dan williams

Two words, college students. Essentially pure ethanol. Used for making your own fortified wine, liqueur, ER visit for alcohol poisoning....

Last time I machine washed a liner I pulled a mass of threads and foam pads out of the machine.

Yeah but the residual smell of vinegar or Lysol would drive me crazy. This stuff dries leaving only a residue of water. I’ve been using it for a year or so on the new carbon Jitsie my wife got me and it seems to work the best of anything I’ve tried. Pretty much de-stank my old NZIs too. Supposedly illegal where I live but the local store has it on the shelf so...

Cheaper than those piddly little cans of helmet mousse. Highly flammable! Illegal in many jurisdictions. Extremely effective. Yes I know you can buy cans of denatured alcohol much cheaper but they have acetone and methylated ketones and who knows what else to make them poisonous, well more poisonous, and I’m not sure how those additives affect the helmet materials. edit: turns out acetone is a solvent for polystyrene.

Not quite sure what you’re asking but the way I understand this the white wires are ac feed from the stator lighting coils. The black is “ground” and the two red wires are +12V. The red wires feed the LED headlight (small connector), the fan thermo switch and the CDI. The yellow/brown wires from the map switch go down to the CDI box.

So, you don’t want one? ?

I heard the same reason but it never made sense to me. Once the gear is chased into engagement there is minimal torque to deflect the shift forks. One other thing that was suspect is wear on the drum causing play in the fork tracks. Since installing the uprated bearing/arm in my bike stopped it popping out of gear without changing any internal gearbox components I’m now fairly certain it’s simply a crappy bearing/too light pressure/low cam lobe issue. Fix any one and it improves dramatically. Fix all three and it’s pretty solid so far. Anybody else want to give it a try?

I took a putt on a friend’s 200 last week. Damn that thing is good!

I agree not everybody should get a trophy but everybody should be able to play. Hence some want/need electric starters. Plenty of people who have trouble kicking a bike over at the end of the day are perfectly capable of kicking my ass in the sections. The relative merits are not the issue I was trying to elevate. Merely that I think it can be done better. The same attitudes were on full display when radial tires came out. Same for water cooled engines.

Snowball’s chance in Canoga I’ll start the Beta by hand.

Understand that. My wife had a lovely little ttr125l that she didn’t ride because she hated kickstarting it. I could start it by hand? she replaced it with a CRF150f because it has electric start. It also weights 80lbs more than my Beta. She’s added a KLX140g with electric start and I came home Thursday to find her in the garage with the primary drive side cover off installing a Rekluse! To be expected when you marry another engineer. We both spend more time redesigning than riding.

Still experimenting but the 13mm bearing seems to work well with the stock cam. (As long as the idiot installing it uses loctite on the screws) I have the 14mm bearing in now with the custom cam and it’s really good. I will try the 16mm bearing with the reverse indexer next time I get around to cracking it open. Unfortunately unlike the clutch fix this one requires some parts swapping.

I remember reading about that. Of course the RD400 wasn’t meant to spend a lot of time at low rpm so maybe the effect would be more noticeable on a plonker. I do like the different responses to the post. Your measured engineering response and the inevitable “Just kick it you wuss!” “We don’t need no steeenking electric start.” Are both expected and entertaining. Though your thoughts are a bit more useful.?

Well that’s a bit harsh. I’m pretty sure the trials manufacturers are not rolling in dough and willfully holding back technology just to spite us. I think it more likely their R&D budgets don’t extend to components they can buy on the open market.

Yup and technology has moved on a bit since then? Well magnets are stronger.

Kudos to TRS for thinking outside the box and designing an electric start that drives the ignition side of the crank. My question is why do we need a separate starter motor at all? Current designs use a high speed starter motor geared down to provide starting torque which is engaged and then disengaged becoming dead weight when not in use. With the lighting coils we have an array of coils in a mass of spinning permanent magnets already. If used for a starter motor and then switched to generate power once the engine is started there is no mechanical interface and none of the animal is wasted as the saying goes. The concept of a motor/generator is old. Real old. Starter/generators have been used on aircraft for decades. So is it now time for this to be applied to trials bikes or are we just waiting for the electrics to catch up and not really developing internal combustion any more. I know the margins on trials bikes are pretty thin and most manufacturers have bins full of ignition systems to use up but... For old guys like me that find kicking the beast to be less "fun" than it once was an electric start looks better and better. If it can be done in such a way that the penalty is simply the weight of a LIPo battery and electronics to commutate the motor signal I think it'd sell quite a lot of bikes. The strength of rare earth magnets could make for a very light weight flywheel. Weight could be added to the primary drive side so engine characteristics wouldn't feel significantly different and the twisting force on the crank due to wheel loads would be reduced. Just throwing it out there.

Obsessed? Me? No, why do you ask?

Yeah I talked to a friend Sunday with a new 200 that mentioned his has started jumping out of gear occasionally. Just like mine he said it was great to start with but over time it’s starting to be more prevalent.. I don’t think the custom cam and reverse spacer is necessary. They are just test vehicles for me. Replacing the bearing and machining down the pivot pin to align the bearing with the cam are all that appears to be needed.

Ah the machined spacer to let me flip the indexer bearing arm has arrived. And my wife is in the garage installing a Rekluse in her KLX 140G. It’s good to have an engineer wife who enjoys wrenching. My wench with a wrench?

There is a common issue with the Keihin on big Betas where if you hold the throttle on full for about 20 seconds the carb starves for fuel. I’ve experienced this on my 2008, 2013 and 2018. Usually only notice it on fast fire roads but it does happen. The Keihin doesn’t have a float valve seat. Just a drilled hole in the carb body which is fine for the use the carb was intended, small bore bikes like the KTM 85. Someday I’ll get around to drilling the valve seat bigger To see if that fixes it.

Probably best to ask Ohlins.

Two days with the new cam and 14mm bearing. Awesome! Shifting effort is slightly higher but when the shift is initiated the gearbox snaps into gear with an audible click. Neutral can be found easily with a light tap from second. Almost impossible to find from first. Now to run it for a while to check reliability.

Excellent write-ups on fuel. There is one other factor with ethanol that must be considered and that is its affinity for water. I've noticed that any fuel with ethanol stored for a while where there is exposure to air seems to deposit a waxy buildup. I've seen this in carbs and fuel bottles. My suspicion is this is hydrogenation of the olefins in the compound gasoline component as they steal hydrogen from the water trapped by the ethanol. Any thoughts on this my imaginary friend.

All this talk of restricting tires and making bikes heavier/fatter/older is missing the point. The problem isn't the bikes or rider skill level. The problem is the mindset of the people designing sections. When I was doing section design for my club events years ago I had the usual cast of New England riders plus Geoff Aaron 10 time US champion. I noticed a trend with the other trialsmasters. They'd set up these insane hits to get Geoff to drop points which were so intimidating to anyone else nobody else would ride the champ class. It wouldn't matter because Geoff would eat these hits for breakfast. My club had a different approach. We would have hits doable by the class below (expert) but the approach for the hits would be different for the different classes. Experts could go straight up while Geoff had to turn on rolly rocks in a stream bed or launch from an off camber slippery rock or have almost zero setup space. We'd always get him for points. But the other effect was the class below could see it was doable for them which is a tremendous confidence booster. World trials now isn't a test of skill. It's a circus to see who can stop Bou and Raga while selling the most tee shirts. I believe the effort to monetize trials by making it gladiatorial games hasn't been healthy for the sport. The growth driver for trials has always been the grass roots efforts of the local clubs and riders welcoming new riders and making the sport accessible. I've seen trials grow and contract and grow again and been surprised how the lessons learned are unlearned and relearned. Through it all I've seen one consistent thread. Trials is a weed. After it dies out the seeds spread and take root. Individual riders talk a few friends into getting bikes and find a place to ride. The few friends becomes a club. The club starts holding events drawing in more individual riders who talk a few friends into getting bikes and finding places to ride... So the real question is how does the world trials scene support that growth engine. It certainly doesn't in it's current form.

That was wonderful. Thank you for posting that!