Progress Thread Today in the shed........

[Don7Up]

Thanks for the heads up on the hardware. I'm sure I'll be needing some. Leave it to Ford to sell only the gold plated versions.

Another fun day in the shed. Took the moped out for a run. Been using it for living room art for the last 8yrs. and got it out a couple months ago. Clutch plates were stuck so bad I had to run it down the hill and hit 2nd gear to pop them loose. Stuck again this morning. Now has 1051 miles, so 44 years on it's time for the break-in service. Swapped the OE fish oil for some Rotella 15/40. It was nasty, and the sealing washer wasn't sealing, so got a new one. A few sparkles in the pan, but not more than I expected. ran it around the block, and do it again tomorrow to see if the plates stick again.

Hard to pick a band for such a mundane job. Been thinking about that, and last week came up with a fix. Had an old windows 7 laptop gathering dust because a bunch of bad sectors in the hard drive retired it. Gave it the full nuke reset to see what would happen. Loaded up all my.mp3's, and all my digital service manuals. Fortune smiled upon me. It plays tunes, and the Adobe reader still works. This is all it's good for as it won't talk to the interweb. Put it on random and the first song was by King Crimson. Score!

Car content. Ran more errands in the Comet. Was checking the p/s pump leak (still dry) and noticed the battery sitting a little awry. Hold down clip nut broke. Looked rusty enough to be OE, so I'll give some slack. All good now.

 

[Don7Up]

I'm getting to the end of cleaning out my late bro's shed, and started on the wheel/tire rack this morning. I need some help ID'ing this stuff. The set of SVE wheels have 275/40/18 tires on them. Would these fit the 90 7Up? Look too wide. They look mint, but the 09 GT is already sitting on an identical set of SVE wheels. If they won't fit the 90, not sure what he ran them on except the street Marauder. The rim on the floor looks like a stock wheel measuring best guess 19 by 9 wide. Would they be the stockers off the 09? The large units in the truck is the first set he ran when he back halved the race Marauder. Sent a couple stock wheels off to be widened. Probably boat anchors now, lol! Also found the mod motor blower intake manifold. Put one of those in the Comet? Hell no, lol! Wish I could weld like the person who built it. Beautiful work.

As far as my stuff, I had another trip around the sun a few days ago and was going to celebrate by riding a few I don't get out much but got sidetracked. The pre-ride ritual with the Norton is draining the sump. If it sits longer than a month it wet sumps too much to start without blowing the seals. I need to get to that ride soon as the shed cleaning is getting depressing.

 

[Don7Up]

Had some time to kill before the futbol game today so got a couple chores done in the bike shed.

New plate for the rat XS this year. Notice the paint scraped, caved in old one. Going to miss that, lol! Damn DOT leveled out the RR jump. I can't hit it hard enough to bottom out the back end anymore. Another sign of changing times, like picking up the land line and hearing one of your neighbors talking. Getting old I guess.

Had room in the corner for a shelf unit out of bro's shed. The 2stroke powered shovel always sat there in summer, and push mower in winter. Now have room for a few tubs of spares. You all know how precious shed space is.

Fired up the portable .mp3 speaker and Janis Joplin comes up. Fitting. All my friends get the blues seeing what I did to a perfectly good XS.

 

[Don7Up]

This morning in the shed, it's my least favourite work. Electrics. Nothing hard, electrics, I just don't care for it.

Got that ride I was jonesing for on the Norton. First ride went well, but it did fart a couple times at highway speed on a steady throttle. In the biz they call that foreshadowing, lol! The next ride (yesterday), I got almost out of town and it starts cutting out bad. Tried to limp it home but didn't make it. Could have been worse. It was only a 24 block walk home. Hot as hell though. That's why I was in the shed at 4:30 this morning. Started on it yesterday afternoon but after an hour of sweating a beer and A/C seemed a better plan. No sparks. The coils ohmed out OK, and the pick-up coil isn't shorted. I'm sitting here posting because temporarily stuck. It has the upgrade Lucas RITA ign. That hasn't been made for over 40 years, and my Chilton only covers the points ign. I need to do some web crawling to hopefully find a schematic and specs. If I don't find a voltage to the brainbox problem, I can see a new Pazon ign. in it's future.

The observant will notice I swapped the Comet for the 7UP last week. It also has an electrics issue. Forgot to pull the neg. battery cable and the parasitic draw flattened it in 2 days. DOH! Date code on it is 19. Had it on the charger all day yesterday and it topped out at 12.8V. S'okay, Wallyworld can fix that. I have fantastic luck with their cheap line. Always get better than 10 years with those.

Working on an old Brit, of course the tunes are the Beatles.

Update. Guessed right. When going to disconnect the brainbox plug, the power lead wire fell right out. Of course, my Jap pin connecters dia. was too big, so wired it outside the connecter. No biggie, saved me $$$. It's always been a magical mystery tour with this bike on so many levels, but I love it. That under square long stroke motor pulls like a nuclear freight train.