On again, off again

Last Sunday marked the first day of production on The Crud Run Diaries. For this day’s shoot we filmed the next step in preparing the CL for the spring run.

If you remember from a previous post, my last attempt to start the bike ended with one carb bleeding gas and the other passing nothing but air to the cylinder. This being the case I decided the next step is to pull the carbs back off the bike and clean them up properly before attempting to use them again.

This, of course requires removing pretty much everything that I’ve re-installed since I received the bike a few months back. You see, the super-cool high exhaust pipes make removing the left-side cover impossible (as far as I can tell), and you need to remove the cover to remove the carb, so off comes the exhaust system again.

So, after about 20 minutes of disassembly, the carbs once again rest on the cement of my driveway and we’re ready to tear into them.

Off to the basement we go and I first pull the bowls off and drop the parts into a little muffin tray. An initial visual inspection doesn’t reveal any reason that one of these (of course, I can’t remember which one it was) would leak gas like a Badger fan in October, so we’re going to look further.

I the pulled the top of the carb off and pulled out the slides and their diaphragms and didn’t see anything suspect there either. Looks like we’re just going to be doing this the hard way.

So we headed out to Auto Zone for a bucket of Chem Dip. This time we’ll properly scrub these puppies up since we can’t find the actual problem; we’ll just try to put them back on the bike in the best condition possible.

After removing the first carb from the dip it looked pretty damn good!

So tonight the second carb will soak and after that the associated parts that I removed during the initial disassembly (bowls, jets, etc.).

Later that night I was back on Ebay searching for various parts and found complete carb rebuild kits for this bike for about $30.00. I’m wondering if, since they are off the bike and in pieces if I might as well pick one of these up and properly rebuild the carbs. I didn’t see any damage to the components included in this kit (needles, jets, float bowl gasket, etc.) but obviously there is something leaking somewhere and for $30.00 now it would be nice to eliminate as many variables as possible.

Rolling

The Crud Run Diaries has finally been "greenlighted" by the second society. What this means is that it will now occupy an "official" spot on the production schedule and things should really start rolling from here.

What happens next is we will be scheduling interviews with anyone involved in the Run's history as well as time to record major mechanical work on the project bikes (which means I need to get a list of to-fix items for the CL). The first of these sessions will be recorded on September 9th so I'll have more to report on after that.

A few other decisions have been made and due to scheduling conflicts (and frankly, lack of progress on the project bikes) we're targeting the spring Run of 2008 to get the bikes running and on the road. This will give us most of the winter to get the work done, and since we live in Wisconsin, there's not a lot else to do, really…

In the meantime we are looking for stories from anyone who participates or even knows something about The Slimy Crud Run. If you or someone you know falls into this category drop a comment on this post and we'll get in touch.