Shiver

The warm weather on Thursday fooled me into thinking it would be warm on Friday too. Nope, high of 44°! I made another attempt to ride around Donaldson Center again. This time I made it all the way without the bike dying. As I passed the golf course, I saw two of the guys from work that had left earlier to go play golf. I waved to them as I went by. They were right by the road so I turned around to say hi. I pulled up by them just of the rode and they were looking at me like I was crazy. After a couple of seconds, I realized I didn't know these guys. No wonder they thought I was nuts. I left feeling like an idiot.

When I left work to go home at 8:30, the temp had dropped to about 30°. When I tried to start the bike, it made a very weird noise, kind of like a goat screaming. Something I've never actually heard. I tried using the kickstart, thinking there was something wrong with the starter, but it still did it. I put it into gear and pushed it a little ways thinking the clutch may be stuck. I tried to start it again and it made the sound one more time and then it started. I let it warm up for about 2 minutes while I got cold. I don't really know what was wrong, but at least it started.

I rode home and decided that I needed some new gloves and some riding boots because my wrists and ankles were getting very cold. About half way home I noticed one of my front blinkers looked a little funny when I turned it on. I stopped at the next intersection and found that one of the turn signal lens screws had fallen out and the lens was hanging on for dear life. I couldn't feel my fingers so I decided it would just have to hang on until I got home.

On The Catwalk

Since I got the bike back together last night and today is the warmest it is going to be for a few days, I rode her into work so she could pose for some pictures. I charged the battery over night, put some air in the tires and tightened a few bolts and screws in the morning. She seems to be running pretty well now. Those new jets must have done the trick. Here are some of my lame attempts to get artistic.

Cool Runnings

Everything went back together pretty smoothly last night. I got the cables lubed. That was a bit messy. I held a paper towel over the cable luber to catch the stuff the came out of the gaps. All the wires found their mates correctly the first time, so nothing fried. It was a little hard to work on the bike since it was about 40 degrees in the garage.

Ooooooo...Shiny

The new handlebars are almost done. Everything has been polished and the controls are mounted. The only things left to do are to reconnect all of the wiring and re-attach the cables. Since I have the cables off, I thought now would be a good time to lube them. One of my friends let me borrow his cable luber, so I will do it tonight. If all goes well, and I can figure out which wires go where, she should be ready to ride tomorrow!

Gone Fishing

Last night was spent performing the arduous task of fishing the hand control wires through the new bars. I knew it was going to be hard, but that sucked! I removed the old heat shrink from the wire bundles and re-wrapped them with electrical tape. I wrapped the big bundle for the right hand side in two separate bundles, thinking it would be easier to pull them through separately. WRONG! I ended up undoing all of that and wrapping them as one bundle.

I fed a nut through the bars that was tied to some dental floss. The floss was tied to some speaker wire. I then taped the speaker wire to the ends of the wire bundles. The left side with only 4 wires went through relatively easily. The right side with 9 wires......not so easy. In all, I made 5 attempts to pull it through. On all but the last one, the speaker wire would pull out of the wire bundle. On the third try, I was so close I could see the end of the wire bundle through the "exit" hole, but I couldn't grab it. The main problem was pulling the large bundle, that just barely fit in the tube, around the 90° corner of the clubmans.

But in the end, and after two dirty martinis, I got the wires through. Next week I will finish polishing the parts I took off and reassemble everything. I think I will borrow a camera and do a little photo shoot as well.