[glavey]

With another ride under my belt, I have a little bit more to report.

Before the ride I just took, I checked and adjusted the valves. The intake valve had loosened up to about .007" and the exhaust valve was still .006". I decided that I would set the valves to .004" on the intake and .005" on the exhaust. At the end of the ride, when the engine was well into operating temperature, the valves were audible at idle, but not loud. The best way I can explain it is tick-tick-tick, not click-click-click.

I drilled a small hole, I think 1/16" into the fuel tank cap right behind the pivot for the "lift open" tab for the fuel tank vent. The hole opens up on the underside of the cap, in a recess that should prevent fuel from getting pushed out of the hole. That solution appears to work well, fuel hasn't leaked out of the cap and no fuel is leaking our of the capped vent nipple on the tank.

However...

After the ride, even with the tank vent port nipple capped off, the carb and some of the surrounding area was wet with gas. The picture I attached shows a vent hose coming down; I took that picture when I was using that hose as a vent, I no longer have that hose on the bike, but the wetness of the carb is still representative of what is happening. Only the side of the carb that faces forward is wet, the other sides and the top are dry. It almost appears that the most wet area is the choke lever. Perhaps something isn't completely... torqued? internally in the carb. Maybe there's a leak in/around the choke area. Maybe the carb is tilted forward a bit and I haven't noticed it because I always look at it while the bike is one the center stand. Maybe the float level is too high. Maybe the o-ring for the float bowl is pinched. Quite possibly a combination thereof. I'll have to find out at a later date.

I had intended to try the shock mod after I had done all of the above, but I had the realization that since I don't have a front-end motorcycle stand, I would have to do some shady, sketchy stuff to keep the bike off the ground while potentially the front wheel and both front shocks are off the bike. I managed to do something like that once before by using a floor jack right on the meaty piece of frame that is just inside the kick stand, lifting the rear of the bike off the ground and then weighting the back of the bike down with cinder blocks, stepping stones, and bricks. Like I said, sketchy. A different way I could get the front lifted is put the bike "inside" a folding ladder and suspend the front from the top step of the ladder with rope/straps/chain. The only folding ladder I have is an inherited, old wooden, creaky ladder; not very safe or sturdy. I do have two saw horses of roughly the same height... I don't know exactly how I'll do it, but I'll do it. Also, one more smallish thing that kept me from attempting the shock mod sooner was the bolts in the triple tree were already starting to strip, so I bought some new ones to replace them.

I finished designing and printing the gauge cluster. I had originally planned to hold the cluster to the speedometer with just zip ties, but they just wouldn't hold tight enough, so I ended up using small bolts and nuts with rubber grommets between the cluster and the speedometer to eliminate any vibrating and to "absorb" any differences in contour between the two pieces. I haven't wired the gauges in yet, for the time being they are just there, but not functioning.

For the past few days, I have been mentally planning out circuitry for a quick shifter. Not just the switch that gets triggered by the shifter, but all the electric components that go in to giving the ignition system a sub-second cut out. At the time of writing, I have just a overview of the specific ICs (integrated circuits, those little black chips you see inside anything technological) I might use and how to clean up the input signal to prevent false re-triggering and/or switch bouncing. I don't have anything tangible to show yet, it is still all brainstorming.

I had originally thought about using an arduino for the quick shifter, but arduinos CAN crash. If the arduino inside of a quick shifter crashed while you were riding the bike and using the quick shifter...

1. On the next attempted upshift, the bike would probably, depending on load, either shift very harshly, damaging the dogs in the transmission in the process, or it would go into a false neutral. So the gears as well as the arduino would crash and probably made a sad sound.

2. Upon hearing said sad sound, you would probably turn around, go home and investigate what happened. Once you realized what happened, you, as well as the gears in the transmission, would have made a sad sound.

I decided to use dedicated ICs for the quick shifter because, to the best of my knowledge, non-programmable ICs (the kind that you can't upload code to) cannot crash the same way an arduino can. There are still reasons the ICs might not work properly like a quick dip in supply voltage or a floating input/reset pin (floating in this context means not connected to the positive or negative voltage rail).

Things are getting to the point where I am running out of new things to talk about regarding the bike. Posts might get even more spaced out since I won't have much more than a few lines of information to share.