Patience is a Virtue

Old Faithful Gets What She Deserves—Disassembly Virtually Complete

Completely Stripped Frame Sans Swingarm

I have completed the dismantling and have started collecting the bits and pieces for the "paint pile," the "chrome pile," and the "powdercoat pile." The issue now is fudning the continuing work. Luckily, I have a cousin who is a very talented painter and he has agreed to repaint for me.

Here's the "Paint Pile."

While saving up for the paint, chrome, and powdercoat I need to search out the parts required to put this baby back to orginal. One of the hardest things I though would be to find woudl be a new right-hand 350A carburetor, becasue the 350As were used on only a small number of first year models like mine. The 350As were soon swapped out, along with a cam change with 3Cs, and then 3Ds which they stuck with for quite a while.

As luck would have it my first eBay search turned up a pair of 350As, but with a high starting bid. I reluctantly passed them up and looked on, but with no success. A few days later, I returned to my search on eBay to find that the original auction for the carbs had expired with no winner and now was up again with a starting bid of half of what it was the first go-around. I bid a dollar more than the starting bid and a few days later the carbs were mine! I only needed the right side one, but it sure won't be a bad thing to have a spare slide and parts from another one. These have bad floats but otherwise look fine, and floats are available after-market, so this should fix the old girl up just fine. I'm looking forward to opening that box.

Now, to find a set of gauges (or fix these) and a shift linkage.

But first, family vacation calls, so there will be a brief interruption to progress on Old Faithful. We all need a break and my brother needs his household belongings moved to Inman, South Carolina, where he has bought a house, so I am driving them up with the family following a day or so later. It will be fun to play once again the Blue Ridge and Smokies, but alas, this time by car.

But the vacation will provide me with ample opportunity to play some with a new-to-me photographic technique (High Dynamic Range photography) that hopefully will punch up my ride photos. HDR is a process where three (or more) pictures are taken of the same subject with bracketed exposures. Then the images are processed together to form one high density image. This allows much more infromation to be displayed in the image (like our minds remember the scene) where typical washed out skies are replaced with blue ones and lost shadow details are restored. The little I've played with it so far has been fun and the coming week I hope to create some master...ok, well, um, some better pictures.

Here's One of My First Attemtps at HDR Photography. My Triumph Bonneville T100 above Bob's Landing on Crooked Lake, Lake Wales, Florida.