Atlantic Vintage TT 2002

If you’ve been following some of my posts you would know that for a couple months I was planning on riding the chopper to the Atlantic Vintage TT sponsored by British Cycle Supply http://www.britishcycle.com/atlanticVintage.htm (I have no affiliation with these guys other than it being the place I buy stuff) at the Atlantic Motorsport Park with my brother, who I’ll refer to as Bep from here on out, who was visiting from Ottawa with his Triumph T100 chopper.

Prologue

Bep got here from Ottawa last Monday and we’ve been spending our time working on the bikes and taking them for short test runs.  All week I’ve been fighting electrical gremlins, and as a result I was ignoring a problem that I suspected I had.  Wednesday night we took the bikes out for a ride after fixing a problem that I was having with the left side not firing. This was causing black gas to come out of the exhaust and leak out over the head, the problem turned out to be a simple one, a bad plug, once this was fixed the bike ran great. We went for the ride and after about 30 minutes my lights got really dim and the bike started running poorly, I made it back to the house and tested the battery, damn, only 5 volts across the leads, not good.  I checked out the battery and the fluid levels were way too low, so we topped it off and charged it up. We also found a connector that had worked itself loose, this connector would have prevented the bike from charging, perhaps we found the culprit.

After working on Thursday we hooked the battery up and went for another ride.  This one didn’t last long, I got about 1/3 of a mile from the house and the bike died, no gas, I had asked Bep to check my tank while I took care of something else, turns out he didn’t bother, even though he told me that he did and that there was a little in there, but that’s another story.  After pushing the bike the remaining 1/3 of a mile to the gas station I topped it off and tried to start the bike, nothing, wouldn’t start up.  We pulled the plugs and checked them, only one was getting a spark, but not enough to start the bike. Bep went and got the truck and we got the bike home. I knew that the battery had been abused, so I resigned myself to buying a new one, but why was only one plug firing?  We quickly switched the leads coming off the points to see if the problem was with the points or possibly the condensor or coil. The problem seemed to follow the points, the condensors and coils seemed ok. By this time it was getting late and the women folk wanted us inside helping with the boys.

Friday, I go to work and my brother stays home to work on the bikes. He finds out that the problem with the points is that the washer that prevents the lead coming off the points had cracked and the lead was grounding out, an easy fix. He also picked up a new battery since the one I had didn’t seem to want to hold  a charge anymore, not surprising, it had been abused and not taken care of. I left work early on Friday, making up for some late nights, and we worked on the bike some more. Bep had re-wired the bike a bit, making it much better to work with and less likely to shake something loose.  We played around with it a bit and then started testing the charging system.  I had purchased a new stator the week before and we were now getting great AC voltage out of it, to the tune of 40volts AC when not connected. The next piece was the Tympanium (a black box that replaced the rectifier and zenier diode), this is where the trouble lied, it was not converting all that nice AC voltage into a decent amount of DC voltage.  The result of this is that we couldn’t charge the battery when running. By the time we were convinced that this was the problem, confirmed by hooking Bep’s Mity Max (combination rectifier and zenier diode) up to my bike and checking the DC voltage again, it was too late to get a replacement.

So here we were, Friday night, nobody around here sells the Mity Max accept British Cycle Supply, and they’re closed for the weekend.  My only resort is to call their number and leave a message that I needed a Mity Max in the hopes that they get the message before they open again on Monday and give me a call.

The Trip <click pictures to enlarge>

Saturday morning rolls around and it’s raining out, but the weatherman says that it’s going to clear by afternoon. I call a couple more bike shops, they’ve never heard of a Mity Max.  We hang around a bit while it rains and when it starts to let up a bit we start packing the truck up.  The plan was that Bep and I would ride the bikes and my friend Brett would follow us in Bep’s truck in case of a breakdown. As you can see from the picture below, this isn’t how things worked out.

The only good thing in this picture is that the roads are starting to dry up, it was still pretty cloudy, but no more rain by the time we were ready to go.  It was close to 1:00pm by this time, a slow start, but today was just the qualifying round of the races, so we weren’t missing any real racing.

Once we were all packed Bep fired up his bike. We could only let it warm up for a short period on account as we were afraid the EPA was going to showing up soon to lock us all away.  Bep had also fought with a plug that wasn’t firing the day before, the smoke is mostly from burning off all the crap that accumulated in the cylinder that wasn’t firing during the last ride.

We promptly replaced the plug with a spare and were off again, with a much dirtier bike now that black gas had sprayed all over the side from the plug not igniting it. We made it about another 5 miles when Bep slowed down once again and pulled off to the side of the road, I couldn’t beleive that he had fouled another plug this quickly.

We made a pit stop at Canadian Tire for a few spare plugs, just in case, and then it was all twisties with no stops for pretty much the rest of the way. Bep wasn’t sure of the route so he followed behind and we made sure he didn’t drop out of site on us.  It was still a damp and cloudy day, but we didn’t hit any rain.  The ride to the races was probably about an hour after the pit stop at Canadian tire, not a great distance by any means, but longer than Bep’s bike has gone to date, at least since he bought it as a rolling basket last summer.

One gent quickly pointed out the missing inspection cover for the valve guides.  Bep didn’t even have a chance to look over the bike before they came over, so this was news to us, but sure enough, one of the caps was missing.  To keep it clean until he could replace it Bep put a couple peices of electrical tape over the opening, as seen in the picture.  The engines a ‘68 or ‘69 500cc T100 Tiger for those of you who are wondering.

We setup camp on the edge of the hill overlooking the twistier part of the track, the tent was on a little bit of a slope but the view was good.  The sidecars were doing there practice runs when we got there, those old sidecars (this being a vintage event) are something else, I never realized how low the driver sat in those until we walked through the pit area and saw them up close.

After relaxing for a few minutes and talking to a few people we decided to go get some grub and try to see if we can find the swap meet in order to look for anything that would get me on the rode for a ride with Bep before he had to go back to Ottawa. I had a Mity Max in mind, but would have settled for a Tympanium (although that’s what I was replacing and only had it for a year) or even the original style zenier diode and rectifier. We couldn’t find anyone selling anything and even had a couple people comment on how if they knew it would be like that they would have filled their cars with parts and brought them out.  We had no luck on the parts search, it looked more and more like I was out of luck, so what’s a fella in Canada to do when things aren’t looking good, have a beer of course. The rest of the evening involved telling stories, checking out what other people brought along, answering questions from all the guys who used to own a Triumph and wish they never sold it.  I don’t think I’ve met anyone yet who said that they were happy to get rid of their bike.

As the evening progressed we had a few more beverages, got to walk the track, you don’t realize how long it is until you stumble around it in the dark, and went back up to the pit area to look around.  We came across a guy working on a T120R for Sundays race and started talking to him about it, apparently for racing they don’t bother using any kind of charging system, they run straight off the battery and then recharge it after the race.  Nevertheless, this old fella had a Mighty Max sitting in his truck, not connected to anything, problem was he mumbled something about not wanting to part with it because then he’d just have to pick up another one, fair enough. But knowing that he didn’t want to part with it, I think it was a bit cruel to bring it out and show it to us. I’m standing there with a few beer in me thinking that I’m standing two feet away from the part that will get me on the road to ride with my brother tomorrow.  It’s a good thing I’m civilized.

Eventually we called it a night and for the first time in a long time I slept on the ground, the tent helped but it didn’t keep out the noise of the two loaded guys about 20 feet away.  It was one of those sleeps where your not in your own bed and the night seems to drag on, although it did seem shorter than I thought when I heard one of the drunk guys say that the sun was starting to come upm so I must have dropped off for at least a couple hours.

A quick trip to the facilities, a breakfast sandwich and a hunt for the supposed swap meet is how we spent the early part of the morning waking up. Still no luck with the parts that I needed, and this old fella was the only real approachable guy in the pits, so I called up the wife and confirmed what I thought the retail price of the unit I wanted was. We walked over to his truck and I told the guy that I’d kick myself later if I didn’t at least make him an offer on the unit. Knowing it was used, but knowing that I really wanted to ride, I offered him $10 more than what it would cost me to buy it, pay taxes, and have it shipped to me from British Cycle Supply. The guy was happy to take it, I guess having the money in his pocket versus a unit he’s not using at the moment made it an easy decision for him.  I was happy as a pig in shit, I was going to be able to ride, we brought the bike up on the outside chance that we’d find what I needed and it paid off, good fortune had smiled on us.  So we brought the truck up and unloaded it in front of his trailer, he asked if we wanted to wheel it into his pit area so that we could hook it up and test it out.  It was quite a site to see us working on the chopper in the middle of the pit area where everyone else was gearing up their racers, I was so happy to be hooking it up that I didn’t even think to take a picture.  We made up a couple new connectors and fired it up, worked perfectly, I was now getting a decent amount of DC voltage, plenty to keep the battery charged, or run without the battery if desired.

The ride home was a great one, the roads were dry and twisty, the sun was shining and the traffic was minimal. The racetrack is in the middle of nowhere and the ride out of there takes us by lots on farmland, nothing like the fresh smell of cowshit on the open road :-) . The ride back only lasted about an hour but it was a fun ride notheless. The only mechanical issue was when I lost my back brake, the nut on the brake line (no hydraulics here) started backing out, so pushing down on the peddle had no effect.  A quick fix was to re-adjust it and then wrap some electrical tape around the threads behind it, this seemed to do the trick.  When we got home I checked the voltage across the battery, about 12.5 volts, excellent, I’m finally charging my battery, my next step is to add a brace to the battery box, currently it shakes like crazy, not a good thing for a battery according to a certain owner of a certain Triumph Chopper list.

After all was said and done I was able to accomplish our goal of going for a nice ride with my brother before he had to return to Ottawa.  It was looking pretty grim on Saturday morning with no part for the bike and the rain coming down, but it turned out to be a great weekend,  The bike still needs a lot of work, leaky petcocks, lose bolts, bad paint, and I lost the air cleaner off of it last night while riding, but all this stuff can wait until winter, including the air cleaner, right now I’m tapped financially so I’ll just enjoy it for the rest of the summer and hope nothing goes wrong with it until the cold weather hits.