Vacuum chamber thingy
When I was younger and rode mini motocrossers, I had a Yamaha YZ80F. Tnen when the G model came out we all noticed it had one of those (I'm actually not sure what it was called or did) can type things attached to the rubber manifold between the head and the carby. Our theory was it somehow stored petrol vapour when you throttled off going into a corner and there would be this reserve of vapour waiting when you opened up again coming out the other side meaning you'd take off faster and supposedly beat the opposition by that microsecond we all thought would make us champions. So a mate and I immediately decided to replicate this with out own version. We got small pieces of copper pipe, cut a hole in the rubber manifold of our bikes and jammed it in, sealing the edge with silastic. On the end of the pipe we clamped some garden hose that was then clamped to the neck of an old Brasso bottle that was clamped to the frame. It looked pretty similar so off we went to the track where the bikes started and rode perfectly... and as far as we were concerned, a little better than before. Chances are it did absolutely fuck all but that didn't matter because everyone thought it worked and within weeks at least a dozen other bikes had them. There's probably bike mechanic here somewhere who is right now banging his head with his hand screaming "What the fuck were you thinking???" but really it didn't seem to do any harm and maybe it really did give us an edge. We sure believed it.
( difficultchild, Tue 15 Mar 2011, 23:20, Reply)