Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory

Over a long holiday weekend, I decided to go do something a little different.  I hadn’t been out of the country yet this year so I decided to take my Honda Pacific Coast motorcycle to British Columbia for the weekend.  Canada is just a few hours away from Oregon yet this is the first time I’ve ever taken a vehicle to the Great White North.  Why did I never do this before?!

The first stop after I went over the border was at the National Research Council Canada’s Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory.  I really like checking out different interesting sites used for astronomy and other space-related things.

This is a really interesting little facility.  It is much smaller than the Goldstone Deep Space Network facilities but no less impressive.  Rather than only talking to spacecraft, this facility does many different types of research.

This big thing is the CHIME telescope.  It is mapping hydrogen in the universe.

This is part of a tunable long baseline antenna setup.

All of these poles are from a 22 MHz telescope that has been offline for many years.  It helped map the universe at one point in the past.

The main operations building and the big dish.

Looking down at another telescope array.

One of the two solar trackers at the facility.

Back out with my motorcycle getting ready to go.

This is a really cool facility and well worth the visit.

Stupid fuel leaks on the PC800

I rode my Honda Pacific Coast PC800 motorcycle to work today.  It’s been running well enough the last few months but I hadn’t really taken it on a long jaunt.  As I was going through Sherwood, I started smelling gas.  By the time I got to work, the bike was peeing out gas.

I disassembled the bike behind the office to try and fix the issue.  A little premium gasoline and some seafoam, and I was able to get the float valve unstuck that was causing the float bowls to overflow and dump fuel out of the vent port on the back side of the carb.  However, I can tell this problem is going to keep coming back.  It’s time to search for a new carb.  I’ve rebuilt this carb enough times that I’m getting sick of it.

A surprising gas leak on the PC800

Tonight when I came home from seeing The Hateful Eight at our local Alamo Drafthouse, I smelled some gas. I went down and checked on my fuel injected PC800 to find a small puddle of a mix of gasoline and oil under the bike. I immediately started draining the tank while I removed some plastics to try and determine what was going on.
 
No leaks around the fuel sensor. No leaks around the fuel pump/filter/gas tank outlet. No leaks around the piping going up to the throttle bodies. No leaks on the injectors. But wait a minute…
 
When I took the airbox off, some gas sloshed out of the airbox! It turns out there was quite a bit of gas in the airbox. Some of you might remember that I connected the vent line from the high pressure fuel pump to the airbox. It appears that the airbox and air intake were sucking gas up from the pump the last time I ran the bike (a couple weekends ago). This gas stewed in the airbox eating away at some RTV sealant until it leaked. Or maybe the gas got into the engine oil via the crankcase breather hose and leaked out somewhere lower on the engine (I’ve got a slow oil leak that’s been with the bike for the last 30,000 miles).
 
I’ll do a little more sleuthing tomorrow once the residual fuel evaporates around the bike to find the place where the leak came out to make sure it was some RTV that I had used to seal a hole on the bottom of the airbox and not something else.
 
Luckily I have a California-style gas cap (the one with the hose barb) laying around that I can plumb the vent line from the fuel pump to. That should solve that problem, assuming that was the problem.
 
Always something exciting in my garage!