2007/10/01

Valves and carbs

After we are done with Hugh's bike last week, it is time to adjust the valves on my Ninja250 this weekend. Hugh kindly offered to come down to Athens with all the tools to help me do that in our house. Without hesitation, I shamelessly asked for all the help I can get.

To make things go faster, I took the bike apart the day before Hugh came. The fuel tank is so huge and oddly shaped, I had a hard time finding a place to store it. I ended up had a lot of fun with it. Here is a joke from my trial and error when finding a place for it:

Dad, can I have that fuel tank?

I want to build a super trike!


That's too big, I am going to get rid of it.


I actually tried to put it on the trike first. David's facial expression was really interesting when he saw it. After tried a couple different places, I finally settled with the recycle bin. It is fairly stable, plus the color is a good match.



Alyssa and Vivian watched me to take the bike apart and they were both surprised to see that their dad is capable of doing such things. Alyssa is always wondering about how things work so I spent a little bit of time explaining to them how motorcycle works, things like here's the fuel tank, gas flow from here to the engine, engine burns gas and turns the gears, gears drive the chain, and chain drives the rear wheel. I hope this is a good experience for them and wish I had experience like that when I grew up. While my dad spent a lot of time taking care of his cars, I've never seen him working on the cars himself and the whole mechanics thing is just a big mystery for me. Sometime I still wonder how I developed interests in these sort of things given my childhood experience (study, study, and study....).


Hugh got to our house around 10 on Sunday morning. I was kind of embarrassed when I found out that we don't even have any coffee in the house for our guest, maybe we should stock up on coffee next time. Ann took the kids to the Memorial Park while we were working on the bike. Here is a picture of us and two under-age mechanics before they go:



Since we had just done the same job on Hugh's Ninja250 last week, we both thought that the second time should go very smooth. To our surprise, it actually took longer to adjust the valves on mine. But anyway, we eventually got everything right (hopefully) and even have the carb sync'ed before lunch. Here's a picture before we went out for lunch, it serves as the evidence that we didn't screw up:



We took West Lake Dr to get to McAlister's and it was a very good ride. The weather was very nice today so we sat outside to enjoy the delicious sandwiches. I am very happy to have such a good friend to share my hobbies and hope we can go for another ride soon.

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