SF204

Heralding the dead time between Christmas and the New Year celebreations is the new issue of Streetfighters, fighting its way through snow, ice and slush to reach subscribers' doors this week. Those of you not wise enough to recognise the benefits of subscription will be able to buy your copy from newsagents during the first week of 2011.
With a second installment of our trip to Fighterama, coverage of the NEC show plus Will's excursion to Milan, a variety of feature bikes (including two turbos, a fat-tyred FireBlade and the stunt-tastic Bandit on the cover), updates on the project bikes we've been covering (including the completed Project Li'l Lives) and a very exciting episode of Andy Sparrow's superb cartoon, Jet Metal.
SF204, in newsagents from Thursday January 6th.

SF203 Fighting Talk

Well, here we are. Only a matter of a few weeks since the Coalition’s austerity programme was announced and already there’s been widespread ConDem-Nation (woo, go me) and a small riot during a London protest. That riot, one would assume judging by the tone of the media coverage it received, was tantamount to the Storming Of The Bastille but it resulted, in fact, in nothing more serious than a few windows broken by hyperactive students, a renegade fire extinguisher obeying the laws of physics and some police-issue Kevlar underwear suffering mild distress.

Anyway, as a result of these swingeing cuts (great word, swingeing – I just wish I knew what it meant) we’re all going to have to tighten our belts. I’ve had to stop using the top 3000rpm on the ZX-10R to conserve fuel (which means it takes me nearly 0:47 minutes longer to get to work), and have initiated a campaign of maintaining an economic rate of front tyre wear by keeping the thing aloft as much as possible. Worst of all, Streetfighters Towers is now operating exclusively on low-cost budget toilet paper made of recycled Honda service manuals...

Read the rest of this Fighting Talk in SF203, and then add your comments here...

Two Strokes Are Enough

A phenomenon of the 21st century (in fact of the digital age where the proles expect, and are expected, to have their entire personal life on public display on the internet) is the blog.
Now, many are life-sapping diaries of dull, keyboard-tapping souls who spend their waking hours in front of a computer monitor, but others are inspirational collections of pictures and quips that inspire you to unmanacle yourself from the PC, and go out and do something exciting.
Here's one - the 2 Stroke Bike Blog (found here ), and as the name suggests, it focuses on motorcycles powered by a two stroke engine. Any motorcycles, from ex-Sheene Grand Prix beasts, to modified Eastern Bloc commuters. Every smoker's dream...

Internally 'Charged

There's many wierd and wonderful things to be found on the internet. And some of them involve motorcycles.

This motorcycle was once a GS500. Until, that is, it was acquired by Matthew Neal and Prabesh Prandey, to use in their mechanical engineering design project at San Francisco University. Using convenional student wisdom, their project is most definitely 'outside the box' (and yes, that is a truly horrid turn of phrase). Their plan was to supercharge the little Suzuki, but instead of using an external (and conventional) supercharger, they've instead used one cylinder as the compressor...

You can find out more about this astounding project from the blog here

Obituary of a CBR...

Faithful readers (as, no doubt, you all are) will have already seen the feature on Jon 'CBRRRT' Lungley's Blade in SF203...

However, given that we are limited in the number of pages we have each month, we don't get chance to tell you about all the issues encountered during the build. Rather conveniently, Jon ran a build thread on his Blade on the Custard Fighters forum - here as well as at the upside-downies forum at www.streetfighters.com.au/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID+12308
Being the friendly, co-operative type, Jon has also ran a thread on how easy it is to fit a single-sided swinging arm into a Honda FireBlade, and that's here

Going Down(hill)

While neither of these variations on two-wheeled lunacy are especially connected to streetfighters, a significant number of motorcycle hoodlums enjoy riding off-road, whether it be motocross, enduro or trials. And there's an ever-increasing number who're getting hooked on the joys on downhill mountain biking. Watch this video and you'll realise why...

SF203

Subscribers will have already received their copy, unless they're truly snowed-in, and the new issue is also on sale at the Streetfighters stand (X10) at Motorcycle Live at Birmingham's NEC.
Containing a shed-load of stunning feature bikes including the red hot turbo Bandit cover bike, plus the first of two reports from Fighterama, a comprehensive guide to loads of suspension goodies, a report from a totally barking French hillclimb plus all the usual project bike and race reports and childish malarky...