Matt Tries – 1984 VF500F Overhaul

Your 500 is looking Very Nice

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Wow Matt, it looks great. Cool to watch this project progress.

And about that 86 VFR700, I think I dodged a bullet by NOT buying one off of FB Marketplace in July. Went on vacation and someone bought it before I got back. Kind of glad now. There will be others that are not hacked up. Good Luck to you!

 

Can i borrow your garage forever? I need room dammit!! bike is looking cherry dude!

 

That bike is BEAST !!!!


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I may need to drive a truck to one of our offices in Ft Worth later this year. I'll leave the 700 in your driveway, lol. I'll know soon enough whether it's worth trying to bring back to life. I wish I could pull and clean the carburetor without needing all new rubber, but I'm sure that as soon as they're separated, none of the float bowls are going to seal anymore.

Yea. But you have to teach me how to go faster on an SV650! Only two more track weekends scheduled for the year. Then it's back to ̶d̶e̶p̶r̶e̶s̶s̶i̶o̶n̶ off-season.

Nah, not offseason yet. The VF is close to being able to try and start-up. Painted a bunch more odds and ends yesterday.

 

hahahaaa enjoy your track days!

 

So I feel like I need to apologize to my poor VF that's just been staring at me begging for attention. I've been painting some parts when I have time, but that's about it. I picked up a can of 2K clear after I completely messed up the clutch cover I'd painted by getting some brake cleaner on it, so I need to clear coat everything I've done. Lesson learned.

Did a few more track days which went pretty awesome--just learning--and those have been fun. The two below pics from Road America.



But then I really went and made a mistake... I signed up for the Learning Curves program at a CCS weekend to get my race license this Saturday with the intention of spectating Sunday and just taking it all in. I passed the class and one thing led to another and Sunday I signed up for three races. Now, I was pretty adamant that I wasn't ready for it, but about 15 people told me I'd regret it if I didn't. So I signed up for three races. That was probably the most intense and exciting day I've ever had. I'm still mentally exhausted from it.

My track goal at Blackhawk was to simply get down under 1:30 this year (not a huge feat on an SV at all... but realistic for me). I was in the 1:28s. I dropped to 1:24.9 in the first practice simply by being around faster people. All three races I was in the 1:24s and bested at 1:24.4. More importantly though--despite the fact I was kinda shitting myself the entire time out there--it was just the most exciting thing ever. I was convinced I was gonna just loop the damn thing on the standing start since I'd never done one before, but that went surprisingly well. What's crazy is I can easily see knocking another 4s off by just getting comfortable. The real fast guys and gals are down another 4s from that.

Your boy even managed to snag his first piece of hardware since high school sports too! P3 Rookies Cup GTL (license <12mo)--okay, so it was a bit unfair since 4 of the 7 other bikes in my class were <400cc, but 4 of us were on 650s, so it wasn't totally unjustified, lol. But that grid of 26 of us rookies launching into turn 1 in a single wave was bananas. I thought track days were intense--this was just another level. It makes me appreciate the lunatics on the professional level that much more.


So now that I've got to wait 8 months to get on track again, it's probably time to get that poor neglected Honda running again while my heartrate falls back to a stable level.

 

Hell YES. Good job! Nothing like it, need to get my ass back out there soon.

 

Very awesome!! Hardware is a super bonus!! My first moto race ever was 57 bikes deep. I was starting 53 because of the date that I got my license..lol

I am glad you had a good experience. Only advice I have is to not overthink your start procedure. In the beginning I just acted like I was at a light trying to outrun some traffic (best starts of my life). When I moved up to "pro", I got in my head too much and messed up a lot of starts.

So excited for you. I look forward to hearing more racing stories, good or bad. If you need to bounce any ideas about your SV around, I have some solid contacts and experience tips for you.

Now get on that 500hundy!! Need a track day for all of us forum peeps. Too bad we live like a 1000miles away from each other...

 

F YEAH! I wish I had done some road races but was always a dirt guy. I had to pick one and motocross it was.

Please keep us up to date, realley fantastic seeing you kick some butt! Can't beat the rush!

 

HUGE Congrats to you Matt !!

Must have been a blast out there. I see the carnage in the first turns on MotoGP all the time, doing that with a field full of rookies much have been something else !

Congrats on taking that step, no one achieves great things without pushing beyond their comfort zone, and you seem to have done just that. Nicely Done, and you have a metal to show for it, make sure that one has a place of honour in the garage, no matter how much more hardware you take home now im sure that one will always be very special.

BTW, will I find a video of the race on your Youtube Channel ??

 

Absolutely. I'm already planning next year based on what I think the CCS Midwest regional weekends are going to be. And preparing to say "No, I don't have any money" when anybody asks me to do anything else, lol. Would The Ridge be your home track then? If you do make it out again, I'd love to hear about it.

I'll shoot you a PM soon about SV stuff so as to not go too sideways on here, but that'd be awesome. I'm working out my list of "wants", "needs", and "dreams" now, and trying to prioritize what's important vs. what can wait. I'm thinking "comfort" will be the #1 priority--especially with front controls.

Yeaaa, we're unfortunately spread out as hell here. I'd love to go out to Barber someday though.

There is one specific spot on track that I wish I had motocross and (really any) dirt experience with. I have this mental fear in the bus stop area of clipping the side of my bike or peg on a spot by putting my front tire too close to it. I've worked on it literally every track day, and on our track walk I even made a point to kneel next to it to show myself I physically couldn't clip my peg there. But at speed I'm just hesitant to put my front wheel in an exact spot. I feel like if I had some dirt/motocross experience, I wouldn't think twice about it.

Competition is competition. I'm guessing the rush is very similar no matter which motorcycle grid you line up on.

Thanks Stray--it was definitely a blast. One of those things I was absolutely overthinking and psyching myself out of, and it turned out to be one of the better decisions I've made not to postpone it for any longer.

I wish I would have taken more video or even pictures of the weekend, but I was pretty focused on not having any other distractions, so I only recorded the final race. The first two were actually exciting, the final one just has me getting passed by about 4 bikes into the first corner, then catching my foot because I wasn't thinking in turn 6, getting passed by a KTM 390 (that I know has a really fast rider on it), and then following him for as long as I could and setting my quickest lap. Then I never see another bike the rest of the race.

I'm going to put something together though talking about it--mainly the logistical stuff because it's pretty sparse. I'll have something up this weekend most likely. I was watching/listening to the video of your ZX7R fender modification and the careful work you were taking... laughing to myself that if you saw what I did to the fender on my SV650 you'd have gasped, hahaha.

 

+1 on the vid question from Stray!

 

You don't need to see how slow I am. Just imagine a good lap at Blackhawk Farms and then set the playback speed to 0.75x, and then that'll be it.

Kidding. I'll share it when I get a chance later this week to put something together.

Another guy I met that day was in the same position as me. He's a bit quicker and also on an SV650--though his is a SuperBike build w/ GSXR 180 rear and some more goodies. His starts were a bit more ambitious than mine. We're in 2nd wave here, first wave is already launched. We were both wearing our blue "Learning Curves" shirts to make it obvious to approaching riders that we're on our first day. That was tough to fit a medium T-shirt over my leathers and Helite vest. I almost wanted to rip the helite vest ripcord just watch the tshirt explode.

 

Excellent photo!

FYI, you do not want to go to the 180 rear. It is too much tire for the SV and will make the predictable handling go away. You also loose some of your power to weight ratio. 160 all day long. If anything get a fancy lightweight front wheel. I had a 16.5" marvic front and it was too small. It made the front too knife edge. I think the 16.5 is for larger people 200+. I traded for a 17" marvic and it was sublime! My buddy who traded was 230+ and loved the easy turn in on the 16.5".
I had a superbike build with 06' gsxr front but honestly the original forks with some good race insides will work real nice. I raced superbike and stock at the same time and the stocker was almost as good handling wise. Although I was going slightly slower.

 

I have my pop corn ready

 

These things sure come apart a lot quicker than they go back together. I've been piecing everything together over the last few weeks, and finally got it to a point where I thought I might have a shot at riding it this weekend before temps go below freezing. I still haven't touched any of the parts I want to spray yellow (forks and fairings), but I did get quite a few parts sprayed black and used the 2K spraymax to hopefully help them last.

I've made... quite a few mistakes reassembling and painting. However, when I went to put the carburetors in I lined them up and was going to grab my hair dryer to heat the boots and figured, ehhhhh... let's just try it quick with the two tiny screwdrivers. Had it in in 2 minutes. That used to take me hours. That was neat.

Anyway, it fired almost immediately. Maybe I can thank those new #40 pilots that were suggested. That was pretty neat. Everything sounded brilliant and I just kept waiting for the ball to drop and the engine to explode because I did something wrong with the oil pump swap or perhaps the coolant pump seal that needed to be replaced.


I painted, stripped, painted, stripped, and repainted this chain cover piece because I just kept messing it up. The art of the wet coat isn't an easy one learned for me. I'm happy with how this bit turned out though, so hopefully the clear coat holds up at least a little bit. It's got me thinking about doing some more pieces if it makes it a while. Every time I look at the thing I see 100 items I want to improve..


Then I went to install the front brakes, and I noticed I had a duplicate piece. Son of a bitch, lol. I sprayed the broken caliper mounting piece. That shouldn't happen again.


Anyway, I noticed I had a leak on the lower radiator hose. I sprayed the outsides of the radiator, but otherwise didn't touch it. So I've been starting the bike and repositioning the clamps and whatnot to try to eliminate the leak. It wouldn't go away. So I thought it might be the sensor, and I PTFE-taped the threads just to try to see if it would stop.


Nope. That wasn't it. I saw a small drip start uphill. There is a small pinhole leak above on the radiator. Gahhhhh... I'm not sure how to really go about fixing this. I'm not even sure how it would have happened. Maybe removing the sensor stressed that section. I barely even handled the radiator. You can see the bubble forming and I'm pretty certain the cause is right above.


You can see the bubble pointed to with green and I circled the spot I think it's coming from. I guess I've got some more research in front of me. I assume some aircraft stripper to try to take off all the paint in that area and then remove as much as possible as gently as possible. That's about what I know. I have one experience working with copper in my life--less than a month after I moved into my house and I heard a storm in my basement. Turns out the old water heater rusted and blew out and was flooding everything. Installed a new one and soldered in a new copper pipe. As you can see, it's a work of art (lol). It's held a while though..


So yea. Not rideable yet. I want to make sure the engine is all good with some actual riding before I start on the fairings and forks though.

Anyone have recommendations on how to go about repairing a tiny radiator leak?


And yes I owe you both (stray and rogue) vid from my first race day. I just figured I'd get around to putting something together after I had the VF running first since I want to ride it before hibernation season! I've been riding my VStrom because it's the only highway speed-capable bike I've got running right now, and it's sooooooo boring in comparison.

 

You should be able to get that welded at a radiator shop.

 

I've got a stupid question--is this radiator brass or aluminum? I just assumed it was brass based on the color of the outlets and the temperature sensor threads.

I googled "radiator shop" and was explaining to the guy the issue. I asked about price and he said "well with these aluminum radiators you got about a 50/50 shot on whether it can be welded, but if I can it'd be $80-100". That's when I mentioned that I thought it was brass, and he said that would be easier. But now I'm second guessing it.

Tempted to just try some JB Weld since it's such a tiny leak that only presents itself once it gets hot and pressurized, but maybe I ought to let someone qualified take the reigns on this one.

 

Aluminum (he says with near certainty). I've seen the coloring you are talking about, and I think its a chem treatment like Alodine.

Let the pros do what they do. Do you want your "repair" to fail out in the middle of nowhere?