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Categories: all aviation bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater Sun, 12 Dec 2010This is the weekend of the International Motorcycle Show, and I had several reasons I wanted to go this year. First in my mind was the fact that Honda just introduced this CBR250R, and I really wanted to check it out in person. Next, I thought (and just confirmed) that I've had my current helmet for a long time -- I try to replace my helmet every 3-4 years, and I'm now past 4 years on this one. Finally, I wanted to sign up for my racing license, and pick my new racing number. So, I headed down to the stadium district (it still massively annoys me that we have multiple stadiums, but that's a different story), and parked my little CL175 in the parking structure, glad for the cover. It wasn't raining yet, but every indication was that it would be pouring very soon. As I was parking, Mark Etheridge (a racing buddy) pulled to a stop in front of me and said, "I thought that was you." Yep, big guy in a big yellow suit on a little CL175. There's really only one of those in Seattle. We walked into the show together, and perused the display bikes. He really liked the Honda MB5 on display, and I couldn't stop looking at a Soviet-themed Harley with a structure that I can only think of as the "nut remover" -- a cage-like structure that would be the first thing your crotch hit in a frontal crash. Ouch. Neat bike, though, assuming you could get around that.
We wandered together a bit, looking at various displays and bikes. He ran into an old friend I didn't know, so I excused myself to go look at the CBR250R. Honda had two on display: a black one, and a red/grey one with ABS. There's no external difference to the ABS bike, other than the sensor rings inside the brake discs. I think that more interesting than the bikes themselves was watching people react to the bikes. There was the pair of very short young women comparing seat height -- "The Ninja's seat is lower," said one of them as she sat on the CBR. She apparently owned a Ninja 250. The sales rep leapt upon them, survey clipboard in hand, and started asking marketing questions. "You're pretty much exactly our target customers," he said. There were a lot of positive reactions. I watched a couple of vendors from a different booth sit on it, remarking how incredibly light it is (quite true). A passer-by remarked, "Four thousand dollars?" It was clear he was impressed at the low price. People were not saying, "Pff, who wants a 250?" It was encouraging. Mark posited later that it's because the economy's so down, and that Honda never would have bothered bringing in the 250 if we were still all rolling in home-equity-based riches. He's probably right, but I hope that having brought it in, Honda will keep it for a few years.
One of the things that impressed me about the bike itself is that the seating position is very well set up. I fit on it with no problem, and it was clear that bigger and smaller people would also fit, assuming the seat-to-peg distance wasn't an issue. It wasn't very leaned forward (matching the Ninja 250 in that regard), with a neutral seating position. When I got down into a racing tuck, I found that the tank was perfectly angled for this position, and the screen was the right distance away -- obviously Honda hopes that people will race their newest little import. Eventually I wandered on, and found myself at the Seattle Cycle Center booth. I figured this would be where I'd find a helmet, as they're the only major vendor selling a number of different lines at the show. Earlier this week, knowing I'd be going to look at helmets, I looked around for reviews, and came upon the very useful archive of helmet reviews at WebBikeWorld. I went through all the recent reviews, and wrote down a little list of the helmets I wanted to check out. The problem with this approach is that about half the helmets I wanted to check out (notably the Nexx XR1R Carbon and the Akuma Phantom II) weren't anywhere to be found, anywhere in the show. I didn't even bother writing down some of the other "off" brand helmets, knowing I'd never see them in person. If no one carries a helmet, how am I supposed to know if it fits me? If I don't know it fits, I'm not going to bother. It's a kind of chicken-and-egg catch-22, and it's terribly frustrating when you want to try out these cool but underdistributed helmets. So, I tried on the ones that were actually present, including a raft of Shoeis, a raft of Arais, and a few HJCs. The HJC FS-15 Carbon was particularly interesting, but when I put it on, it wasn't noticeably lighter than other helmets, and didn't fit. That was actually the story of the experience, as it always is -- I'm lucky if I find one helmet that fits well. I'm not sure if I'm super picky or what, but it's very difficult to find a helmet that meets me all the way around, and doesn't press anywhere, and is actually comfortable for more than a minute or two. Everything I tried on was either too round, or too short front-to-back. Everything, of course, but one: the most expensive helmet I tried on.
I tried to avoid it. I tried on the other helmets. I did everything I could, but I ended up with the next generation of my current helmet, and one of the most expensive helmets Shoei makes: the X-Twelve. Part of the reason, I have to admit, was talking to Tim O'Mahony, who is the WMRRA chief tech, and one of the trained medical personnel who respond to crashes on the track. He responded to two deaths in the last year -- one in which the rider died on his bike, then crashed, and another in which a novice made a mistake and ended up piling into a dirt wall with his bike on top of him. In both cases, he related how he had to just take the risk and yank the helmet off the rider, risking possible aggravating neck or spine injuries. The X-Twelve (and a few other high-end racing helmets) now include quick-release cheek pads, which means that an EMT can pull the pads out and ease the helmet off a downed rider's head gently, without aggravating any spinal injuries that already exist. Between the fact that the X-12 fits well, and this new wrinkle, it seemed like it was probably worth the expense. I can no longer claim that I primarily get around by motorcycle, but as long as I can afford it, I'd still prefer to get the best safety equipment I possibly can. Particularly as this helmet will be used for racing, I'll take any extra safety I can get. So, I plunked down my plastic money, and I should have a shiny white helmet here in a week or two. My final task at the show was to sign up for my race license. This year is extra cool to me because I get to choose a new number. After a few years of being a graduated novice without having actually gone through the full graduation process (ie, doing my volunteer hours), I was stuck with my novice plates and number, 823. It's not a bad number, but I knew it wouldn't be permanent, so I couldn't mark it on anything (putting your race number on equipment is pretty standard practice around the pits). I had prepared a list in my head of the numbers I wanted, for various nerdly reasons: 555 because it's the number of a useful, simple and popular integrated circuit. 556 for the same reason, plus 5.56mm is a popular rifle caliber. 223 for the same caliber expressed in inches instead of millimeters. Then, when I was sitting down to write down my number preferences, I checked the website again (yay smartphones!), and realized that 250 was available. I certainly enjoyed racing the Ninja 250 more than the CL175 last year, so I have a feeling that may become my preferred bike -- I scratched out the list I'd written down, and added 250 as my first choice. I'm sure I'll get one of 250, 555, 556 or 223, and any one of them will make me perfectly happy. So, that was most of my IMS experience this year. I certainly saw other things, the show was full of stuff, most of which didn't interest me. And of course, sometimes you just see things that boggle your conception of why people spend money like they do.
Posted at 14:40 permanent link category: /motorcycle Tue, 07 Dec 2010
I've probably been living in a cave as far as this news goes, but finally some good news in the "Smaller is Better" department: Honda CBR250R available in the US 250cc and smaller bikes are usually the provenance of Asia. It's incredibly encouraging to see a company other than Kawasaki bringing in a 250cc bike of any kind, much less a sportbike, much less a sport bike with available ABS. I'm too invested in the Ninja 250 at this point (having a fairly new one as well as a race bike) to consider expanding my stable with another new bike, but you can bet I'll be keeping up on news about the littlest CBR. I'm particularly interested to hear how the engine compares between the Ninja and the CBR, since the Ninja has a high-revving twin (13.5k redline) and the CBR has a single (likely about a 9k redline, I haven't been able to dig up the actual number yet). The CBR should prove to be considerably friendlier to new riders, with a better spread of power down low than the comparatively high-strung Ninja. Kudos to honda for bringing it in! I wish they'd brought in the inline-4 CBR250 of yesteryear (19k redline!), but the single is a great choice if you're aiming the bike at new riders, which they certainly are. The CBR is priced exactly the same as the Ninja in the US (and cheaper than the Ninja in Canada), or you can blow an extra $500 on ABS, an option Kawasaki doesn't offer. This is going to be interesting. Posted at 16:52 permanent link category: /motorcycle Wed, 24 Nov 2010A friend linked to this story, which is a bit clearer (and more fact-based) on why Seattle has such a hard time with snow: Posted at 12:12 permanent link category: /misc So, Monday of this week, we got a bit of snow. Maybe 5 inches, if I read the NOAA report right. Nothing much, right? A little plow action, some sand and salt, voila. Not so, of course. Seattle is famously inept at handling things like this. After Snowpocalypse 2008, a lot of people got very angry, words were said, mayors were elected, things were promised, etc.
Anyway, my personal story is a mixture of vexation and victory, and I wanted to share it. Mid-day Monday, it looked like things were getting better, and I decided I'd try to head out after working from home for the morning. I got in the truck (my bicycle being out of commission with a busted shifter), put it in gear, and spent the next five minutes fruitlessly spinning one of the tires: the parking brake was stuck on, and the free right wheel got all the power from the differential. I feared this might happen, and after some intense frustration at my predicament, sent a text to the person I'd been intending to meet for lunch, and dejectedly went back inside. In the back of my head, I was plotting: how will I get out and about if I need to? I actually walked down to the store on Monday to get some groceries, and ingredients for the chestnut stuffing traditionally made in my family, and which I'll be sharing with friends on Thursday. I made use of my Yak Trax, which I bought after Snowpocalypse 2008, and hadn't ever really used. They worked delightfully, and I'm quite happy with them. So, walking: check. However, I don't live walking distance from much. A grocery store, a handful of restaurants, a convenience store or two, a gas station. Higher speed transport was still in order. Still is in order, for that matter. The truck is, honestly, out of the question until a bunch more melting happens. It's rear-wheel-drive only, and has terrible tires on it in any case. Its only saving grace is ABS, so I wouldn't necessarily lock the tires up, but I would still rear-end someone due to no traction. Even with a couple hundred pounds of stuff in the bed, it's more likely to spin the rear tires than go anywhere. Normally, I'd lever the studded snow tires onto my bicycle, and pedal off without a second thought. That's why I have those tires. Unfortunately, late last week, my shifter gave up the ghost, and so the bicycle is now a single-speed until the new shifter arrives. Since I took the shifter off, that speed is the highest gear, which makes riding in a slow speed environment like snow pretty much a non-starter. Finally, yesterday, I gave in to my frustration and put the snow tires on the bike anyway. I threaded the shift cable back through its run, and left the head pressing on the end of the cable housing at the handlebars. Using the thank-god-I-got-this-thing third-hand tool (seriously, if you work on bikes at all, you need one of these), I carefully clamped the now-immobile shift cable in place so that the rear derailleur was stuck in 6th gear. Naturally, I removed the front shifter and converted it to single-speed front about a month ago, so this was the only option. With my bike now stuck permanently in 6th gear (until I get a new shifter, anyway), and equipped with snow tires, what did I do? If you guessed, "Went back inside," you'd be right. But it didn't last. In order to make our traditional stuffing, which is based on chestnuts, I still needed to get some chestnuts. There's a schmancy brand of chestnuts from France that come pre-peeled, saving one about 5 hours of burnt fingers and misery, and I wanted to get some of those. They're spendy, but I figured I liked my fingers unburnt, so they're worth it. The only problem? The only store that carries them locally is Whole Foods. Trader Joes has some chestnuts that might be the right thing, but when I called, they were down to one 4 oz package. I need 2 lbs. Out of curiosity, I did a quick search to see if there were a nearer Whole Foods store -- what did I spy, but the one in Ravenna! I had completely forgotten about it! I never go that way, and why would I (normally) want anything to do with such a spendy store? I didn't want the chestnuts to sell out (a thing which happens frequently around Thanskgiving time), and it was only 7 pm. The bike was ready. What was holding me back? Nothing! I pulled on some extra clothes, packed yet more clothes into the pannier, and headed out. I'm glad I packed those extras: according to my thermometer, it was 22° F when I left the house, and 19° F when I got home, and the winter-weight motorcycle gloves I brought along were actually kind of inadequate to the task. Still, I made it to Whole Foods without any problem (discovering a new and very useful route along the way), got my chestnuts, snapped a quick "I made it!" picture, and headed home. The trip took about 45 minutes each way. I have to say, there's something fiercely delightful about riding through the snow on a bicycle, with all the flashing LED lights going crazy. The snow tires mostly kept me going, with one incident on the 92nd street overpass over I-5 where some slush nearly got the better of me, but I was able to stick a leg out and slide slowly to a stop without falling. Climbing icy hills with the snow tires is still a surreal experience, with about as much grip as I expect on dry pavement. Only the uneven rutted surface of the snow gives any clue that anything unusual is going on. And, in this case, being stuck in 6th gear for hills I normally would have taken in 2nd or 3rd. So although I wasn't able to regain all the transportational freedom I'd have liked (never made it out to see my lunch date), at least I've got a viable option. Now I just hope that the weather predictions are right, and Thanksgiving day is a lot warmer. It'd be nice to be able to get out and about. Posted at 11:30 permanent link category: /misc Fri, 12 Nov 2010
Countersteering and Gyroscopic Effects
I've you're a long-time reader of this writing channel of mine, you'll know that I'm a big proponent of clear-headed thinking on countersteering. I've done a Countersteering 101 video, a Slow-Speed Countersteering video (to demonstrate that countersteering is still possible and still happens even at very low speeds), and wrote a long article on countersteering for new riders. I've always maintained that although gyroscopic forces certainly play some role in cycle steering, it's not very large, but I've never backed that up. It seems intuitively obvious to me, having played with a hand-held bicycle wheel at a museum, and felt the gyroscopic forces involved. They're there, no question, but they're not all that strong. So I was interested when someone commented on my Countersteering 101 video with a link to an article that goes into a bit more depth on the subject: Gyroscopic Effects Have Almost Nothing to Do With Your Ability to Ride a Bike It's nice to see other people out there dispelling myths on the subject. Posted at 10:38 permanent link category: /motorcycle Tue, 09 Nov 2010
A Bit of Seasoning Saves the Soup
I mentioned before how the Droid X was not being at all pleasing to me, in particular as regards the battery life. After a couple of deep discharge cycles, I respectfully offer a different opinion. The first discharge was enough to (probably) calibrate the battery meter, and the subsequent discharges have served to condition the battery much better. This last weekend, I had the phone playing a Pandora stream for perhaps 4 hours, playing locally-stored MP3s for an hour or two, plus my normal light usage, and after nearly 24 hours of this, the battery was only down to 50%. That's way more like it. I also found the way to turn off the email push/fetch action (the setting is inside the Email app, instead of in the system-wide Settings). The phone is finally starting to get into the state I prefer. Generally speaking, if I want data, I'll ask for it. There's no need for my device to go out and fetch it when doing so is an expensive operation in battery life. Posted at 11:01 permanent link category: /misc Fri, 05 Nov 2010For reasons we needn't get into, I was required to get a Droid phone, and decided on the Droid X after a too-brief introduction session with a few of the contenders. So far, I'm not very pleased with my choice. My biggest complaint is one that few of my contemporaries seem to share: I don't have any interest in telling Google my secrets. In this case, by "secrets" I mean my schedule, who my friends are, and what their contact details are. It seems like a basic tenet of modern life that your phone number is semi-privileged information -- would you want your phone number pasted all over the internet, as a private citizen? For most people the answer is no. So why would I willingly upload all my friends' phone numbers to a service which is dedicated to advertising, data mining and data correllation? Same goes for my calendar, but at least there I'm only sharing my own private information, not that of all my friends. Generally speaking, though sharing your calendar with the world is a bad idea. I don't talk about upcoming events here or anywhere else online, so as to advertise as little as possible things like where to find me, or where to find my absence (such as at my house). Why would I want to share my calendar with a service which is dedicated to disseminating information far and wide, and has shown already proven to be a valuable hacking target? You know where this is going. I've only owned the Droid X a few days now, but I've already had a battery-is-DYING panic (on day 3), at 7:30 in the evening, after unplugging from shore power at 8:30 am. Really? 11 hours (under light usage, no less)? Bullshit. So now I own a fancy retracting Micro USB cord which I'll be carrying everywhere with me like I carry my prefer-not-to-die-of-asthma inhaler. Fantastic. Fortunately, I've found solutions for some of these problems. The contacts thing was, while very difficult to find, the simplest solution. I didn't want to upload all my iPhone's contacts to Google, and after two days of searching, I finally found a passing mention in a forum to an app called Import Contacts. Import Contacts takes a vCard file (which most contact apps will export), and imports those contacts directly to the phone, without having to involve the all-seeing eyes of Google. For 2.1 and later versions of Android, the Contacts app also includes an Import/Export option under the Settings menu, which will do the same thing (of course, it's completely undocumented, that I could find -- I only found it because the Import Contacts app said it was there). In Address Book on my Mac, I selected all the entries, and did File > Export... > Export as vCard... Done. Uploaded that .vcf file to the phone's SD card, and the import worked perfectly. The schedule solution is not going to be as pleasing to any of my readers interested in a calendar app with a local database. I bought a Moleskine schedule book. Advantages: no batteries, can't be rendered inoperable by shocks or water damage (such as the light dunking that nearly killed my iPhone a week ago), doubles as a sketch book and way to foster vague literary pretentions. Disadvantages: can't be sync'd, and moving entries around is not as simple as cut and paste (except in a very literal way). And repeat entry options are... pretty manual. For the battery issue, I bought a retractable USB cable. I'm usually somewhere near a computer, which is enough to give the damn phone a booster charge, and I've got a small USB-output wall-wart on the way for those times I'm not. I also turned on the Maximum Battery Savings setting on my phone, which turns off "sync" after 15 minutes of inactivity -- fine by me, the first thing I did on my iPhone was turn off any push stuff I could find (to save battery life). The Droid doesn't even have the option, you have to force the data connection to turn off. The radios in these things are the number one killer of battery life, so anything you can do to reduce usage of the radios (by which I mean: voice/SMS radio, 3G radio, GPS receiver, WiFi radio, Bluetooth radio) will help. There's also some amount of app-killing you can do, but I'm still sorting through what I can kill off without destabilizing the phone. I'm underwhelmed so far. The huge screen and lightning-fast processor (despite which I've already found numerous laggy points in the UI) are nothing to me if I can't use them for lack of power. Next time, Motorola, sacrifice a couple millimeters of thickness (which you can afford!) for a heftier battery. Less than 24 hours of battery life sucks ass, and if I had it to do over again, I never would have picked a Droid X. Of course, I'm stuck with my choice for now. Posted at 09:32 permanent link category: /misc Mon, 25 Oct 2010After the boat tour (which only lasted an hour or two), we headed back to the hotel to change. Well, others had to change. I was, of course, already dressed in my fancy best, so I just hung out while others changed their clothes. The party started at 7 pm, at the Alt Hamburger Bürgerhaus, a classy old building near the harbor. I don't know what it used to be (the name may or may not correctly indicate that it was a bürgerhaus, or a sort of Middle Ages community center), but the building is now done up as a restaurant with separate rooms above. It was very nicely appointed, and was laid out with tables to seat about 70. I ended up riding the U-bahn with my parents to get there. Although we got off at the right stop (Rödingsmarkt off the U3), we got turned around as we exited the station, and it wasn't until we'd reached the previous station at the Rathaus (town hall) that we realized what had happened. Fortunately, we were only about five minutes out of our way, so we turned around, and found our destination without any problem. Reading maps is a little odd in European cities, since everything is packed so close together -- what appears to be a fairly large distance on the map is actually pretty short when you walk it because of the density. Once we got to the restaurant, we were escorted past the empty dining room, and upstairs to a low-ceilinged room, packed with people. It was the cocktail party before the dinner. Finally, I felt more comfortable with the kilt on (although it was clear that I was going to be too warm in short order -- the kilt is many things, but cool and breezy is not one of them). Drinks were passed around, and we mingled in.
For my dad and myself, we at least had some idea of the conversations going on, but I felt bad for my mom, who speaks essentially no German, and only understands a bit. Most of the people there were game to speak English, but I'm pretty sure she didn't interrupt anyone to request the language change. I only barely followed what people were saying, between the background roar and the fact that I was wandering between conversations. I also didn't really know anyone except Cori, Jens (who I'd just met that morning) and a small handful of family and friends. Cori and her family were the only people who I could really claim any familiarity with. After an appropriate period of mingling, Jens gave a little speech thanking everyone for coming, and inviting us to head downstairs for dinner. Dinner places were laid out with place cards, and I was seated in among a group of Jens's friends whom I hadn't really chatted with up to that point. Nanette, the woman I'd been talking to on the boat tour, was at the next table, so I couldn't continue the conversation I'd been having with her. The group I was seated with was interesting, though, and I ended up playing my "quiet listener" role that I seem to fall into so easily in groups. After a bit, the appetizer course was announced, and we all got up and filed through the serving area. There was an interesting variety of food served, including great bread, surprisingly good sushi and a diverse selection of other food. Bread became something of a theme of the trip. I'm sure bad bread exists in Germany, but pretty much everything we had was excellent. It was a real difference to the US, where you can pretty safely go in with an expectation of mediocre bread, and it's a surprise when you get something good that you didn't specifically seek out. After the appetizers came the dinner course, and this time my tablemates and I got up in a timely manner -- for appetizers, we'd waited, engaged in conversation, and ended up standing in line for quite a while. I ended up with a healthy mix of stuff from the appetizer and dinner courses on my plate, and ended up very happy. During the course of the dinner, several people got up and gave little speechs: Jens's father, Cori's father, my dad, and the best man, Max. Max's speech ended dinner, and drew us back upstairs, where several things were awaiting us. There were a few gifts that the best man and maid of honor had prepared, including a marriage log book (Jens is a sailor, and they've been on several sailing trips together) and some other things. There was also a shrimp eating contest, which was strange but enjoyable.
Jens and Cori were seated at opposite ends of a table, and a huge plate of unshelled shrimp was placed in front of each. With a flourish, Max produced a bottle of Aqvavit, a strong liqueur, which he proceeded to fill a wine glass with. He placed this in front of Jens. With a similar flourish, Cori got a glass full of sparkling water, in deference to the fact that she was pregnant. There was a certain amount of good-natured ribbing about the fact that she was getting out of the exercise due to the pregnancy. A timer was started, and each started to feverishly eat shrimp. I'm pretty sure the idea was that the one who ate fewer shrimp in a minute would have to take a drink (drain the wine glass? Not sure), but Jens got a head start by taking a large steadying gulp of his drink before anything started. At the end of the first round, I think Cori was behind, but Jens took another drink anyway, also handing the glass to his father, who drained it like it was water. I don't recall now who won, or if a winner was even possible. Cori told me later that she was really glad she had an excuse to not have to drink, and that she'd been afraid they'd try to push her to have Aqvavit as well. Because this entry has been extremely long in the writing, I'll cut it off here, and continue later, with the embarrassing baby photos, dancing until the wee hours, and the rest of the trip. Posted at 12:18 permanent link category: /misc Tue, 12 Oct 2010Ok, I'm definitely not going to get this all out in one entry, but might as well get started. As of today, we've gone through the following:
Friday started out gently enough, after our long walk back from Blankenese, and we gathered, nicely attired without being in our finest black rags (or in my case, tartan rags), for the trip to the city hall where Jens and Cori would be married. The building itself was big and white, and looked a bit older than a lot of the buildings in Hamburg, which Jens has been pointing out as we have driven along. There was a huge firestorm in Hamburg during WWII, worse than Dresden (the one all the Americans know about, if they know anything about firestorms in Germany), and it wiped out a great deal of buildings, and killed a massive number of people, many of them simply due to lack of oxygen after the fire swept through. It's hard to imagine cowering in your basement, listening to the world shake and shudder, only to be killed not by falling masonry or shrapnel or bullets, but by a simple absence of oxygen. In any case, we stood around for a long time (we'd gotten there somewhat early, just in case). Cori looked great in her wedding dress, a comparatively simple white dress that had a sort of modified Empire waist to go over her increasingly prominent belly (she's due around January first), and Jens looked like a million bucks in his suit and pointy Italian shoes. The crowd size increased as more friends showed up, and I saw some new faces that I'd be seeing a lot of over the next few days. Eventually, it was closer to time, so we stopped hanging out in the parking lot, and filled up the lobby of the building. At least this entrance was specifically designed for these civil ceremonies (if I understood correctly, every wedding in Germany is a civil ceremony, and the religious ceremonies are viewed as a kind of unnecessary extra by many), and the ceremonial room was directly off the lobby. We watched another couple disappear into the room, only to emerge about 15 minutes later, happily wedded. The new wife was dressed in a fairly amazing assemblage of gothy wedding-dress-ness, including a tightly cinched corset. I couldn't help but take a few pictures. Then it was our turn, and we filed into the room. Jens and Cori sat opposite the official, a mild older woman, and the best man and maid of honor sat on the far ends of the long table. The ceremony itself was pretty short. Cori and Jens both signed some documents, the official trotted out what was probably a well-rehearsed speech (but also well delivered), and then they signed some more documents, Cori using her new signature for the first time ever (having forgotten to practice it the night before). There was nervousness, and there were smiles, and in all, it was pretty moving for being done in such a business-like way in language that I barely understood. My German's ok, but it definitely doesn't stretch to wedding ceremonies. The happy couple led us out to the area in front of the building again, where the maid of honor and the best man were holding up a white sheet with a huge heart painted onto it. There was some fumbling, then Cori and Jens were each handed a small pair of scissors, and they started to cut out the heart, to comments of, "he's definitely faster than she is," as she was hampered by a bouquet until she handed it off to her father. They met at the top and smilingly held up the freed heart, only to have to finish off a tiny bit at the bottom, then they stepped through the heart-shaped hole. All the while, flower petals were falling around them. It was very pretty, and apparently completely non-traditional -- people in the crowd were asking where the tradition came from, whether it were Hungarian (Cori's part Hungarian through her mother). The universal response was, "Dunno, I've never seen that before," (but in German, of course). I later learned that it was an idea from either the best man or the maid of honor (Max and Suzi, since I'll doubtless want to keep referring to them). Then we walked a short distance to a park that overlooked the Elbe river, and all the cargo-handling cranes lining the river. Max and Suzi set up a little folding table with champagne flute filled with champagne and orange juice. We drank a toast to the newly married couple, and I shot a ton of pictures. I'm incredibly glad that I brought along the big camera. The little one never would have sufficed, and I got some great images. Our little party got curious looks from the people who were just in the park because it was a nice day, but I'm sure people must be used to wedding parties heading out there -- it's only a few hundred meters from the wedding room. After a bit, we packed up the party there, and headed to the next party, an informal-ish late lunch at a very nice restaurant overlooking the water south of St. Pauli, called Lutter and Wegner. I sat in the midst of a group of people around my age (Cori and Jens are both about 5 years younger than me), mostly friends of the groom. The conversation was mostly in German (which I liked, even though I missed a lot of what was happening), but it quickly became clear that we weren't the only long-distance travellers: there was a couple who'd travelled from Shanghai with their adorable little girl, who spent the entire lunch sleeping peacefully, much to the delight of the parents. Eventually Cori and Jens departed, to have their pictures professionally taken, and the rest of us slowly filtered out to our respective places of residence. I walked back with my family and Cori's family to the U-bahn station we'd been using a lot: Landungsbrücken, which is the center of the river tourist area. Reinhardt, Cori's father, took us on a curious route that did eventually get there, but all of us spent at least a few moments looking at each other and wondering if we were ever going to find the station. I should have trusted to his sense of direction more -- looking now at a map, it's clear that you just have to follow the river, so it's pretty hard to get lost (the river's that big wet wobbly thing with boats on it; keep it to your right, keep going). The Wifi problem had been very vexing up to this point, and my dad finally broke down and paid 5 Euros for some Wifi time from the hotel. His new Droid X phone made the trip with us mostly so it could act as a GPS and mapping platform -- he loaded it up with offline maps. The GPS wasn't working though, presumably because it really wanted to talk to a cell tower to figure out approximately where it was. The hope was that once the phone spent some time on the internet, it would figure out where it was and give the GPS a kickstart. It also meant that my parents' laptop popped up on Skype, and before we knew it, my brother David was calling. There followed a brief conversation which was primarily spent doing the "Why isn't this video camera working?" dance, and then basically covered scheduling the next call. Saturday was really the big day. With the harbor tour in the afternoon, and the party in the evening, it should be full and interesting, and if we did it right, at 5 am we'd all head down to the Fischmarkt to buy Fischbrötchen (fish on fresh bread). However, the harbor tour didn't leave until 2, so there was some morning time that could be spent doing whatever. I hadn't been successful in tracking down the contact information for the Keims (although I then found it too late in my phone -- since when do I do sensible things like put contact information in a contact information database?). I lived with the Keims for some of my time in Germany in 1991, and have remained friendly with them. However, for that morning, I decided to see if I could track down the house of the Schmidts, my first family. The Schmidts lived on Walddörferstraße, in the Tonndorf area of Hamburg, right near a huge park called the Eichtalpark. I had no idea what the house number was, but I figured it couldn't be that hard to walk the length of Walddörferstraße. Surely I'd recognize it, even if I couldn't recognize much of Hamburg. I took the U-bahn to Wandsbek Markt, the shopping district that started one end of Walddörferstraße, and started walking. I didn't particularly recognize Wandsbek Markt, but I also hadn't spent much time there for all that the name was terribly familiar. Walddörferstraße, on the other hand, immediately looked familiar. For some reason, I had the idea in my head that the house was number 58, but was quickly proved wrong -- number 58 was a multi-unit apartment building that had clearly been there since the 50s or 60s. Every slight corner the street made was naggingly familiar, and I expected to find the house any minute. In fact, I ended up walking nearly 40 minutes before I finally found it at #279. It was surely the same house, although if the Schmidts still live there, they've gone down in the world -- the exterior of the house is in terrible shape, and they've gone from two big Mercedes SUVs to one little Suzuki mini-jeep thing. I didn't really have time to hang around, so I didn't even try ringing the bell. In any case, we hadn't really parted on good terms. They thought I was weird and quiet and unfriendly, and I thought they were loud and obnoxious and hard to deal with. It was about 11:50, and I estimated that I had to be back on the U-bahn by 1. I'd arrived at 11, so I didn't have a lot of time to dally. One of the striking things as I walked down Walddörferstraße was the smell. The Deutsche Hefewerke (yeast manufactory) stands shortly past Wandsbek Markt, and it produces a very very distinctive smell. The rotted-grape smell was immediate, and had that remarkable quality that smells have to bring me right back to the past -- I was reminded of 1991 and 1992 all the more strongly because I'd been thinking about it while writing these entries, and in general being back in Hamburg. I walked back via the Eichtalpark (a name I think I'd never known when I was here before), and spotted a few familiar looking places. I used to ride my bike through the park to get to school, and it was a much more pleasant route than riding down the street. I thought hard about asking someone where Gymnasium Tonndorf was, but decided ultimately that I didn't have enough time. It would have been really interesting to go back and see it again, although it would have doubtless changed a bit in the intervening 20 years. I was disappointed to see that the park hadn't been well treated over the years. The little stream that ran through in particular was remarkably full of garbage, with cloudy water where the sun shone through the trees. The rest of the park was alright, but I figured with all the environmental consciousness that has grown in Germany since I was there, I wouldn't have spotted a dead shopping cart shoved into the stream, nor the collection of white plastic bags. I don't know if it's a good or bad thing, but walking along the Eichtalpark caused me to more or less shift back 20 years. I remembered events and people I haven't really thought about since then, and remembered how homesick and frustrated I was at my situation, with the Schmidts and my inability to really be understood or understand in my adopted language. I also remembered the better times toward the end, when I was much more comfortable with German, and when my living situation had settled out much better. It was fairly moving for just walking down a gravel path in a park. I made it back to Wandsbek Markt, and made a strategic decision to stop in for a small spot of lunch before going back to the hotel to change. I brought my kilt with me, as it's the most formal clothing I own, and that seemed fairly appropriate for going to a wedding. Unfortunately, I'd left myself precious little time after my little trip down memory lane: it was 5 to one as I walked into the cafe, and 5 past when I left, and I had to get back to the hotel, change into a kilt, and make it to the harbor before 2. The boat sailed at two on the dot, so it's not like I could be fashionably late. I took the train back to the hotel (which required a transfer at Lübecker Straße, guaranteed to slow me down), and was feverishly throwing on my formal wear by 1:30. Without actually running, I walked at a furious pace to the U-bahnhof next to the hotel (Uhlandstraße), and at a further furious pace down to the dock once I'd reached the harbor. Let me tell you, it's a very odd feeling to be wearing a kilt at midday in a German city, riding a subway. I know I got a few curious stares, and several people stopped to say they thought it was cool. I don't have the whole outfit, with the fancy jacket and shoes, but I have enough that I look like I mean it -- kilt, tall socks, pseudo-wingtips, and the little sock-top knife, the sgian dubh. I had several comments from people about the sgian dubh, I think because it was remarkable to see someone walking around with an obviously displayed knife. In that particular situation, I think I would have been happier to have a fakey sgian dubh that was all one piece, and didn't actually contain a shiny and pointy blade inside the little scabbard. Thanks to my sharp-eyed mother, I made it to the boat before it took off, but it was a close thing. I wouldn't have found it except for her calling my name, as I was looking on the wrong side of the dock. The dock was absolutely awash in tourists, so thick that it was hard to walk for all the people. But made it I did. As I climbed aboard (or stood around waiting to climb aboard), it became clear to me that the harbor tour was not, in fact, a dressy event. I'd done all that rushing around for nothing. But it impressed Nanette, a friend of Jens's, who I had talked to at lunch the previous day, and who I sat next to for the harbor tour. The boat was well-packed, and had to be near it's rated capacity. It was hard to move, so I ended up basically sitting in one spot (which was perfectly pleasant) next to Nanette, getting my own mini tour as we talked about all the sights passing by. She was quite patient with my somewhat deficient German, and humored me by staying in that language even though it probably would have been easier for both of us to switch to English. I noticed with a few people that I was switching in and out of German pretty easily. Most everyone there spoke enough English to carry on a reasonable conversation, ranging from Cori, who I would still call pretty fluent (and who's had about as much time away from English as I've had away from German) to her sister's boyfriend (Gerhardt is the boyfriend, and Andrea is the sister), who could speak English but clearly wasn't comfortable with it. Another funny thing was that I was spending so much time around my dad, who knows German, but not as well as me, that I found myself thinking in his German, including what sounds like a sort of half-way Slavic accent. It got to the point that it was fairly distracting, since that amounts to backsliding for me. So, up next: the wedding party. Posted at 06:25 permanent link category: /misc Thu, 07 Oct 2010Being back in Hamburg has been very interesting. I find my German coming back pretty well, although I'm still pretty halting when doing anything more than the barest basic communication. I don't honestly remember most of Hamburg proper, so it's hard to say whether the city is terribly different. I'm sure it's changed, but I was never in the place we're staying (near the Aussenalster, a small late at the center of the city). I also never went to the place we've been going (largely down to the harbor). My previous life in Hamburg was to the east, in Rahlstedt, Tonndorf, Wandsbek, Glinde and Braak. The first day, we were feverishly trying to stay awake, so as to stave off the worst of the jet lag. We were actually quite successful, staying up and mostly awake until about 8 local time. We all suffered a bit from little attacks of the tired, nearly nodding off, but rallied back pretty well. As I type, it's 11 pm, and I feel almost like I could stay up as late as I normally do. So, I'll call that jet lag plan a success. Speaking of jet lag, it's one of the many topics I find myself almost completely unable to discuss in German due to having never learned the terms around it. Fortunately, jet lag itself is just called "jet lag" in German, so that problem was quickly solved. But many of the things I've done recently in my life, such as theater, motorcycles and photography, are things for which I completely lack vocabulary. It hasn't been a problem, it's just an interesting thing to note. The first day in Hamburg, as we were fighting off the jet lag sleepies, we did a lot of walking. We went down to the harbor, and ended up walking through the warehouse district. I'd never seen warehouses served by canals, so I was very interested to see how they work. There's a winch every couple hundred meters, which was used to convey cargo from a transfer barge to the warehouse. Each warehouse seemed to be 5-6 stories tall, and they were universally made of brick in a style that would be considered old-world in Seattle. Probably they'd actually be considered olde worlde, but one can only take these things so far. The search for wifi access that doesn't cost ridiculous amounts of money has been fruitless so far. Our hotel, despite being fairly teeth-achingly expensive, only includes wifi access for a fee (5 Euros for 60 minutes, up to 30 Euros for 24 hours), and then only in the other building. We swallowed our pride and walked into a "McCafe" on the advice that they had free wifi, but we discovered that that's only if you have a German mobile phone. Fortunately, the coffee was pretty good, so it wasn't a wasted experience. I've decided that this really is the complete severance of electronish leashes that I was quietly hoping for. The cell phone doesn't work, and we can't find wifi. Done. I'm really in Hamburg now. Today (day 2), we had two big events. Cori's parents arrived from Vienna, and we had a big lunch with them. Another odd thing is that it's been pretty hard to find vegetarian food that wasn't just straight-up salad. That's not as surprising, but it's still not what I was expecting. I'm surviving just fine, but today at lunch, for instance, I discovered half-way through that my potatoes had been roasted with bacon (no wonder they tasted so good!). Oh well. I'm not going to freak out about it. Just rollin' with it. The second event was taking the S-bahn (streetcar nominally, although honestly you'd be hard pressed to find the difference between the U-bahn and the S-bahn in terms of which spends more time above or below ground) out to Blankenese, a former fishing village turned shi-shi rich-district to the west of the city center. It was fun to wander down among the Treppenviertel houses (all connected only by footpaths -- no vehicles allowed), and wonder how the rich inhabitants moved in or out, or brought groceries to their houses. I guessed they had people for that. There followed a long, long walk from Blankenese to a dock where we were supposedly going to take a harbor mass transit boat (which accepts the same day-passes as the U-bahn or busses). The walk was pleasant, but by the end, my feet were aching, and all I could think about was sitting down. We were passed by three different boats before we finally gave up and went up to catch a bus. Fortunately for us, the express bus to the Altona station was waiting.
A bunch more people arrived today, and so I've had a bunch of new names to learn and immediately forget, and dinner was a much bigger event, with 13 people in a restaurant that looked a bit strained to seat us all. As it was, we had to split up between two tables, and I ended up sitting at the "adult table." After that, I had a brief tour of the roads between where we're staying at the Hauptbahnhof, or main train station. Max, the groom's best man, needed to return his Smart car, and offered to bring me along. Despite getting lights flashed at him by the police when he turned where he shouldn't have, we arrived safely. That brings us to about now, where I find myself nodding off at the computer, sitting in a small bed in our room. Evidently 11:20 is too late, and I need to proceed to bed. Tomorrow will be the wedding itself (a small, civil union with a few people attending), and then the day after will be the big reception. Some sleep will do me good. Posted at 14:24 permanent link category: /misc Wed, 06 Oct 2010As I write this, I'm most of the way through the flight from Seattle to Amsterdam, and by midday (European time, anyway), I'll be in Hamburg. My connection with Hamburg goes back a long way. After graduating high school, I decided to defer going off to college for a year, and go to Germany instead. I don't recall now how we settled on Hamburg, but I went with an awful agency called Euro Vacances. It was ok to start, but once things went south (about which more in a moment), they basically shrugged their collective shoulders and said, "Gee, that's too bad." I was thoroughly underwhelmed. In any case, at the tender age of 19, I packed up my things, and shipped out for Hamburg. I was bound for the Schmidt family, an MD, his wife, and their 6(!) children. My father solemnly reminded me that I should refer to Dr. Schmidt as Herr Doktor Schmidt when I got there. I was expecting to have a few weeks to ease into my new life in Germany before I'd start attending Gymnasium Tonndorf, a high school in the Rahlstedt neighborhood of Hamburg, near the eastern edge of the city. Instead, what happened was that I was bundled into a panel van (clearly a repurposed delivery van) along with all 8 of the Schmidts, and we started rolling for Yugoslavia. At the risk of dating myself horribly, the year was 1991. The intense and bloody Yugoslavian war was still in the future, but was clearly rumbling, to the extent that even I (famously underinformed on such things) was aware of it. We were headed for the island of Krk, in the northwest corner of what was then Yugoslavia. As it happened, the fighting (which was already going in other parts of the country) hadn't reached Krk (and maybe never did, I'm not sure). I'm sure the Schmidts wouldn't have made the trip if it was going to be dangerous, but it was an odd outlook for me. Even odder, though, was the fact that the Schmidt family, minus Herr Doktor, conducted itself in Croatian. Frequently at a very high volume, with lots of what were clearly obsenities (or moral equivalents) thrown in for emphasis. I'd taken German for a couple years in high school, and was prepared to suck at it once I got there. What I wasn't prepared for was having to live in an environment where I understood not one word (although I did eventually learn the phrase "Makni se cha!" -- as near as I could tell -- which seemed to mean "Shut your hole"), and having to do it at earsplitting decibel levels. So, this was my introduction to Germany: a trip to Yugoslavia, and a family screaming at each other in Croatian. We came back a few weeks later (there went my several weeks settling-in time), which was a few weeks I would have preferred not to have lived through. Yugoslavia is a Mediterranean country, therefore quite warm in late August and early September. In addition, I didn't speak the language, and had little idea how I should pass the time. I burned through the books I'd brought in short order, and whatever town we were staying in (Frau Schmidt's hometown, I think -- she was Croatian, and they spoke the language at home so that she wouldn't infect her children with her Slavic-accented German) was not big on amusing attractions. It was big on stucco and vaguely sullen, angry-looking men who filled me with a certain desire to stay inside, which combined with the powerful sunshine to keep me sequestered. Once back in Germany, I launched right into school, showing up at Tonndorf and enrolling (after a little bit of confusion) in the 10th class. 10th class is roughly equivalent to 10th grade, and Gymnasium goes to 13th class. Age-wise, I was closer to being 12th or 13th class, but we settled on 10th as being where my limited practical comprehension of German would work out best, while still keeping me with people about my age. My class consisted of maybe 20 or 30 kids, and somehow, I almost immediately fell in with the pot smokers. In this case, hash smokers, as pot was apparently a rarity and quite expensive, while reasonable quality Russian hash was easy to get and comparatively cheap. I never tried it except by proximity, and given the fact that I've never done any drugs, and never had any desire to, it struck me as odd even then that that's who befriended me. The people I best got along with were C and N (no names, I'd hate to impugn anyone's honor). Both young men were friendly and outgoing, and played together with a band that liked to cover Metallica songs. N was the guitarist, and C played drums, working the entire year I was there to perfect a double-kick pattern that really requires two pedals. I happened to play bass, and we all played together, making up some new songs, and they'd coach me on some of the easier Metallica songs (I didn't know the songs at all, so it was hard for me to follow along). Somewhere I still have a Minidisc of the songs we recorded. School was where I really enjoyed myself. Interacting with other folks my age, working on my German, tangentially learning stuff about geology and chemistry. I worked out with school officials that I could take a 3rd class German class, which the 3rd classers found hilarious, and I found amusing and also informative. At some point, I discovered that the school had a darkroom. I was a keen if untrained photographer in high school, and I must have brought my SLR with me (I forget now which camera I had). I quickly adopted the darkroom as my own. It was disused, and needed some cleaning up (and chemical replacement, I discovered to my dismay after the first batch of film turned out pitch black), but it was well set up, and I quite enjoyed myself down there. I distinctly remember listening to NDR2 (Nord-Deutsche Rundfunk, the local equivalent of NPR) on the old tube radio that inhabited one countertop, as I worked on prints. Meanwhile at home, things got worse and worse. The Schmidts and I only barely got along. I slept in a room with three or four of the kids, on a bunk. Frau Schmidt didn't much like me. H-D Schmidt seemed to think I was fine, but he was never there. I got along best with Sergei, the eldest son, who was a few years older than me. I suspect part of this is that he spoke excellent English, having spent a year in California. Sergei was actually quite a bright spot in the situation. He was a collector of bicycle parts, and quickly put together a bike for me so I could get around. He also rode a motorcycle (some variety of 400-600 single cylinder dual-sport, maybe a Yamaha), which I took exactly one ride on as a passenger, convinced the entire time that the tires were going to slide out, dropping helmet-less me to an ouchey fate. It didn't happen, but I wasn't enamored of the experience. The rest of the Schmidt experience, however, was slowly driving me insane. Finally, I couldn't take it any more, and I went back to Euro Vacances (and the guy I worked with, who I can only remember as The Forehead, for his by-far most prominent feature). He was unimpressed, and made it clear that he was doing me a huge favor by going out and finding a different family for me, once I finally convinced him it was necessary. It took several trips back to his office to do this. Thus, I was moved out of the Croatian-screaming Schmidt household, and into the quiet and placid Keim household, in Glinde. Glinde is a suburb of Hamburg, but appears contiguous, much like Shoreline is a suburb of Seattle. The Keims were the exact, 180° polar opposite of the Schmidts. They had one son, Ralf, who was in the US while I was living there. They were quiet and composed, and had tea at 4. No conversation (save one) was conducted above a gentle speaking voice. Herr Keim, Guenther, was a ham radio operator, and I spent many an hour hanging out with him in his attic shack, talking to people all over, but particularly with his friend in New York, whose name I've forgotten. They would talk several times a week, sometimes daily, when conditions were right. They had a code: call the other on the phone, and let it ring once, then hang up. If such a signal came, the signaled party knew to get up to the radio, and they'd converse over the airwaves. At the time, conditions were such that 10 meters was the band of choice. Life with the Keims was wonderful, compared to the Schmidts. I came home from school every day, and sequestered myself in my room, although I can't recall now what I was spending that time doing. Probably reading, I would scour the flea markets (a habit the Schmidts got going in me) for English-language books, and ended up with a very eclectic collection, including The High Times Guide to Recreational Drugs, among others. When it was tea time, I'd come out and have tea, and we'd have dinner in the kitchen. I even made burritos for them, hand-making the tortillas myself, and buying refried beans as one of the approximately three Mexican food products available in the market. During my time in Germany, my brother David had also embarked upon an exchange, to Holland. He was living in the Hague, which is close to Amsterdam. During one of our phone conversations, we decided that we should visit each other. I'd come to him at New Years, and he'd come to me at Christmas. After this particular phone call, I went to tell Guenther about the plans, and the world exploded. He got very tense, and raised his voice for the first time in my experience. There was shouting and unhappiness and general misery. It seems that I was too quiet. I disappeared into my room. I didn't talk to them. I was, without being too blunt, not Ralf. I would have to move out, there was nothing else for it. Absolutely in tatters, I was encouraged to go out to a party I'd been planning on attending. I ended up at the party, doubled over and crying for the majority of it. I was relating my troubles (which included, as far as I knew, the fact that I'd have to fly home early, since The Forehead had made clear that he wasn't going to swap families for me again) to one of the girls from school, and suddenly we were kissing. I have no idea how long it lasted, but it was honestly the best first kiss I've ever had, probably because of the massive emotional swing from doom and desolation to hey-I'm-kissing-a-girl. It was also my first kiss ever, which doubtless played into it as well. I was a bit of a late bloomer. Kiss or no, I was still, I thought, doomed. Then, out of the blue, one of the girls from school, Marei (whom I had a fairly hefty crush on) volunteered that her family had a spare room, and I could spend the rest of my year there. I was actually reminded of Marei just recently when one of the actors in Her Mother Was Imagination at Annex looked a lot like her. In any case, salvation! So, I moved again, this time into Marei's house. This was a bit more toward the center, in the sense that I was no longer in the extreme-shouting house, nor in the extreme-quiet house. Marei's family consisted of her, her older sister, and her two parents. Unfortunately, I can't remember any of their names, except Marei, but I recall that dad was some kind of rich yuppie type, maybe a banker. The elder sister was bound for college, and maybe even left before I did. The household, while richer than my own, was much more like my own in temperament. Marei lived in a little tiny farming village called Braak, just outside of Hamburg. Possibly the most amusing thing about this is that when spoken in German, Braak and Prague sound basically identical. So I'd tell people I was living in Braak, and they'd give me this puzzled look until I spelled it for them. I think I was happiest at Marei's house, but that's as much because I was left alone as anything else. As time was passing on, I was also getting more comfortable with life in Hamburg. My German was getting to the point where people thought I was a native (one of the things I was very happy about). Toward the end, I was hanging out at a sort of youth club called Startloch, and when I explained to one of the people there that I had to go back in two weeks, he looked befuddled and asked, "Go back where?" "To the States," said I (in German, of course). "Really!?" He honestly thought I was German, and it was one of the best compliments I ever got. So that, in a brief nutshell, was my almost-a-year in Germany in 1991 and 1992. It was a fantastic experience, family drama and exchange organization stupidity aside. I've always looked back very fondly on it, and have even thought semi-seriously about moving back to Hamburg for some period of time (and continue to think about it). Seattle will probably always be home, but Hamburg is pretty neat. Of course, I never explained why I'm headed for Hamburg in the first place. My family had exchange students over the years I was in college, and one of the best was Cori. She was from Vienna, and played violin and volleyball, and almost seemed to be made to slot right into our family. We all got along famously, to the point that she and my brother even went out for a while. We took a trip to visit her family among other exchange families in 1996. I went back for a two-week visit at Christmas in 2000. And now, Cori's getting married. She invited us to the wedding, and it's to be in Hamburg. Given my happy history with Hamburg, and happy history with Cori, how could I say no? So back to Hamburg for me, and a fine week to be spent with Cori and Jens (her fiance, who I've never met), Cori's family, and 65 friends at a wedding reception that will probably go until 5 am (between that and the jetlag, my body will have no idea what's going on!). It'll be good to be back in Hamburg, and good to see Cori again. Posted at 05:23 permanent link category: /misc Wed, 15 Sep 2010
Thoughts on racing the Ninja 250
My race-day report earlier didn't really address some of the Ninja 250-specific stuff I was pondering. The bike acquitted itself pretty well. The suspension upgrades (.95 kg/mm springs in front, '08 stock shock in back, cranked to full preload) were definitely worthwhile, although I really need a stronger spring in back. The back end was wallowing a little bit -- not a lot, but enough that I was aware of it. The front springs are so stiff that even at full preload (a poor-man's stiffer spring), the rear shock was a bit mushy feeling. Damping was fine on both ends, or at least I wasn't aware of it. Unfortunately, I don't think the '08 shock can be resprung, so if I want to solve the problem, I'll need to find another way of doing it. The stainless steel braided front brake line was definitely worthwhile, and I'm sure most of the bikes that make it out next year will sport them by the second session. I already knew this, but it was nice to see on the track too. Between the suspension and the SS line, my bike was the most race-ready of those that went out. Tim had BT-003 tires on his (cheetah!) '09 bike, which was to his advantage when the track was dry, but left him behind me (a position he never sees, except while passing me, normally) for the first damp-track practice session. He said his tires were "like ice" on the wet track. Phil, running GT501s and stock suspension, said that my form was good enough around turn 2 that I was pulling away from him in the practice (and I was going pretty slowly, in my own estimation, not trusting my tires too far). The BT45s I had on were fine, but I noticed particularly in the entrance to turn 3 that I was chirping the rear tire every time I downshifted. It's not a big deal, as I never have to downshift while leaned over very far, but I have a feeling that the relatively hard center compound on the BT45s is contributing to that. I'd like to put stickier tires on the bike, and I've emailed Pirelli (requesting the advice of their experts, according to the web form I filled out) asking their opinion of the MT75 vs. the Sport Demon. I'd rather go with the MT75 if they're equivalent or better, as the smaller tires will be better handling, and will noticeably reduce rotating, unsprung mass. Interestingly, after my rides on Sunday, I was able to clearly see the line seperating the hard center and soft side compounds on the rear tire. I found myself holding back through turn 2 (where I feel like I'm getting pretty good, with the new pavement, and as my crash there recedes a bit into history), unsure of the grip my tires would actually have. I know I wasn't pushing them too hard, and I can go further there, but allowing myself to do it is a real challenge. I still pussy-footed through turn 3 and 4, and as always, I know I can go faster through there. I know how to do it, I know what the good line is, and I just can't get myself to actually do it. This isn't a Ninja vs. CL issue, it's just me. Having the greater power of the Ninja was very pleasing to me. I didn't even take out my airbox snorkel (something I think everyone else did), and I was doing well down the straight. If I follow through with my plans to get a Muzzy exhaust (single-sided, therefore lighter, and theoretically flows better) and yank out the airbox, I should be able to add a little bit to top-end power, at the expense of midrange. It's a compromise I'd never make on a street bike, but for a race bike, it looks pretty attractive. I'm going to get the bike down to a dyno before I make any changes, and see what happens with and without the snorkel, then take further dyno runs to figure out jetting, and see what kind of gains I actually make (I don't expect much -- I honestly just want to get the weight reduction; one ninja250.org forum poster said the stock system weighs 20 or so lbs, and the Muzzy weighs 5.5). The Ninja 250 is a much physically larger bike than the CL175. I always knew I fit on it better, but it was pretty dramatic how clear that was when I immediately leapt from the Ninja to the CL on Sunday. The CL felt weedy and insubstantial, where the Ninja had felt solid and reassuring, at least as far as my physical contact-points went. The Ninja was obviously suffering a bit from weight: where the CL175 feels stiff and solid on its suspension primarily because it weighs very little, the Ninja felt like the forks were flexing a bit. I may build myself a fork brace to try out, but I can't see spending the $100+ the commercial braces seem to command. I think I'm going to get some of that Stomp Grip stuff (nubbly grip tape that goes where your knees hit the tank, to give something to hold on to), as I think it might help increase my confidence in hanging further off the bike, and will probably help me relax my arms a little bit in some situations. It's a relatively cheap investment, and seems worth trying. I have grip tape on my street Ninja, and like the effect, although it's really just a friction tape, where the Stomp Grip is actually sizeable nubs sticking out. I've never bothered on the CL, because the tank is so skinny I can't really grab it with my knees. Overall, I was very pleased with the Ninja 250 racing experience. Sure, I came in last, but I was up against dramatically more skilled riders. I was on a bike I enjoyed much more, and it definitely seems like it's worth pursuing for next year. Posted at 00:11 permanent link category: /motorcycle Tue, 14 Sep 2010Pictures like this are why you take a ton of pictures at a fast-paced event like motorcycle racing. Most of them are crap, but this one turned out really well:
Posted at 08:54 permanent link category: /motorcycle Mon, 13 Sep 2010I have pictures brewing for this story too, they're just not ready yet. So, I've been prepping this Ninja 250 for the track, and this last weekend was the time to do it. I took Friday off, and finished bike prep by installing the new stainless steel braided front brake line. This is an absolutely necessary modification, in my mind -- I'll skip the exhaust and the pod filters and whatnot, but the two changes every Ninja 250 needs for me are suspension and brakes. I got my friend Jesse's trailer loaded up (thanks for the loan, Jesse!), and all my stuff packed into the truck in plenty of time, and had a leisurely evening, including impromptu dinner with a friend. Mmm, indian food. Saturday morning came nice and early, and I was out of bed around 5:30 (I don't honestly remember, it was so early that things like clocks didn't make a lot of sense yet). Pack food, final check, lock and unlock the door several times as I remember things. Finally, around 6:40, I rolled out. 20 minutes later, rolling down I-5 southbound toward the track, I was passing under the West Seattle bridge when I noticed what I first thought was a hockey stick, slowly and gracefully pirouetting in my lane. It was travelling about the same speed as traffic, so it had obviously been dropped by a vehicle just in front of me. Traffic wasn't heavy, but there was enough traffic around that I couldn't quickly change lanes, and there was this delighful Jersey barrier (ie, solid concrete wall) to my right. As it got closer, it resolved itself for what it really was: about 8 feet of 1-1/2 inch iron pipe. There was nothing for it, and as I overtook it, it passed under my left tires. There was a big bump, but no apparent damage, so I put it out of my mind. Going up the hill after that, I noticed a truck to my right, exactly pacing me. This kind of thing annoys me, particularly when my truck is suddenly acting underpowered, and I feel a strong urge to pull over just in case, having recently run over a very solid-looking piece of iron in the road. He eventually pulled forward, and I saw that it was my friend Mark, also on his way to the track. I offered him a weak smile and a wave, and he pulled away. About a mile later, I was looking in the rear view mirror, and noticed something black spinning away from my lane. I thought to myself, "I hope that's not from my truck, I don't want to lose anything." I'd tied everything in pretty well, though, so I wasn't worried. I looked in the mirror a few seconds later, and saw several more black things spinning off, and realized I had a problem. I pulled off the road as quickly as I could, and took a look back at the trailer, and the small cloud of burnt-rubber smoke coming from the left tire -- it was completely shredded. The wheel had a huge dent, and it had obviously deflated the tire within a second or two of hitting that pipe. After far too long sitting there dithering on what I should do, I finally detached the trailer, and locked it and the bikes to the guard rail (thankful that I'd remembered to bring along a long cable just in case), and headed south, to the Harbor Freight store. Jesse's trailer is from HF, and I figured they'd probably have a spare wheel. Of course, it was 7:30 in the morning when I got there, and they don't open until 8:30. Arg! The rider's meeting (mandatory) is at 8:30. Looked like I wouldn't be doing any racing that day. HF fortunately opened a bit early, and I was rolling northward to retrieve my (hopefully not already stolen) trailer full of motorcycles from the side of I-5 by 8:25. I couldn't see them as I passed where they should have been on my way north, and the last few minutes of my trip were quite tense. Turns out there had been some strategically placed shrubs blocking my view, and the trailer and bikes were still exactly where I'd left them. After an inordinately long digging-around period, I located all the pieces of my jack, and jacked up the trailer. Then I jacked it back down, loosened the lug nuts, and jacked it back up. The new wheel went on with no problems (fortunately I spotted in the store that I'd first grabbed the right wheel with the wrong number of lug nuts), and I was quickly on my way to the track, only about 2 hours behind schedule. Equally fortunately, I had my full tool kit with me, so the fact that I needed a 21mm socket for the trailer lug nuts didn't even phase me. I got to the track around 9:15, and even the front gate folks had heard rumors of my misfortune. She admonished me for missing the rider's meeting, and I said, "I know, my trailer tire blew up." "Oh, that was you!" By the time I was ready to start unpacking (having quickly zipped over to registration to pay my moneys), the slow practice session was getting called. I hadn't even rolled a bike off the trailer, much less had a chance to get out my leathers (not for lack of trying: my fellow racers had offered to get my bikes unloaded, but were stymied by the cable lock I'd left looped between the bikes -- thanks for the effort!). Oh well, I'd be in time for the one race of the day, a make-up race from the first session, where Claude Jinks had passed away while racing, which had cancelled the rest of those races. I ran in that race, turning in a mediocre 2:17, just like the last time I'd been out. I missed the majority of the races this season, due to a number of different complications in my life. Then it was time to lower the canopy over the bikes, and head out. I promised the theater folks that I'd be back to Seattle by 1, and still hadn't left the track at 1:10, procrastinating while hanging out with my racing friends. I don't get to see them enough. Eventually, I did make it to the theater, and we got some stuff done. Sunday morning came too early, although I was able to get up at 6:30 instead of 5:30, since I didn't really have to do any setup. At the rider's meeting, Tim, #220, rolled his Ninja 250 (an '09, the cheetah bastard!) up, and Phil Cook (#217) and I did the same. Tim and Phil gave a little speech about the Cheapskate Cup class, encouraging others to join in the fun. I have a feeling next year is going to see a few more 250s out on the track. The schedule on Sunday was a bit mental. 9:40, practice. 11:40, 250 race. 1:10, 250 race. 1:40, 160 race (back to back). 3:40, 160 race. The weather forecast was for rain, and we did get a bit of a misty rain, starting at the rider's meeting, and ending during the practice session before ours. So, the track was distinctly damp when we went out for our practice. Of course, I took the 250, as I'd never had it on the track before, and wanted a chance to sort out any bugs before the 11:40 race. It ran well, and nothing obviously needed attention, although the track was wet enough that none of us were able to go very fast. I got one of the best compliments I've ever had: Phil said my form through turn 2 was really good, and that he was unable to keep up with me. Granted, he was on a 250 with stock suspension and brand new (therefore slippery) tires. Tim (who is hella-fast) was behind me for the first few laps, and although I was worried about holding him up, he said I was fine. Apparently his race-compound BT-003 tires were "like ice" on the wet track. Score one for running BT-45 sport-touring tires on the track! He actually had the back end step out in turn 7, to such an extent that the corner worker thought he was going down (we ended up red-flagged at turn 7 after #87 crashed in turn 5 -- no injuries, but he flung a lot of gravel onto the track that needed to be cleaned up). The first race at 11:40 was a 250 race, and it turned out pretty well for me. We were riding with a couple of other classes of bikes, some of which were considerably more powerful than us. I didn't have any problems with that, and I was only lapped twice (turning a 10 lap race into an 8 lapper for me). My times were pretty good: 2:12 worst lap (the first) and 2:05 at my best. 2:12, for reference, is the fastest I've ever gone on my 175. I'm sure it's all down to higher straightaway speeds and more power exiting corners, but it was pretty cool to see that 2:05 sitting on the timing sheet. The next race, at 1:10, was a bit sketchier. I did almost exactly the same, performance-wise, but had two incidents that made me question the sanity of what I was doing. The first was in turn 6. This is in the middle of a series of closely-connected turns. Right at the apex of 6, as I'm at maximum lean, there's suddenly a motorcycle beside me. On the inside. He passes me safely, but by doing so where he did, he put himself where I needed to be at the next moment. The only choice I had was to straighten the bike, aim for the wall, and pray I could stop in time. I did, leaving a heavily-gouged trail in the dirt leading up to the embankment, but I was deeply unhappy about it. I suppose a better rider probably could have saved that better than I did, but it looked to me like trying to stay on the track would just have me crashing. The second incident in that race was coming around the bus stop (turn 10). I was entering it as I always do, when I heard the throaty rumble of one of the faster bikes getting close. I figured he'd pass me into the bus stop, which is fine. When I looked back, though, I saw a line of five of those fast guys lined up, packed close together. Remembering that I'm their problem, and not vice versa (as long as I'm in front of them), I went through as I normally would. One of them ended up jumping the curb. No damage, but that was a lot of disaster potential packed together right there. I'm just a slow vintage rider, guys, I don't do the "grr, gonna getcha!" thing. Tim was saying later in the day that they want to re-arrange how races are grouped together to avoid that kind of dramatic speed differential in the future. Apparently these guys have never had to deal with slower bikes on the track before, and they didn't handle it as gracefully as they could have. I guess everyone on a 250 in that race had a few sketchy moments too. Possibly the most heart-pounding moment of that race was actually the fact that I had to roll into my pit, park the 250, and leap on the 175 and head out again. I did it in very short order, and just made it for the whistle releasing bikes to the track entrance. My first turn into 2 on the vintage bike was pretty clench-inducing: the 175 is definitely not like the 250. It turns in a lot quicker. I nearly threw it onto the ground, and had to quickly readjust my riding reflexes. Fortunately, that was just the tire warm up lap, and I was alright for the race. My knees were definitely feeling it, though, and the smaller frame on the 175 felt a lot less comfortable than the big, more-modern 250. My quads were pretty sore by the end of the day. The last race of the day was the final vintage heat. I did fine, just doing another 2:17 best lap. I'd actually managed a 2:15 in the first race on the 175 (although I felt like I was faster than that, coming straight off the Ninja). Nothing notable to report, although it was nice to have another vintage race where I wasn't immediately lapped by a big bike. That's because they weren't there, but I'll take what I can get. The day wrapped up with packing all my stuff up, taking a few pictures, and heading out. I was home by six-something, and returned Jesse's trailer by 7:30. I think I was in bed by about 10. Much sleeping. I still don't feel caught up on sleep, but I'm better than I've been on some past weekends. In all, I had a good weekend. I wish the races had been spread out over both days more than they were, but this wasn't too unusual. The 250 racing is actually quite exciting: I feel like I fit on the bike a lot better, and I don't spend any time worrying about what's going to fall off or fail. It's a 2005. It only has 12k miles on it. Once I sorted out the cam chain tensioner and tightened down all the engine mount bolts, it was fine. I'll probably still be going over it and applying many drops of thread locker this winter, but it was solid. Of course, I'm already pondering upgrades to the Ninja. On the short list are different tires, clip-on handlebars, and a single-sided exhaust (mostly to lose weight off the bike -- it'd also be nice to have a louder exhaust note; I couldn't hear the engine very well, which made it harder to judge shifts). I'm sure Tim and others will show up next year with beautiful, blinged-out bikes that will put mine to shame, but I've gotten used to losing that contest, too. Posted at 12:53 permanent link category: /motorcycle Wed, 08 Sep 2010The track Ninja 250 is almost ready. I got the number plates on last night:
All that remains (to be legal) is the belly pan. I'd also like to get the front brake line replaced, but that's a secondary concern, and I'll only worry about it once I have the belly pan sorted out. Almost there! Of course, it looks like Saturday's weather might be acceptable, and Sunday's will probably be rainy. Not that you can trust any forecast greater than one day out around here, but things are certainly moist today, and it doesn't inspire me with confidence for the immediate future. Good thing I've got BT45s on the bike, I guess. They're supposed to be really good rain tires. Posted at 11:34 permanent link category: /motorcycle Thu, 02 Sep 2010The pre-08 Ninja 250 comes with some of the weakest suspension springs I've ever encountered. It feels like a goofy toy bike when I sit on it. I decided that, although it's "against the rules" of the Cheapskate Cup (which I'm never going to win anyway, so no one really cares), I would change out my suspension a bit. I've done it with every other Ninja 250 I've owned, and it was impossible to imagine taking this thing to the track without doing it. The first thing I did was look through the Ninja250.org FAQ section on rear suspension. This is definitely where to start. I liked the look of the 08 rear shock upgrade, so I poked around on Ebay. Within minutes, I'd won a 2008 rear shock for a grand total of $26 shipped to me. Deal. Gotta love all the racers upgrading their new shiny Ninjas. Of course, all was not beer and skittles -- I immediately got an email from the seller, saying they were going to be on vacation for the next week, a fact which was not called out in the auction anywhere. Not pleased about that. However, they did ship it promptly the next week, and despite the shock's best efforts to escape, it was still in the box. (Seriously, people, it's a heavy, linear spike. Don't just throw it in a box with some loosely crumpled newspaper. Every used shock I've bought has arrived with several holes in the box where the shock tried to escape during shipping.) But it did arrive, and in perfectly functional condition. The installation (I'd forgotten) is almost desperately simple: remove two bolts, pull the old shock, put the new one in with the two bolts, done. Takes 10-15 minutes. I set it on the heaviest preload, knowing that it was going to go head to head with a seriously stiff front end. It felt ridiculously firm with the old front springs, but it was clearly a huge improvement, even for me. I started in on the front forks, but discovered after I'd pulled them apart that I didn't have any (so I thought) 20 weight fork oil. Of course, by the time it was time to give up for the night and go to bed, I discovered that I did have some 20 weight fork oil. Ah well, the next day would work. Today being the next day, I got everything reinstalled. I am using .95 kg/mm springs from Sonic, which seems pretty hefty to me (my street bike only has .75 kg/mm springs, but this was what their calculator said I should use for racing). It all went back together pretty easily, and the first time I sat on the bike, it was clear I'd made a huge difference. Someone guessed at one point that the stock front springs in a Ninja 250 are .44 kg/mm. I more than doubled the spring rate, if that's true. It's clear I made a dramatic change. The front springs are slightly but noticeably stronger than the rear spring now. It's not bad, and shouldn't cause any real problems, but I'd like to get them closer together for next year. I'll probably look into either replacing this shock's spring (if that's possible, which is unlikely) or upgrading to a better shock. I strongly suspect that with the resurgence caused by the remodel in 08 (which takes the same specs, shock-wise), there's a wide variety of rear shocks available to choose from now. (Interesting side-note: when I went to look for rear shock information just now, it was amusing to see that most rear-shock knowledge available online is traceable directly back to an article I wrote in 2006.) Anyway, I'm definitely happy with the mods, and I'll probably be all excited about getting a better rear shock in there after I go ride it, mostly for the better spring rate. Posted at 22:54 permanent link category: /motorcycle Out of curiosity, I decided to check out a different kind of glasses frame. The glasses I've been wearing for the last few years are cool, and I like them, but they're comparatively spendy now that my insurance has basically punted on paying anything for frames (side note: VSP is an awful provider, and my preferred optometrist had to drop them after too many gross experiences, and their compensation fell too low; I don't have any other choice through my employer, though, and prefer to have insurance for emergency coverage). So, my old glasses cross the line at $150 just for the frames. I found something that's close, but, as you can see below, a bit more... cartoony: the Titmus 70F prescription safety glass frame. Aw yeah.
I'm not committed to using them, but they're $27, vs the $150 for my old frames (which are dying and need to be replaced soon). Plus, as you can plainly see, the new ones are ANSI rated as safety glasses, a bonus for working in the shop, or riding a bicycle. I can even get side-shields for them, if I want to go all-out safety nerd. I'm actually kind of disappointed they didn't come with side-shields (the copy on the website was ambiguous). I'm not convinced I like the look, but it's different, and a hell of a lot cheaper... Posted at 13:49 permanent link category: /misc Wed, 01 Sep 2010I was able to replace the rear engine mounting bolts on my new track-only Ninja 250 last night. I fired it up for its hopefully-last road ride, and was very pleased to find that the vibration that had so worried me was completely gone. Isn't it amazing what properly tightened engine mounting bolts will do? With that problem positively fixed, I brought the bike back to the garage, and started stripping it of road parts in earnest. It was surprisingly easy to take off all the street parts and reduce it to a much more visually spare motorcycle. All those missing pieces only really take off a few pounds, but hey, that's a few pounds, and less stuff to break. Hopefully the number plates will arrive soon, and I can get it all tarted up in racing drag. I've got my belly pan ready to install ($1.99 at Goodwill, but I had to visit four thrift stores before I found a 9x13 brownie pan). Fork springs and brake line are in but not yet installed. I hope to see the rear shock soon (and probably won't do any suspension work at all until I have everything here -- the bike would be horribly unbalanced with only forks updated). Frankly, it's starting to look like a race bike!
Posted at 14:46 permanent link category: /motorcycle Tue, 31 Aug 2010The new Ninja 250 had a number of problems when I got it. The most obvious and worrying was the grinding and general unhappy feeling from the final drive. Obviously, the chain was in a bad way. The front sprocket was a bit hooked, but not excessively so. There was also the camchain slap, but that was pretty much cleared up when I cleaned the camchain adjuster before I bought the bike. So, last weekend, I took the bike apart some to check things out and do some of the work that needs to be done. I flushed out the coolant, and replaced it with water (no coolant allowed on the track, as it's slippery as hell if it spills, and nearly impossible to clean up), also drilling the drain bolts for safety wire as long as I had them out. I shot a bit of video showing the initial state of the bike, but it's pretty low quality, and I don't think I really have enough time to properly document what I'm doing -- it's looking like a tight squeeze to get the work done, much less jockey a camera around. As long as I had the bike apart with the tank off, I decided to check the valve adjustment. About half the valves were too tight, so I adjusted them. In the process, I tried a new method of doing the valve adjustment that I really like: I removed the front engine mounts. The rear bolts are enough to hold the engine up while the front mount is out, and it makes access to the head absolutely amazing. I'm doing it that way every time from now on. In the process of doing that, I had occasion to notice that the big fat bolt that goes through the front engine mount was actually backed out about 3/4 of an inch! That's nowhere near a good thing. When it all went back together, I was liberal with the loctite, and it shouldn't be backing itself out again. I also drained the oil, and drilled the oil bolts for safety wire (all fluid-retaining bolts have to be wired per race regs) today. I considered changing the filter as long as I had it out, but I didn't have any spares handy, and it looked to be in pretty good shape. I'll change it after the race, which is the last of the year. I'll have to winterize the bike anyway, since the water in the cooling system will be a freeze danger if I leave it in over the winter. Fortunately, the new sprocket came in today, and I was able to install it and the new (non-o-ring) chain I picked up last weekend. Most of the grinding went away, but there was still some disconcerting feeling about the engine, as I rode it around a little bit. I had a little brain spasm, and checked tonight (far too late) after getting back from a theater event: sure enough, both rear engine bolts are loose, and their threads munged up pretty badly. Off to Tacoma Screw with me! Two new M10x140 bolts will be mine soon. That should sort out the remaining odd grinding feeling. I knew it was somewhat familiar -- my 2006 Ninja had an engine mount bolt come loose like this (the nut was actually completely gone), and it was a very similar feeling. So, if you're keeping track at home, you will have counted three engine bolts that were loose. If you consult with the manual, you'll find that the Ninja 250's engine is held in with... yes, three bolts. That engine was only loosely held in place. That's a disconcerting thing to think about. I noticed a sticker on this bike (which is a 2005) that said "Made in Thailand." I recall vaguely that Kawasaki switched to the Thai factory (although I recalled it being Taiwan, not Thailand) in 2004, and I guess I'm not surprised to find little things like missing loctite on engine bolts in common between these two non-Japanese made bikes. It's inevitable when you switch factories like that, I guess, although it's disturbing that it should have spanned so many years. Once I get the new mount bolts in place, that should be the last reason I need to ride the bike (to confirm that those bolts nixed the vibration), and then I can start aggressively stripping off street parts. Right now, I have to leave it legal enough to drive for testing. New fork springs arrived today, and I expect to see the new rear shock in the next few days. The new front brake line arrived last week, but hasn't been installed yet. I'm stalling on those changes so I can take care of essential "race requirement" modifications before "wouldn't it be nice" changes. I can tackle the nice mods after the race, but I can't even race it if I don't make the required changes. So hopefully, after this coming weekend, I should have the bike race legal, and then I can ponder nice changes, or I can actually take a few minutes off to not be doing something. That would be nice too. Although I'm excited about the opportunity to race a Ninja 250, the additional time commitment of prepping the bike is a bit overwhelming. Posted at 01:26 permanent link category: /motorcycle Fri, 27 Aug 2010Today was another one of those days that inspired me to grab the camera on the way out the door. Glad I did.
Posted at 13:43 permanent link category: /misc Wed, 25 Aug 2010My parents have taken off on their latest adventure -- a sailing trip aboard the SV Sequoia to Mexico and points south. I had my first radio contact with them last night, from 8:00 to 8:08 pm PDT, using 80m (3.870 MHz). It's a very noisy band, and we were only just able to hear each other. I really wish my dad's radio included a DSP to clean up the audio. It makes a substantial difference. As of 8 pm last night, they were southbound about 15 miles off the coast of Oregon, 20 miles from the mouth of the Umpqua river (Reedsport, OR). I didn't catch whether they were north or south of the river. They had the third reef in the mainsail, and the staysail out, so they must be working with quite decent wind, although if they said windspeed, I didn't hear it. The radio contact thing is interesting, because it's so variable in its reliability. At least this close, 80m is a very reliable choice in the sense that the signal is practically guaranteed to get there. The question is whether the atmospheric noise will overwhelm the signal or not. So, wish them luck! Next stop is San Francisco, probably in about 3 days. Posted at 09:09 permanent link category: /misc Mon, 23 Aug 2010This may be the fastest I've ever acted for something like this. Last week, maybe Thursday (it being Monday as I write this), I got a message from one of my fellow racers: he was looking for help checking out a Ninja 250. I asked why he was all hot for a Ninja 250 all of a sudden, and he pointed me to this thread on the WMRRA forums, which was closely followed by this one. Racing Ninja 250s? Hell yeah! I've always wanted to do that, but never wanted to make the leap after it became clear that the only people who were racing them (I met one, and one only, nearly three years ago) were wannabe big-bike racers with attitudes. Not where I want to hang out. But with people like Bateman and O'Mahoney racing 250s, that starts to sound pretty appealing. So, I set out to look for one, turning to the One True Source for all things of a classified nature: Craigslist. The first one that my eye lit upon was a 2005 listed for $1500 just a half mile south of where I live. I contacted the seller, and we set up a time to check the bike out this weekend. I met him and looked the bike over: it looked to be in pretty good shape, although it had obviously gone boom onto its side a couple of times: the right muffler was pushed in and rubbing on the swingarm a little bit; the upper fairing had a 3 sq-in section broken out of it on the lower edge under the turnsignal stalk; there were scrape marks here and there. Everything seemed to be present, though, and nothing vital was bent or broken. I got the key from him and started it up, only to be horrified at the awful clattering noise coming from the head. It sounded like there was a low-speed grinder rattling around inside the head. Not encouraging. I asked Tom (our seller) about the noise, and he said it'd always sounded like that -- he'd just assumed it was normal. It did basically go away when the engine sped up, so I clambered aboard and took the bike out for a spin. Everything about it was loose and sloppy-feeling, which wasn't really unexpected. It's only a year older than my street 250, and has 4000 fewer miles, but has clearly lived a harder life, with some abuse, and some time spent sitting in the rain outside. There was nothing obvious, but there were little signs: the ignition keyhole cover didn't slide to like it should, and the finish on some of the painted parts was characteristically dulled. There was no rust to speak of, though, and nothing seemed structurally wrong with the bike, which is all I actually care about. I liked it, and told him so, but said I had to come back the next day to finish the test ride. He was very willing to humor me, as I think he'd had no nibbles on the bike in a week of having it up on CL. So I came back the next day, and he agreed that I could take it back to my house, adjust the chain, and try cleaning out the camchain tensioner to see if that would take care of the rattle. Several hours and a trip to the hardware store later, the rattle was gone, and the chain was actually the proper tension again -- when I rode it the first time, I pulled up the bottom run with my toe, and it hit the swingarm without any resistance. Not a good thing, and doubtless a source of some of the loosey-goosey feeling I got from the bike. Riding it with the chain tensioned correctly was definitely a mixed bag. On the one hand, it wasn't so loose, but on the other, there was an exciting new grinding feeling when the bike rolled forward. I pulled off the front sprocket cover, and discovered that the front sprocket was moderately hooked (a bad thing), and the chain pulled far enough off the rear sprocket to see a bit over a millimeter of daylight under the link (a bad thing, indicating a new chain is needed). There was an odd thump when the bike rolled over some bumps. The throttle cable needed about 10mm of adjustment to be correctly tightened. I'm hopeful that with a new chain, a lot of the grinding feeling will go away (although some of it is obviously in the transmission too, so I'm equally hopeful that the tranny doesn't need new bearings). As you may have already guessed, I made an offer, and Tom accepted it, and I now have a fourth motorcycle taking up precious space in my little garage. Something's gonna get booted out to tarp-land soon, but I haven't decided what. I really need to get to work on planning for the backyard shed I was just sure I was going to build this year.
Posted at 11:15 permanent link category: /motorcycle Tue, 10 Aug 2010Every once in a while, I'll shoot a theatrical press photo that's just a really great photo. With Penguins, it's pretty easy for me to work with a huge grin on my face. Check those pictures out. They range from pretty good to fantastic. That's largely due to the content, though. With Clubfoot (a show about stories from an EMT), I wasn't expecting to have the same reaction. What can you do with three people and more or less no action? Certainly not anything like what you can do with Penguins. Which is why it was odd when I found myself grinning like an idiot over this picture:
It's really a fantastic picture. The composition, the lighting, the coloration, the expressions; everything came together. The subject matter isn't enough by itself ("three people looking at the camera" is not, on the face of it, a compelling idea for a picture) to grab you, yet this one does. Anyway, it's nice to come away from something like this feeling so good about my work. These are the odd little moments that I'm reminded how much I enjoy what I'm doing. Posted at 00:35 permanent link category: /theater Thu, 05 Aug 2010
A Children's Book of Revelations
You ain't seen nothin' yet.
Come down to Annex Theatre for a showing of Penguins to catch this film in all its big-screen glory. Runs from August 7 through August 27, don't miss it! Posted at 13:52 permanent link category: /theater Thu, 29 Jul 2010Feel free to skip this one, it's kind of heady, and may not make a lot of sense. So, think about how a normal consumer transaction goes. I make a widget, and it costs me $5 to produce. Let's say I spend another $5 on packaging, distribution, marketing, etc. My total cost to put a widget in a customer's hand is $10. I charge them $3 on top of that to have some profit, total $13 charge to the customer. They pay their $13, and go away happy with their widget. Don't dwell on the amounts here, just get that process in your head: cost, product, price, overhead, etc. The end of that process is that I'm out my $5 product, and the $5 I spent on marketing and overhead, but I'm up by $13, so I've made $3 at the end of the day. Pretty straightforward. Do that a lot, and that's the basis of most trades. Theater, however, is an entirely different beast, as occurred to me the other day. In theater, you spend various resources to put together a product (a show) -- time, money, reused materials, etc. Rent costs a certain amount. If you assume a fixed-length run of a show, the product cost (the cost to put on the show) is pretty much fixed. However, unlike many other transactions, the customer doesn't diminish your supply of the product. Whether you have three paying audience members, or a full house, one night of a show costs the same, and uses up the same amount of your product. You end up with the same amount of product left whether you cancelled for lack of sales, or completely sold out. So income is, effectively, completely disconnected from cost. If you spend $100 on a show that is for whatever reason a hit, your profit would be enormous. If you blow $10 grand on a show that's a complete flop, you're out $10 grand. And through all that, the amount of product you have never changes -- your show is always (within the limits of what fate doles out in the form of actor performances, tech successes/failures, etc.) the same. Time is the only thing that diminishes the amount of product you have. I don't really have a point here, it's just such a weird business to be in. The normal rules don't apply. Posted at 16:22 permanent link category: /theater Mon, 26 Jul 2010After the questionable focus tests, I decided that the only real way to test was to take the lens out and use it. So, I wandered around Fremont and took pictures, being sure in each case that I was holding still, the subject wasn't moving, and the focus was locking on a reasonable thing. The end result was that at a variety of focal lengths, and a variety of subject distances, the lens focused pretty well 95% of the time. There were a few missed shots, particularly closer up. Basically, it's Good Enough. I'm disappointed that this is the result of spending $900 on a top-of-the-line lens, but I'm not sure what else to do about it. In the realistic light of day, no lens gets perfect focus every time, because the camera can't always get good focus. Obviously this one is well enough adjusted to work most of the time. So I'll keep plugging away with this one, and if it comes up obviously deficient in some other situation (such as the much lower-light environment of the theater), I'll sell it on to someone for whom it'll be the right thing, and look into other choices. In the mean time, it's nice to have my "good lens" back, and not be limited to primes (which take beautiful pictures, of course, so long as you want that specific focal length). Posted at 15:05 permanent link category: /misc Wed, 21 Jul 2010I sat down with a notepad and did some ordered and logical testing with my 24-70 last night. With no adjustment in the camera, the lens was focusing about right in most cases. This is good and bad. When I say "about right," that means that in something like 20% of cases, the focus was pretty unacceptably soft. When I dialed in +20 on the AF adjustment, the results were less predictable, with the focus sometimes right on (what?) and sometimes dramatically back-focused, like I expected. I didn't collect statistics last night, but I'll post a gallery of the focus shots later (I need to redo them with better light, to ensure that low light wasn't contributing to errors, although the lens has to shoot in low light in practice), and come up with some numbers. The bottom line is that right now I'm not comfortable with this lens's ability to focus correctly. This will probably end up with me renting that Canon 24-70 f/2.8L lens from Glazers again, to compare. The Canon L lens is pretty much the gold standard, so it'll be a good control result. Posted at 14:33 permanent link category: /misc Tue, 20 Jul 2010I got the lens onto the camera last night, and I'm honestly a bit confused about what I discovered. The best I can say is that the linearity of the focusing data seems questionable. With the full (+20 toward distance) adjustment dialed in, my 70mm at 1.5 feet test looked alright. Not ideal, but close enough. However, with that same adjustment dialed in, shots further away were dramatically back-focused (what you'd expect with this adjustment in place, and a correctly-functioning lens). With other tests, it looked like I was getting in focus consistently on the second shot, but not the first, and not by the huge difference I found in some other shots. I didn't have time to sit down and approach the problem systematically last night, but the answer I have right now is that I have no clue what's going on. I don't trust the lens to focus correctly. Once I get some rational test results that hit the situations I mostly find myself in, I'll have a clearer picture. I was too tired last night and fiddling with too many variables at once to have anything conclusive to say right now. More to come. I just need to approach the problem rationally and I should end up with a workable solution. Clearly the lens is getting close, and my messing with the AF adjustment in the camera was a lot of the confusion. Posted at 11:41 permanent link category: /misc Mon, 19 Jul 2010A quick recap of our story so far. Back in February, I took the plunge and bought myself a very nice lens, a Sigma 24-70mm f/2.8 HSM lens. It's roughly equivalent to the $1500 Canon lens of the same specs, but for $600 less. It was, at the time, the most I'd ever spent on a single piece of camera equipment; that includes the camera it was going on to. Fast forward a few months to June. I was talking with a friend, and we got to talking about autofocus, how it works, and how to test that it was working right. He recommended a test page, and I tried it out. Lo and behold, my new 24-70 lens was front-focusing a bit (the point that was actually in focus was about 10mm in front of where it should have been). So, I contacted Sigma, confirmed that they could fix the problem, and sent it in. A couple weeks later, it comes back. I excitedly fix the lens to the camera, and check it out. Nope, it's still out of focus. Oh wait, once I take out the camera's adjustment (which I'd put in before), it's way out of focus! It looks to my critical but unpracticed eye that they adjusted the focus point by 10mm alright, but in the wrong direction! Ok. Call Sigma back, explain the situation. They're very nice about the whole thing, offering to ship the lens back to them at their own expense. Get it shipped off, and the waiting starts. Almost two weeks after it was shipped off (having requested expedited service, since I'd already had the lens in once before), I got a phone call from them. It was one of their techs, and the (fairly confused) conversation boiled down to them saying, "Our calibration procedure doesn't cover the situation your test shows," and me asking, "So, the lens isn't guaranteed to focus in that situation?" The answer seemed to be that sure, it should, but that's not what we're testing for. (For the nerds in the house, I was testing at 70mm focal length, f/2.8, focused ~1.5 feet from the lens -- which is within its nominal capabilities.) There was a strong undertone of "Why would you do that? It's not a macro lens. You're an idiot, aren't you." Now, nearly two weeks after that phone call (the lens came back to me three weeks to the day after I sent it, so take all my "two weeks" descriptions with a grain of salt), it has arrived at my desk again. The note that came with it says:
IF YOU WANT THE BEST RESULT WE NEED YOUR CAMERA WITH THE LENS. CHECKED ALL IN GOOD WORKING ORDER. That sounds to me like they helpfully left the lens with its even-worse calibration in place. I'm not sure why my camera should be that different from their camera. I know that I saw the exact same error with two very different camera bodies (an XTi and a 7D), so it's hard to imagine that their test 7D could have been so vastly different. Perhaps the most galling thing about the whole experience was that phone call. The tech sounded like he was rolling his eyes and making the yapping-mouth gesture with his hand to the other guys in the room as he talked to me. It's news to me that a lens should be expected to not accurately focus within its design parameters. The fact that it has the problem doesn't make me feel very confident of its ability to accurately shoot the demanding photos I'm taking (low light, moving subjects, etc.). The fact that I had to send the lens back twice with a $900, top-of-their-line piece of equipment is very worrying, particularly if (as it appears) the second trip to the factory resulted in them leaving things exactly as they were after the first trip messed it up. The half-suppressed "You're a complete idiot" vibe is just icing on the cake. Of course, the real test will come tonight, when I can bring lens and camera together. I'll have an update soon with the outcome, but if at all possible, I'm never going to deal with Sigma's warranty service again. The method I've heard described for dealing with this is to buy 3 copies of the lens you want, then send back the two with the worst focus. An expensive way to do it, but it honestly sounds more surefire than going back to the factory for adjustments. Color me seriously unimpressed. Posted at 13:43 permanent link category: /misc Fri, 09 Jul 2010I had a free day today, and decided to take a little ride before it got too hot. Seattle's been dealing with fairly bipolar weather lately, and a week ago, it was in the 50s and raining. Today it topped 90 with perfectly clear skies. I loaded up Google's map page, and started scrolling around. I found a little road near Carnation, called Griffin Creek Road. It looked delightfully twisty and interesting, and I'd never heard of it before. I figured there was a reasonable chance it was a dirt road, but it was worth a trip to find out. I loaded up the Camelbak with ice and water (a fine idea, and it stayed very cold until my return home several hours later), and headed out on the Ninja 250. My usual route for this kind of trip is to take 520 out to Avondale (520 really just turns into Avondale where it terminates), then turn right on Union Hill Road, and follow that through its twists and turns to Snoqualmie Valley Road, which runs up the west side of the Snoqualmie Valley, and eventually leads to some of the best twisties in the area (although they're brief, and relatively high traffic). This time, I continued out to Carnation, and south a bit to pick up Griffin Creek Road. I got there, and it was indeed a dirt road, but with an internal shrug of the shoulders, I headed up, figuring I'd turn around if it got too uncivilized. I finally stopped a few miles up, where the road suddenly narrowed from a wide single lane to a narrow single lane. I didn't have anything to prove, and paused in a convenient pool of shadow to take off some of my gear and spend a few minutes without earplugs in. It was very pretty, although not particularly picure-worthy -- the picture would have been titled, "Trees." Any follow-on shots would have been titled things like "More trees," or "Bike with trees." I turned around, and on a whim, decided to turn south on Carnation-Fall City Road, and make my way to Snoqualmie Falls. I was most of the way there, so why not? I made my way to the falls, and, sweating in my gear among the tourists, took a couple of quick, "I was really there" photos.
I made my way back to the bike, and back down the hill, the way I'd come. I stopped at the delightfully deceptive "$1.00 sweet cherries" booth ($1 buys you a miniscule amount of cherries, although you can certainly get those few for a dollar). I rolled on. As I was coming back along highway 203, I was reminded of something Jeniffer and I had experienced and discussed in our trip around the North Cascade loop last month: no one knows how to pass any more. So, the way it works is this: on any two-lane road (ie, one lane each direction) where passing is permitted, well, passing is permitted. Generally speaking, to do it legally, the vehicle in front of you should be going less than the speed limit, and you shouldn't exceed 15 MPH over the speed limit in your overtaking maneuver. In Washington, at least, it's illegal for any vehicle to detain 5 or more vehicles behind it, and it's required to pull off the road to let the other guys go past. I suspect other states have similar rules, and it's certainly a common-sense idea. Anyway, it was interesting to me how atrophied the skill is. Everyone who drives on a multi-lane freeway is used to simply having a second lane available for overtaking. Someone in front of you not going fast enough? Pull into the next lane, and overtake them at your leisure. On a two-lane road, it's not that easy, of course. First, you have to determine if it's safe to pass. That is, is there oncoming traffic? Do you have a dashed line? (If there's a solid yellow line in your lane, passing is prohibited, usually for a very good reason.) Is the guy in front of you behaving predictably? Sometimes the best course of action is to back off, or pull over for a few minutes to let them get ahead. If things are safe, turn on your turn signal, gun the motor, and jam past the slowpoke. Signal back into your lane, and slow down to something approximating the speed limit for the benefit of the local constabulary. It's really easy, particularly if you're on a motorcycle. Of course, not all motorcycles are created the same. The Ninja 250, while it embodies many fine attributes, will never be mistaken for a powerhouse in the modern pantheon of motorcycles. With the 250, you have to plan your strategy with a bit more care -- find somewhere with good visibility, a useable gap between cars ahead of you if you can't pass the whole line in one go, etc. It's actually a pretty interesting challenge. On our trip on Highway 20 last month, Jeniffer was riding her BMW F650GS (a confusingly-named 800cc vertical twin), and I was on my Ninja 250 (a rationally-named 250cc vertical twin). Her bike produces something like 80 HP, mine screams along with maybe 28, for a not terribly substantial difference in weight. It was with interest, therefore, that I would pass people, and wait a surprisingly long time for Jeniffer to catch up, despite rolling through some prime passing areas. When I asked her later what was happening, she said she's just not comfortable passing, and deferred to my decade-plus of experience. This is by no means an attempt to rag on Jeniffer or her riding skills, it's just interesting to me that we have such different approaches to it. But similar to both my ride today, and our ride last month, was the fact that very few other drivers showed any inclination to pass. We'd come upon these long trains of cars unhappily guttering along behind a slow vehicle, and I'd pass them in one or two leaps as conditions warranted, and Jeniffer would catch up to me a bit later. Therefore, I'm urging you, fellow drivers, break free of your multi-lane roadway habits, and actually take a chance on your next road trip. If you're driving a modern car, you have so much power available to you in most cases that passing is little more than a trifle, to be accomplished with as much difficulty as most people execute the pouring of a cup of coffee. You can do it. You can break free of the mental chains. And you can get around that slug ahead of you. Posted at 18:22 permanent link category: /motorcycle Tue, 29 Jun 2010Well, here it is months later, and I finally have the dyno chart posted. Here's the chart that shows what happens when you install a well-timed cam in a CL175:
What you're looking at is two runs: the first (the more jagged line) being with the stock cam. The second (the smoother line, with the big bump at the start) is with the timed cam, this spring. The line shows power (HP) vs. speed in MPH. Click on the image for the dyno chart page. Basically, the power smoothed out, so I've got a chunk more area under the line (a good thing), but the power didn't go up a couple HP like I was hoping. Progress is a good thing, though. Posted at 10:51 permanent link category: /motorcycle Fri, 25 Jun 2010I got my 24-70 lens back from Sigma today (in for adjustment due to about 10mm of front-focus, which I couldn't adjust out), and I excitedly put it on the camera to test it out. The test shot came back ok, but it wasn't quite right still. Unhappy, I went to check and see if I could adjust it out, figuring it might now be close enough. Haha. No. The adjustment was still maxed out. When I pulled the adjustment out, the lens was actually further out of adjustment than when I'd sent the damn thing in. Sigma? Wrong. You have failed. So, in order to illustrate the problem (since apparently "front focus" doesn't mean the same thing to me that it does to them), I give you this terrifyingly graphic demonstration of the problem. Focus distance: around 1.5 feet
Posted at 01:00 permanent link category: /misc Mon, 21 Jun 2010I took a troll through Motorcycle Daily today, and came across this interesting article. The relevant portion for today's discussion: Imagine my surprise when, after having my ass kissed for several years, I attend a press event where I am scolded, along with several other journalists, by the manufacturer's rep. That's right, most manufacturers want to "make nice" with the media, for obvious reasons. Piaggio's North American president, however, had a different idea. The media wasn't doing a good job of selling motorcycles as transportation in the U.S. The traditional buyer here, of course, is focused on entertainment, not practicality. Piaggio wants that to change (although they still want the occassional buyer to step up for an expensive Italian superbike). To which I say, Cool! The article goes on to explain that of all the bikes available at the Piaggio press event, none of them were of the small-displacement, "transportation" variety Piaggio was worried about. Ok, so, irony aside, this is the kind of thing I want to see. Europe has boasted a robust two-wheeled transportation sector for a long time, in large part because gas has typically been 2.5x what it costs in the US, making even economy cars seem pretty spendy. A 110 MPG scooter looks pretty nice when you're dropping $8 per gallon of fuel. The comments on the article are revealing, although hardly surprising. Small bikes are too small. The US isn't Europe (bigger cities, further distances, etc.). US buyers won't buy based on practicality or transportation value. Where's the Bigger-Better-Faster? That's where I get frustrated. It would take years of work to change the minds of a significant number of Americans as to the transportation value of motorcycles. That's years of advertising dollars, years of editorials, years of advocacy, and years of legislation. None of which, of course, will happen. Why? Because that's not what people want. They want Bigger-Better-Faster. We know. Why? Because we told them that's what they want. Yet here I am, freshly back from a trip around the mountains on my diminutive 250cc motorcycle, where I got a trip average of 64.5 MPG. My riding companion, on her 800cc BMW, got 62 MPG. Despite my small-bike "handicap," I was riding at the pace I wanted (which was more or less the speed limit, occasionally hampered by slow-moving cars, which were passed in short order). Granted, this was a trip more about fun and vacation than transportation, but it breaks a common notion held forth in the Motorcycle Daily comments: "Oh, a 250 is too small for American roads." Bullshit. I just did it, and if I'd needed to do it at an average speed of 80 MPH, the bike would have complied. My "little" 250 was more than a match for I-5, and it was adequate to climbing mountain roads at 4000 feet, and it was able to do all that for less fuel than any car yet produced. That's a bike that's "too small" for American roads? Bzzzt! Try again. My point is really that there are US riders who ride for transportation, and we do it with a wide variety of bikes. I'd be thrilled to see more 250cc-and-smaller bikes in the US market, and see them marketed as daily transportation rather than crap-your-pants adrenaline machines. Well, perhaps my point is too diffuse to really pinpoint, since I've touched on marketing and popular expectations and practicality, but hopefully you can see where I'm headed. We're using too many resources as a nation, and it's really in the public consciousness with the oil catastrophe ravaging the Gulf of Mexico (and soon to ravage the Atlantic, if the spread happens as predicted). Reigning in our transportation choices is one way to reduce our oft-belabored (but otherwise ignored) "dependence on foreign oil." Lose the SUV and pick up something that uses less gas to get around. Consider a motorcycle or a scooter -- imagine what happens to your budget when you're buying gas in 2 gallon doses instead of 20 gallons at a time. Posted at 10:31 permanent link category: /motorcycle Sat, 19 Jun 2010
A moto picture post, for a change
My friend Jeniffer and I just got back from a trip around the North Cascade Loop, and it was a fantastic trip. I took a zillion great pictures, but was playing with (shame on me!) HDR a little bit. It's like crack for photographers, and I had to try it, 'cause who doesn't like an exploded heart? Well, it's a bit safer than crack, I guess. Anyway. I thought you might be interested to see the self-portrait we took at Rainy Pass, in central Washington, on Highway 20. It was, you might say, a freakin' beautiful day, and well worth photographing. This was shortly before we made it to our end point yesterday, in Winthrop.
I'm not really sure which is better, the color or the black and white, so you get both to admire. Posted at 19:48 permanent link category: /motorcycle Fri, 18 Jun 2010
In which Ian ceases communing with the fishes (part II)
When we left off, I had just gone to sleep after an uneventful but death-march-like 11 pm to 2 am watch at the helm. I was deep in the throes of seasickness after having failed to take anti-nausea medication, and essentially couldn't keep anything down. I was getting concerned about deydration, because among the things I couldn't keep down was water. I was scheduled for the 8 am to 11 am watch, and I was awake ("up" is really the wrong term) at 7:30 to get ready for it. However, my dad, upon ascertaining that I was awake, told me that he was going to take my watch. I fought a very brief inner struggle, then thanked him and gratefully lay back down. Although I could have stood watch, it felt increasingly like a bad idea. I listened guiltily as Craig and Dave planned out the new, two-person watch schedule of four hours on and four hours off. At some point during the day (this was Thursday), I was up and (after visiting my old pal the sink for a minute) we were discussing the situation. We were north of Grays Harbor, which is about 1/3 up the coast, and which would provide shelter from the waves that were causing me so many problems. The Washington coast is nearly bereft of safe anchorages, particularly in the northern half. Examine a map of the coast, and you see that from Neah Bay at the NW corner of the Olympic Penninsula to Grays Harbor nearly a hundred miles to the south, there's nothing. At a roughly 6 MPH pace, a hundred miles is quite a distance. The question of the moment was, do we turn around and make for Grays Harbor (some distance behind us, and offering the considerable impediment of its own hazardous bar, which might require careful timing to cross without undue danger), or press on, and make for Neah Bay? Neah Bay was a greater distance, but lay in the direction we wanted to go, and was navigationally not as challenging. The center of the question, of course, was me. I had had moderate success taking miniscule sips of water, but nothing like the several liters that I probably required. I was in serious danger of dehydration, and although I wouldn't die of it in the timeframes we were discussing, it could still be debilitating. I asserted that it made far more sense to press onward to Neah Bay. I didn't know for sure what the distances involved were, but I had the impression that the ratio of distance was about 2:1 Neah Bay:Grays Harbor. It simply didn't make sense, as long as I was able to lie down and avoid being sick, to backtrack so far for the questionable shelter of Grays Harbor. Dave and Craig were willing to take on the longer watches, and so we eventually decided to remain on course up the coast, and make for Neah Bay. The rest of Thursday, honestly, passed in something of a blur to me. I vaguely recall that we shifted to a port tack (I was later told that we'd actually hove to for some reason, and it only felt like a port tack compared to the 30° starboard tack we'd been on for so long), and there was a period where the engine started up for a while. Apparently the engine was an attempt to see if the ride could be calmed by going a bit faster, but what actually happened was that we ended up crashing hard into every other wave, instead of every third wave, so they gave up on it. The next thing I clearly remember is waking up on Friday to the boat sitting perfectly flat and calm. I emerged to find that we were anchored in Neah Bay, and it was about 8 in the morning. As I'd predicted during my brief period awake the day before, calm waters had cured my seasickness. I still felt strange, but I no longer had an urge to throw up at the slightest inclination of my head.
I even managed to have a bit of breakfast, and went up on deck to take pictures of our miraculously flat anchorage. Neah Bay has a long, man-made breakwater stretching on the north side, which keeps the ocean swells out of the anchorage, and makes for miraculously flat water. It felt good to be over the seasickness. Now that we were in the Strait of Juan de Fuca ("Wan D'Fyooka" in local pronunciation), I should be home free. Our goal for Friday was to reach Port Angeles. It is a fairly short hop from Neah Bay to Port Angeles, perhaps 50-60 miles. Now that we were in calmer waters, our speed would pick up -- crashing through big waves takes a lot of energy. I went forward and raised the anchor (so pleased to have that electric anchor winch!), washing the mud off the anchor with the washdown hose (helpfully labeled WASH ROWN on the breaker panel below -- the boat was built in Shanghai, and they didn't get every last detail right). I got the fore locker ship-shape, and we were off! The trip to Port Angeles was practically boring, in comparison to the trip up the coast. The wind was directly behind us, but not strong enough to be worth putting up the sails at first (it takes a 20 knot wind to push the boat 4-5 knots downwind), so we motored. All three of us were in the cockpit, as the weather was pleasant (cold, but not raining, and not oppressively overcast).
The miles passed by quickly, and we traded watches on roughly a three hour schedule. Everyone had gotten enough sleep the night before that all anyone really needed was a nap. For the latter half of the day, we put up the sails and tried to catch what wind we could. We reached Port Angeles around 5 pm, having left around 9 am. The arrival in Port Angeles is a story in and of itself, with which we will commence in the next episode. Posted at 10:42 permanent link category: /misc Tue, 15 Jun 2010
In which Ian communes with the fishes
A few months ago, my dad approached me about helping with a trip up the Washington coast in his boat, the S/V Sequoia. I enthusiastically agreed, as I've been feeling a certain lack of sailing in my life lately. Well, it finally happened last week. I packed my bags and took the train down to Portland on Tuesday night, and we were casting off the dock in St. Helens early Wednesday morning. The river was pretty high, running fast with heavy floods from all the rain we've been having. My dad said that as of that day (June 8th), Portland had already broken the record for rainfall in the month of June. There were gorgeous clouds in the sky, and I found my camera in my hand as often as not. (All the images used here can be found in the gallery.)
We made amazing time down the river -- it must have been flowing 2-4 knots most of the time, and at one point I saw that our speed-over-ground was 11.4 knots. That's a speedy pace considering the boat's hull speed (its practical top speed) is only about 8 knots. One knot is one nautical mile per hour, which is the same thing as 1.15 statute miles per hour. So 10 knots is about 11.5 miles per hour. It's about 90 miles to Astoria (where the Columbia River joins the Pacific Ocean), and we had passed Astoria in the early afternoon. Of course, that trip wasn't made without one or two things happening. Dave, a friend from the yacht club who was helping crew the trip, kept exclaiming with a manic grin on his face, "I can't believe how fast we're going!" His boat is smaller, and has a hull speed of around 5 knots, so we were typically running about double the speed he could normally manage; the river was comparatively flying by for him. The most notable event was that a small orange speedboat with a flashing blue light came out to meet us, and we were in short order boarded by the Coast Guard! Two of the four officers in the boat came on board, and one of them went below with Craig (my dad) to perform a safety inspection while the other one stayed up in the cockpit with Dave and me to fill out paperwork.
Fortunately, if there's anyone in the world who's going to be prepared for a Coast Guard safety inspection, it's my dad, and we passed with flying colors. I was even harnessed to the jackline in the cockpit as the little boat came to join us, although that was, at that time, an extravagant and unnecessary step, sort of like keeping your seatbelt fastened while waiting in a parking spot. Shortly after the Coast Guard left us, we were passing out of Astoria, and over the Bar, which is apparently a hazardous crossing some of the time. Conditions for us were such that I didn't even know when we'd passed it. As we were going through Astoria, there was discussion of whether we should press on, or stop for the night. There was equally compelling evidence to support either choice: the wind was favorable right then, but was going to change before we could round the corner at the northwest tip of Washington, and no matter which way we chose, would have had us facing an uncomfortable headwind just as night was falling. The only choice was, would we face that headwind Thursday night, or Friday night? The path up the coast would necessarily involve about 24-30 hours of straight sailing, with no viable resting place. There are a couple of harbors along the Washington coast, but it's so much trouble to get into and out of them (with their own hazardous bars), that it usually makes more sense to just keep going. With three people, we'd each stand a 3 hour watch, for three hours on, and six hours off -- a very reasonable schedule that should allow for plenty of sleep. So, after about 10 minutes discussion and pondering of the options, Craig decided that we'd just head out, and Dave and I voiced our assent for this plan: there was no advantage to waiting, and there was a potential downside if we had any other kind of delay later in the trip. We aimed the bow west, and pressed on. A problem immediately arose: we wanted to sail, and now we had to raise the mainsail. The correct time to do this was about 15 minutes previously, when we'd been mulling the decision whether to go or not. So now we had to raise the sail in the increasingly heavy seas where the river joined the ocean, and we were starting to run over heavy and confused seas, with swells coming from all directions. I started almost immediately to feel a bit blurky, but ignored it -- I've never been seasick in my life, although I've had that blurky feeling before. Between Dave and Craig, they got the mainsail up, with me at the helm keeping us pointed into the wind. Then, it was on. We pointed the boat southwest to stay in the channel, and I went below to make an entry in the log. It was about 4 in the afternoon, and the weather had gone from mostly cloudy to a heavy, ominous overcast.
I came back above decks to find the staysail out (a small forward sail -- we were rigged for heavy winds, as the wind was 20-25 knots out of the west as we sailed out), and after a few minutes, clear of the navigation channel for the Columbia, we tacked to a northwest course, and we were off on our ocean adventure. We were all three up in the cockpit, enjoying the silence now that the motor was off, and we were receiving our thrust (all 5-6 knots of it, pretty good considering the size of the waves we were sailing over) from that stiff west wind. It would round to northwest at some point, and we were enjoying the favorable wind while we could. Craig at one point estimated that we were sailing through 10-12 foot seas. That is, the waves were between 10 and 12 feet tall from crest to valley. Fortunately, as we got clear of the land, they became less confused, finally all coming reliably from one direction. This made the ride better, although it was mostly a quality difference, not a difference of severity. The boat pitched up and down, and had something of a corkscrew motion: we were sailing northwest, with the ocean swells coming from the west, so we were hitting them diagonally. The boat would be rolled a bit to the right, then pitch her nose up, then roll left, then pitch down, and then start on the cycle anew a second later. About every third wave, we'd come down with a crash that killed half our forward speed, and sent spray off to either side. The foredeck was awash in seawater -- fortunately, not a bad thing, but an indication that we weren't in the friendly calm waters of Puget Sound or the Inside Passage of Vancouver Island. It also rained on and off, and the volume of water flying through the air encouraged me to put away my expensive camera and rely on my considerably more waterproof eyes and ears to record the passage of time. The motion of the boat increased in my consciousness, and I found myself feeling increasingly ill. The last time I threw up was roughly 25 years ago, and I wasn't interested in disrupting that record over a little bit of rough water. I thought back to that morning, when my dad had mentioned offhand the new anti-seasickness medication he was trying out. He didn't explicitly offer it to me, but that was my chance to speak up if I'd wanted some -- but of course it hadn't occurred to me at the time. Now it was too late. Whatever was to happen had already been set more or less irrevocably in motion. I was also getting cold, as I'd packed inappropriate warm clothes: too much reliance on long underwear, and not enough outer layers. The problem, of course, being that in order to get into the long underwear, I had to go below (seasick feeling +500%, more or less), then spend some time getting undressed, pull on long johns, then back into the outer layers, and back up above. I could tell from the way I was feeling that this was an absolute non-starter. Just going below would make me feel more sick, but the thought of inclining my head to pull on pants or take off my shoes made me feel palpably more ill just thinking it. So I sat, shivering and queasy, facing backward as the boat pitched and rolled and the wind blew. We saw every promised knot of wind, with the wind occasionally peaking 30 knots, and the wave size increasing as the evening wore into night beneath the heavy, ponderous clouds. I lasted until about 9:15. I had a sudden surge of nausea that sent me to the weather side of the cockpit, face into the wind, fiercely gripping the railings trying to marshall my rebellious innards. I controlled it for a few seconds, but someone spoke to me (probably to ask if I was going to be ok -- I'm sure my face was a mask of fierce concentration), and when I turned my head, that was all it took. I flew across the cockpit to the lee rail, crashing into it in my haste to avoid barfing either into the wind, or in the cockpit. The late contents of my stomach mingled with the frothing waves, and suddenly I didn't feel so bad any more. Warning: graphic descriptions of seasickness ahead. Skip to the next bold line if you don't want to read my musings on puke. I found myself viewing the whole thing from a very detached, objective place. I remarked to myself as my stomach voided its contents that the process wasn't nearly as painful as I'd remembered: there was no sting of acid, and although it was exercising muscles which hadn't been used that way in decades, puking wasn't hard. I was also surprised to find the taste of tomato soup in my mouth. When had I had tomato soup? Not for months, certainly. What an odd thing. I also noted that I might want to chew more thoroughly. I thought that was it, and I'd be fine, but my body apparently had different ideas -- it seemed to relish the newfound freedom, and was going to work out all the puking I hadn't done for the last 25 years. Over the course of the next 36 hours, I threw up more times than I could recall, and I got to the point where I understood the memories of acid sting: even with nothing at all in my stomach, I found myself heaving over the side, only I didn't get the relative respite of dry heaves. Each time, I brought something up, although toward the end, it must have been pure stomach acid: bright yellow and burning as it came up. But enough of that, let's return to the story without as much gross-out. Ok, done being graphic about vomiting now. I drank some water after the first episode, anxious that I shouldn't get dehydrated. It disappeared over the side a few minutes later -- apparently I wasn't going to keep anything down, no matter how inoffensive. My dad handed me some candied ginger in the hopes that it would help, but it just seemed to make the churning much more violent, so I discontinued it after a few tiny nibbles. Dave and Craig both felt terrible that I was reacting so strongly, but fortunately they had both medicated themselves against the problem, so they were unaffected by the heavy seas. We went on to our assigned watches. I was scheduled for the 11 pm to 2 am watch, and then again for the 8 am to 11 am watch. I went below and lay down with my eyes closed until it was my watch at 11 pm. Fortunately for everyone, lying down with my eyes closed was a perfect remedy to the seasickness, and I wasn't even uncomfortable in that position. Of course, every time I tried to sit up or do anything more involved than opening my eyes for a second, I became ill again, and made good use of the galley sink. Even so, I managed to pull on all my warm clothes before my 11 pm watch, and was much more comfortable as I went above. The 11 pm watch was not an eventful one. The sun had set around 9 pm, but it wasn't fully dark until nearly 1. I was amazed to note the difference in available light between 11 pm and 1 am. It was mostly in the ability to see clouds, but I was truly able to see the clouds until after midnight. Standing watch essentially means being the human in charge of not running into other ships for three hours. Sequoia is equipped with a nifty invention called the Monitor self-steering gear, which uses a devlishly clever set of gears and pushrods and vanes to steer the ship precisely in relation to the wind. Once you set it to sail at, say, 45° to the wind, it will continue to sail at 45° to the wind until there's no wind left to reference, or no progress through the water with which to affect the boat's path. So, to stand watch, what you do is keep your eyes peeled around the boat for anything with lights. Fishing boats are equipped with enough wattage to dazzle the sun, and freighters are adorned with an array of lights that would put you in mind of an over-the-top Christmas display. Every 15 minutes or so, you turn on the radar to make sure there's nothing lurking in the immediate future without lights. Of course, I was feeling like death warmed over. Any time I wasn't sitting with my face into the wind, my queasiness increased, and I had roughly as much energy as a marathon runner post-race. I shifted positions perhaps four times in my three hours in the cockpit, spending the majority of my time sitting in the aft corner, where I could catch a good dose of wind (cold be damned, I wanted the fresh moving air). I was harnessed in, as we all were while alone in the cockpit -- with a three hour interval between people checking on you, falling into the ocean was more or less guaranteed death. The only excitment which happened on my watch was the very slow passage of a fishing boat off the starboard side. I watched in glacial anticipation as its glow filled the horizon very slightly to the right of our path. Over the course of 30 minutes, it gradually came over the horizon, but as we drew near, all the zillions of lights shut down, and it sported only the running lights appropriate to a ship making way across the ocean. I wondered blearily if it were an illegal fishing trip; the fishing regulations are so draconian that most fishermen are granted a tiny handful of fishing days in a year. The urge to cheat must be overwhelming. When our little sailing light appeared to their dazzled eyes, I suspected they quickly shut down operations and headed back to shore so as not to be caught in the act. But this is only speculation. Of course they may have been out there legally and our arrival just happened to coincide with the end of their activities. Around 2, Craig popped up and asked how I was doing. I responded, "Sick," and moments later was leaned over the lee rail again. It's amazing how the slightest disturbance can change things -- I hadn't been actively ill my entire watch until I turned my head to address my dad, although I was obviously still suffering from seasickness. He took over, and I gratefully went below. My eyes had been forcing themselves closed for 10-15 seconds at a time for most of my watch (but I was proud that I never once fell asleep, which I confirmed by regularly checking the time on the instrument display), and all I wanted in the world was to go to my berth, lie down, and pass out as thoroughly as possible. And so, at 2 am Thursday morning, I shucked off the majority of my clothes, and lacking even the energy to pull my sleeping bag out of its sack, crawled into the quarter berth and fell into a fitful sleep. To be continued. Posted at 23:13 permanent link category: /misc A while ago, I wrote about a new CompactFlash card I'd gotten for a camera, and its ability (or rather, lack thereof) to work quickly. I was, in fact, frustrated. As part of that endeavor, I timed the card I had using a particular test: shoot 5 RAW images in quick succession, and time how long it takes from the first shutter press until the "busy" light went out. On the old camera, using the latest 8 GB card (not the one I returned, but the one that replaced it), the number was something like 15 seconds. Yesterday, I finally got my spiffy new Transcend 16 GB card, which promises to be dramatically faster (400x as opposed to 133x). This is to be used with the new camera. Out of curiosity, I decided to repeat my timing test with the old 133x card vs. the new 400x card. So, I set up with my little timer ready, and hit the button five times. Off clicked the timer as the light went out, and I looked at the time: 7.24 seconds. Huh. That was with the 133x card. The card that had taken about 15 seconds with the XTi. The XTi that takes pictures nearly half the size of the 7D's pictures. Wow. The new 400x card was actually a disappointing difference: 5.25 seconds for the same test. Hopefully it'll be faster to pull files off the card when doing an upload, at least. Still, the lesson was clear: the 7D is a much faster camera, and that's definitely something that doesn't suck. Posted at 12:20 permanent link category: /misc Sun, 13 Jun 2010It feels almost cliche at this point, but I saw the clouds going all pink and orange over my house, and I just had to run down to the park. This was shot with the 7D and the XTi's old kit lens (as my nice lens is off to be adjusted). Further proof that just because it's the kit lens doesn't mean it takes bad pictures.
Posted at 21:39 permanent link category: /misc Tue, 01 Jun 2010This is pretty much just a picture post. The rhododendrons are in bloom, and it's a very nice view out my window in the morning. I thought the world would enjoy seeing the same thing.
Posted at 09:01 permanent link category: /misc Mon, 24 May 2010I was pondering a phenomenon on the way in to work today. When I swerve around an obstacle on my bicycle (or motorcycle), I've noticed that I never perform a nice sine-wave curve, with the obstacle at the peak of the wave. Instead I end up making a kind of stretched wave, with the obstacle at the front shoulder of the wave. In thinking about it, I realized that of course this makes sense: turning a cycle is a multi-step process, which is one of the reasons they're harder to pilot than a car. Step one: decide to turn. This isn't the meaningless distinction it may initially seem. You need to choose to turn before you can start the turn, and there is necessarily some delay between deciding to take the action, and actually taking it. In particular, when swerving around an obstacle, you have to decide it's safe before you're willing to turn back into your original path of travel. Step two: initiate the turn. This includes a bunch of sub-steps, which you may or may not take, but which I do. The first is to turn my head and look at where I want to go. If you're not already doing this, it's a simple but astoundingly effective way of guiding a cycle with confidence. The next step is to actually lean the bike over, a step I've actually spent hours and hours considering, filming, talking about, and writing about, using a method called countersteering. Finally, once the bike is leaned over, you're actually in the turn. Step three: roll through the turn. This is the simplest part: you've set yourself on a path, and you continue along it. Interestingly, there's a kind of inertia to turning a cycle, so that deviating from a curved path takes more energy and thought than just staying on it. Newton might not be happy with it, but it's true. Step four through whatever: recover to your original path. This is essentially the reverse of the curve you just took, but without the decision-making step about whether or not the obstacle is a further factor. The key thing in all of this is that in order to describe a nice curving path around an object, and place it at the peak of the curve, you have to decide to turn back, and actually be in a turn, before you can pass the obstacle. As I've just outlined, it takes time to follow through with those actions, and particularly with obstacles (and double-particularly with live obstacles like animals or humans, who are prone to doing stupid things like move toward you), you don't really want to decide to swerve back until after you're past the obstruction. Thus, the too-long curve back to your original path. This all actually plays heavily into racing. If you're running as fast as possible, and you decide you want to turn, you have to have made the decision and gone through all the steps to actually get you into the turn well before you reach the turn. It's kind of counter-intuitive, and is one of the reasons that inexperienced racers end up running wide through turns, or having to dramatically slow down: you've got to be looking at the next turn, not the one you're in. I'm still working on that, myself, mostly through turns 3 and 4 at Pacific Raceways, but that's a discussion for a different time. Posted at 11:31 permanent link category: /bicycle Tue, 18 May 2010I was on my way home this evening, and (the sun being out so late these days), noticed quite a sight. I had to stop, and pulled out the camera. This was the result.
I was pretty pleased. This may become a habit. Posted at 22:46 permanent link category: /misc Sat, 15 May 2010I finally took some time to do to do a couple of minor tasks on my commuter bike, and looked down to note the mileage (I keep a maintenance log, and that probably tells you more about me than I could in ten times as many words). There it was, in bold letters on the little display. 7003. That's a lotta miles, y'all. Posted at 15:40 permanent link category: /bicycle Tue, 11 May 2010I tried taking the street CL175 for its inaugural break-in ride yesterday (seems like I've done a lot of those rides in the last few months), but was thwarted out of the gate. It would idle, but that's about it. Any more gas than that, and it would have enough power to spin up the motor with no load, but nothing more. When I put it in gear and tried to head out, it just bogged and nearly died until I turned around and gave up for the day. I spent some time pondering the problem. It was doing this odd coughing/backfiring routine whenever I cracked the throttle, and I started entertaining gloomy thoughts of having messed up the cam timing -- something that wouldn't be disasterous, but would mean I'd have to pull the engine out of the bike yet again. I also considered crud in the carbs, water in the gas, and dead sparkplugs. The obvious first step (that's a lot less obvious when faced with these problems, for some reason) is to replace the sparkplugs. Once fouled, it's effectively impossible to get a plug back to a functional state, and these sparkplugs had been through a fair number of first-runs without being replaced. So this morning, I replaced both plugs, carefully retaining the ridiculous double-washer I have to run with my too-large sparkplugs (it's a long story involving miscommunication and Helicoils). Although it hesitated at bit at first, after a few minutes of idling and warming up, the engine came to life, and I was able to ride off for a fairly satisfying first ride. It's so nice when the first and simplest attempt at problem resolution completely solves the problem. There are still a few tiny issues to deal with (timing could probably be adjusted; jetting could probably be adjusted; an indicator light needs to be replace), but it's looking likely that the street CL is finally healthy and back on the street. Posted at 10:13 permanent link category: /motorcycle Sun, 09 May 2010It all started, as they say, much earlier than the actual events. Without getting ridiculous about it, I can safely start with a few weeks ago, when I noticed that my wristwatch's band had broken. I took it off, and eventually brought it to a repair shop, where it's even now awaiting a new band. Thus, when I set off for the track yesterday, I didn't have a watch on. It was a fairly standard departure, made slightly less stardard by the fact that I'd had a theatrical event the night before, which kept me out until 1, and my plan was to be at the track around 7 am. So my alarm was set for 5:30, and I went to bed at 2. Grand. As I pulled the bike off the truck, I noticed that it seemed a bit tough to move, but I put it down to deflated tires, since both tires were low on pressure. I got my pit area set up, and after I'd pumped up the tires, something made me check the bike again -- it was still tough to move. Something wasn't right. So, I spun the rear tire (conveniently suspended above the ground by the bike's stand) -- no problem. I lifted the front of the bike with some effort, and tried to spin the front -- yep, that's not right. The front brake was sticking. I messed around with it a bit, and discovered that the rear of the two brake levers was actually sticking in the engaged position, and then as soon as the tire was rolled backwards any amount, it would snap to the disengaged position. Seeing that we had nearly an hour until our practice session (the only time we'd be on the track that day), I decided to pull apart the front wheel and grease up the various bits and pieces, something I'd never done before (so it was probably long overdue). Sure enough, the actuating shafts were bone-dry, as were all the other moving parts inside the brake. I applied careful smears of grease in the appropriate spots, and put it back together. Of course, what I'd forgotten to factor in was the "not at home" time multiplier. Any time you try to do anything like this at home, it takes X amount of time. Any time you try to do it away from home, ie without all the normal setup and tools and work areas, it takes longer because of that change. I think it was about 1.5x on this job, which isn't bad, but of course ate into that hour I'd thought I had. Added onto this (I realized part-way through the job that the time factor was hitting me), I didn't have a watch, and I'd forgotten to bring the little battery clock I usually have hanging from the shelter. So the only way I had to check the time was to check my cell phone (which I didn't want to smear with my greasy gloves), or call out, "What time is it? Anyone?" I had no idea how fast or slow time was progressing. So I started to panic a bit. Naturally, when you start to panic a bit, things do not get better. But I didn't want to miss this practice. If I did, then it was a huge mistake to even come down for Saturday, when we only had one practice instead of the normal two. I'd considered, very late Friday night, just not coming down for Saturday, but figured I should probably make it if I could. Now, I was up to my elbows in disassembled front brake. Not a thing you want to have go missing while railing into turn 2. So I was under double pressure to do it quickly, but do it well. As it happens, I did manage to get it done, and in enough time to head out for practice with everyone else, but the story doesn't end there. As we were sitting at the mouth of the track entrance, I realized that I'd forgotten to safety-wire my belly pan bolt, a bolt which will vibrate itself out within a minute or two of riding. Indeed, I leaned over to check it, and it was halfway backed out. I reluctantly turned my bike up onto the gravel return road and went back to my pit to hurriedly wire the bolt and get back out. Thus, I was able to get into the practice having only wasted a couple minutes of track time. But, of course, it doesn't end there, either. I have this routine I go through before a track session. I think everyone has a variation on this. I put on my suit about 30 minutes before we're supposed to start. I check the gas. I check the tire pressure. I look over the bike to see if there's anything I've missed. And so on, but the key fact here is that it starts about 45 minutes before we ride. What was I doing 45 minutes before we were to start? Well, the same thing I was doing 20 minutes before we were to start -- putting my front brake together. Even with all that, I didn't manage to get it adjusted correctly, so that it was both dragging and working at about half power. So, about 2 laps in, I finally remembered: I'd pumped up my tires with too much pressure (like I always do), preparatory to using the tire gauge to carefully set them. Tire pressure is terribly important, and too much or too little can cause serious problems, including crashing. And here I was, running with way more pressure than I wanted to. Afterward, after the tires had cooled down, I measured 27 PSI front and 35 PSI rear. I normally run 23 and 29. One pound of difference is the usual increment of change when you're tuning tire pressure. Needless to say, I backed off a bit, and had a generally unsatisfying practice, firm in the knowledge that if I pushed it, my tires would probably slide, potentially dumping me off in the process. So, although I did actually get out on the track, and nothing really bad happened, it was a completely unsatisfying time, and the rush-rush-rush pressure I'd felt before riding left me fairly exhausted and unhappy. The consolation prize for this story is that, because we didn't have any more events in the day, I was able to take a much more leisurely approach to rectifying the remaining front brake issues, and I was able to come away from the day with a much more calm and zen feeling than what the morning had produced. Posted at 20:39 permanent link category: /motorcycle Sat, 01 May 2010Although it's been over a relatively long period of time, I've had some interesting developments in the Land of the Bikes (aka, my garage). The big one is the CL175 street bike. I think I've had that damn motor out of the bike about 5 times in the last 6 months, most of those occurring in the last month or two. Last year, in the fall, I took it apart to track down an odd clattering noise in the head. I found absolutely nothing in the head that should be causing a clattering noise, but in the process, I had so thoroughly cleaned and burnished the head that it seemed a real shame to put it back on the awful, oily rest of the engine. So I proceeded taking it apart, until I had the whole thing all the way apart, down to the transmission being out of the case. It cleaned up beautifully. I only really found one problem in doing all that -- there are these little flat pieces of metal under the crankshaft, which I think serve as oil baffles, and they're held in by spring tension against a pin. It's not clear to me exactly why they're there, but they are, and one of them was loose. So I bent it a couple of degrees, and now it's not loose any more. There's more than that, of course. As long as I had the engine apart, I figured, I might as well replace all the oil seals, and the piston rings. These are things that just wear out and get old, so it was worth replacing them. So I did. When I was putting the new rings in, though, they didn't match the diagram in the manual, so I kind of guessed at the order they should go in. It happens that I guessed wrong. I put the engine back together after a very long period of being in pieces on the bench (from November last year to something like early March of this year). I did a little break-in process. After all that, it was still smoking like Groucho Marx on a bad day, so I took it apart to swap the rings around (having figured out that I'd done it wrong the first time). So that was cool and all, but it didn't actually solve the problem. Still blowing a ton of smoke, and it was around here that I busted out the leakdown tester, a tool that can help you isolate where leaks are happening. I quickly determined that there was a comparative torrent of a leak around the piston rings in the left cylinder. Apart it all came again, and I checked things out. Thing is, everything looked good. I did careful measurements, I checked ring end-gap; everything I could figure out how to check, I did. Eventually (and about three more engine dismantlings later), I threw up my hands and took the cylinders in to Autosport Seattle to be bored (Autosport did the same service on my racebike engine, and I've been very happy with the results). The cylinders will probably be ready early next week, and I'll be able to update you as to whether the haunted left cylinder is finally working right. Hopefully, that's the last time I have to pull that engine for a while. It'd be nice to actually be able to ride the damn bike instead of looking at it forlornly sitting, denuded of tank and engine, like a sopping wet kitten who's suddenly half the size you thought it was. The race bike also received some love lately. I had the first race of the season a few weeks ago, and managed to get what I was hoping would be significant work done before that point -- I degreed the cam. This is a terrifying-sounding but surprisingly easy process that brings the engine into a theoretically better state of tune. I finished it in plenty of time for the first race, but not in enough time to get it back on the dyno before the race. At the same time, I swapped cylinder heads between the race bike and the street bike (I really like this "having two of the same bike" thing), to get the race bike back to a closer-to-stock condition. With all these changes, it was worth getting the bike to a dyno, which I finally did last week. I have results ready to set up, but haven't had a time to actually get them generated yet. The short story on the race bike is that I was hoping for a couple of HP from the degreed cam, and I would have been satisfied with one. I got .5, so that all felt like kind of a failure. However, we cleaned up the power curve a lot, and actually made a quite noticeable difference as far as area-under-the-curve, and that's actually pretty important. I also discovered that with the new head and degreed cam, the engine was running noticeably lean, so in went the 100 jets (I was on 98s before). We saw a peak of 14.9 HP, with the aforementioned increase in area-under-curve. So, I'll have to see how that works out. Hopefully it'll make a little bit of difference in times around a lap, although I'm pretty sure I'll notice no difference whatsoever in how the bike feels. There's also been news on the pedal-powered bikey front. The big news is two-fold: first, I got the new headlight from Supernova, and while it's not the night-into-day HID terror I'd been secretly hoping for, it's much better than the old one with its shaped beam and massive hotspot right in front of the front tire. The second bit of news, which impinges a bit more on my daily riding, is that I finally broke down and got myself a rear rack and a set of panniers. I'm not 100% convinced on this as a change, but it's pretty cool to not have the weight on my back (and therefore on my butt). The obvious negative is that I'm now putting that stress much more directly onto the rear subframe, particularly as I normally only run one bag. Asymmetrical loads bother my engineer's mind, and I can definitely feel that the bike is a bit wonkier over bumps now. The Ninja 250 and the Xtracycle don't really have any exciting news to impart (as much as news about an inanimate object can be considered exciting). The Ninja just keeps on keepin' on, and the Xtracycle hasn't been out much lately, particularly with the panniers on the commuter bike. Still, no news is good news, so I'll take it. Posted at 17:31 permanent link category: /motorcycle Thu, 29 Apr 2010I stepped outside today, and immediately turned right around and went back inside. I had to get a camera.
For those following along at home, this is cropped, turned to black and white with the "red filter" preset, and a very very slight purple-blue tint added. I need to pick up a red filter for the 5x7 camera, clearly. This, by the way, is why you never want to use any of the black and white or funny-color presets in your camera. If I'd shot this in black and white in the camera, I never would have been able to apply the red filter, and get this striking effect -- it depends on color data being there. It's always better to take a perfect, balanced picture in the camera, and then adjust it later. You'll have way more latitude, and will almost certaily be able to get better results. Update: And, because I'm a big ol' nerd, I just went out and tried again, with the camera set to Fine instead of Normal. I'd previously thought that I couldn't tell the difference between the two, but I think that's because I hadn't found the right situation. Taking pictures of clouds definitely suggests that Fine is a better choice for big enlargements, but RAW would be an even better choice, and is what I should have been shooting with in the first place. Anyway, I thought the second picture came out well enough to be worth posting, as well.
Same treatment, but a slightly different tint, and a little bit less of it. Posted at 13:46 permanent link category: /misc Tue, 13 Apr 2010Tom Parker spent some time wandering around the track with a video camera last year, talking to racers, filming bikes, filming races, and generally making a delightful nuisance of himself. He was producing a documentary on Vintage 160 racing. The documentary is finally done, and he's presented his video to the world: The Fowler Formula from Tom Parker on Vimeo. Posted at 11:49 permanent link category: /motorcycle Wed, 07 Apr 2010I posted this over of Ye Olde Tome of Faces, but I figured it was worth further exposure. Ian's Theory of Antagonistic Causation: any action taken in anticipation of a given outcome virtually guarantees the opposite outcome. Ian's Corollary of Antagonistic Cancellation: actions taken in conscious anticipation of the Theory of Antagonistic Causation instantly negate it. This, of course, explains the following situation: you're waiting for a bus, and all you want in the world is a cigarette. You look at your watch. There are at least 5 minutes left until the bus is supposed to arrive, and they're never early. Within 20 seconds of lighting up, the bus appears. This also explains why hopefully lighting a cigarette when you don't really want one absolutely never makes the bus magically appear. A similar situation: you're desperately hungry, and waiting for your order to arrive at your table. You decide to go to the bathroom, which seems to have the near-magic power of making the food appear. When you get back, the food has indeed appeared, but is also lukewarm and rapidly cooling. I was originally going to call them Murphy's instead of Ian's Theory and Corollary, but then I figured, why give that dude credit? Posted at 08:39 permanent link category: /misc Tue, 30 Mar 2010Somewhat frustratingly, after putting in all the work over the weekend, I was unable to actually start the bike up and see if it ran on Sunday. Some crazy garbage about disturbing neighbors or whatever. Anyway, tonight I was able to fire up the bike, and I am extremely pleased to report that it started as easily as it ever has. Once I got it warmed up a bit, I took a few experimental first-gear rides down the shoulder of my street (the bike not being street-legal), and I was impressed with how much power it seemed to have. I'm really looking forward to getting it onto the track, and see how it does in the real world. I was hoping to get it onto the dyno before this weekend's race, but it looks like I waited too long to call Ducati Seattle -- there's no time available when I'm free. Well, that's not entirely true, I'm to call on Thursday to see if they can slip me in just before closing, but that will require that I drive the bike to work, and I'm not sure I'm that committed to the project. I can always put it on the dyno after the race. Also, as a side note, I took a glance into the left cylinder of the street engine, and was pleased to see no obvious gouges on the cylinder walls, so it's unlikely I broke any rings there. That lends more credence to my theory that I may have left some crud in one of the ring cutouts, leading to the ring binding in the piston rather than pushing against the cylinder wall like it should. Stupid mistake on my part, but a very easily remedied one. Posted at 23:10 permanent link category: /motorcycle Sun, 28 Mar 2010This has definitely been the Weekend of Motorcycles. The first race of the season is coming up next weekend, and the race bike had been essentially ignored all winter. I'd put it away with vows to do a bunch of stuff "over the winter," and of course, nothing came of that. Well, that's not entirely true, but nothing happened until this weekend, which makes a pretty poor showing of "over the winter." As I've mentioned before, I made up an adjustable camshaft last fall, and then left the project to sit for about 6 months as other bits of life intruded. Finally, a month or so ago, that camshaft made it into the street CL175, and I've been riding it around. However, piston ring problems have plagued me, and so I don't really know if it made all that much difference. Well, I'd reserved time in my schedule this weekend to work on the race bike. The main thing I wanted to do was to put new tires on, which I accomplished in a surprisingly short period of time on Friday evening. Faced with the remainder of the weekend, it occurred to me that I actually had time to swap that camshaft from the street bike to the race bike. Heck, I needed to take the street engine apart again anyway, so why not kill two birds with one stone? The point of the cool new camshaft was to put it into the race engine anyway. So, out came one engine, then the other. I'm getting really good at pulling engines from CL175s, I must say. Lots of practice. The head came off the street engine this morning, and I went through the procedure of degreeing the cam on the race engine -- it's potentially different for every engine, so you have to check. As it happened, the cam as set was working out to 104.5° or 104.75°, which is so close to perfect (in theory you want it a tiny bit advanced for race use) that it wasn't worth changing anything. Of course, it wasn't as simple as all that. In the process of pulling things apart, I discovered problems that had to be solved, notably a dent in the cylinder head that was right on the border of the right combustion chamber. There were actually scorch marks on the head where hot combustion gasses had escaped, and I'd found soot outside the engine right there earlier. That required about an hour of patiently swirling the cylinder head on top of a piece of sandpaper on the granite surface plate I picked up over the winter for exactly this purpose. Life got a lot better once I figured out how to tape the sandpaper down so I wasn't trying to hold it with one hand while grinding the head with the other. As long as I was at it, I also removed the brittle, ancient gaskets from the cam-end bearings, a process that took way longer than I had hoped. However, this will hopefully cure that head of its oil leaks without resorting to sealant goo like I did last time. The sealant goo was perfectly effective, but I was worried that it might be clogging vital oil passages. Earlier, on Saturday, I'd actually pulled the head off a spare engine to swap it on to the race engine, and reworked its valve seats. Then, of course, I discovered that one of its sparkplug threads might be stripped, which would have complicated things unnecessarily. The reason for all this head swappery was that my original race head, due to a communication error with a machinist a couple years ago, has the wrong size sparkplug holes. This rendered one of the special tools I made useless, so that I couldn't set up the fancy new cam. Anyway, today was spent almost entirely standing in the garage, making slow but steady progress. The new race head (which was formerly the head from the street bike) has been beautifully reworked: it's newly very flat on its sealing surface, it has newly cut valve seats and new valves, and the cam-end bearings have new gaskets. This combined with the known-good rings of the race engine should make for a respectable engine. I hope I can get it out to the dyno before the race, just to see what changes I made (I took it to the dyno last fall to get a baseline). I wrapped up my work this evening around 8:45, and decided judiciously that although technically still legal, firing up my mega noise machine late on a Sunday night was probably not the best way to keep my neighbors happy. Still, it was nice to get the race bike completely back together this weekend, and know that I don't really have anything outstanding I need to do. There are surely things that it still needs, but at least it's back together, and I don't have any more work ahead of me than I did before the weekend started, and the bike is at least theoretically in better shape. It was a good weekend, although I'm ready to not stand for a while. Posted at 22:56 permanent link category: /motorcycle Fri, 19 Mar 2010I've been riding with my Supernova E3 Pro for about a week now. After the initial shock of the beam pattern wore off (see previous entries), I had some more thoughts I suspect will be welcomed by searchers on this subject. Effort: I haven't actually noticed any difference biking with the new hub and light. I've got a front wheel built around a Schmidt Dynohub, and if I were to judge only by riding, I don't think I could tell you it's any different from a normal bearings-only front hub. Of course, when you lift the front wheel off the ground and give it a spin, it slows down noticeably quicker with the light on than off. But still, that should give you an idea -- spin the front wheel with your hand, and it goes around for a while. The hub just isn't taking much energy from the wheel. Hardware: The light itself continues to impress me with its design and construction. I've got the Lefty mount, and flipped the arm over so that the light hangs pendulum-style, and then used the straight arm to mount the whole thing under the handlebar stem. To mount it, I just drilled a hole through the stem itself, and a M6x45 bolt with some red thread locker holds the whole thing together. In an effort to make it less glaringly obvious to potential thieves, I colored the bolt head with a black marker so it's not shiny and stainless-steel looking. I should probably redo it with matte black paint so it more closely matches the anodizing on the stem, but it's not a big enough deal for me right now. Support: When I contacted Supernova via email about my beam shape problem, I had a response the next day. Their support has been very good, and I certainly have nothing to complain of in that realm. The fact that they're in Germany complicates shipping and means that email exchanges take a day apiece due to time differences, but I knew that going in. Overall, if you discount the fact that I ordered the wrong lens on mine, I've been very happy with the light. I really enjoy having a light that just comes on when I ride, and incurs so little penalty that it makes sense to leave it on all the time. I have the Supernova tail light that I still have to install, but once I do that, I'll have front and back lights that are always on, which is very cool. Once I get a different lens in my front light, I think I'll be quite happy with my bike light setup. Posted at 10:51 permanent link category: /bicycle Fri, 12 Mar 2010
Supernova further update -- wanna buy a light?
Supernova has indeed agreed that they can swap lenses for me, and that the turnaround will be right around 3 weeks. They also offered me the option of buying a symmetrical-lens'd light at a discount, so I could sell the glare-free unit on Ebay or some such. Honestly, that sounds like the best option. Are you interested in a slightly used glare-free lens'd Supernova E3 Pro? Scroll down for video of the lens pattern. I have to admit, my reaction to the light definitely falls under "personal preference," and clearly Supernova thinks enough of the design to produce and sell it. I suspect it would be a good choice for someone whose average speed is a bit lower, or who rides in different situations than I do. If you're interested, please contact me at reaper at obairlann dot net. I'll post a picture of the light as installed in the next day or two. The only thing that's not absolutely shiny-brand-new about it is that I cut off about 12" of the supplied dynamo wire, and one of the mounting screws has had a wee bit of the black paint chipped off. This could work out well. Posted at 16:43 permanent link category: /bicycle Wed, 10 Mar 2010I got an email back from Supernova, to the effect that they are quite capable of swapping lenses, but that it will require me to send the whole light back to them, as it will involve soldering in a different LED in addition to putting in a different lens. Hopefully I can pursue that course of action soon, as riding with the light in its current configuration is irksome. Posted at 16:40 permanent link category: /bicycle Tue, 09 Mar 2010I just uploaded this video showing the headlight pattern of the Supernova E3 Pro with the "glare-free" asymmetrical beam.
My ride home last night was enough to show that I'm not at all happy with the asymmetrical beam pattern. It casts far too much light too close, with the result that I found myself repeatedly staring at a spot 10 feet in front of my front tire. That's incredibly unsafe when compared to keeping your eyes at the horizon, and I really don't want a light that encourages that kind of unsafe riding. I would be very happy with an asymmetrical beam pattern that wasn't so deep, and could be focused further out, but my hope now is that Supernova will be able to sell me a symmetrical lens, or swap out the one I have, or something. Peter White won't take the light back, because I actually installed it, cutting off some of the supplied wire. Silly me, actually installing a light. Still, I've read anecdotally that Supernova will swap lenses, so hopefully that will work out. I really don't want to have this ridiculously spendy light on my bike that angers me every time I ride in the dark. Posted at 10:58 permanent link category: /bicycle Mon, 08 Mar 2010
Supernova E3 Pro first impression
Last night, I finally got my new Supernova E3 Pro headlight installed. I received this, along with the new Schmidt Dynohub, a few months ago. I finally got the hub built into a wheel last month, and I finished installing the light yesterday. The E3 is a dynamo headlight that was designed to be the ultimate dyno light, and the price reflects that fact. If I weren't biking every day (and getting incredibly sick of batteries that need constant recharging), I wouldn't have sprung for it. But I am, and I did. I opted for the shaped beam version, which has a pattern similar to a car's headlight: a sharp cutoff at the horizon, so as to avoid blinding oncoming drivers, while casting as much light as possible on the road in front of you. I had actually temporarily installed the light a week or two ago (with a hilarious combination of zip ties, alligator clips and safety wire) and gone for a brief ride along a dark trail. That proved that the beam pattern was pretty useful, and showed that my intended mounting location (right under the handlebar) would work well. My very first impression of the beam was that it wasn't very bright. That is, it seemed about as bright as my current headlight (a NightRider MiNewt X2). Then I realized that, although it seemed about as bright, the bright area covered something like 5x the area of the MiNewt's bright spot. That means it's a tremendously brighter light, it's just spread out into a much larger, more useful area. There's not much point in spearing a single point in the distance on a bicycle, it's not as if I ever move any faster than 40 MPH at the fastest, and 25 MPH normally. The beam pattern itself is a bit odd, being quite wide, with "saddlebags" of brightness off to the sides, and not as much right in front. I have a feeling it was designed to be multipurpose, including being useful for offroaders. I'll see if I can get a photo or video of it, and post that here. The LED or optics give the light a greenish tint, which is a bit displeasing -- when spending this kind of money on an LED light, I expect excellent color, and greenish is not an excellent color. Now that I look at posted pictures of the beam pattern on both Supernova's site, and the Peter White beamshots page, I also have the impression that my beam is a weird shape, and not what I thought I was getting, particularly compared to the beamshot on the Supernova page. I may be talking to Peter White (where I got this light) after tonight's ride. The light itself, in terms of construction, seems to be well built. The mount is a very pretty machined piece, and the light body suggests high quality. It's fairly heavy, but that's to be expected, since this light includes a lot of aluminum to dissipate heat, as well as a large capacitor to act as a "stand light," keeping the light on for a few minutes after you stop riding (for use at stoplights). The stand light is about half the brightness of when riding, but it's still enough to be seen pretty well. I didn't time it, but my stand light was still glowing 5 or so minutes after a ride. It seems to slope down brightness over time. Other than the beam pattern, I'm pretty happy with this light. It was spendy, but ideally that's bought me a bright, durable light. I'll post updates as I have them, but I hope to get some photos and possibly video in the next few days. Posted at 10:58 permanent link category: /bicycle Fri, 05 Mar 2010
A Lovely Non-Motorcycle Picture For A Change
Goodness, but those flowers look gorgeous...
Posted at 10:38 permanent link category: /misc Thu, 04 Mar 2010Well, taking the engine out of the bike and getting the top end off goes a lot quicker when you have some motivation. My findings so far: the piston rings were in fact in the wrong order (the correct order is square profile first, then stepped profile, then thicker oil scraper; I had the square and stepped rings swapped); the combustion chambers were positively swimming in oil, far more than I had expected to be there; the oil didn't seem to be coming from the valves, or at least not much; still nothing that should be making that clunking, rattling sound at idle; oil all over the engine is from the points cover gasket not sealing. It was nice, at least, to get the engine torn down enough to confirm that I'd done the rings wrong. I can probably get it corrected, cleaned up, and back together this weekend, assuming nothing goes wrong. Hopefully, that's not a big assumption. I have discovered (well, more confirmed, I guess) that Orbital is excellent engine tear-down music. I'm sure you were dying to know that. Posted at 23:03 permanent link category: /motorcycle Wed, 03 Mar 2010I did several more CL175 break-in runs tonight, and it's very likely I've done something wrong in my reassembly. The engine is coated with a thin film of oil, and the exhaust is a perpetual blue haze. The crankcase breather is dripping an unhappy looking mixture of water and oil, and has been blown half off its attachment point. The best guess I've got is that I messed up installing the piston rings, and got the top two swapped. That would mean that oil is not effectively removed from the cylinder walls and is getting into the combustion chamber, and combustion pressure is not adequately sealing the top ring against the wall. That would lead to positive pressure in the crankcase, which might be responsible for, oh, I don't know, oil seeping from every gasket. I guess I'll be taking the engine apart again to check on the piston rings. Not an auspicious beginning. But maybe my new valves will come in while I've got it apart, and I can send the head off to the shop. There's a reasonable chance that the valve guides are worn out, which could lead to some smoking, but not as much as I'm seeing (and especially not considering that the engine didn't smoke before). It is highly suspicious to me that only the left side sparkplug was oiled, and the left side is where I bent that intake valve. Hopefully I don't have multiple problems cascading upon each other! Back to the workbench, I guess. At least I'm not facing anything mysterious -- tearing down the engine is almost something I can do in my sleep at this point, and either the rings are in the right order, or they aren't. Of course, one mystery does remain: that clunking in the head is still there, exactly like before, and I still have no idea what's making it. Hooray for progress? Posted at 22:22 permanent link category: /motorcycle I took this picture of the CL175 today, and thought it was pretty cool. Figured I'd share.
Posted at 16:48 permanent link category: /motorcycle Tue, 02 Mar 2010As I mentioned in the previous post, I made myself an adjustable CL175 camshaft last fall. That must have been around October. In order to do that, I pulled the camshaft from a spare engine I had, and did the modifications, cutting down the sprocket and pressing on an adapter flange. Around the same time, I realized that my street CL175 (as opposed to the race CL175) was making these odd, and somewhat disturbing clanking noises at idle. It sounded like a loose cam chain, or loose valves, or something. I adjusted the valves, and adjusted the cam chain, but all to no avail. I knew I wanted to test the adjustable camshaft I'd just made on the street bike, so this seemed like a perfect confluence of events: tear down the street engine to look for the rattle, and reassemble it with the new camshaft installed.
That way, I could make mistakes on the street engine without imperilling the race engine. I have another street bike, so it was no hardship to do without the street CL175. I don't have another race bike, and if I messed up that engine, I would be unhappy. It turned out to be a good choice, as I ended up bending one of the valves as I was working on the street engine; the street engine has old valves, while the race engine has new valves. I would have been annoyed indeed to make that mistake on the race bike. The problem, of course, is that life (in the form of holidays and theater) got in the way. I found that between Thanksgiving and the end of this last run of shows a few weeks ago, I just didn't have time to work on the project. What little free time I did have was dedicated to things like sitting still for a few minutes, or going to bed before midnight, or occasionally collecting the terrifying dustbunnies around the house and introducing them to their new home in the circular file.
Finally, though, all the shows ended, and I've been able to pick up the project where I left off. The last few days have been full of engine work. This morning, I was mysteriously awake two and a half hours earlier than normal, so I decided to seize the opportunity and work on the bike. I was close to done, and it was just possible I could finish it this morning. As I continued work on the project, I realized that I just had two major tasks left: reconnecting the exhaust, and reinstalling the gas tank. Both of these things are fairly simple to do, and by around 8:45, I had the bike completely reassembled, adjusted, oiled, gassed up, and ready to go. I kicked the motor over a few times to get the oil system primed and pumping. Then, it was the work of mere moments to flip on the choke and press the go button.
Lo and behold, after a few cranks, it fired up, and ran as if nothing had happened! It's just as finicky about starting as it was before the teardown, but I can't say I'm entirely surprised by that. I ran it through the initial 10 minute "Do nothing but idle" phase of Duke's break in method from the Ninja250 board. I'll have to modify it for the CL175, in terms of target RPM, but that's the basic method I'll be following to break in the new rings. It was a glorious feeling to finally have this long-stalled project going, and working again. I can't wait to go home tonight and start riding it again. I'm sure there's more work to be done to get everything set just right, but the correctly aligned camshaft promises noticeable improvements in power and economy.
(Man, you can really tell the difference between the real camera and cellphone camera pics, can't you.) Update: It's been pointed out to me that I left my handful of readers hanging! Did I find the rattle? Well, maybe. As I tore the engine down, I was discouraged to find that there really wasn't anything that should be causing the rattle. It sounded like it was coming from the head, which is why I was thinking valves or cam chain. It all looked about right as I took it apart. When I reassembled the bottom end, I did discover that one of the oil baffles under the crankshaft (which are held in place with spring tension) was loose. I bent it a little bit so it'd exert some pressure against its retaining pin, but that was the only thing I found that was a likely source of rattling inside the engine. As I was reassembling the whole thing today, I ended up inverting the muffler a couple of times, and noticed a very loud clanking coming from it -- apparently one of the internal baffles has come loose. That's even less likely to be the source of the rattle, but it was pretty loud as I handled the muffler, and I suppose anything is possible. I'd love to ditch the stock muffler (which is heavy and makes taking off the exhaust pipes a serious pain), but that's more fabrication than I'm ready for right at the moment. So, the answer is a solid maybe. When I started the engine this morning, it didn't rattle, though. I'll take it. Posted at 11:00 permanent link category: /motorcycle Wed, 24 Feb 2010So, last fall, I made myself an improved camshaft for the CL175 streetbike. (Seriously, if you're not into engines and tuning, you can completely skip this entry.) Then, life got in the way, and I've only been able to get back to it in the last few weeks. Finally, a couple days ago, I got all the bits and pieces put back together, clean, beautiful, new oil seals, the works. I had stalled enough. Time to degree the cam. Degreeing the cam is not, in concept, hard to understand. The camshaft is locked to the crankshaft with a chain. The tensioner makes sure there's a minimum of slop in the chain. As the crankshaft moves the pistons up and down, the camshaft controls the opening and closing of the valves. Easy enough. If a valve opens too early in, say, the power stroke, then some of the expanding gas gets blown out the open valve instead of powering the crankshaft. If that same valve opens too late, then the exhaust stroke isn't as effective, wasting some power on compressing the exhaust against a closed valve. Likewise a bunch of similar scenarios -- the cam has to open and close the valves at exactly the right time, if you want to make the most power. Degreeing the cam is just the act of making sure the cam is lined up exactly where it should be in relationship to the crankshaft, so that the valves open and close as the manufacturer intended. Honda, at least with the 60s and 70s era 160/175 motor, wasn't always super precise when pressing the cam sprocket onto the camshaft, as far as how everything lined up. It could be off. It could be off by a lot. According to Mr. Bateman's article on cam degreeing, even 1 degree of cam timing is pretty significant. That's what made my degreeing experience so interesting. After first bending a valve and cursing a great deal, and then remembering that I had a couple spare valves from the race engine (note to future cam degreers: no really, don't stick the piston stop pin in the cylinder with the valves adjusted to .002"! Really!), I got my shiny new adjustable cam degreed. What should I find, upon degreeing the cam as I'd pressed it back on (admittedly without any precision at all)? 98°. The 175 is supposed to be at 105°. Yeah, that'll never work. I did the math real quick, and decided I had to move the cam 3.5° thataway (the cam rotates at 1/2 rotation per crankshaft rotation). I did, and was almost blown away by how easy it was. Turn the crank around a couple of times, loosen the three bolts, and give 'em a quick tap with a drift and hammer. Done. Without the adjustable adapter, you have to take the head halfway apart, pull the cam out, press the sprocket off, and press it back on to do the same thing. I'd taken a ~30 minute operation and performed it in about 3 seconds. I had marked 5° increments on my adapter (you can see a few more pictures of this stuff here), and moved the pointer what looked like about 3.5 degrees, more or less. I re-tested, and found I was at 103°, so I'd gone the right direction, and adjusted it just a tiny bit further. The numbers worked out to 105° on the nose. Hot! So now, the engine awaits final assembly, and I can finally put it all back together, and see if it works! I really hope the old cam was actually at 98° (but don't expect it was, I'm not sure it'd run at all in that condition) -- the performance increase from re-setting the cam at 105° would be huge! And the best thing is that the increased performance would come along with improved fuel economy. I've got my fingers crossed. Posted at 11:40 permanent link category: /motorcycle Tue, 16 Feb 2010I know you're just dying to see it.
Note the yellow stain along the bottom edge. I'm pretty sure that's oxidization from being old. Never a good thing. And here it is inverted and contrast-enhanced (but nowhere near as contrast-enhanced as the first one):
So, more developer time is good. Fresh film will be even better. Posted at 22:45 permanent link category: /misc I developed the second exposure from our epic four-shot 5x7 photo shoot on the 31st. The first exposure was pretty milquetoast, as far as contrast went, so I went from 11 minutes to 15 minutes in the developer. It definitely made a difference, but the contrast still seemed weird. In fact, once I looked closely, I realized that the bits of the film which were covered up by the film holder were... well, kinda foggy. Uh-oh, thought I. 10 year old film. I might be dealing with film that's just past its use-by date. So I developed an unexposed sheet of film, to see if the film right out of the box was foggy and gross, or whether it was somewhere else in the process (such as handling, the film holder, light leaks in the camera, etc.) that it was getting fogged. So, this is the completely unexposed film:
That's pretty much exactly what it's not supposed to look like. Note the even darkness (it should be nearly glass-clear), plus the slight yellowish fringe around the edge. Oh well, I guess that 10 year old film is junk. I'll still process the other two exposures, because they're salvageable, but I know I'll get much better results with fresh film. Well, this is why I wanted to do a throw-away photo shoot first. Posted at 21:51 permanent link category: /misc I walked out the door to head up for lunch today, and stopped in my tracks. Between the towering rooflines of the buildings around me, I could see a strip of sky, and it was pretty stunning, bright blue and big puffy clouds. It was clearly a day on which I needed to bring a camera with me. So I did. And when I got to the cherry tree, I knew just what needed to happen. These were photographed near the PCC store in Fremont.
The photos are unretouched, except for a slight bump in exposure and exposure offset, which has the effect of increasing contrast and dynamic range. In Photoshop, look under Image > Adjustments > Exposure (at least in CS4). Posted at 14:40 permanent link category: /misc Tue, 09 Feb 2010
The Positive Benefit of Negative Dreams
I woke up from an anxiety dream this morning, and found that I couldn't get back to sleep. It wasn't a normal anxiety dream, in which there's just a vague feeling of tension. This one was definite, and quite realistic. It was after a performance of Penguins, and several people were walking away from the theater, talking about the show. There were some actors from the show, and some of their friends, and myself. At some point, one of the friends is describing a part she particularly liked, which included a prop gun. Only, instead of miming a gun with her forefinger and thumb, she actually pulled out the gun itself as we walked through this public square, and started gesticulating with it. My reaction was swift, and had none of the moving-through-molasses quality that dreams sometimes have. I swiped it out of her hand, and pulled the slide back to check that it was empty. I ejected the magazine. In the midst of this, I also fumbled it, and it dropped on the ground, breaking several large chunks off. While doing all this, I was also asking in a too-loud voice and with rather too many expletives who had let her have this thing. The commotion brought over a police officer, and then the dream branched into a bunch of different exploratory endings as the cop A) pulled her own gun on me; B) started waving around some kind of magical gun-sensing wand that looked like a boom microphone; C) sauntered slowly over to talk to me; etc. None of them ended particularly badly for me, as I just reacted calmly and laid down the now-broken blank gun and kept things mellow, all the while casting dirty glances at the person who'd brought the thing out in the first place. Of course, the anxiety part of this dream is that this is the exact situation I've been worried about for as long as I've been helping productions as armourer: someone brings a fake gun out in public, and Bad Things happen. In real life, it's pretty reasonable to guess that this situation would lead to someone causing a panic, getting shot, getting arrested, etc. I give each cast a speech filled with dire warnings about this kind of thing happening. The value of the dream is that I had not, up until this morning, considered what I would do in a situation like this. I think that in the dream, I reacted partly right, and partly wrong. The right reaction was to get the pistol away from the person waving it around, clear it, and ensure it was safe. The wrong part was to make a commotion about it. I should have just dropped it in a pocket and immediately headed back to the theater, saving any loud speech for later, and in more private circumstances. On this topic, I wanted to relate a story which directly bears on this situation, and illustrates perfectly what can happen. I wasn't involved with this particular show, and heard about it second-hand from one of the people involved. A theater company, which shall remain nameless, had a temporary rehearsal and storage space in a light industrial part of Seattle. It was mostly warehouses and industrial businesses, but there were some consumer businesses there, a gym across the street, etc. For the show they were rehearsing, they had these wooden rifle props, which were approximately shaped like AK47s. 
What a real AK47 looks like On a smoke break, several of the actors were standing outside the door, goofing around, as actors do. They had brought a couple of the wooden rifles out with them, and were presumably play-acting shooting at each other. A few minutes later, smoke break over, they went back inside, and continued with rehearsal. About 20 minutes later, everyone looked up in surprise as the door banged open, and a dozen SWAT officers poured in the door, assault rifles up, and shouting, "DROP YOUR WEAPONS! DROP YOUR WEAPONS! HANDS UP!" Real SWAT officers. Real assault rifles, capable of shooting real bullets that would go through a bulletproof vest like butter. The actors, fortunately, dropped the wooden guns and stood there with their hands in the air, as Hollywood had trained them to do in a situation like this (note: this is a fine reaction to have in this situation). Fortunately, no one thought he'd be a joker and aim his stick at the SWAT guys. Fortunately, the situation was quickly defused, and everyone had a hearty chuckle as the SWAT van trundled off. No arrests, not even a fine for calling out the van. What had happened was this: one of the gym patrons across the street had seen the actors, questionable looking fellows even in good light and close up, playing with AK47s outside a warehouse. The patron's mind being full of 24 and airplane hijackers, he naturally hopped it to a phone, called 911, and reported a group of suspicious men with assault rifles in a warehouse. As the police, this is not the kind of call you half-ass. You don't send a couple of patrol officers in a cruiser to check it out. You call out the anti-terrorism troops you've been training for just such a situation: terrorist cell in Seattle. I'm sure the chief could see the headlines scrolling through his head about his cool, overwhelming and successful response to the situation. Not only the SWAT van and many SWAT officers arrived. There must have been dozens more normal patrol officers. They shut down a 2 block radius around the building. The response was huge. Fortunately, as I said, no shots were fired, and no one was hurt. However, all it would have taken was one joker, and it would have been a very real tragedy. A dozen edgy guys with machineguns turn into a wall of molten metal death very quickly. The moral of this story, of course, is that theater props stay in the theater, and they're not for joking around. You use them for your scene, then you put them back on the prop table. The AK47 props were plainly not AK47s up close, but from a distance, it's hard to tell unless you know what you're looking for. My greatest fear on any of the shows I provide prop guns for is that someone's going to get hurt or killed because they didn't take my warnings seriously. I now use this story as part of my gun speech, just in case anyone thinks I'm joking. Posted at 07:18 permanent link category: /misc Mon, 08 Feb 2010
When I was a big wee lad of 17, I had a crush on a girl. I would leave cherry blossoms in her locker, and ever since then, blooming cherry trees remind me of her. Even now, I miss having someone like that in my life. Older and wiser does not always mean older and happier (although a lot of the time, it does). Photographed in Fremont, camera balanced carefully on knee. Posted at 22:14 permanent link category: /misc Sun, 07 Feb 2010
His Majestic Dustiness, Conqueror of Floors and Corners, Lurker Under Beds and Despoiler of Tidiness Everywhere, King Dustius von Bunnenstein, the Holy Dustbunny Himself, did command my death for crimes against dustbunnies everywhere. Fortunately, by quick use of my wits and a nimble wisk-broom wrist, I was able to avoid his terrible, dusty wrath, and escape with my life. The kingdom of the dustbunny mourns the loss of their leader, and has vowed to regroup and conquer, and I fear it is only a matter of time until I must face a reprise of the terrible, dusty ordeal. Posted at 12:50 permanent link category: /misc Sun, 31 Jan 2010My friend Melanie and I finally went out today, and shot some pictures with the 5x7 camera. I've only been getting ready and geared up for this moment since, oh, last summer. Tonight I spent a couple of hours prepping the darkroom area (my bathroom, with light-tight covers on the window and door). I located and washed out all the old chemical bottles and trays from the last time I did this -- 1999 or so. The chemicals contained in those bottles were... impressively full of crud. Lots of rinsing. Finally, it was time, and I turned out all the lights and processed my first sheet of 5x7 film in over a decade. It went pretty smoothly, but I clearly have some work to do. 
That's the first look at the negative (hanging in my shower stall, still drying, why do you ask?). I inverted the colors, dramatically upped the contrast, and that's the result. Obviously I'll be doing more with it than just photographing it hanging in the shower stall, but as it's still wet, that's all I can offer for the moment. The contrast is so low that I suspect my development time was way too short. This was 11 minutes with Microdol-X (itself about 10 years old, but freshly mixed), and it clearly needs more like 14-15. Fortunately, I took two exactly identical exposures, so I've got another one to play with. Working with 10 year old film and developer is a bit of a crapshoot, but it's a good way to do some initial checks, and make sure that I don't have light leaks in the camera, or any other really obvious operational problems before I go blow money on fresh film and chemicals. In any case, hooray for progress! Posted at 21:56 permanent link category: /misc Tue, 19 Jan 2010Alecto: Issue #1 opens on Friday. If I've been a bit quiet lately, that's why. Talk about a time suck. Anyway, one of the fun projects I'm doing as part of this is making a "comic book" drawing of them for their biography page. Last night, while I was getting pictures of folks, I got this entirely badass picture of the run crew (Regan, Noelle and Mike): 
I liked it so much that I wanted to share it. And I suppose it would be teasing if I didn't share the corresponding comic book image: 
Posted at 12:40 permanent link category: /theater Wed, 13 Jan 2010I work with a small theater in Seattle, Annex Theatre. Recently, we had an event where we needed to play a DVD. We have a really snazzy projector up, all HD and everything, and we were feeding it with a $60 flip-open travel DVD player. When this cranky piece of crap player refused to go beyond the first chapter on the DVD, I'd had enough. I talked to our managing director, and figured out how much we could spend, and started looking at options. I quickly settled on the Pioneer DVD-V5000 and DVD-V8000 models as being likely, but then, buried deep in the search results at B&H, I found the HHB UDP-89. This player looked like the answer to all my desires in a DVD player. It handles pretty much any format on a CD-sized disc with the notable exception of Blu-ray. It has highly reputable audio hardware, including balanced stereo out (which doesn't appear on any other DVD player I could find). It has the necessary front-panel buttons so it can be operated without a remote. It's only 1U high, which means it will take up less space in the equipment rack. Of course, it's also a $1000 player, but it looked like a good investment in the future, and would match our fancy projector well. It finally arrived yesterday, and I spent a few minutes plugging it in and getting it temporarily situated in the equipment stack (the rack is still a bit of a pipe dream, at least for the stuff we have to access frequently). When I pulled it out of the box, I had a very favorable first impression. This is a dense unit, and I suspect that if I open it up, I'm not going to find that density supplemented by weights (unlike some cheap consumer equipment I've seen). The front panel is very plainly a thick, milled piece of aluminum, very attractive and speaking favorably of the quality inside. Once I got it powered on and had spent a few minutes playing with it, though, that favorable impression evaporated somewhat. The buttons feel quite cheap and plasticky, although they emit a loud click when pressed, so at least there's no question of "Did I press that button or not?" The power-up process takes a shockingly long time, something like 10-20 seconds before it responds to any control inputs. It's not a big deal in the long run, but it's pretty surprising for something that's a new design. You have to wait for it to boot up before it will even stick out its tongue to accept a disc. The disc tray itself is thin and springy, which at first seems cheap, but then I realized that its springiness was its salvation -- it could be thin without being brittle and breakable. Once I got a disc in (a CD, as there was a rehearsal going on that I didn't want to disrupt with a video projection), it quickly read it and was ready to go. I was pleased to see that the auto pause function was given its own, clearly labeled button. This will make it the favored CD player for production use, almost certainly. I quickly realized why the auto pause button was so prominent: when you pause the playback, then skip to the next track, it will automatically start playing again, if auto pause is off! This is counter to every CD and MD player I've used in the last decade, and is going to screw up every first time operator of this player. The information display is pretty minimal, a small two-line dot-matrix display with a few dedicated icons (CD, auto pause, play triangle and pause bars were the ones I noticed, though I'm sure there are others). There is no time button on the front panel, most likely in the interests of clarity, although I'd expect to find one on a pro CD or MD player. Still, a time button (for switching between at least elapsed track time and remaining track time) would be a welcome addition, even if it is a bit useless for a DVD player. I suspect the function is available via the remote control, although I didn't check. Fortunately, the player is quicker to respond once it's playing a disc, as compared to start-up, but it's still a bit sluggish. I pressed a track skip button and it took a second to catch up -- a potentially fatal flaw when you need to skip several tracks quickly, particularly in a tense production moment. You'd better be counting button presses, because the display lags. I suspect Sony avoids this by making sure that the display is always quick to respond, even if the underlying system and mechanism is taking a moment to catch up. Granted, this first impression doesn't actually say anything about the UDP-89 as a DVD player, but I was interested to see my own reaction to it. As there's little out there in terms of user review, I figured I'd share my reactions. I expect I'll have more to say later. Just to ensure that I'm not leaving you with the wrong impression, I was overall quite favorably impressed. The build quality, with the exception of the plastic front panel buttons, seems to be top notch. The slow UI is something that could easily be corrected with a firmware update, which is a procedure clearly outlined in the manual, although no updates are currently available. I'm looking forward to powering up the projector and putting the UDP-89 through its paces with a couple of different DVDs. If I can scrounge together enough cables, it'll be fun to hook up to the theater's 5.1 system and get real surround sound going. I'll try to come back to this topic in the future, and keep you updated on our snazzy new DVD player. Posted at 10:45 permanent link category: /gadgets Thu, 07 Jan 2010I think the mountains came out for my brother's birthday. Of course, he's in LA and couldn't possibly have seen them, but it seemed likely in any case: 
Posted at 10:37 permanent link category: /misc Tue, 05 Jan 2010This morning, I came across some coupons from Silence Heart Nest, a restaurant in Fremont, which took over the space from the Longshoreman's Daughter restaurant. It's a new-agey-feeling place, with all the servers in saris, and a menu heavy on the happy/hippie food. I looked at the coupon, saw that it was from this place, and scoffed to myself: "Yeah right, you won't catch me going in there again." This is the story of that reaction. In the early planning of SketchFest Seattle last year, we were having meetings about once a month, and we found ourselves generally meeting for brunch on our meeting days. It was a nice way to get together and discuss the pressing issues while taking our time and being leisurely about it. One time, we decided to stop in at Silence Heart Nest, having heard that it was a good place. They seemed to be doing a brisk trade that morning, but we were able to find a corner table for four, and sat down to our discussion. Food was ordered, and consumed. It was pretty good, and reasonably priced. We had our discussion, and ended up sitting at the table for a couple of hours, deeply embroiled in the issues of putting on a quality sketch comedy festival. This was our usual mode of meeting, and we'd done it at many restaurants. I remember looking over occasionally to see if we were sucking up table space unnecessarily, but there was never much of a line at the door, and the servers didn't seem anxious to get rid of us. So we stayed, and we discussed. Eventually, two hours after we'd gotten there (having ordered a full round of breakfast for everyone), we flagged a server and got our check. "You know," said the server (I must necessarily paraphrase, my memory's not that good), "you guys have been sitting here for a really long time, and you've been taking up a perfectly good table, costing us a lot of income. It was really quite inconsiderate of you, and maybe next time you have a meeting like this, you could take it somewhere else after you eat, like a local coffee shop or something." We four sat there, stunned. Glances were exchanged across the table. There were sotto voce conversations affirming that each of us had been looking out to see if we were being an inconvenience to the restaurant. We paid our bill and left, much more quickly than we might otherwise have done. There was still nothing like a line at the door -- there might have been two people waiting for a table. As we walked down the sidewalk away from the the restaurant, it was generally agreed: that was about the worst possible way for our server to handle that situation, short of actually screaming or producing weaponry. In a normal restaurant, it wouldn't have even come up. SHN is arguably a small space with relatively few tables, and could be excused for being anxious for high table turnover. It would have been acceptable, if a bit weird, if someone had come over and politely asked us to clear out after we were obviously done eating. Laying a heavy guilt trip on us after we were done left us feeling like we'd just transgressed, without having any indication it was a problem during the transgression itself. So, congratulations, Silence Heart Nest. Your ill-timed scolding has not only guaranteed that I'll never be back, it has also produced this journal entry, which will be read by at least a half-dozen people, who might even have the same reaction. The durable power of infamy, indeed. Posted at 10:18 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. |
I had fixated in my mind on the Whole Foods on Westlake, which is
normally about a 35 minute ride from my house. In the snow, it would
have been well over an hour, and to get there would involve some
ferocious hills. It was hard to justify making the ride all that way.
The final nail in the Droid X's virtual coffin is, of course,
battery life. The least advanced cellphone I've ever owned was a
Motorola brick phone. It lasted about 8 hours on a charge, on standby.
Talk time was around an hour. Still, that was early days, and the
phone was analog-only, which is considerably less efficient than the
digital phones of today. The phone with the best battery life I ever
had was a Motorola RAZR, which would routinely go a few weeks before
beeping at me to plug in the charger. Toward the end of its life, I'd
get unhappy when I noticed that it needed charging more frequently than
once a week. My most-recent-but-one phone is an iPhone 3GS, and I was
pretty unhappy that suddenly I had to charge my phone every day or two.
