 Good afternoon, I'm going to talk a bit about the background of why I built my diesel bike and then go on to some of the technical details and photographs of of how I actually built it Presentation First of all why I mean we all like a technical challenge. Otherwise. I don't think anyone be at the MF camp It is quite technical There's there's a lot of things I'll talk about in a moment to actually getting a vehicle on the road as well as Actually doing the mechanical couplings For some people it's the novelty Is there's more than a few around? I mean it is unique, but it's not what drives me and The main thing is the fuel economy Mostly because there's there's more energy in in a pint of diesel than there is petrol and secondly the way the engine Creates the power is it's more efficient us anyway So most diesel bikes have a economy of somewhere between a hundred and two hundred miles an hour miles per gallon That there are some that claim to go further than that on a gallon, but they're actually really quite slow My bike Has a fuel economy of about a hundred and forty five to the gallon Presentation is failing me 11 Function 11 That's as good as we can see as we want to go good as we go. Okay, we'll go with that So the economy I'm getting is about a hundred and forty five miles to gallon which When I tell people I meet in south wales But that's enough to get from south wales to the center of London on a single gallon of fuel And that is on the most way cruising at an acceptable 55 60 mile an hour Which is the speed that the lorries move out so you're not actually holding anyone up and Although it does have a top speed of about 72 miles an hour The next obvious question people usually ask me is is it a new idea? No one else has done this They've never seen a diesel bike And the truth is is diesel and fields have been made from the 1970s Mostly in in India. In fact the only place where diesel bikes have been produced in mass production was India however, they stopped only a few years ago because of pollution and environmental laws that they've introduced over there the other thing is there's a small company in in in Germany called summer or summer and They've hit their target. I think earlier this year of producing 500 diesel and fields But the only other thing that came close to mass production is a bike called tracks, which is a More of an end enduro type sort of high dirt bike type Build which was called the tracks the T 800 CDI bike and that was based on the smart car engine I believe about 20 of those were made before we went out of production and stopped We had at least what between five and six years development putting that on the road And it looked like a new machine that you would buy rather than a self-build kit And they're very nice machines, but I'm not sure why he came out of production But I think one of the concerns he was having was if you if you spend close to 18,000 euros on a machine you want the kind of Warranty and service expectation of something you buy from Yamaha or Honda or Ford and if you're Even a very professional, but small company that is a very difficult target to hit and The last thing is these most bikes are produced as Personal projects or some for some friends, which we you know consider a small run As far as how many are around I try every year to go to the English meeting Which is a weekend Convention much like the emcee, but for people with diesel bikes and approximately 40 bikes turn up I'd say over half of them are self-built by the people who ride them there And then there's the German diesel motor treffen In ham in Germany, and I've been to that about four times and many more bikes turn up there So on an average average year they'll have about 50 50 bikes turn up The tools I've used I mean I've I live in a terrorist house. I've done most of my work in in a shed in the garden Because it's a fairly big house. I often do work in in the downstairs spare room Because I don't have a garage and I live in a city and I can't afford to rent a garage separately And the tools basically are hammers spanners hacksaws I use angle grinder for cutting shaping and grinding metal I have a pillar drill for drilling decent holes. I mean a pistol drill is good But it really just doesn't cut the mustard when you need to drill parallel holes In flat bars and things I have a welder I Now quite a nice DC Stick welder I have a mig as well, but mig welders are quite expensive to feed gas Especially if you're doing slightly more than the weekend job because the small disposal bottles you'll buy from halfers I don't know if screw fit still sell them a very expensive per unit of gas and then the big bottles have astronomical annual rent or the rent free big bottles Again a prohibitively expensive to buy if you're doing it for a hobby The other tool you need for doing something quite as advanced as this sort of conversion is access to a lathe When I built this one, I had a friend with a with a very big lathe who's into projects and and Mad ideas. I don't know if he's in here now No, he's hiding So I would ride up to my mate's house with all the bits of material and measurements on the back of cornflakes packets and Templates and and all the lading up there and I've since bought my my own lathe, which I'll show later on This is my shed it's about 10 by 8 feet. It's very small It's my current project in there I've got a slightly better photo that but not a complete one and you can see the general tooling I have available In the red thing in the middle is a pipe pipe bender You can see the welder and the gas bottle in the corner the lathe pillar drill is a miniature anvil on the floor I really want a bigger anvil, but I think that problem would mean I'd never get it into the shed So that's the sort of tooling I've used to produce this and the other These is nothing that nothing overly special other than maybe the lathe Because I live in a terrace house, I've no real access to the house and I'm on a hill So everything that's in my shed has to come down a flight of stairs Which is why I use the spare room for most of the major assembly So I can get it out into the street and this is this is the lathe being delivered Which is quite a task. I thought you might be interested to see how you get a lathe down a flight of steps so the main technical problems of Building a diesel bike up the power and engine choice Very interesting is probably taught for hours about that because you need enough power to get you moving and you need it to be light and small enough to put in a two-wheel motorcycle and And and that's a balance that's tricky to hit because all the automotive engines are Really quite large and even in cars. It's only very very recently that the engines are built for a lightweight Design, they're all very heavy chunky over designed Run forever type of things and the smaller engines of the sort of 10 to 20 horsepower all stationary engines for stationing applications like generators or industrial equipment that doesn't need any light weighting such as as diggers and and commercial street sweepers and things And I'll mention the moment why I've picked this particular engine and also the speed because That's important because you need to be going fast enough on the road to be safe and that's that's a Problem I've seen with a lot of the Enfield conversions They use a single-cylinder diesel engine which produces anywhere between three and a half and ten horsepower depending on on the capacity and and how modern it is And having ridden one on the road I'd say that ten horsepower is not enough to keep up with modern traffic and With the impatience of the general public to slow vehicles It it can often put you in a dangerous situation when you're in a small Rondable vehicle you've got people overtaking you because they need to get somewhere faster than you So you have to be going fast enough and again that hits the power on weight and size That the gearbox That's Again a critical choice on this particular one. I've used the BMW gearbox, which is an inline gearbox because the engine Is longitudinally in the frame? Faces this way goes around And and that's why it's so many n-fields That's why when when you mentioned diesel bikes or do an internet search You'll see n-fields come up time and time again And that's because they were on the last produced bikes that had a separate gearbox and a separate engine And that makes it easy because all you do is couple the gearbox input to the engine which can be done with a belt to drive So I change drive or I don't know if anyone's done it, but a gear drive if you if you really wanted to And that makes building it easier if you don't have a terribly advanced mechanical background And I'll be covering the gearbox in more detail because that's the main crucial engineering part of getting Getting this particular bike done and the chassis and I'll mention a bit about the regulations in a minute the chassis is important because It has to contain everything it has to be strong enough to support any extra weight you put on it and And you can run into legislation issues if you're going to do it all your paperwork correctly So Coming on to the parts used in this particular project I've picked a cabuta Z 482 engine. It's 500 cc water cooled twin-cylinder engine. It produces 13 and a half horsepower But depending on which specification you read That varies between 12 and about 15 so you know really I'm not entirely sure and I've not bothered to put it on a Dino tester to measure it and it produces that power at 3500 rpm But interestingly this engine is specced for a free running speed of 3800 So it gives you slightly more confidence in over revving it if you ever wanted to The frame I've chosen is BMW R80. Oh, but back about the engine is Most of the stationary engines people use are slightly old and a lot of them are out of production a lot of small diesel engine Producers over the years have been absorbed by larger corporates So so the accessibility of smaller engines over the years has actually reduced I mean one of them is is a Rugger field I used to make quite a nice air cooled twin-cylinder engine They were bought up by Lombardini, which is a Italian company Which means the whole range of small air-cooled diesel engines that Rugger field used to be are now out of production because a lot of Lombardini Prefer water cooled engines. So, you know, it's it's the way it goes and this engine is is used in Street sweepers it's used in Industrial garden machinery And more interestingly it's fitted to the little French Microcar that does about 45 mile an hour that has probably been the butt of a lot of top gear jokes over the years and because of that it's available in In the breakers yards as a scrap car engine Which means I can pick up a industrial twin-cylinder modern engine that's still in production I can still ring up a supplier and say I want a spring or a Crucial part for the injection pump and it will be on my doorstep next day delivery Which you can't do for a lot of stuff. So it makes the engine attractive So the frame is BMW frame it it's it's the particular Range of our series air-cooled engines has been in production since I think the early 70s mid-70s and because of that It's a chunky well-built frame. It's strong. It's you know, it's the BMW R series was was the choice bike for globe trotters So it's it is a robust A robust thing as is the gearbox that's part of it So in this I've used the BMW R80 frame I've used the BMW gearbox transmission and rear wheel and it's a shaft drive, which means I've got no chain maintenance to worry about The other point of interest is my little peanut tank Running out of time so the the peanut tank holds about one and a half gallons or 6.82 liters And if I'm doing on a on a cool run if I'm doing 145 to the gallon That's a fair range for such a small tank And if that was on a modern petrol bike doing 45 to the gallon It would be quite a ridiculous machine to to go anywhere in distance. So I've come from South Wales All the way to here and I you know, I wouldn't be worried about going to a garage until I get about halfway home The other question and all statement people say is they look at a modified bike and they go, oh, that's illegal You're not allowed to do that And and that's the general attitude to a lot of vehicle modifications rain truth You can do a lot And that's not being cheeky and it's not bending the rules. I mean the MOT With a bike that's sort of a rat by like this where I haven't bothered with the paint and the image of the shine You have to find someone who does it by the book who I found and he will look at it and you're got another interesting one you brought me and And and you'll get his tick book out And you'll check the lights and the lights will work and the horn works and the steering is in good Nick and the tires are not balled and it's not dripping oil and the suspension goes up and down the brakes Which there's a machine for testing work and you get to the end and go there there goes a ticket Because it's a test a safety check on the day And believe it a lot most things on this work even though You can probably see the rear lights are in a bit of a sorry state because I strap all my camping stuff to it every week every other weekend And This only needs an MOT as as a modified vehicle because I've not cut altered Adapted or shaped any of the frame parts the main structure of the bike is the same And I've had many lengthy conversations with people in DVL office is saying what do I need to do to register my custom vehicle properly? And we have a big conversation And you have to ring up many times you get a different answer every time you ring the DVL It's quite frustrating, but if you play the game and bring them up and keep note of what they say in the key points You do get get an answer eventually Because I'm not cut roll to the frame It's purely classed as an engine swap and all I have to do is contact them and with some supporting paperwork Say what fuel is what the new CC is because that's a tax issue not a safety issue very important And I have to provide receipts which is a security issue to make sure I'm not ringing vehicles So I have to prove that I own the parts. I've made it from when I'm not re-registering stolen vehicles And that's all the DVLA I registered about but if you do build your own frame or modify it drastically there's something called the MSVA which is the Motorcycle single vehicle approval route and that's a comprehensive test of roadworthiness and it takes a Few hours to do it costs. I think still it costs less than 200 pounds. It's a very reasonable test the spec for that was written with the support of The the motorcycle in groups the lobbyists got involved saying oh you can't You can't legislate us and tell us how to tell us how to build our machines and they said no we're part of Europe Anyway, we were and This is how we allow our vehicles to fit in with that whole European freedom of travel and and everything else and I mean they some traveling regulations But but that that allows the test to be recognized in other countries The SVA doesn't allow you to then sell a vehicle in in the rest of Europe Because it doesn't meet meet that particular country's spec so it's for this country only but it allows you to build your own vehicle and because it was written in conjunction with the Enthusiasts groups and the lobbyists firstly. It's written apart from a few technical Technical sections is written in language. You can read it's written as a manual that a largely unacademic person can follow As you're apart from a couple of chapters Which makes it accessible and That there is something the pressure groups did that I'm actually quite glad of To do with accessibility and and there's something in the law that says the law must be accessible to people It's not a private thing and the lobbyist groups took that to his extreme and said okay then You must make this manual free. You must make it accessible and it is a PDF. You can download it's updated regularly and and and because of that you can You can conform so it's a you can conform and there's not saying oh well I didn't know because you've made this law secret and have to go and see a lawyer and The other point of over stress in that is the SVA which a single vehicle approval for cars Which I think recently changed name over the last few years Pressure groups didn't manage that and you have to buy the manual off the correct government department And last time I looked at that it was about 30 odd pounds so You know that's that's one up for your pressure groups and why you should support them really because they can make a subtle difference The last thing tax is important which is why you must get your registration right and and you know it's There's no difference in fuel type for motorcycles because it is unusual But you must get your engine size right to be in the right taxation branch This is not the only bike I've made I've made a couple of others and I'll briefly show you a couple of photographs That's the first one. I made it's got a very heavy V-twin East German engine It's quite a modern engine for its build again. It was a very out-of-production engine So that was less powerful than this one weighed about two and a half times the amounts Built in East Germany before the wall came down. We should make when it blew up After it'd been on the road for six months. I could not mend it and that was the end of that That's another one again, it's more of a rat bike that photograph is taken in Germany In ham at the diesel motorbike meeting and that has a Volkswagen 1.9 liter naturally aspirated diesel engine in it Absolutely fantastic machine to ride. It was it was like flying through the air sort of open engine by plane. It was it's fantastic And and and the interesting part on that is is there is no gearbox in between the engine and just under what what the battery is I can't I can't run and point you can see the flywheel on the starter gear gear wheel on it The clutch couples the drive shaft straight to the engine. There is no gearbox It's like driving in top gear all the time all the time you're moving I'm pulling away Was a bit sluggish not dangerously so on the road You could you could keep up with modern traffic and not have your horn blown out not been blown out by horns on traffic lights It would it would it would roll along quite easily at about 15 to 18 mile an hour without Juddering because it was on tick over and because the diesel engine produces a flat torque curve to the torque remains about the same through the red range Obviously as the engine speeds up the torque power means it power ramps up and somewhere between about 45 and 70 mile an hour It would accelerate and move like a like a really powerful sports bike despite looking like a wreck And and that that particular one had a top speed of 104 mile an hour Because I've had it had in Germany. I can say that in front of everyone Without worrying there's there's some cop going to go now. Yes. He's just admitted to something About a time Two minutes right sorry so that's about it. There's current build going back to rebuilding the thing so Again building the flywheel The flow it had to be a ducted to take the the BMW clutch and then align it to the gearbox There's some measurements I was going to talk about all this so all the measurements have to be in alignment because it's two shafts that couple you have to make sure They're absolutely facing each other. Otherwise, you'll rip the center out of the clutch instantly You have to fit it in the frame again I think I mentioned I didn't cut the frame so I was going to talk about all this in detail Sorry, I'm flying through it. It's making up some templates for the engine mount So engine mount out of templates cut out with an angle grinder Rule zero never be on fire Because I'm rushing at the minute I couldn't show you the photograph with curtains in the back room today that this is in my spare room. There we are as curtains I'm in the spare room And and the rest of the bilman and and there we are that's that's the The complete machine the other interesting thing is my other bike blew up shortly before building this I had everything ready. I put a lot of thought into it and a lot of the thought takes longer than actually making something so from actually saying right I am actually going to start this project to Using it to go to work on was about 10 days 10 days of manic Angle grinding and running up to my makes house and using his lathe So thank you