So maybe I can build a motor afterall…

I left off last time on the edge of finishing a complete motor rebuild and a complete reworking/rebuilding of the entire bike.  I work incredibly slowly on my own bike, and this was no exception.  I guess it’s always like this, but I encountered any number of setbacks when I did the rebuild-  broken swingarm, stripped bolts, getting taken advantage of by an ex-friend and a machinist, and on and on.  Lot’s of money is what it boiled down to.  Well, after getting through all of that, the day came.  I turned on my camcorder and cranked the bike over.  It fired up and ran.  Nice and cool, no problems.  That was a serious relief having never done a motor rebuild before.  Guess I got everything right.

Not long after, I loaded the bike and took it out to see Johnny Cheese for some dyno testing and tuning.  We ended up making 32 pulls on the dyno and by the end, we had maxed out the dyno at over 500 horsepower.  That was my goal and I can’t explain how happy I was to reach it and not have a catastrophic engine failure.  WOOT!

The Texas Mile rolled around again in October, 2009.  I loaded my baby up and headed for the track.  Things didn’t go straight to hell, but things didn’t go well either.  My first pass, I decided to make a nice easy shakedown run since the bike had any number of changes that I made and they had not been tested as a system on the track.  I didn’t add any additional boost with the boost controller and just ran with 14 psi of spring pressure on the wastegate.  I rolled out very slow and easy and went through 1st and 2nd gear without getting under boost, and then nailed it in 3rd.  The turbo spooled and the bike pulled hard and gently lifted the front wheel for about a second and a half and then there was a loud pop.  I thought the bike had backfired, but it quite pulling hard from there on through the pass.  I rolled back to the pits and let it cool.  I lined up and made another pass and it never got on boost at all.  I took it to the pits and looked it over.  The loud pop had been the rubber hose between my intercooler and the intake plenum popping.  It had a 5 inch tear in it.  I can only assume that it was just about to go after our last dyno pull.  I put my spare on and went out for another pass.  It came on boost again in 3rd and then laid over again.  When I coasted down at the end of the track, the bike was barely running on 1 or 2 cylinders.  I killed the motor and got towed back to my pit.  I found several things.  The throttle bodies had popped out of their boots under pressure, which is why I had no boost.  We checked the compression and it was very low on the first 3 cylinders and normal on the 4th.  I put a new set of plugs in and it fired right up and idled smoothly.  It was decision time.  I decided to put the bike back in the trailer and wait until I could pull the motor and take a look at the top end.  The compression was low for a reason and I need to find out what it is.

I stripped the bike down completely and got it ready to pull the motor out.  I saw some milky stuff in the oil when I drained it, so I know that I likely blew the head gasked.  The oil was black and smelled like fuel.  That tells me that I was getting a lot of blowby for the fuel to get into the oil.  The rings may not have seated and that may explain the low compression and the excessive blow by.  I’ll know something tomorrow afternoon when I get the motor out.  I’m praying for minor problems if any, but I’ll just have to see.  Stay tuned for the post-mortem.

30 psi of boost is 3 too many

Although some may argue, I’m not dead yet.  In fact I’m as alive as ever and making plans for another weekend of racing.  When I left off the last time (waaaaay back then), I was planning to race again in March, 2008.  I did race then and the results were less than steller, but I learned an amazing number of things from the experience.  Let me take a trip back in time and catch you all up on the details.

Go straight, do not turn left

Well there I was, sitting in line to make my first pass after a year and a half of healing, saving, spending, and finally scraping together a bike that I could once again race.  It was unusually hot for October on this weekend.  Temperatures were running in the 90′s and there was no relief from the sun.  I sat at the line waiting and thinking.  The waiting is the easy part, it’s all that thinking that it allows that makes it interesting.  I just did not know what to expect from the bike.  I’d worked on it and done everything that I could think of, but I had not been able to actually take it out and make any test runs.  I was going in blind on my first run after my crash.  Yes, the thinking is what makes it interesting, to say the least.

There’s a new bike in my life

I worked many, many hours over the past 9 months to prepare for last weekend.  I finally lost all sight of my self control (or so my parents might say) and bought another bike.  I had learned alot about building, tuning, and riding turbocharged Hayabusas from my experiences with the last ill-fated bike, The Velvet Hammer.  I wanted to build another from scratch and do it bigger this time out.  I had plenty of time to think about it while I was healing from my prior learning experience and paying off the debts that I had incurred in building it.  It seemed to me that the best way for me to get back into the game would be to buy a bike that was already built and tuned.  Was I ever correct.  I asked around in the racing circles and within 48 hours, I had found a likely candidate.  I bought a bike from a fellow racer in Virginia and had the bike shipped to me, sight unseen, other than a few pictures.  I thought how cool it would be to have a bike already set up, tuned, with all the right parts, and ready to go.  Turnkey. 

Full Circle- Bigger, Better, Faster, Stronger

I guess lots of things in life are cyclical.  What’s cool now will be retro-cool in ten to twenty years.  It seems to me that when somethings do come back around, they never last as long as they did originally.  Not too long ago, there were a lot of people wearing bell bottoms.  The 70’s were back with a vengeance…for a while.  That seems to have faded.  When I crashed my bike and did my stint in the hospital, I felt like I was fading.  I needed the one thing that was my obsession.  The thing that had become my identity.  I needed my adrenaline fix and the dead-fast motorcycle that provided it.   I needed to come full circle.

Putting it together. What have I learned?

  I want to sew this story up and get it behind me.  I hope that this post will do it and I’ll move on into something new.  So what did I learn?  Did I come to any grand realizations after all of this?  Was there some epiphany that will somehow transform my whole life for the better?  Lots of questions and I don’t know if I have all of the answers sitting on the tips of my fingers ready to come out.

The long road back to normal…maybe

  So there I was lying in my bed having had one of the first decent nights’ sleep in over 3 weeks.   In a week or two I would be able to take off the bandages and see my scars.  I thought to myself how nice it would be to sleep on my side again.   I thought about my bike constantly.  Just like when I was thinking about putting a turbo on it, I saw it every time I closed my eyes.  I actually did see turbochargers every night until I finally broke down and got one.   That cured that.   What would I do to cure this hole in my life?  It sounds a little obsessive to have a motorcycle leave a hole in your life almost like a death or a divorce.  The truth is, I was and probably will always be obsessed with motorcycles and going fast.

Day of Days- Under the Knife

  Two weeks of pondering my situation finally lead to the day of my surgery.  I was nervous of course, not knowing what to expect.  My fears about the surgery were unfounded.  I set covered with a pre-warmed blanket around me as I waited.  A quick dose of the right drug into the IV and I was out for the count, long before the operating room.   I woke up somewhere and ended up in a private room.  I don’t remember those details, and that’s fine with me.  I spent three days in that room, watching bad TV and dozing in and out as much as possible.  I clicked the morphine button many, many times.  

Waiting for the Surgery

After the shock of the day, I got home tired and stressed.  My shoulder was aching from having been gone most of the day and not being able to take my pain pills (I didn’t want to be driving while knocked out on pain killers).  I took my pills and sat down to wait for my father to arrive.  It would be one week before my surgeon would be able to schedule me for surgery.  I had never had major surgery before, so that bore heavily on my mind.  What if something goes wrong?  Will it hurt?  How will it feel to have various metal parts attached to my bones permanently?  I had a week to ponder these questions.

The panic attack

  Everything you have read here to this point has been the result of a motorcycle accident.  I think it could be a part of the motorcycle experience for any of us on the worst of days.  More than likely not, but it was very real for me.  My intention is to step through some of the details of my story and possibly offer some insight to those who are going through similar circumstances or to those who might. 

  To continue my story, I left the doctor’s office and headed for the hospital.