Sunday, July 17, 2016
Sunday, May 8, 2016
Saturday, May 7, 2016
Wednesday, April 27, 2016
CARBURETORS!!!!
Today I came home from work a little early to deal with our webernets. We are switching internet providers, since our internet breaks obnoxiously frequently. Of course, it didn't go well. I had to call Comcast to activate our connection, and their robo-directory ended up sending me to the billing department. After 10 minutes on the phone, the gal at the other end said, "Ooooh, we need to send someone out to set up your connection"... which is especially annoying, since they told us we didn't need that. So, someone coming out on Friday to set up our webernets.
After that, it was time for some relaxing with the Model A Ford. Last week, I had found a short in one of the headlight bulbs. Essentially, the contacts that are supposed to touch the bulb were also touching each other -- resulting in a short. Looking at the design, it seems to me that this must happen all the time... the contacts are long and flexible and not that far apart. I couldn't see a way to keep them apart other than shoving some electrical tape in between them... which is what I did. This evening I tried to turn the headlights on and the short was back, so I replaced the old electrical tape with a slightly bigger piece, which did the trick.
After some checks in the garage to verify that the new fix was working (turn the headlights on, whack the bucket to see if vibration caused the short to come back), I set off for a short high speed jaunt along the Snohomish river. I like this stretch of road, the speed limit is 45, and Kingsford maxes out at 45 MPH indicated (which I believe is more like 50 actual, given the speeds folks drive on this road and the fact that I don't hold up traffic).
I had also adjusted the brakes slightly, so when I got to a parking lot near I5, I pulled off to make my checks. The water pump continues to have a slight leak -- I believe the shaft is scored so the only way to fix this is to rebuild the water pump and that's a kind of obnoxious amount of work when you can just live with the slight leak. The brake temperatures were reasonable, but gasoline was POURING out of the carburetor (steady drip/small stream where the air goes in). As you might recall from the facebooks, I had this problem the other week when I forgot to turn the gas off. I had figured the float was stuck, but a few days ago I ran it in the garage for 10 minutes with no noticeable leak, so I figured it had fixed itself. Clearly not, now that I'm 20 minutes from home and it's getting dark... On the bright side, headlights continued to work great!
I didn't want to disassemble the carburetor in the parking lot (and if the float was sunk or something, what was I gonna do?), so I decided to get back on the road and make a beeline for home. On the road, I could tell something was different -- I couldn't break 40 MPH and whenever the throttle was more than 3/4 open you could tell that something was not right.
When I was about 3/4 of the way home, magically it all got better. I could once again hit 45 MPH, and the weird sounds/vibes at full throttle went away. Yeeeeehaw! I made it home without any further incident (headlights continued to stay out without shorts!). Once in the garage, I checked and the air intake for the carburetor was now dry... There must be some sort of intermittent seal issue or something causing the float to occasionally not stop the flow in the bowl? I bet if I take it apart, I will see nothing wrong & and it will continue to do this intermittent garbage to me.
After that, it was time for some relaxing with the Model A Ford. Last week, I had found a short in one of the headlight bulbs. Essentially, the contacts that are supposed to touch the bulb were also touching each other -- resulting in a short. Looking at the design, it seems to me that this must happen all the time... the contacts are long and flexible and not that far apart. I couldn't see a way to keep them apart other than shoving some electrical tape in between them... which is what I did. This evening I tried to turn the headlights on and the short was back, so I replaced the old electrical tape with a slightly bigger piece, which did the trick.
After some checks in the garage to verify that the new fix was working (turn the headlights on, whack the bucket to see if vibration caused the short to come back), I set off for a short high speed jaunt along the Snohomish river. I like this stretch of road, the speed limit is 45, and Kingsford maxes out at 45 MPH indicated (which I believe is more like 50 actual, given the speeds folks drive on this road and the fact that I don't hold up traffic).
I had also adjusted the brakes slightly, so when I got to a parking lot near I5, I pulled off to make my checks. The water pump continues to have a slight leak -- I believe the shaft is scored so the only way to fix this is to rebuild the water pump and that's a kind of obnoxious amount of work when you can just live with the slight leak. The brake temperatures were reasonable, but gasoline was POURING out of the carburetor (steady drip/small stream where the air goes in). As you might recall from the facebooks, I had this problem the other week when I forgot to turn the gas off. I had figured the float was stuck, but a few days ago I ran it in the garage for 10 minutes with no noticeable leak, so I figured it had fixed itself. Clearly not, now that I'm 20 minutes from home and it's getting dark... On the bright side, headlights continued to work great!
I didn't want to disassemble the carburetor in the parking lot (and if the float was sunk or something, what was I gonna do?), so I decided to get back on the road and make a beeline for home. On the road, I could tell something was different -- I couldn't break 40 MPH and whenever the throttle was more than 3/4 open you could tell that something was not right.
When I was about 3/4 of the way home, magically it all got better. I could once again hit 45 MPH, and the weird sounds/vibes at full throttle went away. Yeeeeehaw! I made it home without any further incident (headlights continued to stay out without shorts!). Once in the garage, I checked and the air intake for the carburetor was now dry... There must be some sort of intermittent seal issue or something causing the float to occasionally not stop the flow in the bowl? I bet if I take it apart, I will see nothing wrong & and it will continue to do this intermittent garbage to me.
Tuesday, April 26, 2016
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.
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.
Sunday, April 24, 2016
Electrical Incident
 |
| Exhibit A, Melted Fuse Holder |
This should not have been a difficult trip. We were going from the house to the monthly meeting at a restaurant 1/3 of a mile away and then back. This was the first breakfast Kingsford had made it in several months (September?), due to the extended brake job / Ian being lazy. The drive from the house to the restaurant was uneventful. Kingsford started fine, and the short jaunt was uneventful with the new brakes holding their own (later adjusting would bring them into A+ form).
As always, breakfast was delicious with much discussion of old cars. We stayed late to talk about an upcoming swap meet, and also have some discussion on proper Model A mechanical brake adjustment in the parking lot. When the dust settled, it was only Mike (former club president you might remember from the wedding), and I. I hopped into the drivers seat and tried to start the truck. No dice. I tried a couple more times, and still no signs of life. Kingsford is usually pretty good about starting, and 0 signs of life means that the fuse has blown.
It is salient to note that original Model As do not have fuses. Given the rat's nest nature of the wiring, this is somewhat dangerous so most owners have subsequently installed them. The most convenient location is somewhat obnoxiously downstream of the starter and upstream of literally everything else. Short in the headlights? -- engine dies. Short in the brake light? -- engine dies. Short in the horn -- engine dies. And when the engine/ignition dies, everything else (wipers, horn, lights) goes with it.
So, you can check to see if the fuse is still alive by attempting to blow the horn. I got a wicked weak horn blow that cut out after a second or two -- and subsequently wouldn't blow. I have been bit by a blown fuse before, so I carry spares. So, I grabbed a spare, hopped out, and opened the hood expecting to replace the blown fuse and be on my way.
Unfortunately, the fuse had not blown. Or, maybe it had, but also the fuse holder had also completely melted. As you can see in exhibit A, there should be additional plastic & a wire at the top -- not air and bubbly plastic.
Mike hadn't left the parking lot yet, so I flagged him down, and he came over. Being that this was 1/3 of a mile away from the house, I hadn't tools or spares to speak of. Mike had his full kit, so with this help we spliced a new piece of wire in where the fuse was -- and luckily whatever had caused the original event was no longer making sparks. Sadly, even with the electrical circuit complete, the car still showed no signs of life. The distributor wire showed no signs of life when held near a head stud, so our next thought was that whatever electrical short there was may have killed the coil. Mike didn't have a spare but I had one at the house, so we hopped in his Fordor & took a quick jaunt to the house where we picked up a new coil. Back at the restaurant, the new coil went in, & still there were no signs of life holding the distributor wire next to a head stud. Having nothing to lose, we decided to try starting it anyways. To my great surprise, it started -- and I limped the 1/3 mile home with Mike in tow.
I subsequently discovered that the timing was waaaay off, which may have been a contributing factor. Still have no idea why the fuse holder melted to begin with. I also later found a short in the headlight bucket, but that shouldn't have caused a short while the headlights were off....
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