Nearly there...
Hi all
Haven't updated for a while, unfortunately work has been getting in the way of progress... again! Anyhow, I've been busy on the bike recently and she's almost there. In fact I went for my first spin around the block today. Nice.
The wiring took bloody ages.... I've been working on my cars and bikes for 25+ years but I've always steered away from wiring, so it's a bit of a black art for me. I basically stripped apart a loom from an ST4 and got to work with a soldering iron, some of it had to be shortened and other parts had to be lengthened to get everything where I wanted it.
I've mounted the 16M ECU in the nose (where the P8 would be on a corse bike) on a mounting plate made from a sheet of carbon. On the back of the plate I've mounted all the relays and the fuse box. I can get at the fuses by removing the dash if I need to. The EPROM has the map for an ST4 with open pipes and airbox.
I've mounted a rocker switch on the dash which is both a start switch and a kill switch; to the right is 'kill', middle is 'on' and left is 'start'. The 'start' position in on a spring so it returns to 'on' once the bike is started. This all took some figuring out because the original setup has two separate switches, one for kill and one for start. Normally the kill switch would dump the circuit when it is operated whereas the rocker switch makes a circuit when it is operated. To make this work I used a relay in the 'normally closed' position in the 'kill' circuit so that when the kill switch is operated it makes a circuit on one side of the relay, which dumps the circuit on the other side - this is the actual kill circuit.
The button on the left clip-on is as close as I could find to a real corse kill switch as fitted to the early bikes like the Roche replicas. It came with a 'Map Select' sticker and I've left it on because I think it looks kinda cool. It came as an on/off switch (as you would expect for a map select button!) so I stripped it apart and took out the 'latch' so it's now perfect for it's real use - it's now the horn button!
The battery tray is a reproduction of the early corse aluminium ones, I've no idea who made it. I had to make a bracket (from a bit more sheet carbon) to pick up the existing battery tray mounting point; the road frame has the mounting point above the frame tube whereas the corse frames had it underneath because the corse trays were that much smaller. I made another bracket from a bit of alloy angle to mount the main fuse and starter solenoid on the side, and yet another to mount the regulator underneath. The battery is a sealed Unibat designed for a 999, mounted on it's side. The battery strap is a 9" one and is a bit too long so I've ordered an 8" one that should hold the battery nice and tight.
I've wrapped all the wiring in self-amalgamating tape. I've got to be honest that I don't like the shiny finish but it was the best thing for the job; I couldn't use rubber sleeving because I was modifying an existing loom with the connectors still in place so there was no way I could slide sleeving on.
With hind-sight it would have been a lot quicker and easier to make a loom from scratch. I avoided this because I would have had to buy a spool of wire in each colour, plus all the connectors, plus a crimping tool... But next time that's what I'll do. And next time could be quite soon because I'm planning to build a 955 for the bike at some point, I have just about everything I need including a P8. Having said all that it's been a great exercise for me to do, I'm now much more confident when trying to diagnose electrical faults. When you realise how it all works it's amazing what you can do with nothing more that a test-light and a wiring diagram!
Other stuff: I've used Pipercross sock air filters, the front brake and clutch master cylinders are Aprilia, the hoses are Goodridge, I had to make a new 'pushrod' for the rear brake master cylinder because the one from the original bike was too short to work with the corse rearsets. Carbon endplates on the swingarm, tacho from the ST4 and temperature gauge from the 851 - I'd like to change the colour of the tacho to white at some point.
Another major addition is the spaghetti exhaust I managed to acquire, looks and sounds awesome!
That's about it for now, there's a few small jobs left to do then it's time to put her clothes on!
Darren
