Bonneville 2010 Yahoo!

So we left off with the bike having been roughly assembled after getting the bodywork back from paint. Chris Cosentino swung up to finish assembling the air-shifter he designed and fabricated, while we started to pack up the trailer. Fast forward to the salt and the bike looked something like this:

Once again we had a punch list to address which burned most of Sunday and half of Monday. The darn thing just wouldn't steer and would flop over the second you started to correct the steering. The harder i tried to ride the bike the worse it got. We fixed it, with three solutions all happening at once on our makeshift workbench so it was hard to say which solution was the effective one. So the three steering solutions were:

1) Reverse the steering linkage; Why pray tel? The bike was originally steered with two vertical levers/handlebars connected to the steering arms via push-pull control cables. Note the black control cable in the picture above, this is the original chassis from 2006. I was never thrilled with this system even though it was mechanically very convenient in connecting point A to point B. There was about .125 of play in the steering system due to the cables movement in the cable housing, it worked and the play was hardly noticeable at speed, but it bugged me.

In this photo you can see the cables have been replaced by rigid aluminum rods with rod end bearings at either end providing a very direct link to the steering arms with no slop in the system. If you look closely you can see the original mounting holes for the steering linkage at the bottom of the handlebars which is below the pivot which was correct for the steering cables but not the rods. The rods needed to clear the moving swingarm so the steering arms were rotated 180 degrees and now reside above the swingarm reversing the input movement. Here's the rub; i kept the same mounting points on the handlebars so the steering is now reversed. I didn't think this would be an issue as most steering input happens on this bike with body english and i figured i would get used to it. So we moved the mounting point above the handlebar pivot point. While i don't think this was the culprit it certainly didn't hurt. I would like to move the rods to the originol mounting point, to reverse the steering, as an experiment next time we are on the salt.

 2) Adjust the trail; Prior to arriving at the salt I decreased the trail from 5.0 to 3.5 inches as an experiment. On the right side of the front hub, see photo above, there is a tab pointing downward which is welded to the wheel spacers. These white spacers key onto the kingpin/steering axis and by rotating the spacer the kingpin angle changes which changes the rake which in turn changes the trail. The original chassis was slow to react to steering input, no doubt the low center of gravity played into this as well. With the new longer chassis I feared the extra wheelbase and weight would make it steer even slower so i thought less trail might speed up the steering a bit but it didn't seem to be working so we added 2.0 inches of trail . Again, like the steering linkage I'm not quite sure if this was the solution as i have not played with this adjustment on its own. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

3) We found black rubber on the interior of the fender where the tire was rubbing. I believe this 'smoking gun' is what steered us in the right direction, excuse the pun. The bike had no self righting characteristics and and as i mentioned before would just flop over once the front wheel received or didn't receive input. The wheel was binding up enough to stop self righting but not enough to lock it up.

After all three changes were implemented we had a motorcycle that steered really well. The following video shows before and after; before i was sick to my stomach and after you will see i am happy enough to run around in circles. The team worked really well through this problem and we beat it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EHXqdkPmgs

It took a couple of runs to figure out the shifter system which needed a battery and CO2 giving us two more variables to contend with. Simplicity had always been the mantra when designing the bike but this added complexity seemed necessary due to the ergonomics involved at the footrest area. Shifting up and down with a thumb push of a button was really cool, Thanks again to Cosentino Engineering.
That's me and Cosentino in the photo, I'm really happy with the shifter and he.......well he looks uncomfortable.
Next blog entry, we set a record!

Why 125CC?

THIS    2011 Aprilia 125cc SuperMartXe' VIP Team / Paris Hilton.

NOT THIS 

There are many good reasons why we run a 125 at  Bonneville or on the track, here are a few:
1) My buddy Dwight had a 1996 Honda RS125 motor in my shop and it sounded like a good idea to build a land speed bike for this motor.... but it's actually much deeper than that...
The reason there were 125cc bikes in my shop was due to the acknowledgment by my friends that the only way to find out what it is like to ride a race-bike is through riding a Honda or Yamaha 125 or 250 GP bike that has been imported from the land of the rising sun. The key letters being GP, that is Grand Prix, the real McCoy, the shit. And in the words gleaned from an English cooking show, its fookin' pukka. I assume that means genuine or awesome. anyway...I had the good fortune of running a friends 96' RS 125 and within two laps i understood what they were getting at. If you have never had a go i highly suggest seeking one out at a track day and begging for a spin, like we used to do when the first dirt bike showed up in our neighborhood as kids.
2) This next bit is really going to offend the majority of racers: Street bikes converted into race bikes, and or track day bikes, are fookin' pigs. I don't care how much money you spend making the bike lighter and quicker it will never equate to the riding experience undergone while riding a purpose built race bike. Once I was tuned into this my track life changed for the better. It turns out this might be the least costly way to race and or do track days, the 125 that is-a 250 not so much. More on that later, for now a brief and slightly informed history of why the 125 is such a noble steed.

3) This is a 1996 Honda RS125 2-stroke GP motor. It weighs only 38 pounds and in a mild state of tune puts out 42HP at the rear wheel. A more potent, slightly more modern, and an extremely more expensive version might put out as much as 55HP at the rear wheel! With a proper chassis a complete bike weighs in at 150 pounds and in the GP stables they weigh even less. This is one reason a 125's corner speed is greater than a 600 and a 1000cc superbike, its all about the power to weight ratio. (Note: this is based on observation and hearsay, i have no actual speed gun readings of pro riders all going through the same corner on said bikes. If you have that info please post a comment so i can be humbled or more confident in my corner speed arguments.) Our current land speed bike weighs in at 200 pounds even, not bad for a motorcycle with a 104 inch wheel base.

Some historical perspective; I recently read Kevin Cameron's' book, 'Classic Motorcycle Race Engines' and discovered that Suzuki's GP125 single in 1962 had the same bore and stoke as the modern GP motors. That's fifty years ago! It was air cooled with a rotary valve and produced 22HP and would get up to 30HP after two more years of development which included water cooling. The bore and stoke of the Honda motor pictured above is nearly identical to the fifty year old Suzuki RT62 at 54mm x 54mm, and while this similarity might be layed in bedrock as a perfect engineering solution to what is needed from a 125, it most importantly bolsters our desire to get the most out of a historically significant displacement. Keep in mind this single cylinder format would be doubled and doubled again to create 250 twins and 500 fours, all three sizes becoming the GP standard race classes in the modern era of GP racing.

4) The 125 format is just plain handsome in its simplicity. This jewel is our newest 125cc motor which took us to a top speed of 155MPH at Bonneville last year with a new AMA record of 149.907. With 48HP at the rear wheel at sea level and probably 42 or so at Bonneville elevation we are nipping at the heals of bikes with 8 times our displacement. We will be running the bike on the dyno to verify these dubious horsepower figures next month. The Rotax bottom end design goes back to the 80's i believe. The Aprilia cylinder and BRC head are both from the last 5 years or so.

So for all the dopes who have made faces and or scoffed at what we do at Bonneville, history and the pragmatic engineering of a 125cc 2-stroke motor is on our side while we very quickly approach the AMA land speed records of most 600cc four strokes and have surpassed all but two of the 1000cc AMA records held by Harley Davidson's. Two more miles per hour and those two Harley records are done for. That might sound childish but I can't wait!

A lucky 15 year old Maveric Vinales' adds two more good reasons to race 125's..........

Cheers,
Scott

A Maniacal Push!

That's what it's going to take to get this bike done on time. Keep in mind its mid July 2010 and there is only a month until the rig departs for Bonneville so lots to do. Craftsmanship and sweet fitment will quickly give way to the mantra, 'Moving Forward'. Next up is a test fitting and massaging of the nose, center seat section and tail. Once the parts are fitted over the frame we can figure out how to attach them to the frame and to each other and while i have a good idea how to do this i need some hard numbers to machine to.

Test fit with leathers, boots, and helmet so we can be sure everything fits. The front fairing seems a bit low and needs clearance for the helmet. I am perched a bit precariously with everything being propped up by 2 x 4's and some clamps but it got the job done and quickly. Moving forward!

As much as i curse wood and its dusty byproduct it does have its place even in a machine shop. The notes you see in black reading through the fiberglass were written on the fabric prior to layup so i could remember which pieces went where during the layup process. Easy to forget when there are ten pieces and three different shapes among them. Obviously you can go to you-tube and watch hundreds of videos on all of this, and i highly recommend doing that, but no videos as it relates to Land Speed Racing motorcycles. So maybe this is helpful especially as we are cheating like crazy to get to the finish line, meaning skipping lots of steps that would have easily added twice as much work while only yielding a product 20% finer and lighter.

This is the buck for the belly of the tail section. If you look closely at the first photo in this post you can see a wire form behind my boots, that is where this part will end up. I won't bore you with the same repetitive details already reviewed in the previous posts, but be sure this part was fiber glassed, bagged, demolded, trimmed, sanded , fitted and went out for paint with all of the other parts. Damn that was a lot of work!

Fast forward two weeks and we are back from paint and fitted with nifty stainless button head Dzus fasteners.Wayne Quick, father of flat-track pro #58 Jake Quick, handled the paint work and did a sweet job and managed not to critisize us too heavily for our ham fisted bodywork.

HANDSOME! Still lots to do, cut a windshield, foam blocking for the knee area, assemble air shifter, etc. Dan, Greg, and Marty are all chipping in big time here and in fact have taken off of work here and there to put in some daytime hours. Thanks again brothers.

BIG PICTURE! I probably sound like a broken record but thinking big picture without getting stifled by the minutia of bodywork details is how you get this shit done in three months instead of ten unless you have the luxury of working on this stuff during the day. Bike leaves for Bonneville in 24hours. But before that the next post will answer the question: "Why a 125?"

Painfull hours......

Body work is the most painful part of motorcycle building. I think that's why you see so few efforts in this department outside of manufacturers and the handful of masochists offering one-off hammer-formed  fairings. It is also a design exercise more subject to a proper, and often public critique, than a bike which might just be a creative assembly of parts which might include bullets, sharp pointy things, or antique bathroom hardware. This critique, bound to happen at least more than once, will need to be taken with a grain of salt by the designer as the rules of streamlining set in many racing categories define the start stopping point of fenders, fairings, and seat/tail sections. So while there may be a a reason for every turn, radius and edge in your design it may just fall on deaf ears as this tends to also be a subjective kind of thing. Now onto more bodywork discussion.

Here is the nosecone ready to be prepped for glass work. Note; Having previously mentioned that body filler works poorly on this soft carving foam, i did use some body filler here to build up a low spot. It sort of worked but the transition from filler to foam is a bit bumpy. Not much i can do with the foam being so soft but this will result in less filler on the fibreglass parts in the end. The body parts are a constant juggling of time, cost, weight and performance.

There are no photos of nosecone bagging or prep, i find it difficult to stop and take photos sometimes, just this shot of the finished fiberglass nose on the left side of the table upside down. We had just completed molding in the fender to make it all one piece to help keep things more slippery and to keep salt out of my face while riding. It seems there is a turbulence or maybe a vacuum occuring between the nose and the fender when they are separate parts thus creating a salt storm inside the nose while at speed. Hoping this uniting of the nose and fender resolves this. As you can see its tough to keep things orderly during the wet layup process.

The center section of the bodywork will need to support my weight with my knees and toe of my boots touching down on the thinner section which I call the running board. This is the thinner rib near the bottom of the part. If you look closely this foam rib is a separate piece held in place with hot glue and will not be prepped like the rest of the buck, so it cleanly seperates from the fibreglass part, rather it will live with the finished glass part so we have some structure where all the weight will be. Does that make sense?

Lay-up complete and vacuum on for the right hand side of the center section. Once complete we will flip it over to layup the left hand side. In the end the left hand side and right hand side will screw to each other through mating holes in the chassis.

The right hand side of the center section getting fitted to the chassis. I have added the 1/8" thick foam to the back of the part to gain a little strength here and there. The bulge on the running board is clearance for the expansion chamber.

Right hand center section as seen from the other side. The white material is resin mixed with micro balloons to give the resin some thickness without it getting heavy. I used it to seal off the foam running board inner edge and help give me a smoother sand-able area where the left hand side will be fitted up and massaged to fit well. That's all for now, final fitment and paint in the next post.

Back to Bodywork

We left off with the sculpted wire and wood form having been measured and the drawn up in AutoCad. I then printed out full scale 2D profiles, side, top and end views and glued these to foam blocks that were a near net shape. The profiles allowed us to rough out the shapes with a tree saw blade, the long course blade cuts quickly through foam. Dan was going to tackle the tail and i was handling the nose and center section with the aid of some sur-form tools and coarse sandpaper. Many other hands pitched in here and there as well so if i don't mention your name forgive me, the 90 hour work weeks at this point are now a blur.

 Two pieces of  foam were glued together with the seem line down the center to produce our rough shape, but the glue seem is disintegrating a bit during sanding. This is one of the downsides of using 2lb. foam. Again the upside is it's quick to form and quick to the finish line. The green clay is a quick way of filling in the seam line. Body filler works poorly on this light foam because it is so much harder and doesn't allow for any finish sanding because the foam around the filler is so damn soft. So soft in fact that rubbing your hand against the foam will remove the foam! Dan did a really nice job with the carving work.

Now the foam buck would normally be finished off with primer and filler and polished out so a mold can be made off of it. WAY TO MUCH WORK! Time is of the essence so this male form will be used to be molded against rather than into, like a traditional mold. So instead of primer and filler i found that masking tape will seal off the foam.  Rubbing along one edge of the tape will stretch that edge allowing it to deal with the compound curve. There is a limit though and you can end up with wrinkles but who cares, we're moving forward. Packing tape works as well, it just doesn't like to stretch. The really sharp curves just get a heaping handfull of wax. Even if some of the foam sticks to the fiberglass the foam is so soft it will break and sand off quickly. Yes the buck is compromised but when you most likely only need one finished part it represents reasonable time management. That is Janina and Dan, now married with twins, helping out. This would not have been completed in 2010 without there help and Janina's impeccable cooking!

  

 Thats Dan looking as proud as i do with our successful layup and vacuum bagging. Yahoo! 

 

Here is the tail section after we removed it from the buck and have molded in an air scoop. We also sanded the interior surface and applied one layer of 1/8" thick foam, the green shading, and one layer of fiberglass over the foam to give the part some rigidity. It works surprisingly well. This green foam is generally used for infusion molding but i find it works well to reinforce and its easy to taper its edges with sanding.

Looking into the air scoop which was beautifully carved by Dan. Again the scoop, like our other bucks, was a positive shape and would be a 'lost buck' format. We covered the foam buck with tape and wax and then wrapped it in fiberglass. Once hardened we carved the foam out of the interior yielding our hollow scoop. This part was then deftly integrated into the tale. It will ultimately mate up to a molded air-box under the tail section. Next I'll go over the center section as it involved a new set of molding issues.

SPONSORS and MANIACS

Before we venture back in time again i thought a fresh shot of the current team / maniacs, and mention of our current sponsors would be a good idea. Every person in the photo and every graphic on the bodywork represent the vast number of ingredients necessary in making this bike possible.

The Maniacs: (I refer to them as maniacs as who else would take well earned time off and spend it with us at Bonneville baking in the sun for 5 days) From left to right, Tom Pheffer, Susan Hereth, Kerry McQuaide, Me, Peter Huntstein (graphics supplier) Ann Rose, Dwight Eyrick, Alicia Katsur, Chris Bernard, Eric Omland, Aiden Eyrick (the little maniac) Chris Nealon, Mike Thomas, Chris Cosentino, Scott Calabrese, and Andrew Anderson.

Special thanks go out to Tom Pfeffer, Scott Calabrese, Billy Gillis, Marty Lennox, and Chris Cosentino all of which labored heavily and brought in new sponsors for 2013.

Sponsors:

Royal Blue:  http://royalbluewax.com/ I met one of the owners at Americade 2013 when we stopped in to give a presentation on the merits of attending Bonneville. I think they liked amount of very blue surface area  on the bike making it a fine candidate for their 'wash and wax' all in one product. We used there genuine Brazilian Carnuba to take that handsome paint job to the next level and keep it there. Another sponsor from the great state of Ohio.

Markertek: www.markertek.com A long time sponsor of our racing program. Your go-to guys in the broadcast audio and video world. Need a special cable made, to include fibre optic, they can knock it out and while your there you can pick up any support gear to include the finest gaffers tape in the world.

http://www.markertek.com/Expendables/Gaffers-Tape-Adhesive/Gaffers-Tape/TecNec/BGT-60.xhtml 

Swagelok / Albany Fittings: http://www.swagelok.com/albany Valves, tubing and fitting for fluid and gas control product. All made in the USA in Ohio. The Local distributor of Swagelok product, Albany fittings, poked there head into my machine shop after dropping parts off at a clients facility next door and fell in love with the 125cc Partial Streamliner and then took great interest in the full streamliner project. Both fluid and gas will need to be distributed and managed on the new bike and Albany fittings has the engineering smarts to do just that.

YoYodyne: http://www.yoyodyneti.com/ Suppliers of parts for race bikes but more importantly passionate about racing. They helped us out with our data aquisition needs and outfitted the bike with a Starlane system that has made the tuning of our bike on the salt, less of an educated guessing process to decisons based on reality.

Cosentino Engineering: http://www.cosentinoengineering.com/  Chris Cosentino has year after year offered encouragement, support, and most importantly key engineering solutions to our go faster issues. Chris also makes the trek out to the salt and works flat out to make our goals possible in the often grueling conditions. He also gave a me a rear brake rotor in 2010 as seen in a previous post. There you go Chris, ARE YOU HAPPY?!! Chris recently engineered a two wheel drive KTM950 adventure bike utilizing some of the Christini two wheel drive parts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F4Qqw06tyM Well done sir!

Rev-It: http://www.revitusa.com/en-us/#/home Rev-It supplied us with a sweet set of leathers, undersuit, and gloves. Like always there sizing system and phone support yields the correct fit on the first try. Check them out in this fine photo taken by Scooter Grubs, http://www.scootershoots.com/, from our 2013 record run:

Thanks again to all of our sponsors for making 2013 a year to remember!!

1634 Days......

....since my last post. Why so long?
As you all know the economy went into the shitter in 2009 and really it started for me in 2008 when i first  noticed the phone ringing less and less. The wonderful clients who love our custom architectural metal work and our sponsors who help with this hobby run amok decided along with the rest of the world to stop spending money. Who could blame them. So all focus went into keeping the business afloat.
Fast forward to Spring 2010:  A few previous clients and sponsors asked me if we needed help getting the land speed thing going again, i waited about two seconds before responding with a 'what the fuck do you think?' All kidding aside i was incredibly gratefull and thrilled to start the crazy adventure all over again with no time for blogging, only building.
I will be posting photos with comments at least once a week now to get you all up to speed with what has gone down over the last three and a half years with what is the most aerodynamic 125cc partially streamlined motorcycle around.

So we left off with the frame cut in half and mounted into a fixture so we could extend it to reduce frontal area.

We then filled in the middle with some steel tubing, the 'ladder bar' looking thing. Very narrow and very rigid allowing me to bring my knees in very close together to reduce frontal area while still being strong enough to resist any torsional frame flex which might make for a sketchy ride.

A shot from the rear quarter also illustrates the lack of enthusiasm often displayed at 11:00pm on a Tuesday night when you are working for beer and pizza.

Dreaming of 200MPH in a 125cc streamliner.

 Next was a mock up of the bodywork. I cut up the old bodywork as a starting point and added to it with plywood, cardboard and aluminum welding rod. Hot glue holds it all together. I measured all the parts and then drew them up in AutoCad to create some 2D profiles to be used in cutting and carving foam blocks into the shapes to be used for molding the bodywork.

Shot from the rear quarter, it just might be handsome in the end. A reminder to anyone reading this: I find blogging to be tedious at best, but i have had so many requests to document what we have done that i find myself compelled to give it a shot. My apologies for the very basic writing. Enjoy!