Author: grant

CB750F: Day 24: That Changes Everything

Tonight I really wanted to see if I could make progress like the article did on polishing your aluminum engine case so I bought some Dremel attachments. The results were generally nice, but didn’t get it all the way there. Since I had borrowed the Dremel, I removed some of the crudified paint from the right horn and grip assembly for future painting. At the end of the night I felt good, that it looked pretty decent, even though it is not a perfect mirror finish.
At the end of class Pat told us that this might be the last semester, ever. As such, I’m going to shelf the polishing, and spend spring break acquiring the necessary gear to complete the most important service tasks, eg: brake fluid change, new sprockets and chain, front fork fluid, and more.
At the end of my work, I sprayed down the engine with a very diluted Simple Green mixture to get the carb spray off and ended with using compressed air to get all of that included; I didn’t want anything that the plastic wouldn’t like on there.
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CB750F: Day 23: Engine Polishing Continues

On the way to the shop I stopped at Harbor Freight and bought a 7-pack of 500 grit wet/dry sandpaper, and boy it finishes fast. The “you are going to need patience” advice kicked in tonight. It was so strange, after hand-sanding and also trying out the tiny little brash brush with the Dremel, I thought that it was getting close to the metal but Pat showed me how there was still clear-coat on there. What?!
You can’t see it, and it is very shiny, but you can feel it. It feels like the fine grain of a leather jacket, and it has kind of a different finish than the edges where you can feel that all of the clear-coat is gone. Numerous breaks were necessary, and the dish-washing gloves helped. The Dremel was pretty helpful for digging crud out of some of the tight spots, and I’ll need to buy some new tips.
Pat brought in his recommended choke and throttle lube, Remington Wonder Lube.
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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.