Gomer the Ratster.5

So I gave the guys at the shop my carburettor and bought a Bendix with a fixed jet from them, because it was a Harley carburettor. I didn't ask about S&S, (because I didn't know about S&S), and they didn't tell me about S&S (because they had a Bendix in stock to sell). A few days later, I saw a project Panhead in the shop that had what looked like a Mikuni carburettor just like the one I had turned in.

I found out later that Mikuni carburettors are very easy to fix and maintain, that parts were cheap, and that even a doofus like me could tune them by reading and following a Mikuni manual. Today, I wonder if the only thing wrong with that Mikuni was that it was dirty.

I should have learned, never turn in old components. Clean 'em, lube 'em, wrap 'em up, and put them away where they won't rust or corrode.

Anyway, the guys at the shop sold me this Bendix with stock filter and cover. This cover is so big that it obscures the choke lever. The choke lever on Gomer would apply the choke by itself from time to time. Whenever the choke applied after Gomer was warmed up, she would run very erratically, and good luck with starting her.

I only found out about the self-applied choke phenomenon when talking to another rider whose motorbike had the same kind of Bendix installed as on Gomer. He mentioned that that the choke sometimes self-applied after he removed the choke wire and knob. I stopped having this problem after I changed to a round filter/cover setup several years after I changed carburettors.

I took Gomer in for a make-over in March 1980, using the $700 settlement money as a down payment.

1. I asked for a stock handlebar in place of the ape bar.
2. I asked for a 4-5 gallon gas tank in place of the 2.1 gallon gas tank
3. I asked that the motor be rebuilt to 61 cubic inches from 55 cubic inches. I didn't ask the guys to upgrade the oil pump; they didn't tell me that the later oil pump would provide more oil for more displacement.
4. I asked them to install a Phase 3 primary belt drive (I retained the stock primary chain drive in my parts stash).
5. I asked them to paint Gomer almost-white blue and almost-black blue, with a gold dollar sign on the gas tank, and with 'xalepa ta kala'(means nothing without work), using gold Greek lettering, along the left side of the frame.
6. I asked them to install cop-bike styled panniers that they had in stock. 
7. I asked them to install a big tail lamp.

I got Gomer back in June, for an additional $1400 in one dollar bills.

1. Gomer got a wide dresser-style bar. I guess that could be stock. Should have asked for a drag bar.
2. The gas tank ' is nearly four gallons'. I guess 2.9 gallons is nearly four gallons if you squint your eyes a bit.
3. The guys rebuilt the motor and transmission, and installed 1974 20 over cylinders and the heads to go with them. No oil pump upgrade.
4. The belt drive front pulley had to be repaired about a year later, I think.
5. The paint was not bad. Light sky-blue and dark blue, like you might see on a Ford or Chevy. Pretty. OK. Whatever. The dollar sign and the lettering were good.
6. The panniers looked good. The left one fell off of the frame about a week after I got Gomer back and the bottom got nice and scraped. The guys had used the grade three-or-five fasteners that were with the pannier frame instead of new grade eight fasteners.
7. The big tail lamp worked by itself, and not when the head light was on. I found that out the first night I wanted to ride with some friends. Turned out that the lamp was not properly grounded; a ground wire fixed that. I wonder why the guys didn't install the ground wire when they were installing the tail lamp?

 

Gomer after makeover

Doc and Gomer June 1980

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Gomer the Ratster.4

I was riding up to an intersection on the downhill side of a road one Thursday afternoon. The light went from green-to-yellow-to-red-to-green and I shifted from fourth-to-third-to-second-to-down on the road. The driver of a car rushed over the crest of the road, sped down the hill, and changed lanes right into me, scooping up Gomer's back wheel with the car's right rear wheel, ignorant that I was beating on the right rear window and yelling that I was being dragged along for an unpleasant ride on asphalt. She wasn't ignorant for long; her passengers alerted her to her mistake straight-away.

The driver pulled over and apologised, over and over, for running into me. She was driving a company car on company business without a driver license. I got her boss's name, number, and insurance information, and sent her on her way.

Boy, was I annoyed! I was gonna miss work, and I was gonna have to fix my bike, and all because some silly simp drove into me. I picked up Gomer and walked her back up the hill and up the road to the local shop a couple of miles away. My pants were wrecked, my jacket scuffed, and I hurt quite a bit. I limped for a few days thereafter. I went to work the day after the crash.

I called the driver's boss. I got the driver. She transfered me to the boss. He wanted me to take Gomer to his airplane mechanic and have his mechanic repair the damage to the bike. I told him nothing doing; would he want me to have my bike mechanic fix his airplane if I had crashed into it? This guy's attitude was that I was trying to rip him off. All I wanted was fix Gomer, buy me new pants, and pay me for the one day of missed work. I didn't care about his attitude. I just wanted my way. The boss told me that the policy number that his employee gave me was the wrong number and gave me a different policy number.

I called the guy's insurance company and gave the claims adjuster the policy number. The insurance guy told me that he could not help me until Monday morning due to the fact that it was Friday afternoon just before closing. Monday morning, the insurance agent told me that policy number that I gave him was no good. So I had to call the driver's boss. Well the boss was at a meeting, no, he could not get me the right policy information until he was done with the meeting.

I was not a happy camper. I wanted to beat the driver with a ball-peen hammer. I hired a lawyer instead. Fat lot of good the lawyer did me. The insurance guy called me after I hired the lawyer with the good news that they then had the correct policy information and were ready to help me. As soon as I said I had hired a lawyer, the insurance guy could not help me, after all. Ultimately, I got $700 out of a $1500 settlement. What a joke.

From time to time after the accident, I would have trouble starting Gomer. I would replace spark plugs, adjust valves, take 'er in for tune-up, and still would have trouble. Gil at work told me to get rid of the Mikuni carburetor, that it was junk. Gil told me that Jap parts were junk parts. I listened to him because I actually believed that he knew bikes. The shop manager at a local shop told me that Mikuni carburetors were junk. I believed him because I thought as a shop manager, he knew bikes. I had two different guys who told me the same thing, and I concluded that they were right.

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Gomer the Ratster.3

I was out riding one day, shortly after the front end transplant, and discovered what happened when I could not make up my mind whether to stop or run the light. There was something about that intersection. So, anyway- I'm going south; the light turns yellow; I don't know if the light will turn red by the time I get into the intersection; do I slow down or speed up or stop or what? I sqeezed the front brake lever, locked up the front wheel, and down I went. Picked myself up with a little help from Gino, who was right behind me, walked Gomer around to the northbound side of the street, and started her up. I rode to work, parked her overnight, and took her to the shop the next morning, where they re-aligned the the front end and sent me on my way.


I fell down a lot learning to ride. I was pretty much on my own. So far as I knew there were no riding schools then like there are now. Being stupid, I never thought of getting some big soda bottles, laying out a practice course at the end of the street in front of work, and practicing there. Never thought to ask around if anybody wanted to teach me for pay how to ride without crashing. I just went out riding, and crashed and learned.


I tried to do as much of my repair work as I could. It took several incidents for me to figure out that I should not ask for long-distance diagnosis. For example, I tried to start Gomer one day and the kicker went around without engaging the motor. The kicker arm went down and stayed down.


So I called Gil at work, and he told me the kicker return spring was broken and I needed to get another one. I looked at the spring and it looked OK to me. But hey, I called Gil, so I should follow his advice, right? I bump-started Gomer and rode to work, and parked her there. The next day I went to a dealership and bought a new spring. I installed the spring, and nothing happened.


Well, I guess if it don't work, you gotta take it apart and find out why. And that's what I did. That's when I found out that the kicker gear was broken. So I went back to the dealership and bought a new kicker gear. I go to put the kicker gear in, and n o t h i n g ! No engagement, no resistance, nada. I took the assemly apart and looked at everything, checking for engagement. It all looked good. I reassembled the kicker, and tested it. No engagement.


Just about that time, a line driver from the Bay area walked by and saw me working on Gomer. He walked over, looked at what was going on, and told me that I had the wrong kicker gear, that I needed the earlier gear. It took him all of what, fifteen seconds?, to tell me what I needed to do to fix the problem. I went to the dealership the next day and swapped the new gear for the earlier gear. I put everything together, tested the assembly, buttoned it all up, and started the bike right up.
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Gomer the Ratster.2

Gomer The Ratster.2

Well, I took a denim jacket that I had, removed the sleeves, sewed some patches on it, and wore it over my leather jacket from then on. I took Gomer into the shop and had the guys repair the oil tank.

But the next time that the chain cut a hole into the oil tank, I learned how to remove the tank and take it in to get it fixed. The oil tank was a wrap-around tank that I had to remove from the left side of the bike.

I was determined to maintain Gomer myself. Draining the oil was easy. I parked her up on a curb, removed an oil line at the motor end, and directed the line into a bottle below on the street.

Checking the ignition timing, though, was a bit of a trick the first time. I had the factory book. The book indicated that I should remove the spark plugs. OK. Then, remove the screw plug from the timing hole on the left side of the motor. OK. Then telescope the front push rod cover. What? What is a push rod cover?

How do you telescope it? At that point, I had not adjusted the valves, so didn't know those things.

I went through the book trying to find something that would tell me what I needed to know. Failing that, I located a shop up a ways and took myself there.

I said: “I am checking the timing on my Sportster. What is a push rod cover? Where is that on the motor?”

The guy behind the counter pointed to a Shovehead parked near him and said: “There is a push rod cover, right there by the carburetor. There's four of them.”

“OK, so how do I telescope a push rod cover?”

“Well, you push down on that round part and pull that top part out. Then you push the tubes together. You do that when you adjust the valves.”

Wow. So simple. Good thing I had not tried to adjust the valves using the factory book to guide me. I might have never got that figured out due to the fact that in the factory book, you adjust tappets.

Later on, I got a Clymer book, after destroying and replacing the factory book. So, anyway, I went back and adjusted the valves, and checked the timing. To this day, I don't know how I managed to check the timing without advancing the circuit breaker against its stop. I did not figure that out until I melted the back piston. I will talk about that later.

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Gomer the Ratster.1

Gomer the Ratster.1
I got Gomer in June of 1979, with a dollar's worth of weed in my head and fifteen hundred dollars burning a hole in my pocket. I had made up my mind that I was gonna buy a Harley that month, or shut the heck up about getting my first bike. I knew that I wanted a pre-AMF bike, and that custom was better than stock. That just goes to show how much I knew back then.
I had passed on a trike and another Sportster already by the time I saw Gomer. I didn't name her until a few years later. Hosea the prophet had a harlot for a wife that his Employer directed him to marry. I thought at the time that she gave him grief, but he still hung onto her. I found out later, not so much, but had already named my bike and did not care to rename her.
Gomer had a 1968 XLH motor breathing through a Mikuni carburetor, in a Paucho chopper frame with an extended Honda front end with a non-functional brake, a sixteen rear tire with a very functional brake, a small sportster tank covered with the graphics from Meatloaf's Bat out of Hell album, a solo seat and pillion pad, and chest-high apes. She was ratty, and she was mine.
So there I was, my first bike, and I did not really know how to ride. Paul showed me that she would start on the first kick for him. We exchanged paper, Paul showed me what I had to do to start her up, and then he left for work, with Gomer and me in the alley behind his house, at about noon on a hot Saturday.
I spent three hours learning how to start that beast. I ran out of water, but not out of patience. Finally, I could start her. Next, I had to figure out the point at which to release the clutch to get underway. After starting and stalling a few times, I was able to putt out of the alley onto a boulevard westbound.
I would putt a ways, stop at a light, stall out, push the beast across the street, start after a few kicks, lurch on my way, repeat, for a few blocks. Then I turned right, lurched north and finally could not proceed. I had run out of battery.
I was looking at pushing this bike home along afternoon traffic. Oddly, though, a guy in a lift-gate equipted pick-up saw me trying to make my way up the street. So we put the bike into the back of the truck and he ran me to the House. We unloaded Gomer and parked her in the back yard. The guy was gone before I brought out a doob for him.
That was the first day.
On Tuesday, Jim, a fellow employee, and I set about replacing the battery. We drained out the oil into a bucket, removed the oil tank, and the battery slipped out of my hands into the bucket, spashing oil all over my t-shirt. Well, the battery was junk, the oil was old, and the t-shirt was black, so no harm, no foul. I thought I was a biker.
We got a new battery, replaced the oil, and then I found out that Gomer would start ever-so much easier. And then, we replaced the solenoid. Now I could push a button and start the beast. Not so much fun, that.
So I would go to the House and take Gomer out for practice. After a couple of days I could actually shift into third from second, and second from first, and first from stop. By Saturday, I could ride well enough to putt from the House to work. I would park Gomer at work. Nobody bothered her there.
At the time, I lived in a rooming house within walking distance of work. Gomer was safe at work. Not a chance of safe parking at the rooming house.
I had some of the guys at work ride Gomer and tell me what they thought. They were nice to me. They all hated the front end.
So I would come to work several hours before my shift started and would practice riding. Over time, I got to where I could actually shift up and down without stalling. I got to where I could make a turn without stalling. I could stop without falling over. I could start Gomer in about two to six kicks, or push a button.
Right after I moved Gomer, I changed the fiber plates in her clutch basket. This made her shift better.
I think I had Gomer about two weeks when I took her in for a front end transplant. The guys at the shop sold me a Sportster six over front end with a disc brake that worked very well. I think I still had the apes.
I would ride that bike any old time and to every old place when I was not at work. One time I found out why so many riders wore vests over their jackets when the drive chain ground a hole into my oil tank while I was riding out to some far away place. Oil was all over the back of the bike and all over the back of my jacket. I had oil in my hair, too.
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