Repairsville

This morning we nipped into town. On the way in I had to switch to the reserve tank. So on the way out again we stopped for gas. I spilled 2-stroke oil all down the side...yech. That morning we had had the carb apart looking at the jets to see if we could pick up some spares in town. On the way back out of town, I was nipping along at nearly full throttle when I could almost hear something change, then the plug fouled, and that was it. Put put put puuuuh. nada.

We were just about back to the site, so I just pushed it (with a bit of help from Christian) home.

So today we had a bit of a look at the bike, tracing and testing wires. It seemed that the condenser was giving us some grief, and from our diagrams it looked like we could just cut it out of the system and run without it. I gave Christian the go ahead to do so.

We went over the rest of the bike with a fine tooth comb, and eventually Christian found out why I had stopped so suddenly: one of the carb jets fell out. That caused the engine to run super super rich and foul plugs almost instantly. Once that was fixed it should have run again, but it took us two days to get the spark going again. Eventually we discovered that our wiring diagram was misleading, and when we cut out the condenser, we cut out the ground for the spark. oops. We borrowed a soldering gun from a guy at KOA, one of the old ones with the huge element, and we couldn't get it to warm up.

So we had to go into town, buy a soldering gun, and come back to solder the contact back on the Condenser. Time to order new bits...

Then she fired up, and we were good to go. Unfortunately, but this time it was sunday night, and we were all leaving on monday. No major rides had been had yet. A plan was hatched: Christian and I were going to get up and head out early monday morning for a ride into the hills. More on that later.