first time I’ve been able to work on the scoot for a while, was just trying to see sorta where I got up to and check it still runs etc, which it does \o/.
I remembered to drain the carb this time and she fired right up.
This is how she’s looking – sorry for the terrible pic. New phone, camera sucks.
I feel like the lines of it are actually coming together nicely this time. Tapering the vertical bars inwards made all the difference so was worth the hassle i think.
Whilst my thus-far pitiful efforts to pop dank wheelies are still going unrewarded, trying to do so highlighted some issues with my hand controls.
Continue reading YAMAHA YZF-R125 ADJUSTABLE CNC brake leversOk so this seems to be an ongoing urban myth, whether it’s chavs drilling the airbox of their mum’s Fiesta 1.1 popular or little 125s, or even big bikes, people seem set on the idea that airbox designers are actually our mums who are trying to sneakily slow our bikes down. or something.
On my bike I’ve shown the exhaust side of the engine quite a lot of love and attention, but despite the nice, big-bore shiny pipesness, she continues to run better with a little baffle in the end, like so:
The best reason I can come up with that the bike runs better with a smaller diameter exit/baffle in the end (effectively restricting the flow again) is that perhaps the exhaust is a bit much pipe for the bike – and by that I mean for the amount of air the engine is moving, the pipe diameter gets too wide at the end, which ends up with the gasses slowing down too much and actually impeding scavenging of the exhaust system. Or maybe there’s some sort of sound-waves stuff going on like with two-strokes.
Either way with the baffle in you get a little bit of torque around that 70mph point where you shift into top gear. With the open pipe it didn’t have the oomph to push through that but with the baffle it does (albeit slowly).
A couple of months ago, under what turned out to be ideal conditions on a private runway, thanks to that baffle we hit 85mph.
That was on a 15t front gear too so would have needed even more torque to make it through to the power band.
And it was absolutely equal parts terrifying and exhilarating..,as you would expect flying along on a glorified moped! 😀
Continue reading Debunking airbox mods On Yamaha YZF-R125? – part 1This is me trying to do a walkthrough of changing the front/drive sprocket on a Yamaha YZF-R125 without a rear wheel stand/paddock stand.
Continue reading Changing front sprocket on yamaha yzf-r125So when I did the handlebars conversion and made up the new clutch cable, I kept it following the OEM design where it has a corner just before going into the clutch lever assembly…like so:
For whatever reason, that doesn’t really seem to work too well on the new setup. This was something I only discovered when trying to learn to pop wheelies the other day…
Continue reading YZF-R125 Handlebar risers vs clutch cablebecause of course, why wouldn’t you?
This is just a quick video to test how well the gopro clone footage comes out on Youtube. Hopefully it doesn’t mash it up too bad.
In this run I’m testing out the map switching function on the Power Commander V, having just hooked that up (more on that soon), and also there’s a top speed run to see what the max speed it could reach was, on the 13:48 gearing (13 tooth front sprocket, 48 tooth rear).
This is part of my ongoing testing and tuning of my 125.
I’ve got a prior back injury which means the leaned over position of the R125 can be a bit much on longer journeys, and over christmas I’d been commuting on the bike every day and my shoulders weren’t getting a break so was constantly aching, not ideal. So I’d been wondering about the possibility of fitting some clip-on risers for a slightly more upright position.
Continue reading fitting clip-on handlebar risers to the YZF R125So the last few months have been pretty tough on a personal level so I haven’t really had much time to lavish on playing with bikes, plus I broke the car so the R125 has been more about getting me from A to B in all weathers, which much to my delight it did really well.
The little bits of workshop time I’ve had have been mostly focussed on just keeping everything running as best as I can, again, which despite adversity, worked. I have however still been working on things and have a backlog of photos etc which will probably turn into a bunch of posts, of which this is the first.
After the car broke last october (which was supposed to be my winter vehicle) I decided not to sink any more money into it and double down on the 125 instead, however insane that sounded going into what was supposed to be a potentially serious winter. But hey whatever, YOLO
Continue reading Preparing the yzf-r125 for Winter riding, and Further adventures