A Mostly British Obsession
It was only a month ago that I was happily riding down to Crater Lake with my pal Jack, he on his Harley, me on the Sprint. We had a great ride, though in retrospect we tried to cover too much distance on the coast the second day…and the coast was overcast, cold and still crawling with RVs. But once we turned inland at Reedport, Oregon, the skies cleared, we had fabulous roads to ourselves, and it was some of the best riding I’ve done in my life.
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Reg the MGB is still trundling along–as it always has under my regimen of benign neglect. I’ve owned this car for at least a decade now, and I am still very pleased to be its caretaker. All of the cosmetic issues it had when I bought it are largely still in need of attention, but none of them make any difference when driving. I’m incredibly reluctant to take this car off the road and potentially lose the great patina it has.
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I’m definitely enjoying the new bike! I’m trying to get the remedial repairs from the previous owner’s tenure done before the Crater Lake trip; these include replacing the foot pegs (the right one is broken off halfway along and makes for an uncomfortable ride) and replacing the battery. The latter is a disappointment, if only because I asked if it had a decent battery and the seller said yes. I mean, just tell me it sucks, and I’ll get a new one.
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In one of the odder deals I’ve been involved in, I traded the 2002 Daytona for some explosion-proof lights. In turn, I sold those not more than three minutes later to my friend Mark, who will be using them in his restoration shop’s remodeled paint booth this winter. An hour after that, I concluded negotiations on this 2006 Triumph Sprint ST with ABS. It has just shy of 15,000 miles and will be the perfect (?) mount for my upcoming road trip to Crater Lake with my pal Jack. I was a bit sorry to see the Daytona go, but this new machine will hopefully prove to be more practical and just as invigorating.
I’m planning on a longish motorcycle tour in a few weeks, and the Daytona will kill my ancient bones if I try to ride it 2000 miles in a week. So it’s up for sale or trade–I’m looking for something like a late-model Speed Triple, Ducati Monster, Moto Guzzi Brevia or similar. The Daytona only has 3,600 miles on it and is in very nice condition. Looking for about $4,500, but that’s somewhat negotiable.
I finally have sussed what was wrong with the Amal 276 on the BSA: The float was set too high (mind you, straight from the maker, but that’s not much of an excuse). Imagine my excitement when I kicked the machine to life and it idled, stone cold–which it has never done. The carb was absolutely full of crud, too, which I suspect is the remains of the old cork fuel taps. (I’ll check it again in a couple hundred miles, but the tank itself was sealed when it was restored.)
Alas. Back from a short “victory” ride, I discovered I was leaving a trail of oil. The photo above shows why: the return line from the cylinder head decided enough was enough.
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I have had very little time to work on the Jaguar the past few weeks, and have been waiting on suppliers to get me some pieces back…some of those arrived today: the instruments. I sent them out to West Valley Instruments in California to be rebuilt, and they look great. And now that I have them I can do some wiring in earnest (you can see it’s just a spaghetti-fest back there right now).
The toggle switches are going to drive me nuts. They’re all new, and they all sit at slightly different heights, especially the left-most switch. I am hesitant to do much “judicious” bending as that leads, with these expensive-but-fragile pieces, to judicious breaking.
Carburetor-equipped XJ6s have a somewhat oddball throttle setup–a light push on the gas opens the butterfly in the carb, but the charge is routed through a convoluted path in a secondary manifold (as seen above) in order to heat it up. In the photo, the port on the left has had the throttle shaft and plate removed, but you can see the opening for this pre-heat passage on the inner wall.
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This may be the dorkiest thing I’ve done for awhile, but my life is essentially a string of dorky endeavors. I washed my wife’s car, which made me think I should wash the XJ6, which led to me washing a seagull bomb off the MG, which had me thinking the truck hadn’t been washed since last year…so everything got hosed down. (The bikes were out because I was moving stuff around in the shop.) Why not roll out the E-Type? Somewhere in that sequence it passed from “understandable” to “dorky”; in any case, this was the result.
Just presenting a few shots of the car in the (cloudy, overcast, welcome to the northwest) daylight.
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