YAMAHA FZ600 RACER
‘Spike’ Edwards finishes Nancy.
At last Nancy was very near to completion! The chassis was more or less back together, the motor was in and Nancy was on her wheels. There were a few ‘Spike’ race refinements to implement. One thing that has annoyed me over many seasons of racing, is when you try and make adjustments to the rear-sets, they all drop apart with spacers, washers etc. rolling everywhere as you unscrew them – my cunning plan is to counter sink the holes in the spacers, feed a small O-ring on the bolt to sit snugly, then the bolt and spacers have a temporary fix that stops them parting company when you take them off. It works a treat. The gearchange had to be altered from road to race and it wasn’t as easy as it seemed. I had to turn the gear lever around and try to get clearance with the gear rod, so this required a bit more ingenuity and modification to finally get right. Now that I was happy that I could change gear, it was time to work on making sure the rear brake could operate; at some stage during either the strip-down, or the plating, the push rod was mislaid. In fact, I spent several days looking for the bloody thing. What’s bizarre is that it’s quite unique and a sizeable component, so how it could have got lost is still a mystery until this day! So, with necessity being the mother of invention, it was time for a bit more engineering. Taking a length of ally tube, I measured the approximate length and then put a thread in either end; one end I wound a rose joint in and attached to the brake lever and at the other end an appropriately sized bolt to go into the cylinder. Success – a rather groovy looking push rod. Gareth, from Reactive Suspension, had done a great job on modifying the rear shock as it had slipped in with ease, unlike that monster ugly thing that took hours to hammer out. I just now had to find a location and fixing point to site the remote reservoir. The original unit didn’t have a reservoir so I had to find a suitable location, which was complicated by the fact the flexi pipe to the reservoir was a certain length and, at this point, couldn’t be changed. Luckily enough, after much moving and fiddling about with the battery
box it lined up onto the subframe very nicely, supported by two rubber mounts and jubilee clips supplied by Gareth. It was now time to look at modifying and fitting the bodywork ready to be painted. I had purchased a single seat unit, but then after studying and thinking about it a bit more, I thought to myself ‘If I take the original seat off, there’s going to be no support underneath, where I’m actually plonking my arse, and where all the weight’s going to be!’ It would mean that I would have to fabricate and install some sort of seat support on the chassis to successfully weight-bear through the single-seat unit. My easy answer was to leave the original seat in situ, and simply cut and fashion the single seat unit to fit round it.
Hey presto, nice and comfy, well supported, what more could anyone ask for? A seat-fixing bracket, that’s what! One of the original brackets was missing making the front of the seat wobble, but I realised I had got a bit of stainless hanging about, so I copied the existing one and with a bit of dremel-ing and the job’s a good ‘un! Keeping the original tail-light (as it has to stay in place as part of the Junior Production rules) I had to customise the seat unit to fit – remember, measure twice cut once – and now it fits like a dream. Of course, my next problem was because I had completely stripped and rebuilt the bike with a new main fairing mounting bracket, the holes in the fairing were nowhere near they were supposed be, and I had to re-mark and re-drill to fix the old bodywork to the new mountings. Rod Geskell, John Mcguiness’ no.1 stalker (sorry, I mean fan) had been in touch and very generously offered his services to paint Nancy.
We were looking at a Noriyuki Haga/christer Lindholm Yamaha mash-up: classic red, black and white Yamaha but with a touch of class. The wife had also spotted some car graphics on ebay, and although divorce was discussed when I explained they’d be difficult to fit on triple curvatures, typically ‘she who must be obeyed’ went ahead and bought them. So at last Nancy was ready to go in the van for the drive to Wigan and meet Rod for her facelift but then disaster struck as she crashed while being loaded in the van! I hadn’t fixed the brakes up entirely, she’s a big old lump, and halfway up the ramp, Nancy offered resistance, I stepped on the ‘NO STEP’ bit of the ramp, and we high-sided at zero mph! I was incandescent with rage at crashing on our first outing when actually not even being on a racetrack; then realised two things A) she’d crashed on the way to be painted, not on the way back, and B) she’d not fallen on the exhaust side – so all things considered we’d got off lightly! Arriving at Rod’s, I had to confess that there was a bit of repair work to do to the bodywork, before he could start the
Simple solutions: Treat yourself to a good brake-bleeding kit. Or moan like Spike!
painting; but he was having to glass-fibre over the old mounting holes, of which there were plenty, so he was quite happy to accept the challenge. We had a chat over the mock-up design and left the bodywork with him, as Nancy had to come back home as there was re-testing to be done on the dyno. Before we set off for Dewsbury to see Don it was time to tackle my least favourite job in the history of ever: bleeding brakes. I hate it. Nancy was no exception to any other bloody bike I’ve had trouble bleeding brakes on, this time six hours in (yes, honestly) I was ready to set fire to her. In the end, I chanced on the idea of removing the calipers and raising them up above the reservoir, and voila, it eventually worked.
I could now at least control her loading and unloading in the van! Off for a re-run on the dyno. Don was eager to see how much improvement the refresh had made, together with the new MHP zorst. We did a couple of runs, and I noticed there was a FZ400 in the workshop; I’d heard rumours that fitting the ECU from one to a 600 would give a different ignition curve and allow you to rev it more – we ‘borrowed’ it, fitted it to Nancy and ran her up to see if there was a change. I can report that there was absolutely no difference whatsoever.
So, we put Nancy back to standard, double checked the carb balance, and were well impressed to see that Nancy was now putting out some 10bhp more, topping out at 60bhp: that’s the figure we had hoped to get her to when we started the project. I finally got the call from Rod to say that the bodywork was ready to pick up. Soon Nancy would be looking like a real bobby-dazzler. Keeping authentic to the design brief, Rod had done the belly pan in plain white to carry all the sponsors and supporter logos, without whom the Nancy project would not have been a success, and this allowed the rest of the design to remain uncluttered and eye-catching. Now, my actual garage is in fact a shipping container, so with my bike ramp, chests and cupboards, and my coaching chase bike ‘Cato’ in there as well, it’s cosy to say the least.
The wife was pressing to have the printed graphics applied, and in the interest of marital relations, I said that we’d give it a shot – but not in the shipping container. I would need space to move, line-up, stand back and assess before making the ‘sticking commitment’. Gareth has lots of room in his workshop, and as I wanted to make some further changes to the forks, I asked if we could use his facilities to apply the graphics and he said yes, so off we went.
I have previously enjoyed working for a local graphic company, Colour It In, so have got a basic grounding in the principles of applying vinyl stickers. I was a bit more apprehensive prepping for these though, as they were flat panel car graphics, and I didn’t know how they were going to behave once I tried to apply them to the undulations of Nancy’s generous curves. There was a bit of swearing along the way, but the wife managed to keep her distance and her suggestions to herself, and the graphics were soon on!
I have to admit, after initially being a doubter, they really did bring the colour scheme alive and give Nancy that finishing touch. While we were at Gareth’s we looked up some old 1986 spec sheets for the FZ600 and made some alterations to the positioning of the forks, added heavier weight oil, as I felt they weren’t damped enough, and with all jobs completed, D-day had come. There’s nothing else to do now except get out on track and ride her. I’m actually a bit scared!