The RC46 story

I have wanted a clear brake light on the VFR for a little while. When I decided to crack the original lens whilst placing her on the centre stand (NSR got in the way) I opted to spend a tenner more and bought the clear LED unit to replace it. Fitting is fairly straight forward. Just remove the tail unit, disconnecting the wires to the tail light and then unscrew the two bottom screws and inside pair pictured on the right. The LED brake light unit  I opted for uses connectors that replicate the bulbs you would have normally fitted . The bulb holders you already own however wont fir and you have to use the cut down versions that come supplied with the brake light unit.  Once connected it is the reverse process to fit the new brake light unit and pop everything back together. The indicators have resistors prebuilt in so there is no effect to the indicator flash speed. The new unit looks a lot nicer and when the front indicators get changed it should help s...

Image credit  gabitzu79 We get used to our bikes letting us know they have a problem when they vomit their guts up over the back tire so when the dash board starts blinking at you, you are faced with a mix of annoyance at a new problem but relief that you aren't pushing a dead bike back home just yet. The PGM FI unit lets you know it is having bother by leaving the FI light on when the ignition is switched on. To find out the problem you just flick the side stand out and it will blink a code at you in a series of dashes and dots (long and short blinks). The dots are worth 1 and the longer dashes are worth more (I don't have my Haynes manual to hand to give you values, I had a look online and there is allot of bad advice on there from VTEC owners who have a different setup). With this information at hand you can refer to your trusty Haynes manual and pointing you in the general direction of the fault. I initially misread this error code as an injector not working pr...

One of the first tasks I normally perform on a new (to me) bike is to balance the carburettors. This is one of those jobs that never seems to get done as you need specialist tools but can make quite a difference in the day to day running of the bike.  "But wait Gavin, that's an injected motorcycle" I hear you cry. Well this is true but you can still balance the throttle bodies and mine are all over the place.  When I first purchased this bike, the tick over was up at 3.5k rpm when warm. I bottomed out the idle screw and had to also wind back the whole throttle body plate in order to get it near to the 1.5rpm correct idle. Now this might have had something to do with the bike massively over compensating for having a mouse house in the airbox  but with that small obstruction removed I knew the throttle body balance would be out after my fiddling. The first thing obstructing me from doing this right in the first place was that I had lent my carb gauges to a...

 I have never been a fan of coloured screens. It was a big fad with the Gixers to put blue screens on them and I hated it. So despite the fact that in some pictures this screen looks okay I still wasn't a fan. I have had double bubble screens in the past and suffered with melted clocks as a result of them focussing sun light into a clock killing death ray. A quick fix is to wedge a bit of card or your gloves into the bottom of your screen when you park up outside but better still you can paint the inside of the screen at the bottom. A more permanent and elegant solution that I did to my CBR600 FX. As it happens, Powerbronze screens come pre painted and have a nice VFR logo on them. So, as I had accumulated allot of Nectar points, I spent them on a new screen on eBay. The screen is held in by the mirror stems and a cover on the inside of the  front fairing. On the old screen there is also a clip that fits into a slot in the fairing and is slid down to lock it in place and ...

Slow your road! All good things must come to an end; like roads for example. So to improve my bikes ability to avoid hedge diving I picked up some front braided lines. These are in improvement over the OEM hoses as they are stronger, so less prone to bulge under heavy braking. They are also lighter which helps with unsprung weight (something that I am really not bothered  about on this bike). As the old hoses were, well, old. The replacement hoses were doubly needed to bring back a more responsive front brake. As it so happened a helpful chap decided to write his VFR off and chose to break it so I was able to get this Goodrich aluminium braided front hose set for only £17, well it would be rude not to with a full set tipping the scales at £249. On a slight side note, if I were to go new I'd get some Wezmoto hoses . I got some for my NSR250 and they tuned out to be pretty high quality. As you hopefully already know. The VFR800 FI doesn't have simple, separate front and...

Got black bits on your bike? Could they be blacker and less flaky? Well it's time to strip and repaint them as they make your bike look crap. As you can see my VFR was getting a bit flaky around the mirror stems (Just like every other Honda I have owned with this style mirrors. Seeing as I had a few bits of the NSR off for respray  I decided to do the same for the VFR's mirror stems in the same batch. I'll explain the process of dis-assembly followed by respray so you don't have to read everything if you don't need to. To disassemble the mirrors I took the mirror and arm off with the single hex bolt being careful not to loose the spacers inside and remembering the order. Then the two smaller hex bolts need to be removed, allowing the stem base to come off of the fairing. Finally detach the rubber anti vibration spacer from the back of the stem base and we are ready to sort that finish out. Prep for painting required me to lift off any loose paint, rem...

I'm not a massive sticker fan as they tend to detract from the lines of the bike. This bike had quite a few Team Roberts LTD stickers all over her and although not terrible to look at, they didn't mean allot to me so had to go. I was worried that the old stickers might damage the paint work when I tried to remove them but was relieved to see them wrinkle up and slide off with a bit of pressure using a finger nail.  Not fancying tearing my nails off over this; I went about finding a soft scraper and settled on a paint rattle can lid. When held to make the bottom oval it becomes strong enough to chip away at the transfers without being so strong it scratched the paint work.  For the first couple I used WD40 to soften the adhesive but it didn't make allot of difference and seemed to make the scraper skip over the transfers so did the rest dry. After allot of scraping I used household polish to lift any residual glue by leaving it on there for 10 minutes then b...