Thanks for the birthday wishes men, and Happy Birthday to my fellow Pisceans! It's been a great week, my second RC cylinder block arrived, (Thanks Michrobi!) so did my shiny new AC/DC TIG welder that I bought myself for my 50th, and I bought another bike.
Only problem is that the bike was located in Canberra, 425 miles from my place, so I had to organise a hire trailer and borow my son's car to tow it, and be on the road nice and early to get up there and back in the same day, so I woke up at 0430, jumped in the rain box to wake myself up, and hit the road.
After going to collect the trailer and the comedy of errors that ensued when the key to the padlock wouldn't open the lock and the half hour wasted there, I arrived at Ken's place around 1pm. We had a cup of coffee then loaded all the spares into some big plastic crates, and I took this pic of Ken on the bike before loading it in the trailer.
Ken is a fascinating bloke, he's now working as a mechanical engineering lecturer at the Australian Defence Force Academy, (ADFA) but back in the 1970's and 1980's he built race bikes for some very notable riders, and showed me pics of him with Wayne Gardner, Mick Doohan, Wayne Rainey, Kevin Schwantz, and Kenny Roberts, just to name a few. He built his CB750 back in the early 1990's and continued to modify it right up to last year, when he threw it down the road and badly injured himself. If you look closely at the pic of him on the bike, you'll see that his left knee has got more scars than Bad, Bad, Leroy Brown.
Ken rebuilt the F2 engine that now resides in the K2 frame (in place of the 69 K0 engine I've got sitting in my garage) and was able to (then) but a Wiseco 836cc kit specifically for an F2, so unlike most 836cc F2's, it's running much higher compression. Ken wasn't happy with the F2 carbs (or any CB750 carbs, he tried K series carbs as well but hated them) so he found some 32mm CV carbs and made a new rack and linkages etc, to re-space them for a CB750. Check 'em out:
There's lots and lots of other trick mods including big brakes and beautiful CNC triple clamps cut from solid billet, and I'll take more pics tomorrow when I've got it all unloaded. Thebike came down pretty hard, but I don't think the frame is bent, and I've got most of the parts I need to fix it already, apart from the 41mm Yamaha FZR1000 forks, but I'm sure I'll find some. All up I was on the road for close to 16 hours, and boy am I tired! See you tomorrow!
