Throttle Pedal and Cable
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With the clutch in it seemed like a good time to fix up a throttle pedal and go for the full set. This is another part of the Striker that is left in the hands of the builder, which is fine. When I went up to the factory I had a look at how Jeremy was building customer Strikers and he had a tidy throttle pedal on one that had been adapted from the standard Sierra pedal. I got myself one of these from the scrappy and set about cutting down the mount and cutting the pedal itself in half and re-attaching it back-to-front as advised by Jeremy. This did fit quite well, but I was less than 100% happy with the offset that I could get with it and it wasn’t the easiest of things to attach to the chassis neatly. I had a look at what Stuart-Taylor did with their SP1 engined Pheonix and also what Raw did with their Pheonix. Both had used Stuart-Taylor’s locost throttle pedal, which did look like a much better solution. I liked it so much that I had one made the same, only in aluminium of course. The pedal was mounted to the chassis by another bit of 3mm thick aluminium angle. The first mounting was a direct copy of the Stuart-Taylor 3-sided box mount made from 18G aluminium sheet, but this was just too thin and the flexed noticeably when the pedal was floored.
Attaching the throttle cable to the carbs was going to be a bit more tricky. The original throttle cable mount is on the front of the carbs (in the bike) but this fouled on my bonnet so I cut it off. Fortunately I found a couple of blind holes cast onto the float chamber lids of the front pair of carbs, which co-incidentally lined up either side of the throttle cable linkage. These must serve some purpose somewhere on some kind of R1…but they were ideal to fix a new throttle cable mount to. I tapped them out to 5mm and made a small bit of 3mm thick aluminium angle (bent to 120 degrees) to fix onto these. This required a fair bit of careful filing and fitting around the contours of the float chambers, but the end result fitted a treat.
A trip to my local Halfords sourced a universal bike brake cable with the right kind of gland on the end for the carbs. Whilst there I also raided their spares box and found some threaded adjusters for the ends of brake cables (in alloy of course) for fixing the cable to the new mount on the carbs and pedal.
As with the clutch cable I experimented with the location of the cable fixing to the pedal to give some reasonable travel between closed and wide-open. With the final position determined the whole lot was tightened up and tested. The pleasure gained from revving the engine with your right foot for the first time is immeasurable…
Basking in the joy of a working clutch and throttle pedal I also eventually fixed in the steering column linkage between the column and rack. This is another part sourced from a Sierra which is cut and extended with a short length of CDS tube provided in the kit (although Jeremy had run out when I got my kit so I only just got this). Not wanting this to come adrift at any point I got this TIG welded.
With the steering in place the car took its first trip up to the end of the cul-de-sac. I stalled about 5 times because despite ensuring long travel on the clutch and throttle they still seem to be very on/off (compared to a car), which I guess is just bike-engined-cars for you. I reckon I must have reached at least 15mph (Still no front brake calipers and the handbrake isn’t the most effective stopper), which was totally terrifying and very noisy. Awesome!