The Mystery Machine

We inherited a lot of junk when we bought our house three years ago - like two freezers full of ammo, two kegs of black powder, tubes of liquid Mercury, a gun ... and an engine analyzer?

Why would I care about this Magical Machine of Mystery? Well, I don't have a tachometer on my bike, so I have no clue what the engine speed is. Even though I had the carb put together and working OK, I had no way of tuning it with the air and idle adjust needles.

Folks kept telling me "I do it by ear" but I have no clue how things should sound - so that was not only cocky advice, but totally useless to a newbie like myself.

Of course the engine analyzer didn't come with directions, so I hit the internet to try to understand the bugger. It was surprisingly difficult. For reading RPM, the thing has a black clip, a red one, and a green one. I did a butt-ton of research and still I just went with my gut in the end.

Red clip - positive terminal on battery. Black - negative terminal on battery. Green - the lead that comes in and attaches to the points.

It's a single cylinder bike which means when I have the analyzer at its lowest setting (4 cylinders) I needed to take the reading and multiply by 4. So when it read 310RPM, it really was 1240RPM. Check the awesomeness...
The gauge is from another era - but what-ev's ... its bitchin.

The problem with using this beauty was threefold -

1) The bike or the analyzer was not super stable so the needle drifted around by a bit

2) The bike seemed fairly insensitive to changes in the two needles. Yeah I could go way off the mark and it would stall or sound nutty, but it wasn't like I could tune +/-50RPM, which would have been fun.

3) Gabriel was *supposed* to be keeping track (on paper, no less) of the # of 1/4 turns out or in and recording the corresponding reading of the gauge on the mystery machine. I, being on the other side of the bike turning the screws, trusted him with this task. After about 15 minutes, he turns around and asks me... "How many turns total out did you go?"

Really Gabe? Why don't you tell me - seeing as you have all the freaking data!!!

This is why, folks, an engineer and an artist do not work well together on projects such as this.

What the what!!??

Anyway I succeeded at getting annoyed with my husband, so the day wasn't a total loss. And I totally cracked the mystery of the analyzer wide open. Take that, all you 1960's smarties.