…!

Ash stuck on a toe-guard

while I made the tea!

The blue seat unit weighs about 2 elephants, so we decided to recycle Ash’s old red one. We’ll need some captive nuts for this to enable speedy strips and mounting, but that’s not a problem. it’s a lot lighter and looks a bit more modern too- I’m guessing this seat unit is a later development of the Tigcraft chassis

And that was the state of play on Sunday night
Looking good eh?? I can’t wait to just do the few little things, then hopefully, around the end of Feb, we can get back on track. Cadwell’s the first round on the 16th of May!

Happy New Fuel Tank

I’ve been thinking about fuel tanks of late. The original tank, holding 5 litres sits under this cover, but may be just a little too small.

A phone call to Dave Pearce at the Tigcraft Technology Centre was very fruitful. He let me have not one but 2 tanks, for an absolute steal. Thanks for that Dave, very much appreciated.

Option one is 7 litre plastic job, which could live under the existing (or my spare) seat unit.

This was originally on a Derbi GP50, but could potentially solve our problem.

Secondly, he also gave me (for a song), a manx tank, which looks like it holds about 18 litres! As he said, we’d probably only have to fill it up at the start of the season…”. Dave also observed that it did appear to have fallen out of the ugly tree, but maby it could be judiciously modified by someone who knows what they’re doing. there’s certainly enough sheet ally to work with there!

I think it was made for flying Scotsman Denis Gallagher for the '99 Singles TT, and then passed thru the hands of Andrew McCombe before coming back to Dave.

Next to it is the carbon fibre cover.

The bike is still out at Ash’s, I’ll report more after we get the front end together next weekend. And there may be another seat option too...

Finally, provisional dates have been published for the upcoming season:

Cadwell May 16-17

Snetterton June 19-20 BSB Combined UK & Euro-round

Brands GP July 25-26 (Possible UK/Euro-round)

Snetterton September 5-6

Brands Indi September 26-27

Plus probably one more weekend in either April or August to give a championship of 6 weekends. I'm getting excited!