WontonBlog

Demons have possessed my motorcycle

Apparantly my motorcycle hasn’t experienced enough downtime. This morning I was perturbed to find a nice puddle of gas forming under it, never a good sign. It appeared to be dripping out of the overflow for the carburetors. Well, I had left it on prime, so it wasn’t necessarily indicative of a serious problem. The bike even started right up. No problems there. So I took it out, it seemed to be running ok.

Alas, ok it was not. On the way to the gas station to fill up it was running decidedly rough. It felt like it was only hitting on three cylinders, so I hoped it would fix itself as it heated up. I got it to the gas station and filled it up. It didn’t want to start up again, which is never a good sign, but after a few tries, it caught. It made it about 15 feet out of the parking lot before dying for good. The engine and the carbs were flooded beyond help. Constant attempts at restarting it only managed to drain the battery, which was fully charged to begin with.

So in the end I had the pleasure of pushing my 22 year old cast iron ridiculously heavy motorcycle home, up two hills, one bridge, and numerous intersections with a motorcycle helmet, a heavy leather jacket, and a sweatshirt. Getting it home, I examined it further. There appeared to be more oil than there should be. How could that be? Well, I was wrong, there wasn’t too much oil, just too much gas in the oil. Another fine surprise!

On the brighter side, my computer is back up and running. The motherboard was indeed the culprit. The new a7v333 motherboard I have has a dead ide channel which isn’t nice, but I’d rather avoid the downtime and not send it back, as for the 6 IDE devices I use, it works just fine. If I need more, I’ll just turn the old HP pavilion I got from MDP into a file server. Its better not to tax the power supply and motherboard with more than 6 IDE devices anyways… they seem to die enough on me without the extra stress.

Between my computer and motorcycle troubles, its been a long transition from college to home. At least it can’t rain forever. Especially since I get payed tomorrow. Thank god for paychecks.