Failure to launch

Fuck! It doesn't run. I filled it up with gas and it won't fucking start. I tried so many times. Only once, it made one good "pop" like it was about to fire up.  One tantalizing moment to get my hopes up and then nothing at all. What a tease. 

I pulled the plug, and held it next to the engine and yes, it made a spark. It was also slightly moist, so I'm pretty sure fuel was getting to the engine.

The equation is fuel, spark and compression combine to make a running engine. The last piece of my puzzle was compression. 

As I was kicking it over, I thought I saw something come out the side of the engine. I crouched down in the gas station parking lot and put my hand next to the engine as I tried to start it a few more times. I could feel a breeze coming out of the side of the engine, right where the head meets the cylinder. The engine wasn't holding pressure. No compression. Fuck me!

The whole time I was working on the bike, I was always suspicious of the compression. I hadn't sprung for a gauge so I gave it the "thumb test". The thumb test make might be different for other situations, but on an engine, you pull out the spark plug, hold your thumb over the hole while you crank the engine over and hold the throttle open. It should blow your thumb off.  I could feel it making something, but it didn't really push my thumb off. I chalked it up to having strong hands and told myself it's probably fine. 

Apparently, it's not. I walked the Honda Express home (tried to bump start it on the little hill on the way back from the gas station in a moment of hopefulness) I tore down the head when it back in my living room. My living room reeks of gasoline now. I'm amazed my girlfriend how puts up with me. 

When I got it open, I cleaned the head gasket and the faces of the head and the cylinder that it touches. When I tried to put it back together, the bottom left engine stud wouldn't thread in. Even with 3 other studs in there, the last one wasn't grabbing. It just wouldn't fucking go no matter how much I fucking swore at it. 

I pulled the stupid thing apart again and this time in my rage induced careful inspection, I noticed the threads on the studs were fucked. 

There's you're problem! It looks like the threads in the engine case that the studs screw into are fucked up too. Not as bad as the screws, but they don't look so hot. I'm going to have to deal with them. I wish I could just order some new studs and make it work. Maybe that's what I'll try first. 

I think I need to drill it and tap it. I might be able to use a heli coil, but I really don't know much about those. 

I'm also concerned that I might need a new head gasket because this one had been installed and removed a bunch of times. I guess I should worry about the studs first. 

Speaking of gaskets, I'm also going to be shopping for a carburetor rebuild kit too, because it's leaking gas. Maybe it's good that it didn't start because it might have caught fire. 

So it's not running. I thought it was ready. I even bought a helmet the other day. So close, yet so far. The helmet is dope though. It's a Bell Mx-9 Adventure. I got the white one so it makes me look like a storm trooper.

 Dammit, I'm pissed at these engine studs. So close, yet so far. 

Wired and Farts

Tonight, I did all the wiring I'm going to do. Lots of crimp connectors made it happen.

Here's the rundown:

Brake lights should get brighter when the lever is pulled*

The horn is hooked up. I know the horn is good because I hooked it up to a random D.C. power and it beeped. It's got a cute lil beep.

Front and rear lights should work. The high and low beam switch is even hooked up.

The kill switch and the secret disable switch are wired up.

What's left:

Do something about the dangling wire pasta. It seems like it'll get caught on something. Zip ties and/or electrical tape should take care of that

Tape up the seat. I'm pretty sure there's some gaffers tape around the apartment.

Put the headlight back in, and make it slightly more secure.

Get that right hand grip all the way on. Maybe even put the matching one on the left side. Those yellow oury grips are going to look great. The yellow totally matches the yellow in the Honda Express logo

Optional Stuff:

Measure the clearance for those shinko tires I've been eyeing. I hope they aren't too wide. Those fat knobby tires would look killer and I'd love to do a bit of bandit off-roading around the city. I'm not sure where my calipers went to, but they would work really well or this type of measurement.

Wire up the right hand switch for the brake lights. I tried to solder a new wire on earlier, but it came off. I might have to buy a whole new switch. Or I could just not give a fuck.

Install the speedometer cable so I can know how slow I'm going.

Wire up those blinkers. I think if I do any more wiring, I'm going to get a terminal block. At the very least, I'll need some more connectors. I also need a flasher relay thing if I want them to actually blink.  I might just ignore the whole blinker situation and hand signal.

I've also been thinking about a bar swap, but that might create more issues than I really want to deal with. Still, I think a pair of chrome motocross style bars would look way better than the stock awkward ape-hangers.

A fender between the rear wheel and the engine/hoses and wires seems like it would be a good idea. Maybe, I can find an old license plate on the side of the road that I could use.

Install the oil seal under the second piston ring. This should give me better compression and thus more fasterness. It doesn't look big enough though. I  might just leave it out. It'll probably be ok, right?

Stuff I'm worried about:

The bike doesn't have the stock air box/filter on it. I packed the high flow mesh filter with foam, so hopefully the tune won't be too far out of whack but I suspect it's going to get too much air and run lean.

Speaking of air, I need some of the fresh kind. I've been ripping so many horrible, rotten farts all night. I'm so glad my girlfriend went out with a couple of her friends so she wouldn't hear/smell my ass. What the hell did I eat that's doing this? They're loud and they totally reek. I've been laughing at how bad its been all night. I'm surprised the cat isn't dead.
 Most of the time, it's one or the other. I'll have loud but relatively non-stanky farts or silent but deadly ones. Tonight's not normal, they're loud, frequent and noxious. I wonder if it was the steel cut oats I had for breakfast or maybe the snacks from the Asian grocery store yesterday.

Ugh, there goes another one. I'm dying. I'm laughing and crying. It smells like something died in my ass. It sounds like some kind of brass instrument dying. Good god.

And on that bombshell, good night.

Stranded Copper Spagetti

I think I just made the worst wiring harness ever in the history of motorbikes. Good god, I feel dirty in a strange way. Kind of like right after eating a pile of fried food or doing some freaky bedroom stuff. I feel disgusted with myself, but also satisfied and I'm glad I did it.

It's my first wiring harness, ever, so I should theoretically improve each time I do this. It's only up from here!

The abomination I'm calling a wiring harness isn't even done, though. The running lights are hooked up, the high and low switch should work for the head light and the kill switch works. The brake lights aren't hooked up  and one of the switches for the brake light in the lever is real messed up and I don't even have a blinker relay for the turn signals to make them flash. I might just do that manually with the switch... or just skip the whole thing. I did use the multi-meter to check the bulbs and circuit in the turn signals and I'm pretty sure they're good. Either that or nothing electrical on the bike works and I've been using the multimeter totally wrong. The chances are probably 50/50.

I do definitely want to hook up the horn though. I hope it sounds like roadrunner. Meep Meep! The bike def won't move like roadrunner but I hope I at least get the noises.

I think I've done enough to keep myself from getting pulled over too quickly, which is the main goal, besides making it run.

Perhaps I'll post my crudely hand drawn wiring diagram when I'm done. It's going to be ugly but it'll probably be easier to understand than the one in the Honda shop manual. I wonder who over at honda thought it was a good idea to make a diagram of more than a half dozen different colored wires printed in only black and white. Wiring diagrams are confusing when they're in color, but making a black and white wiring diagram is brutal.

The next thing I have to do, other than try to take care of some of those dangling wires, is check the transmission fluid situation. I'm still not totally sure which screw to pull in order to drain the thing, but I'll pull screws till I find the right one.

I guess that's it for today.

Wiring and Roundeye Makes Congee

I'm starting to get a hang of this whole wiring and electricity thing. It no longer seems like the dark art of wrangling angry pixies. It's making more sense to me and I feel more like I sort of know what I'm doing.

Before, I had the stator hooked up directly to the coil. That let me see a nice blue spark when I spun it up, but if the bike actually ran, I'd have no way of shutting it off besides the petcock, and this thing probably runs forever on a couple spoonfuls of gas. Today, I actually wired up the run/stop/run switch on the bars. I got to use my fancy connectors that I ordered from treats and I dipped everything in marine grease in hopes that the corrosion demons will leave my wiring alone.

I had a bit of an electrical epiphany today. I learned long ago that electricity follows the path of least resistance to the ground and blah blah blah. I passed the tests and all that, but it's a whole different thing when you see a working example in the real world. The way the kill switch works is not by breaking the connection from the stator to the coil/spark plug. It actually just provides an alternate and easier path to the ground. Rather than do all the work of going through the coil and spark plug, the current takes the path that has way less resistance and goes right through the regular copper wire, through the switch on the bars, right to the ground, nothing slowing it down. When that switch is flipped, the easy path to the ground is shut and the current has no choice but to go through the coil, to the plug and make a spark. Definitely more resistance on that path, but with no other option to get to ground, that's all it can do.

This is great because now I have an easy way of turning off the engine before it runs out of gas.

There is no key or ignition on this bike so, I added a second kill switch in a somewhat hidden place in hopes that people won't be starting it while it's locked up in the street.I wired it inline, right before the coil so I hope this doesn't mess with anything involving the spark. I'm sort of worried I'm making things too complicated. Also, the switch is for AC stuff, so I'm not sure if it's a great idea having half of it wired up inline like that. I guess I'll find out. It won't be too hard to fix, I did leave myself some extra wire.

Also, while I was getting into it, I shortened the fuel and oil lines a little bit so they are a little further away from the rear tire. They're still real close though. I think I'd like to put some sort of fender in there at some point, or maybe cover the hoses somehow. If I mounted the tank on the cross bar, I wouldn't really have that problem anymore.

I also scrounged up some hardware to let me take the old airbox bracket off. The bike never came with the stock airbox so it was nice to take it off the bike. It was threaded and held the carb in place, but a couple nuts and washers from my stash hold the carb now.

I used the multimeter a bunch today. I checked continuity the whole time I was setting up the kill switch and then I also used it to check that the left brake lever will actually be able to make the brake light come on. When you pull the lever, it closes the circuit. When let go, the lever opens the circuit. The right side lever has a broken wire, not sure how I'm going to fix that. Maybe some soldering will need to be done.

At Home Despot, I found some cotter pins. I know the bike probably wants something metric, but the 3/32" ones fit fine, if a little loose.

Playing with the lights, I figured out the general scheme of things. The yellow wire is the running light, the red wire is the bright or brake and the black wire is the ground. So now I just need to bolt the lights and regulator to the bike and wire them up.

After the lights, I want to change the transmission fluid and then I should be good to go. I mean, the turn signals don't work, the tires should be replaced, the seat is torn, the horn is at the bottom of the parts box and there's probably other things horribly wrong with the honda express, but whatever. Those are just details. I just want to ride.

In other news. I made congee for the first time. I put in dried shrimp. I like it.