Nooks and Crannies

I don't like to venture too far away from my tools. The toolbox that I built will hold quite a bit, but I still felt there was more room to be found. When I had the seat off, I noticed that there was a large gap between the fuse box and the side cover on my bike. I made up this little box and glassed it to the inside of the side cover. I went to the Borg the other day and picked up a set of three zippered nylon bags, small, medium and large. They were cheap, under 5 bux for the set. The medium one holds a full set of 1/4 inch drive sockets and the small one has extra fuses, electrical and teflon tape, small zip ties and a Swiss Army knife. Both bags fit into the new storage pocket and free up space in the toolbox. I have room now for extra fuel and water pumps or whatever. I plan on going to a drycell battery when this one conks out, so there should be even more space for additional stuff.

Man Plans......God Laughs

I took it out yesterday for a test run and all went beautifully. The clutch was working perfectly. A nice three finger pull. I was stoked. Woo Hoo!! Finally, sucess. I put the bike away and decided to get up in the morning and clean it up a bit and take a longer ride. This morning I put it all together and fired it up and.........THE FRICKEN CLUTCH WOULDN'T WORK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! After calling the bike and myself a few choice names, I began adjusting all of the various links, the mousetrap, the spring tension.........nothing. As I was about to push the bike outside and set fire to it, I noticed that the pushrod that comes out of the back of the booster was cocking at an angle when I applied pressure. I said to myself, "Self, this cannot be good." I yanked off the booster and made a support plate. Simply a hunk of 2 x 1/8" flat steel with three holes, one in the center drilled to the size of the pushrod and two that fit the mounting studs. I placed shims, (OK, flat washers but shims sounds more professional), between the support plate and the pushrod seal to apply a bit of pressure and keep the vacuum in the can where it needs to be. Works bitchen now.
One suggestion, made by an old hand at this sort of thing, is to install Torrington bearings on the mousetrap and the cable-to-booster bell crank. I will be doing this very soon, but for now, it's working well with the bronze bushings in the mousetrap. The bell crank is steel against steel, so that will be the first thing that I will change. With the lessened friction that the bearings will give me, I think it will be, nearly, perfect.

Another Cheap Coverup Scheme

I modified the left side cover today. I filled in the old switch holes as well as reshaping the bottom edge to cover the booster linkage and squaring off the lower corner to cover more of the frame. I hated to kill my flames, but cest la vie. I will repaint them black and put a BH logo on them. There is still a bit of work to do on them. There is at least 1/8 inch of Bondo and three paint jobs on them. I'll take them down to the bare glass and start from scratch. In a former life, I used to paint cars, but I may be a bit out of practice, plus the new paints are not like the old lacquers and enamels of yore. If all else fails, I still have a gallon of good old black acrylic lacquer on the shelf, but I understand the base/clear coat paints are pretty user friendly.