A few more mods - gotta love winter !

Well as it's that time of year when the roads are covered in salt & my highly modified Viffer is off the road for some more experimentation & other work.

So a few little mods made to support some other ones that are still in progress. I added my nice new titanium axles (front spindle, swingarm pivot) & large bolts (front engine & swingarm pinch) plus a few more Ti fasteners.



Then I replaced the Redfox hugger & standard chain guard with a Skidmarx one (pics to come) but they never told me it was a two piece affair & that it was a carbon glass composite ! So looking at it the hugger part was great on the smooth carbon side, but had obvious voids in the laminate below, so without further ado, I gutted the glass laminate inner layer off & reduced the weight by 55%. The whole point of carbon is its weight saving, the looks are secondary, so if anyone wants a carbon hugger I'd advise against the Skidmarx one as there is no weight saving there & a cheaper carbon look plastic unit will look just as good.

Moving along, the expansion tank was hanging off the side of the bike so I decided to weigh it & it was 800grams with fluid at the minimum mark. Even when hot the fluid never reached the upper mark & there is a lot of capacity above that. So a little ebay searching turned up this little KTM690 one & a bit of fiddling produced this. It will get a nice mount once it’s proven itself. Plus a test fit shot.






Which when mounted looks like this. You can also see the alloy pipes I used to replace some of the silicone hose & I did the same on the part between the 2 rads under the headstock.






And the left side minus the old expansion tank, gives a good shot of the EBP water pump & I got a shot of the T-piece I used to restore the thermostat function after the failed digital controller install last winter.






The strange Black hose on the frame leads to the next mod. I want to fit a high mount exhaust, but the shock remote was in the way, so what to do ? Where could I move it to ? I didn't want it on the left side, so decided to move it to where the front left coil used to live before I went Coil on Plug (CoP). I measured it up & made a bracket, then made a hole in the fairing for the adjuster.











Added some cooling air holes in the front inner fairing. Then added the left side panel.






I had modified the original horn to mount like this.




But it is a bit feeble so I bought a combined airhorn with attached twin trumpets & that left the problem of where to mount it ?






Still need to finish the wiring up, but the original horn wires will feed inside the fairing to a relay under the new shock mount & then a separate fused power line, will feed from the battery via the relay to the horn with a local ground shared with the starter motor. The horns face down & slightly back so should stop any water ingress, plus it will be behind the lower centre fairing panel which should protect it from most direct spray.

More updates as I finish them :biggrin:

Enjoy.

 

Wow, that is quite a bit of work. Looking good!!

 

YO MO, how much weight did you save with the new T Axles ?

 

Ah well that's a bit of a sore point based on cost. The Ti parts saved 0.75Kg, the KTM expansion tank saved 0.5Kg for 100x less cost :frown:

But the mods to date this winter have saved another 3Kg, but as the weight was equally saved off both ends the balance is still probably 50/50. Dry weight is now 180Kg, wet weight 214Kg fully fuelled (30Kg lighter than standard), 205Kg with 10L fuel as per manufacturers "wet weight" figures.

I'm done spending money on light weight parts now. Only one left & I'm not sure if I'll do that yet. I could knock approx another 3Kg off by removing the passenger appendages & the main stand. But this is a road bike & the other half goes on the back sometimes, so they will stay.

Going to put it back together for the spring, have a magazine do a comparison test with a standard one & leave it at that.

Hope to manage a maximum top speed run later in the year if I can arrange it. Might manage a track day or two this year as well.

Hopefully we will ahve some good weather in the UK this summer so I can enjoy it. Then finish my ZZR250 project bike next winter

 

Cool man.......

 

Very nice!

 

Where did you get the Ti parts?

 

They are hand made by Pete Lidster in the UK Titanium motorcycle parts | Ti64 check out the blog for details of his work !