Here is a little update on the old Barnfind bike , as I saw that the last time I wrote about this one was 3 years ago. It has turned out to be my favourite traveling bike in the last few years and has taken me to 3 Tripouts in the UK, the Chopperbash in Belgium a few times, KKF in Germany, many trips in Holland and a few weeks ago on a 2000 km roadtrip through Belgium, France (Linkert Attack) and Luxembourg.

Before the roadtrip to France I made a few small changes; replaced the seat pivot bushing as the seat had become quite wobbly, replaced the front brake caliper bushings as the caliper was rattling and most visible of all the mods I tried a different (Bates Baja) front tire.

Allthough the tire looks like an offroad tire it has vastly improved the handling of the bike, mostly because it has a rounder profile than the Avon I guess, with that one the bike tended to weave a bit if there were length grooves in the road.

This was before the roadtrip in France, the bike ran like a champ but perhaps because of the hot weather it went from sweating a little bit of oil to sweating a lot of oil through the valvecover gasket of the front head, so after the trip the whole left side of the bike and my left leg were covered in oil..

I removed the heads to replace the valvecover gaskets and tried to clean off the oil from the heads. Brakecleaner did not work and neither did soaking in degreaser for a night, so I ended up having them blasted with dry-ice, worked great!

I gave the valvecovers a quick polish while I was at it, then I reassembled the bike with all new gaskets and decided to repaint my pipes as well as I had bits of my boot melted on to them and they were also starting to rust a bit, so I sanded them down to bare metal and after a good degreasing painted them with heatproof paint. As I write this the bike is running again, no leaks yet, and in a few days we ride to the UK for another Tripout!