March 2022 – Page 2 – Mechanical Sympathy

1971 Oil In Frame Triumph Bonneville Restoration: Tire Choices

The old Bonneville needs new tires and inner tubes so I’m wrapping my head around olde fashioned, pre-metric motor-bike tyre sizes.

Those would be the Dunlop K70s that came with the Bonnieville back in the day.
Fortunately Dunlop is still looking after the bike they designed the tire for.

The ’71 Triumph Bonneville came with 3.25 X 19″ front & 4.00 X 18″ rears and used Dunlop K70 tires as standard equipment.

It looks like there are modern Dunlop options for vintage SAE (non-metric) wheels at Revco where I’ve gotten my last two sets of tires. The handy chart below shows metric and imperial conversions but after some digging I was able to find SAE/pre-metric modern Dunlop K70s that are the exact fit for the bike. Using recent versions of original equipment that give me the benefit of modern rubber durability and grip while still keeping close to the originally engineering intent in Triumph’s tire choice is fantastic. I’m not trying to recreate riding in 1971, I’m trying to start with that technology and update where prudent for 21st Century use.

Tire Charts Motorcycle Street Tire Size Conversion Charts

Metric

80/90

90/90

100/90

110/90

120/90

130/90

140/90

Alphanumeric

– NA-

MH 90

MJ 90

ML 90

MN90/MP90/MR 90

MT 90

MU 90

Inch-(Series90)

2.75

3.00/3.25

3.25

3.50

4.00/4.25

5.0

– NA-

Inch-(Series82)

– NA-

3.60

4.10

4.25/82/4.40

5.10

– NA-

**Front Tires:**
Metric 80/90 90/90 100/90 110/90 120/80 120/90 130/90	Alpha MH90 MJ90 MM90 MN90 – NA- MR90 MT90	Inch 2.50/2.75 2.75/3.00 3.25/3.50 3.75/4.00 4.25/4.50 4.25/4.50 5.00/5.10

**Rear Tires:**
Metric 110/90 120/90 130/80 130/90 140/80 140/90 150/80 150/90 160/80 180/55 200/60 230/50	Alpha MP85 MR90 – NA- MT90 – NA- MU90 MV85 MV85 – NA- – NA- – NA- – NA-	Inch 4.50/4.75 4.50/4.75 5.00/5.10 5.00/5.10 5.50/6.00 5.50/6.00 6.00/6.25 6.00/6.25 6.80/7.00 7.00/7.25 7.90/8.00 9.50

Size

120/80V16

130/90H16

130/90V16

500S16

MT90H16 3.00

130/90H16 3.00

140/90H16

140/80VB16

140/90H16

150/80V16

160/80H16

200/60VB16

120/80V18

120/90V18

120/90H16

130/80V18

130/70VB18

150/70VB18

140/70V18

170/60VB18

180/55VB18

230/50 X 15

Rim

2.75

3.00

3.50

4.00

5.50

2.75

3.00

3.50

4.00

4.50

5.50

7.00 to 8.00

Overall Width

4.7

5.00

5.2

5.3

5.4

5.8

5.9

6.0

6.2

6.4

6.8

7.9

4.8

4.9

5.2

5.4

5.9

6.1

6.9

7.0

9.5

Overall Diameter

23.8

25.4

25.0

26.4

25.3

25.6

24.8

25.8

25.4

26.1

25.9

26.4

26.3

25.4

26.2

25.7

26.0

26.3

25.3

Note: Measurements are based on the given rim widths. A rough rule of thumb: Each additional 1/2-inch of rim width will be approximately 1/4-inch more in each tire width.

The K70s at Revco are just over a hundred bucks a pop and Counteract Balance Beaded inner tubes are actually cheaper than name brand plain old rubber inner tubes. I’ve been using the Counteract beads for years to great effect so they’d be my first choice even if they weren’t cheaper. All in I’m looking at about $320CAN ($250USD) for new rubber for this vintage restoration project, which considering the price of some of the other parts is pretty reasonable.

In order to rebuild the wheels I’ll need to replace the bearings and clean up the brakes before putting new pads and hydraulic brake cylinders back in them. All that and getting the frame sorted out will get me back to a correct rolling chassis ready for the upgraded engine.

Somewhere at the end of all of this will be a road worthy ’71 Triumph Bonneville, but it’s a lot of parts to find and get in and then a lot time in the garage to get there. I’m hoping it’ll be on the road for next year’s riding season. As we thaw out here in Canada I’ll be out on the Tiger and GTR and not spannering so much.

Meanwhile, here are some more motorcycle tire sizing reference charts found on the interwebs:

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Thunder bolts & Lightning

I was up early, getting ready for my 3rd day of commuting to Milton on the Ninja. The sky was heavy, the roads patchy but still mostly dry. In the 20 minutes it took me to get ready the weather moved in, rain bucketing down, the sky so dark the street lights came back on.

I’m standing there on my porch looking at the bike which I’ve got started, sitting in the driveway with rain tearing off it. I’ve gotten into the safety gear, then the rain gear. I’m hot and dry, but I won’t be for long. The car is sitting there, an easy, comfortable option.

I’m looking for experiences. I could have stripped down and taken the easy way down, but I wouldn’t have felt the rain, or smelled the world as it opened up under it. I wouldn’t have been out in the world as mist rose from the ground and trees emerged from the fog.

I was worried about the 401 but I need’t have. With the rain it was barely moving. By the time I got to Milton I was crawling along at walking speed behind a transport truck. I arrived at the school after an hour in the wet. The worst was in Elora, then I drove out of it and it was only drizzle, but by then I was hosed.

I only lost the back end once while downshifting and a quick hand on the clutch got that back in line. I stopped downshifting after that while in the deep water.

It’s 2pm now. Most of my gear is dry after some time under hand dryers and sitting on a warm lamp stand. In retrospect, today would have been a good day to wear my big cool weather boots – I think they’re waterproof too, unlike the AlpineStar summer boots I had on. I now know my gloves aren’t remotely waterproof. The rain gear did a good job of keeping me warm and mostly dry. The only wet spot on my body was on my stomach. It probably got in under the jacket. I’ll tighten that up next time.

It would have been easier to jump in the car, it would have been more comfortable, but it wouldn’t have left me with an idea of what riding in driving rain feels like; lessons learned.

It’s 6pm now, and trying to dry out wet gear in an air conditioned lab is all but impossible… there is nothing better than some good old sunlight on a hot deck:

A Honda Wander

Ah, to pretend to be Marquez…

I finally found KW Honda today! It’s hidden around back of the big Honda car dealer peddling bland people movers. If you head around back you find Repsol themed race bikes and jewel like VFRs.

On a much needed lunch break from Skills Ontario provincial championships with thousands of boisterous teenagers watching a few hundred wonderfully talented ones, I got some head space wandering through the Hondas.

The bike I longed for as a teenager was the VFR750, so I was hoping to find its spiritual successor at the Honda dealer, and I wasn’t disappointed.

The white VFR800 they had on the floor was breathtaking. The paint has a subtle pearl iridescence that gives it fantastic depth. Every detail of the machine has a finished quality to it that I’ve found lacking in a lot of other bikes; it’s a bike worthy of desire.

Stealth fighter cool front end on the VFR800…

They had a number of older Hondas as well, including this astonishing 1970s CBX with a massive air cooled six in it!

If I had thirteen grand to throw around a VFR would be in the garage right quick. Sitting on it, my legs are about as folded as the Concours, I’m leaned forward more but it’s a substantial bike, I don’t feel like a circus bear on it.

1971 Triumph Bonneville Restoration: Gudgeons, Johnson Rods & Cylinders out! (oh my)

I’ve got a degree in English, but working on the old Bonneville is stressing out even my vocabulary:

That’d be your gudgeon pin right there.

Gudgeon: one who will bite at any bait or swallow anything, credulous or gullible person Mer. V. I. i. 102. (that might apply to this project)

Definition of gudgeon

1: PIVOT sense 1, JOURNAL (we’re getting closer)

2: a socket for a rudder pintle (a rudder pintle?)

Definition of gudgeon pin: WRIST PIN

Definition of wrist pin: a stud or pin that forms a journal (as in a crosshead) for a connecting rod (that’s it!)

They can make up anything! Nobody knows! Well, you need a new Johnson Rod in here!

A few people know, George. Consumer ignorance is expensive, but who has time

to understand the machines they depend on?

Gudgeon pins? After the massive fight that was removing the seized cylinder head, I was bracing for misery, but I was able to pop the circlips (!) out and tap the gudgeon pins (!) through with no sweating and swearing. Pink Floyd was playing on the computer and I think music from its era calms the old Bonneville down when I’m working on it.

The circlips popped out easily and a 3/8 inch socket extension was the perfect size to tap out the ‘wrist’ pins. I thought the one on the seized side might cause more problems because it had been stuck in place with moisture but it didn’t and both came out easily leaving a motor bereft of its pistons.

British Cycle Supply Co. delivered my 750cc kit quickly and without any headaches (and also for about $200 less than comparable kits out of the USA), so I got the shiny new bits out and had a look:

You’d think a 750cc head would look significantly different to the stock 650cc unit, but you have to look closely to see a difference in size.

I had a close look at the connecting rods and they appear to be in good shape and the bottom end of the motor moves freely. I think next steps are to remove the rest of the engine from the frame, give the oil-in-frame a deep clean and then recoat it with some quality paint. With the frame cleaned up and sorted I’ll strip the rest of the motor and clean everything out to ensure nothing’s whacky before I begin the great rebuild.

I could just chuck it all back together now and hope for the best, but if it ends up having other niggles rushing things at this point is just false economy. I’m not worried about making the bike look mint, but I do want it to be dependable and that wouldn’t be the case if I haven’t checked it over completely after such a long (30 year?) layoff. An engine out deep restoration was always the intention here and I’m not in any kind of rush since the other two bikes are both five by five and felt fantastic on their first rides of the year this past weekend.

The gudgeon pin itself looks to be in good shape, which is good because the head kit didn’t come with new ones. The circlips came out nicely too but the kit did come with those. It amazes me that even specialized material like that in these cylinders can withstand the extreme forces they operate in. This Bonnie had done at least twenty thousand miles on these cylinders and they’re still in remarkable shape considering they were face to face with more than 17 controlled explosions every second (a spark plug typically fires about 17 times per second at 2000rpm!). You’d think all that heat and violence would cause more wear than I’m seeing in the beating heart of this motor.

This is the 3/8 inch socket extension I used to tap the gudgeon pins out. Nothing grabbed or slowed the process down and I barely had to apply any pressure. I might have even been able to push them out had I been so inclined. I caught the pin as it came loose and the cylinder lifted off the connecting rods easily. Again, considering the extreme conditions the heart of every engine operates under, I’m impressed by the engineering and metallurgy that makes all this possible.

The new cylinders don’t have the carbon build up from all those combustion cycles and look pretty spectacular in their pristine newness:

Here’s the whole kit from British Cycle Supply. It includes the cylinder head, cylinders, piston rings, circlips for the gudgeon pins and a head gasket. I swiped the last one they had in stock for $688.75CAD ($535USD – told you I got a good deal). Unfortunately I might be the last person on the planet to get a 750cc kit that cheap. Prices will be going up on the new stock and probably even higher than that as we’re in an inflationary spiral thanks to Putin overreaching and years of pandemic fueled broken supply chains; we live in interesting times.

Another tool came in that’s interesting. I was reading Practical Sportsbikes last week (highly recommended if you love bikes and getting your hands dirty on them), and editor Chris mentioned an endoscope smartphone camera he was using on a project bike to inspect the internal parts of an engine. I found one on Amazon for under $40CAD and it came in on the weekend. It lets you see parts of the engine that haven’t seen light before. It’s an exciting thing that offers you a look into the secret life of engines. I’m looking forward to using it as i continue to work on the Bonnie.

Through an inspection hole inside the engine – it’s disco in there!

That look on my face after the first ride in a long, long time.

The 12 year old Kawasaki (left) and the 19 year old (!) Tiger (right) were keen to turn a wheel after a long hibernation.

Bison were out bisoning at Black Power Bison Co. when I was out for a ride in balmy 6°C March Sunday.

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First Ride of the 2022 Season: Scratching That Itch

Imagine having an itch you can’t scratch for 112 days. Riding a motorcycle in Canada is an ongoing act of stoicism.

It was a long one this Canadian winter. I’m usually able to get out for a cheeky February ride, but not this year in Ontario. Winter started later but when it came it clamped down on us like an angry professional wrestler and didn’t offer any breaks from Polar Vortexes and snow. My last ride was mid-November, it’s now March.

T’was -22°C on Friday and tonight we’ve got freezing rain and snow into tomorrow, but it was a balmy 6 today so off I went.

The C14 started on the first touch and was bullet proof on a 30km ride up and down the Grand River:

The bisons were out at Black Powder.

It was mennonite o’clock as I shook the cobwebs out of the Connie.

The Tiger took a bit more convincing but that wasn’t its fault, I’d had the whole fuel injection system out for a cleaning and it needed to get represussurized. Once it had fuel it took off like a rocket!

Leaning into a corner, finally!

The zipper replacement on the jacket is working like a charm!

The roads were thick with sand and salt so after a cleanup everyone is back under a blanket waiting for the next break. I’d be a year rounder if I still lived in Norfolk (UK).

On the upside, the 750cc cylinder head for the 71 Bonnie project came in so I’ve got other things to do!

On bike photos were taken with a Ricoh Theta camera attached to the windshield and auto-shooting every 8 seconds. If you’re curious, here’s a bit on how to make awesome on-bike 360 photos. Here’s another published on Adventure Bike Rider Magazine in the UK: How to capture 360-degree photos while riding your motorbike.

Looking forward to leaning into more corners in less than another 112 days!

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Consumerist Edtech has us all living in Hotel California

If you work in education and leverage technology (so that’ll be anyone in any classroom these days), give this a read and see if it doesn’t make you a bit uncomfortable.

The Metaverse Is Simply Big Tech, but Bigger

Perhaps you’re thinking that your particular edtech provider isn’t like that, but they’re all coming at it from the same angle:

Apple is into it.

Google is into it.

Microsoft is into it.

And what angle is that? Marketing for the attention economy, of course. Big tech’s focus on a ‘total service environment’ is there to make sure you never leave: whether it’s #tech or #edtech, we’re all living in Hotel California; you can check out any time you like but you can never leave.

Platform agnosticism has been a recurring theme on Dusty World since it began. I’ve been barking at the moon about this for years because we don’t leverage educational technology to teach how technology works, we just let it insinuate itself into all our learning while being illiterate in terms of how it influences us through media and medium. We predicate technology use in education on media illiteracy.

Dreaming of ‘free range’ open source
technology access in 2013.

If we taught digital fluency, anyone who became digitally skilled in our education system would be much better at identifying fake news and managing their digital presence. If we taught digital fluency instead of depending on consumerism to do it for us we’d be platform agnostic both in hardware and software in every classroom so students understood how things work and influence their thinking instead of producing blinkered consumers for corporate consumption.

Imagine if our language and social studies teachers got certifications by certain book publishers and then only taught from that publisher’s collection in the way that their particular publisher provided; that’s what we’ve done in educational technology over the past two decades.

“In a social-science class last year, the students each grabbed a Google-powered laptop. They opened Google Classroom, an app where teachers make assignments. Then they clicked on Google Docs, a writing program, & began composing essays.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/13/technology/google-education-chromebooks-schools.html

We use edtech to indoctrinate students in closed digital ecosystems designed to monetize their attention. It doesn’t matter which multinational edtech ‘solution’ your board uses, they’re all the same, and they’re all playing the #metaverse marketing game: “marketing spin on Big Tech’s increasing reach and power. It’ll be Big Tech—just as problem-riddled as now—but bigger.”

Wouldn’t it be something if we required and taught platform agnostic access to all technology in our classrooms instead of acting as a marketing arm for rich, tax dodging corporations? These organizations are parasitic, our kids deserve better.

The ‘drink from the firehose’ approach to edtech doesn’t end when we’re told what we have to teach with. Many teachers then brand their practice with corporate logos.

The point of that article is that a true metaverse (a shared, non-partisan online space) hasn’t existed since the dawn of the internet. Once the attention merchants got a hold of it they subverted democracies around the world and created a privacy and security nightmare, including in education.

Perhaps the saving grace in this might be that if any of them could get past their greed, educational technology would be the place to make this non-partisan metaverse happen. Instead of demanding control of the technology narrative to generate users, wouldn’t it be something if the technology giants and school systems around the world worked together to create an educational metaverse that was platform agnostic and open to all?

Even Hollywood can only envision a corporate owned future mind-space.

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Mechanical Satisfaction

The Concours carburetors weren’t snapping back when I released the throttle. Everything worked, but they wouldn’t close on their own as they should. I removed the carbs, reset the butterflies so they all closed properly and replaced a bent spring. With everything lubed up and working freely, I reinstalled the carbs and ran the throttle cables over and along the top of the frame rather than around the side, trying to have the throttle cables address the carbs as perpendicularly as possible. With the cables properly tightened, the carbs snap shut when the throttle is released as they should.

My to-do list on the Concours is down to a rebuild of the master break cylinder. The part isn’t expensive. I’d purchased a set and did it on the Yamaha XS1100 I had before, so the Concours should be pretty straightforward.

I also have to sort out a rear light and body panels for the back end. I’d asked if they could be done at school in the metal shop, but asking for work to get done there seems to result in it disappearing down a hole. I’d rather do the work myself anyway. The plan is to form the panels for the back end and find a rear brake light with indicators built in and wire it in to the back end.

The last job is going to be reworking the radiator reservoir to somewhere around the battery box. With that done, in theory, the Connie will be ready to begin test riding the kinks out.

Follow-up: rear brake lights were found on ebay – let’s hope they arrive this time.

If they do then ebay is a more dependable shipper than the Amazon Marketplace, which seems pretty bizarre, but there you are.

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My First Distinguished Gentleman’s Ride

I’m going to get past my age related hipster-imposter-syndrome and commit to taking part in the The Distinguished Gentleman’s Ride this year, complete with ascot and tweed. I bet I have a pillion willing to dress up and join me. I’m hoping I can channel my granddad’s riding style when I do it.

From my DGR Suggestion from the summer of 2020.

My ’03 Triumph Tiger also struggles with the idea of being a faux-classic hipster style icon (DGR likes classics or faux classics to fit the image – I’d argue the Tiger is a kind of, um, scrambler?). Tigger’s too genuine for that kind of style police nonsense, but it’s an old warhorse with over 80k on it from another era so we’re both going to commit. I wouldn’t take the C14, that’s missing the point, but the Tiger deserves the work.

The Concours is a fine thing and my wife and I are enjoying the rides together, but the old Tiger is still my two-wheeled spirit animal.

The question now is do we fight our way into the misery that is the GTA for an event in the Six with hundreds of riders or enjoy a similarly (time wise) ride through the country to London for a smaller event with far fewer riders but without the traffic?

There are many Canadian DGR events forming this spring to ride on Sunday, May 22nd: Get out to one if you can, and don’t be anxious about not meeting the hipster bike style code (though do dress nicely).

This is last year’s poster – I’m sure they’ll come up with a 2022 one shortly (it’s on Sunday, May 22nd.)

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