Festival of cold

The overwhelming feature so far this weekend is the temperature, which is real cold. Last night it was -4 degrees, and today it barely made 3 degrees. We made just one run down the strip today, and we had to sit for over an hour in the pairing lanes waiting for constant snow flurry's to end.
The run was disappointing, in that the bike seemed to head left constantly, but on the good side - the new wheelie bars didn't snap! and we got down the track without breaking anything.

I bought a new/secondhand digital camera a couple of weeks ago, and it can do slow motion video in various settings. We tried the fastest, which was poor quality but good enough to see what was happening off the line. 

All systems are thawing out.

Tomorrow we head off to the pod for the Festival of power, the weather is in charge and will have a big say on how the weekend goes as usual. Santa Pod themselves have released a statement saying to come prepared as conditions aren't great. But today i loaded the van in glorious sunshine, and if it weren't for the icy wind it would've been quite warm.

As normal, you can follow the action thanks to eurodragster.com the event page is HERE with all the links to the live Nitro FM stream, webcam, end of day galleries etc.

We have the laptop and will try and post any events over the weekend.

Imminent Easterness

Less than 2 weeks now till the first event of 2013 - the newly named Festival of Power at Santa Pod.
As usual there's a wide variety of classes entered, and an amazing selection of other entertainment too. It's by far the biggest event that the ACU bikes race at and the best attended spectator wise by miles.

Competition bike has 6 entries, which isn't bad for the first race of the year, and funnybike is looking a bit healthier this year too, with 6 entries also.
The lineup in Comp is made up of familiar faces and in theory at least it could be a good meeting as all are capable of  running within a few tenths of each other and 4 ran pb's in the high 7's towards the end of last season. The entry list then looks like this:

Allan Davies

Jemma Venables

Lizz McCarthy

Me

Phil Leamon

Harold Wolfenden

 The event has sadly been demoted to just a 3 day meeting, with the friday becoming a test day (which costs a LOT extra) so we are not bothering with it and will just run the Sat, Sun & Monday.
There's not been any major changes to the bike over the winter, as it was running pretty good towards the end of last season. Parts have been replaced like the tyre and battery, and bits of the wiring loom have changed. Plus the bodywork was modded to make it comfier and easier to tuck in, (might be worth a mph or two!) and the only totally new thing really are the wheelie bars - which are now 100% finished, painted and polished!

New look

After modifying the seat area of the bodywork, it seemed like it would be a lot of hassle to blend the paint back in to the current scheme, so the decision was make to respray the whole thing. In retrospect it would've been much easier to blend it in, but it's too late now!
Today was spent digging out any cracks, filling and sanding. The weather was really cold and i had to keep nipping inside to regain some feeling in my hands. several hours later and it's still nowhere near done. I nipped back out to get a picture and found it had started snowing! So called it quits at that point.

This is the hot favorite look.

There are a few ideas kicking around where paintwork is concerned, most are similar to how it was before, but the chances are there will not be time or the warmer weather required to spray outside, and it'll be matt black primer again for the first race.
Wheelie bars are complete other than the steel bits need painting. Still not got round to weighing them, it'll be interesting to see how they compare to the old - all ally ones.

Work on the bike ready for the coming season has stepped up another notch. Several much needed parts arrived this week, and today i finally got the replacement hose for the brazing kit i bought, (the first had a dodgy fitting). I used our local hobbyweld supplier for the Oxygen cylinder, as theres no rental cost, just a refundable deposit, and swapped the vans butane cylinder for a propane. So today - after a bit of practicing, i attempted to braze up the steel cross bracing of my new wheelie bars. The result is pretty good, and i realized that brazing really is a nice way to join steel, plus it's pretty easy as well. The downside is cleaning off the flux residue afterwards, it turns to a glass like substance that is rock hard. It's supposed to soften in water so i'll try that next time.

A new Tyre arrived yesterday as well, it's a Mickey Thompson the same as the last one, and i use the car version of the 10" Tyre rather than the bike version, purely because it's supposed to last longer. I did get 2 and a half seasons out of the last one so it seems right. The last one did wear on one side faster than the other, which started to manifest as a handling problem. So I'll rotate this one at the end of the season and try to balance the wear.

The engine is now back in the frame, and a start has been made on wiring modifications, mostly just replacing relays and switches and a few key wires and connectors. The reason for the electrical gremlins we suffered from at the last meeting is still a mystery, hence i'm replacing nearly everything electrical. I've had to source and fit a new lanyard kill switch too, as a change to the rulebook this year has made the MPS type switches non-compliant. I went for a trials bike type switch, which is good quality but requires a lot of force to actually disconnect it.