Pulled the bike up on the lift to get her ready for Dragon time. Oil and filter change (metal found on the magnet was slightly less than in years past, my engine must like the ZDDP booster as the miles were a lot more this year and a lot harder miles to boot).
Stage 2 cam has settled in finally, I was technically within spec on both intake and exhaust valves, but I took them both back down to .003" anyway as the intakes were up at .004" and the exhausts were closer to .005". I consider the Stage 2 cam to be reliable now as it has quit the rapid increase on the valve clearance nonsense and is acting more like a normal routine maintenance set up now.
Changed out the polyfill on the air filter, once again on a 2" thick matting air born dirt is only making it into the first 1/2" of the oil impregnated filter thickness after a fully year and a half of use. Technically, I should have put it back in and ran it another year but I wanted to play with it some more.
I noted that in the heavy air flow areas the oil was getting thin and the dirt was going in deeper as the trap oil wasn't as plentiful. I theorize the oil is very slowly evaporated by the air flow as gear oil is volatile just like gas or kerosene (just a whole lot slower to evaporate as the molecules are much longer and heavier).
This time I attempted to improve on the heavy gear oil as an oil impregnation by using a liquid carrier light grease as a matrix builder. White lithium spray grease by Snap-on from Autozone was tried and as far as the loose spray in application went the idea worked as intended.
The white lithium sprayed on and penetrated like the Mazola frying pan oil did, but the evaporation process was totally different. The lithium grease is cut with kerosene to make it mobile and when the carrier (propane from the smell of it) quickly evaporated the matting was a soggy mess with the kerosene. This kerosene separated from the lithium white grease it was cutting and the kerosene dripped out for like 2 days which was totally gross to watch as the white mess was oozing clear stuff jest like road rash does and muffler burns do after the outer bubble of skin bursts and comes off -- yeck.
(flash back to scraped up legs, muffler burns & such from years past)
When the kerosene finally evaporated, the lithium grease was sort of stiff and hard so I added some 90-180 gear oil to the white impregnated matting and it was assimilated by lithium grease matrix jest like the Borg would do -- they became one.
Now NONE of the heavy gear oil came dripping back out of the matrix after several days of observation. The white grease became oil tinted uniformly throughout the entire mass, so the heavy oil has osmosed into the grease/soap binder. The matting is now quite soft and flexible now and when you touch it the yellowish grease that comes off on your finger is quite sticky and soft and thick.
The end result looks usable, but the process was slow and somewhat of a pain in the ass.
Next time I'll try chain lube. PJ1 would likely do this same sort of thing but would likely only take overnight to dry.
This weeks work was to tear the new rear tire off the bike, it had a slow leak that apparently was air simply going right through the cheap chinese inner tube material (no leak bubbles were able to be detected in the tube when held under soapy clear water. No pinch marks, no folds, no scuffs -- just would lose about 10 psi in a months time).
3 new inner tubes are on the way, so I have me some time to figure out how to rig up my cheap, trunk mounted front wheel grabbing bike hauler thing-a-ma-jig.
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