Joe Gresh

Ho-Made Tools I Don’t Use

I’ve been cleaning out the shed on and off for about four years now. When we first moved here we stuffed everything into the shed. There was no time to sort through the junk. We had to return the Penske truck. After the junk sat there a few years the mice made a lot of decisions for us: if it was chewed up we tossed it.

I had tools at my work, tools at the house, tools at The Love Shack, three of everything. I just can’t bring myself to toss out tools. I have some home-built tools that no longer serve a purpose but I hang on to them. Because you never know when you’ll need to remove the centrifugal oil filter on a Honda 305.

This wrench was made from a cut down socket and a rear fender support from a Sportster. It fits the output flange nut on a boat V-drive. The output flange sits pretty low in the bilge and after a while the salt water splashing around in the bottom of the boat corrodes the seal. To remove the seal you have to separate the prop shaft from the V-drive. The problem is the prop shaft will only slide back a few inches before the prop-shaft flange hits the stuffing box. With this set up I could change a v-drive seal without pulling the engine. It was a stupid move on my part because at the time I was paid by the hour. The faster I went the less I earned. I still keep the wrench; maybe it will fit something else someday.

I mentioned the stuffing box and here’s the cut down pipe wrench I used to remove the packing nut and loosen the lock nut. Stuffing boxes are used where the prop shaft goes through the boat hull, a bronze casting called a shaft log. The stuffing box is a large nut that has several rows of flax packing, also called cat gut. These rows of packing are fitted into the packing nut or the shaft log depending on the design of the shaft log.

The flax packing seals the shaft log where the shaft enters so that water won’t leak into the boat…almost. In practice you want to leave a small drip, maybe a drop every 30 seconds, for a water supply to cool the stuffing box. If you crank down on the packing too much you can burn up the flax and the shaft log will leak. The pipe wrench is short because the stuffing box nut is large and it’s always hard to access between the stringers of the boat. You can buy a store bought stuffing box wrench but they are made like a flimsy adjustable wrench with a cheesy wing nut to lock the jaws into position. Trust me: the pipe wrench works better. A hammer also works but tends to damage the bronze stuffing box.

I didn’t make the dial indicator, just the Z-shaped bracket. This tool is used to set the timing on a 1971 360 Yamaha Enduro. The ’71 Enduro (and other years) has an angled sparkplug hole. The angled hole precludes measuring the piston stroke through the plug hole. With the cylinder head removed this tool bolts up and can measure the stroke. You have to know the piston position to accurately set the ignition timing. Once you’ve set the correct fire position there is a little tab inside the flywheel area that lines up with a flywheel mark. Bending the tab to line everything up will save you from measuring the piston stroke every time you want to adjust the points. It’s a use-it-once type of tool unless you disturb the timing marks. Godzilla runs so good I may never need it again.

This tool is made from Monel, a metal found around boat yards, which isn’t important to its function. There are a few other holes in the tool but I’ve forgotten what they do. The two holes marked by the red arrows will fit a Norton Lockheed front disc brake caliper. In operation you insert a couple drill bits into the tool; the bits line up with two holes drilled into the Lockheed caliper. The caliper plug this tool fits unscrews and allows removal of the caliper piston. You need this long lever because the plug gets pretty tight after 35 years. I’m hanging on to the tool because I may own another Norton one day.

At one time my dad and I owned BMW motorcycles. He had the 600cc and I had the 750. These were early 1970s models with the new, suitcase engine. In building the suitcase engine BMW relocated the cam below the crankshaft so the pushrod tubes were below the cylinder rather than above like on earlier engines. This was done to raise the cylinders higher in the bike allowing steeper lean angles in the corners. The problem was the pushrod tubes leaked oil where they contacted the crankcase. This tool slips over the pushrod tube and by tapping the base of the pushrod tube you could tighten up the seal area. It sounds crude but it was easier than pulling the heads to install new pushrod tube seals. I think you can buy a factory tool that looks much better than mine but does the same thing. I’m not adverse to owning the early GS 800cc, the ones that are clean and light and don’t have all the useless garbage BMW loads onto new motorcycles.

This tool is used to remove the nut from a Honda 305 centrifugal oil filter. I had two 305 Hondas. Those bikes had beautiful engines that were made extremely well. Early Hondas had a spinning cup type filter that oil circulated through. In the spinning motion heavy particles suspended in the oil were slung outward, clean oil flowed through the center. It was a good oil filter and if you wanted to take the engine apart like I did you needed this tool. After thousands of miles you would remove the right side cover to gain access to the filter. A wire clip held the o-ringed lid on the filter and I’d pull the thing off for cleaning. It wasn’t unusual to find 1/8-inch of compacted swarf stuck to the walls of the filter.

Back to boats. This tool is used to remove the macerator from Raritan Crown marine toilets. Working on boats isn’t the glamorous job that you see in the movies. Sometimes you had to fix toilets. The Crown was a very popular toilet back in the day. It used a large starter motor to spin a macerator and two rubber impeller pumps. One pump supplied seawater to the bowl then a macerator chewed up the poo and finally another impeller pumped the mash to a holding tank or overboard depending on how far offshore you were. After much use the seals would start leaking and the stuff leaking out wasn’t peppermint.

You had to disconnect hoses and the bowl then turn the motor (usually) to get to the end plate. Small straight slot screws held on the plastic end plate, removing the end plate allowed access to the macerator and the poo. The macerator had two pivoting chopper arms; removing these arms allowed you to screw the puller tool onto the macerator and a center bolt would pull the macerator. It was not a fun job. I wish I never made the puller tool. I could have told customers, “Sorry I don’t have the tools to fix your toilet.”

I have more homemade, or as we say in the south “ho-made” tools that I may write about on a day like today, a day when I’m sifting through the accumulated junk of my life.

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ExhaustNotes Road Test: Shoei RF SR Helmet

I finally managed to put some miles on my new Shoei RF SR helmet. I took the RD350 out for a loop of the mountains and Tularosa’s TulieFreeze Ice cream shop. I had a Sundae with hot fudge, nuts and whipped cream. TulieFreeze always puts a cherry on top.

Oh yeah…the helmet. The Shoei was quiet at highway speeds, none of my bikes have windshields so I get the air full blast and I like it that way. Turning my head side to side was comfortable and the wind didn’t over-rotate my head side on. All in all the Shoei RS cuts a pretty clean swath through the air. There was no shaking or turbulence.

The fit is perfect on the top parts of my head (your head may vary) but the cheeks are still too tight as the pads press in on my jowly visage more than is appropriate for two people who just met. Luckily the cheek pads are made to be easily removable in case you have crashed. Hopefully the EMT will know to remove the pads before trying to force the helmet off and severing your spinal cord.

I’ll probably wait a bit longer before shaving down the cheek pads. I still have hopes it will break in. I need to stop and remove my helmet to relieve the face-pressure after 50 miles. It gives me a chance to admire the RD’s metallic purple paint. The tight-ish flip shield has loosened up a bit, I gave it a squirt of Shoei oil and after 10-20 flips it’s ok.

Speaking of the shield I have Shoei’s auto-darkening face shield. That sucker cost more than any helmet I’ve ever bought. Since I now have had both cataracts removed from my eyes I can see much better at night. I’m planning to step up the after hours summer riding and the auto-tint works fabulously. From the outside it appears super dark but from inside the helmet it’s not so dark. In fact, I wouldn’t mind if it got darker. As it is I can ride in bright sunlight without squinting. It seems to keep the inside of the helmet cooler.

When the sun goes down it’s as clear as a clear shield. On thing that worries me is how resistant the coating is to gas station squeegees and bug guts. I’m going to put a heavy coat of paste wax on the shield and even that makes me nervous. What if the wax screws it up?

It was cool but not cold on my ride and I totally forgot to open the vents to see if they had any effect of the interior airflow. At 70 degrees with the vents closed it was comfortable. I’ll test the vents after the doctor gives my new eye the ok to thrash around on a motorcycle.

Another week or two and my eye should be back to full strength. That means I can lift concrete bags and ride around without a care. I’ve already planned a trip to Tina’s Mexican food in Carlsbad; they have reopened after Covid shut them down for a year. It’s good to see things returning to normal after such a trying two years.

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ExhaustNotes.us Book Review: Maus By Art Spiegelman

The main reason I read the two-part graphic novel, Maus, is because a school board in Tennessee banned the book from their curriculum due to nudity and bad language. I wanted to see what the school board found so sexy about the holocaust.

Spoiler alerts ahead.

Maus is mostly about one Jewish man’s survival of the Nazi’s effort to exterminate the Jewish people. You’ve heard the stories and the subject has been covered extensively. Maus is a different in that the hero of the book, Vladek (I call him a hero because just surviving took an incredible, heroic will to live.) seems to have an unnatural ability to thrive in any situation no matter how desperate. Vladek never loses his spirit and can find the positive slant in a horror of degradation and abuse. It takes a strong man to feel he’s lucky to be in Auschwitz instead of Birkenau.

The road to the concentration camps was not a direct line. There were many slights and inconveniences that the Jewish people tolerated because this was their home. All their friends and relatives were here. Little by little the Nazis increased the pressure, still no one could have imagined the full extent of the plan and by then it was too late. The numbers killed are staggering. Vladek’s nighttime visit to the bathroom is shocking to us now: he steps over and on dead bodies lying on the floor hoping not to slip down and become one of them.

A second story line runs parallel to the Nazi extermination; this is the son’s story of trying to come to terms with his father’s obsessive cleaning and extreme thriftiness. Vladek’s terrifying life has left him unable to stop preparing for the next holocaust even when he’s safe in America and financially well off. Vladek counts matches to avoid running out, returns half eaten boxes of cereal for credit and is perpetually on the make for a deal. These traits served him well in the concentration camps and I don’t see any downside to them after he is freed. Compared to what Vladek had been through any minor embarrassment on his son’s part was no big deal.

My Dad and grandparents were from the depression era and I saw some of the same kind of economy and scarcity mentality when I was young. For my Dad, wasting food was the biggest crime you could commit. He told me often how joining the US Navy was the best thing he ever did. He couldn’t believe the amount of food the Navy provided and didn’t understand how some of the other sailors could complain about the food. He thought it was heaven.

The comic book style of Maus might make it more accessible to younger readers and the short sentences keep the story moving along. The artwork is black and white using a brutal sort of drawing. Each panel looks like a carved linoleum print. The Jewish people are shown as mice, Polish people are pigs, Germans are cats and the American GIs look like dogs. At times the Jewish characters try to disguise themselves by wearing the mask of a pig or a cat. Sometimes it works.

There is a third storyline running in the background. This is the love story of Vladek and Anja, husband and wife. They become separated in the Nazi’s roundup of Jews. Luck plays a big part in life and by luck Vladek and Anja end up seeing each other in the concentration camps. As the war came to an end and the Allies closed in the Nazis stepped up their abuse and started shipping Jews back into Germany for killing, sometimes leaving the Jews in locked cattle cars for weeks until they were all dead. Vladek survives the rapidly worsening conditions like he always does by eating snow and horse trading for sugar.

I think schools back in the 1960s and ’70s were a bit more enlightened and less of a political/ideological battleground than they are today. The school curriculum was set by professional educators, not by angry, politically motivated parents. I know the story of the holocaust because we were taught it in school. The ovens, the gas chambers, the millions killed by clockwork death factories and the chimneys always rendering fat. The scale was unbelievable. Maus is a believable, personal story and the eyewitness account made me despair for our species.

I truly believe something like the holocaust could happen in America. Native Americans will tell you that it has happened here. Black slaves were treated only marginally better than concentration camp prisoners. I’ve seen how people in our country rose up and cheered a kid who shot protesters. One of their side had shot some people from the other side and that was praiseworthy. I’ve seen Americans fighting over toilet paper. Jewish synagogues and gravestones are routinely defaced. I see Nazi marchers parading in American cities. There is plenty of hate to go around in the American psyche and by the hour we are being indoctrinated to regard the other side as less than human. It takes so little to create a monster.

There is nudity and bad language in Maus but if you’re the type of school board that finds mountains of naked bodies being doused with gasoline and set on fire or a woman dead in a bathtub titillating or erotic there is really nothing more to be said. If your real goal is to stop people from reading Maus then you will identify with the cats in this book.

Anyway, I figure that by the time an American kid reaches 12 years old he’s seen around 50,000 murders on television or at the movies so that kid should be ok to read Maus. The story of the holocaust needs to be told over and over in as many ways as possible. It should be drilled into each student’s head until they can recognize the first sign of evil: like an American school board trying to ban a book about Nazi crimes. Instead of being banned Maus should be required reading from junior high onwards.

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New Boot Day

Life is full of tiny, traumatic incidents. Each day we are met with hundreds of micro-decisions that demand little of our attention yet matter enough to require a few seconds of our time. New Boot Day is not one of these decisions.

I was going to the Harbor Freight in Alamogordo to pick up one of their welding carts that was on sale for $34. Or maybe was it a closeout? Inventory reduction? Anyway, I try not to leave the house in my bathrobe and slippers so I put on my day clothes and boots for the excursion. That’s when it hit me. My boots were looking pretty bad.

I’ve been wearing Rossi boots for about 8 years now. They are super comfortable right out of the box. Style-wise the Rossi boots are no great shakes but who wears boots for style? If the Rossi’s can be said to have a flaw that flaw is that they last forever. The damn things simply never wear out. Since they still work as boots you never know when to call them done.

Today though, the Rossi’s looked pretty tattered. The soles were still firmly attached and the uppers were all in one piece, it’s just that the overall boot looked like something you’d see worn by the unfortunate men in one of those grainy photos of a depression-era food line. I began to be self-conscious about my foot wear: will the clerk at Harbor Freight take a look at my beat up boots and decide to call security?

I’m hard on boots. My shuffling pace, the lazy-feet constantly tripping over rocks and thresholds and my need to crawl around on the ground to do the things I like to do all tend to shorten the life of boots qua Gresh. Popular, well-known brands of leather work-boots will last about 6 months on me.

Conversely, I hate to get rid of a pair of boots unless they are utterly destroyed. Part of it is my natural thriftiness and part of is my deep-seated feeling that I don’t really deserve a new pair of boots. What have I done to warrant new boots? There are many, many people who work much harder than me and these people do not get new boots…ever. I feel like such a fraud wearing new boots. Who do I think I’m fooling?

Then there’s the distress caused by having to witness my brand new boots get scuffed up. One time I had new boots on and the first day I tripped over a sharp piece of rebar, the rebar put a 1-inch long slice on the toe of my new boot. It nearly killed me. Not the trip: the slice. I find my movements inhibited with new boots on. I can’t do my thing and worry about the finish on my boots at the same time.

After much anxiety and teeth gnashing new boots become old boots and my world can settle down. Everything is in order, I can pull on my boots and go about my daily business, be it motorcycle riding or concrete placement, without a second thought. I’m free and loose with old boots.

But not today. Today I have on new boots and every step I take in them is a toxic cocktail of fear and self-loathing. I will step high, always watching for obstacles that could mar the beautiful ebony leather of my new boots. I will bend at the knees. I will stand soles down and I will wish I could leave my new boots safe in their shoebox forever.

ExhaustNotes Hasty Conclusions: First look At Shoei’s RF-SR Helmet

My nephew Anthony has been bugging me for years to buy a new motorcycle helmet. He was in the business as manager at Cycle Gear in Albuquerque, so he knew his helmets. Even I had to admit my tattered lids were getting old. I have a HJC from New Zealand bought in 2014 and a Speed and Strength from The Helmet House that dates all the way back to Motorcyclist magazine’s paper era.

Most brand name helmets have gotten pretty expensive. Since I’m so cheap I don’t like to give up old helmets until they kill me, or ideally, give them up a week before they kill me. But from a fiscal standpoint who can say which day that will be? Over the years I’ve bobbed and weaved around the topic so much that Anthony offered to send me a new helmet, any helmet I wanted. I mean, the guy is tying to support a family; I can’t have him buying helmets for me. That’s what wives are for.

My A-number-one, favorite helmet of all time is the Speed and Strength. That helmet fit my head better than any other and it felt lightweight. The aerodynamics are great on the thing also: no buffeting in the wind and fairly quiet to boot. Naturally, the same model is no longer made. CT and Anthony got together and always keeping a weather eye on my thrifty nature, decided a Shoei RF-SR would be a quality helmet without costing much more than the motorcycles I habituate.

The Shoei RF-SR model must be on its way out because finding one was not an easy task. CT ordered one from Dennis Kirk and after a few weeks she checked on the order status. The helmet was out of stock and on back order. It would have been a polite thing for DK to mention this at the checkout page. As usual Amazon had the helmet but only in silly teen-age Moto GP colors, white or flat black. I chose flat black to make myself less conspicuous. Kind of a, if-they-can’t-see-you-they-can’t-hit-you, loud pipes save lives type of reasoning.

The Shoei came with a fat owner’s manual that consisted of page after page of responsibility disclaimers, warnings not to use anything but mild soap and water to clean the helmet and descriptions of all the ways the helmet could be made unsafe. I flipped through the manual and didn’t find much useful information but then I’m not a tort lawyer.

I was mostly concerned with fit, as the best helmet in the world won’t protect you if it is bouncing down the road without your head inside. Helmet brands are sized differently and with Internet purchases you can never be size-sure. Amazon’s easy return policy made the proposition a little less risky. My pea brain suits a medium helmet and the Shoei medium is a snug fit. Not painfully tight but you won’t forget you’re wearing a helmet. I think a large would be too loose.

I like a snug helmet. There’s nothing more annoying than a helmet wiggling around on your head causing double vision. I haven’t worn the helmet much but I think it will conform to my head shape after a few long rides. Or as they say on the British situation comedy Are You Being Served “It will ride up with wear.”

The Amazon shipping box felt very light and when I took the helmet out I commented how light it felt. I felt the urge to get all Cycle Magazine-y and put the thing on the scales. I was surprised to see the Shoei was heavier than both the HJC and my battered Speed And Strength.

The Shoei weighed 6 ounces more than the Speed And Strength, which seemed like a lot to me. The HJC, which always felt sort of heavy to me, split the difference. Oddly, the Shoei feels lighter when you pick it up and wear the thing. Maybe the hole it knocks in your wallet makes it seem lighter. This goes to show you I cannot be trusted when describing weights or measures.

There is a large, closeable front vent on the chin bar of the Shoei. I hit the opening with my Ryobi grass blower and the vent passed a decent quantity of air. The plastic latching bits seem fairly secure.

On the forehead area there are two small vents that also open and close. The Ryobi grass blower passed less air through these small vents but really the only way to see how all these holes work is to ride the bike.

Two back vents take advantage of a low-pressure area directly behind the helmet’s spoiler thingy to help draw cool air through the Shoei. These are fixed and cannot be closed but you really need some air exchange inside the lid to keep from falling asleep and crashing. Okay, I made that last part up. No one has fallen asleep from motorcycle helmet oxygen starvation. That I know of.

Also included inside the Shoei box was a nose guard and a chin cover. The nose guard helps direct your hot, steamy exhalations downward away from the face shield. This might help with fogging but I can’t say for sure as it rubs on my awesome beak so I leave it out. The chin cover fits along the front-bottom of the chin bar and seals that area off for cold weather riding. I don’t like the feel of the chin cover chafing against my waddle so I left that bit out also.

A pinlock anti-fog insert came in the Shoei box too, you get a lot of extras with a Shoei helmet. The pinlock fits inside your face shield creating a double pane window effect that is supposed to stop condensation and related fogging. It might do this but I’ll have to wait for conditions to worsen here in sunny, dry, New Mexico to test it out. Shoei included a couple of easily lost, pinlock posts in case your shield isn’t Pinlock ready. You’ll have to drill your shield and insert the little posts in the correct location. Right, that’s not gonna happen. Luckily for me the RF came with the posts already fitted.

Lastly, a helmet bag and a tiny jar of Shoei oil were included in the box. I’m guessing the oil is for the face shield ratchet mechanism. I should put a little oil on there because the shield is kind of hard to open. I’m hoping it will ride up with wear.

Construction projects at Tinfiny ranch have been keeping me busy so I haven’t had a chance to test the Shoei beyond wearing it to bed for a couple Star Wars nights: “I’m your father, Luke!” I’ll try to get out in the next day or so with an ExhaustNotes follow up report with an additional surprise helmet widget review.

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Flipper Nation: How To Ruin a Fun Hobby By Squeezing Every Dime That You Can Out Of It

I realize we all have to make a living. Food has gone up, gas costs more and the rent is too damn high. Look, I have nothing against businessmen, as long as they play it straight and don’t scam customers. Go for it. Make all the money you can; see if I care. No, this story is about how all of us grease monkey types have forsaken the cool and the funky to become a bunch of soulless stock fluffers: a nation of pump-and-dump Hobby-Hawkers concerned only with what they can extract from the other, equally soulless fluffers.

Take Jeep YJ’s for instance. The square-headlight YJ has been the entry-level vehicle for 4-wheel drive buffs for the last 30 years. Shunned by other Jeep owners, despised for the simple crime of having headlights that actually align with their bodywork, Jeep YJ’s were the bottom rung. You could pick up a running YJ for a couple thousand dollars and hit the trails later that day. Light weight and simple suspension made the YJ very capable off-road and easy to fix when it broke down.

I bought my ’92 YJ for $2800 about ten years ago and the thing has been running good-ish ever since. If you believe the YJ groups I habituate, YJ’s are $20,000 rigs now. I see people posting up rusty old YJ’s for $6000/$8000 dollars. The users of YJ groups love it. Just sitting on their hands their investment (note: It’s no longer a Jeep or something they enjoy; it’s just an investment, like oil futures) goes up several thousand dollars a day. When someone online asks what their YJ is worth, which is every second question after which oil to use, the shills pipe in with ridiculous amounts of money that they themselves would never pay. All in service of bumping up the YJ’s stock price.

I could understand it better if Jeep YJ’s were sort of rare, but Jeep made 685,000 of the things over a nearly 10-year production run. They are everywhere, in fields, rusting in driveways, stacked in Jeep specific junkyards. That doesn’t stop the flippers from trying to run up the price. Everyday the imagined value of a Jeep YJ goes up another few hundred dollars. We may have missed out on Bitcoin but we’re darn sure not going to sell our clapped out old Jeeps for less than the price of a 2022 model. This money grab turns a fun hobby into just another IPO stock offering, something to own for its upside potential, not because you enjoyed it.

It’s the same with old motorcycles. The prices people are asking for any minor part that fits a vintage Japanese bike are just silly. I’m not immune to fluffer-fever. Prices for old Z1 Kawasaki’s have gotten so high I’m thinking of selling mine to cash in before the bubble bursts. My funky old motorcycle has turned into a savings account. And that’s the truly sad part: I enjoyed building the Z1 but now have to worry about where I park it due to its inflated value. I was going to ride it to Mexico with Berk but what if it gets stolen? The bike is no longer fun. In my mind’s eye it has become a stack of dollar bills waiting to be blown away by the slightest wind.

I know I’m ranting here but just once I’d like to log into a vintage motorcycle forum and not be bombarded with Internet shills asking for valuations or offering Jeeps and motorcycles for sale at stratospheric numbers. Old Jeeps, motorcycles and for that matter, vintage cars should mean more to us than how much return on the investment we can get from them. They should reach back into our memories and emotions; they should recall hot-metal smells and loves lost or found; they should be valued and not commoditized.

I guess what I really want is to remember the fun we had with our old cars and bikes before it all became a race to the top. I know the air will rarify and these old clunkers will become like casino chips: traded but never loved except for their monetary properties. You know, I used to hate the way people chopped up vintage Japanese motorcycles and turned them into goofy looking Brat style bikes but now I’m having second thoughts. Maybe by so thoroughly destroying the value of their motorcycles the Brat Butchers are actually saving the old bike’s true value as a motorcycle.

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Read more about the Z1 and other projects here.

Once, I Knew One Thing: An ExhaustNotes Review

When I first started working on boats there were only two choices if you wanted a generator: Onan or Kohler. This was in the 1970s. Most all the equipment on boats was still made in the USA and China was largely an agrarian society with little industrial capacity. It seems impossible with today’s global economy and seemingly unlimited options but we got along fine with just the two manufacturers.

Onan generators were the most popular in the territory I covered which was from Balboa Island up near Los Angeles to San Diego. The company I worked for, Admiralty Marine, was on Shelter Island right off of Rosecrans Street. Admiralty Marine sold a lot of Onan generators. One year, Woody Peebles and I installed 51 new generators. That’s only one a week but you have to realize we also did engine installations, ElectroGuard corrosion control systems and repaired and serviced all those Onan generators.

To install a generator isn’t as easy as it sounds. You don’t just plop it on the deck and plug it in. The California boats were pleasure yachts and everything was varnished if it wasn’t polished or oiled. You had to cover all surfaces with cardboard and plywood before starting any work. Making things worse, the generator was usually buried in the engine room behind the main engines, batteries and a zillion other components down in the bilge.

To get the generator out might mean removing the rug, lifting heavy hatches, taking off exhaust manifolds on the mains or moving water tanks and cross beams. Then you had to brace underneath the deck to support the portable A-frame hoist used to lift the generator out of the hole.

The portable hoist was portable in name only. The thing weighed a ton. Consisting of two steel uprights, a steel crossbar, a chain-fall and a metal box full of wedges, lifting eyes and the carriage that slid on the crossbar. All in, the hoist weighed about 300 pounds. We didn’t trust aluminum. You had to carry each piece of the hoist down the dock and onto the boat without causing any damage. Except that anything the hoist touched was damaged.

There were no store-bought portable hoists; you had to make them yourself or pay someone to build a hoist for you. I made my own and still have it baking in the sun here at The Ranch in New Mexico. You never know when you’ll need to pull a boat engine 500 miles from the closest ocean. Working with the hoist all those years I became attached to the thing. We’ve been through a lot of wars, you know? So much heavy lifting, I can’t bring myself toss it out.

It took about three days for me and Woody to remove an old generator, clean up the mess and install a new generator, roughly 24 hours labor times two men. At my hourly rate I made 78 dollars for the job. Admiralty Marine charged my labor at 600 dollars for the install, clearing 522 dollars once you deduct my pay. I never knew what Woody was paid. Probably more than me as he was the brains of the operation. The cost breakdown on these jobs was a great lesson in capitalism for me.

On rare occasions we worked on gas-powered generators but they were usually old wooden boats with cash-strapped owners. The Onan generators we worked on were almost all diesel-powered. The block was modular: 1 cylinder for the 3000-watt, 2 cylinders for the 7500-watt and 4-cylinders for the 12,000-watt version. The 4-cylinder used two, two-cylinder heads.

The early models used a CT (current transformer) set up to control the field voltage, which controlled the voltage output. In a nutshell, the power output leads went through these big CT’s on the end of the generator causing an inductive current in the CT’s and the CT’s sent power to the field. It was self-regulating, always varying the field current to suit the load. I never fully understood CT generators but luckily they were fairly reliable. Newer, solid-state voltage regulators superseded the CT voltage regulators.

The new solid-state Onan generators were a mechanic’s best friend. They broke down at such a regular pace you could forecast your income years in advance. The start-stop-preheat circuits were analog. It looked kind of funny: the top of the control box where the voltage regulator lived was all space-age but underneath that were stone-age relays, big brown resistors and purple smoke.

None of the Onans had counter balancers so they shook violently when in operation. The single-cylinder was the worst; it had soft rubber mounts that insulated the boat from vibrations. Fortunately for us repairmen the relays and wiring was susceptible to vibrations and would shake to pieces. Parts were always breaking off the things.

One time I installed a single-cylinder Onan in a boat and a week later the owner called saying it had stopped running. I went to his boat and found the flange that the seawater pump bolted to had fractured. Without sea water to cool the heat exchanger the engine overheated and shut off. The flange was steel and it was sandwiched between the timing cover and the block so you had to dismantle the front of the engine to replace it. It was such a crappy design.

The “One Thing I Knew” was the control circuits for the Onan. I understood them better than the other guys at the shop and could trouble shoot a problem in no time flat. I didn’t fall into this easy knowledge; it took a few years of trial and error before I could visualize the flow of electrons on their path through the various old-fashioned relays and resistors. All the wiring was the same color. Onan printed numbers on the wires to help identify which was which. These numbers were not always intact or positioned in a way that you could see them.

We rebuilt the engines and the fuel systems as the twins and 4-cylinders had a habit of breaking crankshafts. The twin had two main bearings, the four had three mains. The cranks would often break where the alternator rotor connected. They would break in such a way that the generator would keep running until it was shut down, then the crank would bind and the owner would call us saying “I don’t understand it, the thing was running fine when I shut it off. Now it’s stuck” After a few years of rebuilding engines we discovered that Onan sold a new long block for about the same price as we could rebuild an engine. It even came with a warranty. That made turn around much faster.

The governor (that controlled the engine RPM, thus the frequency) was a ball and cup type of deal driven off the camshaft. Centrifugal force would move the balls outward pushing a cup away from the cam. The cup was connected to an arm that controlled the fuel control on the injector pump. With the balls at rest the fuel was set for full throttle. As the balls slung out it reduced fuel. This seesaw effect could be fine tuned by adjusting a governor spring. Both tension and leverage were set by the hapless mechanic moving one thing affected the other.

After a few thousand hours of steady state running the governor balls would wear a groove in the backing plate of the cam gear and no amount of tinkering could get the frequency steady. Pulling the cam gear was the only way to get the thing to run without hunting. I liked to tell the owners that they were lucky the thing ran long enough to wear out the governor.

All those things I knew are just trivia now but they seem as real as this computer I’m typing on. The old Onan generators are long gone, replaced by modern diesel engines made overseas. Nothing breaks off the new stuff. My brain is full of things no longer useful, information that has no application in today’s world. I wonder about the knowledge the old ones that came before me took to their graves and if someone in the far off future will wonder about mine.

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The 2022 Tarantula 100

They say time flies and that’s corny-true but I think time accelerates the closer you get to the end. We have been living on Tinfiny Ranch for 6 years now and I have missed the Prairie Dawgs Tarantula 100 desert race each of those years. It seemed like there was always something that needed doing or I was off somewhere else. I usually hear about the race after it has run and say to myself: I’ve got to make it down to mile marker 45 and check it out next year.

This year was the someday year. My old high school chum Greg was in town so we burbled Brumby down Highway 54 early Sunday to catch the second day of Prairie Dawg action. The event is held at a huge off-road playpen about halfway between El Paso and Alamogordo. When we first moved to La Luz I attended a Prairie Dawg club meeting. They were a great bunch of guys and gals (another of those things I keep meaning to do is join The Dawgs). I’m not real big on organized motorcycle events preferring instead to toss about on the floor picking up cat hair like a gigantic sticky lint roller. To enter a race, to pre-run the course, to get in physical shape so that I could hold on to a bucking 1971 Yamaha 360 for 100 miles of desert seems like a lot of effort.

Effort that could be better spent consuming beer and eating beef jerky in the warm February New Mexico sunshine. So that’s what me and Greg did. We arrived on a perfect day just as the riders meeting was ending and wasted no time getting to the start line. The PD riders lined up according to class. The start is dead-engine. When the flagman, who gave no 30-second board or hint of when he was going to drop the flag, gave the signal you had to start your bike and off you go. It was so unexpected I missed several photos. With the dead-engine start, the electric start bikes had a bit of an advantage over the kick start bikes.

The race is run in 50-mile loops. When the riders come back through the pit area they ride underneath a red, pipefitting type of arch where the transponder records their time. We had a bit of a wait after the last class was on their way so we got our chairs, beer and beef jerky and settled down to discuss how old we were getting, the various ailments we were suffering under and to try and remember some long ago event that the other guy was reminiscing about.

One hour later the first of the Pro Class arrived at the transponder. Most everyone took on a gallon of gas, a swig of water and were on their way for the second lap. Some guys pushed their bikes under the yellow pit-tape ribbon and called it a day. Greg and I set up behind a hill at a spot that had a good view of the last mile or so of the course and the red transponder arbor. Some pits were located before the transponder, some after, but I guess it didn’t matter as the second lap was the one that counted. The sun beat down, the early morning chill was long gone, and our world became a balmy 70-degree red dirt sand dune. We shed our jackets and settled into a mellow, New Mexico low simmer.

Greg was heading to Fort Stockton, Texas later in the day so we decided to hang around until the first youth-class rider completed his lap. That came around 2 hours into the race or almost exactly twice the time it took the first pro-class rider. We folded up our chairs, shook the sand off and went back to the Alamogordo Moose Lodge where Greg had left his gigantic motorhome. I read later on the Prairie Dawg’s Facebook page that there was some trouble with the scoring system and I’m not real sure who won. I figure why mess up such a nice day out with accounting issues.

I don’t know if I’ll ever compete in the Tarantula 100. I’m still able to trail ride all day long but can only make about 2 miles at race pace. Staying up to speed for 100 miles would leave me rubbery-armed with blood pooled in my calves. I don’t want to take that helicopter ride. There is a 60+ class but those guys looked pretty fit. Maybe they’ll let me enter the mini-cycle class. Pouring concrete would be easy in comparison.

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Hasty Conclusions: First Look At The Harbor Freight Tire Changer

I usually change my own motorcycle tires. I’ve been doing it since I was a small child and the job has never been all that easy. In fact, I dread changing tires but there is no other way. The thought of taking a motorcycle in for new tires was as alien and hoity-toity to me as having a live-in maid. The Husqvarna changed all that. The Husky’s wide, 17-inch rims combined with even wider tires really stymied me. I would pinch the tube nearly every time I put a tire on that bike.

One time after pinching the tube four times trying to get the last bit of bead over the rim I stuck the only tube I had in the 150/60-17 back wheel: a 21-inch dirt bike tube. That tube lasted for the duration of the tread life and when it came time for a new tire I folded my cards. I took the rim to our local independent motorcycle shop, Holiday Cycles.

Holiday Cycles charged me $25 to install whichever tire I supplied. Size did not matter. I didn’t need to buy the tire from them, as they don’t stock sizes to fit the Husky. What a relief to drop the new tire and wheel off at Holiday and pick it up a few hours later shiny and new. And there were no holes: the tire held air. This was a wonderful relationship. Holiday gradually raised the price of a tire change to $40 but it was still worth it to me. Avoiding hours of struggle only to have the tire leak was not the sort of thing I wanted to go back to.

Unfortunately, Holiday Cycles closed up recently and I’ve been lucky not to need a new tire on the Husky. There is a Yamaha and a Kawasaki dealer in town that change tires. I’ve never used them; I kind of liked Holiday Cycles.

My buddy Mike from the Carrizozo Mud Chucker’s bought a Harbor Freight motorcycle tire changer and said it was okay. Better than a 5-gallon bucket, I think were his words. Naturally anything Mike gets I have to copy.

Harbor Freight spammed my Facebook page with the motorcycle tire adaptor part for $32. This seemed like a good deal. My first thought was to just get the adaptor and make my own base. When I got to Harbor Freight I saw the base was only $44 and it was made for changing car tires. I looked at the bright red, powder-coated base and thought, no way can I make a base this nice for only $44. I bought the car-tire changer base. I was all in for $76, a little less than two tire changes at the old bike shop. You get a lot of steel for your money with Harbor Freight and I loaded up the weighty boxes of metal and drove home.

Like most of Harbor Freight’s shop equipment, you have to modify the things to make them work a little better or at all. One of the first things I did was take the motorcycle adaptor to Roy’s Welding to weld the three legs of the adaptor to the adaptor hub. The factory setup is a couple bolts on each leg. This does not work well as the bolts are squeezing on square tubing. No matter how tight you torque the bolts, right down to crushing the square tubing, the arms won’t stay flat and move up and down easily.

The whole purpose of the motorcycle adaptor is to secure the rim so that you can work on the beads without the whole assembly skidding across the shed floor. You don’t want the three legs flopping around. Roy had a hard time welding the legs because the powder coating was very thick. “Man, they put a ton on there.” I thanked Roy, paid my $15 and the welded legs are very secure now.

The way the motorcycle adaptor works is two of the legs have adjustable, pinned rim-grabbers. You adjust those to suit your rim size. The third leg has a screw-driven rim-grabber that tightens onto the rim like a vise. Initially I thought the grabbers worked from the inside out. Turns out they grab the outside of the rim.

Since the grabbers are flat-faced when you tighten them onto the rim it doesn’t hold well: the tire slips upward and out of the adaptor. Mike simply heated the grabber tips and bent them inward so that the rim can’t slip out. My other brother, Deet, who also has a Harbor Freight tire machine, made some nice, plastic rim protectors to grip the rim. I copied Deet’s system. We will see if it works or just snaps off the first time I use the motorcycle adaptor.

I had an old bead breaker but the Harbor Freight tire machine comes with a pretty good bead breaker built right into the base. You use the (included) long tire iron as a lever. The base unit for car tires looks like it should work well. I might try changing a few MGB-GT tires on the thing. I think it needs a sturdier center cone to hold automobile rims but maybe not.

Bolting the base unit to the concrete floor was fairly easy. A hammer drill does the job faster than a plain old rotary drill. I used 5/8” expansion studs on three of the base legs and a 3/8” expansion stud on the bead-breaker leg to keep the bolt size down in that area. I also added a few angle pieces to join the three base feet together. Harbor Freight should have welded the foot pieces but that would make the package larger. Shipping stuff from China isn’t cheap.

Adding it up, I have about $100 in the Harbor Freight tire machine with the motorcycle adaptor, anchor bolts and plastic. I had to clean out a section of the shed to make room for it but it looks the business sitting there doing nothing. The long tire iron that came with the base is sort of fat for motorcycle tires so I may look around or make something different, maybe something with plastic tips to keep from scratching chrome wheels. I’ll do an update when I get around to using the thing. I figure with the money I’ll save using the Harbor Freight motorcycle tire changer I can start interviewing for that live-in maid.

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Retail Therapy, Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Lower The Boom

Here at ExhaustNotes we like to support local businesses. Without local stores and a healthy business environment a town dries up and becomes a collection of houses. Interaction between the town populace slows to a crawl and sad as it is, the only action will be found at Walmart or the Chevron station out by the highway. That’s no way to live.

In the USA we operate on the capitalist economic system. This means I do your laundry and you do my laundry, we keep handing the same money back and forth. The cyclical movement, or pumping action, of these few, tattered dollars are where the magic happens. Capitalism relies on all of us constantly spending and gathering dollars: the trick is to keep that money supply moving. If no one buys anything no one earns anything and the whole system crashes.

When we buy stuff online that money goes out of our local economy to some far-fetched location. In other words, they do our laundry but take their laundry to another town or state. Maybe they don’t even get their laundry done. Maybe they invest in block-chain cyber securities and sit on it.

If the system is functioning correctly you will eventually do the laundry of someone who did the laundry for someone else three states over who did the laundry for someone else. Except when the system gets so large and ruthlessly efficient your town becomes unable to do laundry at the massive scale required to match the price of the other, Mega-Laundry-Towns.

The local pool of cash begins to flow in one direction: out of here. Your neighbors no longer want you to do their laundry. It’s easier and cheaper to send dirty clothes to an Internet laundry service. The people in your town become bitter, superstitious and convinced the system is rigged against them. Less money circulating means people have to shop for the cheapest place to get laundry done or forego clean clothes altogether, taking money out of circulation even faster.

Look around now: the people are wearing dirty clothes because no one can afford laundry service. There’s nothing to buy and no money to pay for it if you did find something to buy. Since there is no money circulating the pulse of your community grows weaker. Young people see a bleak future with no one to do laundry for and leave. They move elsewhere, anywhere clothing is being washed, leaving the halt and the lame behind.

Neighborhoods become run down due to deferred maintenance. Angry, desperate, hungry and poor, this is the point when you turn to a life of crime. You steal from other poor people, your neighbors, and get caught doing it. After the trial you are sent away to a privatized, for-profit prison because your local prison cannot compete with the private Mega-Prisons. There you are: locked up and forced to do laundry. For free.

So ExhaustNotes likes to shop local. Like the other day when my wife’s lock switch fell out of the driver’s door of her Jeep. It’s a Jeep thing. The plastic bezel that holds the switch has two little tabs that fit behind the door panel and the switch is held in by two metal flat springs. The whole magilla snaps into place and works fine unless the tabs break off. I spent 45 seconds on Amazon and found a replacement selling for $14 with free 2-day shipping. I was about to send the bezel to my cart when I thought about our local Jeep dealer and figured I’d practice what I preach. I like having a Jeep dealer in town and I want him to stay in business.

The Jeep dealer is about 23 miles away and I know I should have called first but I usually have a hard time describing what I want to the parts guy. I drove down the hill to the Jeep dealer and chatted up the parts guy. He found the driver’s side switch bezel on his computer after 15 minutes. “We don’t have it in stock, it’ll take a couple days.” I said, “go ahead and order it for me.” The price was $35. I asked the parts guy if he gave a local discount and he knocked $10 off. I was well-chuffed as they say in England.

A few days later the Jeep dealer called and said the part had arrived. I drove back down the hill and picked up the bezel. All was well with the world. Sure, I paid $10 more than Amazon but I had supported our local economy: I kept the money in town.

When I tried to install the bezel I noticed that it was the bezel for the passenger door. The little graphic of locked and un-locked would be upside down and the angle was wrong. Darn it. Ah well, mistakes happen. I rigged a few pieces of sheet metal to hold the switch in the door and drove back down to the Jeep dealer. I know I could have called but I figured I’d have a hard time explaining that they ordered the wrong part and it’s easier to deal in person. The parts guy looked the bezel over and apologized. He said he would order the driver’s side bezel for me.

A few days later the Jeep dealer called and said the part was in. I drove back down the hill and picked up the part. It was the correct one and fit perfectly. All in, I drove 184 miles to get a $25 switch bezel that cost $14 on Amazon. I used around 12 gallons of gas. Gas is right around $3 a gallon here so I spent $36 on gasoline. My time doesn’t really count because I enjoy riding around in old Brumby but if you’re counting I spent about 11 hours driving back and forth and talking with the parts guy.

I feel really good that I supported a local business. The money I spent was circulated to the gas stations, the Jeep place and a hamburger stand where I ate lunch on one of the four trips to the dealership. I really spread it around, man. I used my Social Security check to pay for the switch so that’s Uncle Sam’s money injected right into the veins of my town. Buying local is the best way we can work together to save capitalism… and have clean clothes to boot.

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