fall allergies stink.
Achoo. I skipped tonight's Wind Dancers meeting due to sore throat. What sucky timing -- the meetings are only once a month, yet they always perfectly coincide with nights that I feel like poo. Ugh. Fortunately, after a night of tinkering in the garage, and some Round Table pizza thoughtfully delivered by Peter, I feel much better now.

i may be a bike mechanic yet!
I've got yet another bike in the garage now, and it isn't mine nor Peter's! It's a '97 Yamaha Seca II, belonging to a friend of a friend of a friend -- I'll call him Lance, as that's his name. At any rate, somehow Kim ended up hearing that Lance needed a short-term bike mechanic, so she recommended me to him. He brought the Seca over last night, and now I've got a new project for the week!

There isn't anything wrong with the Seca per se (other than a couple of burned out dash lights which were easily replaced); it mainly needs a valve adjustment and an overall look-see. Last night, after Lance left, I took off the fairing and dash cover, and removed the burned out light bulbs. Luckily, the hardware store right by work had replacement bulbs.

They only had one type of automotive replacement bulb, and while it was the correct voltage (12 volts) there were no wattage markings on the box or on the bulbs. The Seca takes 12v, 1.7w bulbs, so I can only assume the replacement bulbs that I bought are good enough. At least, they worked when I installed them and turned the bike on, so there you go. Maybe all automotive instrument panel bulbs are 1.7 watts, so they didn't feel the need to mark it on the box, but I thought it odd that they wouldn't. Why make note of the voltage but not wattage? These subtle nuances of electricity are still somewhat of a mystery to me.

This evening, after work, I installed the aforementioned replacement bulbs, took the fuel tank off, and removed the air box. I also adjusted the clutch cable -- Lance mentioned that there was an audible "clunk" when downshifting through the gears at speed, but from what I could tell from some research online, that's just a feature of 90's Secas. If anyone knows differently, please let me know, but until I do a test ride after everything's all back in place, I'm going to assume that the clutch itself is fine.

Removing the fuel tank was fun; I vaguely remember removing the VF700's tank for some reason way back in the day, and it was petrifying to me at the time. Peter probably doesn't even remember this, but I was certain that something was going to catch fire or explode or that we'd just never get everything back on the way it had been. For that reason alone, it was amazingly satisfying to remove the entire tank and air box alone tonight. It's funny what we see as milestones sometimes, isn't it?

I've decided that the next piece of high-tech equipment that my garage needs is more masking tape. Seriously! It came in really handy tonight for marking hoses -- I'd write "vacuum line" on a piece of masking tape, rip it off the roll, and wrap it around the vacuum line that I had to remove from the petcock. Ditto for "fuel line". "Crankcase breather hose" got two pieces of tape -- one on the hose itself, and one on the plastic bracket through which I need to remember to re-route the hose. I'm sure I'll have some re-routing adventures, but hopefully I won't jinx anything by saying that I think the masking tape reminders will make life a lot easier when it comes time to put the fuel tank back on.

The reason I'm taking all this off is just to check the valve clearances. The Powers That Be over at Yamaha decided to put the cylinders in such a place that they really look accessible as is, but you actually need to remove half the bike to get to them. The Seca also has shim valves, which I've never played with before. The SVS also has shim valves, though those are shim under bucket, and the Seca's are shim over bucket. So far, the difference I've gathered is that I'll have to remove the cams on the SVS to get to the shims. That'll be a fun service, boy howdy.

Anyhoo, hopefully the valves'll get done Thursday evening so I can get the Seca put back together and back to Lance by early next week. Whee! I keep reminding myself that if my day job was being a bike mechanic, I'd probably wish I could stay at home and write computer software all day, too...