Alan, Mark and I put in a 14 hour day on Saturday, working from 8:00am to 10:00pm. Lots of little things needed doing like re-mounting the fuel and air tanks, aligning the rear axle, installing the driver's fire system, etc. etc. We had been hoping to start the engine, but getting all the electrical and fuel systems working took too long, we start it next week. We did complete basically everything in front of the firewall, which was the seatbelt, steering column, windows, etc. Mark spent the morning fabricating the fuel and air tank mounts, and welded them in. They needed to move back because they were too close to the Hayabusa exhaust pipe. Late in the evening, we started to align the rear axle. Over the winter, we had converted the disk brake to a taper-lock hub, which gets a much better grip on the axle than the old hub did. The down side is that alignment is a sort of hit & miss game. We had to install it about 3 or 4 times before it was right where we wanted it. Unfortunately, we galled a bolt in the process, and had to cut it off with a sawzall.

James and Mark cut off the galled brake bolt.

We also had to re-align the rear sprocket. It went faster than the brake, but still took a long time. There's still a big list of things to do, but most are small jobs, and hopefully, we can finish them next weekend.

The fun of the weekend was spoiled a little by the announcement from Mark's work that there would be a large layoff on Monday, and sure enough, Mark got the bad news yesterday. If anyone on this list has an opening for a maintenance supervisor or sr. worker, please let Mark know. He has quite an impressive set of skills from welding to hazardous waste management.
 

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