Tuesday, April 21st

Another fun day with the motor bikes! Today, we began our day by going to second period at 8 AM. After that, we went to Eli's house, where we planned to ride the bikes. However, the batteries for the electric bike weren't completely charged yet, so we decided to get organized on our reimbursements while we waited for the batteries to charge. We made a list of what we spent, and had receipts to match them. Once the electric bike was full, and the gas bike was fueled, we decided to ride our bikes to Lovett from Eli's house. Eli lives across the street from New York Pizza Exchange, so Lovett is about a mile away. This was definitely the most fun part of the day because of how much we were accepted on the road. Eli and I slowly inched our way onto the road, but expected cars to swerve past us and give us a mean look. Surprisingly, our bikes were actually able to keep up with the cars, and stay at a pace where the cars felt no need to pass us. Today, I was on the motor bike, and I can tell you from experience that there is nothing like riding a gas powered motorized bike. The sound it made as I rolled through Vinings was amazing.
Once we made it to Lovett, we headed down to the track, and this is where we had issues. We decided to time the bike on the straight part of the track and figure out how fast the bike was going. We used the electric bike first, which clocked a time of 8.9 seconds for a hundred meter distance. However, when we tried the gas powered bike, we had some difficulty getting it started. We couldn't figure out what was wrong, but the motor would turn on, then cut off. We were able to get somewhat of a reading on it once Eli made a few adjustments to the bike. However, eventually the bike shut off again. After about two hours of riding the bikes and tinkering with the gas powered bike, we figured out the problem. The carburetor was not securely fastened to the bike, and therefore was slipping loose on the motor. This may seem like a simple fix, but Eli and I actually foresaw this issue coming. When we were assembling the bike, we realized the clamp holding down the carburetor was not nearly sufficient enough, but we thought it would work out since the clamp was standard for the kit. However, as we learned today, this was not the case. We spent time at Eli's house coming up with ways around the issue, but eventually subjected to calling Patrick. We plan to meet with him tomorrow.
After we found what we thought was a solution to the issue, Eli and I talked about the day. We went over what we discovered today, including distance lasted on each bike, speed of each bike, and issues with each bike. We then planned our day for tomorrow and hope we are able to fix the bike. Pretty awesome day until the carburetor incident.