4/13/12

Well, my sister has made it around the sun fifty nine times now. Happy birthday Linda. Hmm, I wonder if I shouldn’t tell her age like that. Oh well, what are you going to do? Anyhoo, as Juan might expect, I've been thinking about the trike again. I think we’re going to call it the Crossbow, by the way. This whole time I've been thinking about how I was going to get enough rubber on the ground out back. Motorcycle tires are all round and balloony and don’t have as good a contact patch as car tires. I don’t like that particularly. So while intergoogling this morning I came across an article about a trend called “Darksiding.” Apparently to “go to the dark side” in the motorcycle world is to run a car tire on the back of your bike. The article I read was about a dude with a Valkyrie, which is basically the same thing as a Goldwing. He suggested running a 205/50-16 or 205/55-16 car tire. He claims to have run this setup on his Valkyrie for over 10,000 miles with no trouble. And the pictures look totally awesome! So, now that I know what size to look for, I'm definitely planning to run a car tire on the back of the Crossbow. I also found out from John that the bike uses a mechanical tachometer (which I'm still having a little trouble believing), cable clutch, and… um, something else which I don’t remember right now. Probably unimportant. The cable clutch is a good thing, I think, but the mechanical tachometer (if true) could be problematic. Of course we might get lucky and a speedometer cable will drive the thing, but I'm not holding out much hope of that. We’ll see. I've also been thinking about carburetion. Of course the simplest thing would be to run the Goldwing carburetors… if they are any good and can be tuned properly. I'm thinking a dual side draft setup wouldn’t be too tough to make. Basically I'd build two DCOE manifolds with straightish runners which would pass each other in the middle and feed the opposite side of the engine. Another thought I had was to take essentially a header collector and zook a DGV flange to the “outlet” and run the four “primaries” out spider-like to the four intake runners where the stock carburetors mount. Hmm, working with that design, I could also do a single DCOE at the “outlet” of the collector. Said collector would essentially be running “backwards” to how it is used in a header. It would be a splitter rather than a collector, if you get my meaning. Of course the collector/splitter could also be connected to the outlet of that supercharger I have as well. Ooh, I like that. No, the more I think about it, the less I like the collector/splitter idea unless it is under a DGV and pointing up. I can see the two bottom runners collecting liquid fuel and running richer than the uppers. Ok, that idea is out for now. Of course I could always run a simple log manifold on top of each bank of cylinders and run dual ICT carburetors. I have three of those collecting dust. That could be interesting. An IDA on each bank would work but could get spendy. I think I'll think about the single DGV carburetor on a spider manifold as my first choice. Synching multiple carburetors ain’t really all that exciting to me. I think a simple 32/36 DGV on a spider manifold otter work pretty well. And since the faux fuel tank won't be in the way, the collector/splitter thingy can be taller for more bottom end torque… in theory. I'll need a fuel pump but that ain’t no hill for a stepper. Hmm, I think I need to go do some more intergoogling on carburetor options for a Goldwing. I guess I'm going to call it a rant and go do that. I'll tell y'all Monday if anything transpires. Oh wait! One more thing I almost forgot. John wants me to pick him up in the morning so we can go look at a car. He won't tell me what it is and we’re not meeting anyone about it so I'm intrigued. I'll let y'all know about that Monday as well. Toodles.