Part 2: Should I be worried?

Well, after Sunday's euphoria of having a pair of lovely bright red wheels sitting 'comfortably' in between my forks, this evening I took a more objective look at the situation.

The first thing to occur was that I wasn't going to be able to customise the existing rear brake carrier to fit the new wheel/disk as the keying mechanism which locates in the swing-arm and acts as a torque stay, wouldn't allow the 17.5mm lateral movement I need to centralise the wheel in the fork. Which ever way I look at it, I'm going to have to go 'Old School' and employ a torque-arm layout (as originally fitted to the CBR600 F1 whose wheels I'm using). The prerequisite for this will be a caliper and carrier from a CBR600 RR3 (should fit with luck) which I'm bidding on currently, (mainly 'cos I can't find a F1 unit to bid on!) plus a home-brewed bracket, for a torque rod, which I'll need to MIG weld onto the arm. Well at least we're into a bit of interesting engineering now!

All that said. I took a picture of the back of the bike and with the wheel more or less centred in the swing arm fork, it all looks off centre with the rest of the bike! Methinks I need to take its clothes off and check for straightness....

However I still don't know if the RR carrier uses an integral detent for torque control; If so, I will need to mill and drill it to suit the revised application. Let's see if I win it first, then I can take it from there!

Re the rear sprocket, I've just won a CBR600 R item for 525 chain that should fit the bill - I hope - so that should be here before the weekend. Add £7.74 to the running total...

A new split-link which I still need to order, will see the drive train restored in principle. However I still need to replace the engine sprocket. Given the smaller rear sprocket (43T as opposed to 47T), I need to compensate for it by reducing the number of gearbox teeth from a 16T from 15T. This will give a final ratio of 1:2.87 as opposed to the original of 1:2.93, so there should be negligible difference in acceleration and general performance.

The cush drive rubbers were here today but I wasn't in to take delivery so they'll be redelivered tomorrow and left in the side alley!

I haven't given a lot of thought to the front end yet. I really want to keep the new disks - they look so good - so I need to think seriously about how to modify the caliper carriers to compensate for the extra diameter of the rotors. As I mentioned yesterday, I did have a couple of ideas but I need to pull a caliper off the bike and see how much metal I've got to play with. Maybe tomorrow if I can get away from work sharp enough, I'll do that.

I was having a think about the speedo gearbox on the front axle and wondering if I really need to bother about a pukka CBR600 F1 item. The disadvantages of not doing so are that (a) the speedo will read slightly high, which isn't an issue - I never use the speedo anyway ;o) and (b) the mileometer will register a higher mileage than it's actually doing. That isn't a showstopper for me, given the fairly low commuting mileage I do each week.

(Just looking at ebay, there's a correct speedo gearbox available for £21... I've tagged it but I'm inclined to wait until I'm on the road before spending out on this little luxury! And it occurred to me, is the 600 gearbox actually different from my TransAlp unit or do the respective clocks compensate for the wheel size? Dilemma!)

Well, this was only ever going to be a little update so I'll leave it for now and see what the rest of the week brings. In the meantime though, I'll add a couple of pics of the splits in the original rear wheel rim...

(I know, the wheels are filthy - I ride my bikes rather than polish them but I guess that's not much of an excuse!)

If by chance anyone's reading this and has successfully completed such a project, please shout up - helpful advice is always welcome!