YADBS - Stage 1
so yes we tell ron about our plans. discussions follow, and a few choices come up. obviously we need porting and chambers. so should the porting be a full blown drag setup. or should it be a milder go, with more emphasis on midrange and say a 8 or 9k redline? ron warns us that the second option wont be much of a drag setup. but still we decide to go for a mild port, something that provides decent engine life, yet better than stock. the idea is to get pipes onto that, and aim to do a sub-15 ET and then later move onto more drastic port specs and lower ETs. as if things were that simple - but then, during those first days of discussions, ignorance was bliss dude.
anyway the bike lands up at rons place and he takes a look at the barrells. the exhaust port looks terrible - it has already been ported by a local mech.
anyway to be brief, ron cleans up the ports and raises the setup to something which he calls "danny setup", or "combo". as ron rightly warned, its not even a drag setup, but more of a killer street one. but then we figured that would be a good place to start. rons work done, we bring the bike back home. this is how she looked that day.
as you can see, its hardly a dragbike at all. but thats our stage 1 anyway. the handle bars, the seat, the speedo etc, there are a lot of unsuited stuff on the bike.
we plan to do a single testing session, get a feel of the bike, and then do some stripping and get rid of or replace all those unwanted elements. need to replace the stock handle with a flatter one, maybe clipons, throw away the meters, replace the seat with a lighter one having a bum stopper, remove indicators, and some more stuff.
but then for all that visual impotency, the engine is much more potent now. ron has done a great job of cleaning up the ports, and thats all to well apparent on the first ride back to our place. if you notice carefully, you can see the base gasket - its aluminium and quite thick. effectively raising the ports, and hence the whole powerband.
our aim then was to finish in 6th gear at as high an rpm as possible. we figured that to do under 15 secs you approximately need 140kmph at the quarter; so that translates to roughly 7000 rpm in 6th gear. this was the initial reason for selecting such a "danny" setup - something which revvs quick and fast from low rpms to around 8k or so. something that wouldnt need to be launched at ultra high rpms with blade like precisions.
so we promise ron to provide feedback after the first test run. so one saturday early morning, around 5:30, we take her to outer ring road and do some runs. on an open road we find that the jetting is totally out; there is a bad flutter, very bad one, limiting revvs to around 6k or so. tom does a couple of runs, and despite the 6k limit, he does something like 125kmph at the quarter. and i take it for a topspeed run, and it flutters out at something like 135 kmph.
no its not the way it looks like - we are happy actually. considering the flutter, 135kmph is not a bad topspeed and 125kmph is not a bad TS. sort out the jetting and we expected to get a considerable leap on those figures. but then we decide to postpone the jetting to stage 2 - where pipes are gonna come in - because the jetting just turn out to be right then and we might not need to touch the carbs.
anyway we take a look at the plugs and they look like this.
anyway so its onto stage 2 now.