Day 19 Minehead

 Headed out from the campsite and aimed for Exmoor. Riding over the hills I ran out of fuel much earlier than expected. With some investigation it looked like either the float had gotten stuck or the fuel tap was leaking. Since I hadn’t stripped and cleaned the carb and float bowl for a while I decided to give the whole system a strip down in case that fixed the problem. I also investigated the fuel tap and found that one of the corks was absolutely knackered and the integral filter was pretty gammy also. When I put this all back together unfortunately the fuel then stopped flowing so it was a struggle to start the bike. In all the fighting to start the bike the kickstart fell off. This was just the cherry on top and really put a damper on the mood. Luckily I managed to get fuel flowing but it resulted in fuel pouring out of the tap when it was turned on. Luckily there was a petrol station only a few miles away and I was able to limp in. I then proceeded to investigate the leak further. The owner of the petrol station very kindly gave me a hand with stripping everything down and even filled me up for free, he then followed me up the steep hill the other side of the village to make sure it all went smoothly. With his help I was able to make it to Minehead where I visited the lifeboat station and made some calls to sort out my issues. Dad had a friend with a field I could camp in near Bridgwater and there was a member of the Sunbeam club who had got In contact offering help near Bridgwater as well.

The next day with everyone’s help I had my kickstart welded up and Tony Pashley of the Sunbeam club had given me a new cork for the tap and also glued up my oil pump some more too. I then went to the Langport bike night where I saw a whole load of cool old and modern bikes.

The broken kickstart 




Stripping the clutch in order to get the shaft out in order to weld it back together in the morning 

At the Langport bike night

Tony with the bike and the re-glued pump


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