The XS Triple Sidecar - give me the g*d-d*mn papers already!

... or in other words a little writeup on how everything went up to the registration.

First things first: I had a call from my engineer that we had a little mixup with the numbers on the noise levels and as such my bike was too loud. So I sort of knew, that I had to do something about it. Luckily my muffler-insert-design already planned for such events, which meant the inserts are stackable and although the devil's in the details, i.e. how do you have this whole thing end up somewhat straight, it was a mere hour of fabricating to end up with a two-stage version. (The one originally in the TR1's exhaust ended up bent, when I took it out, so I couldn't simply cut that up as I had planned.)

Ground the old weld off and the tip can be driven out with (relative) ease. A quick measurement returned between 77 and 77.3 db of noise, which was way below the 81db mandated. And it sounded like a squirrel with diarrhea. 

To please the eye of the official I quickly polished the mufflers and have to admit they came out rather decent. 

The next problem was one of those tasks, that I had on my list, but forgot about: The rear brake lever on XS-Triples only makes very little way (maybe 15 to 20 degrees) as they have a rather beefy master cylinder. As such the lever mount in the frame tends to seize up, with the brake lever not coming back up anymore. Unfortunately, as I found out, if I want to fit a grease nipple, I have to take the sidecar off, as I can't get to it properly. (Luckily I had exactly the same issue on my first XS, but it took me bl**dy ages to find.) Pushing it back a bit and soaking it in WD40 cured it for now, but it's definitely one of the higher priority mods that needs to be addressed.

One of the other challenges I had to face: As I didn't register the bike in my name BEFORE I started the conversion, I couldn't simply drive it to the department of motor vehicles, but had to borrow a trailer.

Already loaded up on the trailer, I realized that I had forgotten to install a reflector and this is exactly the kind of sh*te that might have gotten me into re-visiting them...

But I didn't and this is probably one of the most expensive eight page books I have ever bought.

Coming up next: removing all sorts of things from the sidecar that have only been fitted for registration and running into the first problems during the first few kilometres!