Catching up

Well I did say I miss out on posting regularly!

It's been what?  Over a year since I posted "gunge and schrapnell" and the Suzuki's still running.  It's still noisy as well.  The tips of the valve stems are pitted making the setting up of the tappets approximate at best.  What can I say?  It needs a re-build really but it does run well, so all in good time...

But, but, but the biggie is that I've finally got it together and the Velo's chassis arrives tomorrow morning!!
 

Two tanks and bits...

Cadavre - erm, chassis I mean.

Gunge and Schrapnell

Sympoms 

My trusty DR600 has begun to make some alarming noises.  Well, one alarming noise actually.  It goes tickety, tickety, tickety in time with the engine and is independant of anything transmission or loose and floppy like a loose number plate or clutch lever.

This bike is brilliant.  Me and my Missus have had some really lovely times with it.  It cannot be allowed to die!

Initial diagnosis

I stuck a screwdriver stethoscope on various places and confirmed it's to be heard almost everywhere inside the engine, although reassuringly louder at the top to middle.  There's enough compression for me to stand on the kick start all day when the valve lifter mechanism is disconnected.

A history of malpractice

I'll confess that because the only thing this bike has ever done is run, I have been as lax at looking after it as my predecessors.  I've maintained and changed the oil and filters as necessary, but little more.

Testing and investigation

To put matters right I tensioned the ballancer chain, checked the cam chain tensioner, spark plugs, re-set the tappets and did an oil and filter change.

Indications

Well the results were interesting.  The plugs were perfect, as was the cam chain tensioner.  The ballancer chain was as slack as a tart's knicker elastic and the tappets had closed up.  This is the point where you have to get a good grip on your sense of reason and not let the imagination run away, well I do anyway.  What makes tappets close up?  Deteriorating valve seats?  Valve train support, proplems?

I turned my attention to the oil and carefully drained it into a very clean container.  I set this up to filter through some coffee filter papers, aided with a drop of white spirit so that it didn't take all day.
Whilst I was waiting for that, I dropped off the sump and cut up the oil filter and had a bit of a look.
 

Oil filter cut up and unraveled, coffee filter paper on the left, white spirit for rincing on the right and no, those screws are from an old radio cabinet, not the Suzuki!  Yes my workshop got dirty.

I used a couple of nifty tools to go with the magnet on a stick my wife found for me in Liddle (of all places!) on sale. Magnets on sticks are so useful!  I pulled apart an old hard drive and popped out the lovely rare earth magnets and glued them onto some M4 rods I had lying around.  These I swiped over the filters and sump to try and find bad things.  My heart was in my mouth.

Ex-hard drive magnets on sticks.  Very handy tools.

In all I found seven tiny pieces of magnetic metal between the sump, filter and the old oil.  I don't know if that's all that bad as I doubt if anyone has done anything nice to this engine in a long time.  Is this terminal?  Is the bottom end breaking up?  I have no references yet.  Everything I have read says if you find anything you should drop the engine and fit a new bottom end immediately.  Before I do that I'm going to try a few other things.

What I did next

I gave the poor thing some very superior oil (all the cheap stuff was out of stock!) and put it all back together because I needed it to go to work.

The noise is still there, but it does sound like it's not in the bottom end.  I live in hope.  On the positive side, it sounds like a BSA, it's really smooth running and it goes like a train!  Next Sunday I'll pop off the rocker box and see if there's anything to see.

Hold your breath for the next installment!  Actually don't do that, sometimes it takes me an age to add a post.

Truth.

And then I woke up to find things had changed...

A couple of things have stirred my otherwise dampened imagination recently and it’s all about electric vehicles and specifically electric motorbikes.

Blindspot Electric Custom Motorcycles
http://www.blindspotcycles.com/bikes.html

Brammo Empulse R from the review in Cycle World here;
http://www.cycleworld.com/2012/11/19/brammo-empulse-r-electric-motorcycle/

Until now the debates have run back and forth over things like “feel” and ideas of what constitutes a real enthusiasts vehicle.  This has gone on safe in the knowledge that unless you want a bike that will outweigh a Honda Gold Wing but not outrun a Honda 500 and be limited to around fifty miles range then its all so much science fiction.  That is until now.

The first thing that, as I mentioned above, stirred me is something called Graphine, a material that I believe will change a lot of our world.  It’s a form of carbon that turns out to be ridiculously easy to make (one scientist uses water dispersant and a computer DVD drive) but it has electrical, thermal and mechanical properties that could replace silicone and steel.  I could babble on for ages but I’ll cut to the chase instead.  Watch this link, right up to about 3 mins :15secomds (after that it repeats in silence with Spanish sub-titles). 

So unless you were distracted during that you will have surmised that a very fast charge, long life battery is a practical feasibility now.  For electric vehicles that’s a game changer.  

Of course there’s a lot of work to be done before we consumers will see the benefit, but if think how fast your tech such as phones and cameras have developed in the last ten years, then you can begin to believe that this is no longer science fiction. 

So the second stirring thing I referred to earlier is this rather extreme but nonetheless exciting illustration of how it could feel – you need sound, by the way;

Inspiration and procrastination

As I was scanning through Faceache tonight I stumbled on thiss little nugget;

Take your eyes off the gallery setting and just concentrate on the machine.  Yes it's a Honda wet dream from sometime in the eighties.  As I recall, duller than ditch water but equally reliable and endowed with Honda's "Euro styling", which at the time I hated. 

No, I don't like it much now either, but whoever built this has uncovered some interesting lines.  Remove most or all of the bathroom acessories these were festooned with and you end up with a purposefull looking bike.  As I've been discovering lately, a low powered bike with good tyres and springy bits can be husled along at a supprising rate.  So much so that it can really unsettle riders of very sporty bikes not to mention run rings around expensive large engine cruisers.  

This is all very exciting!  These things are at the bottom of the heap along with CX500s and those Yamaha XS twins that exhuded an aura of beigeness.  They're machines though and machines can be fixed to become characterfull and entertaining.  Let's look at the Wet Dream again. 

The builder/ exhibiter is probably going for the "diamond in the rough" appeal.  The essence of biking lurking somewhere in the rat bike before you.  This is fine if you like bikes but don't know much about them.   It certainly works as an exhibit, but what if it had a pair of half decent forks, rear sets and good sticky tyres?  The shocks look newish.  What if you knew you could give it all the beans and hold that into the next bend with confidence?  All that and then when you arrive, you can have a cuppa and admire the lines.  Oh a double-entendre - I must be right!

Lovely rides are in the morning.

This I had to post.  Old Empire Motorcycles are one of the new wave of custom bike builders who specialise in the neo-retro style and have put a lot of effort in building their brand tastefully.  They are clearly very creative, have a good sense of aesthetics as well as practicality and seem to favour engines and donor bikes that I like.  That said, I confess to not keeping up to date with their stuff after they did a load of bikes with those silly firestone tyres (sidecar type pattern). Yes, I'm one of those. 

Then I happened on this video of theirs.  It's nothing short of heartwarming.

Lovely memories stirred up eh?

Going Slow

(Thanks to http://graphicsfairy.blogspot.fr for the graphic)

I've been re-discovering the pleasures of going slow.  Nothing to do with the Venom, althought I've hit an obstacle there, no just biking in general.

To get to work here I have bought a ratty old DR600 Suzuki.  It's not likely to turn heads, but that's fine by me because I didn't buy it for that.  We all joke about mid life crises and I reckon I need to put up my hands to this one because I suppose I'm trying to understand a bit of what would have happened if I had kept my first propper bike, a BSA 250, and put in the CCM 550 engine - I'll explain. 

I learned most of my basic spanner twirling on a 1971 BSA B25SS.  I fell in love with it before I bought it because to me it looked right, it sounded right, smelt right and above all, it felt right.  I think that a mixture of established, but expensive manufacturing methods used by the Small Heath factory and the use of common parts across the ranges, made this bike a tactile pleasure in the same way as a gun can be.  Sharing cycle parts with 650s, the frame and suspension were way over the top for the modest 250cc engine.  All the steel parts were a decent gauge, the aluminium castings were lovely and there were no plastic bits at all!

In the follwing 12 months I ran through a gamet of emotions as it dumped me in the middle of nowhere, set fire to my trousers, broke expensive bits, refused to start etc.  The night before my motorcycle test, it dropped it's clutch basket inside the chain case and I suffered the ignomony of taking the test on my brother's C90 Honda!  Every one of those faults could be traced back to me abusing or not using key parts (like tab washers!) correctly.  Consequently, bit by bit, I grew to understand what made it tick and what stopped it ticking and in doing so I bonded with it.

Sadly though, teenagers can be fickle creatures and I was no exception, bowing to peer pressure to move on to a 500.  This is how I ended up with the Velo, but at the time I was becoming familiar with that bike, I was missing my old BSA.  The angst was compounded when a bloke came and bought the BSA and took it away for ever just a week before I read an old article in Bike magazine about a B25/CCM 550 custom entitled "Staying Single" (May 1978).  It looked fast and fun and I was especially grabbed by the part that read "...a better power to weight ratio than an RD400" - crikey, on a level with the enemy!

BSA B50s look very purposeful.  CCM used to re-work these engines to raise the power and put right various known faults.  The chassis is almost identical to the 250.  Rubbish tyres though eh?

The rest is history, but I have often wondered what such a bike would have felt like to ride. Thirty four years later and enter the DR600, 45 bhp, 160Kg including fuel and oil.  Compared with the BSA B50 at 35 bhp, 135kg dry, then the DR600 looks like it may answer the question of what the CCM special would have been like, particularly when you look at the RD400 at 43 bhp and 175 Kg wet.

The DR600 with supermoto wheels

Where does all this lead?  Everyone knows that young men's biking has usually been about going as fast as you can.  Ring the bugger's neck, get to the front and above all overtake in bends to show how much better you are than your prey.  It's a culture of bravado and daring do on a par with Italian cavalry rules of fire engine driving down mountain roads.  Consequently, I wore the sides off my shoes and learned about falling off gracefully as I stuck with my mates entering the next unknown bend way beyond our limits of competence and ashen faced with fear.  Don't get me wrong though - I wouldn't change a moment, not one.

On the other hand, I would also sneak out alone and chug around country lanes just enjoying the sensation of the engine burbling away happily and the country side unfolding with each corner I exited.   A secret pleasure that was (as far as I knew) mine alone...

Some thirty years on and I have the machine and the maturity to go my own way.  It's brilliant, bloody brilliant.  The supermotard conversion means that once again the cycle parts are well beyond the engine spec to the point that I can even forgive the plastic bits.  So easy to set up for the next bend and so forgiving when I balls it up. The power to weight thing is nice, but I've run much bigger bikes, so it's just very nice.

As to pressure, well, I live in a place that is very macho, particularly in terms of things with wheels.  Here, everyone is heavily preocupied with overtaking each other from high speed traffic to jostling shopping trolleys to the check-out.  Then there's me rolling along at my speed, sometimes brisk, sometimes very leisurley but always happy.