Halvard Enns

One thing that is not normal: howl plus noticeably weak braking. If the power is there you are almost certainly fine.

Check who is responsible for the roof penetrations, and for removal and reinstallation if the roof needs work during the term. In some agreements you pay to remove and refit panels that somebody else owns.

Check the shower screen seal at the bottom too. Water tracks along the bath rim and over the edge and you never see it happen.

Replace the chain at 0.5 on 11 speed and you will usually get three or four chains out of one cassette. Waiting for 0.75 costs you a cassette every time, which is much worse value than the chain you were trying to save.

Checking a real endpoint rather than the homepage. My monitor was hitting a static page the whole time, so it was green throughout.

Good addition. After a winter sit I would still bet on the jet, but that test takes twenty seconds and rules it out.

Run the bowl dry specifically, not just the tank. The bowl is where the residue forms.

Eight percent is on the high side for some soy waxes and excess oil pooling near the wick makes the cavity worse. Run one batch at 6 percent and see whether the surface behaves before you blame technique.

Running only on partial choke means it is running lean, which means the main jet is partially blocked. Choking restricts air, which richens the mixture, which compensates. Your engine is telling you what is wrong, and after a winter with fuel in the bowl it is nearly always the same thing.

Order of operations:

1. Drain the float bowl first. There is usually a bolt underneath, and on many engines that bolt is also the main jet. Catch what comes out and look at it - varnish, water and green crust are all common.
2. Take the bowl off and clean it properly with carb cleaner, not a rag.
3. Remove the main jet and hold it up to a light. You should see a clean round hole. Anything visible in there is your problem. Clean it with carb cleaner and a single strand of copper wire pulled out of some stranded electrical cable. Never a drill bit, never a sewing needle - scratch the orifice and you have permanently changed the fuelling and you are buying a carburettor.
4. Blow out the emulsion tube and every passage you can see.
5. While the bowl is off, check the float is not stuck and has no fuel inside it.

Nine times out of ten that is the whole repair, it takes 45 minutes, and it costs a can of cleaner. If it still leans out afterwards, check the fuel cap vent - a blocked vent creates a vacuum in the tank and starves it on roughly the timescale you describe. Loosen the cap and run it as a test.

Since it sat over winter, make sure you clean the tank too, or you will just re-varnish the jet you cleaned.

It is the most common way people turn a 45 minute clean into a new carburettor. Copper is softer than brass, so it cleans without cutting.

Note when it reopens. Always late autumn or always in a dry spell is humidity moving timber, and that is benign. Reopening at random or widening each time is a different conversation.

Maintenance is the thing nobody warns you about. There's a second filter, usually behind a hatch at the bottom, and if you never clean it the machine slowly stops drying properly and you conclude the technology is bad. Fluff filter every load, condenser filter monthly.

You're an engineer, so: you're not selling, you're reducing uncertainty. You have a hypothesis about what's painful and roughly what it costs them. The call either raises or lowers your confidence in it. Going in with three specific things you want to find out makes the whole thing feel much less like improv.

Write the three down. Look at the list at minute 20. If you haven't got them, ask directly - nobody minds a direct question at minute 20.

I have been trimming to about a centimetre. Dropping to 5mm on the next test set.

Having watched a few of these close and a few fall over: commingled personal and business money rarely kills a deal on its own at low six figures. What kills deals is inconsistency, a number in the listing that does not appear anywhere in the data room, or a founder who cannot explain a month.

What they will ask for beyond the P&L: monthly recurring revenue by month for at least a year, customer count and concentration, churn, refund rate, and the split between one-off and recurring. Have all of that ready before you answer the books question, because the books question is usually the first of about nine.

Photograph the linkage and which hole the spring sits in before you touch anything, just in case.

Pilot circuit versus main jet, decided by load, is a clean diagnostic. Straight into my notes.

It always is. Watts sell panels, amp-hours run fridges.

Do it in amp-hours rather than watts, and derate hard. 120 W nominal, real-world, on a folding panel at an imperfect angle, in shoulder season at a northern latitude - assume something like three to four useful equivalent hours, so call it 25-35 Ah on a good day and close to nothing under thick cloud. Against a 30 Ah daily draw that's break-even in good conditions and a slow drain in bad ones.

Or hold the bike still, stand on one pedal and rock it. If it creaks while stationary it is not the drivetrain.

Set a floor and a date and make them boring. Mine was: I go part-time on services when the product covers my fixed personal costs for three consecutive months, and I stop entirely when it covers those plus 30%. Writing the number down mattered more than the number itself, because $210 to $6,200 feels impossible and $210 to $2,400 is a target.

Also: 14 customers at $15 average is a pricing statement as much as a growth statement. Doubling the price with 14 customers is a much shorter path to $2,400 than getting to 160 customers at the current price, and you'll lose fewer of them than you fear.

If it will not even cough on starter fluid with confirmed spark, stop looking at fuel delivery. That is the split point in the diagnosis.

A two stroke with good spark and fuel put directly into the cylinder that still does nothing is usually one of:

• Low compression from a scored piston or worn rings. Under about 90 psi they generally will not run properly; under 60 they will not fire at all. A gauge is about $25 and it is the only way to know rather than guess.
• Timing. A fat spark on the bench does not prove the timing is right if the flywheel key has sheared, and a sheared key puts the spark in the wrong place entirely. Pull the flywheel and look - five minute check, very cheap part.
• A spark that looks good in air but collapses under compression. Test with a known good plug gapped correctly.

The sheared key is my first guess on a six year old machine, especially if it has ever hit something solid.

There is your answer, probably. That impact is exactly what shears a flywheel key.

First cassette on the bike, and I changed the chain once before at about 0.6.

Coconut soy takes fragrance better in my experience - noticeably stronger cold throw at the same load, and cure time felt a day or two shorter.