Mission accomplished

Nipped down to Ken’s late yesterday afternoon with the newly cleaned-up carburettors and had them refitted in under quarter of an hour. Pulled trike and trailer out of the workshop and decided that it would be safest to get Our Trike off the trailer before starting the engine. Then the big moment came. Checked all round to ensure everything clear and flipped the Ignition switch to make it live. The switch promptly broke. 😕

Suppose it was to be expected as it was an old switch and it felt dodgy last time I ran the engine. It’s no big deal.

So what to do? Removed the switch and shorted across the two connections with a short length of heavy wire. Then operated the electric starter. Nothing. Tried again. And again. Still nothing.

Then I had to remove and clean the plugs as it was pretty obvious that if they weren’t already oiled up, they soon would be. Sure enough they were very wet, so cleaned, dried and replaced them.

Then the thought occurred to me. I said to Ken that if you thought about it, the Ignition switch was probably an earth, to stop the plugs sparking (ie a ‘break’ rather than a ‘make’) so I said I’d try it without the link between the switch connections. Turned the starter key and it roared into life! 🙂

So that was it – another hour or so’s tinkering and the engine was running more sweetly than it ever had done. Warmed up, full throttle gave us about 6000RPM (needed for take off, and it was hard holding Our Trike back!) and I could now fully close the choke. And we also had a nice even tick-over at around 1500RPM.

That’ll do me 😉