Happy thanksgiving MM! If you are traveling, do it safely. Eat lots and enjoy the time off!

HAUNTS me even

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somebody that's 4 hours closer to NY should buy it!! :thumbup:

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wow

What are your favorite marques in racing. They do not have to coincide with what street cars you like but they do have to race or have raced in the past (this pretty much means no Lamborghini or Koenigsegg or whatever). When the results are in I'd like to make a graph or pie chart or something. Then maybe on with the next survey.

My favorite marques in racing:
Honda
Lotus

I've come across some good and funny quotes and passages while reading various motorcycling periodicals and books and thought we can have a thread for it. Unlike the MM quotes thread this can include magazine quotes and quotes from anywhere else that is relevant.

"People are more violently opposed to fur than leather because it's safer to harass rich women than motorcycle gangs."

"If you ride like there's no tomorrow, there won't be."

"Life may begin at 30, but it doesn't get real interesting until about 150."

ÔÇ£Calling upon my years of experience, I froze at the controls.ÔÇØ
ÔÇô Stirling Moss

ÔÇ£ThereÔÇÖs the V-4 thing: thereÔÇÖs just something about it that inline 4s donÔÇÖt have, and V-twins have too much of.ÔÇØ
ÔÇô Murray Duncan

ÔÇ£You start the game with a full pot oÔÇÖ luck and an empty pot oÔÇÖ experience... The object is to fill the pot of experience before you empty the pot of luck.ÔÇØ

ÔÇ£Why are motorcycle dealers closed on Sundays? Because Sunday is for worship... Catholics go to church, Motorcyclists go to the track.ÔÇØ
ÔÇô Justin Skalka

I was about to place an order for some Falken Azenis with Vulcan tire but they informed me that the size I wanted (225/50/R15) is not available and Falken is no longer planning on making that size. So WTF?

The tires I have now are BFG G-Force Sports. They're good but they overheat really quickly after a few laps.

I meant to pay closer attention to this, but it actually happened a couple of weeks ago. And, to absolutely no-ones surprise, the 100,000th post belongs to Feersty:

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Good work Rob, I'm sure you'll get us most of the way to 200,000 as well, with Mike and RJ's help, and without any content whatsoever :roll:

I'll leave it up to the current officers to decide if he gets a prize, or just banned :lol:

And speaking of Mike and RJ - they had the first and second posts on the board, respectively...

cmon, no one's heard about this yet?

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oh yeah, the language is NSFW

Well, some of you may remember my '87 VFR a'sploding...



Back a brief back track - it was 100% disassembled on April 9th because of a repetative electrical system failure.

I expected to part it out on ebay. A month later, though, I found a parts bike in Georgia and couldn't help myself. I rented an SUV, put RJ in the passenger seat, and drove down to get it. We stayed with Jess & Chan (Thanks!), and he and Scotty took us out for dinner and drinks (sorry guys, I don't put out on the first date)... pretty cool trip... aside from the, what, 16 hours in the truck?

The bike sat for a few months, and eventually I sorted through everything I had. A few MM'ers that came to a party I had early in the summer might remember helping me swap motors between two frames, and throw parts at stuff, and all that. I told myself that I'd hook stuff up, connect a battery, and put some serious effort into the project if I could get the swapped motor to crank.

It didn't.

Phil wouldn't let me give up on the project, though, and insisted on working with me for a day before giving up hope. And this is what happened....

We got started on a nice sunny afternoon in October.



Phil, being the professional wrench, made a game plan...



I did what he told me to.



He picked up a wiring diagram from Coleman... it taught us a lot things, most importantly that the little black ignition box is very important and very majikal.



And lots of progress was made - hope was renewed.

The plan was to completely open up the wiring harness and remove everything non-essential to running. This would prevent whatever was frying batteries from occuring again and also help us debug the factory switchgear issues.



The visual progress alone was enough to restore my motivation, but Phil managed to push us farther along and we got spark by the end of the day - the way we did it was gimpy, but it worked:



Next we had to tackle using a real starter button because we bypassed the controls on the clip ons, put wire ends back on the parts of the harness we stripped off, and pretty much tie up simple ends that we left hanging. Finish one thing before we moved on to the next.

So back to work on a new day... beginning of November.




Actually, that might have been Saturday night before Matt's party.. I'm pretty sure it was.

Phil started tearing apart the carbs. I had two sets, one from a 1990 that was pretty gummed up, but complete, and the carbs that came on my bike - 1987 - but were missing a boot to connect to the heads.



We got distracted and moved on to un-seizing the fuel pump. If you reverse the polarity and run it you can sometimes bring a stuck one back to life.



So that's what we did.



And it worked, and was great. We pumped stuff from one beer bottle to another, and back again. And then I looked at the clock.

Late for Matt's party - sweet! (sorry, Matt)

My laundry room looked funny after that.



We were on a roll, mostly because of Phil.

Today we got back to business. I started work on attaching the headers and Phil went back to the carbs. For anybody unfamiliar with Honda's V4 - anything having to do with the intake, or removal of combustion stuff is a pain in the ass. Big.

The headers were missing some hardware, so I picked up some replacements from sears (so much for "6mm Nut - Special" listed in the fiche) and did my best to come up with wierd universal-extention-universal-size adapter-wrench combinations to tighten the rear bank.



I don't have any pics of how tight the rear bank was, but it took me over an hour to get the two pipes back there completely mounted. The fronts, obviously, were easy.

And Phil carbeurated.



He knows carbs. I do not.



I did do something with them, though. I put the boots on - hooray!



Phil figured he could clean up the carbs from the 1990 and we'd put them on.

Well, guess what? They didn't fit.

Honda changed the intake angle from 87 to 90 so the carb mounting plate was just different enough to not work.

Have no fear, though, swap plates and we could still use the freshly cleaned carbs.

With some dremel work.



You can see where he had to alter the mounting plate to accomodate the newer carbs (the little divet ground out of each circle).

That created a new problem, though. The boots on the '87 were a different size than the '90 and I only had 3.

So I called Coleman.



And they didn't have one.

So we made one.



Don't laugh. It works for now.

And we had a set of carbs ready to go on the bike.



Remember how I said that intake and exhaust stuff was a bitch on these bikes? Half an hour of pushing and jumping on the 'new' carbs resulted in zero progress.

Not completely zero, though.

Earlier I put a starter on



And Phil had wired in a spare black box.



Two of something majikal is better than one. Hooray spares!

And then we had an idea for the carbs.

Leverage!



And then we had a time crunch. And my phone rang twice. And we rushed around like madmen to try and meet our goal of getting the bike running.



And then something happened.



Something big.

Phil and I have been turning wrenches together for 6 or 7 years. We went into 'get shit done' mode and pushed the bike outside. 5 minutes of cursing and running around later we had a running motorcycle!



It doesn't look like much, but it really runs!

We've got a lot of ends to tie up now that we've reached our goal. The fuel system needs work, the carbs will need good tweaking, it'll need a chain, more switchgear, and so on down the line. Lots of work.

This represents a major achievement, though. The motor is from my original VFR, the frame and wiring harness are from the Georgia pickup, and everything else got so mixed up that I couldn't say where it came from.

I'll keep this updated for anybody interested.

oh, Dark Helmet, i feel your pain. sometimes i feel like it anyway.

sitting in heavy lunchtime traffic today after dropping a check off at the bank on my way to get some arbys. i notice a pretty beat up mini pickup behind me, and he keep creeping waaaay up close to the back of me. after 4 or 5 stops i'm thinking, "man this guy is going to stop in my trunk one of these times, haha."

oh man, he's still creeping. whoa wh-

*thump*

get out, look at the car (not a scratch, can't believe it), look at this random old guy driving the truck, motion him to go into the nearest parking lot. i walk over with the classic "WTF, mate?" look on my face and lecture him about how it makes no sense to be that close to me, what can you gain in this traffic riding my ass, and how about a little consideration?

he's silent and looks a little disconnected the whole time. when i'm done talking, he pauses for a moment, sticks his hand out, looks me in the eye, and softly says in an eastern european accent, "i got eet, man!"

WTF mate, indeed.

i just got back in my car and left, thankful that it wasn't worse. i was just angry about how stupidly pointless it was. so avoidable. he just creeped right into me. no locked up brakes, not on a cell phone, no crazy weather conditions. just kept on creepin'. made no sense at all. i'm also angry at myself for not doing something earlier to get him to back off...don't know what i would have done but anything could have worked i guess.

i guess i have a case o' the mondays!