Allspeed Exhausts

 A friend of the page Alan Price has contacted Gibson exhausts today to enquire about producing the classic Allspeed exhaust in chrome for the MBX80.

Alan is happy to lend them his bike as a template but the one-off cost is £500. If anybody else wants an Allspeed Gibson needs to get to a batch of 5 to get the unit price down to £445.

If you want to get a new exhaust at the better price please contact via the facebook group

my bike: wiring loom + frame/ fit

This week I have finally started on the wiring loom, a job I'd been putting off. To work on it I made a large clean work area to lay the loom out in its entirety. Using a foam clean and a rag I started just to clean up the loom and connections to see what repair work I need to do, thankfully the loom in itself has no issues apart from a bit of unravelling tape in some areas, some black electrical tape will fix this.

The clock unit is damaged and had been held together with some inner tube rubber and some dirt has got in to the speedo, thankfully I do have a replacement upper case for this already and I just found a replacement lower case on ebay so I will be able to completely repair this.

The other issue is the right hand indicator bracket which at some point has snapped off, these are discontinued and seemingly unavailable on ebay, so I need to fabricate a replica metal tab and weld it on to the stay to repair it.

The next job was to look at the exhaust which is currently mounted on the bike, the problem was that it didn't line up with the rear exhaust hanger (which is part of the frame). Firstly I wondered if the engine was mounted correctly, so I loosened the engine mount bolts and pulled it around, obviously nothing changed... so I re-torqued the engine mount bolts and had another think to what could be wrong?

Looking at the back of the bike it quickly became clear that the rear foot rest hanger was bent in, so I made lots of measurements and realised it was bent in by 25mm. With a dirty great big metal pole, lots of frame protection and some brute strength I pulled the frame hanger triangle out by 25mm and hey presto, the frame lined up with the exhaust and now looked square form the rear.

I would speculate that this part of the frame bent in when the bike was crashed on the right hand side in a previous life, as this part of the frame would damage it the exhaust was hit hard.

here was the problem, not detectable until I started to bolt things on again!

new gap!

all good again and ready for the next step

this image has the bodywork photoshoped on, just to see what it is looking like!

My bike; exhaust, brake pedal

This week I concentrated on getting the exhaust on but I hit a few problems. Firstly I wanted to paint it as it had a couple of storage marks on it, I used Hammerite Barbecue paint as it cures without having to put heat in to it plus you can get a nice matt finish with it.
The first problem I had was that the header mounting flange didn't line up with the exhaust studs by about 2-3mm... This is super weird as the exhaust is definitely for a MBX80, so I opened the holes up to 10mm which was the largest drill bit I had then slightly ovalised them to the point the flange slipped over the studs.
Once the exhaust was on it is a little out at the rear mounting point, by about 10mm. The hole physically lines up but just sticks out a little, you can push it in but its not the fit I would expect from a Japanese bike. This needs investigating a little more.

The next job was to replace the rear brake pedal with a new old stock item. This was purely cosmetic as my original was painted and I didn't feel comfortable with the originality of the bike like this. I raised this point on our Facebook group page about using parts with the incorrect finish and although everybody had a slightly different opinion on this I feel you got to go with your vision on how you want your bike to be?

correct finished pedal on the left vs powder coat on the right