Old Car and Bike rambling

Not happy about that chain guard but the chain is a bit messy due to too much lube On one of my first shakeout runs, I ran over a small puddle in the road and ended up painting my back and the underside of the bike with a strip of muddy water. I knew this would happen and already had a mud guard waiting for me to figure out how to install it but life got in the way with a death in the family and emergency travel to make arrangements for becoming the executor of a relative's estate. I had some spare time this weekend when I got my son to mow the lawn so I had him help me get the bike up on the stand in order to re-work the rear license plate, install a new set of turn signals (These cheap LED lights don't seem to last very long) and attempt to install that mudguard that had been waiting patiently for me to get around to it for more than 4 months.  Driving around locally, I discovered all kinds of loose rattling when going over bumps. After I secured  the contents of the battery

There are lots of videos and articles on adjusting clutch cable free play but no matter how much adjusting I tried, my bike was still having trouble shifting. I was out of adjust-ability in my cable until someone mentioned that these older bikes had an additional clutch basket adjustment. I was having trouble with the bike creeping in gear, finding neutral, and sometimes trouble getting back to first gear (I think). There was some play in the clutch arm that I could not remove during cable adjustment that was giving me all these issues. The instructions seem to be fairly straightforward, but they didn't seem to help me until I watched a video where the mechanic tightened that screw to remove 99% of free play in the clutch arm and then backed it off a little before tightening the lock nut. I finally managed to get the free play in the cable where I was getting positive shifts with just a little forward creep that I removed by adjusting the cable at the lever as well as increasing th