WTF? I hear you say. Yeah I know, madness. But as it turns out, something very different and lots of fun, so lets look at how to do some basic low cost mods to your bike to maximize your fun at the strip.

First of all, let’s clear things up. I want to go drag racing on my CRF450R. Bitumen. I’m going to attend the Bairnsdale Motor Expo and there is a drag meeting linked in with that on the Saturday night, with me invited.

I’ve never been drag racing and fully believe that not only might it be some fun, but I might learn something in the process.

So, let’s see what I can do to the 450 to get her up to speed.

It’s all about the launch. Dirt bikes are way short in the wheel base and wheelie way too much, so working out how to keep the front down is a good start. Wheelstands necessitate reducing the power by either backing off the throttle or slipping the clutch, neither of which promote faster times down the strip.

I dropped the forks through the clamps as far as they would go, so they topped out on the handlebars. This way I picked up around and inch and a half and the bike started to get that nose - down ’stinkbug’ look.

Then I went to the arse end and wound up the rear preload to buggery. I’m now running about zero static sag and only about 60 mm of race sag (with me on the bike wearing full race kit).

Whilst at the back, I wound both the low and high speed compression damping up to max.

Why? To prevent ’squat’, or lowering of the rear under acceleration. Squat promotes wheelstands.

Then I went to gearing. The strip I was riding on is only 1/8 mile, or around 200 metres. Stock gearing would be too short and I’d be on the limiter before the end, reducing top end speed and my times.

So I cracked out a 44 tooth rear sprocket I had left over from Finke and bolted it up. This had the effect of not only raising the gearing nicely, but also maximising the wheelbase.

Obviously, the further the rear wheel is set to the back, the less chance of a wheelie. Mine is as far back as it will go. Note I used the standard crappy non O - ring chain, which also has less resistance and therefore picks up about 1/4 of a horsepower at the back wheel. Every bit helps.

Then I thought of tyres. Yeah, knobbies would have been okay, but I wanted the motard look. I just happened to have some older roadie tyres lying around in the OOT stack. I also happened to have a new CRF450X lying about, so I stole the wheels off the X and bolted on the 21″ front and 18″ rear roadie rubber.

The X and R wheels are fully interchangeable, which is great. Ditto with the 250 and 450.

It was starting to take on the motard look and was gaining potential with every step.

Last but not least was the Coup de Resistance (sorry, can’t do the little french thingies to make it look like ‘resistonce’). Whilst at Honda HQ picking up our bikes, I bumped into Pip Harrison who offered to plug the bike into his laptop and upload some cool curve he had developed for one of their gun racers.

The thing has electronic fuel injection and one can change the ignition and or jetting via a keystroke. We opted for slightly more bottom end and more over - rev. The extra over - rev comes principally from it being leaned out slightly in the top end, with perhaps a little less ignition advance.

Did it make any difference? Shit yeah! The thing goes similarly down low, but now is way happier to haul bulk revs in the top end. It might not produce much more total power, but is way happier to scream away, allowing the lunatic rider to hold gears longer and therefore on a racetrack potentially shift less often. It used to ’sign off’ and just stop revving, but now is mad man.

Unfortunately the ordeal with the laptop was over in about 30 seconds and I got no photos.

I had no choice but to test it. Being Rec. Regd. it was fully legal to run up and down the bitumen road at my front door.

Without breaking the law of course, corner speed was wild with the extra grip of the tyres and lowered front end.

It had so much traction, a wheelie was inevitable every time I tried a race start. In my case, second gear was the go, at about 1/4 throttle and with some clutch slip. After about 10 metres and once I could get my feet on the pegs and the front close to the bitumen, then it was on for young and old at full throttle.

I still had to lean over the front the stop the wheelies.

I was pleasantly surprised how hard the thing pulled and it will be interesting to see how she goes against the other bikes and cars Saturday night.

In fact, the race has been done and dusted and the results are in, but I don’t have the photos yet, so you’ll have to wait. Surprising results, I must say.

I was never under any illusion though that the piss ant wheelbase and comparably piss ant power output would allow times that were anywhere near competitive. I just wanted to reduce the chances of me (and Victoria Police) looking like the whole toolbox on the night.

Being a fan of the Transformer movies, I couldn’t help but come up with the name MEGATRON for the newest addition to the OOT fleet.

I’ve been after some type of track building device for some time and have been surfing e bay and the Trading Post for over six months, working out what’s available and at what cost.

The RUDD rebate cut the cost of all industrial equipment and tractors overnight, with heaps of blokes taking advantage of the 50% rebate and updating their gear. A huge influx of second hand gear for sale has seen prices drop. Two years ago, you would have paid perhaps 10 or 12 grand all day for something like a Massey Ferguson MF40 industrial loader/backhoe, which is an old 2WD 1970s jigger based on a tractor.

Now you can probably get a 4WD tractor with a front end loader for that.

It’s been somewhat of a quandary wondering what to buy.

A bobcat is easy to use and bulk fast. But they can’t dig for shit and haven’t really got much grunt. Once you’ve built your track, the Bobcat is the king of track maintenance, but a track builder it’s not.

A wheeled loader is pretty cool, with much more grunt than a Bobcat, but again, they can’t dig much. And dig you must to source dirt for jumps and berms. Big - arsed wheeled loaders are also fairly pricey.

A dozer is a cool bit of gear. They don’t stop for much and effectively mulch as they go. Run a dozer around your preferred track layout and you end up with a few inches of churned up mega - roosty - loamy stuff to hool about on like an idiot until it becomes hard packed.

Dozers can’t pick dirt up though and aren’t a backhoe, so they don’t dig real good. They also tend to churn everything up wherever they go. It’s hard to ‘tread lightly’ in a D6.

A Drott would be cool. A Drott is like a dozer, with tracks and perhaps a backhoe. You can get ‘em with a four in one loader bucket on the front. Very serious bit of kit for track building, but out of my price range.

What is then the most universal bit of kit? MEGATRON.

The girls favour the name ‘Bumblebee’ because it’s yellow like the dude off Transformers of the same name. He’s a Massey Ferguson MF 40 ‘Industrial Loader/Backhoe’.

He’s got a Perkins 4 cylinder diesel (albeit in this case fully rooted), an industrial strength front end loader, an industrial strength backhoe and a powerful hydraulic pump that runs both. No waiting for slow old tractor hydraulics here, this thing has some grunt.

And no brakes to speak of.

Limited stability, as it turns out, unless the outriggers are down.

The air conditioning is basic.

The whole unit looks fairly rude, really.

I bought her for the princely sum of two grand, knowing fully well that her engine sucked, but acknowledging that apart from that she was a reasonable platform from which to build a valuable tool.

I had her asessed by Des the local tractor guru prior to purchase. I cast my eye over the rig, checking out bushes and pins for wear. All looked pretty good. Sure, there was surface rust, but that was hardly an issue.

She could be started and her bits went up and down as they should, with minimal leakage, which was a good sign.

I got her home on Ernie’s tray truck.

I just had to give her a run.

The bitch smoked liked a joint. She then took a leaf out of Transformers and urinated hydraulic oil all over me when I tried to use the backhoe. Her brakes were rude and slewed uncomfortably to the left when applied, not helped in the slightest by the slew of the heavy backhoe thingy bolted to the back, which was leaking and didn’t bloody work that good.

It’s motor ran, but had only a portion of the grunt it should have had. Despite it’s issues, the thing was a beast and had heaps of potential.

I was able to run down trees up to around 6 inches diameter with ‘gay abandon’. I’m not boasting about environmental destruction here, but I have soft sandy soil and some feral regrowth that needs to be removed. The trees are now scared and appear to be retreating further into the forest.

I can dig a bit. The loader bucket has some mumbo by itself as long as the back wheels have grip enough to push it along.

The backhoe has some serious mumbo, despite it’s urinating disposition.

Any idiot can drive it. Select your ratio (effectively a 4 speed) then push on forwards or reverse with your right foot. Yep, it’s a bloody auto with a torque converter.

Please ignore the type from the photo above. It’s quite obvious on closer inspection that Right = push shit over and Left = go backwards to line up more shit to push over.

The pedal in the middle allows more revs to be added to speed up the loader actuation or road speed of the whole shebang. Believe me, She Bangs!

So, it’s rebuild time.

I’ve sent the offending leaking hydraulic line from the backhoe off to my local guru and $80 later the digger from hell is right to wreak havoc.

The motor is fully rooted. A cursory inspection of the intake hose revealed a rudely large orifice that had allowed the ingestion of approximately 347.5 Kgs of local dirt into the motor. Yes, the same motor that effectively now has no rings. No rings = No power. Bummer.

This pipe runs between the air cleaner and the injectors and yes I found a fair bit of dirt in the injectors too, so it’s all gotta come apart.

I’ve had much better luck with the loader. I set about greasing the bejeesus out of every nipple in sight. I came unstuck almost immediately when a few nipples resisted my advances. Grease spewed forth on my side of the nipple, obviously not getting anywhere near the shit that actually needed the lube.

So I took the stress off the pins by lowering the bucket to the ground lightly, so they’d come out easy. Removal of the pins showed that it was not the nipple that was at fault, but the hole in the pin that allowed the flow of grease.

The grease runs from the nipple, through a hole running along the centre of the pin, then into another hole drilled across the pin allowing the goo to push out and lube the outside of the pin and the inside of the bush or hole it runs in.

I drilled out the holes with my cordless and poked other orifices with wire until the flow was all good again.

Note that grease will follow the path of least resistance, meaning that it’s not certain that everything that needs lubing gets lubed. So to help make sure, I completely removed each pin and greased both the entire pin and the bush it was going back into before replacing it and pumping it with the grease gun.

If I didn’t do this, the grease might just run to the left hand side, like can be seen in the above photo, without actually heading to the right hand side of the pin at all.

These jiggers are based on a Massey 165 or 168 tractor and are ready to have a PTO and three point linkage attached. If I wanted to, I could turn the beast into an agricultural beast that could plough a field.

Having now done pretty much all I either have time for or are capable of, it’s time to float the old girl down to Des’s join to have her motor rebuilt.

If the bore liners are okay (which is doubtful) then we may get away with an in - chassis rebuild, at a cost of maybe only a couple of grand.

I think I’m dreaming though and the dirt will have fully rooted the liners. 5 grand is more like it. Assume the head needs a tune up, the crank needs a grind and the pistonis are rude.

It’s no race weapon and is old, slow and not that capable compared to new and larger equipment available, but compared to a shovel and wheelbarrow it is the shit.

Now all I need is someone to show me how to use it.

I can see Blue grinning right now.

Trendsetters, it seems that despite entries not being officially open for the 2010 Yackandandah Charity Bash, Don has somehow received around 70 applications.

So, it seems entries are open.

Numbers will still be limited to 150 ish so don’t muck about if you want to be part of the adventure, awesome tracks and comaraderie that the bash is famous for.

This will be our fifth bash and the first one that will be run mostly by Don and his band of volunteers. I’ll still be involved, but from a distance via computer and phone to arrange deals with business partners from the motorcycling industry and others such as the Department of Sustainability and Environment.

This year I’m going to ride and will be concentrating hardest on the whole ‘wheelies and skids’ thing. Of course, I’m talking eco - skids here as we try to minimise our impact upon the environment.

Despite Honda very recently announcing the annulment of the Honda Riders Club, with whom we were strongly linked with and even insured under, our operations will continue as normal under the corporate Honda banner.

I look forward to riding with you on the 7th of August.

Bookings to Don (aka puffer - fish) at:

donaldmcinnes@bigpond.com