Sorry!

I have been seriously slacking on my posts up here. As you can imagine I've been spending 100% of my free time locked in the dungeon that is the old gutted post office. But it has all finally paid off! Last night I took the bike out for its first trouble free run!! I had it out Saturday for a bike show but I ended up blowing my chain off and ripping my oil pump in half, so that was not a good ride. The bike ended up puking oil everywhere and I had to ride home with a slick rear tire. Needless to say I went very slow. I will post some proper pics of the finished bike (not painted yet) when I get it outside.

In other news we have finally experienced the Puerto Rican week in our neighborhood. All I can say is that next year we are taking a vacation that week! It was nuts, cops, honking, music and lots of yelling and this was all hours of the day. We were taking care of John's dog Henry and he didn't know what to make of any of it. Luckily he is very calm and took the whole thing in stride, it also doesn't hurt to have a pit bull with you when that many sketchy people are around! I don't know how many people asked us if we wanted to breed him! Morons.

Its Alive!! Sort of.

After three years of tooling around with the Triumph I finally got it started yesterday! Not before a week of head scratching trying to figure out why it wouldn't fire. Turns out I was timing the magneto on the exhaust stroke and not the intake stroke. Stupid. So....after getting it started a couple times and checking all the lights I decided to put it in gear and check the clutch. Bad idea. Something went "boom" and now it won't shift into 1st, 2nd or neutral. I've decided to take today off from the shop and reassess the situation. I've almost reached the end of my patience with this transmission. I have now stripped and rebuilt it 5 times, and I think I might cry if I have to do it again. I'm at the point where I'd rather pay somebody to just do it right. Oh, wait. I already did that and it got me nowhere! But seriously I think I'm going to have somebody with more experience take care of the tranny. Say what you will about the British, but they should never be allowed to engineer anything. I've never seen a trans with so much slop and free play in it and one of the most ridiculous selecting mechanism. That being said the bike idles nicely and the mag is putting out a fat spark. Hopefully I'll have this little road bump fixed soon and I can road test it. So much for finishing this bike for the Mods Vs. Rockers Rally.



On the cycling front I screwed up big time. I was really looking forward to racing this weekend at the Subaru Cup, but it is not to be. With this event being so big they race on both Saturday and Sunday. Me being a little scatter brained requested Sunday off, not Saturday the day of the XC race. And like Mike put it "I'm not driving 4 hours to race a 30 minute short track race".

Sorry about the bad photos, the shop has very bad lighting and its even worse with the flash. Mental note: a tripod would help next time.

I'm Back!

After all the complaining I've been doing about no motivation, yesterday knocked some sense back into me! Ben and I hoped in the car around 9am and headed out to Palos for a little trail riding. Ben claimed his legs were sore from a ride the day before but I've that non-sense before! He left the route up to me and I decided to do some sections that Jason had shown me 2 weeks before. The had just recently been cleared and was rolling very fast. The trail is not very technical but real fast and flowing, the fact we didn't see another person was perfect. After taking the canal trail we hooked up with a rocky gully that took us back up to the main trail system. We hammered down my favorite section and the back up the hill to the car.

This all may sound very simple and easy for a training ride. What mattered about that ride was that it reminded me why I looooove riding trails so much! Thanks Ben for a great ride, and the White Castle "reward" was just perfect! Short post for a very momentous occasion.