Nope. And this we found afterwards. Basically the entire inspection report is worth less than toilet paper since it can't be used as such. Take a wild guess would have we ordered the whole thing in the first place had we known this beforehand.

The events will probly unfold within the next month or so... we have done our best to avoid this situation and yet here we are because we did not know that the building should have been sold to be demolished or to be renovated. One line on paper, in Finnish two words and we'd be off the hook.

If I was to compress all my feelings in one word right now I cannot figure a better one than bitter.

 

Gah, I have a wife, a little boy and a cockerspaniel, most of the time I feel like I`m sir Bob Geldof: everyone wants my undivided attention and no one seems to understand a single word I say! Having lost two full weekends to different illnesses I just had to get some tinker-therapy, at least for a little...

That however didn`t go exactly as planned... or should I say it did go precisely as expected...

Having taken the tank off about half a million times by now I`m getting pretty quick at it, maybe a little too quick even... After taking all the bolts off I started to lift the tank up, and heard the all too familiar *crack* every single Triumphist dreads, I didn`t even have to look before knowing precisely what just happened.



Yeah... Oh well now I can swap those to metal too, only just about wraps up my riding season as those connectors are pretty expensive, and unfortunately the least of my worries with the bike ATM...



Trying to chase the reason for the lost spark I pulled the #1 coil and the service manual to see what kind of resistance should I be expecting from it, the manual says the value should be between 0,7 and 0,9 ohms, the #1 coil gives out 1,4-1,6. Not sure how serious that is but it certainly is out of the given window. At first I though well there you have it and was about to go find a good deal on a new stick until I figured why not measure them all. The other two both give me 1,3ohm, so I decided to pull out the plugs I had recently changed and do a spark test.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-auy...ature=youtu.be

I should be getting a fairly rythmic 1-2-3-1-2-3, what I`m getting more resembles an acid jazz louge jam session... The bike does start but it is very easy to get to choke and stall with too much throttle too quick, and it doesn`t pull. I can feather it to highway speed and keep it there but I can`t do any hard accelerations or it will immediately drop to two cyls.

I`m still inclined to suspecting it is caused by a bad battery but I`m a bit on the fence whether or not to shell out 100eur to a new one now when I`m already packing up for the season or should I just let it sit and wait till spring. Deffy not gonna swap all three coils just to be sure as they cost 123GBP a pop so that`s around 500eur shipped... On one hand I would want to take the bike for a spin or two during the fall but at what cost... money is very tight ATM so probly have to wrap it up and start polishing it for the show. And possibly try to tidy up that ratsnest of wires that are the million times opened front harness...

So that about wrapped it up for today, all 40 mins of it... I`d have a brand new cush drive rubber I could fit if nothing else comes to mind but due to the broken gas coupler the air in the shed was starting to get so thick I had to bail.

I suppose no one here knows if newer 675 Daytona coils will fit? Ebay`s half full of them for very reasonable prices and looking at the pics they look identical.

 

Ok I'm fairly convinced that the culprit is the battery. It doesn't properly hold a charge, I charged it as full as it will go with a smart charger about a week ago. Now the voltage with the bike off says 12,1v, I just put the plugs and coils back in and gave it a crank, during starting the voltage dips all the way down to 10,2v and that's without the fuel pump.

The only bummer is it's gonna take another two weeks till I can afford a new one, just paid a haystack of bills worth several k:s and filled up the Volvo after which I got left with around 250, kinda reluctant to shell out half of it to something non-essential right now... gotta see if I could finally wire the trailtech up over the coming weekend. Promised to take the wifey to *shivers* ikea saturday though...

 

I'm very happy to say the closest Ikea is 2.5 hours away. So I'm not forced to go through that labyrinth of housewares hell too often

 

116km mostly motorway so a bit over an hour to Vantaa at the outskirts of Helsinki, lucky me the visits there are mostly need-based and more annual than monthly...

 

**** it I got too curious to wait for two weeks specially when I saw the payroll of the next two weeks so I'm not exactly dancing on roses for the next month. Let's just say one of the perks of owning a company is having shop credit. So I filled the new battery with acid and let it sit until it stopped "boiling" as instructed, fit the new battery in and ran a few tests. The cranking speed at least doubled with the plugs in place, and when I conducted yet another spark test I got a very steady and rythmic 1-2-3 on the plugs, and during cranking the voltage only drops to high elevens so even without getting to test it I'm fairly convinced I've solved the issue.



Getting the remains of the broken fuel coupler out proved to be somewhat tricky. I managed to succeed by lightly heating a Tx55 torx key and pushing it into the threaded part to make proper contact points, pulled it out to cool with the garden hose and turned the stub out.



There's precisely one shop in the entire country that sells CPC couplers and they don't have an online shop so i had to email them, hoping for a reply tomorrow to get replacements, hopefully metal ones if only they have them.

Also got an email regarding the big exhibition next winter asking for pics of my bike which means I`m in the qualification round so to speak, but I won`t know whether I get in or not until the end of the year when the entry closes...

 

So the new fuel couplers finally arrived, didn`t remember to take pics but imagine them being exactly as the old ones, just chromed. They didn`t go all the way to the bottom but they seem to be holding so I figured I`m not gonna risk the threads as I didn`t check whether they are taperedl or not. Took a fair bit of cranking to get the bike started, probly air in the lines I reckon, but before long it roared to life. It did hesitate with the throttle a little at first but got better every time I stopped the engine and restarted it so I figured might just be because of the cold engine and not running for a month. When I took it for a spin it was immediately clear from the first wrist twist that the pull is back and the sputter completely gone, might have actually gained a few ponies with the new battery or possibly shed some weight off the front end as it was very keen to reach for the sky while accelerating.

So just as I suspected it was the butler in the corridor with a crowbar. The next thing would be to finish wiring the new gauge cluster. again... Currently I`ve got the speedo working, although the speed sender at the front wheel seems completely dead. I was able to cut the wire off the Sigma bicycle gauge I`ve been using and soldered that to the Trailtech. I had a good squabble with the neutral light circuit as well as I was unable to get the light working despite checking the connection several times until I figured what if... took out the multimeter and hey whaddayaknow the neutral switch is out as well. Seems like when the Koso gauge broke it short circuited everything which is probly why the wake-up wire from the ECM, speed sender, neutral switch and who knows what else are all suddenly malfunctioning at the same time.

The entire wiring harness has been modified, re-modified and after that modified yet again so many times I`m starting to have trouble following the color codings myself...

Anyone happen to be able to hint me what kind of diodes should I use to convert the two turning signal indicator lights to one? Haven`t fiddled with the values for a decade so I`ve completely forgotten how to decipher them...

If all goes as planned I should be one diesel heater poorer and one bike lift table richer in a few weeks, got a buyer for the first and a lead on the second.

 

So I did some digging in the very dusty locker in my head called "school stuff", man that thing hasn`t been opened for a decade... From somewhere in the very sketchy notes titled DIODES I found a word "schottsky", went with that, and the knowledge that it has to endure 12volts and at least a few amps, to the local electronics part shop and they gave me these, SB545S, meaning a schottsky diode with 5 amp @ 45 v max rating, a bit overkill but they didn`t have smaller. doesn`t matter really since shottsky diodes have such a low forward voltage drop. Bought five for 2eur and went home to do some testing.





did a quick test rigging with some clip leads and hey it works! One indicator light succesfully blinking to both directions. The light itself could be brighter, or to be more precise, the color domes over the lights could be lighter, the high beam light is also barely visible in daylight so I`m assuming they`re all a bit on the dark side. (OMG just noticed from the pic that I rigged up the wrong light! Don`t matter though, nothing is soldered yet and even if it would the domes just pop off as well as the lights from behind...)


Now the next thing is something that I`d want your opinion on. This is NOT the finished product, more like a study on how to lay a 3D object on a 2D platform as well as a size and a concept test.

























































I`ve been looking at the front end for a while now, and have became into the conclusion that even though I very strongly feel that the stacked projectors are the way to go on this bike, they do stick out like a sore thumb and a small bikini fairing wouldn`t actually hurt. For the finish I was thinking about carbon fiber, maybe even bending the fairing out of loominum and then laminating CF mat inside, cutting off the excess and using the CF part as the finished fairing. I`d just need to find clear epoxy resin from somewhere, all they sell here is polyester resin which is green.

So whaddaya think? Should I? And keep in mind that is not the final shape or form, more like the first proof of concept.

 

Lil slow here eh?





This is more or less how the cowl will be looking, side panels will be brushed alu/stainless and will float a little further away from the black part.

 

...and the finished product after some minor adjustments. I decided to not fit the floating side panels as they felt a liitle too much and I`ve been trying to avoid adding anything just for the sake of having stuff.

I was meaning to fit the turning indicators back where they were, but as I did not want to fit them to the light fixture in the first place I decided to think of something different. At first I was meaning to let it simmer for now and find new blinkers a little later, until last Friday I received an email. There is a fairly big car&audio exhibition in Lahti the coming weekend, and the company that painted my bike wants it to showcase at their stand so I have precisely until thursday night to get the bike in show spec!!! So Saturday morning I packed up my boy to the car and we went to do a little shopping at the car and bike parts shops to get a bag full of polishing liquids, some aluminum stock and a pair of new blinkers, and today spent a good part of the afternoon in the shed.




The right side blinker went on without much fuss, I made some quick brackets out of the aluminum stock I bought earlier and drilled and tapped holes into the crash cage, had to buy an angle gear to the drill in order to fit in there but at least I finally had a good enough excuse to get one as I`ve been meaning to buy one for a good while.



...aaand of course I snapped the daym tap into the left side hole!



Lucky I was able to remove the crash bung and could hit the end out of the hole, I managed to damage the threads a little but was still able to get a screw in and tighten it properly.



The new blinkers are only like ten times brighter than the temp ones I binned the second I cut the wires out.

Tomorrow a proper wash and the first wax coat.