#8 SR400 vs a very hard road surface (Spoiler Alert: The road surface won. Just.)

And here's what happened to the #8. These things are made to be ridden and it came to grief at Broadford. The fairing and windshield were cracked, exhaust scraped, bar ends torn out and part of the rear frame was snapped off. We've seen worse. And hey, nothing failed where it matters - the fairing mounts!

You can see on the right hand side where the rear frame has snapped, taking the indicator with it. If you find it at Broadford at your next track day please return it for a tiny reward.

While we're at it you're probably wondering about the headlight number. That's the same material that you find used as advertising on the sides of trams and buses. It only cuts down on the emitted light by around 5%, so it can still work beautifully at night.

So, like the phoenix (or a Hyundai i30 involved in a minor collision, but we'd rather stay romantic about these things) the bike will rise again. And better.

A new fairing was fitted and the snapped rear frame used as an excuse to cut it down properly and fit a new seat, with indicators that match the front flush-mounted ones. It's looking nearly complete now. But really - are these things ever finished?

Crashed your bike and need it repaired? Why not contact us. But to be honest we're probably not all that interested in repairing your CBR600F4i's crash damage, fantastic bike as it is. But if you have something a little bit more bespoke that has taken a tumble - I'm sure we can find space in our workshop for your Brough Superior!

Fitting a Fairing

As we all know the SR wasn't designed to have a fairing. Sure, there's plenty of options for bikini fairings and even a few half fairings but a full fairing - well, that's a different task altogether. So here's some pictures of the process of dressing up a naked bike.

First up is selecting the fairing and dry fitting it with some clamps to check the stance, width and what areas need to be relieved and cut back.

Indicators are a bit of a tight fit... More on that soon.

Looking pretty good. Once that's been sorted you kinda work backwards to fabricate up the brackets needed to hold everything securely - and to make it easily removable for servicing. First up, the headlight mount:

The lower brackets...

And while we're there we moved the ignition unit to a more subtle location...

And now with the headlight fitted. Things are starting to come together. Tank on there and the ubiquitous nitroheads seat fitted too.

View from the cockpit. Pretty bare.

And here you'll see some flush-mounted indicators. Keeps the lines clean.

And while we're here, here's the idiot lights for the SR. The headlight was drilled and small LED's fitted at intervals across the top. It keeps everything under the fairing simple, light and nice and stripped back. No tacho, but really, if you don't know when to shift on a single cylinder bike you've probably got bigger issues to deal with. The speedo is a Daytona unit.

And we're nearly there. there's electronics to fit and a few other things but it's basically all there. Want a fairing fitted to your SR400 or SR500? Why not contact us?

The SR400 #8's Front Brakes

First of all we need to get through a backlog of information on what we've been up to, before we can get around to telling you what we've been doing in the last few months. So we're going to rewind to the #8 SR400. There's a few cool things about this bike but here's a bit of information about the front brake.

The spoked-wheel SR400 had two versions of front brakes - the disc, which is most commonly seen, and the drum, which has a bit of a bad reputation which is undeserved in our opinion. When set up properly the drum can be just as good as the disc. But anyway, here's what it looks like standard.

They look like holes, but they're actually black plastic caps over alloy. Cheeky Yamaha. And the other side is the same...

On the left hand side of the front of the drum you can spot what looks to be an air intake. It actually isn't - there's no holes machined in there at all, just fins.

So with the #8 SR400 we took the right hand side of the drum brake cover and decided to open the holes up. They were bored through at an angle and then die-ground, dressed and finished. Eventually they looked like this.

Looks good when it's running as well. Gives the bike a little bit of colour.

And here's a brief video of it in action:

The other side was opened up and an intake fabricated.

All in all it looks a lot better than the original Yamaha SR400 front brakes - and it'll be more effective too.

The SR400 #8

Here's a sneak preview of an SR we've been working on for a while. It's at around 80% finished now - the front fender needs to be sorted and we're not going to keep the nitroheads seat on it. That ducktail design is universally beautiful, but a bit of an easy 'out'. So we're working mould that'll make the rear seat.

Besides the obvious, the fairings, etc there's a lot of little niggly things we've sorted - the horrible casting marks on the rear hub, for example. The front wheel actually does have a proper air scoop now (the originals are false) and a few other bits and peices.

More pics to come.