My 950 Refresh or Mission Creep...

Wohooooo this is going really well . I'm curious how you're going to route the pipes, and now the aux rear tanks, sweeeeet.

Great thread

There's a saying around our shop when asked how a project is going: 90% done and 90% to go.

I look at the bike and it seems I'm about 5 minutes from buttoning it up and then I spend the whole day at the shop and when I leave it hardly looks any different. It's little things like accidently routing the brake line between the heated grip wire and the rest of the left controls; I can't leave it so I have to take stuff apart and reorganize the cables so they all lay perfect and clean and suddenly an hour goes by. It's deceptive how long stuff takes.

Since there's no way I'm going to build an entire exhaust in a weekend I decided to just clean the stock one and rewrap the front header. Shawn came by today and helped with the cleaning and mounting of the exhaust. Here's the newly wrapped headers:



This is an insanely tight exhaust system. It's going to be quite the project to make a new one that replicates most of the curves and then changes some as well. There's no room for error.

I decided to swap the silencers inside out since I've dented the right one more than a couple of times. Reversible silencers are a great idea:



Then the rear panels went on and I put the bike on the edge of the lift and pushed the back down to bleed the radiator. Chris came by and was amused that something so simple required such gymnastics - sorta true, it shouldn't be such a pain to do.



During this afternoons work I traded time in the paint booth prepping the windscreen. It was scratched and tired looking but I didn't feel like buying a new one and recutting the NACA's back in so I decided to paint the whole thing. Adhesion promoter and then some PPG K36 primer. Tomorrow I'll lay some putty into the ducts to smooth out the joins and then give it a light sand and another coat of primer and then color. Well, the absence of all color actually - black. When I clear it I'll also put some clear on the raw carbon fender to give that some depth and the additional darkness that clear will bring.



I'm oil away from starting it and James came through with a new seat so tomorrow should see the bike at least run on the stand and the oil changed. If I'm lucky I'll get the paint done by Sunday and that will be it for now. So close and only 90% to go...

Once again, we're going to be doing our BBQ on the roof deck tomorrow so if any ADV riders in the NYC area want to come by send me an email - at this point tomorrow will be busy so I might not be checking PM's.

Later!

One word........ Fantastic!!

Great detail, writing and pictures. Your ride looks so sweet, thanks for taking the time out to document it all, enjoy your BBQ and have a guiness on me.

DG

Gregor, just stumbled on this thread, progress looks great and the black swing arm looks sweet.

Can't wait to see it all together again. What did you decide on the paint?

I thought there'd be more time to work on the bike today but too many other things kept interrupting. Weekends are a time when everyone comes to the shop and Team Incomplete is briefly complete which means there's a lot of socializing and bench racing so it's harder to get stuff done.

I did a little wire management and added some oil and hooked up the battery and checked that there was no smoke when I turned the key on. No smoke which is a good thing so the next step was to add a little gas and see if she'd crank. It took a while for the lines to prime but she's back to life. I didn't have time to warm the oil as the dyno was being used for race bikes today so I'll do it Monday maybe.

Since Brembo never made a mirror mount for the radial master cylinder I found some scrap aluminum and spent a little time on the mill and lathe and worked up a mirror mount. It's simple but one of the more complicated pieces I've done by hand. I didn't realize it but Andrew has a small powder coating system and offered to coat the part - home powder coating in a toaster oven - who knew? You attach a ground wire to the hanging wire and plug the gun in and just dust it down then bake for 30 minutes in your toaster oven.



And there you go, the product of an afternoon's effort a mirror on the brake mount:



It's almost done now - so close I can taste it. I just need a couple more hours...

Great work!
Why not just ceramic coat the exhaust headers Black to match the color theme and call it a day?
I know that you know about the drawbacks of wrapping the exhaust on these bikes...

ktm950se

Yeah, I do and it pains me to wrap them again. Love the look and the heat reduction but it just eats them up. Actually I did think about that but only a few weeks ago and I remember the process taking weeks so I put it out of my head. I think you're right though - I should do that to this set which would free me to experiment with the stainless headers I'm going to make. I just have to find the time now.

Do you know of any place towards the east coast that can do a quick turnaround? I'm so over driving and so desperate to be back on two wheels that I don't want to keep the bike off the road any longer.

I haven't used these guys, but I hear good things about them. Seems like their normal lead time is about a week. I know they do a lot of work for various NASCAR teams.

Their east coast facility is in central NC.

Nice job on the bike.

Greetings,
2 years ago I sent my SE headers to HPC's Arizona facility and upon receiving them back noticed a few small "pock marks" on the outside, and missing patches of coating on the inside. I contacted the company and was offered a chance to have them re-coated but haven't done this yet. Hopefully they've changed their processes to allow the various coating layers to cure between coats, as this is what they indicated caused the problems with mine...

ktm950se

how is the single disc from MM? almost as good as 2?

I think this set up is better actually. The strength is about the same or better, the feel is far better and the lighter unsprung weight makes it feel much lighter. I think with the new Brembo master cylinder I'll finally perfect the system as I think the stock master is a bit wooden and lacks feel and I've always run Brembo radials on my race bikes because of their perfect feel. It's now a complete supermoto race setup.

I've got the bike almost together and will be riding it to TN on Thursday so I'll report back about the new lever and how it feels. Of course I've just discovered that the new master interferes with the hand guards so I'm working on that right now.

I hope to be done tonight and packed tomorrow...

Enjoy the ride, and report back how everything turned up

Is that the ADV master or the SE master?

Neither. It's this one.



This is a 16x18 Brembo Radial Master. It's typically used for single disk four piston race setups such as supermoto, Honda RS125's or the like. It's a pain as you have to rig your own reservoir, brake light switch, and mirror mount so it's hardly bolt on. It's design yields a more direct pressure path and leverage or so the theory goes. I'll let you know how it works.

Sorry, I meant which one felt wooden? (What did you have before?)

Ah, my bad. I had the Adv. I'm not sure how the SE is different in terms of the size of the master.

Smaller piston AFAIK ... so is supposed to have better feel with MM. (SE has half the slave piston surface area)

Thats what K2M and others are using afaik ...

Painting is a time consuming bitch. Of course I could have just used Krylon but I insisted on using House of Kolor and spending $200 to paint a $60 windscreen. It looked great last night and I know the clear will be very durable. I didn't spend as much time and energy on the inside as I would have liked but the outside I made sure was pretty good. I also cleared the carbon front fender but ran into problems with a ton of fisheyes from the small voids of the open weave. I think I can sand it out and buff it so you can't tell but if anyone here has painting advice I'd love to hear it. Custom paint is a hobby so I have a lot to learn but learning is what's fun. I'm really looking forward to painting the whole bike this winter.



James Renazco came through with a fantastic seat. At his suggestion I'm getting a second "winter" seat while we're waiting on my custom suede/carbon vinyl seat to come back from upholstery. It is of course upholstery perfection and extremely comfortable but we'll see how it holds up for tomorrows 700 mile day. I think my ass will give up first.



In between sanding, coats of primer, color and finally clear at 11pm last night I got the pannier mounts, side panels, tanks, seat and hand guards mounted. I think the only thing I need is the screen and that should be dry enough to mount by this afternoon. Not completely dry, that will happen somewhere on the way to TN, but dry enough to mount I hope. Nothing like last minute preparations right?

Here she was last night:

Looking good!

Looks great bud! Dont forget to update us on how it rides, but thanks for all the pictures and thoughts you've shared thus far!!!!

Also....

Amen brother!