Bearing Up

I saw the doctor on Wednesday, and she signed me off work for a week. I am no longer ill (i.e. I feel pretty much OK), but I need to rest my leg and keep it elevated so that the antibiotics can get to work on clearing out the nasty things that have caused the infection. So, naturally, I have been working on the bike. (Seriously, I am fairly immobile. I can be up and about for half an hour or so, but then I need to rest again or the leg starts to throb and swell like something in a science fiction movie. But in the periods when I can get about, where better to do it than in the garage?)

I've been getting a bit panicky about the Sprint being out of commission. I have booked in for the Ride of Respect next month, and I was having visions of having to do it on the XT, which would have been less than ideal -and take twice as long.

Regular readers who have the slightest interest will remember that the steering bearings had become very rough and notchy, leading to a slightly embarrassing tumble at work and some entirely preventable cosmetic damage to the bike. When I got the headstock dismantled, this was what I found:



No wonder it wasn't keen on corners!

Yesterday and today I spent working on it intermittently. I had to cut the old bearings off. They are an interference fit and were very reluctant to leave the party. To get the new ones on, I had to leave the stem in the freezer overnight and heat the bottom race up in the oven beforehand. With all that done, and a few mighty blows of a hammer and chisel, the new ones went on without too much drama. And don't they look better?



I then drained half a litre of 12-year-old brown sludge out of each fork leg and replaced it with nice fresh 10W oil and put it all back together. While all the plastics were off, I took the opportunity to fit some better headlight bulbs. The Sprint's headlights are shockingly bad, and I am hoping that these Osram Nightbreakers will improve matters. HID lights seem to the technical fix du jour, but I am not keen to go down that route until I have exhausted all the other (i.e. cheaper and less hassle) alternatives.

This morning, the bike looked like this:



BTW, that's the garage after I tidied it up to store the new kitchen units. You didn't want to see it before, honestly. Note the sophisticated jacking arrangement to keep the front end off the floor.

Tonight, it is back on its wheels, plastics fitted, and ready to go. A light drizzle and failing light meant that I wasn't too keen to test-ride it today, but if the weather holds I will take it for a few milkes tomorrow to see how it is shaping up. But even pushing it along the driveway I can feel that the steering is totally different; light and smooth as opposed to chunky and recalcitrant.

A shakedown ride, and then I will commute on it for a few days just to bond with it again. I'm looking forward to it. Assuming I can bend my leg.

Bear with me ...

Nowhere Towers, having survived the onslaught of the Kitchen Fitters, Double Glazers and Boiler Installers (all at once) became afterwards a haven of peace, at least until Christmas. This weekend, it started all over again, on a smaller scale, with Anna's engagement of a friendly local man who is 'tidy like' at decorating. The living room is now denuded of everything but a heavy armchair and a Broadwood piano, so we are taking our recreation in the study (filled with the erstwhile contents of the living room) and eating standing up in the kitchen. Anna has commandeered the only horizontal space for the MonsterMac, leaving me with no option but to blog on my knees. Literally, not metaphorically.

In other news, the fault with the Sprint's steering which led, inter alia, to my minor crashlet the other evening, is being dealt with. I have removed the bodywork and the front forks and, after a considerable struggle against the depredations of time (in the form of seized parts and corroded fasteners) I have dismantled the steering stem. No bloody wonder it was a crash waiting to happen. The bottom bearing creaked and groaned like a rusty fairground carousel and the movement of the bearing (which should, according to the manual, be a smooth and almost silent spin) was jerky, uneven and utterly recalcitrant. New bearings are now on order, and await my next few days off to fit them, refurbish the forks, and possibly check the valve clearances while the plastics are off.





This is after a thorough clean. These bits should be shiny. Ugh.

All of which is a long way of saying that blogging will be light for a day or two until order and sanity are restored to the homestead. Keep the comments coming - I get everything in email even if I don't visit the blog, and I appreciate them all. Responses will be made in duke horse.

Need my head sorting out

Yep, it's confirmed. A few days standing out in the rain in November have wrecked my head.

I'd better clarify. While I was under orders to keep the garage clear so that the kitchen fitters would have somewhere to leave the flat-packs (after first getting it clear, in comparison to which the Augean Stables were a bit of light dusting) the poor old Sprint had to sit outside in the wind and rain. When the flat-packs were unflatpacked and installed, the garage became a kind of dumping-ground for bags of grout, fractions of floor-tile and odd bits of plastic whose purpose was never quite clear. This situation lasted for about six weeks in all, during which the weather was proper Welsh wet. The XT suffers this treatment all the time, of course, but seems to be able to shrug it off. This is one of the great advantages of using a trail bike as a drudge - they are built to get wet and mucky, and to fall over a lot, so a bit of rain and rough treatment is hardly going to upset them. Bearings are sealed, O-rings are everywhere, cables have little rubber boots on to keep the water out, and everything is designed to be as weatherproof and durable as posible. A two-wheeled Land Rover, if you like. It isn't that the Sprint is delicate (people I talk to in the forums run them year-round and to astronomical mileages) but it doesn't shrug things off like the XT does. It needs looking after.

And after six weeks of not being looked after, the steering had virtually seized. Moving the bars from side to side was like stirring a bucket full of stones. A bit of gentle toing-and-froing got it to move a bit easier, but it was clearly in need of attention. Rumour has it that the steering head bearings are not over-lavishly lubricated from the factory, so it's a failure that is waiting to happen. The schedule says to dismantle, clean, lubricate and adjust the head bearings every two years. The bike is 9 years old and there's no evidence it has ever been done, so it's not a surprise that things have gone wrong.

It was a dry afternoon here today, so I took it out for a gentle ride. Well, it started gently, anyway. It wasn't as bad as I had feared. The bike was quite rideable, but every corner was threepenny-bitted (should that be fifty-penced these days?) and cornering at speed felt none too secure. Even straight line riding was a bit weavy, but not bad enough to prevent some checking of the power curve. All in order there. So there's no putting it off or hoping it will get better on its own - something must be done. It's bang-on due for its 12,000 mile service now, and dealing with the steering head is part of the schedule, so it is now in the garage again and when I get a bit of time I will make a start. 12k is the big one, and there is lots to do. Luckily the XT is romping round like a teenager at the moment, so it's no hardship - and in fact a considerable luxury - to take the Sprint off the road and give it some proper attention while the XT continues its winter duties.

I suspect that cleaning and lubing the bearings won't be enough. They feel too far gone, so I will be ordering up a new set shortly.

Just call me Mr Upholstery

Actually, don't. It just sounded like a good title for a post.

The new seat cover is on the XT (previous post), and the seat is back on the bike. The bike hasn't been started for about six weeks (New Bike Honeymoon) and was a little slow to turn over, but was soon chugging away like a champ. Chain oiler filled, and a little turn round the garden just to remind it of what it is supposed to do. It's a fantastically relaxed and roomy riding position compared to the Sprint, or even the Bonnie.

The upholstery thang started with my third visit to Homebase to get a working staple gun. The garage pixies have hidden my 'proper' gun, so I went looking for a cheap substitute to get this job done. The Homebase 'Value' model at six quid was such good value that it didn't work. Not at all. So I took it back and got a much posher 'light duty' model, still trusting the Homebase brand. This turned out not to work either. Three clicks would bring three absences of staples at the business end, and then the fourth click would produce all four staples, or sometimes more, mashed together in a nickel-plated pretzel. So I took this one back too. I had unfortunately lost the receipt, so I had to accept a replacement rather than a refund, and I went a little further up the Homebase range and got the 'heavy duty' model. There were other staple guns there, but they were expensive and wouldn't handle the small staples I needed to use. This one worked, after a fashion. Staples actually come out of the end and stick into whatever you were resting on, which is good. However, even at its most powerful setting it wouldn't bang the staple into the seat plastic hard enough to lie flat. But needs must, and I had a job to do.

The back part of the seat is a nice square shape, and the cover went onto this no problem.



I got perhaps two-thirds of the way to the front, stretching as I went, and it was looking great. The front part of the seat, however, is a bugger of a shape, as it turns through nearly 90° and climbs up the back of the fuel tank. Great for when you want to move forward and boss the front end about, but not so good when you want to cover it with a non-stretchy material.



Eventually, with a lot of swearing and an old hair-dryer, I got it all in place and reasonably flat. I then went round the whole thing with an extra row of staples. Since none of them were lying flat, they can't be gripping the material very well, and I figured that an extra row of insurance would be a good idea.

Well, it doesn't look too bad. The back half is great, and I'm happy with it. The front part is a bit baggy and has a few wrinkles, but which of us could not say that these days? The hair-dryer didn't help to smooth it out (I was hoping for a heat-shrink effect) but perhaps a few miles being pressed into shape by my elegant form might do it. Anyway, here's the final result:



And here's a close-up of my wrinkly bits (parental guidance advised):



Even as amateurish as it is, it smartens the bike up a heck of a lot, and has turned it from a complete shed to a partial shed.

Winter? Bring it on.

The XT seat saga continues

I posted last December about how the XT seat had split and the foam had absorbed a lot of water: sufficient to freeze solid and provide a very unpleasant experience for the buttocks and gentleman's bits when ridden into town.

Having sold a couple of things on eBay, I decided to go for it and get a new seat cover. Winter is on its way, and soon the Sprint will be more of a liability than a pleasure. The XT will soon be called back into daily service. Ebay seller Custardgrub came up with the goods for a few shillings (679 of them, to be exact) and it has been sitting in my garage for the last week or two while I get on with more urgent matters. So far, I have only taken off the old seat cover, which was more than embarrassingly tatty; it was a disgrace. I always value function over appearance, but even I was getting ashamed to be seen on it. As you can see from this pic, the gaffer tape had grown since last winter (compared to the neat couple of strips in the original repair), and hadn't lasted well.



So I set to with an old screwdriver and removed the original seat cover. This took about ten minutes, and was far easier than it should have been. The staples holding it on were rusty and most snapped as I prised them out.



So I was left with a plastic base - in remarkably good nick - and a piece of shaped foam. I was lucky, in that the foam was undamaged and still in its original shape; I can't imagine how much a new bit of foam would be. The foam, as expected, was completely sodden. I squeezed a few cupfuls of water out and left it in the sun for two days to dry out. It has been in the garage for two weeks since then, and finally appears to be dry. I suppose I could put the new cover on even if it was damp, but that would seem to miss the point.



I have gone for a pale grey for the new cover, as the original lilac colour was not available. I reckoned that black would shout 'replacement' too loudly, and whatever colour scheme I choose when I get round to restoring the bike, grey will fit in unobtrusively. I'm going to start the upholstery work this afternoon, and will post the results (unless they are embarrassing) in due course.

Electrickery

Sometimes I think I understand motorcycle electrics, and then something comes along to disabuse me of that innocent but inaccurate notion.. Electrics ought to be completely logical, but in practice the 'smoke theory' makes as much sense as anything.

When, for example, the smoke escapes from an electrical component (i.e., say, a Lucas voltage regulator), it will be observed that the component stops working. The function of the wire harness is to carry the smoke from one device to another; when the wire harness "springs a leak", and lets all the smoke out of the system, nothing works afterwards.

I'm on nights at the moment. I rode home on Saturday morning and parked the bike up outside the house. When the time came to go back to work on Saturday evening, I togged up, put my bag in the topbox and switched the ignition on. Nothing. No dash lights, no starter, no go. The ignition switch is a bit dicky, so I fiddled with the key a few times, but then gave up and took the car. (Yes, I checked the kill switch!) This afternoon, after my sleep, I thought I would see what was wrong.

The Yamahaha, being a trail bike, has a very simple electrical system [1]. There is a wire from the battery to the ignition switch, with a fuse close to the battery end. That fuse, just the one, protects every circuit on the bike. A quick check with a test lamp showed that there was juice in the battery, and as far as the near end of the fuse carrier. Then I checked the far end of the fuse carrier and there was still power. So I now suspected a break in the wire under the tank, or a malfunction with the switch itself. Investigating that was going to involve some dismantling, so I decided to do a few easy things today before work, and leave the other stuff to my next day off.

So I took the fuse out to check it. Remember that there was power both before and after the fuse, indicating that the fuse was good, and the fuse itself was unblown. I took the fuse out - all OK - and put it back. I checked the ignition switch, more in hope than expectation, as there was no reason to think anything would be different, and lo and behold there was light. The bike started first time, all the lights worked, and everything was back to normal. So I took out a perfectly good fuse, put it back, and solved the problem.

I know why. The fuse lives in a little box next to the battery, a space which is also shared by the indicator relay. Last week I replaced the relay, as the old one was flashing like a Club 18-30 disco at about 300 bpm. The fuse was simply sulking, as it hadn't had any attention.

It's fine now.

[1] Simple is good, but the disadvantage is that, if the fuse ever blows for any reason, it takes out the engine and lights, everything. I had the headlights fail on a car once, and managed to find a safe place to stop using the indicators. On the Yam, even that wouldn't work. It's a poor design for a bike that is mainly used on the road, and if I ever get round to any serious restoration work on the bike, I'm going to try to design a new scheme that doesn't have all the electrical eggs in one basket.

Last pleasure ride?

I fitted the new front tyre to the Bonnie, balanced the wheel, gave the brake caliper a clean and put it all back together. The tyre still has its whiskers on after about 50 miles, but the wobble on deceleration has gone. On my 'test run' I was able to coast the bike from 50 down to walking pace with my hands off the bars (indeed, folded across my chest) and there was just the faintest tremor at the sharp end, which didn't develop into anything at all. So that's another little issue out of the way.

I was writing about this on a forum I visit, and someone far wiser than me said that it was probably more to do with the fact that I had balanced the wheel properly. Wheels do indeed go out of balance as the tyre wears, so that may well be part of it. Or all of it. who knows? At any rate, I now have two good tyres to deal with the winter roads.

We had a TOMCC meet in a pub for Sunday lunch today (The Sloop, Porthgain: excellent beer-battered cod) and this time I went in the car and took Anna along to meet the gang. We had a great time, but it was a little sad when they were all talking about going on to other places and I had to drive home in a Ford. Still, Anna bought me an ice-cream, so the day wasn't wasted.

After I had fed the dog and cat, the sun was still shining, so I fired up the Trumpet and had a quick blast, up the coast to St Davids and back. It has been a glorious day, perfect biking weather, and I was mindful of the fact that it may well have been the last good Sunday of the year. At least I got a ride in. From here on, it's probably going to be waterproofs and steady riding for a few months. Still, there is the Vintage MCC Machine Display and Social Run next Sunday at Saundersfoot, so that's another thing to look forward to. We meet for breakfast, which is always a sentence I am pleased to hear.

Nother New Tyre

Last month, I replaced the rear tyre of the Bonneville. My usual habit is to try to replace my tyres in a 2:1 ratio, that is one new front tyre for every two rears. I prefer to keep the tyres matched as to manufacturer and type, so if I want to try out a different make of tyre I generally wait until I have to replace both. It's not a perfect system, and I sometimes end up binning a tyre with a bit of wear left, but that's no bad thing. Tyres (along with brakes) are something I never compromise on.

When I ordered the new rear tyre, the front one seemed OK, but silly boy here didn't measure it properly, and it was anything but. Although the tread looked clean and crisp, in fact it was down to 2mm. The handling had also deteriorated, with an interesting wobble setting in while slowing down at about 45 mph. I decided to replace the front as well. Best price was again pneus-online, so they got the business. It was delivered while I was in Ireland (left in the greenhouse as per my note on the front door, which was a pleasant surprise), but I've been too busy to fit it until now.

Tyre fitting gets easier with practice. This time it took me an hour to take off the wheel, remove the old tyre and mount the new one. Two things made the process a lot easier:

Talc: dusted liberally on the inner tube before slipping it back inside the tyre ready to mount. This makes the inner tube slippery and lets it shrug itself into a comfortable position inside the tyre, preventing twists and creases, and reducing the risk of pinching as you lever the cover back into place.

Window Cleaner: I used Mr Muscle Window Cleaner, but any spray cleaner will do. It has the benefit of being incredibly slippery when it is sprayed on something, but evaporates to nothing within seconds. Spray round the edge of the tyre and on the metal rim, and the tyre slips over it easily. Keep re-applying, as it is volatile.

Bad light stopped play at this point, so left it at that. Today I balanced the wheel, and then removed the front mudguard and cleaned it up, and painted a liberal coat of Waxoyl onto the underside. The paint underneath had already started to bubble, so I hope I have arrested its decline for a while. The visible surface of the paint still looks like new. I also gave the brake caliper a good clean with brake cleaner and a toothbrush. Although I didn't set out consciously to do this, I find I am winterising the bike. Everything I do to it, I am thinking about cold and wet and road salt and harsh conditions. Funny how only a few weeks ago we were crowing about two dry weekends in a row!

It's been pouring down all afternoon, so I will probably finish this off tomorrow. All I have to do is remount the wheel and the brake. Shouldn't take long.

New tyre

I have just replaced the rear tyre of the Bonnie. The last run around South Wales killed off the old one - tread in the centre was non-existent.

I ordered a new one from Pneus-Online, a firm I haven't used before. The tyre arrived yesterday and it went on today, no problems. Most web suppliers were asking £100 to £120 for a Metzeler Lasertec 130/80/17, but these people were doing it for £72 with free delivery. At that price, it would be rude not to.

I took the opportunity to do a bit of housekeeping at the same time. I took the rear shocks off the bike, to allow the swingarm to drop fully and make it easier to get the wheel out. While it was out, I did a surgical clean of the swingarm area, which is usually hard to get to, and gets caked up with black chain grease and general road crud. Once it was clean, I brushed on some Waxoyl to the bits I know I can never get to during an ordinary cleaning session. The swingarm is only painted, and it's in the way of a lot of spray and grit from the rear wheel, so a bit of heavy-duty protection isn't a bad idea. The Waxoyl is matt-black anyway, so it doesn't look out of place.

I also cleaned up the wheel while the tyre was off. The Bonnie wheels are really nice, with chrome rims, stainless spokes and very shapely cast hubs. A bit of time with Gunk and a paintbrush, then a hosedown, made the wheel look great. In fact, Anna had a look out of the window and asked if I had been buying new wheels. It all went together again with a dab of grease here and there, Loctite on all the essential bolts, and a tour with the torque wrench to finish off. It looks fabulous.



I had a bit of a challenge with balancing the wheel. I had bought a pack of wheel weights and used the jig that I had made when I rebuilt the XT rear wheel last year. The weights came in 5g and 10g varieties, but I found that the 10g were too wide to fit on the flat area of the rims. I ended up using all the 5g weights, and even had to stick a couple of 10g ones on the flat between the spokes to get the balance perfect. When I get some double-sided tape I will rescue the old 5g weights and stick them on in the correct place, and take off the 10g ones, as they look distinctly odd. The theory is that you mount the tyre with the red spot adjacent to the valve, where a slightly lighter part of the tyre will counter the extra weight of the valve. Then weights will need to be added either next to the valve or directly opposite. In my case, the weights had to go at 3 o'clock to the valve position, which is a bit strange. No worries - the wheel now has perfect static balance.



I went out for a few miles to start scrubbing in the tyre and the bike felt much better. The handling had started to get a bit wayward as the rear tyre flattened off, but it is back to the usual precision now. And the gearchange is much better now that I have adjusted the chain properly - it was getting a bit slack, but I didn't bother doing anything about it as I knew it was all coming apart soon anyway.

It is recommended that new tyres are scrubbed in by taking things gently for about 100 miles, and gradually increasing the lean angle until the whole tyre surface has been roughened up by the road and all the release compounds scrubbed away. I think I got about half-way to this in 15 miles. I now have inch-wide chicken strips, which are due to be slimmed down over the next few days. Should be fun.

The rear tyre went from 3.5mm tread in the centre to zero in 2000 miles. The tread on the new one is 7mm, which implies a tyre life of 4000 miles. But I have always found that tyres wear far more quickly towards the end of their life, so I hope it will be a bit more than that. The front has gone from 3mm to 2mm in the same period, so it won't be long before that will need changing too. The tread looks very clear and defined, but when you get close there isn't too much on there. That will definitely be replaced before winter.