Saturday 20 May 2017

The XS Triple Sidecar - cracking locks and getting small stuff done

There's not a whole lot a (petrol-engined) bike needs to work properly: spark and fuel at the right time and mix in a bit of air and you're golden. That being said, I've had to work on more than one bike in the past where the sparkplug wires were a straight mess and the reason for a weak or intermittent spark and subsequently the reason behind lots of (unnecessary) headscratching.
Now as the XS-Triple-Sidecar is not meant to be some sort of show-pony, but a daily driver, it only made sense to get some fine silicone sparkplug wire with moulded on caps as these have withstood the elements quite well in the past.

And guess what, even thought these coils didn't show any signs of it yet, there was some rust on the core already.


When swapping out the sparkplug cables always make sure you keep the old ferule as that's what's going to hold the new cable in place.


I do admit, that the red colour is a tad flashy, but then again my local bike shop didn't stock them in black and I absolutely wanted the one-piece-cables for reasons of reliability.



A bit of T-piece-art or how to feed three inlets with only two petcocks.


And lastly onto the matter of the lock. I don't have the key to this petrol cap and even if I did, I only want to carry one key per bike. So I took the lock apart, removed the locking tabs, cleaned everything up (yes, I do that sometimes) and reassembled everything.





Testing the petrol cap with my new "universal" key a.k.a. a flatblade screwdriver.


Throttle cables and the missing upper part of the fuel lines next and then it should be pretty close to firing it up with the VM36es.

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