Longest Day Up

So stripping the carbs has been met with some success, and some not quite so successful bits. I managed to get one of the two steel rails that join the carbs off, the other I just can't shift despite soaking in Silkopen over a week and using a bit of shock on the JIS screws that I'm definitely using the correct tool upon Slides and bowls have come off OK, and I'm just removing the component parts, but everything is covered in this salty scale. It's part road dirt but mainly I think the effects of E10 petrol at a guess and water that's attracted to the ethanol polling and doing damage. I might be wrong but that's my theory... Everything is either covered in filth and scale, or has been chewed up though. I only just managed to get one of the pilots out, it had really been attacked in the past. Weirdly this pilots spring was fine, the other one was a completely furred in, had to tease it out with a pick, brake cleaner and a tactical tap onto the bench i...

As it was running so badly it was time to get to the carbs and see what state they were in. I was just planning to see what condition the filter was in and try balancing them. Hopefully that might bring an improvement? First thing to do was to get the tank and then the side panels off, the latter made a lot more awkward by having the luggage rack in place. Annoyingly I'd had to lie the ZX6r down on it's side to get the oil pump off without draining all the oil, and of course I'd stupidly done that right in front of the ramp. That meant that all this work was done stooped over or sat on the floor, having a ramp has spoilt me.   There's enough room to get to the airbox screws by lifting the panels thankfully, but once I did that I found that this might be a bigger job than I first thought...   Yeah, so that's going to be a problem. I've ridden the bike about three miles, I'm pretty certain that Steven (the previous owner and successful LDU challeng...

I've ordered a new steering head kit from Pyramid, it will replace the old loose ball bearings for caged rollers and when I get a chance I'll install it. It shouldn't take too long, but these things have a habit of taking much longer than they should...  For now the next thing to do is to fit the shiny new Black Widow exhausts . Right hand side first as I've already removed the OEM one that had rusted through. The cans and link-pipes were really well packaged, the silencers inside their own cloth bags. Included in the box was the silencer mounting strap and rubber, nuts and bolts, spacers and clamps all of a decent quality and seemingly well plated which was really nice to see. Also included was some (brief) fitting instructions, baffles for each can and a tube of Holts exhaust assembly paste. Basically, everything you could possibly need. Of course I immediately took the baffles out because of course a small capacity parallel twin is going to be as quiet as a...

So that was some steps forwards and I guess time wise, the steering bearings mean most of those steps back. What hasn't been a setback is a package arriving on my doorstep on yesterday. I'd approached Black Widow Exhausts to see if they would be happy in helping in the cost for a pair of new silences and linkpipes for the bike. Both were obviously beyond all help, I'd asked a number of local welders and pipe manufacturers if repairing the old ones were feasible and was consistently told that it was 95% rust I held in my hands. So, after a few emails and phone-calls I'm pleased to say that this box has turned up at my house, and I couldn't be happier. Thank you Chelsie and Black Widow Exhausts , I appreciate it a lot. Knowing the rotted exhausts are being replaced is massive weight off my mind, I wasn't certain how I'd get the bike through an MoT with it blowing so badly. There's only so much you can do with exhaust bandage, paste and ...

  I got back on Monday and in between child herding/parenting I have managed to achieve some good progress. Really good progress in fact, up until I realised something else had gone wrong. Anyway, the right hand fork leg needed rebuilding, and the paint had merrily cured since I've been away so onwards!   Which with a little effort and rewatching the youtube video led to this: I was quite pleased with the way it turned out, hopefully it's oil-tight. I'll find out on the shake-down ride I guess. Brooks Barn had been kind enough to provide a pair of discs with a hefty discount so they were the next ingredient to the front end mix. I wanted to be certain that they were installed upon the hub as straight as possibly so I ran a tap through the disc brake mount threads in the hub, lubricated with plenty of brake cleaner and swizzed out afterwards using the compressor my friend gave me a few years back. Thanks Al!  Off with the old and preparing for the new: And ...

  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...