leapinggnome.org

I have great news! We’ve had beautiful weather in the Copper Country the last couple of days, and the nice weather is expected to continue. Along with this nice weather comes the urge to get out and enjoy it on my motorcycle! I’ve been getting it ready for this season lately. Mostly I want to take a look at a few things inside the engine and seal up a few small oil leaks.

But this is the real great news: Monday night I was poking around inside it and found out my spark timing advancer was rusted together and not working at all. Why is this a good thing? It means the performance and fuel economy I get on it will go up significantly now that it’s fixed. Let me try to explain.

The engine needs the spark plug to ignite its fuel mixture faster and faster as RPM’s increase. At low RPM’s, ignition might occur 5 degrees before the piston hits Top Dead Center (TDC). At higher RPM’s, the fuel mixture takes the same time to burn, but the piston is moving up and down faster. The solution is to ignite it sooner, maybe 12 – 15 or even 20 degrees before the piston is at TDC. Without a functional advancing mechanism, high RPM power (the only power my little 360 cc twin is really able to make) is severely limited.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 at 11:41 am and is filed under Life, Motorcycle. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.