Aprilia Gas Tank

The last time I worked on my Aprilia, I may have gone on a nice little rant about ethanol fuel. Ethanol fuels cause certain types of plastic and composite fuel tanks to swell. It's a little irritating when you go to put a tank back on a bike and it is longer than it is supposed to be and won't fit back on. The solution? Well, I got a used tank to run on the bike until my original one dries out and shrink back down.

With the two front mount bolts removed, the tank will pivot up. The two lines in the upper left are vents, simply disconnect them. The upper right hand line is the return. When you pull that line, if there is any gas in the tank, it will come out there. The banjo close to the center is the pressure line from the pump. A little gas will come out of there, but not a lot. The leads coming out of the bottom right go back behind the batter. They have a connector back there that simply unplugs.

Aprilia Stator (pt 2)

Going by hit count, nobody is reading here anymore. Ah well. I'm going to keep typing away into cyberspace anyway. To the three of you who read Part 1, here's the rest...

This is one of those shots that doesn't show much. Just know that the stator wires are routed through there somehow and it will all be good.

Aprilia Stator (pt1)

The last time I worked on my Aprilia, I determined that the stator needed to be replaced. Here's the teardown:

Brandy new Rick's stator, purchased from AF1 Racing. A quality unit at a fraction of the cost of OEM. An Aprilia stator is around a thousand bucks. This is about $140.

Aprilia Electric Stuff (updated)

see update at the end...

My Aprilia is a 2004 RSVR Factory. This particular vintage is known to have some issues with the alternator stator and the voltage regulator. From what I have read on these bikes, they do like to occasionally burn up one or the other. I decided yesterday to take the time to check the condition of mine.

With the side panel off of the bike, the regulator is easy to get to. The connector between the stator and the regulator is called the "brown" connector...because...it's...like...brown...and stuff. It has a nasty little habit of burning up due to high resistance pins inside. The previous owner had already eliminated the brown connector from this bike, choosing to solder the leads together directly. You can see where the wires come into the left side of the regulator, the connections are under the silver insulation.

More on passenger pegs

Before my accident, I made some progress on my peg mounts for the Aprilia. I'm bored as hell right now, so I'll get the pics up that show the current state of the peg mounts. With any luck, I'll be able to ride this bike sometime this year. It kind of sucks owning such a beautiful machine and not being able to enjoy it. Anyway, enough of my whining.

The frame stand offs are cut from 1/2" stainless hex. I went with that because the factory body mounts are made from hex stock. They will get a little cosmetic treatment to match the factory parts at the end.

Cutting down the OD for the male threads, which will be 8mm. Look close and you'll see a funny spot. It took a few passes to get through it, but that little spot was sort of hard. It happens, and luckily wasn't enough to mess up the part.

Passenger peg mounts

My new bike is an Aprilia RSVR 1000 Factory. It's dead sexxxy, and has more horsepower than I should be trusted with. In fact, it is 131 pounds lighter, and has triple the horsepower of the Sportster that I traded in. Being the "Factory" model, as best as I can tell it was never equipped with any passenger seat or pegs. Normal models would have had a back seat and pegs on the exhaust hangers.
Provided my looks and personality don't get in the way, I thought it might be good to equip my new bike to carry a passenger, just in case I meet some unfortunate young lass who has bad taste in men and decides she'd like to go for a ride.

Basically I'm using a piece of scrap 1/4" aluminum as my stock. The idea was to see if I could squeeze a pair of mounts out of it. Here, it has already been cut in half. It was a bit of a "U" shape. I also had to dodge some existing holes. I pulled the mount dimensions from the exhaust bracket, and just eyeballed the rest.