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The weather and other factors aligned and I finally got around to painting a bunch of stuff. High temp paint and primer on the pipe, oil-resistant engine enamel on the airbox, and appliance epoxy on the toolbox and bash plate. This weekend I'll try to fire this bike up!
Saturday morning I got out of bed early like a kid at Christmas and rode the scrambler up to my mom and dad's. There wasn't a whole lot left to do before an attempt to start the XL- just some adjustments and bolting on parts I'd cleaned and painted and a few new things.
The air filter fit just fine without that crazy mesh.
I replaced the intake insulator and gaskets and installed a new throttle cable.
The tank got a new petcock and cap, and I installed an inline filter (which invariably interfere with the choke lever on these bikes). Then I put in a little gasoline from my dad's mower, crossed my fingers and gave it a few kicks. Two for two!! Besides a couple minutes of the pipe blowing out the dust it accumulated while sitting for 30 years, the bike started and ran like it'd been ridden the day before. Woohoo!
Thanks! The paint looks a lot better through the lens of my crap smartphone camera than in real life, but it's not bad. I got lucky.
The bike idles very nicely after adjusting the carb- although there’s gotta be plenty of residual evaporust, motor oil, and kerosene in the tank from cleaning it, the motor idled all on its own while the high-temp paint was curing and didn’t miss a beat. The CL couldn't do that and I've been messing with it for months.
After hastily installing a new drive chain and adjusting the clutch and brakes, I hopped on and spent a half hour braaapping around with a goofy grin on my face. It was very satisfying to take the first ride on it in the same fields where I rode it when I was a kid.
Yesterday was a big day! I taught my gf how to ride.
https://youtu.be/bxIyhptuLRY
She only got the clutch out once without stalling it before some leftover evaporust/oil sludge clogged the carb. The look of disappointment on her face when I told her she wouldn't be able to ride again was priceless. But after dinner I drained and cleaned everything and she spent the rest of the evening shifting between first and second and making figure eights in the field.
Yeah. She's been asking me to teach her to ride for a while. I would've let her ride the CL, but it sometimes dies while idling and its gearbox needs a little finesse. I didn't want it to be a morale killer. All we need now are new tires and panniers for the XL and we're headed for Mexico. HA HA!
Just needs me to get up off the lazy toochie and work on it........................I'll have to pull the engine back out, split it......all that stuff.
It's hot as crap, I've got everything I need to do what needs to be done, just procrastinating.
Just got a new pool installed, so everything work related is non existing when i get off of wok.
I hear you, budlite. Once I embark on a project I'm in it to the end, but sometimes there's a lot of inertia to overcome getting started. We need to find somebody else to do the busy work so we can focus on the bikes.
This afternoon I found some time to change the XL's oil again, bolt on a taillight I picked up earlier this spring, bend the bars and shift lever back into shape, and get started polishing the copious rust off the chrome. Arriving next week are new tires, mirrors, and random stuff like a rear brake light spring and kicker rubber. I have my fingers crossed Cb2hunnit comes through with the signals!
I applied for an antique plate and registration at AAA last week. The agent who took care of the paperwork told me the current processing time at the PA DMV is about five weeks.
That was my very first bike as well. For my 10th bday my parents got me that XL sold it 15 years later and wish I hadn't. Great to see one up and running!
That was my very first bike as well. For my 10th bday my parents got me that XL sold it 15 years later and wish I hadn't. Great to see one up and running!
Thanks. I got mine at about the same time. It was always "my dad's" (until now), though I rode it far more than he did (and chances are, when he was riding it, I was, too, sitting on the tank before I could ride it myself).
On a related note, it's unclear why my 6'4" 200+ lb dad picked a 100. I'll have to ask him about that. I'm just glad it was a four-stroke, as cool as ring-a-ding-dingers are.
PA got me the tag in a jiffy! (Less than a month.) Hey, slow down there, PA! You're making all the other states look bad.
Since it's so hot right now I've decided to forgo riding the CL in favor of getting the XL road-worthy. What better to do in 95-degree weather than warm up new tires before mounting them?
This time I used a nice set of three 11" spoons. The tires went on really easily. I think I made a mistake with the front, though. Stock-size trials are hard to find for the XL's 17" and 19" rims, so I went up 1/4" in width on both and got matching Duros from Cedar Rapids. After a couple new-tires-and-plate victory laps around the hill, the front still feels a little clumsy, so I ordered a Shinko trials to replace it. Both were about $30- not a big deal but disappointing. Hopefully the Shinko is better.
According to my dad, he only weighed 185 in '74. He's eaten a lot of Tastykakes since then.
I'm down to my fighting weight of 145, which works pretty well on these small-displacement machines but is still probably 50 lbs heavier than when I first learned to ride this bike. It must have really hustled with me on it back then.
I was psyched to ride after mounting the new tires. Since I got it running, the bike has started with slight pressure on the kicker, but this time it wouldn't go. Rather than looking for the source of the problem, of course, I put a big gash and lump on my shin kicking in frustration. Having banged and burned myself regularly on the bike as a kid, I had to laugh. An old rim strip was handy treating the wound.
Disassembling and cleaning the carb didn't help this time. My new e-packet delivery DMM was sitting in the sun for an hour or so, and not only did the decal around the dial shrink a few mm, but the interals suffered, too. $3.39 w/shipping from China was too good to be true.
Fortunately, shaking and squeezing the meter got me a few seconds of use before it'd go haywire again, and I eventually traced the problem to the kill switch. I'll take it apart and clean the contacts soon, but since there was already an open ignition-power female in the bucket and I wanted to ride, I just bypassed it for the moment.
On my first trip, the motor missed quite a bit at higher RPM. I set the point gap and reset the timing, then replaced the points, neither of which helped. I finally installed a new spark advancer (I bought a spare when I placed the order for the CL). The old advancer seems to move freely, but after I put the new one in the bike ran a whole lot better.
It's still weak at higher RPM, though, and seems to be getting worse as the fuel level drops. I'm hoping changing the gasoline and maybe installing a new plug will do the trick. Here are shots of the plug (a D8EA) from before and after my ~45 minute ride:
Sorry about the crap auto white-balance on my phone.
Plug looks good to me. And yes you should hold the throttle open when you run a compression test, it is also supposed to be done with engine at operating temp for most accurate reading. Have you replaced or checked the coil? Spark could be breaking down at higher RPM
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