Over the past several days, Calgary has been blanketed by smoke from forest fires burning in British Columbia. The haze in the air from all this smoke has been quite dense, limiting visibility to just a few kilometres at times – but that isn’t actually what I’m writing about today. The blue haze in our small area of town was from the successful start-up of my rebuilt 1973 GT750 ! 
Needless to say, I was pretty pleased about the whole thing, and while it showed up a few niggling issues still to be sorted out, for the most part it was a complete success. Best of all I suppose, was that it started on the first push of the starter-motor button and when I double checked the ignition timing on all three sets of points, they were spot on. After some minor carburettor adjustment, the engine sounded strong and was idling smoothly.
I will have to take apart and try again to fix the fuel petcock, as I still do not have a good shut-off on the vacuum operated valve assembly, but that is minor. New ones are still available if all else fails, so it is currently more of an annoyance at this stage and will not slow down further testing and engine run-in, although it will need to be working properly before I try to have the bike certified for the road.
Next on the agenda is the finish off the front brakes, tidy up the the control cable routing, finish the seat and attend to a small oil leak on the right side. The right side engine cover was not in great shape on the gasket surface, but it was the original one so I really wanted to reuse it. While I had lapped the faces as best I could, there were still a couple of damaged spots that it now appears the gasket could not properly seal. I will probably just use a small a bit of JB Weld to fill in these nicks on the joint faces and that should do the trick.
The seat will be visiting Calgary Seat Cover on Monday. I have a reproduction seat cover, and I was going to re-cover the seat myself as it isn’t really a difficult job. However when I did a dry fit, I found that with age, the seat foam had shrunk and hardened enough that the shape was not correct, plus of course it would not be very comfortable to sit on ! The folks at Calgary Seat Cover will re-skin the seat with a thin layer of fresh, high density foam to restore the original shape, and also install the cover for a very reasonable price so it makes good sense to just let them do it for me. I will install the stainless steel seat trim myself and it should be good to go !
Next stop (sorry for the pun) are the brakes !