Two weeks

In two weeks, I've made more progress on the Cub than in two years of owning it. Seriously... Which is fine. She's never taken up space that wasn't available, really, and I've never regretted buying her. Before Audrey and I left Atlanta, I'd tried to hook the battery up to see if the electrical system worked, and after grounding the battery to one of the terminals of the starter solenoid, diagnosed an electrical problem. Some of you should be scratching your heads... I know. Looking back, of course that wasn't going to work- the battery wasn't ever really grounded... I finally got around to printing off a proper wiring diagram for that model of Cub and took another crack at it two weekends ago, with this as the result:

Sure, not too exciting in terms of noise and spectacle, but I'd hooked up a new battery correctly, and was using the button to make it work- pretty exciting to me.

The next logical step, of course, was to try to start the engine. Less success here, unfortunately. I was able to verify that I was getting good spark consistently, and better spark after a bit of contact cleaner. A buddy of mine helped me adjust the timing to about where it should be, with no luck. I replaced the old gas with fresh premium, with no luck. After making other adjustments elsewhere (and noting along the way that I needed to replace the head cover gasket), I took the exhaust back off the bike and kicked the engine over. Here, I found that the fuel/air mixture was spraying from the exhaust port of the cylinder. Last night I took the head off, removed the valves, and found some carbon deposits on the exhaust valve... I'm not sure if it's in the right place to affect the seal, but it's worth a cleaning anyway. I'm also planning to check the tappet clearance once I reinstall the head (got some feeler gauges the other day). If it's not the seal itself, perhaps the rocker is just holding it a little bit open.

My plan at this point is to focus entirely on getting the engine running- that's the key goal. I've got a repair to the engine mounting holes I need to do, a lot of cleaning, and more than a few components to track down before I'm ready to call the project complete, but once the engine is running, the bike should be rideable, and I'll be able to take the cosmetic and detail repairs in whatever order I like. 

I'm pretty optimistic about getting this bike running in the next few days. I've learned a lot about engines, and it's been a lot of fun (I think I'd just procrastinated so long it was just ingrained before- funny what a small success will do for work ethic). Besides, I'm an engineer, and I want to build a plane- this is turning out to be good practice for that. I'll post a set of pictures tomorrow, and (maybe with some luck) a video of the engine running.

-The Proprietor