Going Beyond

Over the last 10 days, my father-in-law and I have removed the rotor and replaced it with one from my parts bike. We have gone over every electrical connection, cleaned them and used dielectric grease to help improve the connections. We have replaced the ignition coil and the CDI unit with the one from my parts bike. We have spent quite a lot of time on this and unfortunately, I feel that we are actually moving backward on this. We get spark at one point and nothing the next, except the times we get nothing seem to be increasing.

I have come to the decision that I need to get some professional advice and have contacted a shop in town to come pick up the bike and go over it to let me know what needs to be done. In a sense, I am disappointed in that I couldn’t do this without help. In another sense, the realization that I have learned quite a bit about motorcycles. The fact that I could have an intelligent conversation with the mechanic and point him in the right direction is something I never thought I would be able to do. When I get the bike back, I will continue my updates.

Share and Share Alike

One of the biggest benefits of this project is the number of people I have come in contact with and the great willingness to share information and offer support. The people I have met on the internet who work on old bikes absolutely love them. The care and detail that goes into restoring them is astounding. The level of precision is beyond me. I admire the skill, knowledge and diligence. It is something that I know I cannot match, but I am sure glad they are there to support me.

Parting Out

The weirdness continues. After running great one day, I could not even get a spark the next. On top of it, the carburetor started overflowing. This weekend did not allow fro much progress. I took a great deal of time taking out the exhaust system from my parts bike to sell to some guy in New York State. What is beneficial is that the price he is paying actually covers the cost of my parts bike (So I will be subtracting that from my cost list). The negative part is that it took a long time, with the bolts on the exhaust being very unforgiving, thus not allowing m to move forward. It is worth it in that it continues to support my need to remain revenue neutral in the project.

My father-in-law and I spent our time on Sunday fixing the carbs. He was showing me how to use some Vernier calipers. Interesting, but it gave me a bit of a headache. First of all, reading decimalized inches just doesn’t make sense to someone now used to metric. It gets all screwy in my head. Anyway, we had to replace the floats, using floats from another set of carbs. We have replaced the ignition coil and CDI unit from main bike with the parts from the parts bike. I am waiting on a flywheel puller that should be in tomorrow, as we want to take the rotor off to see if there is anything behind that may be trapping moisture.

Boy, reading the last half of the previous paragraph, you’d think I actually knew something about motors. Well, you can fool some of the people….

Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy!

I'm so excited, I'm beside myself! More words tomorrow. I'll let video talk today. The video was taken by my son, who got a little creative in the shooting.

Another Motorcycle

There is one thing about refurbishing an old motorcycle that seems incongruous with what I see as Zen Buddhism. Fixing an old motorcycle requires ‘stuff’. Not lots of stuff; not ‘flashy’ things or even new shiny things. But lots of ‘stuff’ none the less.

In particular, parts. I have come to understand that parts are everything. The gaps in my blog are the result of one thing and one thing only.

I don’t have parts to fix what needs fixing, so I find myself waiting.

Well, my wait should be over, as I have accumulated more ‘stuff’ in the form of another motorcycle! It is a 1981 Honda CM400E. It has all the same components as mine, except the wheels are spoked and it uses drum brakes. So I have a great parts source now. The bike came with a large assortment of parts from another 1981 CM400T that the guy had taken apart. It was a good deal, costing me only $100 and 3 hours driving time. The parts I need form my bike I can already take from these sources will more than make up for it and I have several people looking to buy the parts off me that I will not need. Overall, the purchase will be revenue neutral in the long run. However, in the meantime, I have a lot of parts. The guy I bought these things from had just thrown all the parts in a bin. That just drives me crazy! I can’t stand digging around for things. I find the more I am disorganized, the more time I waste looking for things or cleaning up mistakes (See my blog on the missing bolt for example). I have arranged the parts into liquor boxes, using the various compartments to separate and organize the parts. I have advertised on several internet sites to get rid of the parts I don’t need (And to raise some revenue for my project). But, I also had to reorganize my garage because now I need space for two motorcycles.

I have decided, however, that the accumulation is going to stop. I should have enough now to get the bike going. And if I don’t I am going to end the project, as I am putting money into it and getting to the point where I could have purchased a running motorcycle.

As I hinted in the past, I am not a patient guy when it comes to mechanical things. With people, I have the patience of Job, especially with children. That’s a big part of my work, sort I have developed it over time. But with machines, it is another story. Part of the reason is just my lack of knowledge. Not knowing why something isn’t working drives me crazy. In the past, I have focused my ‘manly’ manual skills on work that doesn’t require a lot in terms of knowledge, such as renovating several homes. The knowledge I needed wasn’t extensive. Skills needed developing, but that is practice. The actual level of knowledge is not vast. Even basic plumbing I have completed without much concern because the level of knowledge needed is straightforward, even if the level of skill needed can take some time to master.

But working on motors with electrical parts and mechanical parts requires a great deal of knowledge. Even the task of trouble shooting requires quite a bit. Take the problem I have right now in not getting my bike to start. I can follow a troubleshooting sequence, but when there are multiple reasons that can cause the same problem, experience and skills are important, but knowledge of the intricacies of the various parts and how they interact make it very challenging.
The patience to know and acquire skills is one thing I hope to find in this project. The use of my mind and skills to achieve a sense of order, to me, is the best form of peace. In that it is akin to prayer. If the accumulation of stuff is not exactly Zen, I am pretty sure that state of being is.

Good Friday is a day to remember that much of what we take for granted is actually achieved through sacrifice. But true sacrifice is something almost foreign to our modern culture.

I spent the morning and early afternoon working on my bike, so there was little sacrifice in my day. Nor was there much accomplished to move the project forward. Not that it made the day any less enjoyable.

I removed the front wheel and checked to see if the tire was tubeless or not. The tire is a Bridgestone Spitfire, which is tubeless. But since many use tubes anyway, I wasn’t sure if there was one or not. There wasn’t. So the whole tire needs replacing. That will run about $120 with installation.

Next, I put in the new choke cable. I had the carburetor out and wove the cable through, put the carbs back in and realized I had tangled the cable around a piece of the frame. So, out came the carbs again and I did it all again.

My father-in-law and I spent a long time running down a problem with the ignition. I seem to have intermittent ignition problems with the bike. I get a good spark one day and nothing the next. So we went through wires one by one with the tester. My FIL thinks that the problem lies in the alternator, so off the cover came. We took out the bolt, but couldn’t get the rotor off. After some reading we realized we need a rotor puller, which put an end to that work for the day.

I spent some time cleaning up the bike, taking off rust and crud, as well as polishing the cover that goes over the alternator. It is apparent that the bike has been dumped some time in the past, because of the scratches on the co er. For me, it only adds to the character of the bike.