After receiving confirmation of our participation from the IBW organisers, I go ahead and pick up a garage space: so far, we had only been conducting airbrush work for bikes, cars and guitars, along with tattoos at Darkside Ink. We didn’t really have a proper space where we could focus on the fabrication work for bikes in-house. We rent out a garage space, procure all of the tools necessary, and hire a new fabricator. Three days down the line, the fabricator takes a day off, stating that his son isn’t feeling too well. Now, this sounds rather familiar, we think, with a knot in our stomachs.
The next day, the fabricator returns, and asks for an advance. I oblige, as usual, and give him half of his salary. I do not want to be taken advantage of, but now that the RD has been selected for the IBW Mod Bike competition, I have no choice but to play nice. I cannot afford to have my fabricator throw a tantrum a mere two weeks before the deadline. Another week passes by, and the fabricator has thankfully completed most of his work.
All the lines seem to be in place. Now we need to fill in the putty to smoothen out the metal. This is because there is absolutely no time left to beat the metal into shape, if we still hope to make it in time for the IBW competition.
So, we put in a layer of putty to smoothen out the shape. Following this, the fabricator decides to vanish again, this time claiming that his wife isn’t feeling well. At this point in time, I have two options: the first being that I could just let go of everything, go to IBW, come back, and then sort things out. Or, I could pick up the tools myself, and get this beauty into shape. As always, the first thing that came to my mind was this: we’ve come so far. We can’t just hang the tools up on the shelf now and call it a day. This RD needs better – no, she deserves better.
So, I pick up the tools and go at it. I start sanding the bike myself. My fingers are cut and my knuckles are bruised beyond description, but I don’t stop. In two days and three nights, I finish sanding the bike, getting everything into shape and smoothened out.By now, we have precisely five days to go until IBW 2015.
The next big question is this: do I perform all of the painting work myself, or should I get a professional to do a simple paint job? I tried to keep the entire theme as simple as possible by doing a matte paint job, so that it isn’t too complicated and can be performed by somebody else within the predetermined time frame. Since everything was to follow the classic racing theme in terms of design, I decided to embed the Marlboro red racing colours that Yamaha had initially displayed on their bikes.
Just as I was agonizing over whether this colour was best suited for the bike, Marlboro decided to launch their new 2015 packs in India. Matte-finished, soft, and red, black and white: the colour combination that we at Darkside Ink have always been drawn to.
These are things that simply fell into place, not because we wanted them to, but because we feel that they were purely meant to be, for reasons unknown. This is how the Darkside mascot welcomed its colour scheme and theme.
For the front, I decided to brandish two LED projectors upon the bike, one mounted atop the other. The reasoning behind this was simply that I wanted really powerful headlamps; so, we had to import these from E-Bay in the United States. Once I received them, I placed these projectors onto the right side of the bike: in India, there are countless fools who – either by choice or by intellectual disposition – do not know where to use the high beam, and where to use the low beam. They drive in the city with their high beams on. High beams are meant for highways, so that an entire dark patch is lit up adequately and that you don’t meet with or cause any accidents.
High beams are not meant for the city, where you have street-lights and lamp-posts lighting up the way for you, while you use your relentless high-beam to blind the person across you into getting off the road! So, this is why I wanted the headlamps to be placed onto the right side of the bike, which also provided us with a big round patch where we could embed our company’s logo, which we have trademarked for our studio.
The Darkside Ink logo features a werewolf transforming before a full moon; if you pay close attention, you will notice that the wolf is still half-man. The man is still undergoing the process of transforming into a beast, and is still partially human. This further emphasizes our slogan, which is: “Unleash the Beast Within”. So, you wake up in the morning, dutifully do your 9 to 5, and after 5, you unleash that beast within. Not only would the logo enable the bike to successfully transform into the official Darkside mascot, but it would also further communicate the bike’s beast-like capabilities and qualities. This is how the colour scheme and the look of the vehicle had been decided and put into place.
All things said and done, I knew that I still had to do something different and radical with this bike. It was no longer a question of simply riding this bike down to Bangalore or parading it as a mascot for my company, but it had now become a way for me to test myself: could I truly do something positively profound and out-of-the-box with this bike, within a short span of 30 days?
I believe that when it comes to café-racers, everything that can be done has, more often than not, already been done. So, achieving something out-of-the-box with a café-racer is practically impossible. This reality kept biting at me, keeping me awake at night as I tried to figure out how to achieve a shred of inimitability for this bike. That’s when it hit me. That’s when I decided to implement underbelly exhaust expansion chambers: something that I haven’t ever seen on an RD350 before.
I have seen quite a few two into ones, and quite a few under-seat exhausts; but an underbelly exhaust was, according to me, quite different. I do not claim that I am the only person that has done this: there could be quite a few people that have already done this, but haven’t been blessed with the opportunity to tell a lot of people about it. So, I wouldn’t say that I’m the first person to have ever done this, or the only one to have come up with it. I do however really love the fact that this idea came to me in time, so that I could implement this onto the bike.
I had a pair of pre-existing expansion chambers that were already on the bike, so I filled it in with sand so that I could gauge the volume of the entire exhaust. I then collected all of the sand together, put it into a box, and subsequently used the same amount of sand to measure the volume of it. This is how I calculated it all. It could be considered as a Stone Age method in a New Age era, where you have all of the mathematical laws at your disposal: you’ve got your law of Pi, and all of your relevant formulae to measure everything. I had just opened my workshop a couple of weeks ago, though, and I didn’t know exactly how to go about it all, as I have not been fortunate enough to pursue a degree in automobile engineering.
I didn’t have a lot of time to do enough research or surf the web, since this was all conducted during the final 5-day mark of the entire project. So, I did what I could with what I had at the time, and this was the best way that I could think to achieve what I wanted. I measured the volume, got all of the pipes bent and fitted, traveled 15-20 kilometres each way in peak Pune traffic on my way to Nanapeth and back, where I had to purchase my tools and get all of the items fitted correctly. This is how I managed to get the bike, Darkspawn, to look the way she does right now.
For the engine, I decided to give the bike to the garage owner that I had initially procured the bike from, as I felt that he would be best suited for it. All that needed to be done was to change the gaskets, tune up the carbs, and conduct a few settings with the clutch. So, the engine was handed over to the garage owner, and the body was given to a painter.
In the midst of all this, I am constantly running around from point A to B, back to A and then to C, desperately trying to ensure that the typical Indian mindset of lazy, haphazard work does not kick in in the case of this RD350.
I have now split the bike down and have taken it apart, having handed over different parts to different shops throughout the city. A friend of mine, Dhanraj Chavan, who runs Shine Inc. in Kalyani Nagar, was kind enough to give me some space in his shop, so that we could assemble the bike at a suitable venue. Just two days before the IBW submission deadline, we begin assembling the bike at Shine Inc.
We start work at 2pm, because the entire first half of the day was spent gathering all of the different bike parts from across the busy city and bringing them to one workshop. From 2pm – 8.30pm, we work on the bike relentlessly.
By 8.30 pm, our bodies are sore and our eyes are getting heavy. We are now struck with yet another big decision: do we close shop now and get some well-deserved rest, so that we can come back tomorrow morning to finish the remaining work? Or, should we go all out and pull yet another back-breaking all-nighter in one last attempt to finish working on the Darkspawn? Naturally, we go with the latter.
What was running through my mind when making this decision was this: do I get one night’s rest at the cost of not being able to complete the bike, and then be haunted with sleepless nights for the rest of the year, or shall I stay up for this one night, work my fingers to the bone, and sleep in peace for the rest of the year knowing that I did this bike justice? No matter what, I knew one thing for certain at this point: Regardless of what would happen in 2015, I was going back to IBW 2016. I would not give up on this dream.
Keep in mind that at this point, the Shine Inc. studio has shut its doors, and it’s literally just me and my wife, assembling the bike and applying those crucial finishing touches. We were yet to paint the black racing blocks. We work on the bike all night, until the sun is high and bright in the morning sky.
By 11 am, with a heart stopping realisation, it turns out that there is an issue with the electrical wiring on the bike. The wiring had been cut to accommodate an R15 ignition switch, an FZ-S 150 headlamp, and an R15 handlebar switch system. This implies that the original wiring had been tampered with. In a few hours, a tempo would pull up, waiting to transport the Darkspawn to Goa’s famed IBW venue. After all of the tireless hours I had put in by working on this bike for nearly 48 hours straight, I was too frazzled to think of a solution.
I asked Dhanraj to help me out, and he was kind enough to lend a hand, as he already had enough pressure: so many people that were about to travel to Goa from Pune had rolled in their bikes at his studio in order to have the little problems tweaked and sorted out before the trip. Along with Dhanraj, we received another Godsend: Dipen Loomba, a H.O.G and member of the Deccan Cruisers, Pune, had been working on his own bike at Shine Inc., when he noticed me struggle with my RD.
With a kind heart, he lent me a helping hand, along with a few suggestions and tips as to how to easily fix the problems that I had been hit with. At that point, I was so stressed out and my brain had been sent into such a maddening state of overdrive, that I was unable to think straight and come up with logical solutions to the problems that I was encountering. It was thus very refreshing and much appreciated to have Dipen there: generally, people are quick to pinpoint the issues. In Dipen’s case, however, he gave us the solutions, rather than just pointing out what was wrong with the bike. Hats off to him!
By midnight, I had finally finished putting everything together and sticking the decals that my friend Sapna Prakash was kind enough to custom-cut and send over to Shine Inc. The tempo that we had booked for the bike had arrived. I loaded the bike, secured the straps, and waved goodbye.
I felt as if I was saying goodbye to my kid on her first day of kindergarten! I let out a long-repressed sigh of relief, and finally allowed my body to feel the ache of hard labour. A month and a half since I had first laid eyes on this bike, and precisely thirty days of actual work conducted... It had been thirty days of pure chaos, hard work, grease and metal, and dreams definitively transforming into reality. By this point in time, I felt like I had climbed a mountain that was worthy of being called the highest mountain in the world. With a final glance as the tempo turned around the corner, I headed home, hit the pillow, and didn’t look back.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * End Of Part II * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Yamaha RD350 Reincarnated- Darkspawn Part I
Yamaha RD350 Reincarnated- Darkspawn Final Part
By: Sachin Ramesh Shinde
The next day, the fabricator returns, and asks for an advance. I oblige, as usual, and give him half of his salary. I do not want to be taken advantage of, but now that the RD has been selected for the IBW Mod Bike competition, I have no choice but to play nice. I cannot afford to have my fabricator throw a tantrum a mere two weeks before the deadline. Another week passes by, and the fabricator has thankfully completed most of his work.
** It's all about lines and symmetry **
All the lines seem to be in place. Now we need to fill in the putty to smoothen out the metal. This is because there is absolutely no time left to beat the metal into shape, if we still hope to make it in time for the IBW competition.
** It's Putty time **
So, we put in a layer of putty to smoothen out the shape. Following this, the fabricator decides to vanish again, this time claiming that his wife isn’t feeling well. At this point in time, I have two options: the first being that I could just let go of everything, go to IBW, come back, and then sort things out. Or, I could pick up the tools myself, and get this beauty into shape. As always, the first thing that came to my mind was this: we’ve come so far. We can’t just hang the tools up on the shelf now and call it a day. This RD needs better – no, she deserves better.
So, I pick up the tools and go at it. I start sanding the bike myself. My fingers are cut and my knuckles are bruised beyond description, but I don’t stop. In two days and three nights, I finish sanding the bike, getting everything into shape and smoothened out.By now, we have precisely five days to go until IBW 2015.
The next big question is this: do I perform all of the painting work myself, or should I get a professional to do a simple paint job? I tried to keep the entire theme as simple as possible by doing a matte paint job, so that it isn’t too complicated and can be performed by somebody else within the predetermined time frame. Since everything was to follow the classic racing theme in terms of design, I decided to embed the Marlboro red racing colours that Yamaha had initially displayed on their bikes.
Just as I was agonizing over whether this colour was best suited for the bike, Marlboro decided to launch their new 2015 packs in India. Matte-finished, soft, and red, black and white: the colour combination that we at Darkside Ink have always been drawn to.
** Trying to pen down the images in my head **
These are things that simply fell into place, not because we wanted them to, but because we feel that they were purely meant to be, for reasons unknown. This is how the Darkside mascot welcomed its colour scheme and theme.
For the front, I decided to brandish two LED projectors upon the bike, one mounted atop the other. The reasoning behind this was simply that I wanted really powerful headlamps; so, we had to import these from E-Bay in the United States. Once I received them, I placed these projectors onto the right side of the bike: in India, there are countless fools who – either by choice or by intellectual disposition – do not know where to use the high beam, and where to use the low beam. They drive in the city with their high beams on. High beams are meant for highways, so that an entire dark patch is lit up adequately and that you don’t meet with or cause any accidents. High beams are not meant for the city, where you have street-lights and lamp-posts lighting up the way for you, while you use your relentless high-beam to blind the person across you into getting off the road! So, this is why I wanted the headlamps to be placed onto the right side of the bike, which also provided us with a big round patch where we could embed our company’s logo, which we have trademarked for our studio.
The Darkside Ink logo features a werewolf transforming before a full moon; if you pay close attention, you will notice that the wolf is still half-man. The man is still undergoing the process of transforming into a beast, and is still partially human. This further emphasizes our slogan, which is: “Unleash the Beast Within”. So, you wake up in the morning, dutifully do your 9 to 5, and after 5, you unleash that beast within. Not only would the logo enable the bike to successfully transform into the official Darkside mascot, but it would also further communicate the bike’s beast-like capabilities and qualities. This is how the colour scheme and the look of the vehicle had been decided and put into place.
All things said and done, I knew that I still had to do something different and radical with this bike. It was no longer a question of simply riding this bike down to Bangalore or parading it as a mascot for my company, but it had now become a way for me to test myself: could I truly do something positively profound and out-of-the-box with this bike, within a short span of 30 days?
I believe that when it comes to café-racers, everything that can be done has, more often than not, already been done. So, achieving something out-of-the-box with a café-racer is practically impossible. This reality kept biting at me, keeping me awake at night as I tried to figure out how to achieve a shred of inimitability for this bike. That’s when it hit me. That’s when I decided to implement underbelly exhaust expansion chambers: something that I haven’t ever seen on an RD350 before.
I have seen quite a few two into ones, and quite a few under-seat exhausts; but an underbelly exhaust was, according to me, quite different. I do not claim that I am the only person that has done this: there could be quite a few people that have already done this, but haven’t been blessed with the opportunity to tell a lot of people about it. So, I wouldn’t say that I’m the first person to have ever done this, or the only one to have come up with it. I do however really love the fact that this idea came to me in time, so that I could implement this onto the bike. I had a pair of pre-existing expansion chambers that were already on the bike, so I filled it in with sand so that I could gauge the volume of the entire exhaust. I then collected all of the sand together, put it into a box, and subsequently used the same amount of sand to measure the volume of it. This is how I calculated it all. It could be considered as a Stone Age method in a New Age era, where you have all of the mathematical laws at your disposal: you’ve got your law of Pi, and all of your relevant formulae to measure everything. I had just opened my workshop a couple of weeks ago, though, and I didn’t know exactly how to go about it all, as I have not been fortunate enough to pursue a degree in automobile engineering.
I didn’t have a lot of time to do enough research or surf the web, since this was all conducted during the final 5-day mark of the entire project. So, I did what I could with what I had at the time, and this was the best way that I could think to achieve what I wanted. I measured the volume, got all of the pipes bent and fitted, traveled 15-20 kilometres each way in peak Pune traffic on my way to Nanapeth and back, where I had to purchase my tools and get all of the items fitted correctly. This is how I managed to get the bike, Darkspawn, to look the way she does right now.
For the engine, I decided to give the bike to the garage owner that I had initially procured the bike from, as I felt that he would be best suited for it. All that needed to be done was to change the gaskets, tune up the carbs, and conduct a few settings with the clutch. So, the engine was handed over to the garage owner, and the body was given to a painter.
** The Frame hanging above all the mess **
In the midst of all this, I am constantly running around from point A to B, back to A and then to C, desperately trying to ensure that the typical Indian mindset of lazy, haphazard work does not kick in in the case of this RD350.
I have now split the bike down and have taken it apart, having handed over different parts to different shops throughout the city. A friend of mine, Dhanraj Chavan, who runs Shine Inc. in Kalyani Nagar, was kind enough to give me some space in his shop, so that we could assemble the bike at a suitable venue. Just two days before the IBW submission deadline, we begin assembling the bike at Shine Inc.
** Final assembly at Shine inc **
We start work at 2pm, because the entire first half of the day was spent gathering all of the different bike parts from across the busy city and bringing them to one workshop. From 2pm – 8.30pm, we work on the bike relentlessly.
By 8.30 pm, our bodies are sore and our eyes are getting heavy. We are now struck with yet another big decision: do we close shop now and get some well-deserved rest, so that we can come back tomorrow morning to finish the remaining work? Or, should we go all out and pull yet another back-breaking all-nighter in one last attempt to finish working on the Darkspawn? Naturally, we go with the latter. What was running through my mind when making this decision was this: do I get one night’s rest at the cost of not being able to complete the bike, and then be haunted with sleepless nights for the rest of the year, or shall I stay up for this one night, work my fingers to the bone, and sleep in peace for the rest of the year knowing that I did this bike justice? No matter what, I knew one thing for certain at this point: Regardless of what would happen in 2015, I was going back to IBW 2016. I would not give up on this dream.
Keep in mind that at this point, the Shine Inc. studio has shut its doors, and it’s literally just me and my wife, assembling the bike and applying those crucial finishing touches. We were yet to paint the black racing blocks. We work on the bike all night, until the sun is high and bright in the morning sky.
By 11 am, with a heart stopping realisation, it turns out that there is an issue with the electrical wiring on the bike. The wiring had been cut to accommodate an R15 ignition switch, an FZ-S 150 headlamp, and an R15 handlebar switch system. This implies that the original wiring had been tampered with. In a few hours, a tempo would pull up, waiting to transport the Darkspawn to Goa’s famed IBW venue. After all of the tireless hours I had put in by working on this bike for nearly 48 hours straight, I was too frazzled to think of a solution.
I asked Dhanraj to help me out, and he was kind enough to lend a hand, as he already had enough pressure: so many people that were about to travel to Goa from Pune had rolled in their bikes at his studio in order to have the little problems tweaked and sorted out before the trip. Along with Dhanraj, we received another Godsend: Dipen Loomba, a H.O.G and member of the Deccan Cruisers, Pune, had been working on his own bike at Shine Inc., when he noticed me struggle with my RD. With a kind heart, he lent me a helping hand, along with a few suggestions and tips as to how to easily fix the problems that I had been hit with. At that point, I was so stressed out and my brain had been sent into such a maddening state of overdrive, that I was unable to think straight and come up with logical solutions to the problems that I was encountering. It was thus very refreshing and much appreciated to have Dipen there: generally, people are quick to pinpoint the issues. In Dipen’s case, however, he gave us the solutions, rather than just pointing out what was wrong with the bike. Hats off to him!
By midnight, I had finally finished putting everything together and sticking the decals that my friend Sapna Prakash was kind enough to custom-cut and send over to Shine Inc. The tempo that we had booked for the bike had arrived. I loaded the bike, secured the straps, and waved goodbye.
I felt as if I was saying goodbye to my kid on her first day of kindergarten! I let out a long-repressed sigh of relief, and finally allowed my body to feel the ache of hard labour. A month and a half since I had first laid eyes on this bike, and precisely thirty days of actual work conducted... It had been thirty days of pure chaos, hard work, grease and metal, and dreams definitively transforming into reality. By this point in time, I felt like I had climbed a mountain that was worthy of being called the highest mountain in the world. With a final glance as the tempo turned around the corner, I headed home, hit the pillow, and didn’t look back.* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * End Of Part II * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Yamaha RD350 Reincarnated- Darkspawn Part I
Yamaha RD350 Reincarnated- Darkspawn Final Part
By: Sachin Ramesh Shinde
