I’m very depressed. I got the front cylinder off tonight and found disaster. There is a deep gouge in the cylinder wall and the piston id shot. A C clip broke and scrubbed a lot of metal out of my engine. You can see the broken clip here 
and the damage here.
Don’t forget this is only the front cylinder. It was the rear cylinder that had the compression issues in the past.
I spent several hours today taking Marlin appart. Unscrewed the headers, took off the carb, removed the tank, and seat. One thing I noticed was oil in the intake manifold ports. I then took off the front head. 5 bolts and and lot of swearing. Since I dont know what I’m looking for I guess I’ll keep going.
I just thought I would put a picture and a link to more of the bags after being bondoed, sanded and mounted.
Today Paul and I tried to reconstruct my saddlebags. It all started last week when I went out and got fiberglassing materials. Cloth, mat, resin, brushes etc… I watched lots of video and of course I’m not working on nice flat boat hules. But away we went. I first made some molds out of cardboard. We had to get some different clay because the stuff I used first dried and cracked.
When we were satisfied with that I started cutting up the saddlebags. I had two objectives. One was to remove the big humps that were wasting half of the bag volume and two was to fill in the mounting and tail light holes since they were in the wrong locations and not wanted.
On the first bag we went whole hog and cut out the all the negative spaces of the bags and the holes. Then I started cutting cloth and fiber to do the patching. I did and inside and outside layer of the cloth and two layers of mat filler. I hope that it’s thick enough. Now it was time to open up the resin can but the lid would not come off. I ended up having to brake the lid off witch pulled the neck out of the can. So one way or another I was using the whole quart of resin.
Now the second bag was a bit different story. We decided that we were just going to cut out the holes and not remove negative space since it was a lot bigger chunk of the bag. Maybe I will attack that later after I see how all this turnes out.
It took about 4 days after getting the new tires on marlin before I was finally able to go for a ride. It was a short one but in just those few miles I was able to tell that 90% of the wobble was caused by the old tires.
Next I’m going to reset the petcock. I have a nasty felling that it is threaded to deep into the tank. I also want to try and adjust the idel on the carb. Based on some calculations (not my own) I figure the rpm is around 14-1500. I want to get it down to around 1k.
then there is the big job of installing a new wiring harness. that might take a while.
I received in the mail (ebay) a reproduction of the wiring harness for Marlen. I hope to have lots of pictures of the process of replacing the wiring harness but first I will have to make room in the garage. There are lots of bug parts lying around.
