Happy New Year

Hi

Well as the title say, Happy New Year to you all and hope you all had a good festive season.

Mine wasn't all turkey and mince pies, although there was a fair amount of that as well, but as well as that there was a fair amount of work done on the Supertwin.

My hand luggage when I checked in at Gatwick looked more like a bag of bits from a breakers yard.

Luckily I had the sense to get to Gatwick early as knew that I would have to unpack at security. Sure enough I did.

The look of the security staffs face, was a picture as I kept pulling various bits of metal from my bag instead of clothes and presents which they seemed to be dealing with from other passengers.

Of all the bits I took only two spanners were confiscated. Being between 8 and 10mm I didn't think they'd be a problem as I could hardly unbolt the wings with them. Still was funny as they let me take two hacksaw blades on.

When I got to the bike the first job was to remove the excess wires from the loom.

As there were still wires for lights, horn radiator fan and various other road bike electrics which I didn't need, I set about removing them.

This is a real game of patience as you have to trace each wire and make sure if you remove it, it's not going to effect the actual running of the bike.

On top of that I wanted to remove the ignition key and run the electrics through the kill switch.

It may seem a waste of time doing all this but if you get a problem with the electrics you don't want to have wires you don't need getting in the way, and removing the ignition switch saves a fair amount of weight as well.

With this done I then set about cleaning the bike.

It took two litres of Gunk to get rid of all the oil that seemed to coat everything.

A chap on the SV owners forum said he thought the oil cooler was leaking from the pictures I posted last time.

I now think this may have been the case, especially as the cooler appears to be a second hand one. So hopefully the oil was from when that went bang and is now sorted, only time will tell.

I have to thank my helper, Joshua, for the grand job he did helping me clean the bike.

I also replaced a lot of old bolts on the bike and generally made it easier to work on.

Naturally I bought back another load of bits to work on. Luckily this time the person who x rayed my bag realised they were bike bits before I emptied the bag from what they had seen on the screen.

When I got home the postman had delivered entry forms for Cookstown and Tandragee so feels like the season is on its way. This is a great feeling apart from the fact that my bike is still in bits, but should be ready for the season, fingers crossed.

Sorry there are no pictures this time but most of the jobs were just little bits and the bike doesn't look that much different from the last time. Hopefully next time there will be some noticeable changes so will take some then.

So until next time I'll be in the garage, all the best for the New Year and speak soon

Cheers
Stuart