Wavy discs. No longer only for poseurs.

I have to admit that I chose my Braking wave rotors solely for their, erm... aesthetic value (i.e. I thought they looked cool). Imagine my surprise when I flipped through the pages of the latest issue of Performance Bikes, and found their test, aptly named, "Do wavy discs work?". It turns out they do. They (PB) swapped the standard discs on an R1 for the exact same disc type that I'm using, and the wavy beauts actually made the big Yamaha stop quicker. Significantly quicker in fact. They suffered less fade too. What was it they used to say at the Bauhaus school? Function follows form? or was it the other way around?

Fruit of the loom.

Does anyone know where all this crap goes? Jokes aside, I actually took the precaution of labeling most of the connectors, before I tore the bike down. Thankfully, the wiring loom is quite straightforward. It's no Gold Wing after all. No hand warmers, no GPS, no radio, not even a battery. My only concern right now is how to feed the Vapor computer with power, without running the risk of frying its little electronic brain... If it comes to that, I might have to read the instructions. Even if I consider that cheating.

Exhaust hanger.

I mentioned that I didn't like the look of the standard exhaust hanger clamp/band that was supplied with my Supertrapp exhaust. And that I wanted a somewhat tidier looking solution. This is how it turned out.

We welded a little stainless "stud" (is that the word?) with some M8-treads in it onto the back of the exhaust, bolted a new hanger to the stud and then welded a mount for the hanger on the underside of the tube supporting the seat unit. The hanger was laser cut out of 3 mm stainless, which is a little bit too Krauss-Maffei, but there was a little bit of a miscommunication over the material choice between me and the supplier... Since I had planned to powder coat it black anyway, and the hanger isn't very heavy, I chose to keep it. It's too bad you can't make a whole frame out of stainless (It's too brittle) – I just love the feeling of longevity you get with properly manufactured stainless pieces. Pardon the crap mobile phone-image.