Ride Day

So before I start on today, yesterday, Joe helped me tighten up the cam chain that has been rattling around in the engine head. I think we tightened it up pretty well, seems less noisy. So today Joe, Carrie and I went on a ride about 50 miles north of Tampa. We drove all over these awesome curvy roads, and then stopped at a really old Cuban restaurant for lunch.

We saw some pretty strange animal behavior as we drove, Joe hit a black racer (a snake, not like an Olympic Kenyan) A big vulture also cut Joe off and flew in front of his face for a few seconds. We saw a horse with its head inside the window of a nice big country house, and also saw a little tiny dog I thought was a squirrel till I get about 5 feet from it, just sitting in the middle of the road!

Back to bike stuff. I put 2/3 of a quart of high mileage oil in today before the ride and MAN that with the valve adjustment and cam chain tightening really quieted the rattly engine noise in the top end! Just to see what the bike could do, on a long straight road with almost no cars on it, I got the bike to his 115 before I thought I would get pulled over. But hey, thats 10MPH faster than it says in the shop manual, and that's damn good enough for me. Any engine mods from now on are going to be either to smooth out the power band (still have a mini bog down spot around 5k RPM) or to help make the engine more efficient.

Am starting to plan a summer complete rebuild project. Really clean and take almost everything apart from making custom gauge faces to painting the frame, to porting the engine head a bit with the dremel. I am getting quite a lot of inspiration from this Triumph on style and color scheme actually, yes Joe, I am leaning a bit more towards white painted fenders... But I LOVE that fairing, and the red frame with oll the white. I'll get some photoshopping done sometime soon to get a few options going. Till next time!