Tim's Car Pages

Last weekend was the annual 750 Motor Club awards dinner which is always a good night to chat to racing mates and always seems to me to be the startof the season. As such I seem to have an awful still to do.

Hence, eeeek!!!

There’s a bit of progress to talk about here, luckily. First up is that I installed the power commander just at the side of the battery, as shown here. I also had a play with the mapping software which looks pretty cool and fairly easy  to use. Essentially you attach a laptop to the power commander with a USB cable and it gives you a 2D set of sites (the dimensions being throttle position and RPM) in each of which you can adjust the fueling above or below the standard setting dished out by the Honda ECU, which is just the other side of the battery. You can also get an ignition module for the Power Commander but that is specially forbidden by the formula regs. It’d be interesting to try it though.

Continue reading ‘Eeeek….’ »

Well, it’s time to report a major success! This should explain that rather bland looking low-quality photo just on the right.

I’ve said several times that I was working towards being able to start the engine and I finally got there this weekend. After considerable prevarication I finally ran out of displacement activity and set up the camera to take that photo on the right. Then I pressed the starter button and, right on cue, it started! If you click on the photo you’re quite likely to be able to watch a little low-quality video of the excitement. If you look hard you can see the blue flames coming out of the exhaust ports. As you can probably tell, I’m wearing ear defenders as I’m always very careful about my hearing after a mis-spent youth. Hence, I don’t really know loud it really was. But, I can tell it was actually LOUD.

Continue reading ‘Brum, brum…’ »

As I think I said, I want to try firing up the engine at some point soon. Even though I haven’t got an exhaust system it’d be nice to at least see if it fires. If that happens then at least I’ll know that lots of things about the wiring and so on are actually OK.

Mind you, as I write this, it occurs to me that I ought to junk the bit of fuel that I’ve got in the tank and put some nice fresh stuff in. As is well known, unleaded fuel that’s been hanging around over the winter isn’t the best of things.

Continue reading ‘A bit more wiring’ »

Things have been progressing slowly here at Tim Towers. That track day date is looming and I might just about make it. I’m not sure that the car will be in the state where I could race it though. First thing here is that I finally got the banjo bolt for the clutch slave cylinder. This is wierd size (M10x1.25) and it took a while to find a supplier who actually had one. Still it’s in now as you can just about see in the photo. (At the top end of the silvery braided hose.)

Continue reading ‘Water water everywhere…’ »

I’ve just about got the cooling system sorted out, although I still need another hose.  I decided to run that “hot” line that I talking about in an aluminium tube so that should be OK. One issue with the CBR1000 is that it doesn’t have the header breather connection that the CBR900 had. In that case I routed that into the breather connection on the header tank. (Which you can see sticking towards you from the top of the tank.) However, the CBR1000 doesn’t have such a thing and I’ve plugged up the outlet (using a little plug that turned on the lathe) from the header tank this time.

Continue reading ‘Cooling system’ »