900ss Ressurection

After the bike dumping it fuel tank over my engine twice in the last month I ended up replacing the float seats, needles and mixture screws on the flatslides. I decided enough was enough and booked the bike ito a rolling road setup at steve Jordan motorcycles in Great bookham.

Yesterday I went to pick her up. Steve had to wait for main jets to arrive, gone are the days of the dyno station with draws and draws of flatslide jets of all shapes and sizes.

He changed the main jet to a 150 and set the float height to 12mm. I haven't checked what the mixture screw was set at but one thing is certain compared to what it was like before it pulls like a train and also there is a noticeably different bark to the exhaust not, its so much more crisp and sharp.

The mission now is to make the spaghetti system sit level as one of the end cans is currently on the piss and sits higher than the other. I t doesn't help that the carbon hangers were made by stevie Wonder whilst on holiday in italy - they're proper shite, and not even trimmed up evenly!

A real joke, but somehow I don't think that I'll be able to get hold of the stainless hangers that the pipes also came with back in the day.

I'm going to have to undo all the springs and see if I can re-align it so that the cans sit true and not melt my left hand indicator!

View attachment 17441

 

Took the spaghetti system off today. The mission was to stop it melting my indicators so I set about cleaning all the mating surfaces and trying to get her all settled and even from side to side. All I can say is what a sod, after five hours of truly impressive swearing it sat level.

I had to bodge the fit on the shite hangers with some big fat penny washers - I think a call to termignoni might be in order to see if they can make me a set of alloy ones as these carbon ones ar shockingly poo. They don't even match from side to side!

Any ways some pics of the system. It's essentially just giving each cylinder its own silencer with scavenging / link pipes in between. The bora header pipes that Baines used to do did exactly the same thing but without the scavenger pipes.

Crappy hangers










Now they sit level and orientated nearly the same - they're not perfect but better than they were - hopefully my indicators will stop melting now on the left had side, which is the side which has always given me the biggest headache.

 

Today I was ruminating on stuff a while back and I remember one of Baines' mechanics once telling me that they used to duct air to the base of the rear barrels.

So I got a length of ali hose and fed it to the base of the barrels and ran it along the sides of the frame to the nose of the bike. On the right hand side it fitted really well in the grill apperture but on the left hand side I ended up mounting it lower as the wiring loom stole all availiable space.

Lets see if theres any noticeable difference, or if all it does is push hot air up and grille my bollocks.





from the left side:


from the right:


Carlos, no such thing as a humble SS The beauty of them is that you can just keep improving them as time and money allows.

 

Lovely bike and I see the exhausts sit evenly and level for you!

I bought them in the end, and they came to the royal sum of 150 pounds!

Yes you did read that right!

I actually wrote back to tell them that the bracket were the cheapest pieces of old rubbish I'd seen in a long time.

But one thing was certain, they still sat pissed, so I had to do some shimming under the indicators to fool the eye into thinking they were level. - which makes me think the subframe was never right after the crash in 99.

Nah, it's quite therapeutic. Most of it counts for bugger all really , like the cooling ducts, however the bike did take longer to get to temperature. If I had to look at it again, I'd probably look to mod the side fairings to make the oil coolers perform properly with decent ducting and airflow. (Its always been a thing I've wanted to do, as I still think the oversize rad or rads behind the front wheel is totally pointless as they never get enough decent air - and for any rad to work you need to get rid of the air in a low pressure area ideally.

Following Sim900sl's rebuild thread I might give the ignitech units a try, as it would work quite nicely with the new loom.

My question at the moment is where to stick the electrics as I'd love to move them away from under the tank- I have plans for that area. I was thinking either down on the side 916 style which would be beneficial as the wiring runs would be very short for the ignition and charging system, but the trade off is heat management. I've got a Ballistic Evo 8 cell lithium ion battery so packaging space wont be an issue.

hmmm.

 

Sorry for the delay in replying, had a family bereavement which took us all to Italy again.

Kev, Kope, many thanks

Hame, that is an awesome bike and and awesome CV to boot - I'm officially jealous!
I'm really impressed at how you've packaged this, and the end result looks superb. How do you find the split fcr's over the downdraft pairs?
The close ratio box... how cool is that!
With the ignitech did you alter the map at all or is it as it came out of the box so to speak?

In many ways this makes me happy, as it says to me my frame is OK! - I had to do a lot of work to get my spaghetti system to sit properly - I'll get a photo uploaded as soon as possible. It's still not perfect but convinces the eye enough for me to be satisfied that I've done all I can.

The air conveyors came off as I feel that once the rear barrell had got up to temperature it wasn't doing a lot to cool it down, that said, I might still come back to this idea perhaps to either take air to the airbox or alternatively to push moving air through the oil cooler (which would need relocating as it's not doing bugger all behind the front wheel anyway.