I got the exhaust back on this weekend, having had to modify the mounting slightly to account for the slightly repositioned can. You can see the “bright grey” mounting at the back of this photo.
With that done I can hopefully ignore the exhaust for a while, albeit worrying all the time about whether the cat is just wasting away for some mysterious reason.
Next thing was to sort the oil system. As shown a while ago I was refitting the oil cooler. However, a problem arose in that the new cooler that I bought a while ago to replace the one that sprung a leak turned out to have nadgered connection. It looked as though an elephant had sat on the threaded fluid boss on the top of the cooler. I’ll have to phone Rally Design tomorrow and whinge. Problem is, I got this new one about 6 months ago… In the meantime I took the sandwich plate off again…
I then refilled the oil system. I’d drained it because one problem of the engine running rich is potentially that a lot of fuel ends up in the sump, contaminating the oil. So, Mr Castrol is again richer for yet another purchase of oil by me.
Apart from the oil system I also wanted to modify the cooling system. It now appears that I’m not the only one to have had horrendous problems getting the air locks out of the CBR1000 cooling system. I wanted to try putting a bleed in from near the head to the top of the header tank. I don’t know if this is the right thing to do but it seems to be worth a try. I made up this ally pipe connection which connects to a tee inserted into the top hose using a neat little gadget that just fits in the side of the hose. It remains tobe seen whether it leaks or not.
With the fluids sorted, and the exhaust back on, I went ahead and made sure I’d got oil pressure. (The number of times I’ve taken the plugs out of a Fireblade engine and spun the motor on the starter until I’ve got oil pressure must now be in the hundreds.) Then, with the plugs back in again, I pressed the starter button.
Nothing. Well, the engine went round but nothing else happened. I then remembered that I’d disconnected the fuel pump to make sure that I didn’t pump fuel all over the place so I reconnected it.
Still nothing. I spent ages looking at the car, trying to work out what I’d done wrong before I started the time-honoured starting diagnostic procedure. (You know the one: look for a spark, check that the fuel’s there, etc.) Luckily, before I started all this it dawned on me that as I’d had the pump out I’d had to siphon all the fuel out of the tank. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
With that done, it fired up with alacrity. What’s more, it seemed to rev properly. Not really surprising as presumably the exhaust system is now letting gasses out of the engine as it’s intended to.
So, I could move onto the things that I wanted to do other than just fixing the car. The first was to try fitting an Exhaust Gas Circulation Valve, as seen just above. This is a gadget that adjusts the back pressure into the engine on the bike and is essentially a servo-motor controlled flap in the tail pipe. The ECU has always complained before about the lack of one. I wasn’t worried about this but Andy now thinks that it’s worth a couple of bhp, so I wired it up. What I’d like to do is to create an electronic analogue of the mechanical gubbins but I haven’t worked out how to do that yet. Interestingly, the ECU has always had two fault codes in there. One relates to the EGCV, which has now gone away, and one to the lack of the steering damper that is obviously not present. Although the latter fault code is still thrown up by the ECU it doesn’t cause the engine management light to come on, presumably as it’s not an engine management issue.
With these bits done, and a bit more faffing about over the next week or so, I’ll be able to get the car properly back together so that I can take it on its trip to PDQ.