Day One

I started off the day by spraying down almost all of the bolts and screws on the bike with WD-40, leting it soak in, and then carefully loosening everything so that we know it will come loose without breaking, later. After that was done, Rick and I started digging in to see what condition it was in under the “hood”… and we were pleasantly surprised! When we took the front of the engine case off, the generator was in beautiful, original condition and very clean! Here’s what it looked like:

Rick says that you can tell it’s original from the factory when you see the little string ties keeping the wires together. We’ll be replacing all the wires when we put in a new wiring harness, but it’s good to know that there wasn’t an engine leak that leaked into that area. I guess it's really rare to see it looking so incredibly clean in the front of the engine, so we were happy about that! :)  We’ll probably replace the coil as that is something that tends to go over time. We adjusted the points and the gap for the push rods for the valves. Here’s what it looks like under the valve cover:

In case you want a reminder of how a 4-stroke engine works (I did!) here's a good little moving diagram which takes you from the intake of the air/fuel mixture from the carburetor, through the combustion inside the cylinder and finally to the exhaust.

If you were wondering, the valve gaps were a little loose and the points were a little tight. Now that it's adjusted, it should run better when we get around to starting it up.