The Best Electronics Come in Ziplock Bags

Sure has been a while posting on here, maybe this will encourage me to get back into the swing of it again. A big thumbs up to Ian for throwing down the gaunlet and posting about some model A adventures! A quick scroll through my last posts reveals how much has happened since... cripes I feel old!

I was surprisingly productive last weekend, lately it seems I'm finding myself all over New England (and sometimes elsewhere) with my lovely lady friend Kaitlyn. As always I've got half a dozen projects in various states of disrepair so traveling around and having all this fun can be a little detrimental to progress. Last weekend though I had one of those rare times where everything seemed to line up just right such that I was able to make some milestones on a couple things and do some socializing along the way!

I recently took rental of a storage unit in Westbrook for my motorcycle(s). Last year I was able to store my bike at work but it got in the way and was generally a hassle to have around. Being an old bike I really don't want to leave it outside for long periods unattended if possible. I've been slowly working my way into building it into a reputable machine so I wouldn't want all that work wasted. Here is a small list of the improvements I've done on the bike since I got it late in 2014.

• Full carburetor rebuild (Took them off line 4 times for various assorted screw ups. Who knew you had to synchronize your chokes... and the vaccum on each carb... and that the idle adjustment in the rebuild kit is just junk and you should use the original one anyways?!)
• Carb synchronization (I bought 4 gauges to do it with, it was quite the site... real mad science).
• Valve adjustment and timing 
• New battery (which I killed due to a posionous bad starter which was very hard to find.)
• New starter (new to me anyways)
• Newer battery (AGM)
• Starter solenoid(s) ... I welded a brand 2 new ones shut with my bad starter/battery combo luckily they sent a new one for free, also the Cb750 doesn't have a fuse on the starting solenoid so.... if it welds shut it is just on until you can disconnect the battery. Bad design, still haven't corrected it.
• New side covers ( I painted with a matched paint not the exact stuff which is crazy $$. The covers I got were cast by this guy on a forum who replicated some orginals in ABS and they are pretty cool but took a lot of sanding to get right and lots of paint to look good. I still need to shape the mounting features on them to fit right into the rubber grommets on the side of the bike.)
• Various fasteners updated to stainless steel allen heads from old chewed up phillips heads which required an impact driver to remove
• A couple little electrical things
• Front brake dis-assembly/rejuvenation and adjustment (weird design but seems to be working pretty well now)
• New spark plugs
• New fuel lines and hose clamps

The 750 without side covers and missing a handlebar grip

Despite all these items I still haven't really put many miles on the bike. I have taken it back and fourth to Litchfield from P-town a few times but I haven't really gotten things dialed to the point where everything runs 100% as it should. There are a couple of items to address with it still. Firstly is starting, the bike is painfully cold-blooded and no matter what I do it seems the idle will change while I ride the bike. So I'm constantly adjusting the idle to start and then once the bike is warm it will settle down kind of. My quest to fix these issues has led me to the one, the only Hondaman. Hondaman is apparently this badass guy named Mark who lives out in Colorado. Besides making awesome improved parts for old honda bikes in his spare time, he appears to have experience making a lot of cool electrical stuff for his day job. Apparently one big issue with the only CB750 is the points which used to be made of a higher quality material than they are now. Modern points are notoriously bad until they warm up resulting in cold blooded engines. However Mark made a super sweet transistorized ignition that solves that problem. It even goes one step further, it leaves the existing points in place and so in the event his ignition module fails (which is apparently pretty rare) you can jumper it out of the circuit and ride home on your normal points, brilliant! I recently got one of these ignitions but haven't installed it yet, I couldn't help myself and had to take it apart. Luckily Mark responds to e-mails readily and told me how to get it back together! 

I still have the same bike I've had since high school as well, my 1984 Honda CM450 which is a sweet little bike. It has front and rear drum brakes, both mechanically operated (no need to bleed anything). Starts easy and runs solid. This weekend I put a rear tire on it and got it started up, as well as the 750. I drove the 750 down and put it in storage so now it's nice and close for me to ride/wrench on. 

Additionally, I have been planning to build a desktop computer for a while. I finally made it happen after much debate with my coworker using PCPartPicker. It's a great website and allows you to really optimize and see what's out there. My build was loosely based on this featured build which clued me into a super quiet CPU cooler. The goal was a kickass machine that could do solidworks, play rocket league, be up-gradable and basically handle anything I could throw at it without using too much power and making too much noise. I will say so far the machine is super quiet, boots crazy fast and looks pretty sweet too. I have some computer building PTSD from when I was in middle school and threw months of my hard earned landscaping money into a machine that ultimately never worked. Happy to say everything went off without a hitch on this machine which was a huge relief.