THE BIKES WORK!!!

At long last, I am happy to announce that the bikes work.

The guys at S&C Scooters in Fayetteville, Arkansas tuned the bikes. Before I continue, let me say these guys are super awesome. They are the cheapest in the Fayetteville area, and they push a lot of buisness through their doors, which means their guys see different bikes. If you have a chinese knock-off, a frankenstein bike, or any scooter, take it to them.

Leeroy (Chels' bike) worked fine, as per usual, but mine put up a fight. Foiter (my bike) was tuned, and worked okay, but not great. As I rode it around more, the tuning seemed more untuned, and eventually we were back to the scenario of the magical, mystical, moving idle. The idle RPM would climb until they reached a mid throttle rpm, and then fade back down, only to rise again. The culprit was a sneaky air leak on the downstream side of the plastic heat shield between the carburetor and intake manifold. A handful of issues lead me to believe that the surface of the air intake is very barely miscast/damaged, but with some custom O-ring magic and a few squeezes of silicon gasket maker, the leak went away and now Foiter purrs like the kitten she is.

We still need to tighten and Loctite a handful of nuts and bolts, and then figure out Leeroy's turning signals (FYI: Arkansas requires turning signals). We'll both take our motorcycle license test on Leeroy as soon as I get the blinkers working, and then away we go!

I've been a slacker...

Christian stopped working at his raft guiding job on August 15th to focus all of his time and energy on the motorbikes and preparation for the trip (which we have yet to fully explain on here...soon, I promise!). I've continued serving at the restaurant job I picked up a few months ago, along with shooting for the local newspaper, the Vail Daily, so my time has been a little bit more limited. Since I'm the one mostly running the show when it comes to our web presence, this has caused some serious slacking on my part.

However, before I run off to work one of my last shifts in a few minutes, I wanted to post a quick update pointing you to where you can see some snippets from the prep and motorbike work we've been doing. (And by "we", I mostly mean Christian.)

All you've got to do is head over to our Instagram feed to see daily photos and short video updates. It's not much, I know, but it's something!

First video officially up!

Since I spent the day trying to get our website looking a little cleaner and user friendly, Christian labored away this evening on a quick edit of some footage he took of the first time he started his bike, Foiter, after swapping in the new Lifan 125 engine.

It's barely a teaser into what we're up to, I know, but more is soon to come once our work load lightens!