Читать книгу No One Said It Would Be Easy - Des Molloy - Страница 25

18

Gestation

from a four-gallon tin I had and she was tickled … a near-technical term relating to evidencing that fuel has reached the right part of the carburetor … and she was kicked, and kicked, and kicked again. For an engine to run it needs only air, fuel and a spark. These do need to be in the right volumes at the right time … but that is what Roly was for. Our efforts were rewarded by silence, graveyard-like silence. There was no sign of life in the corpse. Too late at night to do anything more we both went to bed grumpy and disappointed.

Next evening, still no life could be coaxed from her, despite there appearing to be a nice fat, blue spark. In frustration, Samantha was pushed out into the road in front of No 46 and then launched down the hill. This was an exercise we’d done dozens of times at home with numerous recalcitrant bikes, but never with one that seemed to be throwing out great gobs of electricity. She chuffed quietly down the hill with the engine spinning over but with no reward what so ever. Optimistically we kept pushing and trying a variety of throttle openings and gears … until we were right at the bottom of the hill. Of course, this meant a laborious joint-effort to push her back up to home-base and once again we went to bed pretty grumpy and disappointed.

Fuel flow was checked, the magneto was checked, valve timing and ignition timing were both confirmed as being what the book said. We were flummoxed. Roly was confused as a single cylinder engine with a magneto is as simple as mechanical things get. No battery is needed, as a magnetic field is ‘broken’ by points opening and closing as the armature spins around creating a spark. Even I could understand that … but why wasn’t she showing any signs of life? You can have instances of a spark being able to be evidenced when ‘outside’ but once under compression in the combustion chamber being insufficient to ignite the mixture. Surely not! Not with the big, fat blue spark we were getting, irrespective of spark plug.

It wasn’t until most of the week had been wasted before Roly twigged that the fuel I had tipped in from my ‘petrol’ tin was in fact ‘red diesel’. It came back to me. I’d acquired some ‘not for public road use’ red diesel from my building site the winter before as spare for the London taxi. Roly felt that he should have smelt it or noticed the oiliness of the diesel and I had been a pillock presuming that if it was in a petrol tin, it must be petrol.

The count-down was stressing us a little. It is wonderful to be able to revel in the ‘only seven more sleeps till … ’ when you are ready and waiting, but nerve-wracking