Change Of Plan

Life’s never straight forward, just like Bruce’s project bike.

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You’ve got to bloody love technology! And Lee Kempson, of L74 Track & Race Products (www.l74.co.uk) too. He came to my rescue with the Suzuki yokes quandary by tackling the job of producing the bespoke items needed to narrow the width of the fork legs. To get that ball rolling it was a simple case of taking measurements of the width, the thickness and the recesses needed for the Moto3 bike’s new yokes.

Armed with that info, Lee, who’s not just a handy bike racer but also an exceptional engineer, created a CAD design of the yokes and then set about 3D printing them.

Maybe the canny eyed among you saw a few pictures of the printing process on our Facebook site, to which there were a few questions as to why we’d bothered to print them and not just machine them out of billet alloy. Well, the answer is simple; if we cocked up, it meant we hadn’t spunked out a load of cash on CNC machining. Plus, it meant we could get our filthy mits on the parts practically overnight. And that’s pretty much how things panned out.

Lee cracked on and got us the solid-state plastic yokes within 48 hours of dropping him a line, which was nothing short of exceptional. What was less impressive was our ingenuity. I should clarify here that when I say ‘our’ I mean ‘my’, because I messed up a few calculations, as Clive pointed out when fitting the fancy bits of plastic.

Full circle