Legalize it! (The XS Triple Sidecar and the TR1 that is...)

... not talking about any psycho-active substances. As the regular followers of this blog might have noticed, apparently some of my stuff was getting pretty close to the mythical state of "done". And in fact they have. On Thursday I had set up my appointment with a government engineer to check up on both the Tractor (everyday TR1) and the XS Triple Sidecar. As is custom with such dates, all of a sudden lots of issues and niggles have come out of the woodwork and meant that from Tuesday evening onwards I was burning a lot of the old midnight oil.

On the TR1 the main goal was to finally declare all the mods done to it and finally run it as legal as technically possible. Except for muffling the exhausts (there'll be a separate post on those muffler inserts "db-killers") there was also the issue of mounting the numberplate and rear light at a steeper angle to comply with local law.

I proudly present the world's chunkiest, billet aluminium numberplate mount. Solid enough to lift the whole bike with it. 😏

And that's the muffler tips in question. Believe me, when I say they work waaaaaay more efficiently than I wanted. (The TR1 is now 7db less noisy than a stock bike. You really have to use the tach to make sure it's running.) But hey, it got me through inspection and the bike's performance hasn't suffered too badly. So in the long run I'll open them out a bit, but other than that... Interestingly enough they also improved the low-end torque quite a bit and helped to smooth out some slight transition issues from pilot jet to needle.

Now of course the XS Triple Sidecar was the bigger challenge. Firstly the sidecar's suspension had to be set up correctly.

The forks were pushed too far through the yokes, resulting in a rather nervous driving experience.

The front mudguard had to be drilled as it's off an XV750 and the holes didn't line up perfectly resulting in a weirdly high mudguard.

And then there was a little pet-project: I wanted to have the choke control on the bars. Which is quite easily done, if you have a set of TR1 or XV750 handlebar switches, as a stock TR1 has got exactly this lever on the bottom of the left control. The switches are all the same, so you can just swap the casing around as you like, resulting in the Turbo no sporting a clean switch with no choke lever and the XS Triple Sidecar being exactly as awesome as it is.

Of course I also had to install muffler tips on the XS Triple Sidecar and in the long run I'll also install an H-pipe to link the two long rear pipes, because the exhaust pressure is really, really high resulting in the XS nearly being louder than the TR1.

Probably install that H-pipe right somewhere overhere, where the twin pipes are joined into one on each side.