Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater
I decided last night that I'd head out and finally catch Picasso at the Lapin Agile, which was playing at Balagan theater. I've got a couple of friends in it, and it seemed to be getting good buzz.
I decided, since I recently replaced the tach drive oil seal in the CL175, to take it out again. It's a little goofy to ride very far, but Capitol Hill isn't a bad trip, and I wanted to see if I could figure out the appropriate change to make to the carburetors to fix a mid-throttle weakness.
The ride up to the hill was fine, and I provisionally decided on the carburetor change I wanted to make (drop the needles a notch, since the mid-throttle feels a bit rich). Unfortunately, as I was riding up Pike, just about to turn to the cross-street where I was intending to park, the engine suddenly died as if the key had been switched off: engine not running, headlight off, no brake light, etc. Bad news.
Fortunately, I was literally a couple dozen feet from 11th when I ran out of momentum, so I duck-paddled the bike to the turn and into a parking spot on the side of the street. I didn't have time to work on it just then, so I left it parked and went to the show.
After the show, I came back and did some poking at the bike. I checked the fuse (looked fine), unplugged and replugged previously troublesome connectors, looked over anything else that might be the cause of the problem. There really wasn't anything I could see. I finally pulled the fuse out so I could check the size of a replacement (you never know), locked up the bike as best I could, and walked down to the bus.
Much later that night (between the walk to the bus, the bus ride, and the walk home from the bus stop, I figured I must have spent about an hour on a 20 minute motorcycle trip), I was able to pull out the multimeter and check the fuse: no connection!
This was a bit of a hallelujah moment for me. The bike had previous done this trick, where it would shut off like someone had flipped a switch, but then it would come back as if nothing was wrong. This was incredibly frustrating, because there was then no way to find the problem and fix it. I had to sit back and hope it would manifest again in a situation that wasn't too unsafe. I'm just lucky it died when it did, instead of riding down Aurora, or on the freeway.
Visual inspection of the fuse revealed no problems -- it hadn't blown from a short or something. This was very good news, and I realized it explained the whole problem: in one of the end-caps of the fuse, the link had probably vibrated loose over the life of the bike. It was now probably waving around and occasionally re-connecting in a way that would perfectly explain the off-on faults I saw before. I've seen light bulbs do this before, but never a fuse.
So, I'm off soon to bus back to the hill, new fuses clutched in my nervous claws. In the absolute worst case, Jesse has offered that he'll be passing through Seattle on his way back from a dirt-biking weekend later today, and he could give me and the bike a lift back to my house. Fantastic timing!
Posted at 10:22 permanent link category: /motorcycle
Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater