Posted: Sat Jun 23, 2012 7:41 pm
The condenser does get hot with the engine and cools with the engine. I agree that you should look at that first.
Now that the embarrassing part is out of the way, it's time for a ride report! (with a lot of pictures.)
I put over 100 miles on the bike today. For the first ride, we went from my Uncle's house where we were working on it to the top of Mt. Lemmon. It was quite a distance through the city to Catalina Highway, which leads to the top of the mountain and then there is about 27 miles of beautiful, twisting road to the summit. There is an elevation gain of approximately 6550 feet from the bottom to the top and this promised to be a good challenge for my Benly. It did really well. I was mostly able to cruise comfortably at 35-40 MPH from bottom to top, although a few of the steeper sections required a downshift into second and I had to wind it up a bit tighter than I would have liked.
Here is a picture of the road from one of the vista points. The section from the part you can see in the picture to the place I stopped to take it was one of those tougher spots where I spent a good amount of time in second gear. The twists and turns in this picture are pretty representative of the rest of the road. There are tight turns and long sweepers. Oh, and the views are great.
So here goes from the beginning. We were pretty hungry after tinkering around and testing the bike all morning so we stopped at McDonald's for some lunch on the way to the mountain.
Mt. Lemmon is really neat because you start in an upper Sonoran Desert lifezone and end up in a Ponderosa Pine forest. They say the change in foliage is similar to driving from South to North from the Mexican border to the Canadian one. I took a few shots at the first pull-out for contrast with later pictures.
We made it up to the half-way point (this is Windy Point Vista, which is where the first picture in this post was taken) and decided to let the bikes take a break. Most of the really hard riding was out of the way at this point but there were still a few steep spots to come.
You can see a group of bikers in the background in this picture. They were riding as a club on their Harleys and the state chapter President came over to talk to me about the bike. Apparently he started riding on a CA95 and mine brought back a lot of memories. He told us a few stories and we were on our way.
As we got close to the top, we ran into a hail storm. That stuff stings! We pulled over at the Ski Valley and took refuge in the gift shop until it blew past. We got a free bike wash out of it too, although mine is still filthy.
This is the part where I found out that my speedometer leaks. Luckily it had time to dry out by the time I got home.
A few more miles of very slow, very twisty road and we were at the summit, or at least as far as you can go before they close off the road. We stopped to take in the view and I snapped a few more pictures of my motorcycle.
We headed back down the mountain a ways, drove through the village of Summerhaven and continued on until the road dead ended at Marshall Gulch. This is a beautiful spot that has escaped forest fire for a number of years and is a popular place to hike and picnic. In the first picture, you can see a very tall man standing next to his very small motorcycle.
We hung out there for a few minutes, enjoying the shade, and then decided to head home. The ride was pretty uneventful except for the part where some lady in an Expedition decided it would be fun to drive right at me on the wrong side of the road. Luckily there was a wide shoulder and I was able to swerve out of her way. We stopped again at Windy Point where a guy on a Hayabusa Turbo that he claimed made 305HP told me about his dad's 305 Dream.
We stopped at one more vista point on the way down and took a few pictures.
I made it home in one piece, even though a monsoon storm was rolling in and the wind was blowing me all over the place. My chain has stretched and is in desperate need of an adjustment. I also plan on adjusting the tappets and the cam chain before I do too much more riding as a precaution as well as resurfacing the clutch disks to try to get the slipping problems I was having on the way home under control.
All in all, it was a great ride. It feels nice to be able to actually ride my bike instead of dreaming about it and asking questions on here. Thank you to everyone who gave me information and advice. One more Benly is on the road.
