Day 19 & 20 & 21
Monday 24th Aug – Wednesday 26th Aug
We ended up spending three days in the campground in Ponca so I could rebuild my engine, clear out my exhaust and a few other things.
It turned out that the piston was fine but a high pressure oil seal had perished, so I replaced that and the piston while I had it all apart. There was also a hell of a lot of carbon build up so I spent quite some time chipping away at that. Next time I’ll stop riding and wait for the piston to come to me!!
I needed to get the cylinder honed so went in to town and found a shop called Mike Duran Racing, where Mike was extremely helpful and did it for free, and helped us with a few other things while we were there.
After burning so much oil my exhaust had got pretty coked up, so I wandered off in to town to get some lye to clear it out. I was left rather amused when I went in to a plumbing store and was told that I wouldn’t be able to find any lye due to meth production! I found that rather random, being from England, but discovered that they were telling the truth when after several hours I eventually found some locked away in a little cupboard in a hardware store! It kept being stolen off the shelves so they only stock a small amount of it and have to keep it locked away; what is the world coming to?!
After leaving the exhaust to soak overnight we got quite a lot of carbon out of it, and I finally put my bike back together and had her running like a dream.
Oh and while I was busy working away a really lovely lady came and brought us a massive slab of watermelon each, thanks lovely lady!
We ended up leaving Ponca fairly late but enjoyed a beautiful evening ride to Blackwell lake, where we camped for the night.
It was horribly hot and sticky but thankfully we had our pocket shower and a friendly lady directed us to a tap nearby to fill it.