I've been enjoying myself lately for a number of reasons.....last week I heard a song I hadn't heard for a very long time , in an incongruous place. Joe Walsh's song "Life's been good" rang out at work, I could hear it from my office , I'm a case manager for homeless men, now I'm sure you can see the irony of a bunch of blokes who live on the street singing along to a guy singing about a life of grand excess....I used to love that song when it came out, in 1978. And to be sure life has been good, though I have to admit on a much more modest scale than it has or had to Joe....but there I sat thinking how well the tank had gone this year, how my ankle was better than I'd hoped it would be after the bike crash in 08 and how I'd had a lot of fun playing music lately.
I got back last night from visiting Brett de Stoop up near Sydney so I could get the basics together for an article that we hope to be able to sell to some magazines. Simon Davidson a salt fan and photographer for some of the country's bigger car and bike mags amongst other things had called me right about the time that I'd been thinking how much I'd like to write a story about Brett and wondering if on some slim chance he'd be interested in doing it with me. Brett is a very clever guy who has achieved something great but there is a whole lot more to him than that. Some people just want to take their ride "out there , just to see what it'll do"...Brett is on a grand pursuit to take his know-how and his ability to see what it will do, he is a massive ball of energy and a fierce creative force who will freely admit it frightens the bejesus out of him. He will also openly describe how the death of his brother and a broken relationship created a blizzard that kept him focused on the bike as a way of avoiding the pain around him.Many of the regulars here will envy the ability to devote so much time but it has been a strange compromise between therapy and self harm.
It is simply fun as he says , theatre that he can perform in and he lights up even when describing what he likes about it let alone the process itself. He regularly says "if that (some particular idea)hadn't worked I probably wouldn't have gone on with it( the whole bike)"....but it doesn't take long to workout that very few things he does are stabs in the dark and he has a clinical way of developing things that eschews "hunches" in favour of plotting out parameters and cooly analyzing the effects that singular changes have.Most of the items that are used on the race bike have been dynoed on a single cylinder test motor, pipes compared , ports compared...he loves to describe the stock 50hp Waterbottle motor as a "lawnmower motor". He's very patient when you ask questions in an effort to consolidate what he has told you because it is often overwhelming and he has a great way of listening to you as you struggle to explain what you understand of what he has said......
We got there around lunch time Brett had put the naked bike together so it looked complete but without the internals , Simon began set up his gear I sat next to Brettie in his dyno shed as he explained that he felt too many people got caught up "tinkering" when they should take that extra step to make their own repeatable version so they had "room to move" and could genuinely "think outside the box"............it was as he said when he made the molds for the block that he could really mess with it and eliminate the compromises that he knew the original designers had made....
Bretts motor is way over square and as he said "anyone who knows their two stroke stuff knows that just by increasing the stroke I will get proportional gains, this motor , the thousand, is like a lame 1500, that's what the bore is ideal for.......I've got heaps to do yet"
I got back home close to midnight , with some notes and some voice recordings...and a lot of writing to do....
Moving right along I have finally bought the Torsen diff centre that we will be using in the tank so we can run numerically lower final drives . Shamelessly we are copying Sparky's ideas for his rear end , it's a 7 and a 1/2 inch 10 bolt that came from Arkansas and has just arrived at ground central, AzTex Motorsports in Phoenix.....we're going to marshall parts there before getting them back here via Bonneville... as the Rev says we try to surround ourselves with clever people and ask lots of questions and I don't need to tell anyone here that Bill Smith is way , way up there and we feel privileged that he even returns our emails...let alone helps, thanks Sparky.
This week I'm talking to an engine builder about modding some roller rockers for our motor and sourcing some solid lifters we're also going to get him to fit some bigger valves to the heads....46 weeks to go.
Anyway, besides all that I bought another Fender Telecaster this week, life is good.