Sunday Ride- Aug 23

We decided to go for a ride rather than go to the Peoria TTs on Sunday.  Got the 6 cylinder Voyager and headed out to Galesburg East Main Hy-Vee gas station and then took I-74 to US 34 west and got off at North Henderson Street and took South Lake Storey  Road to Rt 67 North of Monmouth.  Took the blacktop that runs straight to the Bald Bluff blacktop.  So far so good.  Went North on the Oquawka- Keithsburg blacktop past Big River State Forest and into Keithsburg.  Turned onto the blacktop that runs north up to Rt 17 that goes to New Boston.  All nice new black top, NICE!   Turned west onto Rt 17, took the blacktop North of New Boston that runs up to the highway that crosses the Muscatine, IA bridge.  This road is much better than I have seen it in the past.  Only a couple of dippy/bumpy spots.  We went over the bridge to Muscatine and went South on Rt 61 to Wapello.  There, we picked up Highway 99 and rode that down to Burlington.  Most of this is new blacktop as it was underwater from last summer’s flooding of the Big River.  Stopped by the Burlington bridge and fueled up again and headed back to Illinois.  Once we got to the turn-off to Happy Rock (Gladstone), we took that to Oquawka where we headed east again on Rt 164.  Went through Monmouth on Rt 34 and got off and took old route 34, which is Rt 164, east of Monmouth. and ended up at the Hog Trough (Sirloin Stockade) in Galesburg.  And for those of you familiar with the comedian Ron White, “It was a good day, Tater!”

Bike Maintenance Again

Got my latest order from Mike’s XS, www.mikesxs.net, and got rid of the vacuum operated petcocks on the two 78 XS650 Specials. I only ordered two petcocks, as they are $40 apiece. The 78’s had a petcock on each side of the tank. The 80-84’s only had one petcock. I had bought 2 adapter plates from “partsnmore.com” that would accept a 3/8″ NPT petcock, put a brass plug in the plates and put these on the right side petcock location. So far, working out great. Finished putting new fuel line on the BabyDog on last Saturday. Next thing will be to get some small rubber pieces that cushion the metal side cover mounts and some other small incidentals items to replace things that are getting old, like the rubber covers on the clutch and brake levers. But overall, things looking up on the bikes. Nice to have them running good. When I started to investigate the vacuum petcock issue on www.650rider.com, the advice there was to get them replaced as soon as possible to not have them start leaking and filling the crankcase with fuel. And when I investigated, I discovered that the vacuum hose on the back side of the diaphragm petcock on Spotty had come off! (The carbs have a fuel line between them) This was the source of my idle problem, and backfiring on slowing down. Doh! SpottyDog runs much better now.  I had no problem on Baby because I had to use “72 carb mounts a couple of years back, replacing the stock ones that were not holding the carbs securely, so they had no intake nipple to block off.  But the petcock could still start leaking.  This issue is what happened to the 79 XS1100 that resulted in the fire in the shop last year.  Never want that to happen again.