Mithrandir

Boy, you made quite a production out of that! Do it like this: To loosen it up, first push the allen key up the inside of the fork and give it a couple of sharp taps with a hammer. Then do like in the picture. Grab the axle and the shifter and give a couple of sharp tugs. You'll hear a crack as the loctite breaks, and then it will spin out by hand.

Oh, Macadams 90s *shudder*.... I had those on a ZX6R that I rode across Oz. Worst tyres I ever rode on. Slippery, slimey feel to them when cold (more than once I spun them up on partial throttle exiting a corner, with very little lean on), and took forever to heat up, even after dropping the pressures dramatically. Maybe work better on the bigger bikes where the weight will help warm them up, but on mid-range bikes like the 6R, they're attrocious.

LOL. Hey, that's TWICE you've been in here now Nik. What's happening? Is the world coming to an end? :poke: OK. That's cool. I just like to know why people don't like certain tyres. Usually helps if they can enumerate the problems. As for pressure, 42 is way too high on the front. 36-38 you want. I only run 36 on the BTs and my XX riding is mainly Interstate droning. Slipping on the back, sounds like you may be trying to open the throttle too early, or too hard, in the corners. The other thing might be riding style - are you sitting straight up on the bike or hanging off a bit as you go through the corner? If you don't hang off, and then crack the throttle open, it can lead to the rear end going walkabout on you. I ride very much like my race style- climbing all over the bike, and I've not had the rear end break loose on me on this bike (my old 97 XX did though, but I was less experienced then) and I've been riding quite hard in the wet (Hwy 101 from SF to Astoria, in pouring rain and still averaging 70mph....) Oh... one other thing I've just thought of - do you still have the stock shock on there? If so, with your weight that could be a big cause of it..

Tim, your blessings worked. Went past many Polizei but all were already busy taking care of other drivers. :grin: Coming home and I'm cruising along at about 85 in a 70, there's an on-ramp and a car coming down it. Pull over to the left lane but as I'm checking the mirrors I notice a set of headlights gaining on me, so I pin the throttle, go around the in-coming car and back off again into the right lane. Notice in the reflections as it goes past that its a WSP car. Didn't even look at me. I mustn't have been there :wink:

Tom, after you've got it fitted (Alpha's instructions are spot-on) don't adjust anything. Ohlins shocks take a long time to break in - typically 600+ miles. They feel quite harsh to start with, but will loosen up over time. I'm the same weight as you and I found I needed to add one full turn of preload on the adjuster and then soften two clicks of compression and one of rebound to get a nice plush ride.

I've got photos from my recent fitting. It will take me a couple of days to sort out though. Simply put - comp adjuster on the left side under the fairing, and preload adjuster on the right footpeg.

Oh, and I forgot Tim. If you see a silver XX south flying down the I-5 this afternoon between 1530 and 1630 between Seattle and Olympia - please look the other way. I have no idea who the rider is or why they are heading south to Portland for dinner and then heading north again.... :cool:

I know. I forgot this :poke: But, I've yet to see a m/c plod hang off their HD/Kwak....

Start with getting the right springs front and rear (ie getting the sag right - which you can't do for the Average Rider over here without changing the springs). Lifting the rear of the bike won't decrease scraping that much. Because of the angles that it induces, it normally causes the front of the fairing to want to touch down more, and the rear less. If you want the bike to scrape less in general, you have to raise both the front and rear of the bike. But, as the others said - if you are scraping the fairings road riding expect to have a crash sooner rather than later. You're pushing yourself far beyond what you should be doing on the road, not to mention you are riding in such a style that you have close to zero capacity to deal with changing circumstances. Something comes up on a corner that you couldn't see, a deer or pile of dirt, and you're screwed as you cannot lean the bike any further, and you aren't in a position to be able to muscle the bike to stand up go around the obstacle and pull back in the, now tighter radius required, corner. Get to a track school and learn how to hang off the bike and ride compentantly.

It is always recommended that if you make a radical tyre change on one tyre, you should also swap the other. Radical can be defined as changing brand, or even just completely different types of tyre such as a race front and touring rear (eg Pirelli Super Corsa v Diablo). MSF to start with is a good idea. It will (attempt to) fix up your bad habits first before you do any of the more advanced courses that use racetracks. After that, it's a matter of picking a course that suits you. More often than not, that is dictated by travel distance rather than who the instructor is. If the only thing you want to focus on is better cornering, then the Keith Code schools are the way to go. If you want to go whole-hog with the track riding, maybe one of the others.

Only when I have the rebound set too soft (like I do right now on the XX)

You're right DRB if the stock RR shock is around the $150 mark. I was working on a base cost of $300. Compliance is just a matter of having the right valving and shim stacks. WIthin there lies a whole art in and of itself. If you sent it off to Traxxion, you'll probably want to get a new valve put in it, and from there you can pretty much make the shock feel almost as good, if not better than the brand-name aftermarkets.

Easy enough to do on the bike. Just pull the axle/wheel/brakes/guard, undo the damping rod bolt on the bottom of the fork and then pump the fork bottom up and down a number of times to get rid of the old oil. Put the bolt back in, then fill up.

The 010 front has some fairly bad fatal flaws in the tread design. In Australia, and I also believe europe, the 010 line cannot be purchased any more. The replacement is the 012R. It uses the same compound as the 012SS, but has a different carcass and more groves for better wet handling. I'm surprised they haven't made the same move over here. Maybe trying to get rid of old stock? I've run 010s on a number of different bikes, and the rear is quite an exceptional tyre. The front is pretty good, but they've all cupped. However, they are all lighter bikes than the XX (VTR, VFR, ZX6R etc) and the cupping wasn't to the point of being annoying. I've never heard a good comment about the 020 front, but I like 020 rear. Ridden quite a few VFRs with the 010/020 combo and they handle wear and grip really well. They don't handle racetracks well, but for general fast road riding, they're more than passable.

What's do you find wrong with them Nik? The BT57 is the precursor tyre to the BT010. Quite grippy and handle pretty much everything you throw at them unless you want to do track days. Over time they don't change properties like the D207s would (you could cook them after a single hard riding session) Maybe your riding style and/or bike setup needs looking at?

Anything aftermarket is typically better than stock. They'll all be worth upgrading to. If you are going to put in a 900RR shock, at least get it serviced and the correct spring weight put on it before you fit it to the bike. If you don't do that, then there's really no point. As a guide, aftermarket shock manufacturers recommend having the shock (not forks) serviced every 25,000Km (about 18,000mi). This is to replace the oil (which has deteriorated with use), check on the seals etc etc. The 900RR is getting old now, so any shock that you will find will be well over those recommended service intervals. Add to that a spring of the correct weight for you, and you'll be up around the cost of an Ohlins/Fox/Penske/WP shock.

Dunno. My run down the 680 a couple of weeks ago in a line of traffic in the left lane sitting quite comfortably between 100 and 110mph..... Didn't feel the need to lane split then :grin:

It might not be topping out. If you're saying the bike feels a little soft, I still think its a damper rod problem. Why? Because you say it works fine over small bumps, but only on the bigger ones do you notice anything. On small bumps, with no damper rod, you won't feel anything. It's mainly spring and the oil won't have any effect. That is, your weight will more than cancel out the lack of damping. But, when you hit the big bumps, you don't feel anything as the fork compresses, but you get a big bang as the weight comes of the front and you get a double action of the spring pushing both the wheel towards the ground and the bars in the direction they were already travelling (ie towards you). If the oil is too thick, you won't normally get a big bang coming through the front. What it means is that the damping can't work effectively because it cannot move fast enough. If the oil was too thick (which it is anyway) then you'd be feeling the suspension as quite harsh even on the small bumps. Having the rebound shimstack around the wrong way is an interesting idea. Thinking aloud here, I don't think that would cause the feeling you're getting. If the stack was the wrong way around, you would effectively have two compression stacks and no rebound. That means any compression action would feel really harsh, but the rebound would try to lengthen your forks as quickly as possible. (Note that it is possible to put rebound valves in the wrong way around, but the difference is only a couple of mm in the fitting and would have no effect on the actual damping performance, because the valves are 2-way, not a 1-way).

Did you do the rebound damping rod back up under each cap? Sounds like you didn't. If you get a big clunk as the wheel drops away from the bike then that's almost guaranteed to be the problem.

Mine was like that until the third oil change (2400mi), which is when I went to full synthetic. I also put on a full system akra exhaust at the same time, so I can't really tell you which it was that caused the greatly increased mileage. But, 180mi is a short run before the light starts to blink, and will regularly see 190-200.

No idea on the cost, hopefully Santiago will chime in here with the details. I do know that he has it wired to the horn button. The arming switch turns the horn from a horn to a happy button.

60HP NOS kit as mentioned earlier. Lucky he's a dental hygenist so gets the happy gas for free :grin: :cool: This is mainly photos, but a bit of a writeup of the custom f/g work I did so that he could hide the bottle from unsuspecting Gixxer and R1 riders. http://www.vlc.com.au/~justin/about/bikes/...itrous_fit.html I've yet to ride the bike :wink:

Tried to point a friend at one of the threads here, but says he now requires a username and password. Since I always view as me, not a guest, just wondering what's happened. Did the guest viewing of the board get disabled?

Pretty much all forks operate at between 110 and 120mm. 160 is waaaay too little oil in the forks. At that height you'd be barely above the top of the cartridge at full compression. I've never heard that about the RT valves and I've installed quite a few of their kits in various bikes. Where did you read that because it hasn't been in their instructions that I've read.

Dynos have variations between them. It is usually not accurate to compare exact results between them. For example, try to compare results between a Dynojet and FactoryPro dyno and see what happens. Even within a manufacturer each dyno will read differently. For example, was the dyno operating on a hot or cold day (effects air density) or humid v dry day. There are other factors that come into play as well. Most modern sports bikes are built to make use of ram-air effects to increase the available horsepower at speed. That effect is usually a 5-8% increase in horsepower. Some dynos have fans that can do this, so the question was - does your results include the use of fans to generate ram-air effects or not? I am stating that I did not have those fans. The fact that a full system race exhaust generates numbers almost identical (fractions of one horsepower) to the stock exhaust sounds a bit fishy does it not? As for the operator - it was Mike Velasco. Another of the AMA-level engine tuners, at with racing results at least as good as Dan Kyle. The map that I got was a fuel economy map. But, I don't really trust it right now to be the most efficient setup considering that there were really large holes in the RPM traces for the ignition curves. So while it could sample and talk to the PCIII and adjust the map, I don't think it was getting all the information it was supposed to in order to get the map accurate. In a couple of cases, there were 1000rpm holes in the ignition sensing, which wouldn't help it sniff the outputs correctly. The a/f ratio was tuned at 13.5 (for fuel efficiency). We tried to do a run with it set to 12.8 for power, but things were going rapidly downhill by then so we gave up and he's invited me back to fix everything up for free once he's got the hardware sorted out. I'd like to be able to show you a torque/HP graph, but that was another of the problems - the computer lost the printer so I don't even have a paper copy of the graphs. :cry: As far as being braindead, MV is certainly not that. He's very far from being the sharpest tack in the box when it comes to computer usage, but on engine stuff alone he's one of the best. I spent quite a bit of time trying to resurrect his computer for him, and I know what I'm doing with them. He definitely has some sort of hardware issue with the new machine. While the dyno is old, the computer setup and software on it is relatively new. Looking at the files for the stuff on there and the physical condition of the sniffers and ancillary equipment, I would say it was less than a week old. He was building up 3 Very Special Ducati engines while I was there with trying to get them ready for Road Atlanta, so I guess I won't be able to continue working this out until after then. But, at least it cleaned up the dreadfully lean state of the current mapping. On the base run, the a/f was getting as high as 19!