Old Car and Bike rambling

I wanted to replace my original speedometer and tachometer for something more compact. I'm not sure why, but the original 85mph speedometer always bothered me. I guess I felt like the bike deserved better even though I've only pinned it once in 10 years of riding.   After casually looking around and almost pulling the trigger on a cheaper universal speedo with an analog sweep needle for the tach, I stumbled across this product. It can be found in all the usual places such as Amazon and eBay but it's usually buried behind 2 or 3 pages of search results with vastly different prices ranging from mid 40s to mid 80s (US$). The description typically includes a listing of what each wire is intended to be connected to, but in typical fashion for these kinds of imported products the English translation leaves a lot to be desired. For example: the product detail notes: "Oil Quantity Indicator" as one of the display areas, but they really mean fuel level (my bike doesn't...

I didn't order a Nighthawk brake stay bar to secure the drum brake panel from moving under braking and the CB750c bar was too long so I bought some flat bar stock from Home Depot and painted it.  Looks it it will work.  I'm using the adjustable brake rod from the CB750c and the length looks like it will work fine. 150 vs 130 tire comparison I thought I was done until I remembered I still need to attach my new seat, wire up the lighting and relocate the battery. Still lots of stuff to tackle before I can ride. I got carried away with my new angle grinder and after a day of chopping, smoothing and shaping, I was almost ready to create and install the battery tray I had made. I fashioned the tray from cardboard to get an idea of what the bends would look like and how much metal I needed to purchase but ended up downsizing slightly just to fit within the smaller sheet of 22gauge steel that was for sale at the local tractor store. Zero welding experience, but I cu...

I had a bit of a windfall in January when I sold the Tesla stock I purchased 1 month earlier and made a nice percentage gain of 50%.   Although I had hoped to use the proceeds from the Tesla stock to actually buy a Tesla, I had no where near enough money to get one of those cars and didn't want to hold the stock long enough for that to happen since I have no idea how long it would take. (looking back I now realize that if I had held out for another month, I would have gained 100%, oh well) I started looking for a replacement car for my wife and was thinking either Mazda CX3,Toyota Prius, or Toyota RAV4. CX3 are too new to hit my price range without high miles, but not many available for sale. RAV4 is surprisingly also hard to find since people must be holding on to their cars for a long time due to extreme reliability. I thought a Prius would be easy to find since I live in truck country and nobody really cares about saving gas when it's selling for $2 a gallon but Toyota Pr...

My $500 Honda Accord has been a great car and we drove it all over the country in the first few years.  With the loss of our Kia Sportage we started to rely on it much more for daily duty until my wife got into an accident which is essentially a mirror of the damage it received when my brother in law owned the car. The repair estimate for what looked like moderate damage was $5400.  I understand with the previous accident history, there's little point in paying this kind of money to repair it, but I know there's still lots of life left in it as an around town car or to let my daughter use it as a junker. I'm having the car towed back from the collision place and hope to replace a few suspension components and have a mostly working car even if it's not visually perfect. Easy come, easy go? Maybe not. I don't want to junk another car if I can help it. I should have the Honda back on the road with the new rear control arm and we should be able to drive it to g...

I was preparing to change out the steering bearings on my cb750 and noticed that the Nighthawk 750 uses the same bearing kit.  Since the Nighthawk Swingarm swap went fairly smoothly with a moderately low effort installation, I figured.... 'what the heck', I'll order the $8 lower triple from eBay (plus $20 shipping) and see how difficult a swap would be. My justification : I figured I could practice removing the lower bearing as well as get a measurement to compare the stem lengths. So not a complete loss even if I don't use it.  However, if they are close enough, I can probably adjust or shim the installation enough to make it a direct swap. My dilemma : removing the old triple to get the measurements is a must and while everything is out, it doesn't make sense to put everything back without actually swapping the bearings.  If I eventually do the swap, I would need another bearing kit and would essentially be throwing out the money spent on the first bearing kit...

I removed ~2.38mm from either side of the swing arm pivot area and also 2.38mm from the pivot/collars but after the bearings were fitted and the dust seals installed, it still needs just a little more clearance to fit inside the frame.  I removed as much as I could from the left side where the roller bearings live and still have enough depth to allow the dust seal to go on and sit fairly flush. Not sure what I'm doing wrong but I ruined 2 dust seals trying to install them without mangling them even after greasing the seals prior to installation.  The right side has a little more wiggle room for trimming and it looks like I will need to remove just a tiny bit more on the right side of the pivot for everything to slide into place. I found that, due to the close tolerance, the swing arm needs to be coaxed into place by inserting the nighthawk pivot bolt into the swing arm bolt hole in the frame in order to align the collars the final few mm to line up the collar with the hole...

After 10+ years of ownership and reading many posts warning about staying with the original airbox, I've reached a point where the bike has never run better so why not give pods a try and see for myself. I found a few posts where a few people were experiencing success with their pod installations and it seemed like the jetting combination that everyone was using is: slow jet: 38 primary: 80 secondary: 120 tips for adjusting/compensating the base jetting:  decrease main jet area by 2.8% for every 1000 feet above sea level 1/2 turn on the fuel mixture per jet size 3 or more turns on the fuel mixture screw go 1 size bigger pilot 2 turns or less on the fuel mixture go 1 size smaller pilot There's even a few YouTube videos of guys running with pods on CV carbs.  From my research, it seems like you'll need a well running bike with reasonably good/consistent compression across the cylinders to even attempt to run pods. Over the years, I've come across a number of old...