Takin' Out The Engine...

So I had the bike right where I wanted her, stripped down and almost at 3rd base. I had spent several days with my hands all over her caressing the wires and everything else off. I had been as gentle as possible but now it was time to seal the deal and pop that engine out. I knew it was not going to be too easy as most of the engine bolts and mounts had not been touched in 20 odd years. At first I used a gentle touch and didn't want to force anything. The nuts were putting up a bit of a fight coming off those bolts. I decided what was needed was a little bit of lube. I got some Liquid Wrench and squirted it all over the tight fasteners. They loosened up nice and using my ratchet, a little muscle power and a firm grip I got the nuts off. With all the motor mounts and brackets off it was time to lift the engine out, but it just didn't seem to want to give. It was rocking forward and back but wouldn't come out. I knew I must be missing something. I reached my hand down and fondled underneath her for a bit. I found it! One last fastener I had missed hidden at the bottom out of sight. Once I got that off the engine came right out...I guess I still got the magic hands.
Man, I can't wait to ride her...

For now I just have the engine sitting half in a milk crate. For my next blog post my father-in-law and I have an engine stand in the works. I've seen a few different ones fabricated for this particular motor so I have some specs and we're going to weld one together. It will make it possible to work on and rip apart the engine while it is out of the frame.

Well, looking forward to this evening cause tonight I'm head'in out to my friends bar to check out the wicked awesome band The Sunparlour Players. I look forward to seeing them every time they're in town. Check out their website http://www.myspace.com/thesunparlour.

Thanks for taking the time to read my blog and don't be afraid to leave any comments. Also, anyone that is interested in helping out can send me some cheddah. $Fiddies and $hunges only please.

Cheers,

World Cup 2010...

So it's that time again and the world is at odds to see who is the best in THE UNIVERSE at kicking a ball in the net. Well, all I know is that so far, out of all the "best players" in the world, not one of them has scored 2 goals in one game at any of these 2010 World Cup matches. Please, and they call themselves the best? What I do know is that my awesome daughter blasted 2 goals by the goalie in one game last week and the only reason she didn't go for a hat trick was because she was showing some decency to the other team. Man I hate that decency stuff! I think they taught her it at school or something. All the more reason for home schooling. Anyway, I got the goals on video to share to the world at this time of soccer predominance. Yea, I know, predominance is a pretty sweet word, that's why I used it. So here are the videos. You may want some tissue near you as the witnessing of these shots may overwhelm you with emotion and the happiness you will be caused by viewing such exceptionally good play may cause you to shed tears of joy. Most of my Chopper Charligans will probably not watch the videos or even care about my daughters scoring dominance. Well, to those that don't care, I say suck my arse, cause I prolly don't care about your kid either, and it's getting posted mostly so those connected to me by blood can witness the awesomeness of my daughter if they can't make it out to a game.

Goal One...


Goal Two...


Thanks for watching.
Cheers,

Stripping Down...

So, my friend Sneaky Pete bought a new house with a nice big garage. It's funny cause the house he ended up buying is the same house my brother used to own a few owners back. The garage was nice and big and perfect for Chopper Charlie to take his chop build to the next level. And let me tell you, I'm all about stepping it up in everything I do ever since my favorite band, Spinal Tap, had those sweet custom amps made back in '84 that went to 11 instead of maxing out at 10.
These awesome amps inspire me to take it to the next level whenever possible. The way I see it is choppin my bike in the back yard was me at 10, but moving the build inside Sneaky Pete's garage was like ripping that knob up to 11 and letting it scream! My friend has about 4 of his own bikes in there but he managed to make room for one more.
The plan is a complete ground up build, so every last piece, bold, screw and wire is coming off the bike and either getting cleaned, modified, replaced, painted or just scrapped. I took the gas tank, carburetor, tail light and seat off, and now wanted to strip off all the wiring.
I know absolutely ZERO about wiring. In fact, I know pretty much nothing about motors or welding or anything whatsoever about building or chopping a bike. But, like everything else on this project, I'm just going to use the interweb and a bit of trial and error and teach myself everything from scratch. So after about 30 hours of interweb research and reading about wiring I started in to strip it down. Here's a great online source for bike wiring, it's long at about 90 pages, but it's bang on for a learner like me, www.btinternet.com/~jhpart/bkwirec.htm. For now all I am doing is removing everything, the hard part will come when I have to wire the bike back up. There is about a billion wires on the stock bike, including safety relays and a thousand feet of wire for one freaking light bulb, with safety relays on top of safety relays. I mean seriously, there is actually some kinda huge safety relay thing taking up space and wasting wire so that a light comes on to warn you that your high beams are burnt out. How about getting rid of that and just being able to notice if the high beam is working or not when you turn it on by USING YOUR FREAK'IN EYES TO SEE! Anyway, I want to strip all that crap off and when I rebuild it I'm only having maybe 2 or 3 wires to just run a headlight and a tail light, and a couple of wires for the few things that can't be gotten rid of, like the regulator/rectifier and the starter, and maybe the neutral switch. So you don't know what a regulator/rectifier is? Yea, me either, but I learned myself up on it and now I do, and I need to keep it. Here's just some of the mess that I'm starting with and a wiring diagram of the stock wiring that looks like a bowl of spaghetti. This is JUST the wires that were jammed into the headlight cover.
Of course, I'm going to need to know what wires do what and go where for when I'm trimming it down and wiring it back up, so I got the wiring diagram and traced and labelled every wire. This is only something I recommend if you have about 30 hours to waste and love getting really pissed and frustrated.
A few posts ago I had mentioned the safety kick stand switch wire that was the cause of the previous owner having trouble getting the bike to started and causing him to give up on the bike. Well, here's that safety kick stand switch wire. I think someone told him duct tape fixes everything, so he had put some on the frayed wires. It didn't work for him, and the bike then sat for 5 years in his shed. Now I have the bike, the kick stand switch is in the garbage can, and the bike starts.
After having all the wires and relays and other crap labelled they were all stripped off the bike, and it was pretty much down to just the frame, motor and tires. Oh, and I drained the oil.
Next I took out the starter motor and removed the rear tire, the chain and the swing arm. All that's left to come out is the motor.

Well, that's it for now my Chopper Charligans. Thanks for reading and also a big thanks for letting me know you're reading. Sometimes I wonder if anybody is even checking this blog out , but at least a couple of times a week someone mentions to me that they've read it or ask me how the chop is coming, so thanks to everyone. Leave a comment if you have something good to say or even just a shout out. If you have something negative to say about me or my blog, well, don't, and screw off. Chopper Charlie is all about good vibes and positive energy only. Of course, if you have something bad or negative to say about someone else besides me, then by all means throw it up in the comment section and we'll all have a good laugh...well, all of us except the person we're dogg'in.