Sunday 13 July 2014

Day 15 July 13th Mileage. Location Ishin Russia

Up slightly later as some people stayed up drinking into the night, then down for breakfast which Paul and Dave confidently ordered eggs and bacon.
What came was 3 fried eggs for each person with the now familiar chunks of Hleb ( bread) but no bacon. Then when we were all tucking into our eggs they delivered pork and rice exactly as we had it last night for main course!

We then set off and after just 50 miles Paul's bike started to misfire again in the rain. We were parked at the side of the road where the verge was very wet muddy and slippery and everyone had trouble just getting their bikes to stand up and remain stable.

We sprayed all the obvious areas on the bike with WD40 and because the place we were stopped was not safe we limped along the road until we came to a side road junction where we could start to investigate the fault in depth.


Then for five hours we stripped the bike down three times and changed every component that we thought could have been a possible cause. The fault only appears some 5 mins after setting off and seems to be triggered by water ingress that then dries out and the bike seems ok again. We stripped down every connection and traced out and checked every earth connection associated with the ignition circuit. At about 5pm we seemed to have an improvement and we set off to try and find accommodation some 20km away only to have the problem return when it rained again.

Whilst we were doing these repairs locals kept coming over and asking us where we were going. At one point a man on a horse came over just to ask for cigarettes!
Then some Russian bikers stopped to say hello and see if we needed help. They were called Uri, Chani and Pelo and two of them were on their way to the Alti region where we are going to get into Mongolia.


We then limped into a town called Ishim and found a nice hotel. We proceeded to strip the bike again and this time did all the diagnostic checks and tests recommended in the workshop manual which confirmed that Paul's coil, leads and pulse sender were giving identical readings to the units on Dave's bike. We then swapped the coil, HT lead and plug cap from Dave's bike onto Paul's and vice versa. On putting the lead onto Dave's bike we shortened the HT lead by about 1/2" to make a tighter connection on the plug end.
We started Paul's bike an squirted water into every place where we thought it could be a problem with no fault developing. Next both bikes were then taken back on the road and they located a deep (10") puddle about 50 metres long and spend 30 minutes getting both bike drenched completely. Still no problem with either bike.

So now it's back on the road tomorrow and see if the problem returns.

Working in the hotel there is a Russian man who speaks some English and he has helped us translate the menu. Which he then brought back translated into English and asked if we would check it for mistakes.
We took a photo of us all drinking beer on the hotel balcony



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