California trip

So I'm heading out Sunday for my trip to California.
I've got a small tent, a too-big sleeping bag, and saddlebags that will barely hold a change of clothes and some extra food. Yikes!
Today, I made sure to buy a tire repair kit - something called Slime - and a canister of CO2 to inflate the tire should the need arise. I also bought a clutch cable to take as a spare. I've actually had one break on me years and years ago.
I spent about an hour putting together a small took kit - a socket set, some spare screws, wrenches, electric tape, stuff like that.
I don't have a specific itinerary. My general plan is to get as far south on Sunday as daylight allows. I don't want to ride at night and I don't want to push my bike hard.
So I'll camp when dusk approaches, though I'm hoping to at least reach Southern Oregon by then.
We'll just have to wait and see.
I plan to take photos and post them to my website. In fact, I should have taken photos today of my visit to Bent Bike in Auburn, Wash., and Cycle World, in my hometown of Tacoma, Wash.
Cycle World is OK for clothes and boots and things like that. But for my old bike, the place I go for parts is usually Bent Bike. They've got lots of spare parts for older bikes like mine, and the guys and girls working there know their beef about bikes.
It was good riding weather, just a bit warm. It was actually too warm to feel comfortable in my leather jacket, so I wore an old jean jacket I picked up at a Goodwill.
It was OK, but I forgot how easily those old jackets fill up with wind sometimes. It was like wearing a balloon at some points!
Tomorrow, of course, I'll be wearing the leather jacket, full face helmet and boots. I'll even put the armor in the jacket, to please the wife and spare me bones.

It's ALIVE!

OK, well, this is embarrassing. Did you know that most motorcycles have a kill switch to shut off the engine? When this kill switch is on, the bike won't turn on no matter how many times you try to turn it over. Well, you guessed it.

My trouble starting my motorcycle after my carb cleaning had nothing to do with the job I did, and everything to do with little details like making sure the kill switch was off.

Once I figured that out, thanks to the suggestion from someone on the GS Forum, the bike started right up. I had to adjust the idle and the air mix screws, but it's now running at just about 1400 rpms at idle when it's warm.

Of course, owning an old bike means never having to say you're done.

Now that I've replaced the intake boots, the airbox boots, and cleaned and rebuilt the carburetors, I can see that I have a small oil leak from the camshaft tensioner.

Guess what that means! I get to remove the carbs all over again!

OK, I think I'm going to leave that job for the end of the summer when I replace the seals in the tensioner and, at the same time, adjust my valves.

In the meantime, I'm gonna enjoy my bike.

Here it is now!

Carburetor woes

The on-going saga of my carb troubles only continues.

On the plus side, the gas leak has been taken care of. Following a suggested remedy, I tapped my carburetors with a chunk of wood and that seemed to loosen the floats, which apparently sometimes stick after a cleaning job. Knocking the carbs took care of that problem.

But, now, even without the gas leak, the bike won't start. I'm trying to figure out what I might have done wrong. That's such a troublesome thing to do. I'm certain I followed all the steps in the procedure properly, and yet...

I'll keep working on it.

Gas, gas and more gas

So my carburetors are all done! They look beautiful and I put them on my bike yesterday.
Sadly, as soon as I tried to start them up, gas began pouring out. I didn't cry, but I was disappointed. I've read that sometimes the floats get stuck inside the carb bodies and cause the gas to leak, which may be the case for me since all the gas is coming out of the airbox.
Anyway, I'm about to go out and give the carbs a good whack and see if that loosens up the insides. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.
But the delays are making it less and less likely that I can actually ride my bike down to California like I'd hoped. Oh well.
We'll see what the day brings.

One screw short!

Well, my carbs won't be going on my bike today and, with Monday a holiday, it looks like Tuesday will be the earliest I can install them.

Here's a look at the carbs, all together as one again!

You can't really tell from this photo, but I replaced all the phillip's head screws with shiny silver hex head screws. I figure they look better and will be a heckuva lot easier to remove if I ever work on my carbs again.

Each carb has an idle mixture adjustment screw, some people call it an air screw for short, though that's not quite accurate. Anyway, they were really tough to take out and I mangled pretty much all of them. I didn't know I'd need to replace them until about midway in my project and, at the time, I thought I'd only need a pair of them, which I ordered. Well, those arrived and, as it turns out, I need to replace at least one more.

I ordered another pair but they didn't arrive today (Saturday) which is why I'm angry with the USPS! But I'll get over it as soon as these little screws arrive, probably on Tuesday.

Here's a pic of my bike shortly before I rolled it into the garage for the carburetor job.

I can't wait to ride it again!

Ride safe.

Carburetors and my rite of passage

Carburetors have always frightened me.

They're all metallic with hoses coming out from everywhere and all these moving parts and little doo dads inside that actually have to be adjusted! Yikes!

So, I managed to go my entire life without ever looking into the raw innards of a carburetor, this despite tearing down motors to replace blown head gaskets, installing starters, water pumps, once putting a new clutch in an old VW.

But carburetors ...nope. I guess I just figured if I ever shoved my clumsy fingers into the guts of a carburetor it would mean certain death for the vehicle involved.

Then I bought my motorcycle.

By the way, this is what my bike looked like when I first bought it.

Since this photo was taken, I've replaced the headlamp, added a small windshield, installed some side panels, and the end caps on the engine.

Anyway, in preparation for a ride to California, I decided it was high time to replace my intake boots, which looked like this: They're cracked, old, pretty much just falling apart.

Well, getting new boots was pretty easy. And, actually, installing them was simple, too. The only tough part was removing the old screws. I used a Dremel tool to cut a deep slot and an impact driver to break them loose.

But getting to the boots meant removing my carburetor! OK, not a big deal. But, my brain decided that since the carbs were off, this would be a good time to tear them apart and clean them - each and every single little part. And so, for the past two weeks, that's what I've been doing.

Here's what they looked like separated, but at one point, they were in so many pieces, I needed baggies to keep them in order. I soaked everything in Gunk cleaner, a process that took almost a week in itself. I wiped the parts down, blew compressed air in the various openings, and some carb cleaner. It was just today, I finally got them back together. Inside, there are new rubber O-rings, new gaskets for the float bowls, and some new screws that I had to replace 'cause I mangled some of them trying to remove them.

Tomorrow, I hope to get them installed on my bike. If everything goes like it should, I could be riding again in a warm Saturday in the Pacific Northwest!

I gotta say, I'm pretty proud of myself for trying this.

I really wasn't sure I could do it, but I guess it's like anything else - you take on one challenge at a time, and each one you succesfully meet gives you the experience and the confidence to take on the next.

Ride safe.