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.



The belt and two pulleys are now visible. We need to get the nuts undone on the front and rear pulley and remove them. I used a Halfords 12V hammer socket driver. Piece of cake. Way easier than cobbling together crowbars and using old bits of belt to try and lock the front socket. The nuts are 24mm so you may need to get a 24mm socket.

The front pulley assembly now comes off. There's a bent spring washer behind both nuts. Make sure you keep everything the same way round so the spring washer goes back on the same way.



You need to remove the oil splash plate to get the centre slider out as we need this for the Malossi kit.



The centre slider has 4 plastic locator pieces which we also need. Assemble the Malossi replacement with it's 8 rollers, slide the centre bearing shaft into the middle, put the centre slider piece in o top of the rollers and mount it back on the shaft. You need to hold whole thing together with your fingers round the back as you slide it on the shaft to stop the rollers falling out. Put the outside pulley on and the washer and nut. Just finger tight as we'll be removing it again.

Now the scary bit which is changing the spring in the rear driven pulley. Remove the clutch drum and then the whole clutch pulley assembly.



The problem is that we need to undo that big nut, but it's holding spring pressure behind it and there's no easy way to hold the whole assembly still while you undo it. Of course there's various factory tools to do this which cost large amounts of money and nobody has them. So here's the trick.



Put the assembly in a vice with a cloth or bits of wood and tighten it down, being careful not to damage the fins on the back by resting the vice jaw against lots of them. Then use a large C-clamp to take up the tension on the other side. If there isn't one already, put a mark on the nut and centre with a felt tip.
Now you can use a big stilson wrench to undo the nut. Undo it until it's almost off. Now release the vice pressure leaving the C Clamp holding everything together, pick what's left up and put it on the floor supported on a couple of blocks of wood. Now with your foot holding the top down, remove the big nut, release the C Clamp and gently let the spring expand. If your vice is big enough, you could probably do all this in the vice rather than on the floor. There's quite a bit of preload but once the spring is an inch or so free, you can hold it down with your hand and gently release it.



The spring and roller on the right came from an AN400X (MkI). The spring and roller on the left are from the AN400K3. It looks like Suzuki now use less preload and an 18gm roller instead of the original 21gm. More on this later. The Malossi spring is lighter but about the same height as the stock AN400K3 spring. So fit the spring, hold the clutch part down with your hand or foot and finger tighten the big nut in the middle. Now take the whole assembly back to the vice, put on the C Clamp and tighten the nut down with your stilson. The official torque is 105 Nm which basically means as tight as you can get it. A tip here is to get your felt tip marks to line up again so the nut is in the same place and will probably have the same torque as when you started.

Now put the whole assembly back on the rear shaft with the belt in the pulleys, Put the clutch drum back on and then put the spring washer back on the same way round. This is with the outside edges against the clutch and inside edges against the nut. Now do up the nut with the electric hammer socket. The torque setting is 85Nm so you can try a proper torque wrench and something rigged up using the holes to hold it still. Easier is just to give it a few goes with the hammer driver. I put a drop of loctite on the nut threads as well. When everything is done up tight with the belt in place, use a bit of wood and your hands to lever the pulleys apart which lets the belt drop into the centre.

Now take off the front outer pulley, put the belt around the shaft and replace the outer pulley, spring washer and nut. The washer goes the same way round as the other one. You need to make sure the belt is free and not being pinched by the pulley as you finger tighten the nut. The torque on this nut is 105Nm. Holding the pulley still is not easy. Don't be tempted to wedge a large screw driver in the fins as you'll just break a fin off. You can feed an old bit of belt between the pulley and casing to wedge it solid but easiest is just to give it a few goes with the hammer driver. Again a drop of loctite on the threads is good for peace of mind.

Now check over everything, replace the inner and outer cover, and the air filter and air filter cover. This is a good moment to clean the air filter. Suzuki now use yellow foam so it's easy to see the muck. Finally re-assemble the lower left panel putting all the plastic nubbins and screws back in. Done!

Now I've only had a quick run up the road, but you'll find that under hard acceleration the revs have risen in the mid range from 5.5K-6K to 6.5K-7K the engine is pulling a bit harder and the gear ratio has dropped. And the end result is quite a bit more acceleration between 25 and 60.

Now some alternatives. The Malossi kit is not exactly expensive at about £120 so that's the easiest way to go. If you fancy an alternative, the stock AN400K3 rollers seem to be 18gm where the old AN400X were 21gm. The Malossi set are 16gm with a lighter spring. So it seems highly likely that you can get almost the same effect by using the stock spring with 17gm rollers. Malossi don't make 17gm but Taffspeed apparently do have 17gm rollers from another manufacturer. As an alternative you could use 4 Malossi 16gm with 4 stock 18gm (spaced symmetrically) to give an average of 17gm. Rollers are cheap. But unfortunately I've now gone for the full Malossi so somebody else will have to try this.

I think what's happened is that Suzuki have made the CVT a bit more lively and also reduced the spring pressure, but they haven't gone as far as Malossi do. This ties in with some drag race testing that Paul Blezard and I did between a new AN400K3 and my old AN400X-Malossi. The X was consistently faster up to about 45mph no matter who was riding. But the K3 then pulled back and started to catch up. One guess here is that the Injection model is inherently quiter and more efficient and so Suzuki didn't have to try quite as hard to put a hole in performance to get past the noise tests.

Some thoughts:-
- What's the difference between a Technorati keyword search and a tag:search. And would it be helpful to have the keyword search on the tag display?
- I'm really close to having Ecademy profiles "50 words" displayed with a Flickr style tag UI. So how can I get Ecademy profiles into their corresponding Technorati tags. And would it make any sense? This is relatively static data, where Technorati is all about dynamic changes.
- I've had tags on blog entries here for a while now. I've got Technorati links on each page and in the RSS. I'm successfully pinging Technorati on new posts. But the results never seem to turn up in Technorati. I wonder why?
- The Technorati developers forum has a sign up form. Just one catch, first name, last name and email address are required fields but have no input elements. Is this a challenge?

Here it is. Now does it do what I want? And why document encoding? [from: del.icio.us]

Must read piece. Burningbird » Cheap Eats at the Semantic Web Café

It's a great summary of the state of tags, folksonomies, semantic categories, identity systems.

And Oh, Lazyweb, somebody please port LID to perl, python, C# and others. It’s the first identity system I’ve seen that I really feel I can get behind.

p2pnet.net - the original daily p2p and digital media news site : Consumers, "find a charge of around NT$8.5 (about 27 cents) per download to be acceptable, while the current market price is around NT$30 (slightly less than 99 cents) or more".

Interesting that price comes up as an issue again. And that there's a wide disparity between what consumers think they should pay and what they are charged.

I'm still convinced that there's a price point where it becomes easier to buy music for download than to get it from friends or from file sharing systems. The problem for the industry is that the price point is probably around 10c to 25c per track.

Let's just imagine for a moment that iTunes sold tracks with no DRM for 5c each. Does anyone think they wouldn't sell like crazy? So what's the price point where that would drop off?

Interestingly, my favourite AllOfMp3.com put their prices up this year from 1c per MB to 2c per MB. A typical track encoded with LAME 192K VBR is now about 10c. After spending $75 with them, this is making me begin to slow down.

Just Say No To DRM

Glenn's got a great description of How to Record a Podcast on a Mac. And he's solved exactly the problem we've been having on the PC which is to record both mic and Skype out while only playing Skype out into your headphones. The key is the wide range of audio software available on the Mac and the eway the mac keeps the audio streams of individual devices separate instead of routing them all into a single mixer.

So you're a big music fan. You've ripped all your CDs with LAME 192K VBR. You've collected (ahem) 5000 tracks and have maybe 30Gb of music on your hard drive. So back it up to DVD+R DL and it fits on 4 DVDs. By the end of this year it will all fit on one HD-DVD.

So hand that one to your friend and cut another.

Just another brick in the wall surrounding the Music Distribution business.

If DVDs are too awkward, you can get a 3.5" USB enclosure for £30, and a 160Gb drive for £50 or a 300Gb for £100. Just keep all your music and your favourite videos on that and walk it round to your mate's house. Plug it into her PC and dump the contents.

And both routes have zero chance of resulting in unpleasant lawsuits from the RIAA or BPI.

Is Sneakernet going to be the new P2P.

Bloggerheads (UK) - So this is what freedom and liberty tastes like...

Lest we forget. Especially with a General Election coming up.

Just read it. OK?

jbond posted a photo:

First meeting of the Ecademy San Francisco club

[from: Flikr Photos]

Unfortunately a lot of the suggestions are really hard to code. Sigh... [from: del.icio.us]

Just Say No To DRM

A good enough slogan to get some press?

Mapping the Culture of an Online Community - Common Archetypal member types [from: del.icio.us]

Was the Bush Inaurguration speech, just empty rhetoric?

Tim seems to think so.

Ken Kutaragi, President of Sony Computer Entertainment, admitted that Sony made strategic misjudgments when it let its Media division's DRM zealousness reduce innovation and product flexibility in its consumer electronics divisions. via Techdirt.

Note that we've yet to see Sony really learn this lesson. Maybe they didn't really fall far enough to be a perfect example, but it would be good if Sony could represent an example to all those other companies that Open trumps Proprietary.

I've wondered at times if there's a constant stream of MBAs that come into business focussed on the short term gains to be had from closed proprietary systems. The individuals in this stream each has to relearn the lesson that openness results in a much larger market and much bigger long term gains But unfortunately by the time they work this out another batch of short temr focussed MBAs has arrived.

Time for Sony to go back and re-read Cory's speech to Microsoft? And time for Sony to take the fight to Apple, since Creative (for all their noise) don't seem to be able to do it.

And time for all of us to "Just Say No to DRM"

remembering rebecca :: january 2005 : I've noticed another little problem with Technorati tags. When I updated my site on Monday, I created tags for all the posts, and pinged Technorati. On Tuesday, I pinged Technorati two more times when I updated here. It is now Wednesday evening, and I have yet to see any of my tags catalogued on their site.

Me too. Technorati is clearly collecting some tagging information, but at the same time it's clearly not working right yet. And the Tag pages keep changing layout. And there's some weirdness about the layout according to whether they have got any data for the tag or not. kind of odd that tags aren't integrated into the keyword system as well. Surely, a keyword search should be on the combined page as well. Then today furl tags started showing up as well as del.icio.us. I think what we're seeing is a work in progess where development is being done in public. Let's hope it all settles down soon.

In other news, I'm every bit as uncomfortable with the Rebecca Blood piece as Burningbird. We seem to be playing out the same old, same old pattern once more that's been done a million times before in online communities. The Politically Correct Police (PCP) are making lots of noise about how "This isn't right and SOMETHING SHOULD BE DONE". The Anti-PCP come along, who love a good flame war, and are finding ways to wind them up. The poor developers get backed into a corner and end up coming up with a series of nasty hacks to sanitise what was once a nicely elegant, simple and minimalist solution. What makes me laugh in all this are the ludicrous solutions put forward by the PCP who clearly have never been anywhere code.

# Technorati could design their system not to publish any photo Flickr users have tagged "Might be offensive".. So just like the major search engines, Technorati will need an advanced search option "filter adult content". That's seriously hard and will never work 100%. And BTW, I don't think the photo in question is actually tagged on Flickr as "may offend".

# Technorati could create their own tagging system, and not publish any photo Technorati users tagged "Might be offensive". It's not just photos. It'll have to apply to every one of the millions of entries in Technorati.

# Technorati could provide an email address so that users could alert staff if a photo was offensive or inappropriate, and then the staff could go in and tag the inappropriate photo so that it would not appear on Technorati's site--or hand-select an appropriate one. Ah, the Fintstones approach. Just throw manual effort at it until you've got 250 outsourced support staff in Mumbai. I don't think so.

The whole point of Technorati is that it's dynamic and timely. Which means a very high throughput of items. Which means automation of everything. And which means if you're offended by what you see, look away for 5 minutes. And a prize to the first hacker to get goatse to appear on the MLK page.

Which then brings me to the core element Rebecca weas complaining about.

Now, that photo is perfectly appropriate on Flickr as part of an individual's collection, and as documentation of Sunday's rally. It's perfectly appropriate as an illustration for 'protests', or even 'Israel' and 'Palestine', even though it surely will offend some people wherever it appears. But it is not appropriate to illustrate a category tagged 'MLK'. I personally was offended--these sentiments reflect the polar opposite to those espoused by Dr. King. More to the point, such an illustration is inappropriate--that poster has as much to do with Dr. King as would a picture of a banana peel.

How is this Technorati's problem? The photo was tagged on Flickr with MLK. Technorati is correctly pointing this out. Don't you want to see conflicting views? And who gives a damn if you're offended?

I called Technorati to register a protest. You wasted their support team's time with your petty complaint by telephone? Damn. That's exactly why I have the phone off the hook, and IM turned to DND. What's wrong with email?

Goddess preserve us from people who say "SOMETHING MUST BE DONE".

Journalist Mike Butcher ( profile: http://www.ecademy.com/account.php?id=18161 ) is writing an article for a European print magazine which has a wide circulation across Europe. The article is a fairly light-hearted one about what communications gadgets European business-people use - you know, 3G, blackberries, etc... that sort of thing.

He has have a set of questions to send to any European business execs - the more well-known they are the better - willing to take part and be featured in the magazine. Its an opportunity for someone to be exposed to a wide audience and in print, for a change. He'll also need a photo.

Please contact him on mike@mbites.com for more information.

ps. I don't post blogs for just any old Basic member. [from: JB Ecademy]

I'm building a Tagging system into VoidStar as a way of prototyping what I'll do on Ecademy. It's truning out nicely. Here's what I write about in terms of popular Tags.

Ecademy suffered terrible performance yesterday. It was largely caused by a single bad robot from become.com. So I've now put in long, long robots.txt file and today we're only using half the bandwidth. I've still got some more database tidy ups to do, specifically around avoiding a UNION query.

[from: del.icio.us]

10 days ago I threw up another Drupal site for the Feet Forward Motorcycle Community. It's been quite interesting watching some totally non-tech users getting to grips with it. They're coping pretty well.

I wanted to bolt the simple html editor into it an hit a small problem. As usual Drupal has got suitable hooks to bolt in, but it wanted to put the toolbar above the title of the field. I also had to hack common.inc a bit to get the required hooks into the <textarea> tag.