Categories: all aviation bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater

Sat, 01 May 2010

The State of the Bikes

Although it's been over a relatively long period of time, I've had some interesting developments in the Land of the Bikes (aka, my garage).

The big one is the CL175 street bike. I think I've had that damn motor out of the bike about 5 times in the last 6 months, most of those occurring in the last month or two.

Last year, in the fall, I took it apart to track down an odd clattering noise in the head. I found absolutely nothing in the head that should be causing a clattering noise, but in the process, I had so thoroughly cleaned and burnished the head that it seemed a real shame to put it back on the awful, oily rest of the engine. So I proceeded taking it apart, until I had the whole thing all the way apart, down to the transmission being out of the case. It cleaned up beautifully.

I only really found one problem in doing all that -- there are these little flat pieces of metal under the crankshaft, which I think serve as oil baffles, and they're held in by spring tension against a pin. It's not clear to me exactly why they're there, but they are, and one of them was loose. So I bent it a couple of degrees, and now it's not loose any more.

There's more than that, of course. As long as I had the engine apart, I figured, I might as well replace all the oil seals, and the piston rings. These are things that just wear out and get old, so it was worth replacing them. So I did.

When I was putting the new rings in, though, they didn't match the diagram in the manual, so I kind of guessed at the order they should go in. It happens that I guessed wrong. I put the engine back together after a very long period of being in pieces on the bench (from November last year to something like early March of this year). I did a little break-in process. After all that, it was still smoking like Groucho Marx on a bad day, so I took it apart to swap the rings around (having figured out that I'd done it wrong the first time).

So that was cool and all, but it didn't actually solve the problem. Still blowing a ton of smoke, and it was around here that I busted out the leakdown tester, a tool that can help you isolate where leaks are happening. I quickly determined that there was a comparative torrent of a leak around the piston rings in the left cylinder. Apart it all came again, and I checked things out.

Thing is, everything looked good. I did careful measurements, I checked ring end-gap; everything I could figure out how to check, I did. Eventually (and about three more engine dismantlings later), I threw up my hands and took the cylinders in to Autosport Seattle to be bored (Autosport did the same service on my racebike engine, and I've been very happy with the results). The cylinders will probably be ready early next week, and I'll be able to update you as to whether the haunted left cylinder is finally working right.

Hopefully, that's the last time I have to pull that engine for a while. It'd be nice to actually be able to ride the damn bike instead of looking at it forlornly sitting, denuded of tank and engine, like a sopping wet kitten who's suddenly half the size you thought it was.

The race bike also received some love lately. I had the first race of the season a few weeks ago, and managed to get what I was hoping would be significant work done before that point -- I degreed the cam. This is a terrifying-sounding but surprisingly easy process that brings the engine into a theoretically better state of tune. I finished it in plenty of time for the first race, but not in enough time to get it back on the dyno before the race.

At the same time, I swapped cylinder heads between the race bike and the street bike (I really like this "having two of the same bike" thing), to get the race bike back to a closer-to-stock condition. With all these changes, it was worth getting the bike to a dyno, which I finally did last week. I have results ready to set up, but haven't had a time to actually get them generated yet.

The short story on the race bike is that I was hoping for a couple of HP from the degreed cam, and I would have been satisfied with one. I got .5, so that all felt like kind of a failure. However, we cleaned up the power curve a lot, and actually made a quite noticeable difference as far as area-under-the-curve, and that's actually pretty important. I also discovered that with the new head and degreed cam, the engine was running noticeably lean, so in went the 100 jets (I was on 98s before). We saw a peak of 14.9 HP, with the aforementioned increase in area-under-curve.

So, I'll have to see how that works out. Hopefully it'll make a little bit of difference in times around a lap, although I'm pretty sure I'll notice no difference whatsoever in how the bike feels.

There's also been news on the pedal-powered bikey front. The big news is two-fold: first, I got the new headlight from Supernova, and while it's not the night-into-day HID terror I'd been secretly hoping for, it's much better than the old one with its shaped beam and massive hotspot right in front of the front tire.

The second bit of news, which impinges a bit more on my daily riding, is that I finally broke down and got myself a rear rack and a set of panniers. I'm not 100% convinced on this as a change, but it's pretty cool to not have the weight on my back (and therefore on my butt). The obvious negative is that I'm now putting that stress much more directly onto the rear subframe, particularly as I normally only run one bag. Asymmetrical loads bother my engineer's mind, and I can definitely feel that the bike is a bit wonkier over bumps now.

The Ninja 250 and the Xtracycle don't really have any exciting news to impart (as much as news about an inanimate object can be considered exciting). The Ninja just keeps on keepin' on, and the Xtracycle hasn't been out much lately, particularly with the panniers on the commuter bike. Still, no news is good news, so I'll take it.

Posted at 17:31 permanent link category: /motorcycle

Categories: all aviation gadgets misc motorcycle theater

Written by Ian Johnston. Software is Blosxom. Questions? Please mail me at reaper at obairlann dot net.