Welding up the O2 exhaust sensor bung on the PC800

20150521_163743

After my little incident with a backfire causing the JB-Welded exhaust O2 sensor bung to blow out of my PC800, I decided it was time to weld up the bung properly.

20150521_164209

As luck would have it, Andrew has a portable welder and volunteered to do some welding for me.

20150521_164226

We had to take off the JB Weld from the exhaust to give a clean surface to weld to.

20150521_165726

Then Andrew tacked on the O2 sensor bung with the exhaust in place.


20150521_170311
20150521_180547

Then we removed the exhaust from the bike.  The front cylinder exhaust pipe would not detach from the resonator chamber so we ended up cutting it off with a hacksaw.  Not the most ideal situation but it got the muffler assembly off.

20150521_180817

Then we setup to weld the O2 sensor bung onto the exhaust system.

20150521_181348

20150522_091949

Next I put the exhaust back on the bike.  I found some exhaust pipe of the right diameter to barely slip over the existing pipe.  I used a couple exhaust band clamps to make the seal but the front one wouldn’t hold properly.
20150522_092005

At least the O2 sensor is in the right place now.

IMG_20150522_093932:nopm:

At this point I also discovered that my front cylinder spark plugs were fouled.  I replaced them with Iridium plugs that I had been saving for a special occasion.  It was probably 40,000 miles since the last time these plugs were changed and my fuel injection experimentation certainly hasn’t helped them any.

IMG_20150522_100448:nopm:

With the exhaust still leaking from the right clamp, I had to find another solution.

20150522_113353

Thus I made some soup for lunch with a particularly tall can.

20150522_134932And now I have an exhaust patch made with a soup can, exhaust putty (basically furnace cement), and exhaust tape (basically fiberglass mesh).  It all holds well and I haven’t had another exhaust leak.  Certainly this isn’t the preferred method of rejoining a PC800 exhaust to the bike but it’s what I had to do to make it all work.  The other points where I could have disconnected the front exhaust tube were equally rusted in place as the rear disconnect point.

Now back to tuning…

First Test Ride of My Honda Pacific Coast on Fuel Injection

After literally years of work, I finally pulled my Honda Pacific Coast out of the garage to test it out for the first time ever on fuel injection.  The tuning went well up until I hit a slight snag.  I had the exhaust cover sitting in the trunk during the test ride.  That cover ended up hitting the battery cutoff switch that I installed several years ago.  When the bike lost power, it backfired.  The backfire blew out the wideband O2 sensor due to a JB Weld failure.  The moral of the story is that I need to weld the exhaust bung in place.  A friend is going to come over and do the welding later this week so that I can get back to my tuning next week.

 

After so many years of work, the bike is FINALLY starting to run with fuel injection.  I do believe this makes me the first ever in the history of Honda Pacific Coast motorcycles to ride one using fuel injection.  Huzzah!