CR500- Road Race bike

Lol

Martek frame here. Might build it, might sell it to do the BRC deal, not sure yet. It IS super sick fab tho.

Took the Vdue bike on a road trip in a rental car to see Gary Braun and get some titanium exhausts made. Hopefully by spring. Then I'll make plans to get it wired and painted and tuned. Stopped off to see my buddy at Haas Racing and get a neat tour.

Took a helmet paint class. I wanna flake and candy everything. That's all. Life's been hectic, but glad to be moving on this again.

 

Yeah, I want to see this thing on the track by summer, so I can figure out where you are doing a track day and I can sign up as well and see the duplicate/beater one(if you want to call it that) running out there
I mostly do NCM these days.......Barber is nice, but with work situations, family and money its a little tough to drive 3-4 hours on Fri and spend the night to do a track day on Sat. And getting up 2am to do the drive on Sat is one of those forget about that things. Younger free'er race days, sure pull an all nighter drive and run all day 100%

Also, very cool on painting. My dad, before he ended up in a wheel chair worked for PPG. The race teams would contract and pay guys that he worked with to paint race cars back in the day, before vinyl wraps and all the crap they do now. If I remember right, he painted a Funny car and a CART race car one time himself doing that stuff, but some of the other guys were painting as many as they could. He knew guys that would go and paint a race car or two just about every week.

What are you painting with a detail spray gun, air-brush or something else?

 

Nothing yet. I have an airbrush that I just got. I'm gonna get a SATA mini-gun, then maybe an IWATA with like a 3.0 tip to push flake thru, and maybe one other gun. Pretty much what the dudes teaching the class were using. Gonna start buying stuff. Have a compressor and shit already. Have a Flake King to do dry flake. Gonna do two DH mtb helmets first then we'll see. I don't have a shop/garage so it'll be outside under a tent for now when it warms up. Do some shit like this:





As for the bike... there's about a 0% chance either move this year. I bet I don't see the Vdue one until Summer, then it still needs wiring, paint, powdercoating, brake lines. The other one, if I keep it... I'd like to just send the roller to Ed Toomey or something and say give me back a running motorcycle. Lord knows what the wait time on that might be. We'll see. I got other priorities this year and a bunch of shit going on. Trying to do everything at once but its annoying. I also have no desire any more to wake up early and be at the track or drive 50 hours to do that. We'll see how that all goes when the time comes. You can come up to Summit or VIR if you want haha, maybe that. Maybe Barber at some point just to go there and see it but that's far as shit.

 

Yeah looking good. Airbrushes are nice, good detail and etc. but yeah any kind of larger area coverage can be kind of a drag with an airbrush.
Dang, that sucks. No garage, where you building these bikes? At work or someone else's shop?

Right, exactly on the drive and all that work, as you get older the less it feels like its worth it, if there is anything even remotely close.
Which Summit and VIR about 2 hours from DC, Barber is like 11 and so is NCM, well 10. NCM is only about 2 hours from me, and VIR and Summit are 8-10 hrs.

Someone needs to invent reliable large scale transporter technology already, sheesh come on.

 

They have, America just sucks and we don't use it haha. And yea... combo of a buddy's shop some and my basement. For the bikes its fine, especially since its just parts and they haven't been ran yet, for painting though I'm shit out of luck. I think when we move in 2-3 years I'll either design out the garage if we have a house built, or I'll get one of those 8x10" shed thingies from HD with a door and windows. My old helmet painter dude used to use one, just had a big fan with a furnace filter where one of the windows was and a stool/bench/stand and worked out of there. Seemed pretty ok. Helmets and the occasional fairing don't need a lot of space at all, just somewhere where the paint won't get all over everything else and things won't contaminate the paint.

 

So I just have to post cause I'm so hyped on them. All the drama with everyone afraid to touch my Astralites, even with a blank check, trying 4 or 5 different shops around DC, and then the one powder shop half restoring them but not really doing it to the level I wanted and just blasting over the rivets, Steve @SpeedWerks Racing swooped in and said send em' his way. Totally blew this shit away. I wanted gold, and I had read of a few dudes drilling their rivets out and replacing with bolts so I definitely wanted something to pop against that and black seemed perfect for my future ideas. Steve said no problem. Finish is impeccable. I got a few ideas for them, but for now just happy to have them forever. Best wheels that have ever lived. Appreciate all meticulous attention to detail on this work. Thanks.

In other news... no other news or movement on my exhausts for the Vdue. If that doesn't move by end of Summer, I'm gonna have to figure something else out... not quite sure what that something else would be though, as I don't know of anyone else that'll make me Ti pipes in America. We'll have to see though. Another wasted year of no progress when I just want to cross the finish line. Anyways... smiles for today:

 

The black bolts were definitely the way to go!

 

What'd we miss?

 

Jan. 2022:

April 2022:

Hey so... remember how I made this post 6 months after dropping my bike off? Well another 1.5 years later, zero movement at all. Went and picked up my bike and now back to square one on ti exhausts after wasting 2 years almost to the exact date (Dec. 2021) and $1500 of transportation/hotel costs to go back and forth to Wisconsin twice. What a neat experience full of joy. The amount of restraint I'm trying to exercise about expressing my feelings here... well, just use this information as you will for any future project considerations.

Anyways... I got 2 potential ideas. One is begging for the good graces of somebody who, if they say yes, will probably cost 3x as much, but at least it'll get done and get done perfectly. The second is, working with my buddy in Florida to design the pipe, test fit it with paper, have him send the file to my buddies in MD to cut out the sections, then they can bend/weld them up here. Got some family stuff to take care of until like mid-February, but hopefully a path forward after that time.

Current thought to start out 2024: i could have just bought an RSA250 for what will end up being the same price and saved myself a bunch of trouble.

 

Any movement on this? Unfortunately the answer is most likely not but wanted to bump the thread. I still look at the parts collection and drool...

 

nope. i appreciate the sentiments though. gonna try and feel some stuff out this winter i think, so maybe it gets going again. i was so dejected about the 2 years wasted by scummy people that can't keep their word, i foreal didn't wanna even look at it for a good while. coming back around to it though and wanting it done again. will let you guys know when there's a change.

edit* answering this question started making me mad again inside haha. too much emotional investment here, not good for me.

 

Can definitely understand that! Just keep concentrating on what an AMAZING machine you will own when it comes to fruition! I mean, c'mon - Vdue! Just saying it gives me chills - can't start to count all the hours spent re-reading articles on that bike, even the bad... (sorry for all the exclamation points - can't help myself)

 

I sure hope its cool man, and I can do cool things with it. At some point I guess i'ma have to be old man track dude and buy all the shit all over again for that. Maybe I can get some tags on it. I'd rather just drive it around the street and put nice lighting in a garage and a leather chair so i can stare at it i think. We shall see, hopefully I can give you some good bike porn eventually.

 

"Old man track dude" - I resemble that remark!

 

yea well, when this started (in my mid-30's) i didn't think so, but now in my 40's i feel like i do too. freakin' time flies.

 

60 here...which I can't believe when I say it or even think it. Next thought is always "Holy shit dude, you're OLD!"

 

54 not so bad as it was a minute ago...

 

I digress... one of you probably still could have had me as your own kid, the other, in between haha. i'll shut up lol