quote:
Originally posted by motomark32
quote:Originally posted by Diamondj
Just wondering if any of the Cafe Racer or VinMoto crew will be at the WERA race at Beaverun this weekend. I'm planning on taking the race school and finally getting my license this weekend - although it will be on a T500 rather than a FCB bike...
Jim
Didja do the school? How'd it go for ya?
Unfortunately, it didn't go at all. I bought a race ready T500 from a friend in Canada. He brought it down to AHRMA Vintage Days in Ohio. We had another buddy that races a T500 out in California with AHRMA that seized his bike before Ohio. He was coming to Vintage Days and I told him he could race the T500. The bike had not been raced for a couple of years and I figured it would be a good chance to get the bike in racing shape and help out a friend. It worked out that way mostly although he had a low side on Saturday from oil on the track. Fortunately there was no serious damage to the bike. Sunday went better and he finished sixth in F500. One of the silencers fell off the bike at the end of the race and we weren't able to find it.
I knew when I got the bike home that I had some stuff to do to it before Beaver - fix the exhaust, add a steering damper, add the transponder mount, change the number plates to novice yellow. I got preoccupied with work and house projects (we're replacing all of the railing on our front porch) and the race bike went untouched until Thursday morning on August 28th. I figured a few hours of work and I'd be ready to travel. The number plate change was easy. The steering damper took less than a half hour. Transponder mount was cake. And then the silencer fucked up the rest of my day. The chambers on the T500 were custom built and unlike any of the other sets of T500 chambers I had on hand. Finally after several hours of trying to find anything that would work as a silencer, I started pulling the chambers off to replace them with another set that had silencers. It was then I learned that race bikes are a lot like snowflakes - typically pretty to look at, both tough and fragile in different respects, and absolutely no two are completely alike. I got the new chambers mounted at the cylinder to find the rear mounts needed to go where the rear-sets were. I tried moving the rear-sets to find there was no way of moving them without re-engineering how they were put together. After struggling with getting everything to work together and failing miserably, I gave up at 5:30pm, rolled the T500 back in the garage, canceled the hotel reservation, and cracked open a beer....
I've got a pattern for plate aluminum rear-set mounts that I'm going to cut out this weekend on the bandsaw and then upgrade to some '04 GXSR rearsets. Then the T500 should be ready.
There's still Summit Point on September 20 and Nelson on September 27 although neither has the convenient "get your license race school" on the Friday before that Apex2apex was offering at Beaver....
How did you do at the Beav?
Jim
