The Intentional Destruction of Laboriously Engineered Artifacts

Part I

The Army of Darkness ended last season on an ambivalent note. We were impoverished. We had a trailer replete with equipment that was either antiquated, scratched, scored, stretched, slimmed or stock. We felt that as a team, we were performing at, if not our zenith, certainly a false summit. We had gotten our butts kicked, our clocks cleaned, plain out smoked yet our group had survived the year intact without the distraction and heartbreak suffered by the splintering interpersonal relationships which plague so many teams.

We gathered the coven together for a dinner at the end of the year. There must have been 25 people in the house, all of whom had committed time, money, expertise and/or knuckle skin to get the bike to the finish line for those nine races. Considering how pathetic the results, and obnoxious the commentary, the support we received from outside our clique was stunning. We received letters from folks all across the country who enjoyed the spectacle we had made of ourselves and wanted the t-shirt to prove it. Inertia is one of the more prevalent forces in our world and, although we considered quitting, irrationality carried the day and an order was placed for a 1997 Yamaha Thunder Kitty.

The fateful day arrived when the stork delivered the new baby into our welcoming sausage machine of a garage.

I had managed to convince Tim that I needed to spend more time making money to finance the operation and, as such, skipped out on much of the preparation of the bike. The past couple years of endurance bike building has given us some pretty good ideas of what will undoubtedly fail in the fourth hour and what has a prayer of lasting the entire distance. Despite this, we bought another stroker crank from a reputable source. Tim made tidy billet blank off plugs for the starter motor holes, replaced all the bushings in the transmission with ones machined by Jeff Manuel at PDI, made his own air box, made his own air filters, modified the combustion chamber in the head, figured out the claimed versus actual compression ratio discrepancy, sent the crank off to our new crank guru, sent the rods off to our old rod guru and sent the forks off to our old fork guru. Tim tricked me into going out to the garage once under the pretences of a house fire and while he had me out there, made me build the wiring harness and cut up the frame with a circular saw.

Some of our more exotic (read timely/expensive to reproduce) pieces had survived the 1996 maelstrom relatively intact and were recycled onto the thunderkitty. These included two sets of PM wheels and our most treasured piece: our Forrest Kerns Gas Tank. It is more art than storage tank really.

Although Yamaha has finally produced a bike with competitive horsepower (due to its new airbox, carbs and ignition) a number of their changes were regressive. The new frame has big holes, is still magnetic, and to flaunt its street going focus, has a non-removable subframe. This worried us. Not so much the added weight (since the frame is already comparable to the van chassis) but the additional subframe length allows for more torque in the event we, uh, drop it off the trailer. Not wanting to spend any money on frame repair (especially after I saw the frame repair guys had tried to weld my aluminum YZF 750 frame using a steel plug which, of course, subsequently failed) we tried to take some prophylactic action by cutting off most of the subframe and welding in a lateral support. Since we were wiping out resale value left and right we cut off the sidestand mount (more a display of commitment really) and a few other sundry pieces.

Unfortunately we had to sacrifice the stock ram air set up for the sake of crashability (no tubes in the fairing was one design criteria) and space for gasoline as our tank extends down to where the airbox usually resides. We like airboxes in general and ones with forward facing inlets even more. Tim lowered the radiator to make room for a scoop and sealed the back and sides of the area around the carbs in an attempt to duplicate the factory race set up. We lost the CV carbs in favor of flatslides since our race bikes always sound a bit odd and the clatter of the slides facilitates that end. Tim had been losing a lot of sleep from his finely tuned sense of mechanical empathy and the thought of the motor digesting all of the rubber thrown from our own front tire and other's rears. To finally get some rest he whipped up (oh, say 4 hours) some hardware cloth and foam filter to keep the particulate out of the chokes and assorted air passages.

All said and done we had about 100 bhp but, more importantly, we were done a month ahead of time so we decided to take the new bike, dubbed "Reason" (lifted from Neal Stephenson) for a little ride around the wonderful Road Atlanta for some pre-endurance evaluation.

ROAD ATLANTA

I'll be the first to admit that I am a talentless hack when it comes to building and, worse, riding motorcycles. That being the case I rely heavily on my teammates and pit crew to assemble a bike which is so easy to ride even I can turn almost competitive laps. So perhaps it is my naivete and inexperience but I would love to see how Rich Oliver has been getting around the track with his forks violently bottoming

Our 1996 forks were prepared by Lindemann Engineering, and, despite being a little low on oil upon delivery, were flawless and reliable for the duration of the season. Our 1997 forks where set up by LE to "Rich Oliver's Spec". Now either they meant for his 250gp bike or their work explains Oliver's less than stellar first couple of 600 supersport results. The 1997 LE forks (which had cost $325+) were bottoming out so hard on the brakes and through the dip that the cable ties on the fork legs were getting smashed off. This was not conducive to quick lap times.

We gave LE the benefit of the doubt that they had picked the correct springrate so to try to get decent performance out of the front end (i.e.: not locking and sliding the front wheel when braking into turns) Tim started adding fork oil. He ended up adding 90 cc to each leg. So either they didn’t have even close to enough oil in the forks when they shipped them or I brake and corner harder than everyone else. I think I can safely rule out exemplary talent on my part and can say we will probably not be spending any more money at LE. $325 buys a lot of springs and fork oil.

After Tim got the travel sorted out on the forks Amy started going after the ease of turning. I am partial to bikes that steer without feeling like I am going to wash the front end from pushing on the handlebars forcefully. That being the case we often end up with a bike nose down and butt up. Eventually we had it so face down I was able to tag the inside curbs without too much fear and, as the rear end hadn't started breaking away under throttle, we figured we were close. The lessened rake was giving me a bit of head shake over the hill into the dip but not enough to worry about, so far.

We found a few other teething problems which we were just as happy to sort out at a regional event rather than the more anxiety inducing national. One was the lack of brakes (magazine reviews not withstanding there is something weird about those brakes); another was the leaking quick fill gas caps. "Think of it like an SR-71, it'll quit leaking when it's up to speed" was Tim's helpful advice while pushing me off to the grid with a crotchful of unknown hydrocarbons.

So, although not as focused as the new GSXR-600s, Reason is a vast improvement over what we were campaigning last year. Enough so that I was running consistent low 1:30s, a pathetic time on a fast 600 but about a second a lap faster than my previous year's effort. Perhaps with brakes there will be more to come, then again, maybe not.