Well, tomorrow is the big day! Logan presents at 4:40 tomorrow afternoon and we have decided not to take the bike up there. Not because it isn't ready but because we think it would be almost impossible to control the amount of time needed to walk the judges out to the bike and back. It turns out that you get penalized more for going overtime than it would be helped by taking the bike up there. So instead, he's going to include the following short video into his PowerPoint presentation tomorrow so that he can better control the time.
(Note: I told him to rev the engine a couple of times so the judges could hear that on the video. So he's not just ignoring the advice you guys gave us!)
We still have a few issues:
1) There's a short somewhere. We were blowing fuses on the main 15A circuit. Just jiggling the wires around in the bucket and underneath the seat back by the battery box somehow fixed the issue for us to take the video. But that is something we are going to have to investigate and solve before I'll feel comfortable riding it.
2) After adjusting and bench synching the carbs on Sunday at Bill's house, #2 cylinder is now firing but #1 cylinder still isn't getting hot on it's exhaust. I don't know if this will be solved by vacuum synching the carbs or not.
3) Front brakes are still not bleeding properly. Bill helped by cleaning out the little small return hole in the master cylinder and replacing our crappy diaphragm. After doing so, we were seeing fluid come out of the end of the lever. Indeed, now we can see fluid coming down the Slingshot Cycles stainless steel braided lines (I just like saying/typing that, sorry!
) and out the hole if we remove the nipple. But with the bleeding nipple in (even just barely), it doesn't want to come out at all. Since I've never bled motorcycle brakes before, I'm not sure if we're doing it properly or not.
4) Tachometer stopped working. Since this one's purely mechanical, we removed it from the valve cover today and discovered the braided line inside had broken about 4 inches up. We removed the broken piece and re-inserted the magnet for the video but I'm going to have to get a new tach cable.
5) Our oil pressure light still doesn't want to go out. We're getting around 65 pounds of oil pressure, according to the gauge we attached but the light itself isn't going out. We got another sensor from Bill this weekend and replaced the one that was in it but we're still seeing the light on. I guess the next step is to diagnose if the problem is with the wiring of the light itself.
But we took Stella out of the garage today and shot the video in front of the garage. When it was time to put her back up, Logan offered to help push her back in. I looked at him and said, "I'm riding her back in." To which he replied, "You don't have front brakes." And I said, "I do have rear brakes and I don't plan on getting her going much faster than a walk...but it's time for her to be ridden."
And thus, even though it was only about 40 feet or so, I got to ride Stella briefly today for the first time. Now it's time to get her buttoned up properly and go take my MSF class so I can ride her out on the road.
