5 Week Fighter

Having read Dave Manning's (Zedhead's) article in Streetfighters magazine at the beginning of November 2006, I picked up the phone and had a chat with Dave about supplying him some parts from FHMoto at sensible money. However, that conversation spun way off course, and I found myself saying I'm just in the process of starting another project with a next to f**k-all budget too. Suddenly, I found mysself in the middle of a "biker-build-off" type challenge. Dave and myself rattled out a couple of rules during the next couple of days, all of which we thought would keep this a bit of a laugh.

If you've read the article in Streetfighters mag, basically the challenge is to build a bike in 5 weeks, although none of us actually have 5 weeks in one hit, so 40 hours a week is considered a working week, over 5 weeks, gives a total of 25 days, or 200 hours.... and even then there is a degree of flexibility.



So what did I have to get me started.... well as luck would have it, one hell of a lot. Mostly left over from the build of my (still ongoing) 7/11 build. Amongst it all though, I had acquired a frame, which I had already sent to Manic Motorcycles to fit a new subframe; "had to be cheap I" said, so he fitted a f*rebl*de RRW subframe and supplied all the bodywork for a very minimal fee. I also had several sets of GSXR750k forks, 2 pairs of wheels, a GSXR750 slabside motor, a few sets of levers and brakes



Whan I got it, the first thing I did was rub down the frame and give it a couple of coats of PJ1 Epoxy Black paint. This stuff is much better than normal paint, although not as good as powder-coating (it'll do for me though, as I just happened to have a couple of tins laying around therefore making them free - so well within the budget!)



Amongst the various front-ends laying around in my shed is/was a front-end from a GSXR750k. I don't even remember where it came from now, but over the time it's been stored it wasn't looking pretty. Stone-chip damage didn't help the fork bottoms, but the chrome tubes didn't look too bad. One of the fork seals weeps slightly, but it'd probably be ok for an MOT.



Being lazy and wanting to spend as little time as possible, I considered what would be my best and quickets options. The damage looked too deep to polish out in a hurry, so I rubbed the fork-bottoms down with varying grades of sand-paper and then wet'n'dry paper. The last rub-down was with wet'n'dry soaked in parrafin, as this really cleans out any remaining bits of grease/dirt.



Mask off the areas that didn't need paining and a couple of coats of PJ1 again. I repeated this with the fork-brace and the bottom yoke. However, the top-yoke is a different matter. Someone previously had drilled the top-yoke for risers, but judging from the position of the holes, they must have had one arm longer than the other!



I knew that there was a 750k front-end laying in FHMoto's lock-up, so one evening I went over to take a look, but that had exactly the same problem (how difficult is it to drill holes accurately people?)



This is obviously a pain in the arse. I wondered can I get away with filling the holes with weld and grinding back? Could I machine the holes out larger and modify some risers to accept bigger bolts? Neither of which seemed like particularly good ideas



Then it struck me - something I'd forgotten. I had a set of nice yokes that I had intended to fit onto my 7/11 project, but they needed machining to get to fit (designed for 41mm forks and my 7/11 has 43mm ones). My 7/11 has a 750J front-end exactly the same as the 750K. So my spare yokes have been sent away to be milled out to take my forks and these will be fitted to my 7/11. This will leave me a spare set of polished yokes.... 750j top yoke straight on the 750k bottom yoke and the jobs a good 'un!!



One thing I was missing though was brake disks.... guess who got lucky when a set came up on the auction site that everyone loves to hate.