Finally hitting the track after being tied up for awhile this year. So it's time to finally strip the bike down and put her into track form.

Here's how she sat after I got back from taking my buddy to the DMV in the morning to take his motorcycle test:






Alright time to get to work. Got her in the garage and on stands. Pulled the car out to give me some more room too.




What I have to do is get all of the bodywork, fuel tank, and other street related bits off as I have race fiberglass and a track gas tank that's all paint matched. I also flushing all master cylinder fluids (front brake, rear brake, and clutch) and will be pulling off my brake line pressure switches for the front and rear brakes. I'm getting microswitches for these brakes when I eventually put it back to stock. I don't like the pressure switches. So time to goto work. Luckily taking stuff apart is the easiest part of it all.

After about 15 minutes of work



Next is the fuel tank. It is right at the top of my list of least favorite things to do on my bike. It's right next to bleeding/flushing brakes and clutches. This is one of the very few times I wish I had my superhawk back and had carbs as it would take me a minute to pull. For the RC51 I have to lift it up, clamp the return fuel line, pull it off and spill some gas getting it off. Add a t connection to it so I can run a small hose up to the throttle bodies and another line to my fuel can. Once it's back on I can undo the clamp and the tank will begin to drain. Basically have to sit and wait for 10-15 min pending on how full the tank is and then cycle the fuel pump some to get the rest out so you won't leak gas all over the place. THEN FINALLY you can undo the hoses, get even more residual fuel on yourself and get the tank. Thankfully I don't do this much. Finally all stripped down:






You can see the pile of parts off to the right which I pulled off. What a mess.... At this point I got to the point of having to pull my brakes apart and flush my clutch fluid. See above as to how much I enjoy doing this. So instead I get sidetracked working on putting lights on my trailer for the rest of the afternoon. Tomorrow it's back to the bike getting it the rest of the way finished. I'll take more pics with the assembly as I need to add new numbers, do some safety wiring and check a few things. I'll post some more pics and then pics from the weekend at summit when I get back (no not racing quite yet , just NESBA Summit Main on Monday).

 

bike looks great

i know on my rr, whenever i pull the tank theres a brown electrical plug you pull first and run the bike for about 5 seconds. burns the extra fuel so when you pull the fuel line no gas comes out.

 

No can do on this. Once you pull the return fuel line because the tank has the vent on the bottom the fuel then begins to EXIT through the return line. I could of course always pinch the vent line but that's no easier or harder then pinching the return line. The real solution is to get quick disconnects which I've priced out. I just haven't done it yet cause it's like $120 in parts. Though in reality with just swapping the tanks, I have to drain the tank anyways as the street one will sit around for awhile.

 

i gotcha

 

ugh makes me miss my RC.

is this another RC or the same one you had before?

 

same one. I'll be posting pics soon of it in race form. It looks like an entirely diff bike when I get the race glass on

 

I <3 your RC.

 

where is your taillight ? I might just be blind =P

 

i see it, you got that LED set up on your plate ! is it brite enough ?

 

Well finally got back to it after screwing around with the wiring on my trailer I just got. Never did figure it out >

Anyways I stopped last time when I was getting to bleeding my brakes and clutch. Here's a pic of the rear pressure sensor I want to remove. When I got the rearsets it came with them since the stock spring sensor can't be used anymore with it. Since I never use my rear brake sans the very occasional instance of either running off the track or trying to act like Rossi, I'm removing it.




I didn't take any pics of it but I've been using a MITY VAC for a few years now to bleed my fluids. I find it helps a lot with getting the fluid through quickly but I always finish with squeezing the lever a few times to the last little bit of fluid through and make sure there's no air bubbles. Here's the fluid I flushed out of my clutch.... ick




Next was onto the front brakes. Same as the rear it has a pressure switch but in this case it's cause of my brembo master cylinder. The sensor is no longer working so I'm getting a microswitch for when I do ride on the street in order to activate the brake lights. Here's where I ran into problems. I didn't realize until after about 15 minutes of trying to figure out why my banjo bolt wasn't working that the brembos use a fine pitch thread for the banjo bolts. So the pressure switch went back on as the closest place that has the correct one is 45 miles away.... Oh well.


So I got back to work and got the tank and rear cowl on:




Shortly thereafter I put on my race numbers onto the rear cowl. I picked these up off of a guy on the wera forums. Good quality and price. I have helmet stickers that have a yellow background as well (for novice) as at least ccs requires the number on the helmet in case of multi bike wrecks.




After this I moved onto the front. I had to remove the vinyl off of this as it was on the wrong side. It was on the left corner of the bike as the guy I got the stuff from used to race at daytona which has the scoring station on the left. Well needless to say nothing in the Mid-Atlantic Region has the scoring on the left. So got the old stuff on and cut out a new piece for the right side. Absolute pain in the *** to get it on right but I think I did a decent job. The bike's paint in general isn't fantastic so a couple of small creases in the vinyl didn't really bother me.




And at this point all that was left was getting the belly pan on. All done! Every time I've switched it over it's like having a whole new bike. I love it












Anyways all done for now. I'm off to summit point tomorrow afternoon (or maybe Monday morning as it looks to be raining there tomorrow). I'm excited to finally try out my yoyodyne slipper clutch and well of course just to be back on the track.

 

Yup works great actually. I had a hotbodies undertail that came with the bike when I bought it but it was pointless. I might as well have ridden around with no taillights. You literally couldn't see them at all unless it was night time. This works out quite well and is quite bright during the day. It's all integrated too but because it attaches to the license plate it allows me to keep the same undertail on with my street stuff and race glass. The undertail is now a flat piece of CF that my buddy cut out and we put on some brackets to mount it to the stock locations. :D

 

bike looks good.

i run the same led license plate light on my bike but it somehow leaked when i got caught in a downpour a few weeks ago and blew out the left turnsignal.

have you ever weighed the bike? just curious what it weighs in track form.

 

Looks great! I love the font for some of the stickers - it gives it a comic-book sort of feel for the whole look.

 

I weighed it in street form with a full tank of fuel and it was somewhere around 420 lbs I think. It was a year ago when a coworker was trying to tell me his bike was lighter (zx9r). It wasn't.... 400 some pounds for the RC is pretty good and costs a lot of money to get to as the last 10 or so pounds is cf bits and ti exhaust, etc.... Have to remove a bit of stuff to get it down that far. In track form I'm gonna guess around 410 as a lot comes off plus I removed a bit of stuff since I last weighed it. Another thing that helps is I NEVER run it in race form with a full tank of fuel. Probably 2gallons in it each session. We'll see though.

 

I was kind've thinking the same thing. I think the race numbers is what really did it. I'm pretty pleased with how they came out. I wasn't too thrilled about going to a 3 digit number and trying to fit it onto the bike but it worked out pretty well and the bike in general looks better imo then it did last year with only a few aesthetic changes to it (notice the cf exhaust hangers as the main change)

 

easy solution, don't ride in the rain Like I said I'm pleased with it. I did crack the plastic on one of the mounting holes where I overtightened it a little. I'll put some superglue on it but it's not going anywhere. If it does $40 gets me a new one so...

 

i was gonna try to see if they would replace it, 40 bucks is 40 bucks, lol.

im considering getting another one, but they have flexible led strips now that can be made how you want them so i might give them a shot.

btw, thats lighter than i expected. have you considered going with the ion batteries everyone is running now? shaves off alot of weight. i went from an 8lb oem battery to an 11oz speedcell, it was a nice weight savings.

 

Considered it. My buddy bought one and runs it on his RC. I really don't want to switch to it until this bike is basically track dedicated. Plus I'd rather spend that $250 or whatever on track time right now.

 

weighed it on my bathroom scales before I loaded it up and it was about 410lbs. Now I'd take that with a grain of salt as it's just a bathroom scale and I could only weigh a wheel at a time. But it should be pretty close to that.

 

i weighed mine at a scrapyard, im gonna try my bathroom scale today to see how accurate it is.