CBR900rr Aerospace Motorcycling

With the carbs sorted and the oil changed, the Fireblade sounds like the machine it is (ie: fantastic!).  On the to-do list now is chasing down some wiring issues and shaking down the rest of the bike because a monkey was working on it before and I don't trust his choices.

In working in and around the Fireblade, it's the little differences that add up to a bike 50+ kilos lighter than the Tiger and over 100 (!) kilos lighter than the Concours (while making 33% more horsepower than either).  At 195kg, the Fireblade is even 10 kilos lighter than my first bike, a svelte 2007 Ninja 650r.




The 'Blade makes lightness pretty much everywhere.  I'm particularly fond of the speedholes all over it.

When it isn't holey, it's reduced material wherever possible.  Even the rim spokes are thinned out:

Where Honda had to use material, it's the lightest they could manage...

Compared to the Kawasaki Heavy Industries bikes I've owned, this CBR900rr is a built for purpose thing that feels more like working on an aeroplane than it does a motorbike.

... and it sure is pretty.

Kawasaki Concours C14/GTR1400 Extreme Engineering

I took a couple of hours to work on this incredibly complicated machine on the weekend.  My last project was a 1997 Honda CBR900RR Fireblade which was all about minimalism and lightness.  That minimalism made the Honda a delight to work on but the C14 Concours is a very different animal.  Incredibly, the Fireblade weighs 62% of what the Concours does while putting out only slightly less power.  Man, did that bike know how to dance.

As I worked through the front end on the substantial Concours I found example after example of Kawasaki's overly engineered approach to the bike which has piled on the weight, but you can't fault their work, nor the design.  While the C14 is an incredibly complicated thing, it's also a beautiful example of Kawasaki Heavy Industries industrial design.

The circular white thing in the photo on the left is the windshield motor.  The C14 has an electric windshield that raises and lowers at the push of a button.  This one isn't working but the mechanical parts of it seem ok so now I'm chasing wiring in a bike that makes a 747 look simple.

On the right is the battery holder.  Any other bike I've owned makes do with a simple plastic open ended box, but not the Connie.  It gets an interlocking two piece battery holder with built in wiring harness.  The presses that turn these things our are something special!

These are all the gubbins the owner before me had wired into the bike.  He had that massive horn hanging off the back and the GPS system was wired into the front and installed on the handlebar.

With the bike having electrical issues, I'm putting it back to stock before I start thinking about adding in the extras again.

While I was in at the battery I cleaned up all the connectors, some of which were quite rusty.  It's things like that which will trip up electric windshields.

One of the advantages of fairings is that you can hide the mechanical bits underneath, but even when the bits are never going to be seen Kawasaki went overboard with its castings and finish.

That lovely little round clutch cover at the bottom lives under the fairing and would never normally see the light of day, but even then it's a wonderfully detailed and finished piece that only a handy owner or their own technicians would ever see.

Coffin shaped brake and clutch fluid containers?  Why not.

The benefit of this engineering fixation is that the quality of materials used is excellent.  Even though this bike is just over a decade old you wouldn't know it.  Many parts of it look brand new.  Rust on fasteners is all but non-existent and everything comes apart as it was intended.

This is the newest bike I've ever purchased (it's three years newer than my first bike and the KLX, seven years newer than the trusty Tiger and thirteen years newer than the Fireblade).  It's so new that there isn't a Haynes workshop manual for it.  It's the only bike I've ever owned that is still currently in production in much the same state.  The latest Tigers are five generations passed my old 955i.

Next steps are to get the windshield sorted and change out the air filter while I've got the thing in pieces, then it all goes back together and I'll see if my local mechanic can get me in for a safety, then it's time to put some miles on it!

My First Honda: Fireblade!

I've had a pretty diverse group of R&R  (repair & recover) motorcycles to date.  My first R&R bike was the '94 Kawasaki Concours ZG1000 back in 2014.  Purchased for eight hundred bucks and cut out of long grass to get it out of the field it was in, the Concours got sorted over the winter and put back on the road where it took us to Indianapolis and went on to over twenty thousand kilometres of mileage before I sold it on for what I purchased it for this past summer.

The Concours became my regular riding bike so I sold on the Ninja.  Eventually a KLX250 off road bike came into the garage, but didn't last long as I struggled to find ways to use it in Ontario: land of no fun.  That led to a too-quick purchase of a Yamaha XS1100 from an entirely dodgy kid that led me into the headaches of sorting ownership.  That experience has made me more cautious in buying used bikes.  The belief is that all motorcyclists are salt of the earth types, but that isn't my experience; shifty would be a better description.

So far I've been able to make money on my R&R projects, Shed and Buried style, but I don't make it easy on myself.  Both the Concours and the XS1100 were big, four carburetor bikes with spaghetti loads of vacuum tubes and complex wiring.  I've taken my time looking for the next project and tried to look for something simple, air cooled and single cylinder, but bikes like that don't come up often.  As the summer fades and winter approaches, it was time to commit to a new R&R project.

This 1997 Honda CBR900RR Fireblade came up on Facebook buy and sell.  I've found the local nature of Facebook's marketplace offers up interesting opportunities that you don't find on the hardened semi-pro sellers of Kijiji and Autotrader, where you are much more likely to find shady characters who sell a lot of crap.  This twenty-two year old non-running Honda got me curious enough to contact the seller in Alliston.

It turns out the bike had gotten tangled in a divorce and was then sidelined.  It was eventually used to settle debts between the estranged couple, but now it belonged to a non-rider with no mechanical experience who just wanted it gone.  Her new partner was trying to sell it for her, but with it not running he wasn't getting any calls.  A late nineties CBR in safetied, running condition was going for about $4000, he was asking $1200 for this one as is.

We exchanged a number of emails, both of us cautious as we'd both met idiots from online sales (it turns out the internet is actually full of idiots).  As we got to know each other I asked increasingly direct questions - was is repainted to hide crash damage? (no, the former owner didn't like the stickered stock look)  - why is it in this state?  (where I got the bad karma backstory this bike was unfortunately wrapped up in).  The last problem to solve was how to get it here.

During our give and take the seller offered me the bike for $1200 instead of $1300, and then said he could trailer it down to my place for $100, so I got it at asking price with a $100 delivery charge.  The bike showed up and we had a good chat and ended up being given a milk crate full of pears from his parent's farm too.  Bonus Honda pears - good deal.  This low mileage, non-runner seemed like a steal upon first look.  The paint's a bit rough, but for a 20+ year old low mileage bike, she cleaned up a treat.

I was told the bike was a non-runner due to the carbs.  As I got into the bike mechanically I figured I'd look at the fuel system as a whole rather than only looking solely at the carb since I didn't know how long it had been sitting.  I'm glad I did.  The fuel tank had a worrying amount of rust in it.  I talked to people on the Practical Sportsbike Magazine Facebook group (one of my go-to bike magazines and a great place to talk to DIY types) and got suggestions around various acid etching and chemical routes.

I went out to Canadian Tire aiming to get some industrial grade hydrochloric acid but found Metal Rescue Rust Remover, a water based environmentally friendly solution that neutralizes rust and prevents more from forming.  It also helps the tank retain its structural integrity whereas acid eats holes in it.  My first go at a motorcycle tank cleaning (I've been lucky so far and not had to deal with it) went well.  I left the chemical in the tank for about six hours before recovering it back into the bottle (it can be reused).  With the tank sorted it was time to look at the rest.

The vacuum operated fuel pump in the bottom of the tank was clogged and a mess, but it too cleaned up nicely.  With the big end of the fuel system sorted out, I turned to the carbs.

Compared to the buried in the frame carbs on the Concours and XS1100, the Honda's are a joy to access.  Having seen the mess that was the rest of the fuel system, I figured the carbs were crammed full of guck, and they were.  The only other issues seemed to be more about mechanical cack-handedness than wear.

Once on the bench I've been able to isolate some obvious problems.  I found a spring laying under the carbs on the engine case.  If you're fixing a carb it generally helps to use all the parts.  I also found that one of the choke pins were broken, so the choke was only working on three of the four carbs, and the choke cable itself wasn't attached correctly, so the choke was only moving about 2/3rds of the distance it should.  These are all things that would prevent the bike from starting properly.

Yesterday I took the float bowls off and had a look at the bottom end of the carbs.  The ethanol in modern fuel is not a good mix with older fuel systems, like carburetors.  Not only can it eat away at the rubber and gaskets in older systems not designed for it, but it can also leave varnish, and worst of all, it's a water absorber, so it can lead to corrosion in older, gravity fed systems.  If there was ever evidence of modern ethanol based fuels making a mess of a carburetor, it was here in this old Fireblade, where every carb bowl was worse off than the one before it.

Thanks to some judicious use of carb-cleaner, they cleaned up nicely, but does ethanol ever do a job on mechanical fuel delivery systems!  Fortunately, if I stick with super unleaded from most stations in Canada, it means I'm not running any in this old bike from now on.

I run super in my bikes anyway because they're very fuel efficient anyway so it doesn't cost much and, at least on the Tiger, the power commander means I can maximize power out of it.  For the Honda or any other carb fueled bike, you should be running super just to stay away from the ethanol.

Today I'm going to pull the tops of the carbs and have a look at the state of things (I'm hoping better than below) and finish cleaning them.  I'm also going to see if I can fix that broken choke pin on carb 4 or else I'm going to have to track down the part.  Bikebandit has it for $50US, but no one else seems to have one available.

There are other bits and pieces in this poorly looked after carb that are suspect.  Rather than use boot clamps to attach the carb to the engine, the muppet who owned it before me appears to have put some kind of rubber sealant on them and attempted to 'glue' them to the block.  This is stupid in all sorts of ways.  Bits of this rubber seal would deteriorate in the gasoline rich air-fuel mix and get sucked into the engine, and there is no mechanical connection ensuring the carbs are tight and leak free to the engine.  For a system that runs on vacuum, this is a disaster.

The boots have cleaned up nicely, so I also need to source some ring clamps for them.  The Honda specific ones are hard to find, but I'm hoping I can find some aircraft grade ones that are an engineering match and easier to source.  Oetiker Clamps, ironically based in Alliston where the Honda came from, do some nice, high quality options that I should be able to fit.

So much of mechanics come back to common sense.  The guy who owned this before seems to have had a startling lack of it.  I'm hoping for $1200+$500 in parts I can get this Honda humming and ride it for a year before seeing if I can double my money on it (unless we bond).  Safetied bikes of similar vintage with twice the mileage are going for four grand.  Even with all the work done so far, the bike hasn't cost me a penny in parts and I may be within spitting distance of sorting out this abused Fireblade.

Follow up:

Tops of the carbs were fiddly - the plungers are a pain to reseat properly, but I worked through them and all the top ends have been cleaned, though they were all in good shape as befitting a low mileage bike like this.  The nastiness was all in the float bowls.

I gotta say, I'm enjoying Honda engineering.  Kawasaki has a real heavy industry feel to it by comparison, though my Kawi experience is mainly on a big sport tourer and this Honda is built for one thing only... getting down the road quickly.  But this bike has an engineering elegance to it that makes it a pleasure to work on.

With the cackhanded way this bike has been worked on, there are a number of fiddly bits missing or broken. I was sourcing ring clamps (x8), a choke plunger and other odds and ends and found the price quickly creeping up.  I reached out to local bike breaking yards and only heard back from NCK in Woodstock, ON, who seem organized and on their game.  They have a donor carb in used, rust free (stored inside) condition for $250CAD.  That's within fifty bucks of where I was with buying bits and pieces and means I'd have a lot of spares I could always sell on after.  I'm going the donor carb route this week.

Oh, and Oetiker clamps got back to me and apologized for not having what I needed because (of course) the Honda's clamps are a special size and would require special manufacturing.  My quest for carb hose clamps continues.

NOTES:

One of the tricky bits of working on old bikes is getting the documentation you need to work on them accurately.  The internet is a gold mine for this.  If you're working on a late '90s Honda CBR900RR Fireblade, you'll find this handy:

1996/7 Honda CBR900RR Owner's Manual:  https://mototribu.com/constructeur/honda/1996/1000cbr/doc/revuetechnique_900rr.pdf

It has lots of good technical graphics in addition to all the specs you need.

***

I was also able to source the Haynes Manual for this bike from Fortnine on sale for only $35.  Most other places were over $40US, so finding that on sale was a good first step in this project.

At the moment I've got emails out to The Bike Yard in Caledon and Oetiker Clamps in Alliston.  With any luck I can source the bits I need and have this Honda purring even before the snow starts to fly, then I can spend the winter sorting out the other fluids and maintenance before it hits the road in the spring.

Fireblade Petcock

I think I've finally gotten the fuel system on the scuppered Fireblade sorted.  The last problem (and probably what caused all the other carb and engine issues) was a leaking petcock.  I tried to take apart the existing one, but I should have listened to the Chilton manual and just replaced it in the first place.  The new one (40 bucks on Amazon) seems a quality thing.

The petcock in the tank was pretty mucky, and was leaking even when turned off.  If it was pouring gas into the carbs all the time, even when parked for long periods, it must have filled up the carb bowls and spilled over into the intake manifold and eventually found its way into the engine oil, which would explain the seven litres of what looked like muddy water that came out of the oil drain plug.

The new petcock looks like a more finished thing than what was on it.  Based on the questionable mechanics on the rest of the bike, I'm guessing this was just something that fit rather than the right spec part.  The one on the top is the new one and the bottom one was what was on the bike.  It seems odd that Honda wouldn't actually tell you what the petcock is doing by writing the position on the thing.  

The old one also was also lacking the fuel filter, and the new one with the filter on it wouldn't fit throught a tube stuck up in the tank hole.  I removed the old o-ring and managed to free up the tube with some WD40 and slide it out.  Like everything else I've found in the fuel system, it was a pretty mucky thing.  With those weird bits now out and the tank cleaned, that's the whole fuel system sorted, so hopefully it'll run like it should when I finally get the tank back on.

The goal now is to wait for a break in the weather (we've been in the double digital negative temperatures with a fair bit of snow), and see if I can put the tank back on and fire it all up.  It's supposed to be 6°C and raining on Monday, so that'll clear it up and maybe give me a chance to test the tank/petcock on the bike.

As it is, the new petcock is leak free on the tank (I just held it up and tipped it over a basin, but no fuel leaked), so that's a result!  The problems with this non-runner when I got it had me focusing on the fuel system to the exclusion of all else.  I'm hoping that after a carb rebuild and the various other fuel system nick nacks I've sorted, that's all that's needed, but you never know.

With any luck I'll actually get to ride the thing up and down the driveway later this week and find out what else it might need.  If it's sorted, I can focus on winter maintenance on the Tiger and do the LED turn signals I've got for both bikes next.  Come spring time I'll ride it over to my local motorbike shop, Mostly Ironheads, and have them do a safety on it and then get it sorted for the road.

What's a Kawasaki GTR1400/Concours14 like to ride? NUCLEAR SHINKANSEN!

I picked up this Concours14 (or 1400GTR or ZG1400 depending on what market you're in) back in April for $5500CAD.  It had been sitting for some time and was full of spider nests.  I got the safety sorted yesterday and got the bike licensed and on the road today so we're ready to finally make some tracks with this thing.

What's it like to ride?  I've owned more Kawasakis than any other kind of bike and their engines have always been what makes them special, and this bike is no different.  The 1352cc inline four at the heart of the Connie was identical to the ZR1400 hyperbike's motor back in the day, and it shows.

On my first ride I pulled out to pass a truck and it was behind me almost too quickly to process.  I'm coming off owning a late 90s Fireblade so it's not like I'm inexperienced with quick bikes, but the 1400GTR not only has the horsepower but also has the torque to back it up.  Where the 'Blade was staggeringly quick (and light), you had to wind it up to make it go.  It felt like a light but not overpowered machine at sub 6000rpm engine speeds.  At 6k it became seriously quick and if you were brave enough to chase the 13,000rpm redline the bike turned into a total head case.

You don't need to wring the Kawasaki's neck to make astonishingly rapid progress.  It weighs over 100 kilos more than the Fireblade but makes over 30 more horsepowers and pound-feets of torque; it doesn't feel heavy, which is an amazing accomplishment for a bike that can carry over 500lbs, has shaft drive and feels like it's ready for five hundred mile days.

It's not telepathic in corners like the 'Blade was, but that bike's focus was so singular that it made everything else difficult.  The 1400GTR does a good job of cutting up corners, hiding its 300 kilo weight well, but then it can also ride all day, still hit 40mpg and carry two up with luggage.

Ontario makes you buy a vehicle history when you buy a new bike but I don't mind because it offers you insight into the machine's history.  This bike is a 2010 model but it wasn't first licensed for the road until 2014 (!) meaning it's only been rolling for seven years rather than eleven.  The first owner had it two years and then sold it on to the guy I got it from.  He rode it for a couple of years and then parked it after it tipped over on him in a parking lot (hence all the spider nests).

The prolonged park is what shrank the seal in the clutch that I've since replaced.  The drop also stopped the windshield from moving but both things have been solved now and this Concours, with only 32k on the odometer, is finally ready to do what these bikes do best:  make big miles.  One of the guys at our local dealership is a Concours fan and got his over 400,000kms, so these things have staying power as well as horsepower.

I'm looking forward to getting to know this nuclear shinkansen (Kawasaki Heavy Industries makes bullet trains too!) better this summer.