[safetyfish]

I recently was lucky enough to buy a Bayliss edition off a guy who had money issues. Lucky for me.
The bike was in pretty good nick, but it needed attention. First order of business was a new set of belts. The bike has 3200 km on it and it is still running on its original belts.....

Fitted the belts, cleaned up things like air filters and greased up suspension parts and other small bits and bobs while I had the rims off to fit a new set of Bridgestone 015's.

The morning broke and I was out the door like a rabbit with its tail on fire. I just could not wait to finally start her up and hit the road. I noticed that the oil level is high.... strange? Never touched the oil....
Start the bike up and let it tick over for a minute. Switch it off, and check out the oil level... Back to normal?

She was handling completely differently to my 999, a more involved experience. Took a few turns to get used to the quirks of this bike and new started to step things up a notch.

Bang!!! Sound of metal doing something and then nothing. I wheel to a stop with the clutch in and my first thought was the bike is on fire. Take a few steps back and realise it is all steam....thank goodness for small concellations.
But the steam was coming out of the exhaust pipe also, now that is not good. There is coolent everywhere, it is even running out of the joints on the exhaust pipes.

Got home with some kindly help and took the bike apart.

After having driven it for less than 30 minutes or 25 km's, this is what we find.

If you look closely, you will see the exhaust valve imbedded through the piston.
The titanium conrod is bend to hell and gone and the engine can not turn over with the amount of metal inside of the gearbox. It was somewhere around here when I said FAAAAARK!!!

This is going to hurt financially.

SF