Brad The Bike Boy: Minnie lives!

Friday, April 17, 2009

Minnie lives!

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Minnie, our 600/750M, has been languishing for about 4 months now, ever since the day she intermittantly failed to proceed on my trip to register a business name. But I had a bit of spare time yesterday due to a bike not coming in so after I'd done as much office work as I could find I had a play and fixed her. Not what I was expecting as it turned out either, but intruging, ultimately easy and expenditure free. I went for a quick blast to remind myself of what a nice bike she is to ride.

I've had a fair variation of work in, everything from checking valve clearances on a K1200S (hadn't done that before) to reminding myself how a Multistrada comes apart. Fiddly. But it's all been good fun so far.

Last week I did manage to reset the high bar on my "wtf do I do that for" index by turning on the tap on a 20 litre drum of oil with a measuring jug under said tap then walking away, intending to come back within a short enough time frame to get the required amount of oil in the jug. As expected, the next time I thought about the oil running into the jug was about 6 litres after it had its 5 litre capacity in it. Luckily it was the cheap stuff, as it's also the thick stuff and had covered an area about 1m square. Had it been a hot day and the synthetic Ultra 6 litres would have just about covered the whole 118 square metres of factory floor. So I raced around to the cabinet makers behind me and grabbed a big bucket of sawdust to soak up the mess and left it at that for a couple of days as I had quite a bit of stuff to finish. Not surprisingly my motivation for cleaning up stuff like that can be rather low at times. Rather. I think it was the oil smell that got to me in the end.

Sensational purchase of the week award (for a couple of weeks ago) would be the Samsung 943BW computer monitor for the workshop computer. This monitor allows you to rotate the screen 90 degrees (in my case) so that it's tall and narrow, allowing me to see a full page of a pdf workshop manual. Very, very useful. Quite popular for doctors reading X-rays as well I'm told. Although the software that comes with it is as cryptic as it gets, and I really have no idea how I finally got it to do what I wanted it to. And my screen saver is now the back half of Raymond Roche's 1990 title winning 851.

I will get to putting up another photo of the factory soon. I have it much more organised now. I just keep forgetting to take the camera into work.
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The 851

The 400SS

I bought this 400SS (genuine 93 model Australian delivery! Woo hoo huh.) after seeing it in Ebay for what was possibly an good price. As ever, good was too good to be true. Badly repaired and rusted out fuel tank, badly repainted side panels, lots of km (83,000 of the bastards), etc. You know, the usual. Purchased in October 2012, as of now (Jan 2014) I've nearly finished a major service. The cam timing is done with some of the Madasl adjustable pullies that have been drilled in 4 different settings for easy dyno testing. And I have some 900 headers to try a 40mm dual exhaust set up on it (ala M400). Not a great deal of progress for 15 months, so it's taking on a long term feel. There's an F1 endurance style seat base (more taper at the rear) and front fairing sitting around, which will require frame mods to fit. It's a bit of a mental sticking point as this time. But hey, it's not like I can devalue it much more.

The Mighty KR1S 250

How it looked the rainy night someone came to take it away. Painted all black when I bought it, at some point later I realised i could rub the black off and have much of the original colour scheme underneath. Although the main fairing was originally from a red KR1 I think, and definitely badly repaired more than once, so it stayed black. And the tail panel shown was bought to replace the one I smashed the only time I crashed it and the last time I rode it at a Sandown track day. A sensational little bike, holed pistons and frequently failing stator windings aside. The first bike I rode on a race track and the first bike I had my knee down on. And a great commuter too I found. It's sometimes nice to have a bike that won't wheelie past the city speed limit in first gear.