Going off-grid requires many design decisions, none of them exceptionally hard or final. With off-grid you can always change your mind to suit your needs although you can save a bit of money if you have a plan and stick with it. Of course that’s not how I do things. I generally screw up and get it right the third time, you know what I mean?
The going native part in the title of this story pertains to base system voltage. In my mind a native setup uses roughly the same voltage for the panels, batteries and inverter as opposed to running high voltage panels and stepping them down to battery voltage.
Going native makes your system more resilient to failure. The two most complicated devices in an off grid system are the inverter and the solar panel voltage regulator (not counting strange new battery technologies). When either of those two fail you are pretty much done until you purchase parts. With a native system the regulator can be bypassed completely by connecting the solar array directly to the batteries. Depending on the size of the array you’ll have to keep an eye on your charging to not overcook the batteries but by simply shading or un-shading a few panels with cardboard you will be able to control the charge rate at a reasonable level.
When it comes to common battery voltages for your off grid system you have effectively 3 choices: 12-volt, 24-volt or 48-volt. Fast thinkers will realize that these voltages are all multiples of 12 and that’s because 12-volt batteries are the most popular. You can get batteries in other voltages; there’s no real reason the basic building block had to be 12-volt. You can buy 2-volt batteries all the way to 48-volt batteries.
One or more batteries connected together and powering your house are called a bank and like a bank you have to deposit energy into the batteries in order to draw energy out. For smaller off-grid systems 12-volt battery banks are popular. Inverters in the 2000-watt range powered by a 12-volt battery bank will work fine and are the simplest to connect if you’re electrically impaired. 12-volt banks become less desirable as power needs rise due to the large, expensive battery wires you’ll need to supply the amperage big 12-volt inverters need.
In favor of going native with 12-volt batteries, thanks to the RV industry there are a zillion products that operate at 12-volt. You can get 12-volt refrigerators, 12-volt coffee pots, 12-volt light fixtures, 12-volt pumps, 12-volt air conditioners, 12-volt televisions, 12-volt chargers for your phone and computer and you can even get 12-volt toilets. In fact, you could build yourself a pretty comfortable off-grid house using nothing but 12-volt appliances and skip having an inverter altogether. 12-volt is also fairly safe as your chances of being electrocuted increase along with voltage. Unless you’re really sweaty you can touch both poles of a 12-volt battery and not feel a thing.
The appliances that operate from native voltage will continue to operate with a dead inverter. In my shed that means lights and water pump still work with the inverter shut off. Going native allows you to slowly back out of the complex into the simple and simple things are understandable and reliable.
Going native at 24-volt limits the number of electrical devices you have to choose from. There are not nearly as many 24-volt things as there are 12-volt things. This is slowly changing and 24-volt stuff is becoming more popular. Most DC voltage LED lights are rated 10 to 30 volts. A lot of electronic devices and chargers are also rated 10 to 30 volts (read the fine print on that wall-pig that sucks up all the real estate on your outlets). Getting across 24-volts will give you a tingle and If you’re sweaty you’ll get a shock. Nothing that will kill you, we hope, but still it’s less safe than 12-volt for you electricityphobes out there.
In my off grid shed I’ve chosen 24 for my native voltage, kind of splitting the baby between 12 and 48. My solar panels are considered 24-volt (actually higher but close enough to connect directly). I only really need lights until I can rig up a small inverter to get critical things up and running. The water pump is 24-volt also. My 24-volt inverter is 6000 watts; if I went with a bigger inverter I’d probably go to 48-volt and lose some resiliency.
Going native at 48-volts is sort of useless because you can’t find very many things that operate off 48-volts except inverters. At this native voltage you should toss any hope of backing out of the system gracefully after a lightning strike and put your trust in the thousands of tiny electronic components inside those humming boxes. Go ahead and crank the solar panel voltage up and plan on being in the dark if the inverter fails. Safety wise, 48-volts will give you quite a shock and may even kill you if you are wet and have health issues.
There are devices that will allow you to run most any DC voltage from any other DC voltage. To me these are one more point to fail in the system and they aren’t cheap either. I have one to operate my 12-volt refrigerator from the 24-volt battery bank. It cost almost as much as the fridge!
If you’re planning an off grid system for a remote cabin consider going native. Give yourself the option to keep on keeping on when the buzzing widgets fail. And they will fail. Nothing lasts forever. By building resiliency into the system from the start you can use your head to make things work while others must scamper off to the Internet to order parts.
Here at ExhaustNotes we are not earthy crunchy, granola-eating oil-haters. Far from it as most of the fun things we like to do involve burning refined oil or playing with toxic products derived from oil. Hell, our entire 45-year working career depended on an oil-based economy. We’re not about to turn our backs on our old friend Petroleum. At the same time we enjoy building off-grid power systems isolated from The Man and his ever-increasing system development surcharges, power outages, readiness to serve fees and base facility charges.
It’s a shame that off-grid energy has been politicized along predictable fault lines because it really is nondenominational and serves everyone equally regardless of which clan they voted for. ExhaustNotes Off-Grid is not going to try to convince you to wear a tie-dyed shirt or stock up on ammunition for the coming civil war, but if you can shake off those tribal chains we think you’ll find off-grid energy appeals to the anti-government Far Right insurrectionist, the communist Far Left insurrectionist and that vast sea of reasonable anarchists who find themselves trapped between two crazy extremes.
At ExhaustNotes we are not electrical engineers, but with modern, home-based off grid equipment you don’t have to be. It’s so easy a child of 35 could do it. We go off grid not to make a point but because it’s more reliable than grid power, it’s nearly on par with grid cost-wise, the watts per dollar only get better the longer you operate your system, and it’s fun. One beauty of going off grid is its scalability: You can go full hog and cut the cord forever or take baby steps to energy independence.
This blog series will cover standard, easily-available systems found in houses or sheds. Grid-tied systems are not part of this series. There’s nothing wrong with grid-tie, but to my mind grid-tie systems defeat the purpose of going off grid in the first place: The Man still has his sticky fingers in your business. I’m going to ignore grid-tie because I don’t build those systems and I don’t want to get bogged down in things I know nothing about.
I’ll kick off with inverters. I have a bunch of the damn things. Inverters are kind of like backwards battery chargers. Instead of taking relatively high voltage alternating current (AC, the standard house power from the grid) and converting it into relatively low-voltage direct current (DC) to charge a battery, inverters change DC into AC. I say relatively high or low because the voltages we will be working with are 240-volt down to 12-volt. In the big picture, 240-volt is not that high. Many different voltages can be used in off-grid systems and sometimes the DC voltage is as high as the AC voltage.
AC voltage is fairly easy to step up or down using simple transformers. It’s the reason Tesla’s AC system beat out Edison’s DC system in the early years of electrification. Changing DC into AC and stepping up the voltage takes more electronic components. It requires an inverter.
The simplest and cheapest inverters are called square wave inverters. These are getting harder to find due to inherent issues with their power output. Like all non-rotating inverters they flip the DC polarity back and forth 60 times a second (in the USA) to create alternating current then step that up to a higher voltage resulting in a square wave pattern. The null period between the two voltage peaks is blazingly fast, essentially zero. These inverters produce a waveform that is nothing like what you are getting from the grid. Square wave inverters will operate a lot of things but certain electronic equipment may not like it. Brush-type power drills, incandescent lights, resistance type heaters should work with square wave but I’m not promising anything.
This is a cheap, Harbor freight 750-watt square wave inverter. Good for Christmas lights on your parade float.
If you test a standard, 120-volt square wave with a voltmeter it will probably show around 90 volts. This is due to that waveform switching back and forth instantly. Power under the curve is the closest way I can describe it: a normal grid waveform spends a lot of time rising and falling 60 times a second. The voltage rises, drops to zero then rises in reverse. For grid power 120 volts is an average. What this means is that over 1/60th of a second your electrical component is getting 120 volts some of the time, more than 120 volts some of the time, and no power at all some of the time. Electrical devices are built to this standard. A full, 120-volt square wave would most likely overheat whatever you plugged into it.
Modified sine wave inverters are an attempt to more closely mimic grid power. While a modified sine wave inverter is an improvement over square wave they are still sort of crude. Modified sine wave inverters are popular and will run most things but there’s still the possibility of frying a device if it happens to be really sensitive. Modified sine wave inverters cost a bit more than square wave inverters.
True sine wave inverters, also called pure sine wave inverters, are the most expensive and the closest thing you can get to grid power, maybe even better. These inverters produce a nice, clean waveform that looks the same as grid power to your electrical equipment. True sine wave inverters will run anything that you can run from grid power assuming the inverter has the capacity. True sine wave inverters used to be very expensive but the price has come down quite a bit. They still cost a lot more than a square wave.
While a 12-volt, 5,000-watt true sine wave like this one costs 1200 dollars, three times as much.
If you can afford it, always get a true sine wave inverter. If you’re really skint get a modified sine wave inverter, just assume the risk when plugging anything like computers or microwave ovens into the thing. If you just want to run incandescent lights, maybe fluorescent lights and simple, no-circuit-board electrical things get a square wave but be warned: I nearly fried my air compressor on a square wave and burned up a cell phone charger on one. I don’t buy square wave inverters anymore.
Inverters are sized in output watts and input volts. They are labeled sort of tricky some times. You’ll find a unit may be 12,000 watts surge capacity but only 5000 watts continuous. To make life simple ignore surge capacity and use the continuous rating. Now that you’ve decided to get a true sine wave inverter (if you’re smart), determine what your average operating load will be in watts and plan for an inverter with twice as much output. For a small house or shed I’d go with 5000 watts.
Since inverters need a DC power source, like batteries, you’ll also need to choose what input voltage your inverter will draw from your storage batteries. 12-volt DC input is most common for smaller inverters but as inverter output rises the input voltage usually goes up also. 24-volt and 48-volt DC input is normal on larger inverters.
Higher input voltage from the batteries helps keep wire sizes and voltage drop within reason. A 12-volt input, 6000-watt inverter running at full chat will be sucking 500+ amps out of your 12-volt battery bank. A 500-amp load requires huge battery cables to carry the current and puts a lot of stress on electrical connections. Terminal posts tend to get hot with 500 amps flowing through them. At max load that same 6000-watt inverter with 48-volt input will be sipping a mere 125 amps from your 48-volt battery bank. The reduced current at 48-volts allows for smaller and cheaper cables. The cost savings is significant. Big copper battery cables are expensive. You can use the money you saved on cables for more batteries.
With smaller inverters output power is usually single-phase 120 volt AC. They often have standard duplex outlets built right into the machine. These are a good way to gain a little independence from the grid without having to mess with high voltage wiring: You simply plug things directly into the inverter and go to town. You’ll only be able to run 120-volt equipment but most house stuff is 120-volt.
Another option is 120-volt/240-volt split phase output. These inverters usually require hard wiring to the output and you’ll need a breaker panel. No easy plug-ins. This setup is nice if you have 240-volt things like an air compressor or small South Bend Lathe you want to operate from the inverter in addition to regular 120-volt equipment. A split-phase inverter is kind of like two single-phase inverters joined at the hip, the hip being the neutral leg in this case. One half the total output is available on each of two, 120-volt circuits and all the output is available at 240-volts. On a 6000-watt split-phase you’ll be able to draw 3000-watts of 120-volt power from one side, 3000-watts of 120-volt power from the other 120-volt side or 6000-watts at 240-volts. Note that you cannot draw 3000 + 3000 + 6000 watts all at the same time. You’ve only got 6000 watts total no mater how many ways you divide it up.
In my off-grid shed I run a 24-volt Aims 6000-watt, true sine wave, 120/240 split-phase output inverter that feeds a standard, household breaker panel. From the panel I have circuits for lights, outlets, and 240-volt outlets. I went with 24-volt input because I run LED, DC lights and a DC water pump. It’s harder to find these items in 48-volt. My system has been operating for two years without any problems. The inverter is kind of a watt-hog as it draws 3-amps “on” with no load attached. The Aims inverter has a pulsing, sleep circuit that reduces the no-load draw to 1 amp but it only senses one side of the 120-volt output. Turn on a load that is connected to the non-sensing side and nothing happens; the unit won’t wake up and make power. I don’t use sleep mode but it’s a good energy saving feature if you can make it work.
Another farkle I don’t use on the AIMS inverter is the pass-through relay. The pass through relay automatically stops the inverter when generator power is feeding your system. The generator power passes through the inverter relay and powers your shed/house/whatever. In addition the inverter can be set up to switch to battery charge mode when the generator is powering your load. I do the switching manually because I like to keep the inverter’s job as simple as possible.
The AIMS battery charge mode is great. If you kill the batteries you can input 240 volts from a generator and the inverter will become a 24-volt, 85-amp battery charger. This charger function is useful for cloudy or snowy days when your solar panels aren’t working. Of course I have my system set up for manual operation of the inverter charging. Like most inverters the AIMS shuts off at a selected low input voltage so as to not kill the battery bank completely or harm the inverter from operating on low voltage.
To give you an idea of what 6000 watts will do, I can run a small, wire feed arc welder or a ¾-horse air compressor. I use traditional power tools, a concrete mixer and a spot welder. I have yet to find something it won’t run, I just can’t run everything at once.
A super easy way to take the first steps on your path to grid independence is this little 300-watt, true sine wave, 40-volt input Ryobi. It doesn’t have a lot of power but if you already own 40-volt Ryobi tools like I do it makes a nice emergency back up power supply. You can run a lamp or an Internet router, maybe a small monitor or television. Also you can charge phones with a couple USB ports. Ryobi makes a 150-watt unit but 150 watts is too small to be much use.
If you don’t have 40-volt Ryobi batteries this Bestek true sine wave, 500-watt, 12-volt input inverter will turn any 12-volt car battery into a 120-volt power source. If your power goes out during a big storm clip the leads onto your car battery and you’ll have back up power not reliant on The Man. Just remember to run the car every hour or so to recharge the battery or just leave the car running. At 500 watts you can do some damage with this thing (maybe even run a small refrigerator).
I mentioned earlier about rotating inverters. Back before the advent of fancy, complex inverters a brush-type DC motor turning an AC generator provided a simple, reliable method of inverting DC into AC. The waveform it produced was true sine. It wasn’t that long ago either as I worked on this type of inverter back in the 1970s. I’m guessing it wasn’t as efficient as the new ones and the frequency may drift a bit. The motor-inverter used a lot of copper compared to modern stuff but it worked ok. If you find an old rotating inverter in a junk pile grab it; it would be fun to mess with.
That’s enough inverter chat, it’s too much geeking for me. My head is spinning from typing about it. Hopefully this will help you decide which inverter will suit your needs. If you’re interested in this sort of stuff we’ll cover batteries, solar panels, generators, wind generators, loads, and how to tie the mess together in the future, so be sure to subscribe to our ExhaustNotes.us email alerts and you won’t miss a thing. Unless of course you want to miss a thing.
Brumby, my 1992 Jeep YJ, was a stinky ride whenever I filled the gas tank. It was so bad I tried to fill it less than 3/4 full to keep odors down. That worked for a while but the problem became worse as time stayed on its ever-forward push towards entropy. The thing got so bad raw fuel (is there any other kind?) would slosh out on rough roads.
In addition, the in-tank electric fuel pump kept getting noisier and noisier. If I let the tank drop below ½ it made a real racket that you could here over the flapping canvas roof and the squeaking suspension. These two issues combined left me with a usable tank capacity of between 1/2 and 3/4, or about 37 miles in layman’s terms. I knew I had to drop the tank and have a look at the situation.
The Jeep YJ tank is behind the rear axle and attached to a steel skid plate. After unhooking the fuel fill hoses, no easy feat, you have to use a floor jack to let the tank down. I siphoned out as much fuel as I could to make the tank lighter. Once you’ve got the tank lowered and a bit of clearance you can disconnect the rest of the fuel lines. Being fuel injected there are three lines: pressure, return and a small vent that goes to the charcoal canister I think.
The big leak was at the fuel pump flange. The YJ’s tank is an aftermarket, rotocast plastic unit. This pump-to-tank area warps with age. There is no metal flange cast into the tank top to insure a flat gasket surface. Look for this feature on your next Jeep YJ gas tank purchase.
Removing the fuel pump assembly revealed that the replacement pump was not an exact replacement. The new fuel pump’s electrical connections were reversed but there was plenty of slack in the wires to reach. The bottom pickup of the new pump didn’t quite fit into the pickup screen correctly so I messed around with the extra rubber bushings that came with the new fuel pump until I got something that worked.
I managed to get the fuel pump installed into the new assembly in only a few hours. Remind me next time to spring for the complete pump assembly. When I reinstalled the pump assembly I used a new gasket and a steel backing plate that came with the gasket. Copious quantities of black RTV silicone filled the dips and voids of the warped plastic tank top.
I cleaned and re-painted the gas tank skidpan and attached the tank straps to the pan. Now the whole assembly is situated on the floor jack, rolled into position and jacked up into place only pausing long enough to connect the new rubber fuel lines (also from Amazon!).
Some YJ owners cut out the floor to replace the fuel pump. That’s a good idea but it isn’t very hard to drop the tank. For roadside emergency repairs a hatch cut into the floor would make replacing the pump a half-hour job instead of the two days it took me. I think I’ll do the hatch next time.
Brumby is running fine with its new fuel pump and I can fill the tank without fuel sloshing out onto the hot exhaust pipe. My fuel mileage has improved slightly without the constant loss of gasoline from the leaky tank. The old pump looked like original equipment and lasted 29 years. Stay tuned to ExhaustNotes for a follow up report when the new fuel pump quits.
I’ve been watching these cheap, cheerful, Chinese 7-inch headlamps sold through Amazon for quite a while. There are about twenty different sellers selling twenty different brand names of the same basic headlight. Normally priced around 25 to 30 dollars, this Qiilu brand light popped up on sale for 8 dollars and there was a coupon you could apply to the sale at checkout. It was a crazy good deal. When all was said and done Qiilu paid me 35 cents to receive their headlight. Ok, it wasn’t that good of a deal, but the light was like 7 dollars with shipping included.
This headlight, like all of them on Amazon, comes with LED turn indicators or daytime running lights built into the outer edges of the lens. The entire LED cluster is removable but I plan on leaving them in and not connecting the wires. By the way, the light came with no wiring instruction so it’s kind of hit or miss. I only need the 3-wire main H-4 bulb for my project.
“What project is that?” You may well ask and I’ll tell you. The 2008 Husqvarna SMR 510 comes stock with the worst headlight ever installed on a motorcycle. It’s a 35w/35w incandescent type that has a strange socket more like a taillight bulb than a headlight. Replacement bulbs are easy to get online but impossible to find at any auto or motorcycle shop. And you’ll need to order a lot of them online as the stock bulbs only last about 250 miles before falling to pieces. The plastic reflector housing is slowly melting under the 35-watt bulb so increasing the wattage is out of the question.
I don’t know what went wrong with the reflector design but the Husky casts a gloomy glow not more than 30 feet ahead. Many a night I would ride home at 25 miles per hour, even then outrunning my lighting. As a stopgap I bolted on a large LED spotlight for off road use and it lights up things pretty well but is totally illegal for highway use as it blinds oncoming drivers the way I have it adjusted.
Enter the Qiilu. I’m removing the Husky headlight complete and replacing it with the Qiilu. The Qiilu uses standard bulbs found in any auto store so even if the bulbs continue to blow out I can re-light the sucker just about at will. The Qiilu reflector is twice as large as the stock Husky unit and uses a halogen bulb so I’m hoping for improved light pattern and strength.
But enough about my problems and me: How much headlight do you get for 8 dollars anyway?
Turns out quite a bit. The Qiilu is mostly plastic except for the metal trim ring. The thing weighs nothing. The reflector and lens looks pretty nice. The light came with some universal mounting brackets and stainless steel, button-head fasteners that are worth 8 bucks all by themselves. I probably won’t use the brackets as I plan on fabricating a couple ears and re-using the Husky’s rubber band style headlight mounts. Any vibration I can muffle might make the bulbs last longer.
The Qiilu comes standard with a 35-watt bulb that is supposed to be yellow colored. I don’t see it but maybe a night it would. I’ll replace the bulb with a white 35-watt halogen that will cost more than the entire headlight.
The housing has a large opening in the back and I hope to stuff a lot of the loose, exposed wiring behind the stock headlight into the new housing. I may change the sheet-metal screws holding the rim to the housing to machine screws for a more secure attachment.
Look, this isn’t a super high quality lamp, but then I’m not a high quality person. It’s cheaply made but seems to have all the right parts in all the right places. The housing is not metal so will probably break if you hit a tree. The thing is, the Husqvarna headlight the Qiilu is replacing is even worse. I expect a rock hitting the Qiilu square in the lens will crack the thing but maybe not. For 8 dollars it’s worth a try and beats the heck out of no light at all.
I’ve been working on Zed, my Kawasaki Z1, trying to get it ready for touring. I get the feeling that it will soon be safe to knock about the country again and if not, that the general population doesn’t give a damn whether they contract the virus or not. To that aim I purchased a pair of slick looking goatskin saddlebags from Amazon. I like to keep Bezos in the chips so I figured a pair of $33 Harshali bags all the way from Rajasthan would do the trick.
I didn’t want giant saddlebags, just something for tools and water maybe a snack so I thought the 11″ wide, 8″ tall, 3″ Harshali bags would be sufficient. Being male, I assumed 11-inches would be a fairly good-sized bag, you know? Turns out they looked pretty stupid on the Kawasaki. What looked stupid on the Kawasaki looks just right on the Husqvarna so that’s where the Harshali (one bag, right side) ended up.
The saddlebags look well made. The leather is as thick as a goat, I guess. The metal buckles seem sturdy and are a slightly tight fit for the straps. Like the long running joke in the British sitcom, Are You Being Served, I’m sure they will ride up with wear. One area I may reinforce is the frame strap-to-bag rivet. They seem sturdy enough for street riding but I bounce the Husqvarna of rocks and other hard objects. Two thin steel plates riveted with the leather sandwiched between might be the way to go.
The Harshali bags have several zipper compartments and dividers inside. Being only 3-inches deep these dividers seem pretty dumb but who am I to say. The saddlebag design looks like a lady’s purse missing the handle. That may actually be what they are but I’m secure enough to strap one on.
On the outside face of the bag there is a small pocket that would hold a pack of cigarettes if I smoked or a compact if I used face powder during a ride. It’s a good place for a couple-three candy bars or your bundle of sage.
The reviews on Amazon lead me to believe there may be two saddlebag factories in Rajasthan one building beautiful, sturdy bags and the other turning out stinky, ill-sewn, moldy trash. I got the good set. They smelled like leather the buckles and rivets were rust free.
I’m happy with the Harshali bags so far. Only time will tell if they hold up to the rough and tumble world of motorcycle touring. Which reminds me: I still need a set of bags for the Kawasaki. Bezos is laughing all the way to the bank.
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I may seem like a cranky old man but I’m not that old. I admit I don’t like many of the useless widgets and features coming out on new motorcycles. As a rule they do nothing to enhance the feel of the wind or the joy of riding. Oh sure, they may make motorcycling safer and protect riders from themselves but the additional weight, more frequent breakdowns, and costly repairs (due to excessive complications) hardly seems worth it to me. I would go as far as to say a 1985 Japanese bike is more reliable than most any 2021 motorcycle.
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Listen, I’m a booster for motorcycling. I know manufacturers need to sell new bikes and new bikes need to appear improved over older models. I don’t want you to think of me as a negative person and a killjoy about your fancy-pants electronic-nanny bike. If you imagine you’ve found something you like and feel happy about I’m good with it. And there have been a few improvements to motorcycles since I started messing with them. Keep in mind that I’ve been riding since the late 1960’s so some of the things I think of as new are not actually all that new.
Modern disc brakes are the biggest improvement to motorcycles. I rode for many years on bikes that would not lock the front wheel no matter how hard you squeezed the lever. Not only were the old drum brakes weak, they faded so badly going downhill that often the rider was left with no brakes at all. The first mass produced disc brakes in the 1970’s were a huge leap but nothing like the new multi-piston, multi-disc brakes on modern bikes. Motorcycle brakes became so good manufacturers had to hobble them with anti-lock systems to keep riders from crashing in a panic situation. You really can flip over frontwards on some bikes. My Husky 510 has a dinner plate sized disc that is a miracle of stopping power and it doesn’t come with a safety net. In the dirt I use one, very light finger. On pavement two fingers will stand the bike on its nose. I like having that power even though I’ll probably wipe out using it.
Fuel injection is the second best idea but you have to make compromises with complexity. Carburetors are relatively easy to adjust and owners can screw them up with just a few simple tools. Fuel injection requires some type of reader or display to tune. Aftermarket companies sell all manner of work-around black boxes and mapping programs. I’d say tune-ability is a toss up between the two fuel/air mixing systems.
At a fixed altitude, humidity, temperature and barometric pressure a carbed bike can run just as well as any injected bike. My token modern bike, the Husky 510, has FI but the rest of my bikes have carburetors and I manage to get from Point A to Point B just fine. I accept FI’s extra complexity because fuel injection works great. Over extreme altitude variations fuel injected motorcycles run so much better than carbed bikes you could almost miss their biggest advantage: less clogging. In a perfect world, a world without alcohol blended in, our gasoline carburetors do an acceptable job. The problem is modern fuel has such a short shelf life that, left to absorb moisture and drop out of suspension alcohol fuel can clog up carbs in just a few months of storage. Draining the carbs before parking the bike more than a month is mandatory.
Once past the fuel pump a fuel injection system is sealed off from oxygen and the elements, drastically improving gasoline’s shelf life. Even if the fuel does goes off in the tank the high fuel pressures of fuel injection tend to pump the crud on through. It’s still possible to gum up a fuel-injected bike sitting long periods of time but much less likely.
O-ring chains are not really new but the most recent versions are incredibly good. My early experience with O-ring chains saw the little o-rings go missing and the chain ended up no better than a plain old chain. After that I stopped using them for 30 years. Skip forward a few decades and it’s not unusual to get 20,000 miles or more out of a brand name O-ring chain. Give an O-ring chain a shot of 90–weight oil every 400 miles or so and you’ll be riding carefree minus the heavy parts of a shaft-driven motorcycle. Belt-drives are good, too, but every time I’ve taken a belt driven bike scrambling the belt starts squeaking and it takes a thousand miles for the noise to go away. On small displacement motorcycles O-ring chains do add a bit of drag but don’t trouble yourself over those things.
Tubeless, spoke rims are a recent development and they are a great new idea. Besides looking cool as hell, tubeless, spoke rims combine the easy hole patching ability of tubeless tires with the light, strong construction of spokes. I don’t know what took so long but I’m all for it, brother. One place I see a potential problem is running low pressures off-road but that has nothing to do with the wheel. If you’re trail riding at 15psi I suggest you stick a tube in your tubeless spoke wheel. I like the looks of spoke rims on a motorcycle but I also like being able to stab a tire plug in a flat tire and be on my way in 5 minutes. Tubeless spoke rims are a win-win idea. One day maybe I’ll have a bike with them fitted.
Liquid cooling has been around since gasoline engines were invented but I still think of the application in motorcycles as modern and one of the best ideas. Besides a few odd bikes like Scott and Suzuki most bikes were air-cooled until the mid 1980’s, and 1980 seems like yesterday to me. The big advantage to liquid cooling is the ability to tune the bike with one less variable to worry about: you know within a few degrees what temperature the engine will be 98% of the time. There’s also a sound deadening benefit that has become more important as we move forward into an eerily silent, clean world.
I own two liquid-cooled motorcycles and the extra complexity of the cooling system has not caused a problem on either one. I forget they are liquid cooled. My old Yamaha V-Max developed a leaky water pump at 80,000 miles but once fixed it rolled on to 112,000 miles without a hitch. Unfortunately, that bike was sunk in one of the many hurricanes that struck the Florida Keys during my time there.
These advancements in motorcycling have made bikes safer, quieter and more reliable, but not any more fun. I enjoy riding my old air-cooled, drum braked, carbureted, tube-tired, non-O-ring chained, Yamaha two-stroke best of all. It goes to show that as we move into the silent, safe, modern world the biggest and best ideas in motorcycling are still inside your mind.
Here at ExhaustNotes.us we’ve been discussing the possibility that we may have more motorcycles than anyone actually needs. Personally, I have more motorcycles than I can afford to insure. I can’t ride them legally so the bikes sit in my shed gathering dust. Berk, who has a much smaller shed, is taking aggressive action on the issue by selling off some unused bikes. It’s inspired me to do the same. But which bikes? How many motorcycles do I need? I don’t want to end up one of those hoarders who die leaving Meacham’s auction house to pawn my junk off to the other hoarders.
For the sake of argument lets say X equals the number of motorcycles that your ability and status in life can keep maintained and running. Besides remorseless economics and mechanical talent there are the bikes that have a sentimental meaning to you that goes beyond reason and harsh reality. We’ll call that value Y. For example, you may never get that Norton put back together but if the fact that it exists in your shed brings you happiness why am I judging?
If all we had to deal with was X and Y we could plot the number of owned motorcycles on a simple two-dimensional graph but life is not lived in two dimensions. Reality demands that we consider Z, with Z being the amount of space you have to store the motorcycles. If the value of Z, Y and X were infinite you could collect all the motorcycles. I mean all of them. No one else could own one because you would have the entire world’s output of motorcycles. The problem is X, Y and Z are never infinite; even if they were and you owned them all who would you ride with? Nobody.You’d be a lonely, bitter soul. By simple logic we have determined an upper limit on motorcycle ownership: all of them minus one for your riding buddy.
Since this is a motorcycle blog I will assume the readers like motorcycles. Hence, pandering to the mob dictates that one motorcycle is the lower limit on motorcycle ownership because a story on motorcycle ownership that didn’t involve motorcycle ownership cannot exist in the intellectual vacuum of the Internet.
There are a vast number of motorcycles between one and all of the motorcycles minus one. We can narrow the field a bit by eliminating BMW motorcycles as no one likes them anyway but that still leaves a lot of bikes. I think it’s better to start from the other end, the end that starts with one.
If you can only have one motorcycle (X, Y and Z= jack-all) then that one motorcycle better be an enduro-type. A combination dirt/street motorcycle is the one to have if you only have one. As X, Y and Z grow larger a street-specific motorcycle is handy for highway rides. That makes two bikes and I really feel two is the minimum number of motorcycles regardless of your situation. You’ll just have to put your nose to the grindstone and increase your X/Y/Z, Bubba.
If we break down street bikes into touring, sport, and vintage categories and dirt bikes into enduro, motocross and vintage you could make the argument that six motorcycles are the minimum amount required. You’ll also need a mini bike for bopping around your ranch and a lightweight moped for running down to the post office. This brings the total to eight motorcycles and I feel that eight motorcycles show a good level of commitment to the motorcycle pastime.
With eight motorcycles on site visitors to your home will rightly expect you to loan them a motorcycle and take them on a little tour of your surroundings. Don’t do it. Your bikes are your bikes and if your visitor crashes one it will poison the friendship. Better to own a loaner bike, one you don’t care about for those pesky hanger-onners. An extra copy of your loaner motorcycle will make visitor rides more fun as neither rider has the upper hand in equipment. So you’ll need ten motorcycles to adequately maintain friendships. A small price to pay in the grand scheme of things.
Once you’ve got ten motorcycles you may as well go ahead and get a couple nostalgic trinkets from your youth. Maybe a nice example of the first bike you ever owned or the motorcycle your ex-spouse made you get rid of because you had kids. Maybe it’s the bike your dear old dad owned or the model of motorcycle that decapitated a school chum. There are all manner of excellent reasons to own up to sixteen motorcycles.
Moving far from town and building a large shed to house all your motorcycles is a tell tale sign that you may be overdoing things a bit. Living on canned soup, scouring the Internet for motorcycles to buy is not the healthiest lifestyle but it’s not the food choices that get you in the end. Once you start building multilevel lofts to store motorcycles in inaccessible places you are one small earth tremor away from being buried alive by motorcycles.
There’s something about walking in a shed without having to turn sideways that appeals to me. Our economy is built on over consumption. I’m at eight, maybe nine motorcycles now and I’m feeling like I should get rid of a few. So how many motorcycles are too many? What is your comfort level?
With only two full-time writers here at ExhaustNotes.us, it’s a real challenge to churn out the quantity of content a website demands. Luckily we have Joe Berk on staff. One Berk equals like seven normal writers. Coming up with topics is easy but some of the ideas don’t rise to the level of an actual ExhaustNotes.us story. I’ve swept the floor at the luxurious ExhaustNotes.us office plaza and tossed all the bits into this blog post.
Reaching in through the bottom of the chicken we find that the 1975 Kawasaki Zed has been having a few problems as of late. The far right-side carburetor was spewing gasoline sporadically so I purchased 4, generic carb repair kits online. I really only needed the float needle and seat but at $14 a kit it was cheaper to buy the whole shebang rather than just the seats.
The carburetors sit relatively high off the crankcase on a Kawasaki Z1 so most carb circuits can be accessed from the bottom or top without removing the whole bank of 4 carbs. You can get to the idle jet, the main jet, the needle and seat and even the slide needle and emulsion tube if you’re willing to struggle a bit. When I say access theses parts I don’t mean to imply that it’s easy to do. I have the cuts on my hands to show for it.
After 3000 miles of running I was surprised by the lack of debris in the Kawasaki’s float bowls. If you followed Zed’s resurrection you’ll know how rusty Zed’s tank was. I expected the main-jet sump to be full of fine red dust. Installing the new needles and seats was a fiddly job but I managed to get them in and replaced the pilot jets just because I had them. I left the original main jets in place.
Before turning on the fuel I checked the fuel filter on the petcock and found it clean. I bought new inline filters but seeing how clean everything was I left the old inline filters alone. Don’t fix it if it isn’t broken is a good motto to live by with aging motorcycles.
As soon as I turned the petcock on fuel started pouring out of Carb Number 3 (from the ignition side). Of course this is the hardest one to work on. I pulled the float bowl back off and removed the float and the needle. Everything looked ok. Figuring a piece of dirt must be in there I blew carb cleaner into the seat and reassembled the carb. Back together with the petcock on, the fuel leaked as bad as it ever did.
I took the float bowl back off and removed the float. Holding the needle in place with my finger I turned on the petcock and gas poured down my hand, onto my wrist and up the sleeve of my shirt. This led me to believe there was a problem with Number 3’s new needle/seat.
Upon further examination I found some unexplainable marking on the inside of the seat where the needle valve would normally seal. I’m not sure what is going on. Are the stampings some kind of size identifier? Did the punch that marks the seat miss and stamp the inside of the seat?
It became obvious to me that this particular needle/seat combination was never going to seal so I picked the best looking needle/seat from the old parts and installed them into Carb Number 3. No more leaking.
For the real mechanics: I know I should reset the floats but the bowl drain screws are very tight; removing them may break something I don’t want broken. My rationale is that the replacement needles/seats are the same overall length so the float levels wouldn’t have changed much, if at all. One day I’ll get the drain screws out and set the float levels using the clear tube system.
The upshot is that Zed is running much better. I took a quick, 140-mile, 60-degree-January-day jaunt and stopped several times leaving the fuel petcock on: no leaks. Spinning 5000-5500 RPM in top gear the Zed returned 41 miles per gallon not including the amount of fuel that I spilled while working on the carbs. In addition, I had to turn the airscrews in almost one whole turn after installing the new needles/seats and pilot jets.
Moving on from the carburetor woes, there are a few disappointing rubber-issues with some parts on Zed. The rubber fork wipers have split in just a little over a year. I really expected them to last a bit longer than that. The rubber vacuum plugs that cover the ports used for balancing the carbs have also rotted and split. These were new about the same time as the fork wipers. Not only are the vacuum plugs rotted, but one of the brass nozzles cast into the new rubber intake manifolds came adrift when I tried to push the vacuum plug into position. Luckily it didn’t go all the way into the intake port and I managed to pull it out and get the plug onto the thing.
When I was resurrecting Zed I sourced parts from all over. I’m going to try and dig around to see if I have any receipts that will tell me where I got the various rubber bits. If they are EBay sellers I won’t bother but I’m sure the more reputable companies will work on making it right. One factor that may have caused the rubber failure is the fact that Tinfiny’s shed gets very hot in the summertime. With the doors closed it’s not unusual to hit 130 degrees inside. 130 degrees isn’t that hot for an air-cooled motorcycle engine but New Mexico’s dry air combined with long term exposure might affect the rubber. None of my other bikes stored in the same conditions have had rubber failures.
Well, what do you know, I had more ground to cover but this carb story ended up running on for so long it’ll make a standalone ExhaustNotes.us blog! I’ll post up Giblets 2 soon.
Hunter usually does the navigating for us. I don’t tax my little brain over it. We’ve ridden motorcycles thousands of miles on unmarked dirt roads never failing to arrive at the correct spot in the end. Every now and then I’ll ask hunter where the hell we are and he’ll point to his GPS screen and say, “Right there, on the trail.” I didn’t want to appear damaged, it gets rough on the trail once they know you’re compromised so I’d nod my head and mumble something about waypoints, acting like I saw something on Hunter’s GPS other than a featureless grey screen. Thing is, you can’t always have Hunter with you all the time or even most times.
I’ve bought several GPS navigators over the years and all of them suffer from the same deficiencies: they are too small and the monochromatic, grey-on-grey screens are too difficult for my terrible eyes to see. This Christmas CT bought me a Garmin Zumo XT. The XT is a motorcycle-specific GPS that is supposed to be rain tight and the touch screen will work using a gloved finger, they say. It’s not a cheap unit but if you added up all the useless, invisible GPS receivers I’ve bought over the years I coulda bought two of them.
The XT has a ton of features. It will Bluetooth to your phone and give you traffic and road conditions. I guess you can get spoken directions over your intercom thingy. None of that is important to me or is the main thing the XT does best. This Zumo is bright. Garmin’s TFT screen has fantastic contrast and color. I can see the thing in direct sunlight at 80% brightness setting. It’s brighter than my iPhone 11 by several hundred lumens. (Note: I made that up. I didn’t actually measure the lumen output.)
The Garmin Zumo came with a nice handle bar mounting bracket, the kind with the two ball joints and the center tensioning cups. While a good system for street bikes, I had issues mounting the XT to my 2008 Husqvarna. The Husky has ¾-inch to 1-inch tapered handlebars and on the 1-inch diameter section the supplied U-bolt was not quite long enough for the provided lock nuts to actually screw on far enough to lock. Not a big problem as I hacksawed a thin baloney-slice off of the ball mount part and while still not right at least the plastic locking part got a few threads on the U-bolt.
Once I had the bracket mounted on the right side I decided I didn’t like the GPS sticking out in the breeze waiting for a hole to be busted in the housing by one of the many loose rocks Hunter kicks up into my shins, headlight, face shield and fingers. I would pass him if I knew where I was going.
I moved the Zumo to the left side of the handle bar and tucked it behind an accessory LED headlight I installed earlier. Turns out the new position used a narrower section of the handlebar so I didn’t need to hacksaw the bracket after all. Those of you who turn wrenches for a living or sport will be able to predict what happened next.
I was snugging the U-bolt down a little each side-to-side when the bracket broke in two. Rats. With the bracket now useless I had to dig deep into my long history of crappy motorcycle repair. I ended up sawing off the rest of the busted bracket leaving only the ball joint and a chunk of pot metal to serve as a base. Then I through-drilled the ball joint remnant with a ¼-inch drill bit. Once I had the thing weakened beyond all hope I through-bolted the ball Joint to an existing angle aluminum piece. The squared off base contacts the top handlebar clamp, I’m hoping this stops the whole GPS from rotating on the ¼-inch bolt.
It seems to be fairly secure but I’m going to add a small cable with a quick release clip to help keep the Garmin Zumo XT attached to the bike in case something comes loose on the trail. I don’t have a lot of faith in Garmin’s snap-in mounting plate. A couple small tabs of plastic are all that hold the XT to the handlebar bracket.
The wiring is easy on the Garmin Zumo XT, a positive and a negative to 12VDC. I incorporated a power switch so that I can turn the Garmin on or off without using the ignition key. I like to stop and study the screen once and a while and it’s nice to be able to do that with the rest of the bike off. I’ll have to remember to shut the thing down though, hopefully the big red indicator light on the switch will remind me. Another note: If you want to move the Garmin from bike to bike or to your car you’ll need to buy more installation kits. It’s too much trouble to disconnect all the wiring and broken bits of mounting hardware.
It all made for fairly clean installation and I can’t wait to try out that super bright screen on the trail. I’ll do a follow up story on actually using the Garmin Zumo later. Who knows, maybe I’ll be able to find where Hunter stashes his used tires.
Recently Berk wrote a story on his five best motorcycle books. I figure I’ll copy him since nothing else moto-related is going on. Berk’s choices were all good choices but naturally not the ones I would have picked. Berk and I differ on a lot of topics (ok, most) but we don’t let that stop us from getting along well. Maybe it’s my deep-seated conviction that I am always right or maybe it’s because I actually am always right that smooths troubled waters. It’s hard to tell, really. Whatever it is it works so I’m not going to over-analyze the thing.
The thing is, I don’t read many motorcycle books, and five will be a stretch. Sure, I’ve read Berk’s travel books but only the ones with me in them. I have nothing against travel/adventure books but as a rule, it’s a topic that I would rather do than read about. I’m going to take a stab at the five-list anyway.
My top pick for all-time best motorcycle book is Floyd Clymer’s A Treasury of Motorcycles of the World. This huge hardcover was my bible growing up. I read and re-read the thing so many times I knew it by heart. The Treasury came out just slightly before the age of Japanese superbikes and reading it you get no sense of the dramatic changes that were about to sweep over motorcycling. The Treasury covered practically every brand that you could find in the USA: Harleys, Triumphs, Hondas and the rest. The more obscure brands were covered also. What seems obvious to us now was at that time still up in the air. The Japanese were making inroads but one look at the outsized 4-cylinder Munch and you suspected car-engined motorcycles were the future. In such a fast moving business, who knew which marques would be successful?
The Treasury covered more than just motorcycles. Included were descriptions of motorcycle culture and motorcycle events. A debate between Triumph and Suzuki on the merits of two-stroke vs. four-stroke stands out in my mind. I sided with Suzuki. If you were completely new to motorcycling this one book would bring you up to speed on the whole shebang.
Maybe I’m remembering theTreasury with rose-tinted neurons. I lost the book somewhere over the 53 years since I read it last and I can’t be bothered to buy another copy of The Best Motorcycle Book Ever. I’d rather keep the knowledge I gained from the book: the excitement and wonder from its pages and a life long infatuation with two-wheeled travel. I’ll not risk my entire life history to a few mis-firing neurons.
Next on my list of all-time greats is a book I’ve never read. Learn To Wheelie by Jack B. Watson was advertised in the back ads of the many, many motorcycle magazines I devoured as a youth. The book must have sold by the thousands because the ads ran at least 20 years. That alone should tell you how good Learn To Wheelie is. I wanted to buy a copy for all those 20 years but money was scarce and I ended up learning to wheelie by trial and error.
Trial and error was how most of us learned to wheelie and it was a hard won skill. One time I flipped over backwards on my Honda SL70 doing around 45 miles per hour. I landed on my back and the asphalt wore through at each of my vertebra leaving little, quarter-sized cherries to mark out each one in a zipper-like fashion.
The SL70 continued on for few yards longer and when the front wheel came down the bike started cartwheeling in the middle of the road. It bent the swing arm, the frame, the handlebars and broke any sticky-outtie parts clean off. It was like the SL70 had spent a few hours in a cement mixer. Things would have gone a whole lot different had I read Learn To Wheelie. A whole lot different.
If you asked me, and you didn’t, I’d say the book that had the most influence on my feverish teenaged brain was Cycletoons. Not that Cycletoons is exactly a book. It’s a comic book and that has the word “book” in it so in my book it qualifies. Cycletoons came out once a month for a few years and in that short time did permanent damage to my personality. The artwork and stories were fantastic, running from hardcore nuts and bolts stuff to fantasy pieces that mimicked drug induced psychosis.
Unlike Clymer’s Treasury, Cycletoons came out in the early 1970s right when motorcycling in the USA was coming on the pipe. Up to date in every way with cultural references ripped from the headlines, Cycletoons put all the traditional, stodgy motorcycle magazines on the trailer. Some of the humor (and it was all humor) was pretty lame but when it was good it was the best. The artists and writers of Cycletoons were mostly young guys that knew what was happening and they used the language of the day to tell their stories. Something you rarely saw back then.
Webley-Vickers, The Ol’ Poop, Cycle Chicks, the lonely hearts mail page, Pillow Trot and Elbow Juice, I loved all of it and haunted the local 7-11 store eating Lemon Heads and waiting for the next issue to come out. Cycletoons magazines are fairly expensive now. They go for 30 to 50 bucks a copy on Amazon so I won’t be buying them. I think I still have one issue saved. It’s the one with the cover art of all the Cycletoons characters along with Skip Van Leeuwen, Nixon, Romero and a few other famous racers powering into turn one on everything from a broken down chopper to a Vespa scooter. If you find a stack of Cycletoons at a garage sale snap them up. I guarantee you’ll love them.
If you are into old clunkers like I am Chilton’s Motorcycle Repair Manual is the one book you’ll need for whatever crappy old motorcycle lands in your garage. The thing is massive, weighing over 6 pounds, and covers in detail most 1950-ish to pre-1973 motorcycles. This book has saved me so many times I refuse to count that high. While not the same as a one-make-and-model shop manual Chilton’s Motorcycle Repair Manual gives you enough information to fix most any old bike out there.
Beyond it’s practical applications, Chilton’s Motorcycle Repair Manual is enjoyable as pure entertainment. Looking over the repair procedures for a bike I will never own is a guilty pleasure. The book covers Z1s and H2s and has helped me make decisions about bikes on my wish list.
Structurally, Chilton’s Motorcycle Repair Manual is pretty flimsy. The hard covers are there to protect the super thin, magazine quality paper inside. I guess that was the only way fit in all the information and keep the beast to 6 pounds. Turn the pages carefully, my brothers. Oddly a used Chilton’s Motorcycle Repair Manual is not that expensive to buy. $35 is a cheap price to pay for the joyful information contained within.
Last but not least is another book I haven’t read but I do have it on order from Amazon. One Man Caravan by Robert Edison Fulton, Jr. One Man Caravan deserves it’s lofty spot simply because it’s The Mother of All Adventure Books. Nowadays everyone and their mother are riding motorcycles around the world and publishing a book about it. We’ve become complacent. Bored with the same old stories. Fulton did it way back, between the first horror of WW1 that was supposed to end all wars and the second, more complete horror of WW2. Fulton did it before it was a thing and he rode a (Douglas?) which makes him much, much cooler than anyone else. All the reviews I’ve read about the book are rave so I look forward to reading the thing when it shows up.
It’s a sad thing when your list of five best motorcycle books has two books you haven’t read but there is nothing I can do about it now. Let me know if I’ve missed any!
bags all the way from Rajasthan would do the trick.
