Off-Topic, Off-Center, and Possibly Out of my Mind -Turbo Bike build

[Rettax3]

I've been into the motorcycling scene as deeply and as long as I've been into cars. I just haven't done as much with modifying them as I have the four-wheeled friends. But after my latest motorcycle project, a liter-class Honda from the mid '80s that I recently purchased and built over the last year, I just wanted something that I could be a little less reverent with. Something that didn't warrant so much of a classic-bike 'restoration' as I could lean towards a 'resto-mod' with, and just have fun building.

While looking for hard-bag options I could 'adapt' to my Suzuki 1100 Katana (older beast, I have a thread posted here about it that hasn't been updated for a few years, but it has had some minor upgrades and is still a great runner now easily capable of exceeding 100 MPH in first gear ) in case I actually find time to tour again, I ran across a Yamaha Venture 1300 full-dress touring bike that needed more work than it was economically viable to give it... A proverbial money-pit, out-dated and over-weight, complete with tape-deck and trailer-hitch, and luggage big enough to stuff a spare pair of helmets, a wedding-gown, and a three-piece polyester suit into, and still leave room for three trained monkeys, a complete Duran-Duran album collection on cassette, and a picnic-basket... Well, shoot son, sign me up! (but keep the monkeys!)

So, here it is... A decades-old hard-iron and aluminum chunk sitting beneath heaps of antiquated electronic gizmos interconnected with yards and yards of aged wire, all encircled with as much plastic and plated-chrome as Japan could coat a two-wheeled frame with.

While not my actual Venture, this is a beautiful example of what mine once looked like...

But at the heart of it, beating with 1300cc's (that is 1.3-liters, or roughly 79 c.i.d.) is a ~100 HP quad-cammed 16-valve V-Four that churned out enough torque to move the 780-pound luxury behemoth two-up with a week's worth of luggage up an onramp into dense urban traffic without stressing the engine or causing a twelve-car pileup. The earlier version of this engine, which was 'only' a 1200cc powerplant was also shared with the well-known '80s-era muscle-bike and wheelie-addicted V-Max. While the 'Max had slightly superior cams and valve-sizes, the biggest difference was the lighter-weight of the V-Max and Yamaha's use of "V-Boost", which was simply a set of valve-controlled intake cross-over tubes that let each cylinder pull air through two carburetors at a time, instead of just one. Personally, I felt it was time to just blast the 1300 V-4 with forced-induction and simplify the process...

Still in mock-up condition, the turbo and exhaust-system are getting 'sorted-out' here. The frame will need some minor rust treatment, the wiring-harness will be gone through, and the basic mechanical systems will be inspected and overhauled as needed, and that may be the easy part of this...

I've been highly inspired by high-end bike-builds like this one:

This is a vintage Honda GL1000 Gold Wing with a Flat-4 engine turned into a Cafe`Racer-style bike. I had to scrap an old 'Wing just like this used to be last year, but this shows what old bikes are capable of becoming.

I do NOT expect to achieve results anywhere near to this level of quality, but I am more interested in the style and the process of the build itself than I am the final performance output or cosmetic detail of this particular machine. To be bluntly honest, I don't think a bike of this age and technology-level with the steering geometry, suspension, and tire-size it can run will ever be up to running with some of the bikes I already have on the street, let alone the modern bikes on the market today. I can put things together and get them to work pretty well, without investing in a lot of money to do it too, but there are certain skills I have yet to master, or even get good at. But I really don't need to blur the world more than I already can, so if I get some decent pull from this bike and get to hear the turbo spooling between shifts and get the BOV to trumpet the potential this could have with real money sunk into it, and still like the way it looks -odd and goofy as it will likely be- I'll probably be happy enough with it for what it is. When someone scoffs at the aesthetic quality of my TIG-welds on the Stainless headers or the paint-quality and sheetmetal fabrication underneath it , I will just smile and ask them what THEY built that day... So far, I have upgraded the ignition system to COP (Coil On Plug), started building a (mostly) stainless steel exhaust system, fabricated a two-into-four intake manifold system to use a simplified blow-through 2-barrel carburetor setup, and done some basic maintenance-work on the engine to get it ready to actually run. I have a mostly complete V-Max 1200 engine I can assemble if this one is bad, but I have already cranked it over and it sounds mechanically healthy, so worst case I will probably pull this 1300 and rebuild it if I have to.

As with most of my build projects, I am focusing on keeping the price low (free bike, I already had the carb, turbo, intercooler, AFPR, fairing, seat, etc, so brake system overhaul and tires will be where my money is at with this I hope), and doing most or all of the work myself. Again, as with most of my build projects, I will be using this as a practical learning experience -of all the Turbo-Charged and Super-Charged engines I've built over the years, this will be my first blow-through forced-induction carburetor I've used for instance (as opposed to draw-through carburation or EFI), as well as my first Cafe` Racer bike build- and hope to learn as much from mistakes I make as by ones I avoid. I am enjoying planning and researching the details of this project as much as the actual work I am putting into it. Hopefully, there will be more to come on this project in the next few months, and I'll try to update every so often when I have time. Cheers!

[woody90gtz]

Keep building skills and experience. Weird stuff is cool.

[Rettax3]

Keep building skills and experience. Weird stuff is cool.

If I'm not learning something, I'm wasting my day. If I'm not applying what I've learned, I'm wasting myself.

Just got a rotary-table (precision machining fixture -weighs a little over 60 pounds) to use with my metal-shaper (old-school linear carving machine -weighs maybe 170 pounds), so once I build a mounting-table/rail for it to use with the shaper (strong enough and sturdy enough to hold the machining equipment without deflecting during work), I will be ale to cut internal splines with a VERY high degree of accuracy. This will let me fabricate mounting-brackets (billet) from aluminum or steel for the spline-end handlebars and mounts Yamaha used on the Venture, so I will have handlebar adjustment in two planes, allowing for a high degree of customization and adjustment in riding position.

These two pictures are of Mk1 Ventures, but the bars are the same as my Mk2. The bars can be adjusted for height/pitch at the [red] pivots (splined) and rotated forward or backwards at the [green] pivot-points (splined) for a high degree of adjustability. I will basically be removing the aluminum stand-offs and replacing them with billet blocks to lower the bars for the Cafe`-Racer styling and more aggressive riding position.

My Honda VF1000 came from the factory with a single-plane handlebar adjustment, but it was pretty useless as only one or two positions were remotely comfortable. I've raised the bars on that bike a few inches (and lowered the front-end at the same time, which also increased the steering-rake angle, making an already responsive race-bred bike even more responsive). While I am lowering the Yamaha's handlebars SEVERAL inches, I will probably also lower the front of this bike as well.

The Venture foot-pegs were also adjustable, and while I am relocating them much higher and farther back, I will re-use the pegs and mounts, and retain the adjustability. I'm pretty sure there won't be ANY passenger accommodations on this particular bike, but that is fine, I have other bikes that I can ride two-up on.

I hope I get more future use out of this table, I could have bought SEVERAL pairs of aftermarket clip-on bars for the price I paid for it. When I did the GTU's six-speed swap about ten years ago, I had to shorten one of the drive-axle half-shafts, and didn't have the tooling I do now. I had to recut about one inch of splines by hand, **with a Dremel tool** . Worked out great, but man this would have been so much nicer!

[woody90gtz]

Well, tools are the other thing that need to grow as your skills do. haha