The Phantom

Especially if you could track down that twin exhaust can setup! Yeah it's a great look! I had the chance to buy one of these a few years back for $200, brand new... didn't grab it :rolleyes:

Looks great and you will be able to push fag Harleys out of your way with the headlight bracket battering ram! On colour - I think the RC45 doesn't take a solid colour scheme quite as well as a VFR... Castrol Honda WSB colours always looked good :fing02: Or you could probably find a Suzuka 8-Hour colour scheme that presses your buttons (I reckon most of the RC45s that ever raced were raced at Suzuka):

Mate you are almost as far removed from your Scarab VFR800 as it's possible to get with that little number. Is it a TW200? I only know them through a shop in Sydney that customises them but I haven't seen many other 200cc bikes with tyres like that. I take it you're on www.advrider.com? Some great reports there set in your neck of the woods from MetalJockey, of Eastern Cape.

Wow... I've mentioned to a few people lately that I might build a front subrame out of aluminium, but I think for now I'll just :fing02:

Many Honda cars use the same lug nuts, threads, PCD etc. as the VFRs.

Hi Lacy, You've got some great gear there for your front end conversion. I've wondered about the ZX-10R forks for a while now, the fork spacing was what I was trying to determine but I didn't want to just ask on a Kawasaki forum as it might have alerted the natives to a forthcoming drought of forks! 210mm is the same as the R1 so it is a simple conversion - 2mm spacers on each side for axle and rotors. Your Marvic Penta is damn sexy, I don't think the 5mm spacing that it requires is too big a deal - one-piece spacers will help maintain rigidity and you'll of course just need longer rotor bolts. BTW am I the only person who read your initial post properly? I like that idea of doing what Honda singularly failed to do, in updating the VFR regularly to ditch weight and increase performance as the technology advanced. They weren't racing it of course so the return on investment could never match the GSX-R, but had they done it they'd never have lost their 'tech king' crown and bikes like the Sprint and ST4 would never have gotten close to the VFR - let alone beat it in comparisons. On the rear wheel lug nuts - I have a couple of sets of tuner lug nuts (you can just contact ebay sellers to ask them to sell you four and they will do so) but my concern is that they use an 'acorn' seat and the OEM Honda lug nuts use a 'ball' seat. Honda is the only manufacturer to use ball seats AFAIK, and I'm yet to find an aftermarket manufacturer who does ball seats. Acorns seem to work ok for the tuner (rice) crowd and a member or two here have also had no problems, I'm just not 100% sold. I guess it's just a matter of regular checks on tightness I suppose, just as long as there's no sudden catastrophic failure caused by the different seating stresses over time. Speaking of catastrophic failure, the words "Marvic Penta" gave me a bit of a shiver; Robert Dunlop had a hell of a crash on an RC45 at IoM in 1994 or so because his Penta rear wheel failed, and there were quite a few other examples. However I understand that Marvic learned from that lesson and increased the wall thickness of the spokes to a more rational measurement.

Maybe this link will give you some ideas on lightening a bike. Someone posted it on the local forum. http://www.ducati.ms...ead.php?t=76500 How about a "PORN" warning before you post stuff like that????? I'm just off to look for a towel...

Mrs Phantom cleans our tiled floors with white vinegar, it's brilliant for that. This idea for cleaning rust is pretty cool!

The outer rims and the 'faces' of the spokes have a machined finish that does come up pretty shiny after stripping/dipping. The inner part of the rims (where the spokes meet it) are a 'sandcast' finish and have a more matte finish, but still quite nice. The dipping process merely replaces the paint stripper and elbow grease process, if you want bling you still need to get stuck in, but in my experience the actually polishing is far simpler, cleaner and more enjoyable than the stripping. I can't speak personally on durability of nickel plating, but seeing as they use it to line cylinders in engines I think that durability is not going to be an issue. I did mine in 1999, pic from way back then:

Chemical dipping is the most civilised way to strip the wheels, and the finished wheel looks nice enough to just clear-coat and leave as is. Try a high-end car restoration outfit, they usually have access to chemical dipping. As for chrome, not to my taste but nickel plating is very similar in finish and cost, but looks nicer - has a golden hue to it rather than the flat tone of chrome. It's also safer; unless you really know your stuff you can weaken alloy by chroming it.

Yep I think you'd be hard pressed to find an aftermarket coating that's as tough as what Honda uses on its wheels. AFAIK, Everbrite is Nyalic, but I have no idea why they have the two names. Prep/cleanliness is key (like with any paintwork), and if the coating is scratched, you just gently feather the high points of the scratch with steel wool or fine sandpaper, clean properly, and then simply paint more Everbrite/Nyalic over it - it is not only self levelling, but self blending too! :unsure:

Good luck with it... it took me over four solid hours just to get the paint off my rear wheel. But worth it for the way it looks. Once done, the best solution I found for avoiding endless re-polishing was to coat them in Nyalic - it's not cheap but worth every cent. It comes in spraypack or tins for a paint gun, you can actually paint it on with a brush as it's self leveling but I got a spraypack, which was $55 five years ago, but you can't beat it for ease of use, quality and longevity. You can get it from the importers in Sydney - send Jeff an email to find out how to order it. http://www.nyalic.com.au/NYALIC_%28AUSTRALIA%29_PTY_LTD/HOME.html No affiliation, just a very happy customer.

Wow, haven't seen that - looks great. Not to hijack the welding topic, but my own modest interest in these crazy front ends is fueled by a Girvin Vector fork that I picked up at a garage sale for $5 and want to fit to an old school MTB someday, looks like this: I'd never seen these before I found mine, either. My 'working' crazy front end is the Headshok on my Cannondale Super V, I love it... Enjoying Build II, Red, although I still can't believe that Build I is already done, dusted and consigned to the scrapheap! :blink:

Because Honda (or more specifically HRC) went off on its own tack with racing VFRs - you could buy HRC kit stuff at exhorbitant prices, or you could go race another manufacturers bike. Most people went with other manufacturers... so there wasn't much HRC stuff out there in the first place. The homologation specials (RC30 etc.) made this even worse. There's just not much available, unfortunately... you need to take some weight out of the bike instead.

Looks good Matt. If you moved the bodywork any further forward you might have clearance issues when the forks compress? I could see that your bars were sitting very high in relation to the bodywork, looks like it will be a sporting riding position. SP1 bars?

Mate, from what I can tell you are going along brilliantly on this! I haven't seen this work done before, hope it all comes together for you :biggrin:

Try this Seb (frokm one of GAZMANs repeats of this topic :biggrin: ) http://streetfighterspain.es/foro/viewtopic.php?t=93 Different Puig... no relation whatsoever.

Beautiful bike! The CBR600RR tail works really nicely with the 3rd Gen tank, all your detail touches really integrate well together. Well done! To really bring it together and bring it right up to date, I'd consider powdercoating the frame and swingarm black, but if you're on for a new project then you can certainly rest easy knowing you got this one right over the line.

It's not like a GSX-R where you can just buy some stuff out of a catalogue and bolt it on. Aftermarket headers boost top end at the expense of midrange. A slip-on is the most cost effective way to open up the breathing, along with a K&N airfilter, shimming the needles with 0.030" shims (washers) and pulling out the airbox snorkel (which is there to reduce induction noise. Swap the 43T rear sprocket for a 45T. That's about as much as you can do without breaking the bank. It makes it much more rideable, with a flat torque delivery from just off idle through to 10k. Spend any additional funds you have on doing up the suspension, and maybe a set of braided brakelines and EBC 'HH' pads.

If the 1st/2nd Gen is anything like the 3rd/4th Gen, you can lift the cams, spin them laterally 180 degrees, and drop them back in, and the motor will run just fine (as a Twin Twingle) because (3rd/4th Gens) fire on every stroke rather than only on ignition strokes... so if this applies to earlier models, and the head swap is feasible, and the head needs to be spun around 180 degrees... :rolleyes: then the cam timing should be no problem. I don't know if the heads can be swapped - I've never heard of anyone actually doing so - but looking at them I reckon there's a fair chance you could do it. So, lets get to the bottom of this. Who has a 1st/2nd Gen engine in bits?

Great to see the progress MrMatt. Can't wait to see the new threads :biggrin: A mate weighed his TBR left-exit and his stock system, will see if I can dig up the email he sent me.