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pegscraper

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Everything posted by pegscraper

  1. pegscraper
    Yes? No? Well, at this point I don't really know. First off, the distance between the upper left bolt and the upper right bolt doesn't change, but I think I know what you're trying to say. That is what I might call, for lack of a better term, absolute horizontal distance. So you may be right then. I don't know. This has gotten to the point where I don't need to try to figure it out anymore. What's left that I don't understand I don't really need to understand, because it won't do anything practical for me anyway. I would just be playing with my mental blocks. I figured out how to raise the rear of the bike like I wanted, and IMO it rides pretty nice whatever the spring rate does. I just have too much else that I'm trying to do with my time and my brain cells. Like I said earlier, I think they consulted with Rube Goldberg extensively when they designed this mess. I received my Avon tires yesterday, and got them mounted and balanced today. But this evening it is raining here, so I will wait until tomorrow to put the bike back together and ride it. I'm anxious to try this brand out, and I'm just plain anxious for new tires. My old ones were in really bad shape. The thing I don't like about raising the forks up in the trees to further straighten up the rake angle is that it lowers the front and lessens my ground clearance for the floorboards. I already don't have enough of that as it is. I may try it at some point to see what happens handling-wise, but I don't see that lasting because of the ground clearance issue.
  2. pegscraper
    Here's a link to the article I wrote about it. It's here in the 2nd gen technical library. A cam and valve spring swap is recommended too. I used V-Max cams myself. But the Venture intake cam would suffice. Royal Star exhaust cams are the same as the Venture cams. The clutch is fine. It's the same one as in the Ventures and V-Maxes. It can be beefed up if you want, but I haven't done it. Do this and I'll guarantee you will never see your buddy's taillights again. You'll think you bought a whole new bike. http://www.venturerider.org/carbswap/ Last but not least, we have rules around here, fella. Ya gotta post pictures of your bike. Let's see some of your buddy's bike too. You're from Knoxville, and that must be TN. We have a few members down there. I have a brother who lives right near Johnson City, so I get down there on the bike once in a while. Last year we went down over Labor Day weekend and hit the Dragon. (Check my gallery.)
  3. pegscraper
    We just picked up this video and watched it this weekend. For those who have it, who spotted the white Tour Deluxe? It was only shown for a few seconds, but it was in there. Do you know what my favorite part was? Come on, guess. The part where the guy says, "Scraping your floorboards should be music to your ears". My wife just roared. I had to pause the video to let her finish laughing. She normally will poke me in the ribs if I do it with her on the back. She doesn't like that realization of how far we're leaning over. But after hearing that line and then watching and hearing how much they do it in their demonstrations, she said she will become more accepting of it. I am the pegscraper! :D
  4. pegscraper
    Very nice work. Now you just need to swap the 32mm carbs onto the bikes.
  5. pegscraper
    1) Yes, that's the term. I remember now. When I first started figuring out how to change the dimensions of that link to lower the swing arm, I measured the lengths of the sides and thought I would need to know the angles too. With the links still installed on the bike so I didn't have any down time, I couldn't measure the angles. So I thought I would calculate them from the three side lengths. When I started thumbing through an old college math book about how to figure that I started seeing bunches of math terms that I once knew and had forgotten, and I started feeling really stupid. I finally turned up the formula and was amazed at how complex it was. I decided I would only wade through that if I had absolutely had to, and I ended up realizing I didn't need them. Since I have the shock adjusted to the maximum hard position as it's called in the owner's manual, or its minimum length, I guess that's all I can do with that. 4) Interesting idea, but with the way the links are positioned I don't think that's what happens. The arc segment(?) through which the shock mounting hole travels is for the most part largely perpendicular to the shock travel. In its travel it look like it probably runs back and forth over perpendicular. If the arc segment through which the shock mount bolt travels were farther up the side of the circle, that would effectively produce a variable spring rate through its travel. In fact, if anything here, it looks like the farther the shaft is pulled out of the shock and the farther it moves up the arc through the links' rotation, the easier it would be to pull it out further because of the leverage of the links, making the suspension soften the more it's compressed rather than more firm. Again, backwards. 5) Yes, there's room to move the forks up quite a bit. I may try that rather than having to fabricate links. I could wish I could put an airbag suspension under the rear of the bike instead of the spring, like is available for many other bikes. But with the way this shock works, there's no way to do it.
  6. pegscraper
    Extending the length of the left side of the triangle link (in this pic) would raise the swing arm - lower the bike. Making the rear arm shorter and/or the front arm longer will raise it, like what happened when I flipped these links over. I think Y consulted extensively with Rube Goldberg when they designed this suspension. I couldn't imagine calculating through all the lever ratios and forces through this thing to figure out what spring rate you might want. What a disaster. I wanted to try raising the rear 1 3/4" to get the fork rake angle down to 28.5* and see what happened. I calculated the change in the swing arm angle and thought about what that did to the U-joint. At 1" the swing arm changes 2.8*, and at 1 3/4" the swing arm changes 4.8*. I haven't heard anyone talking about the U-joint failing with a 3* change. I doubt that 5* would be enough to cause trouble, as the swing arm moves plenty more than that in normal riding. But it might. I put two different angle finders on the forks this weekend and I measure just a hair over 29*, which is right where my calculations said it would be, assuming it was actually right at 30* to begin with. I didn't think to check it before I raised the bike. I should have done that, but I'm not going to go back and do it now. I'd still like to get it down to 28.5* just to see how the thing responds. But I'll probably run the bike for a while with the 1" rise to get a good feel for it there before I try it, especially since I'll have a brand new tires in a few more days. These are shot, and that will change the feel of things too. Yes, I'm pretty well stuck with this shock, like it or not. At least I haven't heard that Y has had a lot of trouble with this shock. I know a guy who swapped in the full air ride rear suspension from a 2nd gen. He said it required some cutting and welding. I don't think I'm going to trouble myself with that. How do I check front spring sag? Is that the same as checking the ride height in the front? I'd have to know what it was to start with, measured on this bike 10 years ago, because I wouldn't trust it to have been exactly whatever the spec in the book is. I'm sure the springs are original and they've probably sunk some. And the rear spring would have done the same thing. The term preload is a confusing one. The owner's manual calls it preload, and then refers to the different settings as hard or soft. I'm heavy enough all by myself to get into the upper air pressure range for the rear tire. I plus the wife plus luggage puts us well over the recommended weight limit of the bike. So I set the rear shock all the way to hard. I didn't think I felt any real difference in ride stiffness, but I left it there anyway. The rear suspension spring must be inside the shock housing, as there isn't a spring anywhere else. If the rear shock bolt is removed the rear wheel falls to the ground.
  7. pegscraper
    Those locknuts supposedly adjust the shock preload. I have it set in the stiffest position. I don't know if moving that would change the ride height or not. If it does it couldn't change it very much anyway. The total range on the locknuts is only a couple turns or so. Once the shock is set to the desired stiffness, it's best to modify the ride height another way.
  8. pegscraper
    For those early Royal Star owners who would like a picture, or anyone else who doesn't follow what I'm talking about because our suspensions are so much different, here's a pic. The front of the bike is to the right. (Yes, my back tire is toast and desperately needs replaced. I have some new Avons on the way.) These links are now installed backwards from the way they came. The fatter leg used to be at the front. The bottom mounting hole at the shock stays in place and the top two holes switch places. The fatter rear leg is 102mm and the front leg is 107mm. There's not much difference there, but it's just enough. What happens when the links are flipped is that the mounting hole that goes to the shock is moved further back. Then the swing arm has to come down a little farther to bring the bolt hole in the link forward to line up with the bolt hole in the shock. This has to be the strangest suspension setup I have ever seen. The top rear hole is the mount to the swingarm. The top front hole mounts to a pivoting link that mounts to the frame above. That link can swing front to back. When the bike hits a dip and the suspension compresses, the link will rotate clockwise (in this pic) and pull the shaft out of the shock. Yes, this shock works backwards. The shock actually extends when the suspension "compresses". In this case suspension compression is actually suspension extension. Or would it be called tension? Strange.
  9. pegscraper
    I drew up plans of a link to raise the rear of the bike about 1 3/4". Yesterday I started laying out the drawing on a piece of steel and I'm looking at the proportions of the thing, and then I had an incredible brain storm idea. In drawing up the new link I had of course measured the old one. On this bike it's a triangular piece, and I noticed that none of the sides were the same length. (I forget the technical geometry term for that. Bite me.) Two of the sides are pretty similar, but not the same. Suddenly it hit me that if I simply installed the existing link backwards, switching these two similar sides, that it would raise the bike. I thought about trying to calculate out on paper how much it might raise it, but then realized that it would take a lot longer to do that than to just remove the links and flip them and see what happened. So, I took measurements two different ways of the height of the rear of the bike, flipped the links, and measured again. The rear of the bike stood within a 1/32" of being a full inch higher. What stupid, accidental luck! I took off for a ride with pleasant results. I hit one of the very few non-straight winding roads we have around here at 70+ mph. (That's Winchester Rd. for you there, Freezy.) It's actually a paved over old Indian trail. For the moment I'm thinking I'd still like to try the 1 3/4" rise that I had figured out, but this was too easy of a partial step in that direction. I didn't have to fabricate anything and it took me all of 15 minutes to do. :cool10: So for any early Royal Star owners who have wanted to try raising the rear of the bike for the improved handling characteristics that everyone claims but haven't been able to because no one makes such links for our bikes, here it is. Simply remove the links, flip them front to back, and reinstall them. Yamaha couldn't have screwed up and made this any easier if they tried. Or maybe they screwed up and didn't make it difficult. Whatever the reason, this couldn't be any easier.
  10. pegscraper
    Congrats, Jeff. I'm glad you got it back together and running nice.
  11. pegscraper
    You might also check into this outfit. A buddy of mine here has had three of them on different bikes and swears by them. I sat on his bike just today to check out the seat and I thought it felt pretty nice. I could tell that there was no pressure on my tailbone. They take your height and weight along with a picture of you sitting on the old seat and they custom make one to fit you. In their photo gallery they show one on a Royal Star Venture. http://www.day-long.com/
  12. pegscraper
    Joe, you should have given me a jingle last night then. I would have loved an excuse to go for a ride, and you could have seen the shiny tins. The weather is warming up around here. We'll do it soon. Last summer I saw a white one parked at Ivanhoe's Ice Cream in Upland. That's another fun destination. There are at least two Black Cherries and two midnights running around here somewhere too. I've seen them go through the dealer. Don, I've already done that, mentioned back in the initial post.
  13. pegscraper
    Do you suppose there's room for much more? I'm thinking I'd like to raise the rear of the bike by 1 3/4", which would make the kickstand effectively 7/8" shorter. I know all anyone can really do here is guess.
  14. pegscraper
    Nobody has any thoughts on the length of the kickstand when leveling links are used? This doesn't have enough effect on the length of the kickstand that you have to be careful where you park?
  15. pegscraper
    The '96 - '01 Royal Stars have a different rear suspension than the 2nd gen Ventures, and no one makes any leveling links for them, so I'll be making my own. That opens up the option of being able to raise the bike any amount I want. Since the 1st gens are said to handle so well I compared the rake angle of the 1st gen to the 2nd gen, and did some calculating to see just how much the leveling links change things. The rake angle on a 1st gen is 28.5*, and the 2nd gen is 30*. The 1" that the standard leveling links raise the bike changes the angle of the bike by .86*, creating a fork rake angle of 29.1*. To get to a 28.5* fork rake angle the back of the bike would have to be raised by 1 3/4". I could always split the difference somewhere by raising the rear say like 1 1/4" and dropping the front 1/2". As long as the rear rise plus front drop equals 1 3/4" it's all the same thing. Myself, I would prefer the full rear rise for the most cornering clearance, and I'm such a tall guy I wouldn't mind the higher seat either. This weekend I propped the rear wheel up 1 3/4" with boards and sat on the bike and it felt fine. My only real concern is that with that much rise on the bike the kickstand will be a little short. On the boards in the garage it seemed okay, but I wonder how it would be if a parking lot somewhere was sloped the wrong way or something. So the question is - for those of you with the standard 1" leveling links, how much concern is there about the slope of the ground where you park? Any at all? I'd like to get a feel for how much rear rise I could get away with as far as the kickstand length is concerned. I'd really like to not have to make these more than once. I suppose with some extra work I could design an adjustable link. Then I could make a height change in only a few minutes. Thoughts anyone?
  16. pegscraper
    That's a sad site, but just think, now you have one that's never been dropped. My starter bike was an '82 Honda Twinstar CMT200. It was too small to be seen and people were constantly pulling out in front of me. I'm convinced that bikes that size shouldn't even be on the road, not even as a starter bike. I was in two or three accidents on that bike because of people not paying attention, the last of which put me in the hospital for two weeks and it was six months before I could walk again. My right knee was badly damaged and had to put back together with screws. Other than that I was good. That's been twenty-one years ago now and I have never remembered the accident. The last thing I remember that day was about ten minutes prior. When I was told where the accident actually happened I couldn't believe it. I didn't know I had gotten that far down the road. The bike wasn't too bad, just bent forks and broken headlight assembly. After I was better I fixed it up and sold it and graduated to an '81 XS1100, which has been gone for a while at this point. In several years I never had anybody miss that big bike.
  17. pegscraper
    The only place to find one made for the Royal at this point is going to be ebay. That's where I got mine, a Cobra. The Y unit currently made for the Roadstars is similar, but I've heard that it takes a bit of tweaking where it mounts to the license plate bracket, or possibly some nylon spacers and longer bolts or something.
  18. pegscraper
    I've also heard that they were used for a display stand for a dealer - from someone who said he saw a Royal Star displayed that way a few years ago. In '96 when the Royal Star was the new model it was to be set apart from other bikes on the floor and displayed in a special way with the stand. I don't know how many dealers ever did it. Most dealers I know don't have the room for it or don't want to take the room for it. At this point that bracket looks like something that they haven't expended the effort to remove from the design and manufacture of the bike. On my bike I don't see any evidence that there was anything ever bolted to it even at the factory.
  19. pegscraper
    Annoyed by the mainstream drive-by news media? Don't pay any attention to them. Don't watch it and don't listen to it.
  20. pegscraper
    The other good thing about hair spray is that if you ever need to, you can pry the grip off without destroying it. A little heat from a heat gun helps soften it.
  21. pegscraper
    I didn't see any difference in gas mileage or hp either one when going back and forth from stock to Kromewerks mufflers, and I have the mileage records and dyno runs to prove it, as I kept such records when making a few other engine mods. If you don't keep cold hard records of what happens when you make a change, it's pretty easy to see the results you anticipate, or want to see, whether they're actually there or not.
  22. pegscraper
    How far off is it? All Yamaha bikes, and I think most any metric bike, are calibrated so that the speedometer reads in the neighborhood of about 10% fast, and the odometer reads about 10% too much mileage. And if you do any mpg checks it will cause your mpg readings to be 10% too high. There are electronic devices available with which you can recalibrate the speedometer and odometer.
  23. pegscraper
    I have the Krome Werks turnout mufflers on a 4 pipe model. The sound is great. Yes, they're plenty loud. I could wish they were a little quieter, but stock is really too quiet for me and I don't like the sound of drilled mufflers. So I guess these are it. I have found that I have to wear earplugs anyway, no matter what mufflers I have on the bike; apparently it's not the exhaust noise but the wind noise that stresses my ears. With earplugs, I don't find the loud mufflers bothersome even on all day rides.
  24. pegscraper
    Do you mean moving the shifter forward on the floorboard, or lowering the front of the lever down while raising the back of the lever? The latter is really easy. Loosen the jam nuts on the adjusting linkage and set it wherever you want it.
  25. pegscraper
    Here is a chart some of you may find useful, since this question gets raised occasionally. It compares the engine rpms of a stock 2nd gen Venture against what they become when a V-Max rear gearset is installed. Mph is down the side, gear number is across the top, stock gearing rpms are on the bottom of each box, and the rpms with the V-Max rear gear is on the top of each box. To make things a bit more readable, the rpms are rounded off to the nearest 10, which isn't detectable on most tachometers anyway. If you're one who doesn't like math, then don't bother to read the rest of this. The stock gearseat has 33 teeth on the ring gear and 10 teeth on the pinion gear, where the V-Max rear gear has 9 teeth on the pinion gear. Basically, the V-Max rear gear will raise the engine rpms about 11% over stock: (33/9) / (33/10) which simplified goes more like this: 10/9 The numbers in the chart are calculated figures based on the results of one of my dyno runs, which eliminates the speedometer error (about 10%) inherent in our bikes. The dyno indicated an engine speed of 6610 rpms at a road speed of 87.33 mph in third gear with a V-Max rear gearset. Then I calculated out the miles per hour and the transmission ratios to get the rpms at other road speeds and in other gears. Since my bike is a Royal Star which has a different primary gear ratio as well as different transmission ratios then the Ventures, I had to calculate through all these different ratios to get what rpms in a 2nd gen Venture would look like. For starters, at 90 mph in third gear it goes like this: 6610 / 87.33 x 90 / (29/25) x (30/25) / (85/51) x (87/49) = 7510 where (29/25) is a Royal Star third gear, (30/25) is a Venture third gear, (85/51) is a Royal Star primary reduction ratio, and (87/49) is a Venture primary reduction ratio. And that is with the V-Max rear gear since that's what I started with. To get the rpms with stock Venture gearing, multiply by 9/10. Clear as mud? You were warned. I drew a few different charts showing rpms with various transmission and rear gear ratio combinations on both Royal Stars and Ventures. I made them for myself quite a while back, partly because our bikes don't have tachometers and I wanted to know what rpms I was running without spending the coin it takes to buy one, and partly because I wanted to know what would happen with different transmission and rear gear ratio changes.
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