A Change of Direction...
I'm not quite sure how it happened, but within the last few days I have decided to switch up which race organization I plan to race with. My biggest concern with racing with CVMA is the distance. I live in Ventura County on the California coast. Chuckwalla Raceway is a little over 4 hours away and that is without traffic. It took me ten hours one time to drive to Phoenix thanks to LA area traffic. Desert Center is near the halfway point between Phoenix and home. I don't relish the thought of making that trek towing a race rig especially since CA has a 55mph towing speed limit. Most of the time you can get away with going faster, but when you do get tagged, you get hit with a fine of over $300. No bueno.
M1GP is a mini racing league that has classes for 250cc machines. They predominantly race on kart tracks in the SoCal area. There are several outdoor, paved kart tracks within a three hour drive near me and the M1GP race season has them hitting at least four. CVMA only races out of Chuckwalla so that is a bonus. I will be contacting them to verify that I can race the Ninja, but from a 2013 rulebook I managed to dig up online I can get the Ninja race bike ready for their 2016 season without much extra effort. I only have to safety wire a couple of extra fasteners. That's what I did last night.
One of the extra bolts I have to do are the brake torque arm bolts. Here I'm drilling the threaded end of the bolt. I also drilled the square shaped bolt head that mates with a metal boss on the brake torque arm to prevent it from turning.
And this is how it all ends up. Once the arm is bolted up I ran the safety wire through both ends with a twist in the middle. Now the bolt can't back out without going through the safety wire. The wire stays low profile and out of the way. I could have used cotter pins, but the threaded end didn't poke through the nut very far. I don't imagine these actually going anywhere on their own. The nuts are a type of locknut with a built in spring retainer, but having these wired this way makes me tech legal. The next extra set of bolts to wire up are the exhaust mounts at the rear of the bike. Something I'll work out tonight. I also managed to get the swing arm cleaned up. I also re-lubed the swing arm pivot and inspected the swing arm pivot needle bearings while I was there.
Speaking of cleaning up, here is a better shot of the 11 years of chain lube that was so graciously left on the bike by the previous owners. Here is the drive sprocket cover before the cleanup...
And here is the sprocket cover after. This took two full rags and about 30 minutes to get clean. The gunk was thick and sticky! The engine was similarly covered with crap. I still have some cleaning to do, but I am just about done. As I dig deeper into the final safety related race preps, I'm sure I'm going to need to break out the degreaser, but for now I feel much better about what I've gotten myself into with this bike.
I'll drop some more information about the M1GP race schedule in a future post and hopefully I'll be able to make the official announcement regarding expanding our international coverage. Great things will be happening here at My Motorbike Obsessions. See ya!
Blue
M1GP is a mini racing league that has classes for 250cc machines. They predominantly race on kart tracks in the SoCal area. There are several outdoor, paved kart tracks within a three hour drive near me and the M1GP race season has them hitting at least four. CVMA only races out of Chuckwalla so that is a bonus. I will be contacting them to verify that I can race the Ninja, but from a 2013 rulebook I managed to dig up online I can get the Ninja race bike ready for their 2016 season without much extra effort. I only have to safety wire a couple of extra fasteners. That's what I did last night.
One of the extra bolts I have to do are the brake torque arm bolts. Here I'm drilling the threaded end of the bolt. I also drilled the square shaped bolt head that mates with a metal boss on the brake torque arm to prevent it from turning.
And this is how it all ends up. Once the arm is bolted up I ran the safety wire through both ends with a twist in the middle. Now the bolt can't back out without going through the safety wire. The wire stays low profile and out of the way. I could have used cotter pins, but the threaded end didn't poke through the nut very far. I don't imagine these actually going anywhere on their own. The nuts are a type of locknut with a built in spring retainer, but having these wired this way makes me tech legal. The next extra set of bolts to wire up are the exhaust mounts at the rear of the bike. Something I'll work out tonight. I also managed to get the swing arm cleaned up. I also re-lubed the swing arm pivot and inspected the swing arm pivot needle bearings while I was there.
Speaking of cleaning up, here is a better shot of the 11 years of chain lube that was so graciously left on the bike by the previous owners. Here is the drive sprocket cover before the cleanup...
And here is the sprocket cover after. This took two full rags and about 30 minutes to get clean. The gunk was thick and sticky! The engine was similarly covered with crap. I still have some cleaning to do, but I am just about done. As I dig deeper into the final safety related race preps, I'm sure I'm going to need to break out the degreaser, but for now I feel much better about what I've gotten myself into with this bike.
I'll drop some more information about the M1GP race schedule in a future post and hopefully I'll be able to make the official announcement regarding expanding our international coverage. Great things will be happening here at My Motorbike Obsessions. See ya!
Blue
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