Finding the broken pipe under the house was not fun, but went pretty well, considering. Due to the age and extreme rustiness of the pipes back there, I elected to bypass the whole affair and repipe from the bathroom to the kitchen. Long story short, I (mostly) finished pretty late Sunday night. While it was cheapER to do the work myself, materials were not free. It was about a $400 weekend and all I have to show for it is hot showers.

Perhaps needless to say, there was no progress on Buzz.

Well, that’s really not true. A gentleman emailed me asking if I wanted sell my MS-II, which would help finance a MicroSquirt (which is perhaps obviously much better for a motorcycle) and the correspondence has revealed that he has a well equipped machine shop and it looks like he is going to make a nice 36-1 trigger wheel to my specs. How cool is that?!?

Other progress is more cerebral. Lots of discussion on the XJ-Owners list about alcohol as a fuel and it’s deleterious effects on many standard materials used in modern vehicles. I am still interested in at least *trying* Buzz on alcohol once he’s up and running on MS, but now it will be extremely experimental and I will not be leaving my tank full of alcohol for more than a day or two, tops. Seems that it promotes rust in steel, corrosion in aluminum and eats neoprene, all of which are along the fuel path on a modern bike. There is also reasonable evidence that it is not very successful in air cooled engines, and it seems to get much decent power out of it, I would need to raise the compression ratio of the engine. All in all, probably not worth it. Makes me appreciate what is required in a FlexFuel vehicle like my Dodge Ram.

I needed a door lock motor for the trunk on Toni’s trike and in acquiring same, I have now perused one of two wrecking yards that are literally on the road between work and home. I found a couple of 4 cylinder Fords with the coil packs I will need for the ignition system, $25 each. That’s a far cry from $60-80 for new, but then that’s for Accel or MSD coils, arguably better that stock coils. I will go down there at lunch one day soon and browse more slowly for a few specific things I need, such as the coil pack, a PWM idle solenoid and (if I get the Microsquirt) an external MAP sensor.

Beyond that, lots of rerereading the MegaManual, which comes highly recommended…

This Saturday is again spoken for, but I will see what the rest of the weekend brings…