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Categories: all aviation bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater Fri, 29 Feb 2008The race bike progresses very well. I confirmed that the cam timing is correct (well, at least that the camshaft is as aligned with the crankshaft -- there's an alignment dot on the right side of the camshaft gear). I've replaced all the case screws I'm likely to replace. I have three things that aren't yet done before it's streetable:
Fortunately, of all those things, only the third really stops me from starting the motor tomorrow, and it's not a sufficiently big deal that I'd have to delay too much. It's important, yes, but much more important than cleaning it now is that I want to be able to clean it mid-breakin. Speaking of breakin, I'm going to follow the same procedure I did with my current Ninja 250. It worked really well for the 250, so I don't see any reason to avoid it on the CL175. It's described, at least in abstract, in this article. The basic summary is to progress through a series of increasingly-strenuous runs, starting with idle, and running up through full-power up-to-redline blasts. Once again, I'm glad I'm riding a little, underpowered bike -- doing this kind of breakin on a "real" street bike results in super-legal speeds, commonly even in 1st gear. I'm looking forward to trying to start the wee beastie tomorrow. All I really have to do is button up the case again (it's apart on the clutch side as I dealt with clutch springs), pour in oil and gas, and start pushing/kicking. I have no idea how difficult it'll be to start. I think I left the carburetors in reasonable adjustment... Posted at 23:40 permanent link category: /motorcycle I finally caved and got an iPod last night. My old MP3 player finally pissed me off enough that I don't want to mess with it any more. Anyway, the iPod is a demanding beast, and requires that it basically sync with one computer. All my mp3 files are currently on my work computer, but that's not a good situation to carry forward with the iPod for a variety of reasons. This led me to wonder, as I was loading my mp3s up onto an external hard drive, what exactly is the bandwidth of my bicycle? It's a 500 GB drive. It takes me 30 minutes to ride home. For the sake of simplicity, let's assume that the drive is 100% full of data. 500 GB/30 minutes is 16 and 2/3 GB per minute. Divide that by 60 to get seconds, and we get .277 GB/s. Multiply by 1024 to get megabytes, and I see that my bicycle is capable of 284.4 MB/s, or 162x faster than my 14 Mb/s (small b means bits instead of bytes, or a factor of 8) internet connection. Not bad. Posted at 10:53 permanent link category: /bicycle Mon, 25 Feb 2008So, I see that email to me is trickling in with some hefty delays. Just in case you've sent me email telling me I won one meelion dollarz and are surprised I haven't showed up to claim my prize, that might have something to do with it. I'm guessing this is temporary, but for the moment, text messages and phone calls will reach me much more reliably. Posted at 16:15 permanent link category: /misc Sun, 24 Feb 2008
Now that's what I call progress
For the last few weeks -- well, call it a month -- the CL175, my some-day race bike, has been languishing. The motor sat spread across the workbench in a cacophony of little pieces. The frame sat desultorialy, looking like the sad shadow of the bike it once was. It looked, really, like it needed some pedals. Possibly a wicker basket with some plastic flowers on the front. It was suffering from the Agony of the Order Delay. I would try to do something, then discover that in order to do it (or do it right), I needed some parts. The problem is, every time I needed parts, it added another week's delay as I called the local dealer, they called the warehouse, and the lumbering wheels of commerce turned, one agonizingly slow cog-stop at a time. Eventually, the dealership would get my parts in. Finally, this last week, I had all the parts I thought I needed: new wrist pins and circlips for the pistons; new exhaust valve stem seals; miniscule washers mysteriously turned up after I figured I'd lost them. On Saturday, I started in. Pistons on connecting rods. Circlips in (after an appropriate amount of grunting and cursing). Piston rings aligned. Then the big step -- the cylinders went on. These are the same cylinders that, back in early January, I was so concerned might take forever at the machine shop. Hah! Instead, the machine shop took two days (unusually fast), but I ended up waiting on parts for nearly two months. With the cylinders on, why not (gasp!) proceed to the cylinder head? Why not indeed! After the long delay, it felt like I was moving at light speed, and I was paranoid I was forgetting something, but it all came together beautifully. By the end of Saturday, the engine was whole, looking all shiny and new on top of the bench. I even had the valve clearance set and the ignition timing adjusted.
So this morning, I called Jesse, and he came over, making a diversion from his errands for the day. Ten minutes after he arrived, he was hopping back in his truck: the engine was in the frame, and the two-person part was finished. With terrifying speed, the pieces went back on the bike, which brings us to now: it basically looks like a motorcycle again! In fact, I spent the last far-too-many hours of the day mucking around with this POR-15 tank sealer, hoping to seal in the rusty crud that seemed to be causing problems for me earlier. I think it's done now, though, and all that's left is 4 days curing time before I can pour in gasoline, and call it all done.
In fact again, I believe that leaves me with exactly one task to be completed before the bike can be ridden again: the shifter linkage. This is a matter of finding some material to weld in place, and welding it. The work of an hour or two, at most. The bike is almost rideable again! I can tell you, the excitement chez Ian is palpable. I'm the only one palpating it, but it's palpable, take my word for it. A couple hours of cutting, welding and fitting with Jesse's help, and I'll be on the road again. I'm aiming for... oh, about Thursday night. Posted at 23:29 permanent link category: /motorcycle Fri, 22 Feb 2008J. and I did manage to get together this week, and we had a blast. No particular weirdness involved. The goal and import of our meeting was to trade life stories. Naturally, in the 3 hours we talked, we barely made a dent, but it brought me to an interesting conclusion: I now know more about J. (a comparative stranger) than I do about many of my good friends. The thing is, it's been great. Hearing someone else describe their life is amazingly entertaining. But it occurred to me that in addition to doing this with J., I want to hear the life stories of all my friends. General arcs, details, whatever. It's something that I'm going to pursue (although my vocal cords need to recover from all that talking -- I probably talked more during those three hours than I had for the entire previous week). On top of any personal goals, I wanted to encourage you to trade life stories with your friends. If you haven't already done it, it's great fun. Everyone's life is packed full of stories, and when you sit down with the intention of telling those stories, the most amazing things can come out. I even considered trying to convene small groups of people to cut down on repetition, but decided that really, this is an activity which should be done one-on-one. We didn't pursue a particular strategy, but what we ended up doing was trying to trace the whole thing in general details -- "I went to school here, lived there, met this important person at this other place." This would invariably highlight a zillion more-detailed stories just begging to be told, both in the teller and the listener. We'd occasionally briefly interrupt with things like, "That reminds me of my first motorcycle, but in a minute. Please continue." The referenced story would come next. Probably the hardest part was keeping track of where on the continuity each story fell, and how it interacted with the others around it. Of the stories in my life that I'm interested in relating, I might have touched on 15% of them, and explored perhaps 5% in any detail. It was a very engaging and entertaining evening. I'm looking forward to doing it again, both with J. and with other friends. This is definitely a years-long project if I really pursue it. Give it a try! Life-story time is fun! Posted at 09:32 permanent link category: /misc Wed, 20 Feb 2008Wednesday morning is garbage pickup, so Tuesday night is the traditional time to shuffle out with the noisome cans. I went through the dance, gathering up garbage from the various cans around the house. Took it out to the can. I even stopped into the garage, where the can has been getting a trifle full. I'd been working in the garage earlier, trying to make any progress on the CL175 (progress: essentially none that night), and had taken a can of Coke with me. Collecting the garbage came later, but I had it in my head that I'd also retrieve my Coke, which I'd left in there. Of course, this necessitated unlocking the garage, gathering the garbage, locking the garage again, slapping myself on the forehead, unlocking the garage, grabbing the can of soda, locking the garage again. Finally feeling sorted out, I made my way up the steps of my deck. Somehow, as if a tiny demon had snagged my foot with a tiny but strong grappling hook, my foot got stuck passing the last step. I stumbled and tried to pull my foot forward, but it was stuck fast to something. I couldn't stop my forward momentum, and came down hard on the deck, landing knees first, then crumpling up so my ribs were pressed hard against my left leg. In a testament to the weird-ass priorities that seem to sustain me, the soda can landed upright on the deck, mostly unspilled, slightly crushed when I'd reflexively grabbed it tighter. I sat there, doing a quick probe. I found nothing broken, as I watched the fizzy liquid expand in an angry carbonated mushroom cloud. I got up again, both knees aching, and the left side of my ribcage feeling abused. I thought I might have broken a rib, but breathing deeply didn't hurt, and the only thing that's hurt since is leaning into the same position (such as to tie my shoe), so if it's broken, it's a pretty benign break. I got up, and went inside, pouring out the now-flat soda, and flopped onto the couch to watch the copy of Taming of the Shrew from Netflix that I've had sitting around since early December. Later, I was getting ready to shave, getting a new blade out of its packaging. I converted to a double-edged razor a while back (the old-timey kind, with the flat metal blade you drop into a butterfly door). I misjudged getting it out, and felt the odd, painless strangeness of metal cleaving flesh. It didn't even go in far enough to draw blood, but my thumb now bears a tiny flappy testament to my klutz-for-a-day nature. Fortunately, I managed to get to bed without causing further damage to myself. Here's hoping today will be less generally klutzy. Posted at 11:46 permanent link category: /misc Mon, 18 Feb 2008My Saturday was much more successful than the previous week. I was able to swap both tires, and get the brake pedal mounted. The brake pedal now has 3x the travel it did the first time, and a bit more travel than Jesse's installation. Getting the tires done was nice, and I was able to safety wire a bunch more stuff in between all those tasks. The big safety wire thing I haven't tackled yet is the fork oil drain bolts, because the forks have fresh oil in them. It seems slightly wasteful to dump it, but I also have a much more precise delivery method now, so it's probably worth refilling them exactly. Probably what I should do there is wait until I've got the bike back on the road, so I can get some use out of the oil, and do the forks in the week before the race. Anyway, technical musings aside, it was nice to have a productive day. Sunday was spent on an actual ride, with pictures and everything, but that's the subject of another entry. Posted at 10:31 permanent link category: /motorcycle Sat, 16 Feb 2008I am very pleased to say that J. and I have reconnected, and she was eventually able to dredge up memories from our brief, fateful interactions at Godfather's Pizza, half a lifetime ago. If you're curious, I can't think of anyone I know, except Peter from lunch on Monday, who's met J. So, no, this isn't someone you know. I'm looking forward to hearing her life's story. It's a very strange thing to meet someone who was so important to you long ago, and get to know them all over again. My challenge now is to meet J. as she is now, and not with some weird overlay of the fantasy of my memories (the word "fantasy" being used in its classical sense, ya pervs). I'm looking forward to the challenge. I've formulated a theory over the last few years that at this age -- my junior high and high school years -- I was very self-defeating. I've found myself longing for the chance to talk to people who knew me then, and who might be able to provide me with insight and perspective on how I appeared to be acting. I've already gotten a small dose of that from J. in email (my bold-for-me, Cure-cassette declaration was interpreted as "you're weird," and found to be insulting), and I'm looking forward to hearing more. I'm guessing that this is something other people have experienced, but the chance to re-meet and re-learn someone's acquaintance is a novel and appealing opportunity. How often do you get to peel back the mists of time (he said, mixing metaphors strangely), and meet someone again, for the first time? Posted at 11:29 permanent link category: /misc This has been a week of frustration on the motorcycle front. Last weekend, I went to put together the CL175's cylinder head, and discovered that I was missing two little but vitally important washers. Searching failed to uncover them, and I resigned myself to ordering them from Honda. They're a very odd size, so I didn't figure I'd have any luck finding a generic replacement. While on the phone with University Honda, I discovered that, in fact, I was also missing the very important valve guide seals I thought I'd bought a week before. So, I ordered those too. With any luck, they'll be here next week. Turns out I'd been sold a pair of o-rings that were close, but not actually related to the seals. So, I figured I could at least get the cylinders together and ready for the cylinder head to be finished. I got out in the garage, set up the camera, and started putting parts together. The rings went on the piston, no problem. The wrist pins fit in their bores. I got the right order of piston, circlip and wrist pin after a try or two (all carefully captured on film, of course), when I discovered that the second circlip to go in (which holds the wrist pin and keeps it from moving around) was a really... loose... fit. That is, it didn't snap cleanly into its little groove. I thought about it, and realized that this means I'd have to modify the wrist pins. Rather than taking a grinder to parts of my engine, I got on the F-160 mailing list to try to sort out what I should do. Long story short, I ended up ordering new wrist pins and circlips, after discovering that the clips I have are of the "Dear god, don't use those!" variety, even if they had fit right. I wanted new wrist pins anyway, and the only reason I hadn't ordered any is that I'd incorrectly figured they were unavailable, and hadn't realized there would be non-Honda parts in the world. So, I ordered those too. Another week. Jesse and I had a good time putting together that brake lever I posted pictures of earlier (scroll down a little bit), and of course I immediately managed to drill its pivot hole in the wrong spot. Of course again, my hole was close enough to the correct location that I couldn't just drill the new hole and be done with it -- I actually had to have Jesse weld a plug into the hole so I can redrill the pivot. That'll happen today, most likely. As long as I had the brake lever in almost the right place, I decided I could try shortening the actuating rod a couple nights ago. I did a bunch of holding-up and eyeballing and figuring in my head, and ultimately decided that, actually, I couldn't do anything with it. I have to get the engine back in place and a chain on the rear wheel before I will know how long it needs to be. I hung up the actuating rod and looked back at the bike, wondering what else I could do. Ah-hah! I thought to myself. I can drill safety wire holes. So I pulled off a couple bolts and started drilling out holes. Then, while drilling one of the bolts for the front brake, the drill bit started making familiar crunching sounds. But I was almost through the bolt.. Surely it'll hold! No. You know, any time you find yourself thinking thoughts like that, you're just doomed. Sure enough, the drill bit broke off just as it was poking through the far side of the hole. So close! So I grabbed a punch to see if I could push the broken end of the bit out the other side. A couple taps with a little hammer, and my punch, halfway into the bolt, broke off. The drill bit poked out a little bit, but my efforts to pull it out with pliers failed, and ended up rounding it off so I couldn't get a grip on it any more. Argh! Finally, I realized that I had bags full of replacement bolts, dropped the accursed, drill- and punch-filled bolt into the trash, and drilled the new bolt without any travail. Of course, I didn't have a drill bit that would work on the associated nut any more, having just broken it off, so I gave up in disgust and went inside. So, I've definitely had better luck while working on the bike. Fortunately, today I have a new stock of drill bits, and the brake pedal pivot has been filled in beautfully and the plate painted. I'm ready to tackle it all again, and this time, I'm sure it'll work out better. Right? Posted at 11:05 permanent link category: /motorcycle Fri, 15 Feb 2008I've been on a classics kick lately, going back and re-reading some of the classic literature that I managed to avoid during my formal education. One of those novels was Moby Dick. I have to admit, I started this book with some trepidation. It's reputed to be dense and difficult to get through. It pretty much lived up to its reputation. I won't go so far as to say it's not worth reading. I found it interesting at times, and it's certainly a cultural touchstone. It wasn't exactly a chore reading it, but it was definitely heavy, and difficult to get through. I found myself wondering at times why Melville was using the sort of language and construction he did. What I got out of it was a decent grounding in 19th century whale hunting, and exposure to a style of writing I hadn't read before. I doubt I'll ever read it again (unlike Pride and Prejudice, which I found to be engaging once I got over my initial "they're so rich and whiney" reaction). Next up: Rob Roy, fulfilling some kind of Scottish requirement in my classical literature. Posted at 15:25 permanent link category: /misc Mon, 11 Feb 2008When I was but a wee sprout, I made a mistake, and caused a humongous white van to crash into my little Mazda. Oops. As a result of that accident and the monumental $125 ticket which resulted, I found myself in the position of needing a job. I interviewed around the local culinary establishments, and shortly found myself working as a dishwasher at Godfather's Pizza. This is a now-deceased brand of pizzerria whose ads featured a big-lipped old guy in a fedora exhorting customers to "Do it!" in re the eating of their pizza. The particular Godfather's I worked at was in thriving downtown Woodinville. It featured as normal a cast of misfits as I believe you'll find working in any restaurant of similar prestige. My memories of all this are somewhat vague, so I hope I am not fabricating too much. First, there was the manager, good ol' Bob. (I can't remember any of their names except one, so I'm just going to make them up.) Bob, at the time, reminded me of a somewhat incompetent Moonlighting-era Bruce Willis (current at the time). He had that same balding, smirking look about him, except that he was nowhere near as clever as Bruce. He was also a bit on the bossy side, except that he wasn't very good about following up on his orders, so they tended not to be paid much heed. One of the most memorable of my fellow pizza-slingers was Colette. She actually lived down the street from me, which was remarkable because there were very few people my age who lived anywhere nearby. One reason she was so memorable to me is that she dressed exactly like Boy George (complete with lack of chin and everything), a look which was guaranteed to freak out my sheltered, 16 year old self. It was a look that I now identify as pre-goth, and is one I've even tried for myself, later in my misspent youth. I didn't find her even slightly attractive, which is notable, as at the time, I seemed to find at least half the female population of Woodinville highly desireable, as I've mentioned in the past. There was a moment, one day, when Colette and I were on break at the same time. Break consisted of 30 minutes during which we were allowed to consume one (1) Personal Pizza with as many as two toppings, and a soda, as part of our compensation. Anything else we had to pay for at full rate. In any case, Colette and I were sitting at a table in the nearly-empty restaurant. We may have been having a discussion, but I don't really recall. Suddenly, she spoke up on a complete tangent. "You know," she said, "I'm not addicted to crystal." I looked over at her, goggle-eyed, unsure what she might be talking about. How could a person be addicted to a class of minerals? "People say I am, but I'm not," she continued inscrutably. Moments later, she gathered her miniature pizza plate and glass, and walked back down to the counter to go back to work. I was completely mystified by this non-sequitur. It was only years later, in college, that I had any clue what she was talking about. I'd only ever interacted with her at the Godfather's, and had seen no indications of drug use. There was another girl who left a vague memory, who we'll call Kimmy. Kimmy had huge frizzy curly hair, which was apparently all the rage at the time. She wore a black leather jacket, which frequently hung on the coat rack in the hallway back to the walk-in refrigerator. Kimmy also smoked, which bothered me. I didn't feel any particular connection to her, but I had this stirring deep in my soul that I didn't want her to kill herself with cigarettes. This manifested one day when I walked across the parking lot to the Albertsons, and purchased a pack of gum. We'd had a discussion about smoking some days earlier, and she'd mentioned that when she was chewing gum, she smoked less. It was 25 cents, but my finances were up to the challenge. I furtively slipped the gum into her jacket pocket, in a short-sighted attempt to be helpful. For days, I didn't see any evidence that this had been noticed, and she seemed to smoke as much as ever. Finally, I asked her about it, and she said, "Oh, no, I didn't find any gum in my pocket." At this moment, Bryce spoke up: "Huh, I was wondering where the hell that came from!" Bryce was another character from our little ensemble. I had actually blocked him out until I started thinking along Kimmy's story line. Bryce was a young man with a cruel, bullying streak a mile wide. His face was fixed in a permament, superior sneer. The only problem was that he was built like a hatchet, with a frail, thin body topped by an enormous, distorted face. His chin was promiment enough to prompt us to compare him unfavorably to the "Mac Tonight" McDonalds ads which were running at the time. "Mac" was a sort of life-size mannequin with a quarter moon for a head. The shape of his head was actually a crescent, as if someone had cut a 1/10th wedge of the moon and scraped out the seeds as from a cantalope. Bryce was convinced he was superior to everyone. One of the ways he liked to prove this (and, which wasn't based upon sneering) was in his driving. He'd shift his automatic-transmissioned car into 1st, for instance in a parking lot, and gun the motor. The car would scream forward, howling in pain, until he smugly bumped the shifter into the second gear position. The motor would gasp in relief, and accelerate into the stratosphere again before Bryce would cruelly jam the shifter forward to the next position. I was fortunate in that I never witnessed one of these travesties against machinery. No, I discovered this because Bryce proudly described his driving style to me in loving, sneering detail. In another class entirely from the in-store workers were the delivery drivers. You had to be 18 to be a delivery driver, so they were like some kind of unattainable demi-god to me, at 16. From this side of 18, it's a ridiculously small difference, but at the time, it was incomprehensible -- they were out of highschool, and could drive for a living. And they got tips. One of the delivery drivers, Jason, was sneeringly superior, but unlike Bryce was actually superior in some important ways. He had, for instance, a girlfriend. He smoked (this was something that made him seem even further from me, even though I viewed it negatively even then). When I later saw Top Gun, I would recognize Val Kilmer's character as a higher order of Jason: smug, superior and confident, but with some reasonable justification. The other delivery driver I remember is J. We'll avoid full names here for reasons which will become clear in a moment. She was 18, smoked, and filled with all the self-confidence which clearly accompanied these facts. She was also possibly the most stunningly beautiful woman I'd ever met in person, with clear, alabaster skin, fine features, and straight, light brown hair that was either pulled back into a pony tail, or on rare occasions, hung down to her shoulders, framing her angular face beautifully. When I later saw pictures of Jodie Foster, it put me in mind of J. On top of being 18 and a delivery driver, she was a fan of a wide variety of music I'd never heard before. In particular, she had a tape of The Cure's album Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me that she loaned to me one day after expressing shock that I'd never heard of the band before. She was, now that I think about it, one of the earliest non-classical musical influences I had. I loved to go on break with her. She always had great, irreverent stories to tell, and would tell them with this confident laugh. I was, needless to say, completely smitten with her. Unfortunately, she had a boyfriend. He referred to her as his "china doll," which was a good description of the quality of her skin. She described doing things with him which are best not retold in a family-friendly environment such as this, but were extremely tittilating to me at the time, and did not make it easy for me to "be cool" around her. She demonstrated her "thunder god" impression by taking a deep drag off her cigarette, and then blowing it out through her nose and the corners of her mouth so that it streamed out in four diagonal jets. I have one distinct memory, of the aforementioned tape, which I must have listened to for weeks before returning it. I recall preparing to return it, and carefully cueing the tape so that "The Perfect Girl" would play the next time she listened to it. It was a half-hearted attempt by any outward measure, but to me at the time, it was a bold, heart-thumping declaration of love, which was also carefully subtle enough to cause absolutely no embarrassment if nothing came of it. Nothing, suffice to say, came of it. We probably worked together for a period of a month or two before one or the other of us stopped working at that Godfather's Pizza. It's in the nature of crappy fastfood jobs that there is a high turnover rate, as Bob loved to carp about. She moved on or I moved on, however it worked, and that was that. Shortly thereafter, I moved to Oregon (where I was told while applying at a Portland area Godfather's that my previous experience at the Woodinville store was worthless, because apparently all the Washington stores were run by undisciplined babboons instead of managers; since I would have had to start over at the lowest form of grunt, I passed and got a job at Burgerville. So much better, clearly). As the years passed, I would occasionally remember J, and wonder what had happened to her. I had a pessimistic feeling that everyone I'd known in Woodinville wouldn't amount to much, which in some cases such as J.'s, caused me real regret. Fortunately, I've been proven wrong in this pessimism in recent years, which is nice. Before too long, I forgot her last name, and by the time I got to college, I figured she would have gotten married anyway, so there was no real way to track her down. It was always idle curiosity anyway, so I never pursued the thought beyond idle fancy. Today (fast forwarding just a few years), I walked in to eat lunch at Blue C Sushi as I do essentially every day. I'm well enough known there that the manager and servers and I regularly joke about pretty much anything that comes to mind. I sat down (not having a customary spot) with my well-battered copy of Moby Dick, and waited for something good to come down the belt. I looked at the other patrons around me, and thought I saw a familiar face. It looked like it might be a friend of Jesse's, but I couldn't be sure. I kept my face in my book, and waited for my sushi to come around. When the belt had completely cycled past me, I asked a chef for a salmon maki. By this time, Peter (Jesse's friend) had recognized me, and we'd greeted each other. Peter was talking with someone next to him, so I let him get back to it. As I accepted the plate from the sushi chef, Peter's companion looked at me, and said, "That's the way to do it." "Indeed," I replied (or something equally innocuous). In a few moments, I got sucked into their conversation, and put the book down. I mentioned my adventures in welding from last night, and Peter's companion said, "No way!" turning fully towards me. She explained that she has a 1976 Honda CB360 that she's having restored right now, using one of the shops in town, and we traded memory and "ums" back and forth until we'd filled all the details in. I told her about this vintage racing thing I'll be doing, and she seemed really interested. I told her to come down and see a race, how to find the schedule on the WMRRA page, and so on. Our conversation quickly dominated, as this woman and I chatted vintage bikes and racing. Peter followed along, amused, but uninvolved. The sushi plates slowly ground past. At some point in this conversation, I was looking at her profile, and thought to myself, "She has a really nice profile. It kind of reminds me of J, from Godfather's." I didn't actually go so far as to fully form her name or the restaurant or anything, but I had the impression in my head. I started searching her face a bit more closely, and realized with an increasing sense of disbelief that she shared a lot of facial features with J. Eventually, she hailed a server, and got her check. She pulled out her wallet to get her card, and I found my eye drawn to her driver's license, which was facing up at me from the table. I was suddenly intensely curious, and read the last name. It wasn't exactly familiar, but seemed to ring a bell from long ago. Before she could get up, I said, "I have a weird question for you. Did you grow up in Woodinville?" She looked up at me and said, "Yeah," with an unreadable look on her face. "Uh-huh," I said, pretty sure my theory was right. "And did you work at Godfather's Pizza when you were maybe 16?" "Yeah," she said, "that's freaky, how do you know this?" "I worked with you," I said. "I worked there at the same time. You don't remember me?" "No." Not too surprising, overall. At the time, I was the most unassuming nobody anyone could strive to be. I actually would have been surprised if she'd remembered me. I described myself a little bit more, but it didn't ring any bells. She handed me a business card with an email address scrawled on the back. "Send me an email with the race schedules," she said, as she got up. In a moment, she was out the door and gone. "So, you didn't know her?" asked Peter. "Like, you haven't talked to her recently, you really just met her for the first time in a couple decades?" "Yeah," I replied. "That was really weird. I thought she was your coworker or something." "No, we just got seated next to each other, and started talking. Huh!" Huh! indeed. When I got back to work, I put on the MP3 of Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, and didn't stop grinning for the rest of the day. Posted at 20:07 permanent link category: /misc I don't have time for a full update right now, but I wanted to get these pictures posted: That's a brake pedal for the CL that Jesse and I made last night. He made an identical one for himself. I think they came out pretty well. We spent about 6 hours in his garage. Cutting, filing, welding, grinding, shaping, etc. It was great fun, and makes me really want a gas welding rig. We also put swingarm spools on my swingarm, but I don't have a picture of that yet. Posted at 15:15 permanent link category: /motorcycle Fri, 08 Feb 2008My, how the time flies:  Posted at 09:59 permanent link category: /misc Thu, 07 Feb 2008It's been a while since I've mentioned the ol' CL175 race bike, so I figured I'd post an update. I turned the cylinders over to Autosport Seattle a day or two after getting the engine apart, and they had it back in a shockingly quick timeframe. Maybe a day or two later. Woot! No problems reported, and the cylinders are now well-greased and sitting in a plastic bag until I can get it all put back together. In the mean time, I spent a surprisingly large amount of money at Tacoma Screw to get a mega crapload of stainless steel socket head capscrews for the engine sidecovers. Many of those cover screws had to be removed with the impact driver, a lot of penetrating oil, and even more swearing under the breath. Apparently Honda was fond of some fairly terrible alloys for their screws in 1972, and many of them stripped out, although none so badly that I've been unable to remove them one way or another. Socket head capscrews have the distinct advantage of taking a hex wrench, which is very hard to strip out, unlike a Phillips head. While the engine has been apart, I've also taken the downtime to replace little bits and bobs, such as the kickstart oil seal. I tried to check the clutch and clean out the "oil filter" (apparently a weird centrifugal thing which you're supposed to muck out every 5000 miles), but was thwarted by my inability to stop the crankshaft from moving -- with the timing chain in its current state, moving the crankshaft is impractical. I guess I'll get to that after the engine's back together. I took the head to Hill Machine Headworks in Ballard, and they did their typical excellent job, but there was one Issue. When I dropped the head off with them, I said, "Please put Helicoil inserts in the spark plug holes," in addition to all the normal stuff. What I'd neglected to mention to them was that we'd already taken out the old Helicoils. So, they happily bored the hole yet bigger, and put in a new insert. To understand the problem, let me explain what a Helicoil is (skip this paragraph if you already know). A Helicoil is essentially a carefully-shaped spring, which acts as the outside threads on a hole, and is usually installed to repair damaged threads. When you muck up the threads on your hole so badly that they don't hold whatever they're supposed to hold any more, a Helicoil is the fix. Of course, if you have a 12mm hole, you can't just bung a spring in there, and end up with a 12mm hole again -- the spring/Helicoil would have to be infinitely flat, which is impossible. So what you do is cut the hole a little bit bigger, and re-thread it in the next bigger size; for example, 14mm. Then you put in this spring which is 1mm thick, reducing the hole back down to 12mm (the spring thickness counts twice). It's a great system, and when properly done, results in threads that are commonly much stronger than the originals. Well, Jesse and I had carefully removed the 12mm Helicoil from my cylinder head. That left a 14mm hole. When I dropped it off, I said, "And put in new Helicoils," without actually saying, "It's already threaded to the right size for the 12mm insert." So they found a 14mm hole, and figured I wanted a 14mm hole as the result. Out came the 16mm tap, and zip zap zop! more material removed from the sparkplug holes. In went a new Helicoil, and good as new! Imagine my surprise when I went to put in the old sparkplugs, and they went into the hole with no contact... This caused a fair amount of consternation at the machine shop, to say the least. We sweated out options for about 20 minutes, and I finally left, promising that if I couldn't find 14mm sparkplugs, I'd be back to see about getting a set of brass inserts made to resize the holes back down to 12mm. Fortunately, I quickly discovered that not only are 14mm sparkplugs available, they're actually more common than the 12mm variety. So, mostly yay! Let's hope they share the same basic sparking characteristics. That's pretty much where the engine stands right now. I've been getting more parts in, like a belly pan (to catch any inadvertently dropped oil and prevent it from lubricating the tires of the racers behind me -- that would be very rude), a new shifter assembly, and soon, more new tires. It turns out that the new tires I so laboriously levered on in the last video are actually the wrong kind... sigh Speaking of video, I haven't made any progress on that front. I've done some shooting of the ongoing work, but not as much as I'd hoped. Hopefully I can set the camera running for putting the engine back together -- taking it apart was such a whirlwind that I didn't want to break our momentum to get a camera involved. I've got three more tapes to review and turn into episodes, but I don't expect I'll get another one out for a month or two. Speaking of timing, the deadline for having the bike finished has shifted slightly. The high muckety-mucks at WMRRA fortunately decided that forcing novice vintage racers such as myself to do the New Racer School (the on-track portion) with a bunch of novices on big, fast modern bikes was a really bad idea. My little bike, when finished, will top out around 75-80 MPH. Modern sportbikes top out around 130-150 MPH and accelerate 5-10x faster. Now, put novice riders on each, and put them on the same track. Sounds like a recipe for disaster, doesn't it? So, I will be participating in a more informal mentoring program. I'll still do the classroom portion of the New Racer School, but my on-track training will be handled one-on-one with a more experienced vintage racer. This strikes me as being a much safer way to go about things. It also means that Jesse and I are on the same schedule for getting our bikes ready, which is nice. Plus, of course, I don't have to blow $300 on the "please don't kill me" track day. I still have a lot of work to do on the bike, but it still looks feasible. Starting this Sunday, I'll have a lot more free time, and will be focusing on getting the engine back together, and getting everything safety wired. Then once that's done, I can break in the engine, sort out any further problems (please, no further problems!) and do the remaining race-prep. That should be fun, because it involves things like hacksawing off the muffler, and stripping off all the lights and street gear. So, there's the (somewhat lengthy) update. More news as it happens! Posted at 22:27 permanent link category: /motorcycle Sun, 03 Feb 2008Today, I will leave you with pictures of young Miloš, who recently tried eating a kidney bean, with hilarious results: Posted at 11:04 permanent link category: /misc Fri, 01 Feb 2008This is just a quickie. If you're interested in helping to choose the Democratic candidate for president in the state of Washington, you need to know this: the primary vote doesn't count for Democrats. From the Democrat's page:
Why is Washington State having Caucuses and a Primary? If you'd like to help choose the Democratic presidential candidate, head to the caucus on Saturday, February 9th. You can find your nearest caucus location here. The Primary vote on the 19th will only determine Republican delegates. Posted at 14:20 permanent link category: /misc Categories: all aviation gadgets misc motorcycle theater Written by Ian Johnston. Software is Blosxom. Questions? Please mail me at reaper at obairlann dot net. |
