At least, for me: Electrics. I'm making the wiring loom from scratch. Extra challenging for an electra noob like me, good thing is that the wiring loom is relatively simple (very simple). I moved the bike into the kitchen, it's freezing outside. Gotten pretty far today, pretty sure I'll have it finished tomorrow.
Didn't work on the Suzuki yesterday, I picked up work on the bike this morning. I planned to work on the wiring loom today (and I will), but I had to make a bracket for the ignition key first. I realized that a finished wiring loom would mean that I'd be very close to a first test ride. Two big things need to be resolved first though: I don't have a chain yet (do have sprockets), so that's not a hughe problem. The other problem is fuel tank. I decided I don't want to use the tank you've seen on the photo's. It just do it for me. It would be a waste to start looking for a petcock for a tank I'm not going to used. I still had the tank of the stripped SP lying around though. I checked it. It's rusty and dented, but I'm pretty sure it'll hold fuel without leaking. To my surprise, it looked rather good on the bike:
I'm ussualy against using stock tanks, too easy. But really do like it (if you manage to look past the rust). So I might go looking for a SP370 tank (any tips?)
As you can see I've also got new rear shocks. It wasn't only the look, they're ait filled, so it's really easy to adjust them. They're still a bit short, the rear tire wil hitthe exhasut as you might have seen on the last youtube vid. I'm going to solve that by moving the lower mounts a bit forward.
I want to make my own wiring loom since there's a lot of stuff on the original one that I'm not going to use and I want a totally different routing. To make it easier to find faults I wanted to have the bike running with the original wiring loom of the SP that I used for parts. SO that was my mission for today: get it running.
I blundered on the kickstarter, I'd welded it on in the wrong angle so the paddle would fold in when you kicked it.. So first I had to redo the kickstarter. I than filled the battery and put it on the charger after a while. Did have to do a lot of cutting and soldering on te original loom to get it to fit, so I did that too. Poored in some fuel, hooked up the battery and started kicking.
Nothing.
So I checked for a spark: there was a sprak.
Kicked it for another ten minutes while fooling around with the choke
nothing, not a single ignition.
Adjusted the timing and started kicking again
nothing
Adjusted the timing some more and started kicking again.
nothing.
had lunch, took some time to catchj my breath, check for sparks (yep), kicket it again
nothing
&(^(*%*(%
Tried another carburator and withing one kick it ran. Took some effort ;)
Anyway:
I had to pull the sparkplug cable to get it to stop. Didn't have a key for the ignition so I hotwired it ;)
Still a lot of work left to do, but I'm really glad to have heard it run. I wasn't sure the engine would even work, but it does.
The bike was very cheap, luckily, so I'm not too disappointed after seeing this:
Though the add said the engine was 'healthy'.... Besides this it was full of water and the shifter rod was all bent and ruined the engine casing. Shit happens.
Didn't spend all my time on tearing that bike apart, dis some constructive things too. I switched the swing arm. The one I was using until now had a lot of play on the bearings and this is the cheapest solution. Besides, that one was of a GN250 and the onde from the SP370 is(looks) a bit beefier. After installing the other swing arm (which will force me to do some modifications on the rearet) I made a conrod for the rear brake.
Stopped at about 2:30 pm. Went to meet a guy from motor-forum.nl. Carburator needles of the BMW R-series apparently were made in two different kinds. Mine need replacing and, you guessed it, I'd gotten the wrong ones. Amazed that the BMW-'expert' who sold them to me didn't know.... Anyway, Pieter had the right needles for me and he wanted to trade them for mine. That'll make the BMW run a lot better, thanks Pieter! The weather forecast for tomorrow promises a day without any form of precipitation. That's going to be a tough decision tomorrow: Work on the Suzuki, or ride the BMW.....
Also gotten in a new camera from ebay. 14US$ including shipping from Hong Kong....
It'll be easy to place where ever I want, so expect some more video's when the weather starts improving.
Camera test: (didn't charge the battery of the BMW, so I had to kick it)
You might hear a ticking sound like the valve play needs adjusting, it's been doing that for a while, but I've found the cause now: The rocker arms show some axial play. I'll need to order some shimms to correct them. Just glad it's something that innocent.
I've been getting a lot of questions about the Acewell tacho. As soon as the weather starts improving I'll do some filming of all the functions of the Acewell (including how the charge light works on the BMW) and do a write up of it.
