Author: grant

CB750F: Day 22: Engine Polishing Begins

Tonight I came prepared with 600 grit wet/dry sandpaper and quickly realized two things: sandpaper doesn’t last very long and I had more work to do with the wheel brushes. It was very iterative work, the more work I did and thought that I was finished the more I noticed that more needed to be addressed. It helped to take breaks and jump around to different areas to work on, because, well you do need to be quite patient.
Without pulling the engine I still could reach plenty. I decided to do just the sides and top and tonight I think that I got close to everything I want finished with the brass brushes leaving the sandpaper for next time.
Took some pics at the end, the engine, though rough and needing to be sanded down, does look a little more refreshed than before.
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Ontological Management with Protege OWL and Jess

Part of my quest to learn more about rules-engines involved the desire to find a really good approach for knowledge management. The short story is that when you work with a subject matter expert (SME), you need to find some good way to capture the domain data and behavior, the rules, actions, and everything else necessary to make sense of things. This need isn’t unique to knowledge engineering and AI, of course, all engineers face it, especially software engineers. Object-oriented analysis and design is one good approach, and there seems to be a lot of overlap. One interesting outcrop of the need is the Insurance Application Architecture, an OO model (and more) to help insurance companies manage their intellectual assets.
The client developed a custom tool to manage the concepts (although customizable tools like MagicDraw certainly are an option, too), and I had always wondered if there was some standard way of approaching that kind of problem. While researching rules-engines I was delighted to learn about knowledge engineering, the semantic web, and consequently ontological engineering and management.
Specifically, digging into the tool Protege-OWL, I found something quite similar to what I’d seen developed as custom. Although it is too soon to say they are equivelant, it is pretty interesting to find out. The fact that there is a Jess plugin (JessTab) to let you play, even better!

Rules-Engines Recommended Wikipedia Reading

You know that advice “trust but verify”? It couldn’t be more true when it comes to the realm of applied or narrow artificial intelligence, specifically with respect to rules-engines. There is more dis-information out there on rules-engines than on any other tech topic that I’ve ever researched. It is really, really shocking the amount of inaccurate, confused, and just plain wrong information out there.
The problem with it is that it makes it harder for people who want to learn more about the topic by wasting their time and presenting the topic as very, very shallow and simplistic. It makes rules-engines very, very easy to blow off as sort of a joke and nothing more than pricey business rules engines. That is sad, too, because rules-engines provide a very nuanced and special programming style all their own that every programmer should at least learn.
In order to avoid this, I tried to diligently record all of the materials that I have found valuable, including Wikipedia pages. My hope in sharing them is that they provide some baseline for getting started, that worked for at least one person. My approach was to read and bookmark internally to the site, and also do research out of the site. It wasn’t a race, I took time to take it in, reading as many times as necessary for it to make sense, including re-reading it over as many days or weeks as I saw fit. The topics are grouped into sections that are somewhat logically related, and definitely do relate to one another, and try to help make it easier to access the topics in the following group.
Rules-engines comes from a rich computational heritage, but strangely get a fraction of a percentage of coverage even in comparison to seemingly fringe topics like Lisp, so I hope that you have as much fun reading as I did, it was really enlightening!
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CB750F: Day 21: Engine Polishing Begins?

Intrigued by the Vintage Japanese Motorcycle Club article about using a fine brass wheel brush, very slowly, on the aluminum engine case to produce a fine and smooth finish I tracked down the brushes at Lowes and picked them up, they are the same ones used in the article, great. Before starting I wanted to remove the old cylinder carb connectors and clean the engine up. The connectors were rock solid hard; through a combination of tin-snips, razor blades, and picks, and patience, I got them off.
To clean the case, I emptied four cans of carb cleaner along with brushing it intermediately. Before starting I had lined up paper towel on the life to capture the dirt, and in the end it was totally filthy and dirty. For some reason, I failed to take a picture. Some of the carb cleaner got in the engine exhaust ports; and Pat said that it was OK.
Before starting with the brass wheel I took a “before” picture, and then removed the shift lever and cleaned it, and the brushed the side cover. It is cleaned up, but not soft and supple like the article. Bummer, well now I’m committed. Took a last picture of the other side for reference.
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CB750F: Day 20

  • Realized that I ought to post as of the date of when the work occurred and will do so moving forward.
  • Got the front sprocket count, 15 16. The crank case was filthy, 4mm think of chain oil and gunk. Cleaned it up.
  • Tried to take a photo to show the shifter lever height.
  • Cleaned up the engine hangers.
  • Couldn’t find fine brass wheel brushes anywhere; will research online.
  • Verified that fuel line fits carbs.
  • Tidied up; the number of parts and supplies has again multiplied.
  • Confirmed that WordPress reverses the image order regardless of how I select the files. This is undesirable since the images are out of order in relation to the post itself; need to find a fix.

CB750F: Day 19

Tonight was a very “in the flow” kind of night.

  • Inspected the 30A fuse. It is present, along with a backup.
  • The carb insulators that connect the cylinder head to the cars need to be replaced, they are rock hard, I think I will have to cut them off. Figured I may as well clean the metal bands.
  • The air cleaner connectors were filthy too, so I cleaned those. Apparently you don’t really need a sealer between them and the airbox, but some people use it.
  • The airbox needed a little more cleaning, just old filth.
  • The chain and both sprockets need replacing. The chain is out of measure by the guide, has kinks in it, and hangs way too low. The rear sprocket has the chain links (88) sitting in it on the top of the peak (38)!
  • Cleaned the air filter and let it air dry in the furnace (aka classroom).
  • Nitrile glove evaluation: The generics from Wal-Mart break very quickly. The MidKnight are a little better, but also break quickly. The DermaLite are excellent; you can dig chain grease off the chain guard with your fingernails and the finger won’t break until maybe 15 minutes later which is way beyond the normal use case.
  • An oil change awaits!

CB750F: Day18

Ran out of time last week so here is a picture of the reassembled rack of carburetors. For the heck of it, re-checked the previously 1-finger-tightened float bowl screws, and they were not as tight as I had left them. Re-tightened them. Decided that I had better replace the air filter so as not to gross-up these immaculate carbs. Found out that it is reusable, great. Why are there insect remains in the air cleaner box? They and the grime and crap need to be removed, so out came the brake cleaner, even cleaned up the shifter lever. Decided to re-check the carb holder (shrouds that hold the carbs on the engine manifold) and they were somehow even harder than last year. They are rock hard and must be replaced.

CB750F: Day 17

The carburetor bodies are back together and 1&2 and 3&4 have been paired together. It isn’t obvious but reading ahead reveals that the choke tab spring attaches on one end to the 1&2 body and the other on the 3&4 body. The build guide recommended hanging the parallel end on the tab as you join the pairs, and that worked fine. After testing the operation, the choke tab spring wasn’t wound tightly enough, so an additional one round was all it took. The helper picks were my best friend here; though a paper-clip probably would have been fine. The operation cycled fine for 9 times, so it seemed OK. The top and bottom rail went in fine… checking the choke operation every single time after each torquing according to the order. Learned about a tiny thing, the difference between two 4mm allen key drivers, the notched makes it easy slip! With everything aligned, I red loc-tited the choke plate screws checking them off along the way. Learned on the first one that if you torque to half-way between the min and max of the service manual spec, that you will strip out the bolt…grrrrr.