Project NSR

A bloody age ago (curse of  too many bikes) I swapped the flywheel to advance my ignition. Then Mr money bags went and bought an HRC card... If you want one, don't waste your life and money hanging on for one on eBay. Go to Buyee.com  and you will find plenty for sale on Japan's Yahoo auction site. The website acts as a middle man and for a reasonable lump of cash you get a shiny HRC card, I got the older P-010 dry program card with no key as who wants to open their boot when in race mode? Two things are needed to make this work on your bike: A wire splice - Nice and easy Reprogram the key - Previously impossible but not so anymore! Wire splice In an ideal world this part shouldn't be needed as you bought the race wiring harness with your HRC card.  The idea that a convenient card swap can completely change the way your bike makes power is what attracted me (and many others) to this machine. However the fact that you need to change the entire wiring h...

Water cooling is cool, if you are an engine, but what is uncool is manky old cooling hoses. Enter super cool blue (which is a cool colour) SAMCO cooling hoses! I had ordered a full SAMCO hose kit for the NSR with the HRC conversion front hose from JAP4performance along with some nice, shiny Tyga performance parts. The hoses were to arrive seperately decause the custom hose had to be made special but they proved to be very slow coming with the initial excuse being 'they had already sent one' changing to 'they hadn't made one yet'. This continued for a year before Gavin from Jap4Performance sent me a genuine HRC hose with the standard SAMCO kit as a good will gesture to tide me over till SAMCO pulled their fingers out. Changing hoses isn't rocket science: You just take a hose off and replace it with one of the same shape. If you haven't drained your coolant you might want to do that too. The new hoses don't just look good. The old hoses were sta...

Order I had ordered carbon reeds for the NSR quite a while ago so it was nice to be organised for a change.  So with a little time on my hands I decided to pop the cages out and change these over. I had already had the carbs off previously for cleaning and had only placed them in situe so was no drama removing them. The carb rubbers followed, taking care to release the torque evenly as I have heard horror stories of engines blowing from air leaks caused my bent inlet rubbers. With these off the reed cages are no longer secured to the engine so can be pulled off as well, along with (most of) their paper gasket.  Now I was confronted with this which initially looked pretty horrific. One side shiny and like new as it aught to be and the other brown with a streak of brown and dirt down the inlet. Images of water ingress, corroded bearings and seized bottom end rushed through my mind but then a bit of logic seeped in and I turned the engine till I could see the bearing i...

As the year wound down I had to face facts. I was going to have to put the bikes to bed and start packing for my impending year long trip to the States. Yep 1 year away from tinkering with motorcycles only sweetened by a big helping of freedom and as many beers as I could fit down my neck. Any plans I might have had to buy a bike out there were squashed when I took the 'un like me' decision of buying something sensible instead. So I bought Solar panels for the house. Anyhoo before I left, I did stretch the budget a bit and manage to pick up some rather lovely performance parts, ready for me to come home. The first and most exciting purchase is a set of Ethos design GP pipes. With a stainless system and carbon cans that both exit on the right, they look stunning and should give a nice performance boost over the restrictive stock system. Second hand, these weren't allot cheaper than a new set of Tyga pipes but for the quality and "look at me I have cool old tu...

If you already read  Shiny bits shiny (pt. 1 of 100)  this blog entry won't be full of many twists or turns. Or will there? After the painfully long experience of polishing the left rearset, I finally got round to sorting out the right. Polishing wasn't my only job here though as this side also features the rear brake (as if you didn't know) but on the pluss side there isn't a heel plate, saving my some polishing at least. I had managed to remember to pick up some Autosol this time as well so the polishing process would be allot easier that the usual wet and dry system I had used on the left. I am away from my  main computer and seem to have saved all of the most recent pictures on there. So save this one starting image on the right hand side I have nothing to show for the work I have done. I'll update this in September with all of the images. The starting place is the same as before: Strip down the foot rest hangar, clean it up and work at removing...

One of the coolest bits about the NSR250 MC28 is the smart card PGM IV ignition. One of the least cool bits about the NSR250 MC28 when it comes to tuning is the smart card PGM IV ignition. All you need is an hrc P-030 card and the bike is fully derestricted. With a wire splice you even get your lights back. Unfortunately hrc cards are like hens teeth and even if you did find one, the speedo becomes one big temp gauge so making the bike even less popular with the law on the road. Clearly the thing to do here is to bin the PGM IV unit and buy a programmable ignition unit like the one offered by  Zealtronic . Plug it in, book some dyno time and happy days your bike isn't only derestricted, it now has an optimized ignition curve with exup valve opening times to match! But that does away with the smart card and that was one of the coolest things about the MC28 wasn't it? The HRC card might be an idea for the future but for now there are a few things I can do. First off w...

 One really big giveaway that your bike is getting a bit old is when the forks start to get a bit flaky. You look at them thinking how naff they look but at the same time knowing how long and much of a pain in the ass it is going to be to restore them. After all its not going to cause a break down is it? Well I didn't buy the tarts handbag NSR for it to have furry forks so its time to get at them fork stanchions. This wasn't going to work well without being able to get the front end off of the ground and without any paddock stands to hand this wasn't going to be straight forward. I stuck some axle stands under the pegs, getting the back end up and leveling the bike off then  stuck a well padded hydraulic jack under the engine and lifted the front up. With her front wheel off the ground I removed the mudguard, brake calipers then the wheel to give me maximum access to the forks. Whilst I was there I checked the headrace bearing play and was pleased to find them notch fr...

I have already mentioned early on in the break down process that the boot/ tool box lid catch was an issue. Well in the seance that it wasn't there that is. I made a quick temporary fix using tie wraps that worked perfectly well but for obvious reasons I wanted something a little better. Still with no original part available I opted to fabricate something out of some old bits of aluminium that I found lying about. It didn't need to be a work of art as it's all a bit out of sight but it needed to be functional. One of the scraps I had was an L bracket with two holes along one edge and a slotted hole in one corner of the other edge. The other piece was a straight piece with a long angle cut out of one corner, it was also base coated green unlike its plain ally, L shaped buddy. Both pieces had rounded corners and the L bracket had two sprung anchor nuts with it that would prove to be useful. The L bracket just so happened to have its two holes drilled exactly where the ...

When I looked down into the airbox and saw that thin coating of grime along the intake trumpets I knew cleaning the carbs was a good plan. I had already whilled the airbox off and cleaned all of that gunge off with degreaser leaving me a better view of the carbs themselves. With the trottle held open you could see browny gold wax deposits on the needles that could only mean bad things through the rest of the carb. Mind you the bike ran fairly well so on the other hand it couldn't be that bad could it? NSR World  have a great walk through on breaking down the carb on the MC18-21 bikes. Althought eh cars on the MC28 are different they are pretty similar so this was a good reference to help if I got stuck later on when trying to put this all together. So with the confidence inspired by a few reference photographs and the guidance from the website above, I cracked on with removing all the throttle cables, choke cable and various hoses. Two cross head screws held the clamps do...