Hope you have had a great festive period , has been difficult getting back into it but needs must & all that

Just before Christmas day I chanced upon a frame that still had it's " legals " , the paperwork was delivered with the licence plate so I spent an hour on Boxing day at my local DVLA getting it transferred into my name.

This gave me a new licence plate from my city , registration into my name , insurance carried forward & city tax transferred  but this is a project for another day

On New Years day I pounced on a bargain buy - what better way to start 2012 ! I just had to have it , this time a complete bike needing a wee bit of TLC so when it arrives hopefully sometime this coming week another project will begin

But, on Christmas day Santa brought me a full bodykit which sparked this build into life.

It was a project always on the " back burner "  , there was one particular model I wanted to build and had started to gather up the parts needed. Over 2yrs the "pile" hadn't grown much as my aim was original parts to build something a bit special so I was resolved in the fact it wasn't going to happen any time soon so started to sell what I had off. Now that the " dream " build was out the way I gave it no further thought but I was still yearning to do something with the basics I had so if chance popped it's head up I was having it & it did

Unlike petrol, me & twostroke do not play well ! My past record has been to successfully blow them up in all manners of failures  Something to do with being lead wristed no matter what , yup, they don't want to know going up a steep gradiant at full throttle but I always gave it a try  The lack of a rev' limiter when you got over the brow also didn't help  My local parts shop kept a regular stock of pistons n rings for me - there was no need to say what I wanted when I walked in

But these were the days when you relied on fresh air to cool that all important top end , you stuffed heat resistant rubber blocks between the fins to stop them ringing and if you were brave enough - drilled 6mm holes in the fins to increase heat dispersion

Tampered with cooler plug ratings , removed the "spannies" and blocked the end up and filled with some fuel and lit the end to de-coke them !  Janspeed & Micron were the pipes of choice - street cred' sky rocketed with these puppies fitted

However:

This is a liqued cooled square four , the best engineering of it's time and the last of the big twostroke era design - it's what the NSR500 in MotoGP ended on. There has got to be some " Moriwaki Man! " bullet proofness with these motors - please!