Wrapping up

In preparation for my 140 mile ride to Louisville on Saturday, I worked on the Magnum all day and finished up a few lose ends. It wouldn't start yesterday, and I assumed it was spark related, so I changed the plug to one that was laying out on the counter. It still wouldn't start, so I checked the points, and they weren't gapping, so I set the timing, and still no start. Crap, now I guess its time to see if the plug is sparking, except the bike has no stand or pedal chain at the moment, so I rigged up a spark light tool that blinks when the plug should be sparking, and it lets you know if you have juice from the coil, and it was blinking. So I said, now I know! It is a fuel problem. This is nasty old partly muratic acid gas with too much oils in it. I will drain it all out. I clean my carb! As I am letting my fuel drain, I start to think about the plug I have put in there, and look at it again. It looks fine, but I can tell it isn't new. On a hunch, I go to Dane's pinto and pull the plug, and put mine in there. No spark. I put his back in. Bright blue spark. Son of a biscut! I put in a bad plug, no wonder for all that crap! Any way, I also replaced the head with one that had a properly threaded spark plug hole, and it is also high torque. Yay! I made sure to seal the decompression hole in my 65cc metra kit, since the high torque head does not have that little decompression hole block off. A little JB Weld does the trick (even though I hate that stuff). I thought about tapping the hole and putting a little flush set screw in it (think clutch spring screw), but went the easy route. I took about 30 minutes of cutting and welding, but I made a little bracket out of a drop cut off some handlebars and welded it to the Estoril bracket so it would bold up to the Magnum without too much work. It is nice and solid now, I should pain the Estoril soon, though. I will after I cut and weld it to fit angled exhaust ports for my ZA50 that I will pick up this weekend.

I also honed my old Metra cylinder and pulled and replaced bearings and seals on the crank for my friend Opie, and installed a fresh piston into that motor, and painted the head with BBQ paint. Here is my Maxi, its motor is now the one to get the attention and the 2nd to last E50 I'm going to build in the next few months. If you have a good eye, you can see my next project behind it! Yay! Another plain maxi!
I find out tomorrow if I am accepted to school, so we will know shortly if I am moving to Seattle.