Just Musing

Well, it's April 20 and we have about 70 days to go before we head north. The past month has been pretty uneventful except for a couple of interesting things. We had the XL-Alaska party at my house at the end of March. Attendees were Erica (all the way from KC), Screw Loose Dan (all the way from Philly), Tom "Silver Eagle" McCort, Ron "Skid" Demyan, Lee Levy, Boojr and myself.

I rode to Indianapolis to meet up with Erica, who was comming from Kansas City, and we rode back to Stow together. I wanted to see how the trailer behaved, fully loaded. Erica wanted to see how her new 883>>1200 conversion worked out. My ride was uneventful but Erica's was a disaster. On her way back to KC, Erica's engine quit about 150mi from home. She was able to limp home but when she and Lee took the engine apart they found that the engine had just about destroyed itself. The piston was cracked, had a hole in the top, the connecting rods were damaged and the cylinders were trashed.

NHRS's Aaron Wilson put an email out on the XL-List that said that her engine exhibited all the classic signs of long term detonation. There has been alot of soul-searching and Monday-morning quaterbacking regarding the problem but the causes seem to be..

a) Her refurbished engine had a 10:1 compression ratio
b) She was running a little lean (14:1 - 16:1 on the Air:Fuel ratio)
c) She was running the older 883 ignition module which has a pretty significant spark advance

These three situations could easily (and prolly did) combine to cause premature detonation and subsequent engine destruction. Erica and Lee have decided to implement the following modifications on her next engine.

a) Use low-profile pistons so as to reduce compression ratio.
b) Re-tune the carb to run an Air/Fuel ratio closer to 13:1 or richer.
c) Get an aftermarket ignition module

The second interesting thing that happened a bit ago was when I was trying to adjust my highway pegs for the greatest comfort on the long ride. I had them pretty well situated but when I put my foot on the left peg, it would unscrew and drop down. This seemed to happen no matter how hard I tightened the thing. My solution was to try to take the MIG-Welder and tack the peg in position. Only problem was when I tried to weld the peg, the metal just disintegrated. No matter what settings I used, the thing just went "Poof". Finally I had eroded almost a third of the metal away and I decided to give up and take the thing into the machine shop at my university to see what the heck I was doing wrong.

After some deliberations the machinist announced that my peg was not stainless steel but was ZINC and "Zinc don't weld too good". Oh well, a new set of pegs set me back about $100. At least I could re-use the foot rests.