Monday 19 March 2012

The Cycle-Motor Project: One More Time!

Here I go again.
I'm determined to complete this project and finally draw a line under it.

First off I stripped the 'Dobson' down to it's bear essentials:
There's a bicycle in there somewhere.
I then stripped the Black Tractor down.
One disturbing discovery was what had happened to the tubing I'd chosen as a fuel line. It, more or less, fell apart in my hand as I went to unscrew the hose-clips that held it on:
That could've been very nasty.
I busied myself through the sunny afternoon dealing with all the little problems that threw themselves up.
Then I hit an impasse.
I needed to shorten the drive-chain.
I put the chain-cracker in position, tightened it up and it promptly fell apart.
This made me angry.
I stood up, knocking the front wheel in the process, and the handlebars swung round and biffed me in the left eyebrow.
It was a moment similar to when you stand up bringing your head into violent contact with the corner of an open cupboard door.
"FUCOWWW!!" as we say in this household.

One step forward, two steps back.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ouch!

Your fuel line looks like the rubber gas pipe on the bunsen burners we had at school.
Rubber(s) should not be used with oils!

I was in a branch of Travis Perkins with my girlfriend when she was looking for a particular size of Belfast sink. I noticed they had a lawnmower spares and service counter and took the opportunity to ask if they had any petrol pipe suitable to replace the leaky perished hose on my Tecumseh engined mower.
"What size do you want?"
"Er, don't know".
"You say it's a Tecumseh. It's probably this one".
And he cut a couple of feet of black hose from one of the several reels behind the counter.
I asked him what I owed him (even though I was thinking that it was a bit premature to start chopping off lengths of hose if we didn't know the right diameter).
"Nothing!"

There's a branch of Travis Perkins in Bognor Regis but they may not necessarily give free petrol pipe to customers at all branches, of course!

Anonymous said...

I think you meant the bare necessities.

OutaSpaceMan said...

It's the very same rubber pipe used on school bunsen burners.
Although I was aware of the oil/rubber situation, I foolishly assumed that this type of pipe might have some form of magical property that would allow it to be used as fuel line.

I'm going to use the boring plastic tubing that came supplied with the engine.

In the mean-time I'm off the find a new chain-cracker.