I have an old bike, it breaks, I document that here.
The new pistons and collars have come in so it’s time to rebuild the calipers that were torn down in a previous post.
All so shiny and clean, time to install. Continue reading “Let’s stop and talk about brakes for a bit – Part 2 – The Rebuild”
Yeah it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything, because I’ve been busy (or riding). Well I finally have time to get around to putting the correct front end on my 700S. This means swapping the whole front end, none of it is interchangeable between the 650 and 700S. So I had to order brakes off of eBay and since I don’t trust eBay brakes, step 1 is rebuilding them.
Here’s the before pic. Doesn’t look too bad, on the outside. Continue reading “Let’s stop and talk about brakes for a bit – Part 1 – The tear down.”
Another trek into the piney woods of SE Texas. Along the way I passed a sign that said ‘Big Creek Scenic View’, I thought mebbe I’d find a photo op. Instead, all I found was that my road turned into a rutted gravel and dirt trail. I spent the next 20 minutes going 10-15mph and rattling my teeth out of my head…
So I tried running the Nighthawk on Seafoam. It was only for a few blocks, but i didn’t really notice any difference.
Riding my cycle around Houston after dark. Trying out the new helmet camera.
I guess I have to start covering the bike even in the garage. Stupid cat. I feed her and scratch her and this is how she repays me?
I thought I should wash all of the bugs and crud off of it before installing the crashbars.
Crashbars? You mean from back in July? That’s right. They’re painted gloss black now and I finally have a chance to install them. I’ll put the results of that in the next post.
I’m finally in town for a little while and had a chance to get back to the bike. Nick managed to speak a few words of carburetor to my bike so it would play nice with K&N. We ended up rejetting the carbs, more air more fuel I guess. You can’t argue with the final results however. There aren’t enough O’s in smoooooooth to describe how this thing revs below 5K rpm now. No popping, stumbling, or hesitation from the silky smooth idle all the way up to redline. I put 140 miles on it yesterday, both highway and about town and even some gridlock to test it out. Thanks Nick.
I’m still trying to get the K&N to work at low RPMs because I’ve tasted the increase in performance at high RPMs and I liked it. I first tried cutting the yogurt cup down by about half an inch, since this reduced the diameter of the lip it reduced the height of the cup inside the cone tremendously. Before the lip of the cup was resting on the pleats and the bottom of the cup was flush with the opening of the cone. With the cup cut so the outside diameter of the lip was exactly the same as the inside diameter of the bottom of the cone the bottom of the cup sat about 3″ below the opening of the cone.
