I wanted to see if I could beat last weeks time, so I took the bike down to WISD again. I managed to reel off my PB on the first run! I got 11.89@120MPH which is a bit of an improvement over last week (11.94@121MPH). After that I started getting worse with every pass. I think I was trying to hard to get a big launch... I kept getting wheelspin off the line and looking back at it maybe I was actually overheating my tyre in the burnout. I'd pull out of the water and give it a practise launch and it would bag up hard and I even hit the limiter a few times. I tried slipping the clutch more on the last run and it was worse than the wheelspin runs so I think I'll try smaller burnouts next time. It's hard because I love my burnouts but I'm sure my $300 rear tyre will apreciate it if I lay off it a bit.

In the last burnout comp I had trouble knowing what gear I was in due to the crappy VR commodore shifter that was rivited in with no gear indicator. I decided to spend the money and put a proper shifter in. I went with the B&M Pro Rachet which seems to be the way to go if your not running a center console. Installation was pretty straight forward. Because the commodores have a flat section in the tunnel for the shifter it made it very easy. I had to make up a new plate to cover the massive hole from the original shifter, other than that it was all pretty much bolt in.

The burnout car is almost ready to hit the pad again. I've trail fitted the VN diff and there are no problems there. I've purchased a good second hand 4.11 gearset so I've now got to get them fitted up to the center with a spool.

I've been helping my mate put his bike together in my garage for the last few weeks. He bought it for cheap, unregistered and damaged. He decided to turn it into a street fighter style bike since all the fairings were road rashed. We finally got it registered and took it for the maiden voyage yesterday arvo. We've still got a few little problems to iron out but overall its turned out pretty good for a very quick budget build. I knew very little about working on bikes when I started, but luckily they're easy as piss to work on much like a muscle car because of their simplicity. 

The specs are;

• 1998 Kawasaki ZX9R (900cc)
• Painted matt black with farings removed
• Renthal Fat Bars
• Mini bar end mirrors
  
• Buell XB12 headlight and fairing
  
• Braided Brake lines
• Hindle exhaust
  
• Re-jettted carbs

I took it for a ride last night and it's got stacks of power (more than mine I'm ashamed to say) and the Renthal bars make it awesome to ride, you've got so much more leverage due to the wider grip.

I took my blade down to the street meet at WSID last night. I've never ran before so I was pretty nervous. My best run was 11.94@121MPH (thats 195KPH) with a .009 RT! It was actually the best reaction time of the night but I missed out on the prize by 10 mins. I've still got heaps more in it but I need to work on my launches. It was a huge rush and I can't wait to get back out there!

Here's a pic that Andrea took.

 

I was getting in my car to go down to my local motorbike shop when I saw all these choppers hovering around what looked to be the main road. I decided to take a detour to check out what was going down. The traffic was banked up for kilometers! It turns out that there were 2 servos side by side both offering standard unleaded (ULP) for $0.94 per litre!! There lines were hundreds of meters long and there were helicopters fliming it from the sky and live news broadcasts from Channel 7 out the front. I happened to have my camera in the car so I grabbed some pics of the chaos.

I asked a bloke in the shop what the story was and apparently it was some kind of protest to the oil companies. I'm sure it'll be on the news tonight.

I've been taking my bike out on the twisties alot and have noticed that it seemed insanely stiff. My low speed cornering on the hairpins has always been pretty bad and I've been working hard on my riding to try and improve it. I decided to check over the suspension. This bike has adjustable preload, compression and rebound for the front and rear. I got out the service manual and reset everything to standard specs. It turns out that the previous owner had everything set to 100% hard or close to it. The previous owner told me that he used to take it to track days a fair bit so I guess he had tuned the suspension for the track.

I took it down the Putty Rd on Saturday and on Sunday I did the Galstone Gorge and the Old Pacific Highway. It's like a completely different bike now! My confidence level has gone through the roof because it feels how it should.

The bike gets a bit of head shake cornering at speed, the old blades were famous for it. From what I've read it's not such a big deal but its one of those things that takes a bit of confidence away. I'm bidding on a steering damper on ebay at the moment which should solve that problem.

The only thing left to do is to change the front tyre. I've completely destroyed it, its practically triangle shaped. I'll be pulling the wheel off this week.

Putty Road Fireplace

I decided to make the journey to the mountain on Sunday to see the great race.

It wouldn't be a car event without a police sting operation and another fine for my resumé. I was on my fireblade with Andrea on the back enjoying a nice ride up Bells Line of rd. I was coming out of a 60 zone leaned over through a corner. I saw the 100 speed limit sign about 100m away so I fed on some throttle to get it up to 100. I look up and there's a highway patrol coming at me, he hits the lights so I pull up. I'm now pretty used to this situation so I was pretty relaxed and tried to play it nice and cool. The cop approaches me and lets me know that he just clocked me at 104 in a 60 zone. I explained that I came through the corner at a reasonable speed then saw the 100 sign and sped up, plus its a downhill run to the 100 sign. Luckily the cop was extremely reasonable and decided to let me off with a 15 and over (3pts, $250). I told him that I've been booked a few times recently and I know I've got to watch my speed more. He warned me that there was massive amounts of cops up all the way up to bathurst and to be extremely cautious. 

While stopped on the side of the road, all the cars that I'd overtaken since Richmond went past. I stopped in at Lithgow maccas and they must have all had the same idea. About 15 different people asked me "so what did they get u for?. 

That kind of took the fun out of the day, but atleast we made it up to the mountain. It seems that this year is was massively packed to the point where we hardly got a good look at the cars all day which was pretty dissapointing. I went up a few years back with my dad and I don't remember it being that bad. The best part was having a look in the pits and see all the awesome setups that they have. I hung around and saw a couple of pit stops take place and stopped to get a picture with the inforcer.

On the way back I've never seen more cops in my life, I got followed by a highway patrol all the way to the city limits of bathurst then between bathurst and the lower mountains I would have seen about 12-15 cop cars.

Will I be going up again next year? No.

Me & Russ

Mockup V8 Supercar at Lithgow Maccas

On Friday I got a voicemail from WSID letting me know that they're having a burnout comp on October 4th. Unfortunatley the wagon is still out of action so it'll be sitting this one out. I'll be there watching the carnage from the stands.

For details on the event see WSID's site.

 

As you know I blew an axel during the burnout comp in June. I never explained why it snapped. First of all before the burnout comp we pulled out the axels and inspected them and noticed that the splines were very slightly twisted – thats a sign that they are already weakend. It's very common to twist splines with a locked diff. We couldn't source a new pair of axels in time, so we threw them back in and gave it a quick test to make sure that they were going to hold up for atleast one burnout.

It turned out that the twisted axels only played a small part in the axel blowing. What I didn't realise was that one of the stockies had a plug fitted to the tyre from a previous puncture. When the tyre wore down it spat the plug out causing a pinhole leak which was actually caught by a photographer. So the left hand wheel was now flat and the right was still fully inflated.

Locked diffs + uneven load on the wheels = blown axel.

I grabbed a photo of the axel, it had snapped clean off and because I kept going on the broken axel it kept rubbing against it and kind of pollished it up into a nice smooth dome.

 

I haven't really posted anything about the burnout car since we put it in the WSID Burnout Bonanza back in June. The reason for that is because we haven't really touched it since then. Burnout season is about to start so it's time to get the thing kicking ass!

We learnt alot from the burnout comp and found alot out about the car.

Strong points

- Power and gearing is up to scratch - I was able to get to 2nd gear limiter quite easily and the smoke was pretty instant. I think it'll do 3rd gear.

- Cooling - I was smoking it up for almost 3 minutes and managed to drive out with no leaking fluids. The gearbox was slipping on the way back to the pits which is bad, but we shouldn't be staying out there for that long in the future.

- Brakes - The VT front brakes on this thing are awesome and have no problem holding the car back.

 

Weak points

- Diff - the bodgie 25 spline cig locker 4.11 borgy is stuffed. We blew one axel, the other is twisted and the gears are minced from incorrect preload.

- Power steering - while it's great for doing skids, we keep throwing the belt off which makes steering it go from easy to virtual impossible.

- Fuel surge - As soon as I chuck it in for a heli the car loses power from fuel starvation. This was the reason why I was out there for so long, because I had to keep it in 1st when doing doughnuts to stop it surging.

- Car Presentation - the car itself looks like shit

 

We've got plans for all the weak points. I've ripped out the small borgy and thrown it in the bin. I was given a VN wagon diff (thanks Chocco!) which I've now bolted up to the car. The VN diff is far stronger than the original VK diff. The main difference is that it runs 28 spline axels standard. The VN axels are also heaps thicker than the VK ones. There are a couple of downfalls to the VN diff though, the main one being that its wider than the VK/VL diffs. You can't fit big wheels/mags on the rear with the VN diff, but stockies clear. Since this is a purpose built burnout car, we don't care, but this would be a problem for a street car. The other problem is that you can't run the original VK drums on the VN diff because the axels run different seals to suit disc brakes. You can either change the seal or run the VN discs. We chose to run the VN discs, which also means we have to change the handbrake cable.  A disc brake rear on a burnout car sounds like a waste of time but it was easier for us to go this way since we had all the parts in the shed. The rear brakes are always going to be clamped when we do burnouts anyway so it makes no difference. 

We're going to do away with the original fuel tank and run a small foam filled fuel cell in the spare wheel well, this should solve our fuel surge problems. 

As for the power steering issue we are going to first look at the pully alignment before we rush into pulling it off.  The power steering makes controling the burnout much easier but does rob a little hp and addes unrealiability.. But since it's already on there I'd like to try and keep it but if we keep having problems we'll source a manual steering rack and swap it out.

We're planning to do a quick backyard respray on the wagon to make it look presentable.