Motorcycles

This is too funny not to share. A silly little stop-motion film about a motorcycle gang.

As the snow finally begins to fall, I start jonesing to ride my motorcycle again. I could be riding the hack, but it has a flat front tire and I don't have time during this holiday season to figure out what is causing it. I did look at it a while ago and could find nothing wrong with it. My fear is that the stress from towing a sidecar has cracked the rim.

Anyway, today Sev sent along this wonderful essay by Dave Karlotski about riding. It pretty well sums up the way I feel.

There is cold, and there is cold on a motorcycle. Cold on a motorcycle is like being beaten with coldhammers while being kicked with cold boots, a bone bruising cold. The wind's big hands squeeze the heat out of my body and whisk it away; caught in a cold October rain, the drops don't even feel like water. They feel like shards of bone fallen from the skies of Hell to pock my face. I expect to arrive with my cheeks and forehead streaked with blood, but that's just an illusion, just the misery of nerves not designed for highway speeds.

Despite this, it's hard to give up my motorcycle in the fall and I rush to get it on the road again in the spring; lapses of sanity like this are common among motorcyclists. When you let a motorcycle into your life you're changed forever. The letters "MC" are stamped on your driver's license right next to your sex and height as if "motorcycle" was just another of your physical characteristics, or maybe a mental condition.

But when warm weather finally does come around all those cold snaps and rainstorms are paid in full because a motorcycle summer is worth any price. A motorcycle is not just a two-wheeled car; the difference between driving a car and climbing onto a motorcycle is the difference between watching TV and actually living your life. We spend all our time sealed in boxes and cars are just the rolling boxes that shuffle us languidly from home-box to work-box to store-box and back, the whole time entombed in stale air, temperature regulated, sound insulated, and smelling of carpets.

Go read all of it.

On Tuesday I rode the K bike to work. When I got home and opened the garage door I noticed a 6 inch puddle of oil on the floor where the K bike had been parked. (Why didn't I see it when I left in the morning? Too sleepy I guess.)

Whisky-Tango-Foxtrot?

I looked at the bottom of the bike and sure enough there is oil leaking from somewhere. I haven't pulled the cowling off yet, so I don't know where the leak is, but it's definitely leaking. Bah. I sure hope the rear main seal hasn't decided to leak again. That's a surperb pain in the ass to fix.

Yesterday I took a bunch of sheetrock scraps to the dump in the van. This meant that I could then put the seats back into the van. One of the seats had been leaning against the hack.

Now that the hack is unearthed, I can start riding it again. So last night I gave it a pre-flight check. The front tire was low. Really low. Almost flat.

Damn it!

I filled it up, hoping that it was just a slow leak. It had been parked for a couple of weeks after all.

This morning I got all suited up and went out to the garage. I checked the front tire on the hack: 26 PSI! Double-damn! From 38 PSI to 26 PSI overnight is not a slow leak.

I went back into the house and took off the riding gear.

Then I drove the damned van to work.

My sidecar rig konked out on me during my Minnesota 1000 ride this year. It was acting like it had a bad coil and only running on 2 or 3 cylinders.

I parked it after the Minnesota 1000 and went on vacation for four weeks (to be talked about in a later entry.)

I went out to the garage this evening to see what the deal was. I figured I'd try and start the hack up to see if it was still misbehaving.

Of course the damned thing started right up and ran just fine. Stupid perverse inanimate object.

I'm guessing that there is a crack in one of the coil housings and that it really doesn't like to get soaking wet. It got pretty drenched on the Minnesota 1000.

So I'm going to dip the coils in some of that dip plastic that you coat tool handles with and then just ride the damned thing.

So there.

My ride report for the 2006 Minnesota 1000 is up.

You can go read it here.

Enjoy!

I finally got my photos up from the Minnesota 1000. You can view them here.

Kevin Wynn took some photos too and I'm hosting them here also.

I'll see if I can get a ride report whipped up soon.

I ran the Minnesota 1000 rally this weekend. Here are the quick highlights. A more detailed ride report (with pics) will come later.

• Drove the sidecar
  
• Lots of rain Friday
  
• 785 stairs
  
• Spam!
  
• Broke down
  
• Trailered home - arrived at 2:00am
  
• Rode the K bike to the finish - taking the 10,000 point hit for changing bikes
  
• Almost beat Tim Conway!
  
• Final score - negative 8,047
  
• Took third place in the Sport Bike Class!
  
• Tired
  

More details later.

The Minnesota 1000 motorcycle rally is this weekend. Stephanie (my 13 year old) and I were going to run the rally together in the sidecar.

Last night I started to talk to her about what she should bring along on the ride when she said "Wait, the rally is this weekend?"

She had gotten a birthday party sleep-over invitation from one of her best friends. The sleep-over is, of course, this Friday.

She was crushed. She really wants to ride in the rally, but she really wants to go to her friend's party.

I figured I had two choices:

1. I could be a hard ass and make Stef honor her previous commitment to me and make her come along. This will make the MN1K most unpleasant for both of us.
   
2. I could be a nice guy and let her go to the sleep-over. Since we are going on vacation for four weeks starting on the 25th this will probably be the last sleep-over until Aug.
   

We talked about the possibility of me picking her up after the sleep-over, but the rally starts at 7:00 in the morning and there is no way she would be ready - or rested enough.

Stef did write me a nice note about how conflicted she was about this. She's not totally happy with either choice. Besides (and this was in her note) there will be sushi at the sleep-over. It's hard to compete with sushi.

I totally understand her wanting to sleep-over at a friends house instead of riding with me, but we were both looking forward to riding in the MN1K together. The look on her face when she realized that the rally was this weekend and not the next was so sad.

So it looks like I will be riding the rally by myself. Unless I can talk someone else into being my monkey.

I forgot to post the follow-up about the new sidecar exhaust. (I know you have all been waiting with breathless anticipation - all two of you.)

In my previous posting, I talked about how it was louder, but seemed to produce more power.

Well, it's still loud.

But I filled up the tank again so now I have some mileage information, and it looks good!

With the 4 into 1 exhaust that it came with, the rig averaged around 28 MPG. Not the greatest, but it is hauling around a sidecar after all.

The latest fill up got me an average of 32 MPG. That's a 14% increase! Not too shabby.

The difference between a pleasant ride and one which is unpleasant can be as simple as a matter of a few degrees Fahrenheit.

I was reminded of this fact today at lunch time.

When I rode my motorcycle to work this morning it was about 48 degrees out. I tossed on my Aerostich Fleece Jacket under my Aerostich Roadcrafter and was okay for the 20 minute ride in. I would not have wanted to ride much further than that, but it was okay for the short jaunt.

I had to run home over lunch, so I hopped on the bike and went. For some reason, I was really cold on the drive home. The temperture was about the same and I was dressed the same, but there was a cold breeze blowing in through my 'stich. I may not have had the zipper flap sealed all the way, as it doesn't seal very well, but I was freezing cold by the time I got home. I was even getting a crick in my neck due to the cold. Man, did that suck.

Since I was at home I decided to put on my Widder heated vest for the ride back to work. That thing may be the best motorcycle accessory that I own!

The ride back to work was so wonderful. I could have kept going for hours with that vest turned on. I was so comfortable. As a matter of fact, I wanted to keep going for hours.

The only thing that would have made it better was to have had some thicker socks on. My tootsies were getting a little cold.

Heated socks perhaps?