888 Dyno Day

End of last week I headed down to Southampton to meet RedMax Steve Hillary down at Doubletake Motorcycles to give the old girl a dyno run and set her up for the new Oronero airbox, velocity stacks and MADASL spaghetti exhaust.

She sounds crisp and clean and spins up a lot faster now - thanks Stafford Evans for the Kaemna light flywheel and lightened primary gear. An ally clutch basket from a 1098 was also fitted. Together with the close ration gearbox, when revving hard, you're just grabbing gears. It won't be as extreme on the road, but with a quickshifter, it would be immense! Maybe next year.

The following is some of the engine work was done by Steve...

Fit lightened flywheel

Fit lightened primary gear (standard 2:1)

Fit ally clutch basket

Fit slipper clutch (thanks MADASL Mark Lumb for loaning this)

Check, torque, locktite all bottom end nuts and bits that can fall off

Check head and shims

Replace belts 

Check EVERYTHING

Steve and Nic of Doubletake Motorcycles

They have McGuiness's first TT winning bike - McGuiness offered to buy it, it wasn't for sale so he had a replica built. I will never sell my first race bike.

Interesting thing about the belts - they were new before last year's TT... after the TT, they were discoloured blue. A sign of them getting too hot. Extreme rpm for suck long periods of time and no ventilation I reckon. This year I will run without belt covers... or come up with some ventilation.

So, other than the lightened bits and some vernier pulleys to make setup easier, the engine is completely standard. Just a Oronero carbon airbox and velocity stacks to get the air in and a MADASL spaghetti system to get it out (oh, and an Oronero crank breather box). On the dyno, we played around with the fueling, but in the end just needed a little tweak using Steve's magic yellow box for it to be optimized for the new setup.

Last Year: Blue

This Year: Red

Keep it above 6500 and we'll be okay

Last Year: Red

This Year: Blue

Definite gains in 3rd, 4th and 5th

Compared with last year, we've lost some power mid-range... but it's now smoothed out and it's moved to the top. On the TT Mountain Circuit - this is where she'll live. These are usable gains for flat out riding.

Looking forward to what she feels like on the road :-)

Toon Up Time

The oil-in-bore problem was the 'generic' scraper ring... it must have somehow been sucking oil into rather that keeping oil out of the cylinder.

Exhaust clamps didn't arrive, so I made a sleeve for an old one and robbed another off the flattracker. I got the beastie down to TTS for a toon-up with her new rings, tighter valves, exhaust and airbox.

I was hoping for 60bhp. The best she gave was nudging 58bhp :-(

Booooo

Class limit is 65bhp... so I'm at least 10% down.

Booooo

But... on the same dyno last year she could only give 54bhp and was running rough... so we're up a bit and she's smooth as butter.

Yaaaaay!

I'm thinking the air-filters are interfering with the air-flow. Might experiment with that another time. For now... she needs a once-over, some race numbers and new tyres. Saturday is race day at Brands Hatch.

Classic TT Build - Dyno Graphs

Some dyno graphs from Friday's dyno setup...

Red line is final setup. Slightly down on power because the throttle off at 9900rpm. Look at that 10bhp gain from 6500 to 7500 :-)

 

 Interesting speed run with the peak at 111.5bhp.

 

Shouldn't be too difficult to keep her between 6500 and 10k

Classic TT Build - Dyno Day

So, on Friday the old girl was down at the dyno with RedMax Steve to get setup for the engine rebuild and her new cam timing.

Steve did a base run with her on the P7 ECU and standard chip. 107bhp.
:)

She was fuelling quite lean through the revs too... not great for reliability. Steve then popped the P8 ECU in with the FIM chip (I asked about the 916 chip, Steve just laughed). It only took a few runs to get her spot-on.

111.5bhp

 

Steve also filled in a mid-range hole with 10bhp and the 'curve' climbs fast to 8k and is then pretty flat from 8 till 10. I'm super-happy :) Built for reliability... and now she's got some extra mambo too!

Chris at DoubleTake Motorcycles (the dyno operator) was really surprised that she sat at 70 degrees the whole time... taking a dyno hammering in her stride. She's gonna absolutely love the Isle of Man!
I'll get some dyno printouts up here soon...

Here is a vid Steve shot of Chris giving her a dyno workout. The sound is awesome!

BAMF Engine Rockin!

Got the BAMF back from Andy at Southern Cross. It was waaaay down on power on the Isle of Man following the rebuild. Back in 2005 she was giving us 130 bhp at the wheel.

Andy is the Aprilia RSV guru. He fitted the big throttle bodies and sorted the fuelling. He did loads of dyno work, experimenting with different airbox configurations and velocity-stack lengths. He built a custom airbox in the end.

The final tune is the blue line (short stacks).

Look at that torque!

Not as much power gains as I'd hoped for, but the dyno is probably calibrated a bit different to what it was 5 years ago.

She should now be good for 180 mph down Sulby Straight... I can't wait!