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Road Ramblings - Lucinda, Poppin’ that cherry; the conclusion So 5am the day of the ride I head out. I stop and get gas before I hit the highway and discover that if I fill the tank completely it will leak out of the gas cap when I stand the bike up. No problem, I now have gas all over my leg but I will know at the next gas stop. I quickly fall into my long distance rhythm of 100 miles, gas & smoke then back on the road. I try with each gas stop to get the right amount of gas so it doesn’t overflow but it seems to spray a little each time. The miles and states start to pass and Louisiana, Mississippi go by without incident. Alabama brings a race with a storm front, actually two storms colliding ahead of me. I add more throttle I get drizzled on, but miss the main part of the storm. Then there was Florida. MY god that is a long state. By the time I make it to Tallahassee I am spent. I have been on the road for 14 hours or so, and unlike Lolita (my other bike the bobber) Lucinda has beaten me. I decide my hopes of a straight through ride are shot and admit defeat at a mere 700 miles for the day. I call it and head for a cheap motel, I see a motel 6 and grab a hot shower and a few hours sleep. 5am day two: I load the bike up for another day on the road. I am traveling with a barrel bag attached to the forks just above the headlight. In the pre dawn hours I realize as soon as I hit the highway that the bag now has my headlight pointing at a spot roughly 5 feet ahead of me. I take the next exit and after a few minutes of roadside maintenance I am back on the road. I make it to Jacksonville for the tail end of rush hour then head south to Daytona (actually Palm coast where my friend lives) I arrive none the worse for wear and with no plans until that afternoon (gotta make willie’s tropical tattoo old school bike show) I decide to ride with my friend to Orlando to pick my old lady up at the airport (she wasn’t into riding 1000 miles on a fender) She was surprised to see me at the airport, she figured I would be at the rally. So the next two days were a blur of rally related fun and enjoyment, lots of riding, and even got to meet a fellow customfighters.com member at his now former job. Friday I noticed I had developed a leaky petcock, and the damn fork seal was leaking again. Saturday we decided to just hang out at my friend’s house, I had some maintenance to do on Lucinda before the ride home. So, I tore apart the petcock and got the trash out that was causing it to leak, pulled the plugs and noticed I was running a tad lean, adjusted the carb, and gave the bike an overall once over. I figured I would just leave the fork to leak and fix it when I got home. I spent the rest of the day resting up for the ride home. 5am on Sunday and I was on the road for home, I made it north to Jacksonville and had to pull over at a truck stop and find a jacket of some sort. With the sun not up and the fog so thick I was getting cold. After getting a jacket I was back on the road. Florida, Alabama, and most of Mississippi went by uneventfully. Around Gulfport I hit what felt like a tank trap in the middle of the highway. In Retrospect it was a mere buckled seam in the highway surface, but it was at least 6 inches tall, and at what I approximate around eighty miles an hour it hurt, both wheels left the pavement and it felt like an electric shock being sent up my spine. There was a truck stop about a mile ahead and I took the exit for a rest stop. Somehow there was no damage to the rims or the bike in general and after walking off the pain I was back on the road. About 40 miles before Baton Rouge La. I felt something hit my leg, I looked down and my shift lever was swinging loosely. Maintaining speed I felt down to where the shift linkage should have been and discovered that the shift rod had decided it no longer wanted to be part of the bike, and it preferred the Louisiana highway to being part of my machine……………… in other words the damn thing fell off. I maintained speed until my next gas stop (why not I was already in 5th) and then exited and pulled into the truck stop still in high gear. I spent the better part of the next hour trying to rig up a linkage out of coat hangers, only to discover they just did not have the strength to function through the gears without buckling. Finally I went with the old school standby. I bought a pair of Vise grip from the truck stop and affixed them to the shifter, and then found out I still couldn’t shift because my foot peg was in the way. So, off came the foot peg and mount and a second pair of vice grips was fashioned in to a foot rest. Back on the road and kicking for every shift the combination of road weariness and disappointment started to build and by the time I made it to Lafayette I was ready to call it a day, another 700 mile day. I got a good nights sleep and hit the road the next morning no other problems. I arrived home exactly 4 minutes ahead of a rain storm, but Lucinda was broken in. Postmortem; I fixed the shifter for a whopping $3 and a piece of all thread. The front end ended up pissing me off so I replaced the entire unit with an Inverted front end of a Suzuki Marauder. The front end flows better now, so in the end it was a good swap. Goon |