Weekend's work

Yeeeeeee... I got my valves on Saturday morning! They look great in carbon and nice and light compared with the steel ones. Jerome forgot to send the gaskets though, but fortunately the standard gaskets gave the appropriate clearance between the covers and the valve - 0.2mm I was told it needs to be a "good" 0.2mm and it was every valve measuring around 0.25mm, so happy with that.

I did have to trim the gaskets as they were made for standard covers and valves.

While I was torquing down the front cylinder head one of the M6 bolts stripped the thread in the cylinder, so I had to remove the head, Nr.1 cylinder and fit a helicoil on the cylinder, this was only my second time using my kit, but I was certainly glad I had purchased it otherwise I would have been stuck! I was only mildly sweating as I took the portable drill to my cylinder - one false move and game over!

It worked fine, although I couldn't remove the cylinder stud so had to use a spanner to turn the tap, the helicoil went in well, although when I came to break the tab off it just bent over and I took five minutes to remove it from the head. So cylinder and head back on and torqued up!

I had to make a bracket for the fairing lowers, which was missing from the main fairing brackets, and the biggest job of the weekend was making a "wedge" to angle the Nr.3 carb up on the milling machine.

After much thought I used the Mark Dent wedge (which didn't fit my covers due to a different screw to screw hole measurement) to give me the good angle. I placed my bit of ally on top of the MD wedge, and then I had to try and hold the whole thing in place. I managed to get it solidly installed on the bed of the mill, then I proceeded to remove material from the ally, having to avoid my fixing points. This worked OK, and once I was down to 1mm of material on the top side, I removed the piece and then had to trim off the excess material, with my dremel using the cutter. I am reasonabley pleased with the result, although I need to spend some time smartening it up! Next I need to fit my 4 jaw chuck and bore the hole int he middle! The MD wedge is on the right.

The next big job will be making the cables for the carbs, I tested the standard cables on the bigger carbs and they are missing between one and two centimetres - Grrrrrr! I hope I can find the nipples I used on the RD350 when I was messing with the VM34's!