F X S T E I N - Frankenstein's blog

THE countdown is on!

Less than 10 days before the new Max will hit the streets!

Go check it out!

www.starVmax.com

Upgrading an RS Warrior front brake system

For years I have not been too happy with my front brakes on the custom Yamaha Roadstar Warrior Turbo 21 of mine. Especially after chroming the master cylinder and reservoir of the front brake system, braking power was very washy and would fade quickly.

Very hard stops where virtually impossible. Even the Galfer front rotors could not get the brake to bite.

I was pretty sure for a while that the root cause was the chroming of the piston housing that messed up the master piston slightly. Bet even on a stock Warrior the front brake could use a little more bite.

Off I went to do some research on options. I looks at everything from custom PM controls, over various other makes until I arrived pretty much back where I started: Looking at Yamaha OEM parts. A trip to the local Yamaha dealer here in San Jose, quickly gave me a new idea:

Some of the 2007s and pretty much all of the 2008s of the Yamaha R series come stock with a radial master cylinder and an external fluid reservoir. At first I was a bit unsure as the new radial master cylinder comes with a 16 bore compared to the Warrior's stock 14 bore. Usually mixing bores of master cylinders is not a good idea.

I took the chance and ordered up a setup through the OEM parts service. Instead of the OEM levers however, I went with nice, adjustable aftermarket levers. Instead of the external fluid reservoir I decided for the more and more popular clear silicon hose approach ;-). A short piece of clear silicon hose acts as the reservoir and allows for a clear view to the brake fluid level.

Installation took about 30 min. At first I installed the master cylinder without modification and the slightly larger handlebar diameter of the Warrior was not the perfect fit, it worked for a couple test rides but after that I decided to slightly bore out the handlebar mounting point on the master cylinder.

After everything was installed I went for a ride through town, testing the new brake setup.

Wow - This is truly a match made in heaven! The new radial master cylinder coupled with a Galfer SS brake line, Galfer Wave rotors and the OEM (none-radial) calipers work perfectly together. Hard stops from 80 mph take only 2 fingers. The adjustable levers are super easy to dial in and add to the overall fit.

In fact I was able to brake so hard that my front forks started to almost bottom out on me. The front tire (Dunlop D220) easily kept up on the warm tarmac surface after a beautiful spring day here in NorCal.

For all of you looking to improve the front brake dramatically, this setup is for you. You decide if you want an external reservoir or if you do like I did and go with the more techno look of a clear silicone hose shorty.

Combine with custom aftermarket brake and clutch levers it gives the bike also a nice racy look.

By the way the mod can easily be done to most common Star motorcycle models including the VMax. Lets hope the new VMax comes standard with these radials.

Hope you enjoy it and as always: Mod on your risk and ride safe!

Turbo 21 on New Camera

Time to get a decent camera kit for my bikes. Got myself a kit form www.HelmetCamera.com

Took the Turbo on a spin through town on this beautiful spring day here in Northern California. Enjoy the little movie!

Ride safe!

New Custom Fuel Map available for download

It has been a busy fall season so far. Lots of work going on and far too little riding. I finally got around to create another custom fuel map for the following setup:

Yamaha Star Roadliner/Stratoliner with Patrick Racing BAK and Roadhouse slipon. Make sure you unhook the OEM O2 sensor when you run this map. Leave the exup valve in place. Click the following link to choose between the available maps and download the one that matches your setup: Perfect Custom Fuel Maps

Enjoy and ride safe!

Warriors at Deals Gap - Tail of the Dragon

I finally got around to posting up our last trip to the Dragon in 2006. Boy did we have a blast! This video was taken by Mike (HUGE THX!). He knows this road inside out so he had an easy time hanging with me the Dragon newbie. Well here it is - enjoy!

Ride safe!

The Ultimate RS Warrior Ping Stop!

Many Yamaha Roadstar Warrior owners have upgraded their engines with High Compressions pistons for more power and better fuel economy. Unfortunately that newfound power often comes with a dangerous engine ping, that - if left uncorrected - can damage the engine in the long run. With 92 Octane fuel for most parts of the country, it only takes a hot day for the engine to start pinging under load.

There is multiple ways to fix that ping syndrom, and there is many way NOT to do it. Lets start with the stuff you should NOT do:

Pining cannot be fixed by changing the fuel map. Some tuners will suggest to richen up the part of the map where the engine pings. Not good at all. You need to go rather rich on fuel and it will still ping in certain situations. Running the engine rich will not permanently stop the ping, will cause you to get bad gas mileage and will cost you power, the primary reason why somebody installed high compression pistons.

Pining can also NOT be fixed with various fuel additives. Stop wasting your time on these snake oils that raise your Octane levels from 92 to 92.5 Octane, at several dollars per tank and again at the cost of loosing power for puring almost nonburnable liquids into your gas.

So how do you do it?

There are a couple things you can do to stop the ping:

First you can go buy higher quality gas - 100 Octane race gas will fix the ping. Rather expensive proposition at 5-8 bucks per gallon and rarely available when you do a trip.

Second, and this is the first real mod, you can reduce the timing of the ignition. It does remove the ping but also at the cost of power across the entire rpm range. Filing the timing wheel is also tricky and can cause a lot more ignition retard than planned for. For than and other reasons, I don't recommend it and won't go into details about how to do it here.

Lastly lets talk about the ultimate fix that works, gives you top power and economy across the entire rpm range and can be done in a few hours. We recently did this mod to 357Warrior's tricked out Warrior. He runs stock displacement high compression pistons and has had his fair share of the engine ping. The whole mod took about 4.5h, but that also included the installation of a wideband commander.

The mod is very simple but requires you to remove the heads of the engine. This can be done with the engine in the frame. Total time should be less than 3.5h.

The Yamaha Roadstar Warrior uses a multi layer head gasket when using the OEM gaskets. In order to fight the bad ping we simply double up on the head gasket for a touch more compression chamber volume. This enables the engine to run with High Compression pistons like the ones sold by Yamaha as part of the Stage IV setup. Make sure you replace ALL gaskets when you take of the heads. There is a valve cover gasket and a rocker box gasket in addition to the head gaskets. If you want to go safe all the way you might also replace the cylinder base gaskets, but I have been doing this mod on several bike without changing the base gasket and no oil leaks.

Without the base you therefor need 4 gasket sets. 1 valve cover, 1 rocker box, 2 head gaskets per cylinder. When torquing doen the heads with double head gaskets, make sure you take your time and criss cross the main bolts ever so slightly until you hit the torque as specified in the shop manual. I usually go 2 ftlbs OVER the OEM settings for these bolts.

Put the bike together, fill in 92 Octane and enjoy your newly found ping less power. Don't forget to cleanup your map, in case you got one from a tuner that was supposed to fix the ping in the first place. It will be overly rich during midrange, right there where you ride the bike most of the time. Your gas mileage should go up.

With this fix I recommend you map the AF ratio of the bike to 14.5:1 at or below 20% throttle and 13.2:1 for more than 20% throttle.

The stock lifters will compensate for the extra height in most cases. However I recommend you install adjustable pushrods (and the matching pushrod cover) during this mod, like the ones sold by Patrick Racing, it will make adjustments much easier in the future and you can do your valve adjustments without the need to removed the head covers.

As always: PERFORM ANY MODIFICATIONS AT YOUR OWN RISK!

Ride safe!

S T A R V M A X - The Next Generation Yamaha Star VMax Community

S T A R V M A X - www.starvmax.com has recently opened its doors. The site is still under development and some features are not yet fully implemented. Go check out the site, signup and provide your feedback in the froum section. Over time we are planning to make this the #1 premier internet destination for the All New 2008 Yamaha Star VMax.

The site is free and signup is simple. Just register and wait for the confirmation email. Once registered you can post in the forums, submit News Articles and WebLinks. We will soon add a custom Gallery and a full online community to it. The design and color schema is preliminary but it works for now. Good luck and enjoy!

Customizing the Next Generation 2008 Yamaha Star VMax

Ever since the original VMax hit the roads in the 1980s, it has been a bike that captured the imagination of many bike owners and custom bike builders. When the VMax was released it was the fastest production motorcycle in the world and it would take many years before another bike would even come close to its power numbers. It was not designed as a canyon carver or a track bike, its single purpose was to go as fast as possible down a straight line. And boy did it do it well! Many Power Cruisers and street fighters still fall way short of reaching the acceleration of the old - all mighty - VMax.

After some 20 years Yamaha is about to release the next generation VMax. Awaited for 2008, the bike will set new standards for most powerful.

Early pictures of the prototype have been floating on the Web for a few years now. Yamaha has a dedicated web site for the pre-launch and to conduct consumer surveys: www.next-vmax.com

The bike is still surrounded by lots of rumors, figures like 1400-1800cc displacement, 210+ hps and facts like its next generation variable valve timing system, true ram air setup as well as possible ABS, linked braking and traction control.

No matter how the final bike will turn out, people like myself will want to make it our very special one-of-a-kind, make it our own.

Sure enough I find myself thinking and planning for when the bike will hit my custom bike shop. Here is a first glimpse of what could happen:

Lets start out with straight line performance. It seems Yamaha is not going to make it easy on me with their shaft drive, but if they can get rid of it, I will for sure. The rear swing-arm will get a 4-6" stretch, matched up with a proper chain drive and at least a 240 rear tire setup.

To fill the extra space between the tire and the front of the swing-arm, a good old NOS bottle will have to find its mount in there. An extra 50-75hps shot above 6000 rpm should help the variable cams mimic the good old VBoost even better. Of course we are talking computer controller NOS, would not want to blow up the engine too early. Most likely another Dynojet Wideband Commander that will make it onto this bike.

I am not completely sure about the lighting system. Right now I am leaning towards a high power LED setup to replace the main headlight combined with some air-box internal lightning to better accent the air intakes.

I don't expect the wave rotors to make it onto the production bike either. It could mean a set of Galfers jut like on the turbo.

As for the paint job I have some early ideas down on paper, sorry but these won't be shared until it gets actually done. Expect to see a mean monster, maybe even get parts of the engine a different color treatment to accent some of it features.

At above stated power figures, I don't believe a turbo or super charger will be necessary, although I said the very same thing just 1 year before I bolted a turbo onto a Yamaha Roadstar Warrior.

Round it out with some mean looking accessories, like bar end mirrors and custom foot pegs. And of course a Dynojet Power Commander PCIII (maybe a PCIV by then) combined with quick-shifter to yank the bike down the quarter mile.

Too bad we are still about a year away from the arrival of the All New - All Mighty - Yamaha Star VMax.

The Ultimate Road Star Warrior Search for eBay

Would you like to try out a new fun way to find you favorite RS Warrior items on eBay? Well here it is: eBay To Go. This little widget is preloaded with my favorite eBay Warrior search. It will find misspelled, mis categorized items and is simple to browse. Just browse through the items and click on anything interesting.

Enjoy!

Perfect Custom Fuel Map on the Dyno

After having received lots of requests to dyno one of my custom maps posted on this blog, I finally went ahead and did a few dyno pulls earlier today. San Jose Yamaha just finished installing their dyno equipment and have been pulling a few Roadliners over the past few weeks. None of the equipped like the FXLiner but good for some comparisons. The FXLiner used for this particular dyno run has several modifications installed that all need to be mentioned before you can read too much into those numbers. First off the bike has a modified rear end with a 240 wide tire conversion kit. Having done similar runs on various RS Warriors before I know that the 240 kit eats rear wheel power by about 2-4 hps.

This is primarily caused by the extra mass of the larger rim and tire. More mass to spin up = less rear wheel power.

In addition the bike has a wet nitrous system installed that was not active for this baseline test run. However the wet NOS nozzles create some extra turbulence inside the intakes reducing top power by about 1-2 hps.

Thats the bad news. The good news is that the Patrick Racing HiFlo BAK more than compensates for those losses. The bike had the OEM stock exhaust installed with the EXUP valve hooked up. The Stock O2 sensor was disconnected and a perfect fuel map for this setup was loaded into the Power COmmander PCIII USB. Instead of the OEM O2 sensor a wideband sensor is installed as part of the Dynojet Wideband Commander. The Wideband Commander does not increase or decrease power as it is only a measurement device to record the AF settings of the bike.

With these modifications the bike pulled a strong 94 rwhps and about 109 ft-lbs of torque. Given the 240 conversion and the wet NOS nozzles losses, that should compare to 98-99 rwhps for a Yamaha Star Roadliner/Stratoliner with only the PR HiFlo BAK and a PCIII.

As soon as I have the Cobras back on I will do another dyno pull in order to compare the pipes to the OEM exhaust. If I get my hands on another set of exhausts I might include those as well. With the Cobras back on I will also include a NOS run to see how much power gets added through the wet nitrous setup.

As always: Ride safe!