Morini Kanguro Rebuild

Won't start

Had great difficulty starting the bike tonight when I went to top-up with petrol. This is a bad sign!

Rack

I've fabricated a rack from a piece of lexan cut and bent. It seems to have the desired effect of stopping my tool bag from escaping. It looks more like an office in-tray than a solid motorbike accessory but I'm sure it will do for the coming event.

Shakedown

Another shakedown ride. Very soon the bike was running terribly and after having difficulty maintaining an idle I gave it a good look over and found that the carb balance pipe had split. As it was long, looping over the air filter I pulled it back, cut the end off and routed it more directly. The rest of the ride was uneventful except that I found how awful it would be to stall on a hill!

A local hill has a fairly easy start but then turns sharply and becomes steeper and surfaced with rough stones. I didn't tackle this firmly enough and stalled on it. Couldn't get neutral so had to roll back a bit, which wasn't easy, and then fought to get neutral. Then the engine wouldn't start. Eventually it got going and I negotiated the spot with plenty of revs and feet down.

At home I got some pipe for the balance pipe and rebalanced the carbs before fitting it. Fitted 2 pieces of spark cable too.

Light

To get some decent light I've now fitted a UFO Ghibli halogen enduro lamp unit. This has a 60/55W H4 bulb with a hard plastic lens. The 'loom' supplied was vey badly made and the wires literally fell out of the crimps whilst deciding how to mount it. After that it was obvious that my loom should be soldered directly to the H4 buld connector.



Due to the large clocks and the width of the loom it was impossible to mount the light on its elastics. I've fitted it onto the headlight brackets with a 6mm rubber mount which gave the right spacing. Unfortunately it has a bit of a wobble. Another disappointment is that the lamp is set-up to dip for left-hand drive use. Nice and bright though.

Levers done

The obvious solution for the levers fouling the guard was to get short levers. I've made some enquires and come up with nothing. I have got a MZ lever which would be a cheap but fair substitute for the brake lever but it's no shorter.

So, I've sawn them off diagonally and rejoined them with Technoweld. I'm well aware that many regard this as 'snake-oil' but I don't have facilities for TIG and I reckoned it would be as good as a poor attempt at MIG. Also, the cut was placed so that load is placed on the sound lever, the joint is merely to replace the ball end. An ideal job might have been to place a dowel between the parts and then use the rods to fill the gap?



This was my first real job with Technoweld and apart from getting the parts hot enough, the only problem was tidying the joint without it dropping apart. After joining I ground the step out and they look fair. There is a visible porous spot in each lever. The test will be to see how they survive in use.



After that, fitting the guards was straightforward.

Another little trip

Still no lever guards but went for a short run. All OK except that I still have to fit a rear rack and a decent headlamp.