Tech: Project Victory
VIVA LOST VEGAS Of course, there is customising and there’s customising. It’s an all-embracing term that covers anything from fitting new grips to taking a gas-axe to the frame which, for the sake of clarity, I’ll refer to as dressing and chopping, but that still leaves a massive range of things under the generic banner, and we’re resurrecting the Project Victory to show just how complicated things can be ... aided by the lack of a comprehensive parts catalogue Remember our original long term Vegas? In fact it never went away, and our plans aren’t much different than those we outlined years ago, but it’s testament to those complexities that it hit a dead stop and just ended up getting used instead. The reason? The interconnectedness of everything.
“The head bone’s connected to the neck bone”, as we all know, and much the same is true of a bike. We’d fitted the brilliant Bike Buddy Pro Air Ride, supplied by Nick Gale, in place of the original monoshock; blacked-out the swing-arm and footrest hangers in powder coat, thanks to John J Wilkinsons, who is on our doorstep in Crewe; fitted a pair of drag bars on revised risers from the Pure Polaris range and we had replaced the speedo and tacho with the then-new motogadget mini, which was held in place on the right-hand ’bar, by double-sided sticky pads, where it was dwarfed by the stock switchgear. And then we hit a dead stop because any of the next stages that we wanted to do would impact on lots of other things that we weren’t ready to sort out.
Don’t let anyone tell you that customising motorcycles is easy. And the reason why we’re moving forwards again is two-fold: our friends at motogadget brought out the M-unit, and long-time reader John Mander sold his Vegas to buy the first Cross Country in the UK. Sorry? Okay, so the easy bit first. John had re-rimmed his front wheel and fitted a 120/70x21 to his 2003 92/5 Vegas – an identical model to ours – before he swapped the whole front end for the USD forks of the Hammer/Jackpot. We’ve been talking to John since he mothballed the revised wheel, but never actually managed
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12/1/11 02:08:02