Beta EVO MKIII build Part 3

Putting it all together!

See a little different to the 800 but not by much. 10am start time

Today we threw the 1100 motor into the chassis and set about working on the chassis. Mike ground off all the mounting tabs for the airbox, while I played with the rear shock linkage.  One of the big changes we had in mind this year was to lift the whole bike up by about 30mm. We used two Ducati 999 as our baseline. Measuring the crank centre to ground on both gave us a number of about 394mm. We inverted the rear shock linkage to get the ride height and swingarm angle we wanted. This caused a few problems with the tie rods to the swingarm needing to be shorted by about 10mm. Still small is lighter right!

With the backend done we threw the front end on. This proved what we had suspected with the forks needing to be 20mm further down in the clamps. While we were on the front end I fitted the lighter front fork springs we got from Nick Dole at TekNick. From 8.5kg to 7.5kg finally allowed me use some preload on the springs. Something I have been unable to do last year.

A few more adjustments saw us reach the 394mm we had in mind for the crank centre. The bike certainly looks taller which I think will look cooler to!

For the rest of the day Mike worked on the exhaust pipes. The heads on the DS engine have the exhaust ports at a very different height to the 800M. Mostly due to the extra bore, but there is certainly some design work to keep the port flatter on exit on the DS engine from the 800M. The rear header had to be dropped down further to clear the pump tank. Mike also wanted to put a mount on the frame supporting where the header meets the muffler. This is where the pipe broke at PI last year.  The mount was designed to hold both header and muffler in place.

Once we had the rear header pipe put together we used this as a template for the front pipe to get the same length. With the work to match the header length, and put a new mount on the front pipe the right hand muffler had to be moved. This actually worked to our advantage with the new location providing room for the brake line and brake master cylinder.


We knocked off at 17:00 to have a beer and figure out what we'd do next.

Bike by days end! 17:00

Bike by days end! 17:00