Author: Joe Gresh

Squeeze Me: KLR250 Refresh, Reflash and Rehash Part 3

The KLR250 refurbishment has been going slowly but in addition to that I’m not getting much done otherwise. It’s the heat. Temperatures at Tinfiny Ranch have been hovering around 100 degrees or more and under these conditions it’s all I can do to press paper firebricks.

I did manage to order a brake caliper kit from England. The Widow Maker’s front brake gave me lots of problems at Daytona this year. The caliper was mightily stuck and the master cylinder was odd feeling. I managed to get the brake working well enough for Bike Week and replaced the master cylinder in a previous R, R & R episode but I didn’t trust my half-assed Florida Man repairs on the caliper.

The Brakemasters rebuild kit was very complete and was inexpensive to boot. The Widowmaker’s original rubber parts lasted through 20 years of neglect so the new stuff has a steep hill to climb. The only part I didn’t care for was the new bleeder nipple. The replacement nipple did not want to thread in easily. I could have forced it and remolded the aluminum caliper threads but instead used the old nipple, which threaded in by hand.

As expected, the caliper job went well. Old motorcycles with single-piston calipers are a breeze to repair. The hardest part was fitting the dust seal into the caliper body and then fitting the piston. I didn’t remember how I did the trick last March and was getting frustrated. Thank goodness for YouTube; I pulled up a quick search on caliper dust boot installation and there was a guy showing me how to do the deal.

I think in March I used a beer can to make an expander sleeve for the piston and then slid the piston into the (already installed in the caliper) boot. It just wasn’t working this time. Maybe fresh rubber is stronger than 20-year-old rubber. YouTube man fitted the boot to the piston first (the opposite of what I was doing) and let a short length of rubber hang off the back. That hanging bit was then pushed and prodded into its groove on the caliper. Once the dust boot is in the groove the piston can be slid into the caliper all the way until the piston groove catches the other end of the boot. With all the talk of grooves this sounds confusing but that’s why YouTube videos are so nice. YouTube Man’s method worked great and the caliper is now ready for reinstallation.

If it cools off a little I’ll tackle the fork seals and re-grease the steering head bearings next. And keep making firebricks, of course.

More on the KLR250 and other moto-resurrection stuff is on the ExNotes Resurrections page!

The Not-So-Free Press

Long time readers know that we try to avoid political topics here at ExhaustNotes.us. There’s no percentage in it as the best you can hope for is losing half your audience. Oh sure, we could tear off the bandages and let fly with the anti-pros and pro-cons as good as the next guys. But with Berk leaning right and me not-leaning-right the result would be a complete loss of all of our readers. No, the free press I’m referring to in this click-bait title is my four-brick, paper brick maker that I got for Christmas last year.

This brick thing happened because I’m a subscriber to the Sunday edition of The New York Times. The Sunday Times is a left-biased but mostly true news source that is so big you can read the thing all week long. The NYT puzzle page is legendary and it takes me forever to do the crossword…in ink. And what happens after you read the huge quantity of great writing contained within? Boom! Into the trash goes all that fine newsprint. I felt guilty throwing those efforts into the landfill. It doesn’t have to be this way. I’ve started recycling The New York Times into home heating blocks for the coming winter. If this works out well I may start a commune. We’ll wear flowers in our hair and stink. I’ll call it The Gresh Utopian Society, or Gus, for short.

After shredding all that mostly true but left-biased information I toss the confetti into an empty cat litter bucket. Any bucket will work but the cat litter bucket seems appropriate for America’s political mood. Next I pour water over the top of the paper and add a bit of bleach to keep the odor and mold to a tolerable level. You’ll need to let the paper soak for a week or more for it to break it down into an oatmeal-consistency mush. I give the mush a stir every few days just to let it know I’m thinking of it.

The paper brick mold is a simple machine with four perforated compartments for mush and a close-fitting plunger to squeeze the water from the mush and compress the block. My example was a little too close fitting as it was nearly impossible to get the plunger into the mold. A quick session with a grinder and pliers made the plunger more plungerable, if I can use that word.

Once you’ve filled the mold with your paper mush a heavy weight on the plunger will supply steady pressure and solidify your firebricks. Drying time is about a week out here in arid New Mexico. If you tried this in Florida or the Pacific Northwest the bricks may never dry. Yes, this is a time-consuming process but look on the bright side. If you find one let me know.

The finished paper brick is surprisingly lightweight. It takes two NYT Sunday editions to make about six bricks (depending on what President Trump has said or done the week the paper came out). I have just started building my winter stockpile so I can’t really say if this is a good idea or a total waste of time. As they say, the truth is in the burning and if the bricks ever dry out completely I’ll write a follow up report on how long the paper bricks stay aflame on the next slow news day.

Skip Duke

Skip Duke lived in New Mexico and died before I got the chance to meet him. I don’t know the exact date he shuffled off. Judging from the condition of Tinfiny Ranch when we first bought it from his daughter I’m guessing five or more years had elapsed between our purchase of Skip’s run-down mountain property and his death.

I never met Skip Duke but I get a strong sense of the man from the junk he left behind. I found boxes of mixed fasteners and some really nice ¼-inch by 8-inch screws with flat-topped heads. The heads are 5/8-inch wide and made so that the fastener countersinks itself like a giant deck screw. These screws are so nice I want to build something just to use them. Skip left behind two really nice red-painted, bottle jacks; one of them must be a 50-ton model. It’s a bruiser, like a foot tall and weighs 40 pounds. Skip was into radios: he was a Ham operator I’m guessing. Tinfiny had several antenna wires strung over the trees and arroyos. In his broken down shop I found a signal generator, watt meter and some other radio test gear that I couldn’t identify. That’s some old school radio stuff, man.

I never met Skip Duke but I think I would have liked him. Skip Duke had multiple uncompleted projects running in parallel when he died and that’s the same way I work. I get bored with one project and switch over to another, never finishing any of them. The 1975 Kawasaki 900 I call Zed was one of Skip’s unfinished projects. In the scattered debris of Skip’s life I found motorcycle magazines from the 1970’s featuring the new Z1900. The bike got universally rave reviews in the magazines, and rightfully so: the 900cc Z1 Kawasaki was a landmark motorcycle.

From reading old correspondence I found that Skip was having trouble with a Dyna III electronic ignition system he bought for the old Kawasaki. A melted wiring harness on Zed and no sign of the electronic ignition leads me to believe Skip sent the rotor and pick up coils back for a refund or tossed them in the bushes. One day I’m going to look for it with a metal detector. I found the original points plate in a box of MG car parts and after I cleaned them up the bike ran fine. I remember when electronic ignitions were novel, high tech stuff. I didn’t like them back then either.

Abandoned for years, Skip Duke’s house was overrun by rats when we looked at it with Ronnie, our real estate agent. A converted garage, the house had one bedroom, a living room, a kitchen and a bathroom. Maybe 500 square feet under roof. On the right side of the house was a small garage where Skip kept his tools and his motorcycles. I found a working 4-inch Makita belt sander in there. The bottom garage door panel was broken and the door hung off its track. You could walk inside. Ronnie looked around and said, “There used to be more motorcycles in here.” Next to the garage Zed was sitting outside in the weather, leading me to believe thieves had made off with Skip’s better motorcycles. As if there ever was a motorcycle better than a Z1.

We gutted Skip’s house. Every night after work I would put down 5 of those green rat poison blocks. Every morning they would be gone. Eventually the pace slowed until one day I found the poison untouched. The rats ate a total of 3 gallon-size buckets of poison but I won the war. I spent a pleasant two weeks hauling out dead rats and disinfecting the entire place with a solution of 50/50 bleach and water. My lungs burned and my vision blurred but at last the place was clean and rodent free inside.

We replaced the siding, drywall and insulation, and rewired most of the the electrical system. Skip’s little garage area is now my wife CT’s walk in closet. The concrete ramp leading to the garage has been leveled off and is a 5’ X 14’ office and storage room. We re-plumbed the bathroom and redid the kitchen eliminating any appliance that hinted at being a stove. We named the little house in the arroyo “The Carriage House” hoping to boost the little shack’s confidence. New paint and tile made The Carriage House look fresh inside. Skip’s old fiberglass shower stall was hard to remove and we were running out of time so it still serves, the last remnant of a bygone owner.

Skip Duke was not satisfied with the little Carriage House and had bigger plans in the works. Further up the property there was a graded area where Skip was going to build a structure. Two large, wooden sawhorses held 8-foot x 20-foot sheets of a composite material consisting of 6” white Styrofoam sandwiched between two layers of glued-on, exterior grade, 1/2’’ oriented strand board. There was enough paneling to build a 20 X 40 insulated building. Unfortunately, death has a way of messing up the best of plans. The 20’ X 40’ structure never got built. White plastic sheeting covered the composite panels but the relentless New Mexico sun crystallized the plastic. The sheet lay in tatters and it would crumble when you tried to pick it up. Without protection the panels fell victim to the elements.

Oriented strand board is fairly weather resistant but you can’t let it remain wet for long. Stacked horizontally on the sawhorses, the panels couldn’t shed water and the pooled moisture between the panels rotted the OSB. I’m sure if Skip Duke knew he was going to die he would have stacked them vertically allowing water to run out from between the panels. I managed to salvage enough panel material to build the walls for another of Skip’s unfinished projects: the pump house.

The original pump house was a 55-gallon metal drum over the wellhead. Inside the living room was a 40-gallon pressure tank to smooth out the cycling of the well pump. I can’t figure why anyone would want a gigantic pressure tank in their living room but Skip was not a man who trifled with cosmetics. The amount of paneling I could salvage determined the size of the well house so I poured a 6’ X 10” slab with a central drain and built a small shed over the well. I moved the 40-gallon pressure tank to the new well house and installed a water softener next to the pressure tank. With 6” thick Styrofoam walls the pump house is so well insulated a 150-watt chicken coop heater keeps the pipes nice and toasty in winter. Too bad so much composite paneling was ruined; it would have made for a super energy efficient house.

When Skip Duke died he left behind a 24-foot motorhome without an engine, an 18-foot Hobie Cat sailboat on a trailer, a 1974 MGB-GT hardtop 4-seater, a 4-person Jacuzzi with seized air and water pump motors, two large dog houses and a backyard chicken coop with camouflage netting over the top. Skip was a man who was into everything cool. I got rid of the junk except for the MG. Those hardtops with their Italian, Pininfarina-designed hatchbacks are rare. I might get it running one day.

Life is funny. I have an Internet buddy also named Skip Duke. He is very much alive and a Kawasaki Z1 guru. The living Skip Duke’s Kawasaki advice has saved me untold woe in the long restoration process of dead Skip Duke’s motorcycle. I bet the two Skips would get along famously (either that or they’d kill each other).

I never knew Skip Duke. We’ve remodeled and reused his vast pile of junk in ways he could not have foreseen. I wish he had left details of his future plans, like notes stuck to each project describing what he saw as success. I hope he’s looking down (or up as the case may be; Skip might have been a real jerk) and smiling as he sees his old Kawasaki motorcycle (now my old Kawasaki motorcycle) roaring down the highway full of life and power. I hope whatever becomes of that soulful part of a man after death is aware of the happy life CT and I have built atop the 5-acre spread he must have loved dearly. And I hope he finds joy in all that we have done.

Follow the complete Z1 resurrection here!

For more on Tinfiny Ranch and the Tinfiny Summit, check out the YouTube videos here!

Motorcycle Camping: Level 1

The town of Weed is our last chance for gas or groceries. It’s a small place, population 20, and every Weed-ian citizen is packing heat. The chick working at the only store in town sports some kind of .45 auto that wobbles a crazy figure 8 on her hip as she totes pallets of soda pop from the storage shed into the store. The tall cowboy who delivers propane has a revolver on his hip also but that gun is not nearly as active.

Look there: a soccer mom wearing a white cowboy hat, plaid shirt, jeans and a 9mm pistol goes into the store for a gallon of milk. Mid-sized dogs hop out of a Polaris side-by-side, both dogs strapped with camouflaged vests that sport bandoliers of ammunition and pup-optimized night-vision goggles. Tactical mutts, man. A small child, not more than 2 months old waves about a menacing AR-15 while his head lolls in an elliptical orbit. Each complete cycle baby’s hard eyes lock onto mine and dare me to steal his candy before rotating on.

Okay, okay, I’m joking. The baby wasn’t carrying an AR-15. Needless to say, the crime rate is low in Weed. Either that or the woods are full of spongy ground and failed attempts. Mike and I fill our gas tanks at Weed not so much because we need fuel but because it’s more an offering to the forest gods before we leave civilization. Cover me while I pump the 87 octane.

Mike has a BMW 650 and I’m on my Husqvarna 510.  We leave Weed heading west and after the even smaller town of Sacramento, Aqua Chiquita Road rises into a dark green forest of pines and aspens. This is the Lincoln National Forest. National and state parks may be closed due to Covid but here in New Mexico rough camping in the forests is still allowed.

We originally planned on camping further west, on Thousand Mile Trail, but an interesting unmarked side road caught our attention so we wandered off to see where it went. You can do stuff like that when you have no destination.

The side road was bumpy and almost all rock. Not loose rock, but solid rock. We bounced along for a mile and the road dipped into a sandy mud hole. Off to the right was a wide, shallow valley covered in lush green grass and dotted with grazing cows. “What do you think?” asked Mike. “Lets go check it out.”

The valley was much smoother than the road. There were tangles of old barbed wire sprinkled among the cow patties. Each time we would stop at the perfect camping place another perfect camping place was just a little further ahead. We kept following the Valley Of Perfect Campsites until it split off into two directions. We made camp at the junction of the two valleys on a slight rise that gave a commanding view of the pastoral scene.

I mean camping doesn’t get any better than this: no people, no RV’s, the camp even had a pre-constructed fire-ring and enough firewood for a month. Setting up my new tent was easy. I’ve used pup-style tents for years and they are all the same simple sleeve with two poles. One modification I’ve learned over the years is to use bungee cords for tying off the end poles. In a hard wind the bungees stretch but don’t yank the tent pegs out of the ground.

The pup tent was easy enough to rig but my new air mattress made up for it. I bought a Soble brand mattress with a built-in pump. The deal is, you remove the cap and then the plug on the square pump area. Next you push down on the square pump to fill the mattress. And you pump. And you pump. I started grumbling, “This damn mattress pump isn’t doing anything!”

I pumped and pumped. Sweat started trickling down my sides and still I pumped. Then I tried inflating it by blowing into the fill hole. After 20 minutes of struggling I was light headed, feeling sick and getting nowhere. I gave up and tossed the completely flat mattress into the tent and my sleeping bag over that. At least we had soft grass under the tents.

We were drinking smoky coffee and cooking hot dogs on a stick over our roaring fire. It really was the perfect camp site. Mike asked me, “Tell me how your air mattress works.” I explained the cap and the plug and the little square built-in pump to him. Mike thought about it for a few minutes then asked me, “How do you deflate the mattress?” I was stunned. What a dumb-ass question: deflating the mattress was the last thing I wanted to do! Then Mike said, “There must be a way to let the air out.”

My world shattered. Dark, stumbling stupidity was illuminated by the light of one thousand suns. Of course! There had to be a second plug! I ran to the tent, all doubt erased. There, underneath the pillow on the opposite side from the pump was a 1-inch deflation valve and it was wide open. For 20 minutes I had been pushing air from the foot of the mattress out the valve on the other end. With the deflation valve plugged the Soble mattress took about 2 minutes to inflate into a firm, comfortable sleeping pad.

After the air mattress debacle I realized I should have brought some gin along. I’ll put that on my list of equipment along with more water. Making coffee, cleaning up and drinking used up most of our water supply. Mike had an emergency drinking straw, the king you put into any old water and it filters the muck. A stream runs alongside Aqua Chiquita road a few miles away so we weren’t going to die. Other things we brought but didn’t use were aerosol cans of bear spray and bear bells. The bells were CT’s idea. If a bear can’t hear me snoring then he’s a pretty old bear.

Speaking of snoring, I’ll need a new sleeping bag as the tiny mummy bag would not allow much movement. I finally un-zipped the thing so I could turn and parts of me fell out into the 50-degree night air. I woke up sore. But then I always wake up sore. That night air also soaked all our gear. The bikes were wet, our folding stools were wet, the inside of my tent was dripping with condensation and that’s with both sides open. Mike’s tent didn’t have a rain fly, the top is mesh and was still wet inside. I don’t know if this was just a function of the dew point or the tent material not breathing.

Hot coffee in the morning will pave over a lot of rough patches and by 11 a.m. we felt alert enough to head back down the mountain. We rode west on Aqua Chiquita until Scott Able Road and followed Scott Able back to the paved highway.

A brief discussion was held at the 1000 Mile Trail, our original destination but we were both kind of tired from our night on the hoof. Anyone who thinks homeless people are homeless by choice has never camped with me. I don’t like motorcycle camping and this trip has done nothing to alter my opinion. I guess it’s the new normal until things start re-opening and a treatment or vaccine for Covid 19 is created. I’m not going to complain too much. I’ve learned more on fine-tuning my camping gear, which was the goal on this ride. You know, waking up sore and damp beats not waking up at all.

4 Things You Need To Survive Motorcycle Touring With Covid-19

With the advent of a killer virus sweeping the nation, traveling long distance by motorcycle has become more complicated. We used to hop on our motorcycles, ride all day and then in the evening get a room at the cheapest motel we could find. Those days are over. Don’t get me wrong; motels are still an option, much like Russian roulette is a fun parlor game. Go ahead, pull back those sheets and crawl inside. Did the maid really disinfect the room? Was the last traveler teeming with the virus, coughing and spitting his way to sleep? What can you touch and what can’t you touch?

Nowadays to go anywhere far on a motorcycle you’ll need to be able to camp, and not at commercial campgrounds either. Campground bathhouses were never a sterile environment in the first place, now they seem like a damp Club Med for viruses. I’ll take my chances with the bears, you know? I’m talking rough camping: riding into a National Forest, finding an out of the way spot with nice soft grass and bedding down for the night.

The first thing you’ll need is a tent. In my younger days I spent many uncomfortable nights sleeping out in the open. I’d pull over, toss a plastic tarp on the ground and just lay down. That was the full extent of my camping preparation. I’ve since learned that biting bugs, rain and animals make having a tent the way to go. I bought this small, old school style pup tent because I’m done setting up the flex-pole igloo type tents. Small pup tents are smaller and lighter than igloos and there are too many stressed elements in an igloo. Every Igloo tent I’ve owned ended up tearing.

I’m going to assume you already own a sleeping bag (everyone should). In addition to the sleeping bag an air mattress will drastically improve your chances of falling asleep inside that claustrophobic pup tent. If you’re 20 years old you could probably forgo the air mattress. I’m using one with a built in pump instead of the self-inflating type for two reasons. Number one is an inflatable packs down much smaller than a self-inflating type. Number two is the self-inflating pads compress and after a few minutes you’re on the ground anyway. The need to keep the size and weight of your camping gear to a minimum will become apparent when you start loading your motorcycle.

Hard-core riders can get away without a camp stove but I’m not a hard-core rider. I need my coffee in the morning or a can of warm soup in the evening. Unfortunately, while the burner itself is tiny, carrying one of these small, gas-powered stoves requires a bunch of other gear. I have one pot to boil water or soup, extra water to clean up the mess and then there’s the gas bottle, which is like three times the size of the camp stove. Not to mention the stuff you are going to cook. It’s a space and weight commitment you may not want to make. Plain old water and candy bars will work fine if it’s only a one-night road trip.

Now we are getting into purely luxury items. When you rough camp in the forest there are never picnic tables, benches, fire rings or screaming children. This type of folding camp chair can really make a campsite feel like home. There are two basic styles of small camp chairs, the tripod type and the X type. I prefer the X-type because they are less prone to sink into soft ground…like the ground you find in a forest. The tripod type is much easier to fold up so you’ll have to make your choice based on terrain and patience level.

All the gear in this story can be purchased for less than one night’s stay at a motel so there’s the cost savings to be considered. I can pack everything in one medium-sized stuff bag and bungee the mess to my motorcycle. It’s not an easy way to travel for sure but with many national and state parks closed now it’s about the only way to travel. I’ve recently purchased all the camping gear you see above attempting to make my pack smaller and lighter. And I’ve succeeded: It’s easily half the size and weight of my old camping gear. I’ve yet to use it in anger but that will change soon. My riding buddy Mike and I are going on a several day ride and since we are old, lung impaired and clinging to life by a thread we both feel like rough camping is the safest option Covid-wise.

Catch up on our most recent blogs here!

Hasty Conclusions:  First Look at Viking Cycle’s Warlock Jacket

 Viking Cycle sent Joe Berk a new jacket to test and since I’m the loyal, half-witted sidekick, Berk made sure I got one, too. Viking Cycle was just in time with their products because the heat in New Mexico was getting a bit much for me. I was tempted to go bare on my motorcycle. The folks at Viking Cycle let me pick whichever jacket I wanted and I chose the Warlock, a mesh jacket that should flow plenty of air. I went with the high viz color because car drivers, along with Americans in general, are getting more careless in their comportment. And I look cool besides.

Viking Cycle’s prices are incredibly low. The Warlock mesh in several colors retails for just $54.99 and if you give Viking your email (or invent a new one) they will knock 15% off the already ridiculously low price. All the Viking gear is very economical (check out their website). If you’ve been paying attention to ExhaustNotes you know I’m a cheap bastard. The Warlock appeals to me in that place where my miser instinct festers.

The Warlock comes with a zip-in, vest-style liner, which I promptly removed and tossed into the growing pile of other inner liners. I don’t use them and on a mesh jacket it would defeat the purpose of the mesh. Instead I’ll toss a rain jacket over the Warlock if it gets too cool. Colder still and I’ll put a shirt on underneath the mesh. It’s all about the layers, man.

Kind of a neat feature that I’ve never seen before is the front-pocket lanyard. I guess you can clip your house keys or 9mm semi-automatic pistol to the lanyard and it will prevent them from falling onto the ground when you’re retrieving other items from the pocket. There are four front pockets and one inner pocket. The pockets are plastic so they should delay rainwater from getting inside but if it’s raining you will probably have the whole jacket covered anyway. The Warlock has back armor, elbow armor, and chest armor. The elbow armor slips into a hook-and-loop pouch and sometimes when I slide my arm into the sleeves my finger will catch on the pouch. Not a big deal but since I have not tested the jacket yet I have to come up with something.

The Warlock is made in Pakistan which should appeal to my anti-China friends (I’m talking to you, Keith). To tell you the truth I’m not sure if we are at war with Pakistan or not but it can’t hurt to outsource some of our manufacturing to a wide variety of countries just to keep the world’s economy humming.

I like the fit of my XL Warlock. The arms are slim so they shouldn’t flap around yet the middle is suitably sized for a well-fed Westerner like me. As far as quality goes, the Warlock looks like any other mesh motorcycle jacket. I mean, I’m not a seamstress, I don’t see any glaring problems. I will need to put a few thousand miles on the Warlock mesh jacket to see if anything goes pear-shaped. Unfortunately it’s been raining like mad here in New Mexico and I don’t want to get my motorcycle dirty. Keep watching this space for a full road test of the Warlock.

See more ExhaustNotes product reviews here!

South By South Bend: Part 2

 The South Bend lathe project has been waylaid by several factors, none of them your fault. I did manage to wire the 4-pole, two-position, center-off toggle switch into the Harbor Freight ½ horsepower motor. So now I have forward and reverse. I’ll probably never use reverse but it’s good to have it in case you want to cut from the backside.

I could have made the motor reverse with a three-pole switch but since the motor is wired high voltage (240vac) you want all hot legs disconnected when the switch is in the off position. And I had the switch. The switch connections started out simple enough but soon I had wire coming out my ears. I ended up having to double up the metal junction box to allow enough space for the spaghetti.

I normally don’t like complicated things but I couldn’t come up with a better way and it was like 115 degrees in the shed. Not a good temperature for thinking. I’ve included a shot of the Harbor Freight motor’s faceplate in case anyone can come up with a simpler way of reversing the motor.

After the motor was running I had to file the 3/4-inch to 5/8-inch shaft-sleeve as it was too tight from the factory. I also cut down the tall key that was included in the sleeve package. The new belt is narrower than the original, or maybe not. The old one was pretty rotten. As it is situated, the inner face of the belt contacts the center of the motor pulley. The V-sides are supposed to do the contacting around here. I forget if A is wider than B in belt-speak but I’ll have to do a little work on the belt and pulleys. The thing works like it is so that’s good enough for now.

I’ve been relearning the various levers and knobs on the South Bend, levers and knobs that I knew blindfolded 40 years ago. My first cuts were ragged, a combination of no end support on the work piece and a cutting tool that has been in the lathe for eternity. I’ve since quelled the shaking by using a live center. That one change improved the appearance of the machined surface by 42%. The tool is still not what I want as it is tearing material more than cutting. I might try some of these newfangled carbide tools, the ones with a three-sided cutting edge that you can swap as it gets dull.

I’ve machined my test piece to roughly 5/8” so my next trick will be to dig around the junk box and see if I can find a thread cutting tool. You need a V with the correct angle. Watch this space for the threaded rod or mangled mess. I’ll also go over the remaining tooling I have for the South Bend. I’ve lost a lot of stuff over the years but there are still toys like steady rests, faceplates, and lathe dogs to clean up and experiment with.

You can read the first part of South Bend story here.

Tools For a Motorcycle Trip Part 2: You’ll Need a Luggage Rack

ExhaustNotes.us contributor Mike Huber recently wrote a story about tools to carry on a motorcycle trip. The story threw me because I was expecting a list of actual tools. Instead, Huber wrote about high tech software and hardware to make a motorcycle trip safer and more enjoyable. He should know as he lives on a motorcycle.

I’m always scratching for something to write about. The Internet consumes content at an incredible pace so I figured I’d steal Huber’s idea and write about the tools I carry on a motorcycle. This tool set may seem like a lot but I bring it along on a 7-mile run to the post office or a cross-country ride. Much like a large, ugly tail rack I won’t leave home on a motorcycle without tools.

If your bike has a kick-starter these little jump starters are not a must-have but with a high-compression 500cc single cylinder and no kick starter the Husqvarna is a bear to push start with a dead battery. Luckily I haven’t needed to jump the Husky yet but I have used the jump starter to start cars, other motorcycles (see Royal Enfield Bullet) and just yesterday I used it to start the back-up generator when the power went out at Tinfiny Ranch.

My nephew, Anthony gave me this one and it’s a pricy unit but you can find them on Amazon for as low as $25. I have a cheapie in every car and they work well. Not only will the tiny, lightweight battery jumpstart a diesel tractor or large cruise ship, it will charge your cell phone many times over. The only flaw with them is that they hold a charge for so long you tend to forget about them. Remember to recharge the thing every 6 months or so.

If you have a 12-volt system, not a given with old motorcycles, a small electric air compressor will save you hours of pumping after fixing a flat tire. This one is Slime brand but any of them will work. For some reason I frequently get flat tires so this pump sees regular action.

Of course a pump is useless without a patch kit. Most of my motorcycles still run inner tubes, which are a PITA, compared to tubeless tires. If you can find access to the hole without further damaging the tube patching is easy and reliable. I also carry a spare tube in case a tube becomes irreparable from my ham-fisted repair attempts.

A Leatherman multi-tool pocketknife covers a lot of bases and takes up little space. There are other brands of multi-tool and they are ok but I still think the Leatherman is the best of the bunch. Leatherman also has a great warranty. If you break a blade just send it back and Leatherman will send you a new knife. I’ve done it twice and had no issues.

An assortment of basic tools will get you out of trouble most times. I carry vise grips, tire irons, a decent multi-tip screwdriver, a few wrenches and ¼-inch sockets with driver, and a little flashlight. Vise grips will most likely damage whatever you use them on but they will get the job done and you can replace the chewed up parts when you get back home. The small aluminum tin case seen in the cover photo contains a universal cable repair kit. This is a neat item with several different cable ends and a length of cable. The various ends screw on so you can make a temporary cable for damn near any motorcycle. I’ve never used this item but I will be well-chuffed (warning: Brit slang!) if I ever do need the thing.

I also carry a spare master link, electric tape for those melt downs, a bit of bailing wire, tie wraps and a length of measuring tape. The measuring tape is super for seal cleaning or shimming or even measuring.

In addition to the basic tool set I add a few motorcycle brand-specific bits as I swap the tool set from bike-to-bike. A tube of Seal All rides with me on the Kawasaki 900 because the gas tank was very rusty and might spring a leak at any time. The Yamaha 360 gets a flywheel puller, a jug of two-stroke oil and a 21-inch front tube that will fit both wheels if it has too. The Husqvarna gets a 17-inch tube to suit its odd-sized wheels.

The tool kit rolls up in a canvas bag along with a few paper towels. No two ways about it, this kit is heavy. I look at it this way: The extra weight of the tools is offset by the lightness of my soul knowing I have the ability to fix most any minor problem on the road.

Hey, check out our ExhaustNotes.us home page, where we now have a quick index to our most recent blogs!

The Nevada Northern: It’s Worth a Trip To Ely

I last time I was in Ely, Nevada I was riding motorcycles with my Dad. I had a Honda XL600 and he was on a Suzuki 450 twin street bike. This must have been in the mid-1980’s because my XL600 was a 1983 model and the bike wasn’t that old at the time. We were traveling east on The Loneliest Highway, Nevada’s Route 50, and made a turn south onto, if not The Loneliest, a damn lonely Highway 93. In doing this we skirted Ely having never seen the main part of town or even realized it existed. The impression that there was nothing at Ely except a gas station and a sandblasted alien curio shop stuck with me for the next 35 years. Until I recently turned east off of Highway 50 onto 93 heading north: There was a whole town with streets and a downtown area! So not nothing after all.

Ely, Nevada has a cool, working train museum just a few blocks off the highway. Look, I love trains. I like riding on them. I like sitting nearby when they rip down the tracks at speed. I like waiting at crossing guards, how the train takes precedence. I like how engineers will still blow the whistle when you ride alongside on your motorcycle making that whistle-blowing arm motion. I like the wheels of the train flattening the pennies I put on the tracks. (If they don’t shake off.) I like riding motorcycles on old railroad right-of-ways and rotting black ties full of termites. I mean, my bathroom towel holders are bent railroad spikes, man. The older the train the better; steam trains are at the top of the list. You get dirty just looking at a steam engine. I like a train that sets fire to the countryside and consumes coal and water like a Saturn Five consumes rocket fuel. I guess I just like a train, you know?

Inside the Nevada Northern Railway yard you can wander through the old workshops where huge machinery worn smooth by decades of human interaction await the call. And the stuff still works! Lifetimes have been spent spinning these wheels. The day I visited the action was kind of slow, even the shop cat was nowhere to be found but I did see new bronze axle bearings waiting to be finished.

The star of any train museum is the Steam Engine. For all the reasons mentioned above. Imagine cross-country travel cut from 3 months to 3 days. Telegraph lines ran alongside railroad tracks sending messages thousands of miles at the speed of light. (minus a few relay stations) For their time and impact on society, these smoking water-spewing monsters make the Internet’s capabilities look like two rusty baked bean cans and a length of string.

Things used to be a lot snowier in the west, miles-long snow sheds were built in the Rockies and where the sheds petered out giant snow blowers cleared the tracks. This one looks to be in pretty good condition. I can spend hours poking around this place daydreaming about being alive in that era. Maybe I could have been the one spinning those wheels or repairing leaking heat exchangers.

Check in with the Nevada Northern (https://www.nnry.com) and be sure to get a ride on the old trains. They still operate on a schedule, just not when I was there. There’s a gift shop full of cool train-a-phernalia and cold drinks. I walked for hours but I’ll be going back to Ely again. I want to ride!

Want more railroad stuff?  Hey, here’s a great railroad story about Old No. 463.  How about the Chattanooga Choo Choo? And another one about Golden Spike National Historic Site.  We’ve got two more train stories coming up real soon about the railroad museum in Sacramento and Big Boy (Ol’ No. 4014), too, so stay tuned!

Repairing Blinkers: KLR250 Refresh, Reflash and Rehash Part 2

Blinkers on a dirt bike are kind of silly but lately I’ve been running The Widowmaker, my 2005 KLR 250, on the street more than is right or just. The KLR250 spends most of its time in Florida and the automobile drivers in that state are legendarily bad. With Nearly-Deads behind the wheel and blind rage as their co-pilot any blinking light that may draw attention is a good thing.

The Widowmaker’s blinkers have had a rough go of it. They worked fine when I bought the bike but several thousand miles of the Trans America Trail managed to put a pronounced sag in the rubber stalks holding the lamp fixtures. The rubber soon cracked and the blinkers hung down swinging on their electrical wires.

At first I managed to keep the original stalks in the game using the KLR rider’s best friend, duct tape. Soon the tape was not enough and I progressed to beer can wraps, bailing wire and spit. The rubber stalks crystallized and began to crumble into small, hard black cubes. It was a metamorphosis: soft, pliable rubber became fragile like chalk. The lamps, now free from their moorings swung in a crazy amber half circle pointing towards the ground. As they filled up with water the light fixtures quit blinking and they became memories of directional indicators slapping the side of the motorcycle.

I couldn’t find replacement stalks online. The complete blinker is sold as a unit and when your motorcycle needs as much attention as mine you can’t blow a bunch of money on parts that will break off soon anyway. I dismantled the old blinkers and decided to try to fix them for two reasons: Because I’m cheap like that and KLR riders will always take the hardest path.

Two of the direction lamps weren’t rusty and came apart fairly easy. The rusty ones were more of a challenge. I had to soak them in penetrating oil and break the glass bulbs in order to remove the bulb base from the socket using pliers. After getting them apart I soaked the rusty bits in Evaporust for a few days and then painted the reflector and socket a fetching metallic silver.

Making new stalks was a conundrum: I needed something stiff enough to hold the lamp in position but flexible enough to bend during a crash, preventing destruction of the blinker lens and housing. I toyed with the idea of two thin strips of sheet metal to provide a malleable stem that could be bent back into position. I debated welding a thin tube between the threaded ends but didn’t have any tubing that would serve the purpose.

I settled on ½” Pex plastic plumbing tubing mainly because it comes in a red color than neatly matches The Widowmaker’s faded bodywork. The Pex copper crimp rings would make for a neat finished end to the Frankenstalks. The only problem was the threaded ends salvaged from the old rubber parts were a little too big for the Pex pipe.

I really could have used the South Bend lathe to turn down the ends but that project is not completed yet so I had to chuck the parts into a hand drill and grind them to size. Even cut down they were still too large for the Pex but I didn’t want to grind any more and lose the knurling. It’s amazing how a new tool opens up avenues of creativity. It frees your mind, man. My new tubing expander (bought for an air conditioning job) made short work of the Pex inside diameter and the threaded inserts fit perfectly.

Next I used the tubing expander to resize the copper Pex crimp rings to fit the expanded pipe. Things were going well. After crimping the copper rings with a hydraulic cable crimper the stalks looked like 100 bucks.

The grinding process put a divot in the threaded end so I had to run a 10mm die over the things to straighten out the divots. With 4 new blinker stalks it was only a matter of time before everything was reassembled and back on the motorcycle. I’ll need to put a battery in to see if the blinkers actually work (I’m using the same battery in the Z1, the Husky, and the KLR) but I remain confident they will work at least as good as they used to. Which is not at all.

A few questions remain. Will the crimped ends stay put on a rough trail? I assume they will rip out during a crash and that’s good. My new stalks cost about 67 cents apiece so I can replace them as often as I like. Will the plastic tube droop leaving me with a sad-eyed KLR250? Will the bike require a plumbing inspection now? I don’t know the answers but I’ll report back if these Frankenstalks actually work.

More “Bring ‘Em Back Alive” Gresh Resurrection stories are here!