Proof of Concept Hi All, Some time ago I posted about doing this (sleeving the tube with a polymer) and I don't know where that was. But anyway, I completed my first medical experiment on some used emulsion tubes donated by Mr Grey. I see no barrier in doing this and I expect they will last multiple times longer than the OEM. Waiting for more tooling bits to arrive before it all goes public. Mr Grey and Gert, another forum member, have volunteered to try them out on their bikes. There are many other bikes that use these style of tubes and they cannot buy Keyster kits nor OEM parts, so this will be good news for those owners. Cheers Blair ps. Also am doing a mod to the slide to stop the vibrating needles which is the cause of all these problems.
Well I am not making needles, but at least it will save the ones you have. Also if you want to experiment with jetting you can, provided you can find more emulsion tubes. Speaking of which, if you are going to throw your old emulsion tubes in the bin, don't. You can post them to me and I will pay you for the post. Mr Grey just sent his in an envelope and it was not too expensive.
Replaced the original pic with a better one, just so you can see that it is not a narrow ring that will fall out.
I put this post in another thread but forgot to put it here. Some details. These were done to N6(2.58mm) not N8(2.59). This was based on my judgement call because I think these bikes run too rich. If I am wrong I will enlarge the holes to 2.59 for Mr Grey. The polymer I used to make the sleeves has the best chemical resistance, dimensional stability and self lubricating qualities that I could find, and is sourced from the USA. As a consequence, the needles are going to wear less because brass is far more abrasive than this material. The holes are machine reamed and checked with pin gauges. I don't really want to be doing lots of these because it takes quite a bit of time. Also I expect that emulsion tubes will be available from China soon, if they aren't already. However, if you want a set they will cost you 2500 Thai Baht and you need to send me your old ones and nominate what bore size you want. Increments of 10 microns only. Although the Mikuni emulsion tube table shows half sizes e.g. an N7 would be 2.585mm, there is no such thing and there are no reamers in 5 micron increments. There is a Mikuni spreadsheet on my links page https://litetek.co/docs/Mikuni_Needles.xls and this contains the data for needles and emulsion tubes. Cheers Blair