Longest Day Up

I've made a poster which will never win a design award or even a primary school level of IT competency but it's 2am and I need to go to bed. I've only got tomorrow to get a couple printed and pop them up in Cornwall Kawasaki and the village Post Office as we're away for a bit. I've made then in Canva , an online design studio although I did try in Nitro PDF editor and if I'd just used Canva in the first place I'd have been in bed by now. Anyway, I'll head to the print shop in the morning but does anyone have a preference between the plain poster or the one with the faint picture of the GPZ in the background  Or without the picture? If you are feeling generous you can download the posters here and badger your local landlord/shop owner/workplace to put one up. You would have my eternal thanks and maybe a nice cup of tea next time you're feeling poorly. Poster without picture .pdf Poster with picture .pdf

Time to have a go at rebuilding a fork then! After a few days in the weak spring sunshine to cure the fork outer looks like this. It's not flawless by any means but it's much better than it was and I just need it to be oil tight. Flawless isn't what I'm aiming for anyway, more good enough for seismic which I feel I've achieved. And I really ought to put grey primer on my shopping list. Anyway, to the garage! With everything in place it's time to start. I had to remove surface corrosion from a few items with a bit of we and dry ad brake cleaner. The damper rod, spacer and oil seal washer needed attention from rust that had appeared just in the few days that they'd been in my slightly damp garage. I also took the copper washer off the retaining bolt and annealed it instead of replacing it as suggested because LDU. Hopefully there will be no embarrassed puddle tomorrow like a puppy in the kitchen come sunrise... I followed the Haynes manual but had to refer to...

I've never actually taken a fork apart on my own, and it's been a long time since I "helped" Steve at GTPE to change the oil and seals on a pair of my upside down forks. So yeah, this job has quite a different flavour to it. I've read the Haynes manual and watched this youtube video by a chap called Matt Tries To Do Things a few times and figured I could have a crack at that. One big difference I found compared to the video was the dust seal took a good five minutes using a knife, flat blade screwdriver and significant amounts of cursing to remove. There was so much corrosion around the top of the fork tube it had really gripped the seal to the point where I had to cut much of it away. Once the dust seal was out, the video and the manual both claim that pulling the stanchion from the tube will remove the oil seal and bushings. My stanchion and both bushings came out leaving the oil seal behind however. That took a blade, several flat bladed screwd...

So there has been an ongoing discussion about what to do with the silencers, whether to bodge them with hope, blind optimism, some mild steel and far more faith in my limited welding skills than anyone reasonable ought to have.  Or I could just throw money at the problem and buy some new silencers. But since this is the LDU then I have a cunning plan with respect to the silencers Whether history will show the plan to be as cunning as a fox who's just been appointed Professor of Cunning at Oxford University or just the ill fated gay abandon of a man that was briefly shown how to weld back in 2015 and then went and bough a Lidl stick welder remains to be seen. Possibilities include fire in a Cornish garage, an ill-fated breakdown on the A9, or even the abject triumph of someone who arrives at John O'Groats without both silencers falling off somewhere around Devon are all eminently possible. Some however are more likely then others. Probably the ones involving the fire b...

Now I've accepted the discs are warped I might as well distract myself with doing something else and then hoping magically they'll fix themselves. So I gave the calipers a good service and all seems well if a little ravaged by salt and my damp garage. So after some attention with an toothbrush, brake cleaner, a smear of red rubber grease and a smidgen of copper slip they're back together and.... it's still pulsing at the lever riding down the lane, why did I even bother taking it back off the ramp? It was the most faintest of hopes but worth a try. So now I'll definitely be chasing a cheap pair of decent new discs. Watch this space. Last night I spent a frankly unhealthy amount of time watching youtube videos of people taking forks apart and replacing seals. I've never done this on my own so want to make sure I understand what I'm doing and that I've got the right tools. £45 later and I've got three packages ambling towards me to deal...

I went for a walk on Carn Marth with my mum and on the way home popped into the rather nice people at Cornwall Kawasaki in Lanner and spoke to one of their talented mechanics Adam. He's rebuilt the ZX6R's gearbox for me a while ago and I very much respect his knowledge and experience. I asked him about the gaskets (11060) that live behind the disc on the wheels mounting face, they're £23.38 for the pair, and more importantly almost certainly No Longer Available*. As this is being done to a strict budget every penny spent has to be justified. His opinion was that the gaskets are there to retard dissimilar metal corrosion between the steel of the disc and alu of the wheel. So, as long as I got both faces of the hub and disc perfectly clean and I accepted that corrosion would start to occur, then in this instance it should be fine to bolt the discs directly to the wheel hub. That evening I thought it would just take me half an hour to clean up the faces and ...

Of course it's not all going to be plain sailing, is it? It would seem that at some point or another the bike is going to fight me, so with that in mind, let battle commence... Top bolt is out, the bottom one was quite happy where it was and the 10mm head was almost perfectly round. 24 hours of being basted with Silkopen, a bit of heat and hammering and voila! It would appear someone in the bikes past liked threadlock. And I mean really liked threadlock...   I should probably put four new bolts on the shopping list... My Lidl rattle gun whipped off the disc bolts, they were similarly threadlocked down which isn't a bad thing. But I'm taking the discs off to assess just how warped they were, and then I found this:   Only half of the gasket that should be there to reduce dissimilar metal corrosion was present. It was similar on the other side, and whilst min thickness is stamped on the discs as 3.5mm both discs are 3.65mm. So if they're straight, then h...