Petrol head thread!!!

[Dark Lightning]

I saw that elsewhere. I would opt for making it an "SUV", as I'd want the cargo space enclosed. FWIW, I paid about that amount for a new Kia Forte, 9 years ago. It has AC (needed here in southern California), but it isn't electric. Wife and I are considering a hybrid vehicle for her, when the warranty expires on her car, which is in 5 years. I'm on a low-level search for some more old iron. Something that I can maintain myself.

[billy rubin]

isle of man TT 2025

full kneelers

watch the monkey as he shifts the center of gravity to the inside of the turns. a sidecar cant lean, so him hanging off or over is all that keeps the machine stable. without him the chair flies in the turns.

average speed over the whole course for these is 121 mph- country lanes, city streets. the course is 37 miles long, so it takes great attention to learn it and to ride it fast. even the nürburgring is only 17 miles.

ive been lucky enough to ride monkey one time, briefly. hanging off the side f the chair at 60 mph, with your face two inches from the tarmac is unforgettable.

[billy rubin]

[Icarus]

That thing is pretty. The passanger dumbass has a place to hide.  Both those guys are ever so close to learning the real meaning of the descriptive term; Terminal speed.

[Dark Lightning]

Terminal, indeed. I've done some crazy 100+ MPH driving in a highway (126, between Fillmore, CA and Newhall, CA). One lane each way back then, and people died all the time trying to pass on the short stretches where passing was allowed. Posted for a max speed of 50 MPH, btw. Just like Highway 99 from Bakersfield to LA. One lane each way with a passing lane in the middle. Horrendous crashes. Now, it's the 5 Freeway and the 405 Freeway, and the deaths are down by 95% or so. Just more lanes to get stupid in, I guess.

[billy rubin]

sad news

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/racer-dies-trying-set-land-speed-record-utah-salt-flats-rcna223010

A driver died Sunday after he crashed while he was trying to set a land speed record at an annual event on the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, event organizers said.

Chris Raschke, 60, died after the crash at around 3:03 p.m. MT, officials with the Southern California Timing Association, which runs the event, said in a statement.

Organizers said the crash happened after Raschke "lost control of his land speed vehicle at approximately the 2 1/2 mile." It occurred during the annual "Speed Week," which opened Sunday.

this team built the fastest wheel-driven vehicles in the world-- no jets, no rockets. V8 piston engines. the record is 470 mph. running a team at this level of competition is a rich mans past time, like sending jeff bezos into space. but unlike the rocket billionaires, these guys line up on the same track available to anybody with a machine and a desire to race.

added

he augered in at 280 to 300 mph

[billy rubin]

life moves on. i have been in touch with watsonian squire, the oldest sidecar manufacturer in the world, still messing about in the cotswolds.

i asked what it would cost to get me a new windscreen for my antique 1968 watsonian monaco sidecar, and they told me 413 quid, which i already knew, plus 195 more for the shipping across the atlantic . . .

so in american bananas, that works out to be a bit over US$800, for a windscreen assembly, which includes upper and lower metal trim pieces, made of unobtainium.

that is a horrifying price. however, i have convinced myself to pay the piper, because this antique sidecar is otherwise complete, is in extremely good condition, a correct windscreen with factory mounting parts  is currently available, and i have no expectations that it will continue to be available. after all, the stinking sidecar is almost sixty years old. who would keep pieces of something like that on the shelf except some crazy brits?

so i told the man to work up an invoice, and i would pay him. he responded that he was on vacation and would get back to me next week.

i can only assume that he was fleeing the cotswolds because j d vance was coming to vacation. i would do the same.

for those of you who havent been hanging onto my every word regarding this period piece of british motorcycling technology , here's what it looked like when new:



this is quite likely one of the ugliest sidecars ever built.

the hood makes it look even worse than otherwise, but getting hold of one of those is quite unlikely, so the actual sidecar wont look as bad as this one. but it will be plenty stodgy. in a perfect world i would have liked a sleek and aerodynamic expression of beauty, a land torpedo that pieced the airstream with style and grace. but what was available was an antique that more or less resembled an old boot.

but by god, its my old boot, and we re going to run with it!

[Dark Lightning]

^ That's a pretty cool rig, Billy!

[billy rubin]

shitfire, i dunno about cool.

what i have loks like this



but you know what? 1968 isnt coming back.

[billy rubin]

lol

check this out.

this is why you have to make sure the sidecar is heavy enough when you go around inside turns

[img]https://advrider.com/f/attachments/img_0325-jpeg.7163019/[img]

some people put sandbags or sealed water buckets in there iof nobody is sitting.

clearly even a passenger isnt always enough

[Icarus]

As a kid I had several Cushmans. One of them had a sidecar.  I used to haul ass around inside corners in order to lift the sidehack wheel off the ground. Dumb kid, big fun.

[billy rubin]

well, today was a good day.

i have an ancient little honda, a 1971 100cc scrambler that i bought ages ago to teach the kids how to ride motorcycles. it worked well. too well, maybe, because the two youngest boys took it joyriding in the creek and broke the unobtainable plastic headlamp shell.

stuff like that is not common these days, and requires some searching.

anyway, i found a headlamp shell for sale in indonesia and bought it. it eventually arrived with no drama, and i installed it carefully. carefully is important, because the headlamp shell is also the junction box for wiring harnesses from all over the bike, and everything had to be disconnected and put back together right. i labelled all the wires, and carefully put em all back where they were supposed to go-- i thought--but when i was done, i had no headlight. and whats worse, if i turned on the switch the fuse would blow.

clearly a moment of brain fade on my part during reassembly.

but if you didnt turn the headlight on, everything worked fine, and since i didnt want my ten year old out on the roads after dark any way, i left it that way. put some tape over the switch to keep him from monkeying with it.

fast forward now to this year, and the 10 year old is pushing 22, and wants to take the little honda to a motorcycle rally across the state to putt around the campground on. would like to have a headlight for nighttime debauchery, too.

so i said, no time like the present to teach him some automotive wtroubleshooting. so we looked up a wiring diagram on the internet and opened up the headlamp shell to find my long ago mistake. got out the VOM and started looking for electrons.

years ago i had numbered everything i took apart so i could put it back together right. we looked and looked, but all the numbers were plugged correctly into each other. some 15 multi-wire circuits to high beam, low beam, instrument cluster, taillight, turn signals, and of course the associated switch gear. and all in ancient 6-volt primitive connections.

i was about to give up and call it a day when i noticed that circuit number 7 was all green wires, for ground (honda actually uses a separate set of wires to ground all the energized components, unlike the brits, who just assumed that everything would run back to the battery through the frame and bearings and so on. which they wouldnt).

but in that ground circuit there was a multiconnector of three green wires and one blue wire, connected together.

thats odd, i said,. the only blue wires in there lead from the headlamp switch to the headlamp, and then another wire goes to the high beam indicator in the instrument cluster. so there is no reason for a blue wire to be connected directly to ground, and since it is a high beam feed, the fuse would blow every time you turned the lights on. which was what was happening.

so i pulled the blue wire out of the green wire multi-connector and plugged it into the headlamp's blue wire multi-connector, and nothing happened. then i turned on the headlamp switch, and the headlamp lit up.

bingo. problem solved.

like ten years ago i had plugged that single blue wire into the ground connector, bypassing the entire headlamp circuit, and ensuring that the fuse would melt every time you turned the lamp on. now thats its fixed,we have a high beam without issues.

still no low beam tho because the old 5-1/4-inch sealed beam lamp has a burned out low beam filament, but the OEM bulb is still available over the net, even though the little honda is 55 years old.

so it was a red letter day. i had already scrounged new side covers for it from singapore, and they arrived a week or two ago and fit perfectly. so theres nothing left to do on this machine except clean it off.

its not much for high performance, and tops out at about 35 or 40 mph, and the fish-oil shocks were worn out thirty years ago. but for a farm bike to use to check on animals or to run down the fencelines, its perfect. if i get registration again, i can even take it town.

not on the interstate, tho. i aint that stupid.

[Dark Lightning]

Hey, that's pretty cool, bringing light to that old Honda! That wire color reminds me of the time I was building some electronic equipment. The electrical tech, in order to save money, bought one large spool of black wire. These were scanners that had +/- directionality in 3 dimensions, with limit switches. Of course, it was crunch time, and I was under a table in the dark-ish pushing wires into sockets on the connectors. Turned the thing on, the controller went up in smoke, and the monitor went dark. Turns out that I had put -12VDC on a 5V logic circuit. President of the company asks, "What can we do to avoid this?", to which I responded, "Don't make me work in the dark, and I'll also go up and buy the other 9 colors of wire we should be using to help the poor customers troubleshoot these things when something fails". I was a "consultant", and it wasn't much later that I was told my services were no longer required. About 3 weeks later they called back and asked for help. 

[Recusant]

. . . The electrical tech, in order to save money, bought one large spool of black wire.  . . .

That's demented.

[billy rubin]

there is a special place in hell for people who wire somethg all in one colour