Frame

Rake or not to rake???

If we run a bigger rear wheel, bigger rear tire, longer shocks, lower the front end 2", I think that will take away a couple of degrees of rake. This is far easier than cutting of the neck and re-angling it. Therefore, we will leave it, the neck, where it is... for now.

Got a couple of days in it though to cut off all the brackets, mounts and tabs that we don't require, this would be all of them. Sure we cut off 20 lbs or so of crap, much cleaner now. Welded on the seat mounts, done... for now.

Thinking we're going to be tipping the engine forward a little. this means we'll need to cut off the lower rear engine mount and re-weld it. This can't happen until we get the engine apart and back together and fit up the appropriate carbs. Rumor has it the carbs are a very tight fit to the down-tube.

Put Timken bearings in the neck, think we're going to try and bore the bores a little deeper next time the frame is near a Bridgeport. Don't like the way they project out of the bores. Everyone else seems okay with it, but think we'll fix that.

Got all new seals and steering stem nuts for the trees. New fasteners and a new leather pad for the dampener. Ordered up a new plastic knob and drawbar for the dampener set up. It is surprisingly effective at least in my garage at 0 mph. Don't think it'll be speed sensitive like a nice Ohlins unit, but I want to try it out since its such a visual period piece. Just made that up, (visual period piece), sounds made up but it is definitely retro.

Backend

Not much happening back there.
Wider 18" Excel rim with applicable Scorpion spooned on.
Stayed with the stock drum, as it'll likely be strong enough to lock when we're ready to go sideways.

Oh yeah failed to mention. My friends all kind of decided to build cheap dirt trackers so we could go out to our semi-local, up and coming dirt track north of the city. Cheap! f--k forgot that part. Now I have to learn to slide this thing with the added threat of dropping it when its worth more than my truck.

The aluminum swing arm is made in Thailand. I figured it was worth the risk. When I emailed to ask about fitting it to the XS, the guy said they shut down the shop for 5 days because Sepang is hosting the MotoGP. Can't be all that bad if they're hardcore MotoGP guys. It's a nice quality unit.

Anyways, all cleaned up, new shoes in there, all new bearings and hardware. New seals, axle, levers and custom wheel spacers. Added needle bearings and proper seals to the swingarm pivot. Not big huge dollars, another 1500 or so here, but nice light and tight.

Try to imagine a nice set of Ohlins on there as opposed to the ones shown. I promise, we'll do something about that soon.

Big Brake

So a good part of the reason I decided to spend so much money and time on rebuilding the front end rather than just buying an inverted solution off of Ebay (for a fraction of the price), was the cool front brake set up.

The stock disc carrier actually has two skinny little ball bearings of its own. It has its own hollow axle and is actually bolted to the front fork. I guess this was some sort of racing feature??? You could pull the axle and slip the wheel out leaving the brake caliper and disc still attached to the fork. So despite the fact that there will likely be a tiny bit of slop between the drive dogs on the disk and the hub of the wheel, there is a rubber insert which gets pinched in there, but likely it will still feel a little tiny bit squishy. Despite that, I thought the coolness of the set up was worth keeping. Duh...

So I picked up a used 03 R1 front caliper, the gold dot version. It's a left side so I can flip it over and mount it in the stock location in front of the leg. This also may do some weird things as the differential bore caliper will actually have the larger pistons leading, Yamaha intended it to be the opposite, but whatever, what do they know :). I think all their calipers are all equal bores now anyways. Oh yeah, you should make sure rebuild kits are readily available for your caliper before ripping out the old seals, 'cause I know that now.

Back to the disc. Now everyone knows a stock Ducati carrier will bolt to a stock XS rim and even the left side of the hub has a cover and under there is another bolt pattern that will bolt to a stock Duc carrier allowing for a low cost twin disc front setup. Simple! But as you have likely figured out by now, not a big fan of simple. Also, that is only applicable to the late XS's not the "early" ones.

So okay going to keep the stock carrier and chuck the stock disc.

This is promising. the carrier has a eight hole pattern, thinking I can make up a simple aluminum sub carrier, bolt it to the stock carrier and add a standard floating disc to the set up and be done. Trouble is try to find a eight button floating disk anywhere on the planet! Odd numbered buttons are all the rage.

So more intensive searching finds me a the door of a manufacturer in Sweden. ISR makes beautiful stuff. Guess what though... its not cheap, but he uses eight buttons on his disc. Guess the Swedes aren't as concerned about staggering the load??? So anyways figure while he is making the disc, might as well have him do the sub carrier as well. So we did up a quick SolidWorks design and sent it off to Sweden for a quote.

So for 2500 SED or... $500 ish dollars we are good to go.

A custom caliper bracket/adapter, all new bearings, seals, axle, all new fasteners and a Speigler brake line added in and we have a stupidly expensive 330 mm, not 320mm, front brake for our 40 year old bike. Now lets hope we have 2 finger stoppies, assuming we don't fold the little 34mm fork in half :).

Also, in case you haven't noticed the trend here, the picture above contains over 2000 of my hard earned dollars. this is Canada, and those are after tax dollars. So for you Americans out there thats like 3000 of your hard earned dollars, well close anyways.

Not the final hardware, might do a little pocketing on the bracket as well.

Like so.