Wednesday December 27 2000 was cold. Well, some of you might not consider 29 degrees cold, but when you're riding with only a leather jacket, thin gauntlets, blue jeans, boots and a watch cap pulled over your ears under a half helmet, I consider it cold. But I wasn't thinking about the weather, I was thinking about the new wheels and distributor Andy had waiting for me at his shop. Once again he had offered me the use of his trailer, but since the bike was running, I just couldn't see towing it. I mean, it has never been on a trailer so why start? Well, OK, it had been in the back of a pickup once, but that was when I was in the back of an ambulance so both the Whatzit and I agreed that it didn't count.

According to the HD 2001 Genuine Motor Accessories And Genuine Motor Parts Catalog (which I get because I bought something at the stealership, but which contains precious little that would fit my bike) 10W-40 oil should be used in this weather. I still had straight 50W, and it took a few more kicks than usual to get the bike woke up, but without me getting too out of breath it rumbled to life and I let it idle for a while to warm up. When I was satisfied things were flowing freely, I put the helmet on and headed to Union City.

Yep. It was cold all right. The grin was literally frozen to my face. Teeth set firmly to avoid chattering I pressed on past the snowy fields and communities along the 10 miles to A&A Cycle. Luck was with me, all the traffic lights turned green as I approached them. I pulled up to the roll-up door of the shop and honked my horn. Soon it went up and I pushed the bike in, set it on the stand and stood there shivering. After some good-natured ribbing, Andy put the lift under the bike and proceeded to remove the front wheel.

The decision to get new wheels had come after one of my last backroads journeys took me beyond Dukedom and into Palmersville. The route was riddled with potholes and I had bobbed up and down on the seatpost merrily, but when I finally got onto smoother asphalt I noticed that although I had no trouble holding the bike straight, when I would remove my hands from the bars a slight wobble was there. The spoked wheels were one of the few things I hadn't replaced during the rebuild, and when I had last bought tires at Abernathy's (before I met Andy) the serviceman had warned me of the rust inside and had painted the rim's interior to help postpone the inevitable. From reading the newsgroup I had decided on solid rims. I entertained the notion of trying to find used ones to save money, but Andy couldn't come up with any for a '73-'85 and I was reluctant to buy anything off of Ebay since it could have been in a couple of wrecks. Luckily, nothing from my era showed up on the auction site to tempt me. The only thing that I had seen in the catalogs that looked like they would fit the Whatzit's style was the Sturgis Wheel Super Spoke. A Deja search on the manufacturer found good words from Hog Doctor about their construction, and that was good enough for me.

Another thing that had bothered me was the aftermarket distributor I had. Originally I had a used magneto and no battery, so when I would slow to a stop the lights would go out, which led to the ambulance incident mentioned earlier. It also was a bear to start, usually I would roll it down a hill in second and pop the clutch although my riding buddy got good at straight legging me off the rear crashbar since I didn't have bags at the time. Then I bought a used manual advance distributor, which was neat being able to adjust your timing on the fly, but since I didn't have the handlebar control wire for it, it would slip from time to time. Mostly all the time. So I bought the present auto advance distributor that used the late model points, but timing the ignition was always a pain. From what I had seen, I had two options... The Mallory ignition or the Spyke. The catalogs said the Mallory used mechanical advance weights, I saw that as one more thing to have to maintain, so I did the Deja search routine again for info on the Spyke. Finding good words from both Jinks and Jogos (although there were some opinions to the contrary) I decided to give the single fire a try. But when Andy tried to get the single fire distributor as a kit, he couldn't find it available. After some calls to the manufacturer he was told that around 10% of the single fires used in generator lower ends had problems being intermittant. No one could explain why they didn't want to work in the distributor, but they said they would ship the customer a dual fire coil with directions for rewiring and would never hear back from them so they figured that fixed the problem. So, dual fire it would be, but at least I would be all electronic. And I wouldn't have the yellow Accel coil (that wouldn't fit under a cover) and wires (the only color they came in when I purchased it) glaring out at me from the left side.

The front wheel off, Andy removed the Dunlop 402 from the rim and the rust was apparent. And the "While I'm In There" started. Scrubbing the bead thoroughly might get the rust imbedded in it out and it not have some weird chemical reaction with the new rims, but what the heck, MITM is coming up and I might as well have new rubber, so the decision was made to put a set of Dunlop 491 Elite II's on the tubeless wheels. Of course, with those new wheels, those old brake rotors would look pretty bad, so I might as well get some new ones. I had never measured their thickness, but I did know there was a ridge at the top of them so...

Parts had to be ordered. The phone rang and Andy had to go pick up a motorcycle in Troy, about 20 miles away. I asked if I needed to go and he said that I could stay and answer the phone and R&R the distributor if I wanted to, since I like to work on my bike and know the wiring. All he asked was to just leave the tools I used out, not to try to put them back since he knew where they were supposed to go. A heated shop and a day off to work on my motorcycle on a real lift? Agreed!

Before he left we got the TDC mark lined up in the inspection hole. I removed the old coil and wires, put the new coil on. Spyke was out of black wires and had sent red ones instead, but Andy had insisted on me using a set of black ones he had on the wall. I didn't argue. I switched sides and took the bolts out of the old distributor's base, popped the top and removed the breaker plate. I remembered I didn't have to remove the cylinder head when I put it in, but I wasn't sure how I had went about it. It ended up that I had to pull the front exhaust pushrod and with a couple of taps from a rubber mallet the old distributor was out. About that time Peepers, the killer shop dachshund was looking between the door and me so I figured he needed outside. The shop being on the main drag into town I felt that it was best to hang with him to make sure that he was ok.

Peepers took care of business and we went back inside. I scraped the old gasket off the crankcase. The Spyke Easy Install distributor is 3 pieces, the shaft, the housing and the top cover. The shaft goes in and uses a magneto clamp to secure it to the engine. The housing attaches to the shaft with 3 countersunk allen screws, and then you basically have a nosecone on a shaft that will accept any type of late model ignition; from points with advance weights to fully electronic. At this point, the instructions became a bit confusing as to placement of the pins in the wheel that attaches to the shaft. 4 pins spin around through an optical switch to fire the coil multiple times, the instructions said these are not to be moved. Fine and dandy. But there is an extra pin for coil saturation, and the instructions said the pin needs to go here for distributor installs, and it was there. I knew it didn't need to go way over to the left of the 4 pins, where the 4 holes were for cone motors. But if they shipped it in this hole on the right in a distributor kit, why did the instructions say it needed to be in the second hole? Breaktime.

Andy came back and we discussed it, since neither of us had installed one of these before. He felt it was shipped that way so leave it, I felt that the picture they included in the instructions was correct. After a phone call to Spyke we learned it really didn't matter, but they said do it like the picture. Eyeballing the location of the optical switch on the bottom of the module in relation to the pins on the rotor, I tried to get the shaft into a position that would let the wire exit near the pushrod tubes but not show too much from the front. I pulled the old coil wire out of my wiring harness, but the Spyke harness wouldn't fit and didn't need to go the same direction anyway. So I ran it by itself to the coil where it picked up +12V already at one terminal and returned trigger to the other terminal. Another wire was there for a tach, but I don't have one so it wasn't connected. The rotor plate bothered me, it fit way too tight on the shaft and made it difficult to find where the notch was so Andy got out his deburring tools and cleaned up the inside a little. We were pretty sure it was in the right place before I tightened it down. The module fit above it and I turned the ignition on while Andy rotated the distributor head and watched the static timing LED. Turning counter-clockwise it blinked 4 times, then carefully turning clockwise until it just lights... and the wires exiting out the housing were sitting almost straight out. Oh well, I thought I had it close.

Andy had to leave early, so he gave me a ride home. Parts for the wheels wouldn't be here until Tuesday January 2, 2001. Snow was in the forecast, temps in the teens. I could wait. I wasn't going anywhere on the motorcycle.

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