Lucky Phil

His style reminds me of Kevin Schwantz quite a lot. Watch him in the heavy braking zones. His line into the corner can sometimes be a metre inside everyone else's line. Schwantz was the same, hit the brakes and point the bike straight at the apex and still somehow be able to get it turned without running wide. Zero classic race line here. He is also a bellwether for a Motogp team. Too many teams hire older riders who get to the point where their riding style is set in concrete and they then expect the team/factory to find all the solutions with design and engineering. A young rookie just adapts and rides what he's given and often makes the old riders look silly. Honda need to hire a young rookie. Having said all that you won't really know what Acostas real potential is until he has a factory seat next year and the expectation comes into play. At the moment he's not expected to be a winner but in the factory team that will be different. Some deal with this and some don't. The same as some deal with their first big/serious injury and bounce back and some are never the same rider again post injury. Time will tell. Phil

This is interesting. Are we going to to go down another stupid path? You bet we are. All of this guys stuff is very good. Mainly technical engine stuff.

I'll take the gauge holder Scud. Phil

Of course they did because they have the tools to remove the caps and compress the springs again if needed and are charging by the hour to do it. All things being equal the qty of oil by volume will equate to the desired air gap give or take an amount that's moot for most road riders. Is measured level a better way to go? Yes but for most of us mere mortals it's not a huge deal. Setting the levels with the forks out of the bike and the springs removed and the fork bled and fully compressed is the ultimate way to do it but who wants to do that every time you are fine tuning the forks oil level? Support the front of the bike and remove the caps and springs, collapse the forks measure the oil level, adjust level up or down as required and reassemble and ride. Decide on more or less oil height depending on the test results and repeat. I mean seriously who has the time for that? Oil height level tuning is in the domain of the race track prep with the tooling and the mechanics to play with it. For the average road rider it's fill by recommended volume. The level doesn't affect the damping performance only the overall spring rate and only then biased to the second half of the fork travel. What's the other alternative? Fill to volume and ride the bike. If you think you need to go one way or the other then park the bike remove each cap individually one at a time and either add 10ml by volume or suck 10ml by volume and ride it again. Don't get bogged down in the minutia of exact measured levels because even having a small level difference between legs wont matter. Are the springs guaranteed to be precisely the same rate on both sides? No, and they won't be so getting too anal about precise levels is a waste of time. Phil

Andreani are full of shit. They still list their 105/G08E carts for 01-06 V11's. Italians are Italians after all. Phil

I watched a doco on Cold Chisel last night. I don't have a single album of theirs but god they had some great songs. Done Walker wrote brilliant lyrics and this is an anthem to many Vietnam vets along with " I as only nineteen" by Redgum. Khe Sanh was banned from commercial radio for years because of some of the lyrics in the song but the band didn't give a @#!#$# and kept playing pubs and venues. In the end record companies were forced to sign them simply because of their massive live following. I must buy a best of album from Cold Chisel.

The cable turns without load. Add a load, ie speedo and it slips. Simple. Phil

My feelings aren't hurt, really Phil

No the end is just drilled for the live centre. Too much stick out for a 10mm shaft for threading Titanium. You need the support. Safety wire is .028" my preference for most fasteners. Anything thinner is too thin and .032" is a pain to use. I have some thinner wire maybe .022" or something for light fasteners but I don't have much use for it on things these days. The breather is standard as far as I'm aware. Phil

It's very common to have the rebound and comp in separate legs. USD forks and axles are very ridged these days so it's no issue.

You should still be able to feel the damping working in the compression leg if they are indeed comp one side rebound the other especially if you remove the spring and pump the cart itself. Phil

What was it like before you replaced the seals? Did you notice. The cart may have failed internally before you pulled it apart and you hadn't noticed. Failing that remove the cap and spring and manually pump the cartridge. Phil

Ok thanks for letting us know. Looks like a few things to replace to bring it up to scratch. What part of the casing is cracked? Phil

Machined up the other special bolt for the rear drive.

Second bolt made and fitted.

I've used a lot of aluminium fasteners in aluminium cases without anti-seize and never had an issue. It's what I used before Titanium became affordable. They were anodised 7000 series though. A steel shaft in a bronze bushing is a bearing situation not a galling situation we are talking about here. In Ducati oil pumps the driven steel gear rotates on a ground steel post without any galling. Phil

The thing people forget with dissimilar metal use is there needs to be some form of electrolyte between the 2 for any issue to arise. Putting dissimilar materials together in a benign environment isn't an issue but in a salt air or salt water laden environment then you can have problems. Phil

Black 40mm Marzocchi forks without a separate axle nut ( the axle threads into the l/h fork leg) then yes they will fit. They will not fit the early silver 40mm forks because the fork bracket is different internally and the later black 43mm forks because the fork cap thread pitch and Diameter is different. Phil

Yes, copper anti seize. Phil

Not disappointed at all I'm aware of this and buy a lot of stuff that's made in China, pretty hard not to these days. The thing to bare in mind though is that at least large "known" brands have the buying power and leverage with the manufacturer to ensure high quality and sometimes I suspect better materials. There is also the question of quality grading. I have bought identical machinery tooling and accessories like rotary tables etc from a particular retailer and the exact same part from the exact same factory from other independent sources a few times now and the part from the original large retailer is always slightly better quality, fit and finish. I suspect they have the buying power to make the manufacturer send them the first quality items only and the lesser outlets get the second grade stuff. Phil

I decided to fine tune the fuel mapping on the Daytona engine. The bike ran very nicely but at town speeds the initial crack of the throttle needed some refinement. It didn't jerk around or anything like that but I could here from the exhaust it wasn't perfectly clean although as I said it didn't present any rideability issues. I'm being super fussy here but I also now have access to original .bin files for the Daytona and Centy engines and my original map was quite a bit different so I decided to make up 5 new maps and load them and evaluate by the old seat of the pants methodology. Once I got to the second of my new maps I stopped there because the bike was running as close to perfect as you could ever want. Anyway here are the Delta main and offset maps to show the differences between my original maps and the new map I came up with and decided to stick with.