PERFORMANCE MAONIFI - Bolton Motorcycle Workshop

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KENNY ROBERTS
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Make your bike
FEEL LIKE NEW!
Upgrade your front end
The step-by-step guide
PERFORMANCE
^Ride o WSB bike
v/.Change your shock
/Measure stuff properly
^ Mod for free
Owning, riding
great bikes
THE FIRST
FIREBLADE
The inside story
479bh
BIKES INSIDE =
BMWS1000RR =
Ducati 848 =
Ducati916 =
Honda CBX1000 =
Honda Fireblade =
Kawasaki ZX-7R =
Kawasaki Z1000SX =
Suzuki GSX-R750 =
Suzuki GSX-R1000 =
WE RIDE UK'S
MOST POWERFUL
ROAD BIKE
Suzuki GSR750 =
Suzuki Hayabusa =
Triumph 955i =
Triumph Street Triple =
Yamaha T2R250 =
£O!
Clever budget-build
Honda CBR1000RR
GSX-R forks! Carbon wheels!
Amazing CBX1000, p70
WSB BMW S1OOORR
We test it at Monza and
it's EASIER than the stocker!:- «
is tne best middleiceia
vs Suzuki GSR750 vs Kwak Z75
MAONIFI
£3.75 Sept 2011 USA $8.95
The guide to buying a 90s WSJS legend
Owning 2006 Honda Fireblade
""--INTAKE SYSTEM
Russrtook -apart the standard ramair scoops, Dremeled away the
internal webbing, and smoothed
-he piastic *o" a smoother, larger
alrf ow The^ now have the same
Internal cross-section as a race
item, but look totally stock
Words Matt Wildee Pios Jason Critchell
WEAPON
Mechanic Russell Hotchkiss has
transformed his 2006 Blade with
standard parts and a tiny budget
he idea of this project was to show howyou
could make your standard road bike better
without spending a fortune," says Bolton's master
mechanic and PB reader Russ Hotchkiss. "People
have got less money than they used to have sol
started to play with the idea of making a bike as good
as you can using what's already there."
The eagle-eyed amongyou might recognise Russ. Last
year I headed North to ride his stealthy, modded- for-theroad GSX-R1000K3. It was an awesome bit of kit - huge
midrange, a decent riding position, suspension and braking
tech good enough for a modern BSB bike. To this day, it is probably the best
road superbike I've ever ridden. It was so flexible, so fast, so easy to ride that
the memories of it refused to fade. I wanted to buy the thing, but by the time
the money was together, the bike was gone.
So when an excited Russ got on the phone to tell us about his newproject
we were already half way up the M6. After he'd sold the GSX-R, he indulged
in a Hayabusa and while he liked its road-bias the bike was too fat, too heavy
and not exciting enough.
"It just wasn't me," said Russ. "The engine was lovely and it was great with
the wife on the back, but was just too long and too low to ever act like a sports
bike. I had a 200 6 Fireblade that a customer brought in to the shop for some
work. I took it out for a test ride. I could see that the bike had huge potential
and I wanted to unlock it. Come up and visit and have a go on it." Q
Owning S006 Honda Fireblade
'With an extra two teeth on
the rear it is electrifying
out of slow-speed corners'
Last time I went to Russ's workshop his project bike was so stealthy,
so inconspicuous that I walked straight past it. And as I stumble into
his yard, stiff-legged and late after alongride,! bump into snapper
Jason Critchell. He's photographing what looks like a standard, if wellpolished Honda Fireblade. "You got the right bike, Jase?"
"This is the one," he replies. I've done the same thing again. Russell
comes over grinning. "It isn't what you expected is it?" I nod. "But
that's the beauty of it. This Fireblade might look standard, but the
thing has been tranformed. It feels so different. This is the machine
that Honda wanted to build in the first place. Go on, start it up."
He hands me the key. Flick on the ignition. Pull in the clutch. Press
the button. The Fireblade bites instantly and settles into a snarling,
hungry tickover. It's all very confusing. My eyes see a standard
exhaust, my ears hear the blare of a race pipe. I blip the throttle - the
response is instant, the engine so much sharper, the revs rising much
quicker than the 2006 stocker I'dridden the day before for
comparison. Some explanation is needed.
" The idea was to get a modern sportsbike back into a more pure form,
before emissions regulations started damaging midrange and throttle
response. This Fireblade was an exercise in emissions de-restricting.
I started with the airbox. The flapper valve in the airbox was the first
thing to go." The flapper valve is a servo-operated device that Honda
say is there to speed-up intake velocity at low rpm by reducing the size
SILENCER
Russ cut the back box open with a guillotine saw at one of the welds,
and then ground away the spotwelds holding on the titanium baffle and
removed it. The noise control valve was removed and the holes for the
pivot plated and welded up. Then the whole can was welded back
together. The servo motor was also removed and a series of resistors
fitted in its place to fool the ECU into thinking the motor was still there.
QUICKSHIFTER
The race-spec HM Quickshifter is aggressive and suits the new-found,
free-revving nature of Russ's Fireblade very well. It pivots from a
standard gear-shift lever. Footrests have grippier Bike Tek pegs.
of the air intake. But the main reason is noise reduction. Remove itand
you get up to 5bhp in the midrange and improved throttle response.
"Next I worked at the airbox intake myself, smoothing out the
intake mouth and the webbing for better airflow and volume. I also
fitted a Pipercross road filter that flows much better.
"But the biggest gains to be made were with the exhaust. I had to
build this bike on a budget and I didn't want to swap to a full system.
This was about getting the most out of what I had. An simple mod was
removing the exhaust noise control valve, and its spindle and servo
motor. Plates were then welded in to replace the cuts I had to make."
Russ then attacked the rest of the exhaust, first removing the cat in
the mid-pipe and then the baffling in the silencer. "The stock
downpipes are very good on this model of Fireblade .They are made
out of titanium and flow well, with serpent headers. Effectively, once
you sort out the gas-flow further down you've got a race system for a
fraction of the cost. You need to try it. It is night-and-day better
compared to the standard bike."
Russ has just moved out of Bolton's urban decay and into a new
workshop. He's in the rolling green pastures of the Rivington valley.
Crucially, there are amazing test routes everywhere.
I head out into the moors on the Blade. The sun is shining today, but
the peaks are still bleak and the tarmac is pockmarked and broken by
long, heavy winters. Today we're heading out on the Rivington Road
and it twists, turns and flicks from side to side like a broken
rollercoaster ride. Every camber tries to force you into the verge. It's all
much better suited to the high-barred flick-flick of a supermoto. But
somehow, the Blade feels at home.
The differences between this and a stock bike are stark. Russ's
charges forward on a hint of throttle, pulling so hard from low down it
almost takes you by surprise. As the revs rise, the power gets stronger,
harder and more aggressive, the front wheel floating through second
gear as it hits SOOOrpm. With an extra two teeth on the rear and the
added bottom-end response, it is electrifying out of slow-speed
corners, supple suspension digging in and driving harder than any
2011 litre bike. I can see what he has done here.
We plateau at the top of the climb, the outer reaches of the Peak
District open up in front of me. The sides of the road are falling away,
the carriageways crazy-paved with corrugations. I get my head down
and wind the Fireblade on, each lunge forward punctuated by the
crackle and pop of the HM quickshifter. It feels so much more alive
than the standard bike, and it doesn't matter how hard I try it is
impossible to upset it over the bumps.
Russ has spent alot of time getting the handling to suit him. "I've
been trying to make the most of what is here before spending the
money on upgrades, so I've just been working on getting the best setup. What's good about the Blade is that it is naturally very stable. B
|200C
.Fireblade
*The tweaks have made i8e Blade feels as fresh
as:a 2011 litre bike'
, •
V"
That means thatyou can get aggressive with the steeringgeometry. I've
pulled the forks up 5mm at the moment but I could go further."
It steers brilliantly, nimble accurate and shod in Michelin Power
Pures. Russ's approach to tyres and handling, and bikes in general, is
refreshing. He's one of the fastest road riders I know, but he doesn't
needlessly fit racetrack tyres and never sets his bikes up super-stiff. He's
more concerned about getting a bike sorted than bolting on needless
tat. And the stocklook allows him to merge into the background among
the other local bikers. Ithelps keep him off theradar. Even if his level of
lunacy means he needs nothing less than a cloaking device.
The next twenty miles are full of stolen speed, negative cambers and
chasing Russ on his mate's GSX-R750. It's easy to get carried away here.
The fact that the bike feels so alive and aggressive yet looks so standard
takes some getting used to and makes you giddy. When the RR6 and
RR7 Fireblades were launched lazy journalists always called them
boring. It was idiocy of course, but if the bikes had been launched in this
form they would now be carried high as iconic nutter bikes.
What makes this bike inspirational is not the level of changes
undertaken, but rather the amount of changes not made. Just getting
the engine breathingbetter and making the sensible tweaks to the
chassis has made the bike feel as fresh as a 2011 litre bike. If you have a
standard Blade and are thinking of upgrading to a new bike, don't. You
would, without a shadow of a doubt, be better upgrading your bike in
the same way that Russ has.
"It has been so much more rewarding working with the standard parts
and making them better - and in this day and age, it makes a huge
amount of sense," explains Russ. "Alot of it is stuff that many people
can do themselves or at least can be done at a decent bike shop, and for a
fraction of the price of buying decent aftermarketparts. All you are
doing is freeing up the bike's potential. This is how the Honda engineers
would have really wanted it in the first place."