The musings of a cantankerous over the hill greasemonkey who, though already old, is rather old for his age. I'll bust greasy knuckles out in the garage or argue politics with anyone who will stand for it....



Monday, September 14, 2009

Fire in the Hole!



Well, we're getting serious now...
The Indian is pretty well back together. I tried to fire it Wednesday and the kicker arm reared back and spanked me like a red-headed stepchild. The timing seemed set right, but things weren't advancing/retarding like they oughta. I pulled the ignition all back apart, found my rookie mistake and reassembled it. Thursday night, after three prime kicks at full choke I found a compression stroke, clicked the key over clicked the choke back a notch and on the second kick I had a garage full of blue smoke ( I had oiled those cylinders down pretty good) and the damnedest clatter and roar I had heard in a while. She immediately settled into a nice cadence and we were on our way. I am not comfortable that the feed side of the pump is fully primed, so I shut it down and will confirm that before running it again, but after two years, I finally got off my lazy backside and got a rattle out of the old girl.
It's all downhill from here!

3 comments:

  1. What was the rookie mistake? I'm a rookie...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks Willie... Will do.

    jred... the mistake was assuming the distributor was right without tearing into it. The spark advance was just sliding back and forth on the body, not turning the body to advance/retard spark. I knew the whole body turned on my old scout and on generator bottom harleys. I guess I thought this one must be internal since the lever moved but the body didn't move... Wrong!

    ReplyDelete
  3. yeeha !!! I fired my 52 blackguard tele too

    ReplyDelete