jbond's blog

Ken Leaman

Dear FF community,

As we approach the first anniversary of the passing of Ken Leaman, on behalf of Malcolm Newell’s family, I wanted to say a few words of appreciation and recognition. Ken, a former aircraft engineer, through much hard work and hassle, helped develop, define, and produce Dad’s vision of the Quasar. Although coming from “totally different worlds”, both men were on the same creative wavelength. While their formal Quasar relationship finished in 1981, their friendship continued. When Dad died suddenly in 1994, Ken had been “waiting to get back” to the project.

Steaming Mango in MCS

February 1987 article in Motorcycle Sport about the Steaming Mango, Gold Wing based, Phasar.

Westminster Parking

The protest to try and combat Westminster Parking Charges for Motorcycles gathers steam.

Now we've got banners!

eg

Here

Motorcycle News - Grand Designs PDFs

Here's PDFs of the Motorcycle News article on weird and wonderful PTWs.

Mexican FF

Here's a good one. I particularly like the illuminated skull.

Quasar Meetup

The 2005 Quasar outing will take place in Hastings over the week-end on September 10th/11th. The format will be similar to previous years with us meeting up on St Leonards sea-front on Saturday afternoon from around 4:30pm onwards and moving on to Bo Peep pub for supper. There will be a ride-out on Sunday morning and we'll finish up at the Six Bells at Chiddingly for a late lunch.

All Quasar owners, Quasar enthusiasts, or owners of other Feet-first machinery are invited to join us.

Adding a Volvo seat back to an AN400K3

I've posted a load of pictures to Flickr of my attempt at adding a Volvo seat. Click on each picture and you'll see lots of annotations describing the detail.

After much hacksawing, cursing and abuse of power tools, I now have a Volvo seat
mounted on my Burger400K3. Lessons I've learnt:-

- I'm crap at this metalwork stuff

- I should have listened to Royce, the Volvo 340 seat is the best. I was seduced by the fake leatherette of the seat from a bigger model but it doesn't work so well in this application. The problem is the mounting mechanisms on both sides are a good 4 to 5cms lower relative to the seat.

Fitting a Volvo Seat on a Burgman

As you can see from the photo, it is possible to fit a Volvo Seat on a Burgman!

This is the next stage in making my Burgman more of an FF. I got the seat from the Volvo Breakers on the A1 near St Neots for a mere 25 quid. It's a leather seat so won't need recovering. I had quite a choice and eventually plumped for an early 7 series instead of the usual 340 seat because of the leather, the filled in head rest and the fact that the lumbar adjust and the rake adjust are both on the left hand side. Not only that but it's got a heated back and seat base.

Steering links on a FFE

Here's a PDF sent in by Andrew Gibben on steering linkage layout on Funny Front Ends. (FFE)

Fitting a Malossi CVT kit to an AN400K3

I've just been fitting a Malossi kit to my Suzuki AN400 Megascoot. The first stage is to remove the lower left body panel. This has an astonishing number of little plastic nubbins that hold it on. The foot rest rubbers also have a very large number of bits that plug into the bodywork and you have to get under them to reach some of the fixings. Eventually you get the bodywork off, and the next piece is the CVT air filter cover, and then the plastic CVT cover. That gets you to here.

The next piece to remove is the inner cover. This is ally and has two dowels that eventually get stuck, bottom right and top left. The cover has an outrigger bearing for the clutch mechanism. Sometimes the shaft spins in the bearing making a nasty screech at very low speeds. You can safely ignore this as I'm not sure how to fix it if it happens to your bike. With the ally cover taken off, we have this.

Malcolm Newell's FFs

Here below is a fairly definitive list of machines built by Malcolm Newell. (words mostly by Paul Blezard) This was not easy to compile bearing in mind that most of the machines had the same trade number plate on them when being used by Malcolm, probably no chassis plate and certainly no "official" Malcolm-applied serial number. This list is quite old now. Can anyone fill in more detail?

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