Slow day

Not a lot done yesterday-it was raining pretty good in San Diego.
Wiped down the bike more-it's getting pretty clean.
Took out the spark plugs and dropped a few drops of 10w-40 synthetic into each hole. As per someone on the TriumphRat forums, the Craftsman 18mm spark plug socket works just fine, although it was a little tight on plug three, which is luckily accessible with needlenose pliers. If it had been #2 under the frame, I would have been screwed royally. Let it sit a while whilst I put the new battery in. After about 15 minutes, I turned the engine over. Took a little doing, had to ground out the plugs to get it to work. Also, this worked some more oil into the system-I was confused before, because I had only put like 2 quarts into it, when it said it wanted 4 liters. Still, it's only up to like 2 3/4 of a quart.

My next trick was to try to get it to actually catch. I was able to drain the gas out of the carburetors on the left and right, but you really can't get to the middle one without removing the carburetors. After draining them, I rigged up a little funnel and tube into the carb, and tried to start her up. Fail. Let her sit with Sea Foam in there, tried again. Fail. Basically never got her to start. Debugging for next week, I'm going to rig up a better fuel delivery system than I had-one that only requires 1 person, and delivers a constant stream of gas. Also going to check compression and spark. If all of this is good, it seems that my next step is going to be rebuilding the carbs. Joy.

I'll probably be renting a motorcycle trailer from U-Haul to bring the bike up here. Along with all my work stuff today, I need to start in on cleaning out some work space in the garage.

On the shifter shaft side of the house. I've decided to first try fixing the existing shaft per cafetbird's post here. The only problem being, Lowe's does not sell a knurled thumb nut (got to love that name,) in 10/24. Nor does the Ace Hardware(Home Depot doesn't have them at all.) So that pissed me off, since I had already bought a Craftsman drill bit and tap in 10/24 (as a side note, the Craftsman tap t-wrench is kinda crappy.) So what I did was to buy new drill bits, taps, screws and nuts in 8/32 and 10/32 to see what fit. It looks like 8/32 fit perfectly. hmm..I'm wondering if he mis-remembered the size.