Longest Day Up

  I'm still away at sea with work, I've not heard from the exhaust company and nor has the corporate sponsorship money arrived yet. But I keep checking the Cancer Research fund every few days and on Monday for some strange reason there was a flurry of donations, much to my surprise. I recognised one name as someone Mrs EvilSpike works with and messaged her to convey my thanks and tell her about the other random donations. It turns out she'd had a bake sale at work and the donations were from other pilots, observers and the students at her squadron! She was going to keep it quiet until the end of the day and then let me know with a total which was £121 plus some gift aid in the end which is fantastic. Her mum had been baking too and they managed to present an amazing array of cakes and flapjacks for everyone. I'm only mildly jealous that I didn't get to eat any of the fruit slice offered up.  Unfortunately one reason the donation and blog pages might ...

After changing the leaking fork seals in the right leg and leaving it two weeks, with no oil escaping I felt quietly confident that stripping the left leg so I could service and give it a lick of paint would take less than an hour. It would appear I underestimate the number of ways I can be wrong on any given morning. The fork came out of the leg easily enough, bottle jack under the sump and the bike became tripod. Fork into the workbench, ratchet strap to keep it secure and use the long 6mm allen key to undo the retaining bolt then... ah. Bollocks! Houston, we have a problem... That wasn't quite how I had planned this to go. I'd given the socket a good baste of Silkopen over the preceding few weeks but my guess is the 6mm ball socket on the end of my 300mm long allen key wasn't the best of ideas. Luckily in the village we have the Perranwell Classic Car Garage (who will hire you a Morgan for the day to tour around Cornwall and it's brilliant fun!) and after a quick c...

 Sorry I've been quiet for a couple of weeks, we've been away in foreign climes over Easter, although annoyingly I've only been back a few days and now have to go away to work. But there has been progress. Firstly and most importantly I am in possession of a pair of shiny, new Tourmax discs courtesy of Kerry and Rob at Brooks Barn in Pembrokeshire. Kerry was fantastic and did us a grand discount on the new discs which I'm sure will get me through the MoT unlike the warped ones on the bike at the mo. I've also managed to snag a corporate sponsor which will give the total raised for Cancer Research a significant boost. Considering the company will merely get a middle aged man complaining about how much everything hurts in the days afterwards, plus a few photos of his (slightly)* less than Adonis frame wearing their t-shirts whilst spannering on a bike, I feel the LDU fund has done very well in this cost/benefit equation. Thankfully Elevate Offshore , the premium pers...

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...

 So, bit of garage time today to give the bike a proper clean and look over. After a lot of scrubbing it comes up pretty clean. Other than the broken and rusty bits but to look at it in a positive light, that's just patina and a slow, natural way of adding lightness. I've got the bugs and road filth off from when the last time this valiant iron horse triumphed at the LDU, popped the screen off to clean the remains of an old tax disc off and swept up the not insignificant puddle of rust unnecessary iron that was left behind. Also found the missing battery terminal nut that had escaped the previous owner There are lots of positives, especially compared to what some of the other contestants participants are currently battling with. One person has a bike that has been partially underwater for a number of years. So, the good bits: New plugs, light bulbs, tyres, battery, air filter and it had an oil change about 1500 miles ago. Carbs were rebuilt a year ago wi...

This is the Longest Day Up. If you're reading this blog for the first time, welcome and thank you for visiting. The blog hopefully details how and why I agreed to take part in the 2023 LDU, getting the bike from it's somewhat neglected state to a fully fledged distance trampin' machine and with a bit of luck, the successful journey on June the 21st. If you're interested in reading the whole sordid affair then you need to scroll to the bottom of the main page and read each entry from the bottom up because Google/Blogger has decided to be awkward. The first post is aptly titled As with many decisions it started with a beer... I hope you find them interesting. A decade ago it was the Longest Day Down but, the times they are a-changin' as Bob told us so a while ago it turned into Lands End to John 'O Groats. What's not changed is the fundamentals of starting at one end of Britain at first light on June the 21st and trying to get to the other end before the nex...

*for a given level of mighty. Obvs... Covid had a massive and quite frankly bellenderous part to play in the delivery of the bike. Mainly in that C-19 just got in the way of very good people trying to help. So screw you, bat flu! Eventually, some rather nice people managed to recover the bike from Senor El Stephen and bring it 432 miles south to my front door. Weirdly they'd not accept, tea, biscuits or the use of the loo. Either way angels sang, the skies parted and all myriad of creatures* rose up to praise the GPZ when it was unveiled from the Luton van. I must admire the way that the delivery driver managed to reverse around the gate and corner to our house with the utmost of ease. And there it was before me in all it's magnificence. With not one but two keys in the lock and a significant bag of spares nonchalantly swinging from  a handle bar as though the bike itself had a devil may care attitude towards the supplied Haynes manual. And a full tank...

As with many decisions it started with a beer, and then another one and so on until I was sat on the internet and one thing just led to another. I'm not entirely certain that I remembered what I'd agreed to participate in when I first woke up on the 4th of October last year. Later that morning with a cup of tea I opened the thread again to find out that I was, metaphorically, In like Flynn... The previous evening I'd been partaking in the aforementioned ale and reading my motorbike forum. In the for sale section there was a bike that was being offered for sale for the princely sum of £0 on the condition that the new owner would participate in the 2023 running of the Longest Day Up. I, who have little love for riding motorbikes any sizeable distance, nor much interest in any bike that doesn't have at least a couple of "R's" in it's name nor any space whatsoever for another bike for some inexplicable reason had put my hand up and asked for the bike, prom...