Vacation, With Moderate Drama

Short version: Went on vacation; discovered an old problem that I made for myself; no broken bones, bloodletting or other trauma.

My most lovely and cool wife was on a road trip for work week before last. While she was gone, it was my plan (plan: n. a specific project or definite purpose that will not go as intended) to get the dragon back on the road, but it was just too freakin' hot to enjoy working outdoors enough to get off my duff an do it.


Trikes did well with two exceptions.

We had minor electrical trauma on the Harley. It was a goofy symptom. It would cut out momentarily at not quite random times. We first blamed it on bad gas from a Valero station in Hico, TX. After multiple refills, often with Seafoam added, it was still doing it. It would get bad sometimes and not do it at all others.

I finally decided it was more like a loss of spark than a fuel issue and it occurred to me that the alarm immobilizes the bike by interrupting the coil. We tolerated it for another day because I didn't want to risk tearing into mostly working wiring and making something *really* break.

We were in Pedernales Falls SP, under a bit of shade, with the seat off the bike. I dug in, found the two connections, saw that I had used crimp connectors and gave them a tug. They came loose with very little effort. I know better and have been bitten by crimp connectors before, but at the time I was putting in the alarm, I'm sure I justified using crimp connectors "just this once".

So, I soldered those two connections and checked the starter lockout connectors, which are also crimped, but crimped better. Gilbert ran great the rest of the day and all the way home today.

The other exception was really the escalation of another known issue. The yellow trike has air shocks. It seems to only want to handle correctly with them fully inflated, to 100 PSI. Trouble was, they would leak down over a couple of days. More trouble now because they leak down in a few hours. I pretty much top them off at every stop, if it's been a little while since the last top off.

At least I can top them off with a portable air compressor. Almost none of the air hoses out there will inflate over about 70 PSI, and most are more like 50 PSI.