Well at Round 2 of the PMCC series the Kwikasfuki ZX650 performed like a mixed bag, feeling was good however rear end grip was well down, funnily enough the rear tire was shredding to pieces.. fantastic. We Qualed with a good time but the rear tire was disappearing at a great rate of knots each lap. After a quick fiddle by Mr Dave Moss he believed the rear was too hard on preload, and rebound and compression was also way to slow. An adjustment or two and we went out dropped half a second and gained some grip in both ends doing a 1.38:1 in the F2 race, 0.8 off Scotty Moirs F3 Lap Record.....good results however some suspension rebuilding was def required.
So I asked Rob T to help my poorly gripping stead, at KSS we pulled the shock out and bolted it to what I would call a cross between R2D2 and a dildo machine - only made out of CNC'd ali and carbon fibre. After many 'pumps' a graph was printed and the limits were shown very quickly, both sides of dampening were harder than concrete. Shim stacks were in need of changing, after a few adjustments a quick rebuild it went back on the Shock Dyno, much better but not exactly perfect. So pulled it apart again a quick change before retest and re-install. We also changed the amount of sag increasing it considerably. From start to finish this process at KSS took a total of 4 hours from rolling the bike in to me getting on the road again. Question is was it worth it....
VMCC ran a track day at Manfeild on Sunday - I put a tire that was torn to shreds on the left, so we wanted to push it and see if we could hammer the right hand side of the tire. The feel of the bike was good, the bike held a far tighter line on exit, however ground clearance was compromised due to the reduced pre load. We added some ride height which equaled the back end out, then after speaking to Mr Dave moss again found we could add a little preload to get better drive from mid throttle on wards. Times were similar and getting better sitting at around the mid 1:14's, after the preload tweak the drive was def improved. I started really pushing the rear tire to give it everything I had, She was getting some nice slides out of T1 and Higgans.... then the dash showed me a GPS time of a 1:13.75.....its lied to me before with aliens getting in the way, getting all confused etc, so I thought i'd do a another good lap just to be sure. Next time round it showed 1:13.73......can anyone say nearly 1 second off your PB.......
The rear grip is great - tire was as smooth as a babies butt, and it even cleaned up the shredded side. Some rebound issues up front but we are def happy with the progress we made and are looking forward at doing some damage at Taupo in march.
Huge thanks to KSS for the work, rebuilding and dyno work, once again I obtained instant progress and improvement after they worked on the bike, also a special mention goes to Dave Moss, he was very helpful at the track and was completely inline with Kss thoughts.
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Originally Posted by neil_cb125t
Dammit!!! Maybe I should fit that SV1000 engine of mine!!!! 
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