Riding along Lake Michigan

I brought my Newport with me on a short trip last weekend. I took a few hours on Saturday to ride near the lake in both Michian and Indiana. It was perfect riding weather and the bike ran flawlessly. No complaints here.

long ride

Since neither of us could make the Chicago rally, we decided to do our own local ride. This is the farthest outside of town that either of us have gone. It felt good. The trip was just over 20 miles.

We were hoping to get some footage with Josh's new GoPro HD, but the battery ran out just as we left. We'll get it next time.

For now, here are a couple of pictures.





Shortly after I left Josh's place, my bike just died on me and I had to pull over. I quickly realized that I was out of gas. I've done a lot of quick jaunts on this bike, but no major long rides, so I guess I never really knew what kind of range I could expect out of a tank of gas. It turns out I can only go about 20 miles before I hit the reserve. I think that works out to be a little over 30 mpg. Interesting.

BBQ and mopeds

I had a few friends over this weekend for a BBQ. I'm pretty sure everyone I know in town with a moped showed up. It was great to have that many bikes together. Unfortunately, it rained on us quite a bit...otherwise I'm sure we would have been ripping all over town.

points adjusting tool

I don't know about you, but I always used to dread adjusting points through that small window in the flywheel. You can never get the screwdriver flat on the screw that you need to loosen and you can never get the feeler gauge in there. And even if you do, you can't really tell if you got the gap set up properly or if you just moved the spring on the points enough to get the feeler gauge in there and the actual gap is only half of what it should be. Well, I had enough of that.

I picked up this $10 crusty flywheel on moped army.



I then cut out he middle section to use as a mock flywheel.



Now I have all kinds of access for adjusting points.



I finished off my work by putting degree tape on the actual flywheel. I'm planning to adjust the timing on the pinto this week with a timing light, in hopes of getting it to run better.

welding, kitting, and metal prep

My friend Josh came over the other night to work on a few things. He wanted to relocate one of his seat brackets, add a tail light mount to his rear rack, and start the kitting process on his e50.

Here he is getting ready to relocated the bracket on his hobbit seat. Unfortunately, he put a little too much heat to the metal and it melted the vinyl. I think he was pretty bummed about that.



Here's the stock 2HP e50 that we are going to put a kstar kit on. I'm letting him do all the work. I'm just going to give him a little bit of guidance through the case matching process.



While he was working on his stuff, I finished stripping the old spray paint and original paint off of the top of my Newport triple tree. I was hoping to get these powder coated yesterday, but I wasn't feeling very well. I'm sure I'll get around to it this week.

powder coated my first part

After seeing a few of the items that Responsible Jon was turning out, I knew I had to do the same thing. I've finsihed a few projects now with powder coated parts, but they were all done by local shops. This is the first time I've done my own.

I picked up the powder coating gun from Eastwood and a $40 oven on CL. I also picked up a $60 metal cabinet that I'm hoping to use as an oven that will allow me to do entire frames.



Here is the flywheel cover that I started off with. I stripped all the old paint off of it with aircraft remover. I really need to get my own blast cabinet, but I'm not quite ready for that yet. This picture was taken just after I washed the part and right before I preheated it.



Here it is after I took it out to cool. I've heard several people comment that it doesn't look black in this photo. I think it is because of the lighting and angle.



Installed with a new decal.



I'm happy with how it turned out. There are a few very minor blemishes, but I'm hoping those will go away as I get my technique dialed in.

Installed my trail tech temp gauge

A good friend of mine got this as a gift for me. I figured it would be a good tool to help with my tuning. As some of you know, I've had some problems getting my Newport (65 Metra, 19 dellorto, Estoril) to run above 3/4 throttle. I'm hoping to learn a thing or two with this.

When I first ran my cables, I thought I would send them all through the cable hole in the top of the triple tree. Well, that only worked with one of the cables and it has bothered me ever since. The brass colored washers didn't help either. So, I took this opportunity to fix those things at the same time.

Trail Tech temp gauge:


Before:


After:


I also added a 90 degree elbow where the throttle cable enters the carb. That cleaned it up nicely.