valve clatter

Since I bought my XS400, I've been slowly doing all of the major maintenance items. This weekend I finally got around to changing the oil and filter and setting the valve clearances. Before I touched it it was running perfectly and sounded great.

When I tore it down, I was horrified to discover that the valve clearances were *very* tight...like close to zero mm.

So I drained the oil, changed the oil filter, filled it up with 20W/50, set all four valves to the specs called for in my shop manual. I put it all back together, fired it up, and now the valves clatter like crazy. They're *almost* as loud as the exhaust (although I admit that the exhaust note produced by a 400CC street bike with stock mufflers isn't exactly deafening). I drove it to work yesterday and it rattled away all the way there and back.

So, what's the dilly-yo-yo?

• Did I mess up the clearances?
  Maybe, but I don't think so.
• Do those engines just make a bunch of valve clatter when in spec?
  Maybe...but it sure is clattery for a healthy engine
• Is the engine assembled in such a way that the TDC marks on the crank don't actually correspond to TDC so I set the valve gap when they were supposed to be partially open?
  Maybe...but this is doubtful too because with the spark plugs removed, operating the kick starter would make the engine settle pretty darned close to the TDC mark, like the mark corresponded to the valve springs shoving the cam to that position...(i.e. where there is no cam lobe, i.e. where both valves should be closed, i.e. TDC).
• Did the previous owner have it filled up with super-thick oil to mask some clattery mechanical problem?
  I sure hope not...he really didn't seem like a slimy con man, so I kind of doubt it.

So, my plan is to open up the valve inspection covers again, have my wife kick it over while I watch the lifters to make sure that the TDC marks really correspond with when the valves close. Then I'll double-check my clearances.

In any case, I'm glad that "a tappy valve is a happy valve" and that I'm not in any danger of burning out my exhaust valves from excessive clearance...but I would feel better if the engine sounded more like a purring vicious animal than a clattery Model T.

Why ride?

The post here spells it out beautifully:


motorcycle is not just a two-wheeled car; the difference between driving a car and climbing onto a motorcycle is the difference between watching TV and actually living your life. We spend all our time sealed in boxes and cars are just the rolling boxes that shuffle us from home-box to work-box to store-box and back, the whole time, entombed in stale air, temperature regulated, sound insulated, and smelling of carpets.

On a motorcycle I know I'm alive. When I ride, even the familiar seems strange and glorious. The air has weight and substance as I push through it and its touch is as intimate as water to a swimmer. I feel the cool wells of air that pool under trees and the warm spokes of that fall through them. I can see everything in a sweeping 360 degrees, up, down and around, wider than Pana-Vision and than IMAX and unrestricted by ceiling or dashboard. Sometimes I even hear music. It's like hearing phantom telephones in the shower or false doorbells when vacuuming; the pattern-loving brain, seeking signals in the noise, raises acoustic ghosts out of the wind's roar. But on a motorcycle I hear whole songs: rock 'n roll, dark orchestras, women's voices, all hidden in the air and released by speed. At 30 miles per hour and up, smells become uncannily vivid. All the individual tree- smells and flower- smells and grass-smells flit by like chemical notes in a great plant symphony. Sometimes the smells evoke memories so strongly that it's as though the past hangs invisible in the air around me, wanting only the most casual of rumbling time machines to unlock it. A ride on a summer afternoon can border on the rapturous. The sheer volume and variety of stimuli is like a bath for my nervous system, an electrical massage for my brain, a systems check for my soul. It tears smiles out of me: a minute ago I was dour, depressed, apathetic, numb, but now, on two wheels, big, ragged, windy smiles flap against the side of my face, billowing out of me like air from a decompressing plane.

Transportation is only a secondary function. A motorcycle is a joy machine. It's a machine of wonders, a metal bird, a motorized prosthetic. It's light and dark and shiny and dirty and warm and cold lapping over each other; it's a conduit of grace, it's a catalyst for bonding the gritty and the holy. I still think of myself as a motorcycle amateur, but by now I've had a handful of bikes over half a dozen years and slept under my share of bridges. I wouldn't trade one second of either the good times or the misery. Learning to ride one of the best things I've done.

Cars lie to us and tell us we're safe, powerful, and in control. The air-conditioning fans murmur empty assurances and whisper, "Sleep, sleep." Motorcycles tell us a more useful truth: we are small and exposed, and probably moving too fast for our own good, but that's no reason not to enjoy every minute of the ride.


How beautiful is that?!?

Bike History Part 4: free 1977 Honda XL 100

The other free project bike I've had since moving to Colorado was an old 1977 Honda XL 100. My mother's neighbor had it sitting outside for decades. When he moved, he gave it to her to bring up to me.

Here is what one in good shape looks like:


The one I got was *not* in good shape. The engine was seized, all plastic parts were cracked and discolored from decades of sitting exposed in the Albuquerque sun, and the entire fuel system was filled with gunk that had been gasoline decades before. And he had lost the title.

It was kind of a cool motorcycle, though. It had a tiny SOHC one cylinder. I pulled off the cylinder head, filled the cylinder up with WD-40, let it sit for a few days, and finally un-stuck the cylinder by pounding a 1X1 board against the piston until it came free.

The plastic air filter housing was trashed, so I replaced it with a little K&N breather filter. The exhaust was falling apart, so I ended up cutting off the muffler.

I got new off-road tires for it, re-painted the tank and fenders flat beige, and re-covered the seat with new vinyl over old carpet padding. It actually looked pretty decent after all this.

Unfortunately, the carbs were so heavily varnished, and I'm sure the open exhaust and K&N air filter threw the jetting off so much, that I was never to get it to run very well. A couple of times, after a liberal application of starting fluid and ten zillion kicks on the kick starter, I got it to fire up, and could rev it there for a while, but I was never able to get it to run long enough or well enough to try going around the block.

I got kind of disgusted with it after spending $20 on carb parts at the Honda dealer. The dealer had a distinct "cycles are toys" attitude. I guess that's pretty typical for the U.S.A. There were parents spending hundreds of dollars on motocross armor for their five-year-olds so they could ride thousand dollar toy bikes. There were people on their crotch rockets decked out in their fake racer costumes, and there were guys on their cruisers in their "biker" costumes. It all seemed so fake and ostentatious and lame. What happened to the idea that motorbikes can be practical and fun daily transportation? The tough guys I saw in Paris, riding their weird little grimy scooters with roofs

wearing rain capes were way tougher than the toughest fake biker in the Honda dealership.

I tried to get a new chain for it at another motorcycle shop. This shop was full of motorcycle clothing, but they couldn't figure out which chain to sell me after looking at the rusty old chain I brought in. They had a television monitor playing "extreme riding" videos. In one of them, a bunch of sport bike guys were sitting around a rural lane. One of the guys popped a wheelie, and balanced, completely still, on his rear wheel. Then he pulled out a gun from his waistband and fired it into the forest on the side of the road while balanced on his rear wheel.

I'm not anti-gun, but I am anti-dumbass. Motorcycles are dangerous and therefore must be treated with respect. Guns are dangerous and therefore must be handled with respect. My hope is that people who perform blatantly dangerous motorcycle stunts on public roadways, and people who blatantly disregard any kind of safe firearms handling either learn the error of their ways or remove themselves from the gene pool ASAP, without taking anyone out with them.

For some reason, sitting in a shop, watching a video that glorified such stupid antics with no regard to their impact on the world around them disgusted me. I still liked motorcycles, but I was frustrated that mine was so far gone, and I was disgusted at the glimpses I saw of local motorcycle culture.

I ended up putting the motorcycle out with a "free" sign on it. The guy who got it sure was stoked. His eyes were bulging with excitement as I helped him load it into his pickup truck. I hope he got it going, and I hope enjoyed it.

Bike history part 3: free failed Kawasaki KV-75

Now and then I get a hankering for a project vehicle. Maybe it's remembering all the time, effort, and love I dumped into worthless old cars in my youth...cars that looked like crap to everyone in the world, but were the embodiment of all things good to my eyes.

Anyway, now and then I've had the good fortune to stumble on a free project, specifically, two motorcycles since I moved to Colorado. The first was a Kawasaki KV-75/MT-1 minibike:



It was parked in front of a neighbor's house with a "free" sign on it. It seemed to be in pretty good shape, except for rust in the tank, a missing cylinder head, a missing wrist pin bearing, and being covered with red overspray.

My wife *hated* it. She said that it was *so* lame that she could barely stand to look at it. It also turns out that parts for KV-75s aren't exactly easy to come by. I ended up giving it to my little brother, who brought it down to Albuquerque and couldn't get it running either. However, we did find a wrist pin bearing that works on it, and we managed to break a piston ring. It's currently sitting in my mother's garage.

Since I got my latest XS-400, my kids have gotten obsessed with motorcycles. We have a one-car, attached garage where we somehow manage to fit my Yamaha, my wife's Vespa, and our minivan. The door to our garage has panes of glass. Every morning my two-year-old runs out, peers through the glass into the garage and says, "Good Morning motorcycles!", and every night before bed, he looks into the garage and says "Nigh Nigh Motorcycles!". So I thought it might be a good idea to take the KV-75 and get it going for the little guys when they get bigger - especially since it has just been taking up space in my mother's garage since my brother went to Spain two years ago.

So, after some scrounging on EBay I found a piston ring from a burly chainsaw that should work on the minibike, and a cylinder head from a Honda moped that will work after I hog out the mounting holes a little bit. So I ordered them.

Note that in typical "guy" fashion I ordered the parts without thinking about my wife's feelings. It's not that I intended to make her crazy...it's just that I somehow neglected to consider her feelings on the matter when I got all caught up in how exciting it would be to get the KV-75 going.

Well, it turns out that the thought of our kids riding the KV-75 is even more revolting to my wife than the thought of the KV-75 itself (which is saying a lot). And the whole situation made her start to feel like her riding her Vespa, and me riding my XS-400 might be setting bad, wreckless examples for our kids.

Then this got me thinking...am I setting a bad example? Am I being wreckless and foolish by riding my motorcycle and encouraging my wife to learn to ride her Vespa? Should we just drive cars instead? Will people even drive cars when my kids are old enough to drive and gasoline is $10/gallon? I ride my bicycle in traffic a lot...why is there a perception that riding a motorcyle in a full-face helmet, leather jacket, and boots in traffic at 35 MPH is more dangerous than riding my road bike in shorts a T-shirt and a silly foam hat in traffic at 25 MPH? Why do accident rate statistics support this perception? If gasoline prices continue to soar, isn't it likely that more people, including my kids will end up driving little motorcycles to get places that are too far to ride a bicycle?

So I'm not sure what I'll do. I'm not going to stop riding my awesome motorcyle right now. WRT the minibike, maybe I'll just take the new parts down to Albuquerque and try to get it running for my brother when he's in town for a couple of months this summer. Maybe my wife will come around and agree that it's not a bad idea to give a ten-year-old the ugliest, tiniest off-road motorcycle ever made. Who knows. We'll see.

Motorcycle History Part 2 - My Thrashed Seca

In college I totally fell for a girl in San Francisco, and visited her there several times. I decided that San Francisco was the most wonderful city in the world, and that I needed to live there. Unfortunately, parking a car in San Fran is next to impossible, and trying to learn to ride a motorcycle in San Fran is suicidal...so I bought the cheapest real bike I could to learn to ride in Albuquerque.

I ended up with the most thrashed 1982 Yamaha 550 Seca in the world. It had gouges down the sides from being dropped at speed, smashed speedo and tach, both hand levers were snapped off leaving only two fingers' worth of grip. Its rear tire was dry-rotted and slipping out of its bead. Its white and red tank was faded and dented, but the red-and-white seat was in oddly perfect shape. Go Figure.

Its carb bodies were cracked and it was severely out of tune. It would run, but wouldn't idle, would struggle to chug up to 3000 RPM, and then it's DOHC four-cylinder engine would rev like a bat out of hell instantly to 9000+ RPM. The teeth on its severely undersized front sprocket were worn down to tiny nubs and would actually skip on the chain under load...but the undersized front sprocket gave it insane acceleration. The engine made all kinds of awful noises, and sometimes the headlight would cut out until I turned the key switch off and back on again. The maroon helmet that came with it reeked of gasoline and would leave little bits of its disintegrating black foam rubber in my hair. It was reluctant to start on the best of days, and had no kick starter...so after running down the battery trying in vain to get it to fire up, I'd have no recourse but to take the battery inside and charge it.

It was, at best, a chore to learn on.

After a near-death experience of trying to ride it for the first time in my apartment's parking lot in its horrible state of tune, I decided to fix it up before any further attempts. I bought some rebuilt carbs that didn't drip gasoline out of cracks in the carb bodies, and a new rear tire. I pushed it a couple of blocks to the empty football stadium parking lot, and got kind of proficient riding it there.

Over the next year or two, I'd ride it almost any time I had to travel anywhere alone. I ended up replacing the gauges, chain, and the front sprocket with a stock one. After a few stupid mistakes that I luckily survived, I think I ended up being a pretty safe and decent rider. I really liked riding around at night in the winter, seeing my shadow orbit the motorcycle as I'd pass under street lights, with the cool desert winter air filling my nostrils. Riding a motorcycle lets you experience the world in a different way from driving in a car. I liked smelling the Christmas tree lots as I'd drive by. I liked being able to smell that the occupants in the car four cars ahead of me were smoking marijuana. I liked being surrounded by the world on all sides and being able to move through it effortlessly.

Despite all the fun times I had on that motorcycle, it was still an unreliable rolling death trap. In retrospect, it was so dangerous and sketchy that it really should have been scrapped. Also, I was foolish to just "figure it out" and not take a real motorcycle training class.

The relationship with the girl in San Fran (thankfully) didn't work out. I left the motorcycle at my mother's house when I moved to Colorado for a summer internship, leaving it baking in the hot sun for the summer. When I decided never to return to Albuquerque, I sold it through the classifieds for a couple of hundred bucks.

Motorcycle History Part 1: My first XS-400

When I was twelve, I bought a similar bike at a garage sale for $50 - a 1979 XS-400-SG...that bike had a broken ignition switch, totally sketchy electrics, a black poly-vinyl tarp stapled over the thrashed seat, leaky hydraulic disc front brake, bent up ugly mag wheels, a ton of scratches from being laid down hard, and 30,000 miles on the clock. Also, the illiterate previous owner signed the "lienholder" line instead of the "seller" line on the title and moved out of state, causing it to be un-titleable. Luckily I never got that one running.

I like my current XS-400 much better. It only as 3200 miles on the clock. It is in *great* shape.

Anyway, I really like these old UJM vertical twins...I like that they're pretty small, and have a kick starter and an electric start. My current XS-400 gets about 60-80MPG, but has enough guts to out-accelerate anything but the most exotic cars. It has enough power to get out of trouble, keep up with traffic, and can even do 85MPH if I need to pop on the freeway for a little bit, but it doesn't have enough power to accidentally pull a wheelie at 70MPH if I mess up and crank open the throttle or accidentally go 180MPH. I like that it has wire-spoked wheels with mechanical drum brakes...everything is so simple, minimalist, and accessible.

I guess I get frustrated that most new motorcycles are either super-expensive, suicidially-fast fake race replica crotch rockets, or stupidly-heavy, super-expensive, poor-handling cruisers. I like how my motorcycle isn't a sportbike or a cruiser...it's just a motorcycle. A proper motorcycle.

New Bike

OK...so I broke down and bought a motorcycle. It's a sweet 1983 Yamaha XS-400 Heritage Special. Here is the picture from Craig's List - believe it or not, it looks much better in person (click for a larger view):


  

So I've gotten it going, have been thinking about it, have been emailing about it, and I decided a blog would be an appropriate place to record all of my motorcycle mania. More to come.