polabareus
11-11-2004, 12:21 AM
Well, I took the 84 big red hunting this year and ended up having a bit of trouble. I do want to mention that this bike had it's top end rebuilt last october by a local shop. I hunt on my Grandpa's land which is about 300 acres and his land is surrounded by about 1,000 acres of state land and another couple hundred acres of county land. Needless to say, it's in the middle of nowhere up in northern MN. I rode the trike way out into the state land about 2 miles from my Grandpa's house. I stayed out there all morning and by 1 or so I started heading back up to the house. I got about a half mile threw the woods and decide to stop and have a smoke. I puffed my cancer stick and went to get on the trike when I noticed all this dark liquid all over the top of the bottom end of the engine, or behind the cylinder to be more specific. At first I thought it was muddy water or something but when I dipped my finger in it I quickly realized it was oil! I didn't know where it was coming from so I wiped the oil off with a rag I had and started the big red up. I didn't see any oil coming out of anything and I was about to get back on and just go slow and keep my eye on it, when I decided to see what happened if I reved the engine a little. I reved it up and a perfect little arch of oil came spraying out around the gasket where the top end connects to the bottom end. Disbelief quickly changed to anger when I realized, since there was no way to get a truck to where I was, that I would have to push the trike all the way back to the house over uneven, muddy, and just plain crappy ground. That sucked, real bad. I brought the big red to the shop that did the rebuild today and they said they would look at it. They also said that the person who did the work no longer worked there and that several other projects of his had come back with problems too. I also noticed that after the rebuild there seemed to be a loss of power and some odd knocking noise and some smoking that I chalked up to valves and valve seals. Maybe it was something else? Anywho, I'm not mad at the shop that did the work, and I won't be as long as it's fixed properly. Well, that's my hunting story for the year. No, I didn't get a deer. I did hit one of the biggest bucks (honest to god, no embellishment) as it was running across a field about 125 yards away. It ran in the woods and I tracked that sucker for over a half mile in thick brush and downed trees by following little spots of blood but eventually I lost the trail (sucks when there's no snow). I'm thinking it was just a brisket shot and hopefully he'll be there next year for the re-match.