jbond's blog

Motorcycle News - Grand Designs PDFs

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 11:55:18 +0100

Here's PDFs of the Motorcycle News article on weird and wonderful PTWs.

Mexican FF

Mon, 13 Mar 2006 19:39:03 +0000

Here's a good one. I particularly like the illuminated skull.

Quasar Meetup

Sun, 04 Sep 2005 07:26:20 +0100

The 2005 Quasar outing will take place in Hastings over the week-end on September 10th/11th. The format will be similar to previous years with us meeting up on St Leonards sea-front on Saturday afternoon from around 4:30pm onwards and moving on to Bo Peep pub for supper. There will be a ride-out on Sunday morning and we'll finish up at the Six Bells at Chiddingly for a late lunch.

All Quasar owners, Quasar enthusiasts, or owners of other Feet-first machinery are invited to join us.

Adding a Volvo seat back to an AN400K3

Sat, 20 Aug 2005 15:04:03 +0100

I've posted a load of pictures to Flickr of my attempt at adding a Volvo seat. Click on each picture and you'll see lots of annotations describing the detail.

After much hacksawing, cursing and abuse of power tools, I now have a Volvo seat
mounted on my Burger400K3. Lessons I've learnt:-

- I'm crap at this metalwork stuff

- I should have listened to Royce, the Volvo 340 seat is the best. I was seduced by the fake leatherette of the seat from a bigger model but it doesn't work so well in this application. The problem is the mounting mechanisms on both sides are a good 4 to 5cms lower relative to the seat.

Fitting a Volvo Seat on a Burgman

Sat, 30 Jul 2005 18:16:50 +0100

As you can see from the photo, it is possible to fit a Volvo Seat on a Burgman!

This is the next stage in making my Burgman more of an FF. I got the seat from the Volvo Breakers on the A1 near St Neots for a mere 25 quid. It's a leather seat so won't need recovering. I had quite a choice and eventually plumped for an early 7 series instead of the usual 340 seat because of the leather, the filled in head rest and the fact that the lumbar adjust and the rake adjust are both on the left hand side. Not only that but it's got a heated back and seat base.

Steering links on a FFE

Fri, 24 Jun 2005 20:42:10 +0100

Here's a PDF sent in by Andrew Gibben on steering linkage layout on Funny Front Ends. (FFE)

Fitting a Malossi CVT kit to an AN400K3

Sat, 29 Jan 2005 16:14:49 +0000

I've just been fitting a Malossi kit to my Suzuki AN400 Megascoot. The first stage is to remove the lower left body panel. This has an astonishing number of little plastic nubbins that hold it on. The foot rest rubbers also have a very large number of bits that plug into the bodywork and you have to get under them to reach some of the fixings. Eventually you get the bodywork off, and the next piece is the CVT air filter cover, and then the plastic CVT cover. That gets you to here.

The next piece to remove is the inner cover. This is ally and has two dowels that eventually get stuck, bottom right and top left. The cover has an outrigger bearing for the clutch mechanism. Sometimes the shaft spins in the bearing making a nasty screech at very low speeds. You can safely ignore this as I'm not sure how to fix it if it happens to your bike. With the ally cover taken off, we have this.

Malcolm Newell's FFs

Wed, 21 Dec 2005 12:48:32 +0000

Here's a fairly definitive list of machines built by Malcolm. (words mostly by Paul Blezard) This is not easy seeing as most of the machines had the same number plate at some time, probably no chassis plate and certainly no "official" Malcom-applied serial number. This list is quite old now. Can anyone fill in more detail? Malcolm also paid the bills with some work on customs and choppers. On one of my visits to the cottage there was a trike with a wacky open sidecar. Any others? None I can think of, unless there was another Suzuki Quasar. Are the numbers right? Not far off. Malcolm definitely made in excess of 20 road-going machines after 1980-ish when he ceased working on the original Quasars with John Malfoy at Romarsh in Calne. Not bad going, especially when you consider that most of them were built between '80 and '88. Plus he also put Mark Crowson's original Reliant Quasar together in '85 from 'spares'!! There was also the 'conventional' VT250 Honda to which Malcolm added his own patent leg-protecting bodywork and ridden by his kids Gavin and Michaela on the road and pranged by at least one of them!