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CHAPTER
FOUR - 18
When starting any
engine using a kick start, you usually follow a starting procedure that
has been carefully prepared and proven over several years. I have had my
own starting procedure which started in the 1960’s.
I always placed the
bike on the stand in an area where it can’t damage anything, momentary
lapses in concentration can end up with the bike leaping across the lawn
rider-less as you forget to put it in neutral.
Grovel in your pockets
to find the ignition key, only to find that you have a hole in the
pocket and the key has dropped into the lining of the jacket. Retrieving
it can be costly, not only to the jacket that you have now torn apart to
get the key, but your once relaxed demeanour has now turned into stress
which has shortened your lifespan by at least 2 hours.
Make sure there’s
petrol in the tank, it’s the one thing that modern motor vehicles have
and the older ones don’t, and that’s a petrol gauge. Our normal way is
to take off the cap, look inside and shake the bike about a bit. If
there is sloshing in the tank but you can’t see it, you know you have at
least enough to get to the garage. Of course in the process of sloshing
the fuel about in the tank, you have now disturbed all the bits of dirt
and rust which now makes its way to the very soon blocked jets. Good
tip: make sure you have a filter on the tank valve or an inline filter
before it gets to the carburettors. Blowing out the jets on the side of
the road is no fun, is it chaps. Hands up, who’s been there?
Using the kick start
you slowly move the engine around until the compression is at its
highest. Here now lies a dilemma, which thankfully the brain does
automatically. If you had to do the next calculation manually, the
choices would be much more frightening. I always remember my old AJS
500cc single, the most important thing to do when starting was make sure
there was nothing sharp within 5 feet. The second most important thing
was to hold open the half compression valve, and then kick the bike
over. The bike would normally start very well, but if you were
distracted by anything, your mates talking to you or you did a little
macho starting in front of the girls, the brain went to mush and I found
on a few occasions that before I knew what had happened I was flat on my
back. The bike
 kicked
back where I forgot the valve and threw me over the handlebars. Cool, it
was not, painful, it was for several days. There were two ways of
starting, either straddled across the bike or stood on one side, across
the bike you ended up on your back and stood to one side, your knee came
up and tried to break your jaw. Thank God for our Russian friends who
came up with the idea of a reasonably low compression engine and
attempted to place the kick start operation where it could not be fatal
if all went wrong. (I wonder why they went down that road, maybe they
too had several dislocated knees at one point and thought “sod this,
lets think of an easierski way”, in Russian of course).
In these latter days I
tend to make sure the truss is pulled up to another notch, just in case.
Anyway, once the compression is right, you open the throttle slightly to
allow the engine to get enough fuel through to ignite.
Place your foot on the
kick start lever and push down with all the weight that your body and
leg muscles can muster.
Having done this, the
engine fires and then bursts into life. Your heart races as you listen
to the roar of the exhaust gasses escaping through the silencers; (once
you remove the baffles)
You open the throttle
slightly listening to the engine pulsating with power. Now comes a rush
of excitement knowing that you have a finely tuned machine that can
outrun the flash of a speed camera. |
