I picked the bike up yesterday from Laurie (SuspensionSmith), and got it home yesterday to strip off the fairings and begin the repair. Damage wise I was very lucky, only minor aesthetic stuff to the fairings, and a crack across the front right cowl where the bike flipped, so a touch of fibreglass and some plastic putty and they'll be as good as new. I did manage to bend both rear set mounting plates, but I'll throw them in the press.
So, back to the suspension. This is a new bike to me, I've done one day at Wakefield and it took all day to get comfy, but I thought it was alright, so although I knew the suspension needed to be set to me, I wasn't rushing to go and see Laurie as I didn't think it was urgent. Lesson learned. The forks are off of an earlier model R6, 05 by the looks of things, and they had just been jammed into the lower triple clamp. Laurie had real problems taking this all apart, and once he had, it wasn't going back together, so the lower triple was replaced. The forks themselves weren't damaged, the oil level was far too high to allow any compression (@Marshy, the other fork was nearly full!) and the headstem bearing was quite loose. The spacing in the steering dampner was off too, but I new about this and had rectified it for the day, the crash bumped it back however. There was some routing issues with the cables (hence why the throttle was sticky) and a few other small things out of place: all in all, whoever had the bike before me had done a hack job at putting it back together. The guy I bought it from knew nothing about this, so he must have been genuine when he said he had only done a day or two on it before selling (it was his second bike for racing).
What all this means is that as the bike was leaning, nothing was behaving right. The geometry was completely off from the forks being forced into the clamp, and obviously with no ability to compress the forks, the front tyre had no ability to maintain grip. The tyres were definitely at the right pressure (thanks to triple checking with @stevem 's handy air pump) and they are day old GP-A's, so no issues there. Laurie has set the suspension up for me now too, so no more excuses! He'll be at Wakey next time with me too so that we can test and adjust.
I'll be back out at Wakey on the 30th to give it a go, I think my first session will be understandably well behaved, but if anyone can make it come and say hi. I think this has thrown out the St George season for me this year, as I'm not keen to jump straight back into EC in a race on the 31 Jan/01 Feb, with only a test day at Wakefield on 30 Jan, so there goes a third of the season.
Cheers Steve, they are new bearings, they must have come loose in the first stack. All tightened again now, no damage to the head stem luckily.
Cheers again Nick, I really appreciate you taking the time and making sure I didn't get back out there again.
Cheers man, I'll get some pics up when I'm off the work computer. No damage or wear to the forks luckily, just set up all kinds of wrong. I'm fine, no damage to me, the gear did its job.
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