The Glide Ride

Tappets

Wade — Mon, 21 May 2012 02:14:22 +0000

Last night I decided to drain the oil. Then this morning I was going to refill and head up to the swap meet. When I pulled the filleter out of the oil tank I noticed some particulate mater on the rim. Upon further inspection it looks to be metal fillings. SHIT! Well long story short I talked to Hawg and based on the noise the push rods were making he figured it was at least one tappet going out. So this after noon I started pulling them apart. Now I’m no expert but I’m pretty sure the tappets are in good shape. There is no play that I can tell in them. So the next guess is maybe a piston is disintegrating. Again SHIT. But at least I’m checking all this be fore something catastrophic happens.

Long ride

Wade — Sun, 20 May 2012 03:52:03 +0000

I went on a long ride to Yuba City today. It was over 100 miles round trip and the on the way up I was very pleased with how things went. There were no problems and I enjoyed the ride. Going home was another story all together.

When I pulled up to Hawgs house there was some noises coming from the front cylinder (exhaust lifter to be exact). Hawg said “no bigie” its ether a dirty hydro lifter or the pressure regulator spring is going. So we had a good conversation and I picked up the NOS master cylinder I went for. It was now time to leave so I hoped on Marlin and took off. Except it was a little rough to start and seemed to be touchy at idel. But I rode off and got about two miles away when it died at a stop light. Problem now was I couldn’t get him started. So I called Hawg and he came to the rescue.

Based on what we heard when I arrived at Hawg’s he brought a new hydro and we changed it out on the side of the road there. Problem now was that the battery was to dead to start the bike and it was stupid hot. Another problem was that the circuit braker kept popping. Worse we couldn’t find the stupid thing. It wasn’t under the dash but rather under the rear fender (ethnic rigging) but it was a good thing we took off the dash because we found a shorted wire that later turned out to have no desirable use, at least according to the wiring diagram. It’s still disconnected from the ignition and the bike runs just fine. We finally got it started and got it back to Hawgs house were we started to check the carb. It was loos and probably leaking. So now the manifold is tight and the idel is turned up. One the bike had cooled enugh I was able to hop on and ride home. I had no problems until I ran out of gas and turned on the reserve. Problem with that is there is no warning it just dies. There is no warning that fuel is low.

Things to do.

Change oil trying straight 60wt oil. Should fix the noisy lifters.
Check, clean, and replace the brushes in the gen. It was only putting out 13 v
Rewire
Clean all the lifters
Replace solid core throttle cable with braided.
Tune the engine properly

Probably in that order. But the ride was fun.

Guards

Wade — Sat, 19 May 2012 01:55:43 +0000

About two week about I made what I think was a good find on ebay. It was advertised as “late 60′s saddlebag guards. The opening bid was good and so I bid. At the end of the auction I was the only bidder and the rails were on there way. The add siad that they would need to TLC and they did but not a whole lot. One pad of 0000 steel wool and some crome polish and there as good as the rest of the chrome on Marlin. I call these rails the “Starfish” type because of the backing plate that runs along the finder and I bought them because they have the same lights on them that the pictures on the shop manual have. I think I did good. Even if I didn’t I still like them and the starfish is the right stile for the bike. They even fit around the bags. Except now turn lights wont fit with the bags.

Mounted Bags

Wade — Thu, 17 May 2012 17:37:46 +0000

I just thought I would put a picture and a link to more of the bags after being bondoed, sanded and mounted.

check off

Wade — Sun, 13 May 2012 01:33:13 +0000

Things to do

~~Change tires~~
Change petcock
Install rear turn lights (I have them)
Rewire bike
~~Refab the saddle bags~~. (mostly)
Repair and Seal Gas Tanks

Bag Reconstruction

Wade — Sat, 12 May 2012 23:06:56 +0000

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.

short ride

Wade — Fri, 11 May 2012 04:12:15 +0000

I went for a short ride tonight after cleaning out the fuel filter, tareing the fuel filter and replacing the fuel filter. I also adjusting the idel. Once again the new tires were awesome very smooth ride. But when I got home Marlin dieseled and belched a big cloud of smoke from the carb.

Like Glass

Wade — Sun, 06 May 2012 04:32:24 +0000

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.

Tires On

Wade — Tue, 01 May 2012 02:10:35 +0000

Thank you Victor. He took a 2 hour nap today and I was able to get both tires mounted and installed.

New Tires

Wade — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 03:17:56 +0000

So after spending all day putting the engine in alex’s bug I thought I would use my new tire spoons, and freshly liberated jack to change the tires on Marlin. It started out great got the bike off the ground and got the rear wheel off . This was of course the easiest part of the the operation. Actually getting the first bead off the rim wasn’t to bad but the second was a bitch and a half. First I tried to take it off the same way as the first bead but quickly gave up on that and ended up with both beads on the outsides of the rim. This way the rim was floating inside the tire. According to google it was supposed to now be easy to pull the rim out. Wrong. So after I got the second bead back on I was eventually able to get the tire off, with no small amount of sweat.

Next came the new tire. I lubed up the bead and poped it on no problem. This, of course, was the beginning of the end. When I grabbed the inner tube and tried to put some air in it I found a tare. Being that it’s 8 at night I will have to wait until tomorrow to get a tube.