FJ1346 from ashes to... Well, we'll see...

[movenon]

Mike, you are going to be the first to wear out a set of engine guards   .  Glad you were not hurt.  You had such good luck with that zip tie that I installed one also.  Cheap mod.............
George

[Capn Ron]

Yeah, when I went down, I wished I had a goPro mounted up to see exactly what went wrong.  I have a folder from years ago that has twenty or so videos of motorcycle crashes.  I've watched them over and over to try and pick out the "what went wrong" moment and learn from it.

In my violation of rule #1 last summer, I never saw the strip of sand in the center of my lane...Just carving a corner at a reasonable speed and BAM...bike washed out from under me!  Never even had an opportunity to panic.  It took my brain a full 4 seconds after the bike stopped sliding to register that I wasn't still riding.  I just couldn't imagine why I was on the ground!  Only looking at the road surface afterwards revealed the reason.

Two days ago I was driving my car up Topanga Canyon on the way to the Marina...a motorcycle coming in the opposite direction came into a corner a bit hot.  As I was watching him, his rear tire lost grip and swung out about a foot!!!  He just stayed in it and the bike came back in line.  He may have *slightly* let off the throttle to get the rear tire to grip again...he never changed his riding stance and it was so smooth that I thought he might have planned it!  Damn, I was impressed!

Glad you're okay!

Cap'n Ron. . .

[FJ_Hooligan]

I was convinced that I was going to blow the turn and go over the edge at that moment. So I grabbed a lot of front brake. This is the third time that I have locked up the front wheel in a panic situation.

Just curious about your front brake setup.  Stock?  Blue dots?  14mm master?

I see you've upgraded the rear wheel and can only assume the front brakes are also "upgraded."  One thing that concerns me in a "panic" situation is "one-finger" braking power.  It's one thing to have that kind of power in controlled conditions on a racetrack.  But when your brain is screaming at you to HIT THE BRAKES!!! all that "modulation and feel" don't mean squat when you're picking yourself up off the pavement.

Not saying that brakes caused your accident, but just throwing some thoughts out there for others to consider.

[simi_ed]

I think the Hooligan may be onto something.  As the owner of a 'fully upgraded' front brake system (14mm MC. Blue dots, 3.5" front wheel) I think it is incumbent on me to be fully conversant with operating at 'the limit' of braking.  If you're not, you may do what apparently happened to Mike and overreact & lock the front wheel.  Having crashed from this 1x and nearly crashed several more times, I can tell you that if you don't know where that limit is, you find it as you blow past, usually tumbling past it!  

The "Safety Guy" in Rider mag, and plenty of others always advise us to (repeat after me) Practice, Practice, Practice! Do it safely, do it often.  The result is no worn out Renntec bars. (Sorry Mike, I had to)

[Capn Ron]

Just curious about your front brake setup.  Stock?  Blue dots?  14mm master?

I see you've upgraded the rear wheel and can only assume the front brakes are also "upgraded."  One thing that concerns me in a "panic" situation is "one-finger" braking power.  It's one thing to have that kind of power in controlled conditions on a racetrack.  But when your brain is screaming at you to HIT THE BRAKES!!! all that "modulation and feel" don't mean squat when you're picking yourself up off the pavement.

Not saying that brakes caused your accident, but just throwing some thoughts out there for others to consider.

Not sure about the master cylinder, but you can see in the video that Mike has the 4-pot factory calipers.

Cap'n Ron. . .

[skymasteres]

Mike, you are going to be the first to wear out a set of engine guards   .  Glad you were not hurt.  You had such good luck with that zip tie that I installed one also.  Cheap mod.............
George

Oh boy. That's actually not far from the truth. These things are taking a beating.

Two days ago I was driving my car up Topanga Canyon on the way to the Marina...a motorcycle coming in the opposite direction came into a corner a bit hot.  As I was watching him, his rear tire lost grip and swung out about a foot!!!  He just stayed in it and the bike came back in line.  He may have *slightly* let off the throttle to get the rear tire to grip again...he never changed his riding stance and it was so smooth that I thought he might have planned it!  Damn, I was impressed!

Glad you're okay!

Cap'n Ron. . .

Thanks Capn, sounds like that guy did exactly the right thing. (Although I'm guessing the right thing was doing nothing)

[skymasteres]

Hooligan, I have bone stock brakes. With all of the other changes I have made to the bike I have still yet to install the gold dots that I have waiting in the wings. But I'm going to VERY soon.  Actually that's not quite true. I have braided stainless steel lines out front.  And yes, when that adrenalin spikes and turns you into "He-Man", it's fairly easy to lock up the front wheel.  And yeah, it wasn't the bike's fault just the idiot riding it.

Ed, I'll let you know when I get those other "upgrades" done. As it stands now I have been fully exploring the limits of the stock brakes to try and make sure that I have access to that power when I need it. As long as I'm still making decisions and not panicking I'm often surprised just how much stopping power this machine has. And yeah, if I weren't always pushing it so hard, I wouldn't have so many accidents.

[skymasteres]

Okay, so the obsession continues. It kind of strikes me that I really haven't been getting into the nuts and bolts of what it is that drives some of the changes that I've been making here, or at least not fully characterizing them.  Of course there is an awful lot of the stuff that is just run of the mill repair work of a bike ridden often and hard.

It's amazing to me how much punishment one of these fairings can take and still be serviceable. When I went down on the right side it really hammered it.

Here's just how badly the right scoop was broken up.




Part of the scoop on the inside broke out.



It was cracked all over as well.



Of course this is where having the tools to plastic weld come in handy.



Not quite good as new, but pretty close.



Of course, AFTER I added that piece of scrap plastic I found the missing piece. But I digress. There is also the issue of finding damage everywhere that reminds you just how hard you went down. Like this bracket on the frame that got all bent up.



Or this glare shield bracket that was snapped off.





The frame bracket just required a little messing round with a heavy flat head and hammer to fix. But it was really woppered.





And here's a little video of the fairing repair process.

Too much work to bother making it look nice....



I have also been trying to solve my turbulence issue coming off of my windscreen. After a few tries I finally licked the problem. (Although I'm still fooling around with optimizing my solution)

The first step was to cut a slot near the base of the windscreen to reduce the pressure behind the screen.



This changed the region of the "still" air behind the windscreen slightly, but I think I would have needed to make the slot bigger and install some ducting behind it to direct the airflow along the backside of the windscreen.

The next change was to trim the screen down a little. I just masked off about two inches of the screen and took a dremel with a carbide cutter and removed it.



This had a much more pronounced change and got me most of the way there. After playing around with it a little I decided that I needed to get rid of the last of the "kick up" from the stock screen.  It's actually really neat seeing the little differences in airflow that these changes make. Another thing that is important to factor in is your normal highway cruising speed. At higher speeds you need more windscreen to move the "clean air" region up on your chest.



That last cut was made to eliminate the kick up in the middle to lower the "clean air" region so that my helmet was in it while retaining the calm spots around my shoulders. I am REALLY happy with the result. I can now carry on a conversation without having to slow down on the highway when there is a crosswind. (About the worst scenario wind noise wise)

This is showing how much material that was removed to home in on the perfect windscreen for me.



It's not easy to cut into a $100 windscreen. But when you've already buggered the thing up, and you know you can modify a $20 CBR windscreen to fit if needed... Yeah, it gets a little easier...

THE FUEL GAUGE HAS BEEN CONQUERED! Okay, I definitely used the nuclear option on fixing this thing. But it's rock solid and not moving anymore.  Of course I did a lot of messing around with the cluster while I was going after it...

I'm telling you, it was beyond annoying having the needle bouncing all over the place. My initial solution was to take a needle, heat it till it was red hot, and press it into the face of the gauge. Then I just trimmed the end so it wasn't hanging out there.



The next nagging issue was the fact that I had a crack in the gauge face that was allowing light to show through.  The solution was some liquid electrical tape painted over the crack. Of course, sometimes my own capacity for being a moron amazes me. I looked at the back of this gauge and determined that it was a different gauge and that it wasn't one of the ones that you could put more damping fluid in to solve the bouncing issue. So I moved on to the next step of my cluster improvement.



This bare cluster doesn't reflect much of the light that my LED's are emitting. It was making the cluster really dark at night and I wanted it brighter.



I figured that the solution was some aluminum duct repair tape added to create a reflector.



I figured that would do it so I put it all back together. Aaaaaand... The issue wasn't fixed. The cluster was still dim and the gauge STILL bounced.  Back to the drawing board...  After talking to Mark "FJ Monkey" I found out that my gauge was indeed the type that could go dry and that I could have to go in again to fix it.  So, time to break out the big guns...



It's AMAZING what a useful tool the internet can be when you start really digging. And amazon makes it child's play to get things that used to be impractical to obtain. Things like a syringe and 20 gauge blunt needle.  I also ordred some 10,000CST silicon differential fluid to use as my damping agent. Truth be told, if the tachometer used a damping fluid you would NOT want to use this in it. (It's about equivalent to a 90wt oil) But for something like a fuel gauge where it's basically impossible to use fuel quickly enough to make the gauge response time an issue it's perfect.

After GENTLY pushing aside the gauge windings I used a number 60 drill bit to hand drill into the gauge housing at the 10:30 position.  



There was a comment about someone finding something hard just under the plastic housing of the gauge. This hard object is actually the permanent magnet that the needle is attached too. The gauge works my putting a current through those windings, which creates a magnetic field. By changing the voltage the strength of the field changes and its influence on the magnet is increased or decreased.

Of course this stuff is so thick that it literally took ten minutes to push it through the 20ga needle into the gauge housing.  After it was installed I used some high temp hot glue to seal the hole.

And if all the fuel gauge stuff wasn't enough, I added a 25v 2200uF capacitor between the signal wire and ground to create an R/C damper with a long time constant. So now the fuel gauge is completely rock solid.  



I still wasn't satisfied with my cluster lighting, and after thinking that I had burned out a LED bulb, I ordered some more. Turns out that the one I thought I burned out I had actually just reversed the polarity on it. (Yes, they are sensitive to that, unlike the stock incandescent bulbs.) So, I figured why waste them. The sucker was still too dim so I took some 22ga wire, bent it over the legs of the bulbs that had sockets and soldered the other two ends to another bulb. After about fifteen minutes I had doubled the number of bulbs in the cluster.



Since I already had the hot glue gun out I just stuck them in place that way.  I figure they don't draw enough current or produce enough heat to really be an issue there.   I also used a 12v power supple to bench test the cluster before installing it again. (Learned my lesson the hard way the last time)



Here's a stupid question, does anyone know what this thing is? It kind of looks like a bulb to light up the trip meter numbers, but it doesn't light up.



Oh, and here's another one for you. The tachometer on these FJ's can be calibrated. Mark and I are both running the same gearing and tires, but our tachometers are mismatched by about 500RPM. I hooked up an external tack and found mine was reading about 380RPM high.  There's a  trim pot on the back of the tach that you can adjust to change the displayed RPM.  Unfortunately I turned it to the left which had the opposite effect and further raised the displayed RPM. I'll fix it when I go back into it... (But just FYI, Left raises displayed RPM, right lowers it.)



But on a side note, SUCCESS! I finally have the cluster lit the way I want it and I think it looks great.

[skymasteres]

Well shoot. Got the gaude picture doubled. Here's the back side which should have been the second pic.

[Arnie]

You asked, "Here's a stupid question, does anyone know what this thing is? It kind of looks like a bulb to light up the trip meter numbers, but it doesn't light up."

The part in question is a "reed switch".  It is used to count how far you've travelled so that the control unit will turn off  the turn indicators, as long as you've also met the "time" spec.

[Capn Ron]

Y'know Mike...I get a LOT accomplished...rebuilding various vehicles, repairing broken things on the rock crawler, maintaining a sailboat, working on things around the house, fabricating parts out of all sorts of materials, a bit of welding...But, I have to say that when I read one of your posts on what you've torn apart and fiddled with on the FJ, I feel downright lazy.  Thanks for that.   

Cap'n Ron. . .

[simi_ed]

Mike, that was a GREAT POST!  What a fountain of info you are.   

[ribbert]

I was convinced that I was going to blow the turn and go over the edge at that moment. So I grabbed a lot of front brake. This is the third time that I have locked up the front wheel in a panic situation.

Just curious about your front brake setup.  Stock?  Blue dots?  14mm master?

I see you've upgraded the rear wheel and can only assume the front brakes are also "upgraded."  One thing that concerns me in a "panic" situation is "one-finger" braking power.  It's one thing to have that kind of power in controlled conditions on a racetrack.  But when your brain is screaming at you to HIT THE BRAKES!!! all that "modulation and feel" don't mean squat when you're picking yourself up off the pavement.

Not saying that brakes caused your accident, but just throwing some thoughts out there for others to consider.

Firstly, brakes did cause the accident, he locked the front wheel up on a near vertical bike and it washed out from under him. The fact the forks fully compressed under brakes also suggests the tyre had tons of grip, that is, no sand.

Hooligan, I disagree, suggesting less sensitive, efficient brakes on the road makes about as much sense as limiting the throttle for road use so you can't go too fast or accelerate too quickly.
It is that very sensitivity that STOPS you locking the front wheel because it gives you feel.
Applying just the right amount of brake should be a reflex reaction in a panic stop. I can't even imagine being that unfamiliar with brakes, even on a strange bike.

"When your brain is screaming at you to HIT THE BRAKES" it should also tell you just how hard to hit them on pretty much any surface. Getting 100% max braking under any conditions may be an unrealistic expectation but if you are familiar with your bike you should be able to get pretty damn close.

Dumbing down the bike with brakes that won't lock with a panicky grab is not the answer. Practice to the point of that grab (it's actually not a grab but 2 stages) being somewhere near max braking for the conditions being automatic is the answer.

I know Pat practices this regularly, as do I, and no doubt many others. There are other things that are worthwhile practicing as well, even though we hope to never need them, so that in an emergency or panic the right input will be a reflex reaction.

If you (generally speaking) can't manage your front brakes, and it would appear from youtube that many can't, buy a later model bike with ABS before you kill yourself.

Or, learn to use the ones you've got.

As Simi Ed says, practice, practice, practice!

Noel

[rktmanfj]

This changed the region of the "still" air behind the windscreen slightly, but I think I would have needed to make the slot bigger and install some ducting behind it to direct the airflow along the backside of the windscreen.

Which way did it move the air pocket?  

I've got a Targa +2 screen on my '89 that I've considered slotting and trimming in just that way for a long time now.

[ribbert]

This changed the region of the "still" air behind the windscreen slightly, but I think I would have needed to make the slot bigger and install some ducting behind it to direct the airflow along the backside of the windscreen.

Which way did it move the air pocket?  

I've got a Targa +2 screen on my '89 that I've considered slotting and trimming in just that way for a long time now.

I've given thought to the same idea too but with something in front (standing off the screen a bit) of the slot to deflect the direct air flow through it. The BMW screens that work well seem to do so because (I think) they are not sealed at the bottom allowing air in to equalize the pressure behind it.
Like not a lib, I have thought much about this but never broken out the tools.

Mike, keep us informed of your progress and findings, this is an interesting project.

Noel