Launch date

After Bob fixed the threads on the tank, it went on just fine. The last little bits went together, including hooking up the gas lines, checking over the bolts to make sure they were all tight (I found a couple that were NOT), and finally filling the engine with engine oil, the transmission, drive shaft and final drive with gear oil and the gas tank with gas.

Here's what it looked like, ready to go:

 

       

I kicked it through a few times to get the fluids flowing, turned on the gas, primed it, and two kicks later, at 5pm on June 6, 2011 it was purring. Rick adjusted the play in the throttle cables and adjusted the idle on the two carburetors to make them match. I have to say, it was pretty exciting to start it up and have it sound so great!

We put on a temporary mirror for the left side so I could ride it and yesterday (June 13th), I took it out to stretch its legs. We got up to about 55 and she wanted to run, but I thought we should build a little more trust before I give her the reins... :-) We went along a road near LAX airport and then down along the ocean and back to the shop — about 15 miles all in all.

I've been trying to choose mirrors. You see, BMW had a threaded hole for an Albert mirror on the left side controls, but not on the right (and I want mirrors on both sides.) There is an option to put a kind of ugly bracket on the handlebars and a straight stem and have a second Albert mirror on the right. You can also put mirrors on the side of the headlight bucket and then you're looking back under the handlebar, which seems kind of awkward. You could use bar end mirrors, but while those bar end turn signals that you see in the pictures were an option when this bike was built, I want to keep them.

Here's my solution...I have mirrors on order from a very interesting guy. Joe Groeger has been an engineer and special tool maker. He designed specially tooled brackets to go on the handlebar between the handgrip and the turn signal to hold a mirror. I tracked him down and he couldn't have been nicer. He's obviously very proud of his work. He's sending the brackets and mirrors to me and hopefully they'll be just right. Once they're on, I'll post a picture of what they look like.

I'm going to keep the bike at Rick's shop for a little while longer while I gather some tools in case I need to work on it at home and also, I'll need to make some more adjustments to it after it's been ridden 50 miles and I'd like to get Rick's help with that. There are still a couple of little fixes to make... there's a little leak from the drive shaft boot and there's a kind of ticking sound that seems to correspond to the speed of the wheels. I'll have to jack it up when it's cool and see if I can re-create that sound and resolve it. More on that later, but it's launched! It's kind of surreal to think that it's done... Now I'll have to make room in my garage for it...and ride it!

Oh yeah...and just as a reminder... this is where it started last October:

The last bits take a while...

It seems like the last bits take a very long time. Where exactly should the wires and cables run? Which mirrors should I use? (Perfectly authentic or safer and more functional? -- not yet decided, by the way.)

Then there are the little things that you didn't count on. For example, there is an electrical "switch" — kind of a hub where all of the electrical wires meet in the headlight bucket. It is suspended from the top by sliding four metal tabs (part of a bracket welded to the top of the bucket) through slots in the board and then bending them over.

Here are a couple of pictures:

The arrows point to the 4 tabs
The one on the top left is easiest to see.

This board also holds in the key mechanism, so when the key pushes in, it pushes on a part that makes contact with the electrical mechanism. If you bend them too much, the metal gets brittle and eventually breaks, just like bending a paper clip until it breaks. You don't want that. If a tab breaks, you have to take the whole thing apart and get the tab welded back on, possibly ruining the beautiful new paint job. We were very careful when putting this board back in, but once it was all put together, we discovered that the key connection was not so great. The key was not staying in, disrupting the electrical contacts. In short, it had to come out again, risking the metal tabs breaking. It took a great deal of work. We got the tabs up and the switch out without any disasters.

First we addressed the key mechanism and eventually found that of the two small ball bearings that hold the key in place, one was missing. Here's a diagram of how that works. Sorry - no pictures of this. I was too caught up in the finish line...

We replaced that ball bearing, so we were ready to put it back together. I read about a process called "annealing" where you heat up metal till it's glowing orange and then let it cool back down to room temperature. By doing that, you sort of "reset" the brittleness of the hardened, brittle metal and make it more malleable and hence, less likely to break. The concern in doing this is that you don't want to heat the paint up too much and ruin that. As directed by the manual from Barrington Motor Works, we put the headlight bucket upside down on a cool wet towel and applied a torch to the tabs one at a time, letting it cool from time to time so the whole headlight bucket didn't get too hot. The process worked beautifully, the metal was much more malleable and it all went together beautifully and it's now working great.

Another issue we didn't expect was trouble bolting in the gas tank. As I worked on the painted bike, I found from time to time that paint had gotten into the threads of exposed holes for bolts. To fix that, I would "chase" the threads with a tap to clean it out. Usually, this is just a little time consuming, but no problem. This time, however, I couldn't get the tap to grab on one of the two sides. The beginning threads were stripped and none of the taps in the shop worked. Incidentally, this was not the tank that was on the bike originally. I found out, from the owner before the last owner that the original tank had been stolen. This tank I got from Rick and it had never been on my bike, or I would have know that this was an issue. I probably should have checked that out before it went out to paint, but you can't think of everything! Anyway, we tried, unsuccessfully, for a while to get the tap started and then the next morning I bought a fresh tap that was sharper and had a slightly blunter point, so it could grab the threads sooner and it worked. Here's a photo of Bob Gregor as he carefully got the tap started:

A smiling Bob on hearing that he would be rocketed to fame on this blog.

Not much more to do, once the tank is on, I can fill it up with gas, engine oil, gear oil and see if she starts...