Gas tanks curing in the sun

BARNEY’S JOURNAL

July 14, 2007: And exhaust valve tappet

Here is the 13-cent 3mm box wrench replacement.

So since it fit so well, I figured I would adjust the valves since it sure looked like they were too tight, no .05 mm.play at TDC. As a matter of fact, no play at all.

It took that same 30-inch pipe on the end of the 23mm box wrench and a lot of effort to get the exhaust tappet cover loose and off! Turn the engine just so, step on it with foot and hold with hand. Other hand at end of 30-inch pipe. Eventually pop, it comes unscrewed!

Lighting was poor so here is a digitally "punched up" picture.

Here is the 3mm square screw next to the unobtanium actual tool! The tool measures more like 3.5mm and is loose fit on the tappet screw head. The screw is a perfect fit. It just needs a dowel to screw it into and then one has a tool.

So now that the valves were adjusted, I decided to adjust the points since I had already set the AC dynamo/rotor to TDC.

Couldn't get them to read open with a DVM and found the spade lug that attaches the wire to the points was touching the points base plate, and the screw was tight. So it was improperly repaired.

Here is a DVM across the points, when they are physical open, but electrically shorted.

So I straightened the spade lug, now no short. Now I can set the gap and the timing. But first I removed the points, points baseplate, and spark advancer just to check them out and look at the overhead cam. Interesting how the points cam is a hollow cam that is keyed and bolted to the overhead camshaft.

The usual TDC at the rotor.

And TDC at the cam shaft with ignition parts off,

Interestingly, the points wire was shorted to ground. So there was no way it could work. The points were not pitted but coated with a gray kind of film. And would not contact each other. I filed both points surfaces shiny and now the points made electrical contact. So even if the wire wasn't shorted to ground, the bike wouldn't work! And remember the condenser was shorted! And the rectifier had a short! Now all these things couldn't have happened at the same time? So this poor bike had one electrical problem after another and was never maintained properly. That is my guess. And probably lead to its early demise and relegation to the back of the barn. Also the carburetor was all crudded up, and the petcock leaked and was clogged. Seems that just about everything that can go wrong from neglect did happen to this motorcycle.

The funniest thing of all is that the spark plug has the nice brown color on the insulator of a properly tuned engine.