My learning

Project Marlboro

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Or ‘How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the TRX’

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve really liked the TRX850 since I bought it a couple years back, and it made me regret not buying one back when they were being sold as the desperately unpopular critter they were back pre-Y2K. Sadly though the green was my least fave colour to start with, and the green on this one was looking old and tatty, along with the once repainted yellow wheels looking very battered. With shed space all filled up and my opportunities to ride far less frequent than when I was working at Yamaha World, a cosmetic overhaul was the most logical step. Take a bike I loved riding, and make it one I could also love looking at. I’ve always loved the retro Marlboro Racing colour schemes, I’ve seen a couple of other TRXs done up in similar tribute styles overseas, and riding around on a Rainey YZR500 tribute would feel pretty bloody cool…

The starting point – aside from the yellow wheels, blue spot calipers, Keihin flatslides and aftermarket cans, one stock 1997 TRX850.

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Metamorphosis

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It’s hard to know where to start in explaining the eleven months since my last post. For now I think I’ll leave it as saying I’ve had a career change, and I’m now working where I probably should have been a long time ago – in a motorcycle dealership. There’s of course plenty more to it than that, but to write about it isn’t something I can do just yet – there are too many tangled threads to pull together into a post that wouldn’t help me as the narrator or you as the reader to gain anything from it. Perhaps my brain, which had for so long worked to wrap structured models around complex scenarios, has finally accepted defeat in a war that it was never going to win anyway.

Enough crypticism.

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Taking it to the track

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A work colleague who has just got his motorbike license asked me the other day how to get into track riding, and even though there are plenty of other ‘tips for track days’ information out there I thought I’d go right back to the beginning for, well, the absolute beginner. Why should I do it … Read more

Done. No, really this time.

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Well, the saga of the 1989/90 FZR600 is over. Like, I’m seriously done with it. Countless hours, far more dollars than I’ll ever see again, many tears of frustration spilled on the shed floor, but it’s done. The rebuild the second time around was far less stressful. A big part of this was getting the … Read more

Not done

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Well.

Eighteen months is a long time, particularly when that time includes COVID-19, a change in jobs and a whole lot of change in the bike space, including the realisation that Project FZR is indeed not done.

Or at least the main Project FZR.

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