Monday Articles - January 2022
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 Happy New Year! After the elation of the successful test ride, progress has slowed again as the dirt bike project made its way to its new home. To make that home more comfy, any spare time has been spent in the new garage fitting flooring and boarding out the roof space for storage. 

 Flooring at the moment is the cheap (especially now, they’re on sale) and cheerful garage floor mats from Halfords. The Halfords 6 piece black floor mat set covers an area of 1.2 x 1.8m. You can join sets together to cover a bigger area, which is what I’ve done. The whole of a single garage floor can currently be covered for under £60, but is it any good?
The answer to that is yes, and no. It’s quick and easy to fit. It’s nice and comfy to walk and kneel on, and it provides a good degree of insulation from a cold concrete floor, but it’s not that robust. It’s a soft foam. Park anything of any weight on it and the foam will compress irreversibly. You will certainly need a large side stand puck and there are noticeable depressions where the wheels of my bikes sit. I can live with that for the moment. When funds allow, I’ll upgrade to something better, but for now I’m just grateful that I don’t have to kneel on a cold, hard concrete floor.

 Lots of lovely storage space for all of those bits that I can’t bear to part with!

I don't know why I've titled this part 114 of the dirt bike build, because I haven't actually had time to go near it. But never mind, I've still been busy.

 A slight distraction this week to try and sort out the electrical gremlins on the old Yamaha. You may have read about this before. I thought I’d solved the issue by fitting a new earth lead. But alas, no. The bike sat in the garage for a couple of weeks. I got it out to ride, only to find the battery flat. This is unusual as this battery holds its charge well. (This was one of the rare times when I’m pleased that the big single is kickstart only - it’ll start even with a flat battery.) Something is draining my battery. I suspect the regulator / rectifier, so I’ve whipped it off the bike to check. Basic checks of the unit itself didn’t show any faults. So now, it will be interesting to see if the battery still drains with the rectifier removed. This is the offending item. Should it be required, a genuine replacement runs to three figures!, so I’ve invested £15 in a universal reg/rec unit to trial.

 This is the universal reg/rec. Thankfully it will fit in the space vacated by the old one, although I will need to drill and tap a couple of holes in the aluminium mounting plate and sort out a suitable connector - I’m hoping to find one to match the existing Yamaha one.

 To make the garage even more comfy to work in, I’ve used some of the Halfords flooring to insulate the inside of the garage door. I bought some double sided tape to hold it in place, but it was useless and didn’t stick. I’ve now tried some mini welding magnets to see if they’d do the job instead and also make the insulation easy to remove should I want to. Seem okay, but I wouldn’t buy these to use as welding magnets, they’re really not strong enough.

 Some more stuff’s arrived that will keep me away from the project bike - these are the bases for my log cabin workshop which I’m hoping to build. It’s got to go in the gap behind, where the old water butt, footballs and other junk currently sits. I’ve got a lot of work to do…