Quote:
Originally Posted by thatsdax Only 3000 miles.. Not even break in yet... lol.. I am up to around 135mpg WOT and I can cruise 33mph at 9000 feet. No kidding.. Not quite 12,000 miles yet, but not bad for 5 months or so. It is not unusual for me to ride over 70 miles in a single ride. With a stop for gas since the tank is only a 1 liter tank good for 44 miles or so. Enjoy the ride.. |
Here's a coincidence- Before I bought the first engine, I had called 2 GEBE customers, both out west, and they both said "wait till you get 1,000 miles on the engine, that's when you'll feel a surge".
The Florida engine was about the fifth one I had built, and when I got back, I sold that engine to a friend. So the Denver engine was pretty new when I left Alabama.
Right out of Manhattan, KS, which was around that 1,000 mile mark, I really felt the surge.
I also caught a tailwind , and rode it as far west as I could before sunset. I was having a blast, amber waves of grain, buffalo and antelope playing and all that.
The next day, on a last minute change of plan, I headed into Red Cloud, Nebraska, home of Willa Cather, a favorite pioneer author. I saw the museum, bought cool postcards, did a newspaper interview, asked a bunch of questions about everything I was noticing, from the height of the wheat to the size of the tractors. I was getting the lowdown.
Just as I crossed the Republic River, re-entering Kansas,
I met the prairie headwind, unlike any I had felt previously. With miles and miles and miles of massive hog parlors and maybe 50 trucks filled with "hog produced fertilizer byproduct" passing me, making the experience doubly fragrant.
That tailwind I had experienced yesterday had a big bad brother, the 40 mile per hour headwind. Trying to outguess which way that wind was going to surprise me with became a game I played until I got south of Elk City, OK. They have hundreds of names for the prairie wind, but mostly I was calling it "dammit". I knew why the roads were so litter free, cuz those wind gusts blew it all up to the Dakotas.
Anyway, right after the hog perfume stretch of road
is when I got the bad ethanol.
I HAD noticed there were no more dead armadillos on the road, but between the prairie wind, the vapor locking, and the roller coaster ride on Hwy 36, I'm just a "
confused dude from out east" by the time I got to Denver. (
A solid week of friendly folks buying me "Fat Tire" and other local exotic brews didn't help).
I had found Shell in Denver, BP in Colorado Springs....but I'm blaming the 87 octane and that store clerk in Norton who sold me the bad ethanol, because that real "surge" I had felt seemed to be missing. My spark plug was clean as a whistle, my air cleaner was good....
2 1/2 days out of Denver, coming straight south after riding thru the Oklahoma panhandle, heading to Shattuck, there are 3 long downhill steps. Before going down the first one, I stopped to take a picture because there, in the distance, were "real trees", not the scrub I had been seeing for over a week.
When I come off that second long slope, the engine makes a high pitched "
wheeeeeeeeeee" sound, I'm going so fast that I let off the throttle, thinking "
uh oh, drive shaft replacement time".
BUT it was the
ALTITUDE CHANGE.
This whole time, from the Republic River crossing, spending a week with new friends and their friendly bartenders in Denver and State Bridge Lodge, and heading back,
I NEVER PUT TWO AND TWO TOGETHER about that missing "surge". But when I got back under 3,000 feet altitude, I was flying, and just like clockwork, I'm back in the land of roadkill armadillos.
I had been boycotting the internet for 5 years, so when I finally hooked back on-line in August 2006, started communicating with other MBer's, I understand you High Altitude folks can make a permanent "
intake modification" and/or "
fuel mixture adjustment" to maximize performance.
For "city slicker" tourists, just passing through, when the dead 'dillos disappear, when two or three beers seems to have an extra "kick", throw away all that sea-level mindset, quit worrying about the temporary engine quirks, and just enjoy the ride.