Saturday 9 September 2017

The XS Triple Sidecar - post registration mods

... to make the old girl all illegal again. I mean we all know how this goes: We do quite a bunch of mods to pass inspection and then we revert them, to make the bike rideable again.

Step one: Make the engine breath again. So the inserts for actually running the bike are "just" two washers with 20mm holes in them. It's only moderately louder at idle (around the 81db mark that is in the papers), but admittedly from 4000rpm onwards it does get noisier.


Now with TIG HF-pulsing it is possible to create welds with very little burn in, which in this case means, that once I ground the weld flat, there's not much left to hold it in there. The heat affected zone of the weld (aka. bluing) was only 3mm deep, just to give you an idea. Now on a structural weld this would have been terrible, but in this case we have a weld which looks solid, can be ground back quickly and then gives access to the damper insert.


Additionally the welds look very, very pretty, if I may say so. (That's around 15 amps at 200Hz with 80% on time.)


Now the steering damper is definitely quite useful, but I have to do a lot of reversing, when I park my bike in front of my house and it limits the steering angle substantially. So off it went.


And lastly, as I didn't have the right bolt, that reflector on the rear had to go as well, but is stored in the special-for-registration-only-doodads-box.


With a few kilometres under it's wheels it became quite apparent, that the jetting had left some room for improvement at the very least.




Another thing that became quite apparent was electrical consumption. Now the bike would charge fine, but with headlight, position lights and the various gauges, I had to rev her up to 3000 rpm to make her charge. With some proper LED bulbs this was changed to charging at 13.8V at idle, which meant even riding around town, where you're not running that high rpm would get the battery charged sufficiently.




Unfortunately the whole story doesn't end on a high note. The part with the highest electrical consumption was quite in need of a cleanup and left me draining the battery, resulting in a very healthy push of around 2.5 km to the shop, but that's a story for the next time...


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