Never. I mean NEVER let me paint your Triumph.

With some time between the debacle that was Jeepskool and the next race in Carolina, I took a long, honest look at the ol' Triumph and realized it was a pretty sorry sight. It had been half assed from the start, not surprising considering it was kinda meant to be disposable (the nature of CC being what it is), but it was now half assed AND pretty worn out. I had a month until the two day Carolina White Lighting, so made a nice long list of all the things I needed to do and wanted to do. Along with better suspension, oil filter, redesigned air box, fix leaky gas tank seam, new rings, top end overhaul and modifications to the oil tank, I decided the rattle-can sparkly metallic bass-boat purple paint job had to go. It was time to make the bike look like it was gonna be around for a while, and that's where everything went completely wrong. Gussying up a Triumph just makes it into a petulant prima donna. The oil tank was modified to move the oil filler cap from its stock location which was pretty much under the seat. Having to remove the seat to put in oil, check oil level, or see if oil was actually returning was stupid, so I moved it to a more user friendly spot which entailed a good bit of welding, grinding and sandblasting. None of this is a problem if you get all the products of the welding, grinding, and sandblasting out of the tank. Apparently I did not. There were no big chunks, mind, only what could get past the screen in the tank, fine grit at best. I will take all responsibility for apparently not removing every sub-micron sized particle from the tank, but despite any abuse I may receive for this next statement, I stick by it with all my soul: the Triumph oil pump is an antiquated, shoulda-been-left-in-the-thirties-where-it-came-from piece of trash. I had already had a run in with it before, when some microscopic particle had fouled one of its ball checks and it stopped returning oil to the tank. Luckily that was on the return side, a feed pump failure likely killed Max's 650.

So much for foreshadowing. We (Me,  Max, George and a co-worker of Max's with his son) got to Brushy Mountain Off-road park, site of the race, a day early to play on the trails and try out the refurbished, shiny, repainted Triumph. Compared to its old incarnation, the new bike with improved front and rear suspension was pure joy to ride. A happy day was spent thrashing around with the only trouble occurring to Max's bike which was having problems breathing through its air filter. We got back to camp where Max was sorting that out and when he thought he got it headed off to the MX track to check it. I went to join him only to find the Triumph seized solid. This was curious. It hadn't given any indication of seizure up to that point. Over the course of the afternoon, and through the next day the pump was stripped, cleaned, and refit 4367 times as it alternated between working, not working, return side stopping, and generally mocking me. It was clear the damage was done, upon starting it would almost immediately begin pouring smoke from everywhere. I had obviously done something terminal to the bottom end.

Leaving the greenhouse gas generator for a sec and getting back to the racing, we were joined that weekend by Jay on the venerable Field Pig

as well as a happy group of usual suspect spectators/beer drinkers: Alex (still broken so not racing) and girlfriend Amy, and Patman. Chad couldn't make it because he had lightly broiled himself when his BSA..erm...came alight from a backfire through the carb. Both bike and rider would live to tell the tale, but they were both a bit too crispy to make it. Jay had a good solid race, getting first in Classic Int, Max was unopposed in Expert for a first, and George and I were out for the day.
Day 2 the Triumph was sick but running. I decided with the engine needing a total rebuild when it got home I might as well run and try to salvage what points I could from the weekend. In the end, I'm glad I did, mainly just because the course was incredible. The Carolina boys had done a great job and it was easily one of the most fun courses of the season. Scrabbly, good climbs, some decent long roads you could just bomb along, good stuff. Max was again running unopposed, so got another first. Which was good, because he had some stiff competition in his class and would need the points as the season wore on

Jay started out running ahead of me, but I think the heat was wreaking havoc on his bike (it was reeeaalllyy hot that weekend) and ended up dropping back for second

My bike decided to somehow keep running. Seeing the damage to the bottom end when it was stripped after the race I have no idea how it managed the feat. After one lap it was still running so I figured I'd try for another. It was puking smoke and sounded absolutely-friggen awful, but it kept going

Coming around for a third lap it sounded like there was a bag of hammers in the bottom end but somehow was still making power. It wouldn't last, however, getting about half way through the lap before beginning to feel like it was actually dragging things around in the crankcases. As I passed a road I knew headed down and out, I had to make the decision whether I was gonna ride it off the mountain or have to push it off. I chose to ride out. It almost made it. Just a couple hundred feet from the edge of the woods it stopped. I figured it was permanent and walked out to watch the end of the race. After, Max went back to help me retrieve it, but felt it deserved to get out of the woods on its own power. With him pushing valiantly, it did actually start and though sounding like the horrible stricken machine it was, made it back to camp. There's a lot you can say about Triumph engines, good and bad, but damn it if they aren't tough little things.

The Bikes and Riders: Part 1, the Some-assembly-required AJS

This is the first in an occasional distraction about who we are and the machines themselves. Basically, I've got a bunch of pics that don't really go with a specific event, so it seemed the best thing to do was to give them their own classification. I'm starting out with the bike I'm currently running, the Mongrel 20. In the current chronology of the posts on here, its some moons ago and I'm still on the old Triumph 500, but as the end of the 2010 season approached I decided I wanted a project. I sometimes justify my projects with dodgy logic and long winded explanations of "why it makes sense". Truthfully, I just like projects. So decided I wanted to build a competition AJS. I was particularly fired up by this little gem I saw a couple years back at Barber,

Of course, there's no shortage of inspiration for an off road AMC bike, but I was particularly drawn to the trials frames. They just looked right to me, as well as....how shall I say...not nearly as heavy looking as the beefy roadster based T100 I was currently on. There are, however, a couple problems with the all welded trials frames. Number one on the list is that they are hard to find and un-friggen-holy-hell expensive. Number two is that they prolly aren't quite strong enough for Cross Country. Problems combined, the idea of spending a small fortune for a frame I would likely have to cut, weld, and generally ruin seemed...poor. I saw some replicas, but they were also un-friggen-holy-hell expensive. Being in the mood for a project anyhow, I decided to throw brains to the wind and construct my own purpose built frame. "How hard could it be?" I asked no-one in particular and set to work at a leisurely pace. To make life somewhat simple, I built my assembly jig based on a standard road frame to ensure when the time came all the major bits would drop right in. Then, with the help of many photos of the real deal, I began bending and adding tubes. I upped tube sizes and wall thicknesses as appropriate to, hopefully, allow it to take the abuse of CC.

I changed a couple things, like the swing arm drop outs (couldn't get my head comfy with the idea of a flattened tube) and after much discussion with George and Max, the spine/headstock geometry. At first, things moved slowly, with a component being added and its problems hemmed and hawed over.

And eventually I got to the point where I could loosely pile things together and make a bike-ish looking...erm...thing

Still, a long ways to go. In the above pic, I had tried piling as much on as possible so I could get an idea of where I was weight-wise. I was still missing a few really important components, like the engine I wanted to use. I was slowly acquiring the bits for a longstroke alloy motor, but at this stage I just had a bunch of roadster stuff, so threw an iron head engine in to up the component weight.

 Then, something happened that brought the plodding pace to a pretty quick end: at a Lost weekend soon after the last race of the 2010 season I blew up the Triumph...properly. The two options were to either rebuild the Triumph for the spring, or finish the AJS. I'm a moron so chose the latter. In a stroke, this meant the single motor would have to be abandoned, there was just no time to gather all the missing bits. In its place, a model 20 road bike I was slowly building would donate its complete engine and gearbox for what I thought was going to be a short while til I got the alloy single done.

This meant new engines plates, but thanks to the near universality of AMC bits, very little else. You'll notice the sad donor bike lurking just behind in the above pic, poor thing.

It was beginning to become apparent just how much work is required to build a bike up from scratch. When you start you think about the big fun things: frame, engine and whatnot. I was pretty aware of all the other pieces I would need, and in many cases had decided what I had wanted, but when I suddenly gave myself a ridiculous target deadline it quickly dawned how much work I needed to get done. It didn't help that everything was bespoke, from the oil tank and massive airbox, designed to nestle neatly into the frame, to footpegs and chaincase. Even the kickstart was a project, with the top half of a Triumph folding item grafted onto the lower half of the Burman lever. The primary side in particular was a world of fun. I had made the decision to make alloy covers in place of the hateful leaky steel items (if its gonna puke oil it might as well weigh less)

as well as to put a chain tensioner inside to allow me to fix the gearbox in position for ease of chain tightening

Despite all that, it some-damned-how began to look like a bike

And with pretty much no time to spare before its first race, it was on its own two feet

Not that it was the slightest bit ready. It had a few compromise features, like the fiberglass tank originally meant for god-knows-what and made by god-knows-who and bought for god-knows-more-money-than-the-piece-of-crap-was-worth which began to dissolve almost immediately. And it had some, we'll say, oiling issues. The return to the tank seemed...off, and the engine puked from every seam and seal. It really needed another month/year of working the bugs out, but I was entered for Gatorback and by golly I was gonna run. In the end, it was a near complete disaster. The sighting lap quickly showed some of the more glaring problems. Aside from nearly killing myself from the shift pattern being the opposite direction from the Triumph, the gearing was hellaciously off, it was shockingly incontinent and it was reeeaaallly hard starting. Happily it got worse for the start, patently refusing to fire up on the line

and finally ending with a push out of the woods with a dead mag that thankfully stopped play before it could pump all its oil out.

So began a steady process of de-sucking. The mag was sent off for a rebuild, and the strange oil return was due to a piece of rolled up paper someone had stuffed in the sump return pipe at some point in its past. When you blew through the oil line, it would pass, making it seem like it was clear, but when oil was getting sucked through, it would drag the paper along until it lodged on the back of the pump carrier plate. I finally put a head steady on, which combined with some attention to cylinder base surfaces and a better seal on the dynamo blanking plate began to make headway on the oil loss

 It's forks were overhauled, and the awful, awful, crummy, awful fiberglass tank was replaced with an even pricier AMC item

It was beginning to be almost useable, almost

But I still wasn't really racing, the bike still needed a lot of fine tuning. The gearing wasn't really right and carburetion was proving a major annoyance. In the above pic at Diamond Don's in Texas, it just ran out of revs and fuel/air, but it did survive a whole race. It was running, just not quite racing. In the end, some expert advice from the nice folk at Rebel Gears got me on the right track with my final drive ratio, and a conversation with another rider led me to ditch the concentric for a monobloc. The combination transformed the bike.

Since then, its slowly become more of a mechanical play set, fixing this, changing that, sometimes just for the helluvit. It had been running fixed ignition, having originally been a manual advance bike, but that made hills a bit funky and so I made it an auto advance.

I had to repair a slight hole when the kickstart return stop tore loose

Improved engine breathing and modifying the oil tank is continuing to decrease oil loss. Its had fitted an oil cooler in order to avoid some of the nastier heat related CC issues, like keeping the oil acting like oil, instead of turning into black water over the course of a race, and keeping the carb from getting so hot it leans out and boils its gas which makes running erratic and late race hot starts tricky. With the Triumph, if you stalled it near the end of a race you'd have to frantically try to restart it as quickly as possible.

And most recently, a clutch modification because, being a big fan of AMC's product, I've always thought the Burman job a bit odd for supporting the entire clutch pack on the inner circumference of the last steel plate, which seems to lead to slipping and shortened plate life as the plot gets toasty during a race

The bike is certainly getting quicker, and being 50 pounds lighter than the old T100, is much easier to ride. The last couple times out its been a pleasure to ride...until something breaks, which in its line of work isn't terribly out of the ordinary. Its still very much a work in progress, the main thing at this point is that it finally feels like I'm making progress. Now, with the 2012 season starting up in about a month back at Gatorback, its finally where it should have been last year at this time for this race, so we'll just have to see if it'll become a solid racer. Should be fun.