Success... Of Sorts

Success!

Of sorts.

It was a fabulous weekend here in Southern Ontario. It was great to be able to roll the bike out onto the driveway and work in the sunshine.

On Saturday, after much fiddling and error, I had the bike running for over ten minutes. Before, however, I managed to flood it several times. But once the spark plugs were dried out and we let the carburetor dry out, I managed to get it going. It rang very strong for the ten minutes I left it going, so I was very happy at that point. I learned several things while doing this. One was a simple little trick to check for compression without using any gauges. Did you know that if you put your thumb over the hole where the spark plug goes and try to turn over the engine, you should not be able to keep your thumb over the hole? The air pressure of the moving piston should be enough to push your thumb off. I couldn’t keep my thumb over the hole, so we have some decent compression in the engine!

Now, I started with success of sorts. The problem came later in the day. I had my family over for dinner (Parents and brother with his family) and I wanted to show them the bike. So, they all gathered around in the garage and I hopped on, full of confidence after my morning success. I turned over the engine. It started up and ran for a few seconds.

Then there was a loud crack. A backfire… And the engine died. I tried to getting it started again but it was flooded. I couldn’t get it going again.

Rather anti-climactic.



Sunday afternoon, I was working on it again. It turned over for a second and there was another loud backfire. I decided at this point that I needed to do some reading, so I went to the manual and the internet. It seems backfires occur when there is to rich or too lean a mixture of gas. In my case, I suspect there is too much gasoline getting in, as it seems to flood quite easily.

After some reading, I decided to start taking the bike apart, as I needed to take out the carburetor. I took of the gas tank, which turned out to be very easy. I began on the carburetor, but ran out of time, as I got caught up on detaching the carburetor from the throttle cable.

All in all, I was very pleased with the weekend, but this is going to take a lot of work.

Off to price a carb cleaning kit!