Towards the end of last year’s heating season the Vevor 12-volt, 5kw diesel heater started shutting down and giving an error code. The big blue, start/stop button on the front of the machine blinks the code number between pauses. I counted an error No. 8, which the owner’s manual said was a problem with the temperature sensor. This was a little disappointing because I had only run 10 gallons of diesel through the heater. (It runs a long time on a gallon, like 8 hours) I didn’t mess with it at the time as it was warming up and I was busy doing other vital, yet unimportant tasks.
Fast-forward to winter, 2024 and it’s cold again so I figured I’d better fix the heater. I looked up a new temperature sensor for $4 on Amazon and after waiting a few weeks the thing came all the way from China. Installing the new temperature sensor changed nothing. The heater kept shutting down with an error code No. 8.
Utube Academy provided some more ideas, one of which was the fuel pump was not functioning good enough to keep the fire going. I bought a new fuel pump on Amazon for $18 and installed it. After bleeding the air out of the pump the heater turned on for a few minutes and then shut down showing error code No. 8 again.
Another Utube suggestion was that the glow plug was bad, failing to ignite the diesel fuel. While looking up the glow plug @ $19 I found a complete new heater for $90 with free delivery. I stuck the new heater in the shopping cart and it showed up a few days later.
The new heater was almost an exact duplicate of the Vevor unit and in fact it had a more advanced keypad display instead of a blue button. The replacement unit swapped out easily and in no time I had heat in the shed.
A few more weeks passed and the new glow plug showed up. Taking the unit apart to gain access to the plug was easy and I pulled the wires off of the glow plug so I could put a socket on the thing. That wasn’t a good idea. Turns out the wires are non-removable and you need a special 12mm slotted deep socket to unscrew the plug. When I pulled the wires off I actually broke the glow plug ceramic. The special socket for the plug was helpfully included in the box with the new glow plug. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize this before destroying the old glow plug. That’s just how I roll.
None of this mattered because once I started taking the heater apart I noticed the exhaust port was almost plugged with diesel soot.
It was so clogged I had to take the fuel feed pipe and the combustion chamber apart to clean out all the soot.
The gaskets tore when I dismantled the fuel feed and the combustion chamber so I had to order new gaskets from Amazon @$16. If you’re keeping count I now had almost as much in parts as a heater costs.
These Chinese diesel heaters are pretty simple to work on and after cleaning the combustion chamber and exhaust pipe it was only a few minutes to put the whole thing back together. I rigged it up for a test run and the heater put out plenty of hot air and ran for as long as I wanted to hear it run. It seems to be fixed but I don’t understand why it sooted up so soon. Maybe there was another issue that I have inadvertently fixed while swapping out parts? Maybe not. Keep clicking on ExhaustNotes and I’ll report on this situation as it develops.
We were a swarm of 250cc bees bound for Medicine Bow, Wyoming. I didn’t know why that excited me and I didn’t know what to expect, but the place sounded romantic. Not romantic in the sense of female companionship; it was instead the romance of the Old West. Medicine Bow, Wyoming, and we were headed there on our single-cylinder Zongshen motorcycles. We had been on the road for a week, showing the American West to our Chinese and Colombian visitors. It all started on the other side of the world in Chongqing when Zongshen asked if I could take them on a ride though America.
Wow, could I ever.
Susie took this photo as I was showing the Zongshen execs where we might ride in America. The guy on my immediate right is good buddy Fan, who follows the ExNotes blog.
Medicine Bow. It had a nice ring to it. I was thinking maybe they had a McDonald’s and we could have lunch there. I think the reason Medicine Bow sounded so intriguing is I had heard it maybe dozens of times in western movies and television shows. Medicine Bow was one of the major destinations for cattle drives in the 1800s, where cows boarded trains for their one-way trip east, where they would stop being cows and become steaks. An average of 2,000 cows shipped out of Medicine Bow every day back then. That would keep McDonald’s going for a day or two (except there were no McDonald’s in the 1800s).
The very first western novel.
I was surprised when we buzzed in. Medicine Bow is about five buildings, total, none of them was a McDonald’s, but one was the Virginian Hotel. It’s the hotel you see in the photo at the top of this blog and as you might imagine there’s a story to it. You see, back in the day, the first western novel ever was written by a dude named Owen Wister, and the title of his book was The Virginian. It was later made into a movie. The story is about a young female schoolteacher who settled in Medicine Bow and two cowboys who vied for her attention. When the historic hotel was later built in Medicine Bow, what other name could be more appropriate than The Virginian? And about the name of the town, Medicine Bow? Legend has it that Native Americans found the best mahogany for making bows (as in bows and arrows) in a bend (a bow) along the Medicine River, which runs through the area. I can’t make up stuff this good.
I was the designated leader of the Zongshen swarm on this ride. My job was easy. All the mental heavy lifting and deep thinking fell to good buddy and long-time riding compañero Baja John, who planned our entire 5,000-mile journey through the American West. John did a hell of a job. The roads he selected were magnificent and the destinations superb. It’s also when I first met Joe Gresh, who was on assignment from Motorcyclist magazine to cover our story (more on that in a bit).
Big Joe Gresh, or “Arjiu” as the Chinese called him, on our 5000-mile ride through the American West.
Back to Medicine Bow, the Virginian Hotel, and a few of the photos I grabbed on that ride. The place is awesome, and the Virginian is where we had lunch.
Lunch at the Virginian. That’s Gresh on the right, and Juan and Gabe (two dudes from AKT Motos in Colombia) on the left. A few months later I rode with Juan in Colombia, another grand adventure.
After lunch, we wandered around the hotel for a bit. It would be fun to spend the night in Medicine Bow, I thought. Dinner at the hotel and drinks in the bar (as I type this, I can almost hear someone on the piano belting out Buffalo Gal). I will return some day to check that box.
The lighting isn’t great in this selfie (of sorts). Yours truly on the old D200, Lester, and Mr. Zuo. Lester is a teacher in China. Mr. Zuo owns a motorcycle jacket company in China.Bison. We saw a few live ones in the next couple of days.Who’s a good boy? That’s Baja John and Lester, taking a break after a great lunch at the Virginian Hotel. Lester came to America as a vegetarian. That lasted about two days. He sure enjoyed his hamburger at the Virginian. He told us he wants to be like Baja John when he grows up.Yes, there are moose in Medicine Bow, along with mountain lion, bear, elk, deer, and a host of other animals. Theodore Roosevelt hunted this part of the world.A Virginian Hotel hallway. I think you can still stay here overnight.Hotel hallway art.Even a public telephone.
The Virginian Hotel bar was indeed inviting and I could have spent more time there, but we were on the bikes and my rule is always no booze on the bikes. I grabbed a few photos. We had more miles to make that afternoon and more of Wyoming awaited.
The Virginian Hotel bar. It looks like it would be a fun spot to have a beer or three at the end of the day.Photos and artifacts on one of the Virginian Bar walls.A mural in the Virginian Hotel bar
The Virginian Hotel owner (who looked like he could have been someone right out of Central Casting) saw our interest in photography and showed us this photograph. He told me only six or seven copies of it exist. Spend a minute reading the writing…it is amazing.
There are more than a few interesting characters depicted in this photo.
Medicine Bow was a fun visit, it is a place I would like to see again, and it has a palpable feel of the Old West. It was a place where we could have stayed longer, but after lunch it was time for Happy Trails and we were on the road again. I felt like a cowboy, I suppose, swinging my leg over my motorcycle. Instead of “giddy up” it was a twist of the key and a touch on the starter button; the result was the same as we continued our trek west with Frankie Lane’s Rawhide on repeat in my mind: Keep rollin’, rollin’ rollin’, keep those motos rollin’…
In a few hours, we’d be riding into the sunset. Lord, this was a fantastic ride.
Here are a couple of videos you might like. The first is about Medicine Bow, the second is Joe Gresh’s video covering the ride. And one more thing…don’t miss Joe Gresh’s magnificent story about our ride in Motorcyclist magazine.
That’s me that I’m talking about in the title of this blog and the story is a Riding China excerpt. Joe Gresh and I rode with a group of Chinese riders on a 38-day motorcycle ride around China. This is a small part of it describing the ride into Beijing.
Gresh, King Kong, and yours truly in China. I’m the bugeyed old bastard on the right (after the swelling subsided).
Traffic was moving but it was heavy, and Chinese drivers in cars do not respect motorcycles. If they want to occupy your spot on the road, they just move over. It’s not that they don’t see you; they just don’t care. You’re a motorcycle. They’re a car. They know who’s going to win. At very low speeds in city traffic, you can scream at them or maneuver away or stop. At freeway speeds if you don’t get out of the way, you’re a hood ornament or a big wet spot on the asphalt. Our Chinese riders’ propensity to ride on the shoulder all the time suddenly made sense to me.
On a quiet road in China. China has delightful country roads and modern freeways. We weren’t supposed to take our motorcycles on the freeways, but we didn’t do too well with rules. We literally rode thousands of miles, all of it illegal, on Chinese freeways.
It was dark well before we reached our hotel that night and we had to ride about 45 minutes or so after the sun set. The Asian-configuration RX3 headlight is not very bright (our US bikes are much better), and to make a bad situation worse, as I have mentioned before I don’t see too well in the dark. To see a little better that night, I lifted my visor. Even though it was a clear visor it still has a slight tint to it and when I lift it at night I can see better.
In the motorcycle world, there’s another term that’s similar to ATGATT (you know, all the gear, all the time). It’s “visor down.” What it means is that you should keep your helmet visor down all the time. The reason is obvious: You don’t want to get whacked in the eye with whatever is floating in the air. That night, I proved that “visor down” makes sense. I caught a bug smack in my right eyeball. It hurt immediately, but I could still see. At that point, I put the visor down, but it was a classic case of closing the barn door after the horse got away.
We arrived at the hotel about 20 minutes later. I was tired and cranky. I went to my hotel room in a blue funk. Gresh tried to calm me down, but he was fighting a losing battle. “We have a couple of good rolls of toilet paper in this room,” he said. That was a good point and it was definitely something to be happy about, but it didn’t help me feel any better.
I really didn’t want to eat dinner that night, but I decided that bagging dinner would be too rude. So I went and I sat next to Sean. After some small talk, he noticed my eye. He was shocked. I had not seen myself in the mirror and I guess it looked pretty bad. My eye wasn’t white anymore; it was mostly red and swollen. Okay, I’ve been whacked in the eye by bugs before. I knew it would be red and it would bug me (pardon the pun) for a couple of days, and then it would be okay.
Yep, that Great Wall.
We rode through the countryside the next day to see the Great Wall at another location, but I still wasn’t over being upset and cranky from the night before. When I lead rides in the US or in Mexico that last for more than a weekend, there’s usually one guy in the group that will get cranky at some point. I had thought about that before this ride and I realized that on a ride lasting over five weeks someone would get to that point. I just didn’t think that guy would be me. But it was. I was tired, my eye was jacked up, and the stress of watching out for Chinese drivers was getting to me.
Dong drifting toward Beijing.
The next morning, I missed grabbing a good photo because of that. We were riding to see the Great Wall at a different location. On a lightly-traveled mountain road on a curve, we all stopped and Dong intentionally laid his RX1 on its side in the middle of the lane. He got on the bike with his knee out and had one of the other guys photograph him from the front (to make it look like the bike was leaned way over in the corner and he was dragging his knee). I think nearly everyone got their photo on the bike, but I declined. I just wasn’t in the mood. I think Dong knew I wanted that photo, though, and after I had returned to the US, he emailed a copy to me. (It’s the photo you see above.)
When we got to the Great Wall that morning it involved a considerable hike up a steep hill to get close enough to touch it. I’ve done that on prior visits, so I didn’t want to do it that day. Four of us opted to wait while the rest of the guys made the hike. It was relaxing. Wong, Zuo, Furem, and I shared a bag of peanuts Sean had left in his car while we waited for the others to return.
As we were riding back to the hotel from that location, heading downhill through the mountains the same way we had ridden in, I started slowing down. I didn’t realize it at first, but eventually I was the last guy in our formation. Then I started riding even more slowly, until the rest of the guys were so far ahead of me I couldn’t see them. My eye was still bothering me and by now I was having some problems seeing well. To add fuel to that fire, my left shoulder was hurting (I have a pinched nerve somewhere in there and it bothers me on long motorcycle rides).
But there was more to what I was feeling than just what I described above. Something was going on. I suppose a shrink would call it an anxiety attack. I was driving around every twist in the road expecting to see a truck stopped in my lane, an oncoming truck passing another vehicle in my lane, a person sweeping the street in the middle of the turn in my lane, a guy pulling out right in front of me, a bus making a U-turn in front of me, a car cornering too hard drifting into my lane, someone going the wrong way in my lane, someone pulling into my lane without looking, an old woman walking directly in front of me, people stopping to have a conversation in the middle of the street, or someone squatting down to take a dump (in my lane, of course). On this trip, I had seen all of what I just described and more. What was happening that morning was the enormity of the insanity that is riding a motorcycle in China caught up with me. Yeah, it was an anxiety attack. The nuttiness of it all, my vulnerability being on a motorcycle, and my inability to do anything about it was suddenly overwhelming.
The guys were waiting for me at the next intersection, and from there we went to a Sinopec gas station to refuel the bikes. It was hotter than hell. I guess it was fair to say I was miserable. I was still feeling all of this accumulated anxiety when a guy in a black Mercedes starting blasting his horn at me in that gas station parking lot. He didn’t want to drive around me; he wanted me to move even though there was plenty of room for him to go around. It was more of the “I’m a car, you’re a motorcycle” bullshit that is pervasive in China.
I don’t know what came over me, but I think I just got supremely tired of being the vulnerable victim. I looked directly at that Mercedes driver. I made eye contact. He looked at me, not realizing I was here with eight other guys on motorcycles. I eased the clutch out until my bike was directly alongside his window (which was open). I then leaned on my horn and let it rip for a good solid 20 seconds. Then one of the other Chinese riders watching me did the same, and yet another yelled a really bad word at the Mercedes (which he probably learned from either Gresh or me). It was pretty funny, especially hearing that kind of profanity with a Chinese accent. The guy in the Mercedes had screwed with the wrong Marine on the wrong day. Without realizing it, he took on the Wild Angels that hot afternoon just outside of Beijing. He suddenly and fully realized what might happen as a result of his boorishness. He rolled up his window, he averted his eyes, and he backed his big black Mercedes respectfully away from us. That broke the spell. I wasn’t helpless any more. I felt amazingly better.
Okay, enough about me being a butthead: On to Beijing proper. We stopped at the Beijing Zongshen dealer that afternoon (where they were expecting us) and it was the Dajiu and Arjiu show all over again.
Gresh presenting a vest to a Zongshen rider. They thought we were celebrities.
There were the usual tons of photos with Gresh and me. Hey, how often do Dajiu and Arjiu show up in your neighborhood? Tracy told us the dealer had just sold five new RX1s. He wanted to have a ceremony in which we gave the keys and Zongshen fluorescent vests to the five lucky guys who had purchased the bikes. I was feeling my old self again. I saw an opportunity and I took it.
“We’ll do it this time, Tracy,” I said, “but if you don’t start doing a better job getting these dealers prepped it will be the last time.” Tracy doesn’t always know when I’m teasing him. I could tell that this was going to be one of those times. Gresh picked up on it, too.
“Yeah!” Gresh said. Joe sometimes has a way with words.
“What is wrong, Dajiu?” Tracy asked, concern and maybe a little fear showing in his eyes.
“Where’s the watermelon?” I said. “We’re supposed to have watermelon waiting for us at each dealer visit,” I said.
Joe Gresh on a Zongshen motorcycle and his contractually-mandated chilled watermelon.
“Yeah,” Gresh added, “and it’s supposed to be chilled, too.”
“It’s right there in Section 6, Paragraph 3.2 of the Dajiu and Arjiu contract,” I said, “and there’s no cold watermelon here, Tracy!” (I don’t think I need to mention this for my readers, but I will just in case you were wondering, there is no such thing as a Dajiu and Arjiu contract, let alone any paragraphs about cold watermelon.)
“Ah, I am so sorry,” Tracy said. “It is my bad, Dajiu. I am so sorry.” Then he turned to Gresh, and addressing him as Arjiu, he said the same thing.
“Tracy, relax,” I said. “I’m just screwing with you.” But it was too late. Tracy heard me tell him I was joking, but it didn’t register.
We had a great ceremony and we had fun taking photos and giving those five proud new RX1 owners oversized Styrofoam keys and then their real keys. It was one of the most fun things I did on this entire trip. As we were doing so, I could see Tracy (who had left and returned) slicing several large (and delightfully cold) watermelons on a table in front of the showroom. Hey, a contract’s a contract.
The Beijing dealer had an RZ3, Zongshen’s naked sportbike, parked in front. Gresh was really impressed. I took photos of it and put them on the CSC blog that night, but I couldn’t tell you then what you now know to be the case: CSC is going to bring the RZ3 to North America. I like the RZ3 a lot. It’s essentially the RC3 with a normal seating position and upright bars without the RC3’s bodywork. We’re going to sell a lot of RZ3s. The RZ3 has the RX3 powertrain, and that’s both bulletproof and fast. I already have ideas on how I’m going to customize mine.
When we got off the subway after visiting The Forbidden City, we waited on a street corner for our Uber ride back to the hotel. I watched the scooters and small utility vehicles rolling by, and I realized that nearly every one of them was electric. I must have seen 200 scooters during the 20 minutes we waited, and perhaps 2 had gasoline engines. This wholesale adaption of electric scooters and small utility vehicles in China is nothing short of amazing.
An electric scooter in China.
Sean explained to me that the transition to electric vehicles started about 15 years ago, and the government has done a number of things to encourage people to convert to electricity. For starters (once again, pardon my pun), many of the larger cities in China now prohibit motorcycles and scooters unless the vehicle is electric. Electric scooters are allowed where gasoline-powered bikes are not. That alone is an enormous incentive. The next incentive is that you don’t need a driver’s license to take an electric vehicle on the street. You just buy one and go. And finally, as I’ve mentioned before, electricity is cheap in China. There are windfarms, solar panel farms, coal plants, nuclear power plants, and hydroelectric power plants all over the country. We saw scooters parked on the sidewalk and plugged into extension cords running into small stores everywhere. People charge them like iPhones; they didn’t miss any opportunity to top off the batteries on these things.
That night was a great night. The Zongshen dealer took us to a restaurant that specialized in Peking duck. The guys were excited about this development, but I was initially leery. I thought I didn’t like Peking duck. Boy, was I ever wrong!
I tried Peking duck 25 years ago when I visited Beijing with Sue. We both thought the duck was awful. That’s because we went to a restaurant that served tourists. The food at that place didn’t have to be good. They knew they would never see us again, and Yelp hadn’t been invented yet.
This night in Beijing with the Zongshen dealer and the RX3 owners club was different. The Peking duck was incredible. The chef sliced it paper thin right at our table. They had thin tofu (almost like a crepe), and the guys taught me how to eat duck properly. The deal is you put a few fresh vegetables on the tofu, you add a slice or two of duck, you add this amazing brown gravy, and then you roll the affair up like a burrito. Wow, it was delicious!
Peking Duck, done the way it is supposed to be done, in a Beijing restaurant. It was exquisite. Photo by King Kong.
We had several rounds of toasts at dinner that night and the liquor flowed freely. I got lucky. Kong sat next to me and he schooled me in the proper way to make a Chinese toast. To show respect, you clink your glass against the other guy’s glass, but you hold your glass at a lower level so that when the two glasses meet, the rim of yours is lower than the other person’s. When the Zongshen dealer toasted me, I followed Kong’s advice, and the Chinese riders all nodded approvingly. Ah, Dajiu knows.
It was funny. Sergeant Zuo and I had made several toasts to each other, and when we touched glasses, we both tried frantically to get our glasses lower than the other, so much so that we usually crashed the bottoms of both on the table (to a hearty laugh and round of applause from everyone). Zuo was being polite; I was being completely serious (I have enormous respect for him).
The next day we took the subway into Beijing. We already were in Beijing when we got on the subway, but Beijing is a megacity and you can’t simply drive into the center of it. We rode the subway for a good 45 minutes, and when we emerged, we visited the Forbidden City and Tien An Men Square. It was all grand. It was touristy, but it’s something that should be on any China visitor’s bucket list.
After seeing the Forbidden City, we walked around downtown Beijing for a while. I told Tracy my eye was getting worse and I wanted to get antibiotic eye drops for it. It was Sunday afternoon, but there was a large pharmacy right in front of us and it was open. Tracy went in with me and he told one of the young pharmacists what I wanted. She responded and it didn’t sound good.
“She cannot sell it to you without a prescription,” he told me.
“Well, shoot, Tracy, it’s Sunday afternoon,” I said. “We’re not going to find a doctor. I’ll be okay. Let’s just go.”
“No, it is okay, Dajiu,” he said. “We are China and we have a bureaucracy. It is my bad.”
Good old Tracy, I thought. The guy felt responsible for everything. I was resigned to the fact that my eye was going to take a while to get better. Tracy, in the meantime, had walked not more than 8 feet away to an elderly woman sitting at a wooden table. He spoke to her in Chinese and pointed to me. She never looked at me, nor did she look up. She simply pulled out a white pad with a big “R” at the top. Nah, this can’t be, I thought. She wrote something in Chinese characters and handed the slip to Tracy.
“Our prescription,” Tracy said. “Such a bureaucracy.” He walked the three steps back to the pharmacist, Tracy handed her the prescription, and 30 seconds (and 24 yuan, or about $4) later, I had my antibiotic eye drops. I put two drops in my eye. When we rode out of Beijing the next morning, my eye was good as new.
Like the above story? Want more? Pick up your copy of Riding China!
The New Year hits tonight. The years keep rolling by and it’s time for my 2024 resolutions. I’ve made a few, and with your indulgence, I’ll share them here.
I’m going to continue to hold my tongue (and my keyboard) on all things political. I’ve never seen anyone read a social media post or a blog or listen to someone with an opposing viewpoint and suddenly exclaim, “ah, now I understand…of course you’re right, and I was wrong all along…” Nope, the era of intelligent political discourse ended in the 1960s with the Vietnam War protests. Back then, and now, everyone is convinced their opinion is the only true path. I’m never going to call anyone ever again a leftwing idiot or a rightwing idiot, partly because of this resolution and partly because I hate being redundant.
I’m going to stop getting upset with people at the gym tying up machines while screwing around on their cell phones. Nope, you can sit on a machine and text to your heart’s content. I’ll just move on to another piece of equipment. Someday, though, when you’re standing in front of the Pearly Gates, you’ll have to answer. And I’ll be there. Just in case there are any questions.
I’m going to lose weight. The answer is to use that calorie tracker on my cell phone and exercise. Really. This time I mean it. I want to be skinny like Gresh.
I’m going to cook more, but in line with the resolution above I’ll eat less. I do a great barbequed salmon, a marvelous Italian meat sauce, delicious stuffed shells, a wonderful chili, incredible stuffed peppers, a great wild pork sausage and mushrooms casserole, tasty chicken tostadas, and a few others. I want to try making my own chile rellenos this year and find at least three more dishes to add to my repertoire.
I’m going to sell a few guns. I own too many to enjoy and more than a few that I don’t shoot. It’s time to convert these investments into cash and let others have some fun.
I’m going to ride my motorcycle and my bicycle more. I’ve slowed down on my riding quite a bit in the last three years. Part of it is the pandemic…law enforcement on our public roads has dropped to nearly nothing, and there are too many people driving like maniacs out there…speeding, weaving in and out of traffic, and screwing around on their cell phones. I’ve been hit by cars twice in my life while on two wheels (once on a motorcycle and once on a bicycle), and I don’t care to add a third bone-breaking event to my resume. But I haven’t been riding enough and I want to get out and ride. Get my knees in the breeze. You know the feeling.
It’s time to put more pork on the table. I’m going to do at least two hunts in 2024. One will be a varmint hunt for coyotes in Arizona with Baja John; the other will be a pig hunt with my 6.5 Creedmoor (location to be determined). If you’re a vegetarian or fundamentally opposed to hunting, you have my permission to skip any blogs I write about these events.
I’m not going to buy any more watches. I came across Segal’s Law last year, which holds that a man with a watch knows what time it is, but a man with many watches is never sure. I’m the guy who’s never sure, raised to an exponent.
I’m going to do Baja again, most likely in March so I can see the whales, eat a chile relleno in San Ignacio, and visit Javier at the La Casitas in Mulegé. I think Gresh wants to go, too. Maybe we’ll get our other ExNotes writers in on the action. You’ll read all about it here on ExNotes.
I’m retiring, for real this time. I’ll still write for the ExNotes blog and Motorcycle Classics magazine (I enjoy writing for both and I never viewed either as work), but I’m done with everything else. It’s time.
There you go…my 2024 resolutions. How about yours?
There is a Facebook group called The Dull Men’s Club and somehow it ended up on my newsfeed. A few of my FB friends are members of the Dull Men’s Club and scrolling through the page it occurs to me that most of the stuff I write about would be perfect for the club. My life has become an endless series of tiny battles to keep motorcycles running. You may think I tinker with the bikes to have something to write about but no, my clunker motorcycles really are a pain to keep running.
The Husqvarna SMR510 in particular requires 5 or 6 hours of fettling for each hour of riding. You may recall the story I wrote about the bike’s kickstand (classic Dull Men’s Club content) and how the bike wouldn’t start. I took the bodywork off and tightened connections, I unplugged and cleaned multi-pin connectors and gave the headlight wiring a re-org to gain a little room behind that crowded area. The bike was starting ok after the work I did.
I took the Husky on a test ride through the mountains stopping frequently and it started fine at least seven times. I figured I had the problem licked and when I got home after a few hundred miles I tried the starter one last time. The Husky wouldn’t start. It wouldn’t start after I let it cool down. It wouldn’t start the next day. Again, I jumped the battery positive directly to the starter terminal and the bike roared into life. I knew the battery was okay so I did what I normally do when I don’t know what the problem is: I bought parts.
The starter relay on the Husky is an odd one to me but apparently the part is used on a lot of ATV’s, small engines and Chinese motorcycles. I looked on a Husqvarna parts site and the relay was $43, plus shipping. On Amazon a duplicate Chinese relay was $7, shipping included. If you’ve followed my moto-journo career at all I imagine there is not a lot of suspense as to which relay I bought.
Even to my naturally cheap psyche the $7 relay seemed too good to be true. So I bought two of them just in case the first one didn’t live up to expectations. Kind of like the old “We’re gonna need a bigger truck” punch line but with relays. The clone relay looked exactly the same as the Husky part except the molded, rubber band mounting bushing was clocked 90 degrees off. I pulled the rubber from the original part and it fit onto the clone perfectly. Things were looking good.
This relay is sort of nifty as it has a main fuse and a spare fuse piggybacked onto the starter relay making for a nice, lightweight, compact…thing. The stock Husky relay had a 20-amp main fuse. The generic unit came with a 30-amp fuse. I pulled on the 30-amp fuse to replace it. And I pulled. I pulled harder. I grabbed the fuse with a pair of Leatherman pliers and gave the fuse a mighty tug.
The relay flew apart; parts went everywhere as the plastic bit holding the main fuse broke away from the body of the relay. The tangs of the 30-amp fuse were still embedded in the fuse holder. I gathered the bits and tried to reassemble the relay but it was too far gone. Good thing I bought a second generic relay.
The fuse in the second relay was as tight as the first one so I decided to use the opportunity to upgrade the Husqvarna’s power supply by 10 amps and left the 30-amp fuse in place. It may never blow without melting the wiring harness. I’ll deal with that situation when it arises.
I took the broken relay apart to see what was in the little black box and it was just like a normal starter relay but in reduced dimensions. I suspect the plunger contact on the OEM relay is not making good contact but there is no easy way to dismantle the relay without destroying the thing.
It’s been five days and I’ve started the Husky each day without a problem. Of course, this proves nothing and I’ll have to bang the bike on some trails to see if the starting issue has really been fixed. One positive outcome from all this jerking around is that I understand the relay wiring now and if it won’t start again I plan to bypass the stock Husky starter circuit and install an entirely new, stand-alone starter circuit/ main fuse with a second push button and relay. It will be a perfect story for The Dull Men’s Club.
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The Harbor Freight/US General 5-drawer tool cart has been on my radar for many years. It always seemed like a pretty good deal at $189 and if you bought the thing when it wasn’t on sale (every few weeks) the price would go up to $269. Paying full price at Harbor Freight is to be avoided at all costs and HF’s unrelenting cycle of blowouts, parking lot sales and clearances has trained their customers to wait them out. This particular mechanic’s cart sale was a Black Friday thing and I debated picking one up but managed to tamp down the urge.
I thought I was in the clear until HF declared an extension to Black Friday, at which point I gave in and went down to their store to pick up one of the damn things. This wasn’t a spur of the moment deal. I have a homemade rollaway box full of tools I rarely use but can’t get rid of and another really cheap top and bottom combination setup also filled with odd bits and lathe tools.
My previous mechanic’s cart is a cut down rolling file cabinet, the type used in offices by the type of secretary born sometime in the 1950s. The file cabinet thing was never great, but it made a good workbench to repair the Husqvarna’s transmission. After that transmission job the cart slowly became covered in tools making it hard to dig through the junk to find a 10mm socket. It became a poorly organized catchall.
The US General 5-drawer cart comes to you mostly assembled. You have to put together the wheels and the lower shelf, along with the uprights and some corners for the top box. The instructions are good enough except for the part about lifting the box up onto the legs. The manual says to not attempt this alone. I’m always alone and the box was heavy and too bulky. I got the thing off the ground but accuracy was suffering and I was worried about scratching the paint or pinching my fingers.
Taking the drawers out to lighten the box was one option. Plan B was to lay the box on its side and slide the frame into position as the frame weighed much less than the box. Now I had the cart on the ground, so I lifted the thing upright pivoting on the wheels. It was still a strain but easier than lifting the entire box. You get a lot of steel for $189 at HF. After the thing was upright, I tightened all the bolts that hold it together.
The 5-drawer box is really nice. The paint (five colors to choose from; I got KTM orange) looks thick and applied well. The box comes with drawer liners in each drawer and in the bottom shelf.
The wheels appear heavy duty and are probably overkill. HF included a nice, extra-mile feature by providing the swivel casters with grease fittings for the ball bearings in the swivel part. Also included on the two casters are brakes so if you’re working on an incline the box won’t roll away.
The drawers use two methods to secure them from sliding open under transport. The first is a latch on the front of each drawer that you must slide to the side in order to open the drawer. I’m not sure I like these latches. I want the drawers to open without the added finger motions. I may disable these latches.
The second method of drawer retention includes two, spring-loaded lock bars that slide down onto the backside of the drawers when the top of the box is closed. The box comes with four round-Coke-machine type keys so you can lock your stuff if you work in a shop full of shifty characters.
For such a low price the 5-drawer box doesn’t seem cheap at all. I think it’s Harbor Freight’s best toolbox value. Two gas charged struts are used to hold the top in the open position and the unit came with a handy side shelf to store your unguents and the various toxic chemicals that mechanics use in their daily course of events.
My particular 5-drawer had a slight flaw: one of the drawer slides was not in its track correctly and was binding. I had to remove the drawer and slot the slide into the track after which the drawer worked fine. I’m not sure that I didn’t cause the problem when I set the box on the side and lifted the cart upright with all the bolts loose. Maybe it flexed and popped out. With everything tight the box feels sturdy without any wobble.
I give the US General 5-drawer mechanic’s cart high marks and can recommend it if its size suits your needs. Now I’ve got to sort out that mess of jumbled tools and organize my new toolbox, a process that has already begun.
I should have listened to the guys who knew. They told me the vacuum operated fuel petcock on the ZRX1100 was a source of problems and that I should convert it to a standard on-off-reserve manually operated type. In my defense the new vacuum petcock lasted six months or so before the ZRX became hard to start after sitting idle for longish periods of time.
The vacuum petcock stopped sealing and the ZRX’s last line of defense was the float needle in the carburetors. In an ideal world these needles should stop the flow of gas and you wouldn’t even need a fuel shut off valve. We don’t live in an ideal world, however.
I tested my bad-petcock theory by removing the fuel line. A steady stream of fuel poured out of the hose. There is no “Off” position on the standard Kawasaki petcock so I drained the gas tank and set about converting the petcock to manual.
In practical terms the bike was starting hard because it was flooded. Constant velocity carbs, like the ones fitted to the ZRX, are a little harder to clear a flooded condition. Normally you’d hold the throttle wide open to get a lot of air flowing through the cylinder, thus blowing out the excess fuel. With CV type carbs opening the throttle only opens a set of butterfly valves. The actual throttle slides are independent of the twist grip and require engine vacuum to operate. Add low-vacuum cranking speed that struggles to raise the throttle slides and a flooded engine that doesn’t want to start and you’ve got a sticky wicket.
I bought this generic fuel petcock on Amazon for around $10 and figured if it didn’t work I wasn’t out much money. The hole centers lined up and the valve bolted into the Kawasaki tank without issue.
The new petcock came with these tiny plastic fuel filters fitted to the main tank standpipe and the reserve opening at the bottom of the tank. I got rid of these as they looked sort of restrictive and I planned on installing an inline filter on the bike to simplify the hose connections.
The original style vacuum petcock had a 3/8” hose barb that mated to a 5/16” barb on the carburetors. This mismatch required the factory to specify an unusual molded hose that was 3/8” on one end and 5/16” on the other. The new, manual petcock had a ¼” hose barb. These universal inline filters have both ¼” and 5/16” barbs to fit a wider range of machines. I trimmed off the 1/4″ barb on one side of the filter and had a nifty filter that fit both the petcock size and the carburetor size.
I know what you’re thinking, which is that the new petcock at ¼” won’t pass enough fuel. Maybe you’d be right if I drag raced or rode extended periods at high speed. At 50 miles per gallon the thrifty ZRX1100 gets plenty of fuel through the smaller line. I did a few full-throttle passes at an undisclosed test location and the bike did not want for fuel.
The new petcock hose barb exited 90 degrees rearward compared to the stock petcock, which exited down. This orientation required the fuel hose to run straight back and over the carburetor before turning down and routing under the bank of four carbs. The extra length made for kind of a loose hose so I used a couple rubber-covered clamps to secure the hose and tuck it in out of the way.
The new petcock makes starting easier but the Kawasaki ZRX is still reluctant to cold start. Which is odd because the bike always started on the first push. Maybe it’s just the fact that winter is here at the ranch and I’m starting the ex-Florida bike colder than usual. This is the first New Mexico winter for the ZRX and it takes three or four pushes on the button to get the bike to light off, a great improvement over the 25 or so with the old, leaky petcock. I never got around to adjusting the ZRX carbs; I just cleaned them and stuck them back on the bike as I had a long trip planned and wanted to get some shakedown miles on the bike. Maybe a carb sync is in order.
I’ll try adjusting my starting ritual to see if I can come up with a protocol that will save some wear and tear on the Kawasaki starter motor. Keep your eyes glued to ExhaustNotes.us for important updates as they become available.
I bought the 2008 Husqvarna SMR510 in 2009. I forget the exact mileage on the bike but it was around 800-ish, I think. The Husky was essentially a new motorcycle and the bike sat very tall for a guy with stubby legs. The seat height wasn’t my biggest problem though, the real issue was the diabolical kickstand the manufacturer cursed the Husky with.
The stand was both too short and angled wrong so that when deployed its contact point was only a few inches left of the centerline of the motorcycle. On the stand, the bike would lean way over, unloading the rear suspension to the point the rear wheel was nearly off the ground. This meant the bike fell over a lot. The slightest breeze would pivot the bike onto the stand and knock the Husky onto its left side.
That’s not all that was wrong with the Husky’s kickstand. The foot of the stand was only a millimeter or two wider than the 7/8-inch steel tube the stand was made from. Parking the Husqvarna on anything other than solid concrete was an iffy proposition. If the bike was on sand or dirt the stand would punch through the ground and the bike would fall over. I learned that in the dirt you had to lean the thing against a tree if you wanted to park.
One of the first things I did to the bike was add a gigantic chunk of steel to the bottom of the stand in order to spread the load a bit on soft terrain. I angled the new foot outboard, effectively moving the contact point an inch further from the centerline. The new foot also moved the contact point forward a bit to help even out the fore-aft balance. It kind of worked. The bike fell over less but it still fell over.
The SMR510’s high seat was a pain to climb onto so I decided to raise the rear shock bolt about ½-inch which lowered the back of the bike a full inch. Now I could reach both feet to the ground on tippy-toes or one foot flat. The lowering also improved the kickstand angle and stability although it caused trickle-down issues.
The Husky is blessed with an ultra plush rear suspension. The bike is a Cadillac on rough dirt trails. With the shortened ride height the bike leaned less on the stand in fact it was almost too vertical. Now when I got on the bike the rear would sag pushing against the stand causing the bike to lean hard right. To get the stand folded up I had to lean the bike much further to the right like a 45-degree angle so that the arc of the stand-swing would clear the ground. Even if I wasn’t sitting on the Husky to fold the stand up I had to hold the bike well over center. I dropped it a few more times.
Things stayed like this for many years. My method of mounting the SMR510 was to first fold the stand up then swing my leg over the back of the seat, scratching the rear fender with my boot and settle down into the saddle as the suspension sagged and my feet hit the ground. It was an ok system when I was younger and more flexible.
Unfortunately frailty creeps up on all of us over time. The last few years it became harder to swing my leg high up over the rear of the Husky. The pack I keep strapped to the rear fender made the situation worse. I had to change my methodology and begin a more right-angle frontal assault, high-kicking my leg over the seat like a hurdler or John Cleese at the Ministry of Funny Walks.
You can guess how well that worked: to get on the Husky I had to flip the stand up, hold the bars with one hand, step back far enough to give my leg clearance and kick as high as I could while stepping forward into the bike. Most of the time it worked but if you didn’t get your foot high enough it would smack into the seat and push the bike over. The Husky falls well and all, but still. Getting off the bike was no easy feat either. In fact, I dropped the Husky more dismounting the motorcycle than mounting, although it was a close run thing, percentage-wise.
It got to where I didn’t want to ride the Husqvarna because I dreaded getting on or off of the bike. It all came to a head a few weeks ago when the Mud Chuckers and I did a 140-mile pavement loop with a 40-mile dirt section in the middle. We pulled into the café at Mayhill for a lunch stop but the place looked closed. Neither of us actually checked the door because we didn’t want to go through the trouble of climbing off our bikes.
The parking lot at the Mayhill Café has a slight slope to it and I rolled the bike backwards to leave. The Husky wouldn’t start. Nothing. No clicking. The instrument panel and fuel pump energized so I figured something was wrong with the starter motor circuit. I made the fatal error of positioning the kickstand side downhill. I slid my butt off the seat and started to drag my tired leg over the top of the seat Normally not a big problem. The added distance created by the parking lot falling away meant my leg needed to go even higher to clear the seat and the bike began to topple over onto me. I was bunny hopping with the one leg on the ground and the other leg still not clear of the seat. Events rapidly overtook my hop-speed and the bike fell over. Luckily I was still wearing my helmet because when I fell backwards I smacked my new helmet on the asphalt pretty hard. I think I would have cracked my head open otherwise.
As I was lying on the ground with the Husky on my leg I cursed a torrent of bad words, some of them even I didn’t know the meaning of. It was like I was speaking in foul-tongues except the Holy Spirit was not the one doing the talking. We got the bike off of me and picked it up. I told Mike, “I’m not riding that @#@ing motorcycle again until I fix that #$@@-%ing kickstand.” We push started the bike and I rode home. So I guess I did ride it again after all.
The starting problem turned out to be a loose connection at the start relay but to be sure I took all the bodywork off and disconnected all the multi-pin plugs on the wiring harness and gave them each a shot of silicone. I relocated the horn to gain a bit more wiring room behind the headlight and changed the old, crumbling air filter for a new one. The Husqvarna was running fine. Except for that diabolical kickstand.
The main problem with the kickstand is that when deployed it is too close to the centerline of the wheels. The reason for this is the kickstand-mounting lug on the frame is angled wrong. Instead of the stand swinging out it sort of swings down. All of the Husky’s kickstand issues stem from this one critical design flaw.
I don’t want to mess with the Husky’s frame so I decided to hacksaw a wedge out of the stand (below the return spring mount) and closed the wedge so that the stand would project about 4 inches further outboard. I welded the join as best I could not being able to see the weld or the seam.
Moving the foot outboard made the bike lean over too far so I borrowed a few inches of tubing from an old Yamaha handlebar to extend the length of the stand.
I made a plug to insert into the tubing where the old stand and the handlebar piece join, a couple holes drilled into the tubing allowed me to butt-weld the insert and weld the thin tubing together without burning through.
I made a new, lighter foot and cut a new angle on the end of the stand to suit
And it is wonderful. Parking the bike is so easy when it doesn’t fall over from the slightest breeze. My new mounting technique (with the stand in the down position) is to put my left foot on the peg, grab the bars, stand on the foot peg, swing my leg easily over the rear pack, settle down into the seat and with my left foot, swing the stand up. Easy-Peasy. It sounds like I should have been able to do this all along but the geometry just didn’t work that way.
Putting up with the old kickstand for 14 years shows how a bad idea can keep loyal followers. It took that hard fall In Mayhill to jar me into action. There is no free lunch, however. The new stand angle awkwardly juts out from the side of the bike and will most likely break when I crash on that side. I’m hoping my shoddy welding will be like a fuse and it will break at the join before something important breaks.
The kickstand mod has made me fall in love with the Husqvarna again. It’s such a light, powerful bike you feel like there’s not much you can’t do with it. Now that I can easily get on and off the bike those feelings of dread are distant memories.
You probably know about the meeting between Joe Biden and Xi Jinping last week. What you might not know about is Woodside, California, and the Filoli estate where they met. As always, we want our ExNotes readers to be knowledgeable and up to date, and that’s the focus of this article. I’ve actually been to and photographed the Filoli estate and mansion, and I’ve written a bit about Woodside before.
The Filoli mansion was built in 1917 for William Bourn II, who by any measure was a wealthy guy. He owned one of California’s richest gold mines and was president of the Spring Valley Water Company that served San Francisco and its surrounding areas. If you are wondering about the name, it’s formed by the first two letters of each word from of Bourn’s motto: Fight for a just cause; Love your fellow man; Live a good life.
The Filoli mansion and its gardens occupy 16 acres; the entire estate covers 654 acres and extends to the Crystal Springs Reservoir (which still provides water to San Francisco). If you drive south on the 280 freeway from San Francisco (it follows the San Cruz Mountain range), you can see the reservoir on the right.
Big mansions are expensive to maintain and hard to keep up. That’s why a lot of the big ones have been donated by the families that owned them to the state or other organizations and opened to the public for tours. It’s what the Hearst family did with Hearst Castle further south, and it is what happened to the Filoli mansion. The Filoli mansion and surrounding grounds are now owned by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. For a modest fee you can visit and walk through the same rooms and gardens as Xi and Biden. It’s cool. I did it in 2019 and here are a few Filoli photos from that visit.
A bit more about the town of Woodside: Woodside is one of the wealthiest places in America. A partial list of the big names who live or have lived in Woodside include Charles Schwab (yes, that Charles Schwab), Steve Jobs, Michelle Pfeiffer (the classiest actress ever), Joan Baez, Nolan Bushnell (the founder of Atari and the Chuck E. Cheese restaurant chain), Scott Cook (the founder of Intuit), Carl Djerassi (a novelist and the guy who developed the birth control pill), Larry Ellison (the CEO of Oracle Corporation), James Folger (as in need a cup of coffee?), Kazuo Hirai (the CEO of Sony), Mike Markkula (the second Apple CEO), Gordon E. Moore (Intel’s co-founder and originator of Moore’s Law), Prince Vasili Alexandrovich (the nephew of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia), Shirley Temple, John Thompson (Symantec’s CEO), and Nick Woodman (founder and CEO of GoPro). Woodside is within commuting distance of Silicon Valley, so it’s understandable, I guess, why so many high-rolling Silicon Valley types call it home.
This is an interesting and beautiful area. The Pacific Ocean is just on the other side of the San Cruz range, and a circumnavigation of these mountains makes for a hell of a motorcycle ride (see our earlier blog and the article I wrote for Motorcycle Classics magazine).
I don’t know if Xi and Biden accomplished much during their meeting. If I had organized their visit, I would have left all the entourage folks behind and given Uncles Joe and Xi a map and a couple of RX3 motorcycles. They would have had a better time and probably emerged with a better agreement. A good motorcycle ride will do that for you.
You know, we don’t do politics on ExNotes, but I have to get in a comment here. There ought to be a win-win solution to our current disagreements with China. I think if I could be king of the U.S. for about six months (not President, but King) and good buddy Sergeant Zuo from our ride across China could be King of China for the same time period, we could go for another ride and figure it all out. I’d bring Gresh along to keep it interesting and I’d get another book out of it, too. That’s my idea, anyway.
If you’d like to read more about Joe Gresh’s and my ride across China with Sergeant Zuo, you should pick up a copy of Riding China.
And if you’d like to read about Gresh and me riding across America with the Chinese, you need a copy of 5000 Miles at 8000 RPM.
I’m probably the worst person to review a motorcycle tire. Round and black are my two major criteria for tire performance. If the tire meets those benchmarks it’s okay by me. I’m not sensitive enough and I don’t ride fast enough to push any tire to its limits and I couldn’t tell you if brand A is better than brand B on the street if my life depended on it. Which is why the Continental TKC-80 is such a revelation on the Husqvarna SMR510.
It’s not easy to find a decent 17-inch front tire for the dirt. The front tires I had been running on the SMR510 were those hokey, 70%-street/30%-dirt or 80%-street/20%-dirt tires that are all really just street tires with a few extra adventure-grooves cut into the tread pattern. The street-based tires worked well on the street (see my criteria above) but were horrible on the dirt. The Husky’s front end would push through corners completely devoid of grip or feedback. I had to sort of square off turns: enter straight, come to a near stop, change direction and exit under throttle.
I don’t need the Husky for street duty now that the Kawasaki ZRX1100 is running. Long time ExhaustNotes readers may recall my failed efforts to convert the Husky’s tiny, 17-inch front wheel to a more dirt appropriate 21-inch size. That was a real debacle that cost me hundreds of dollars resulting in the 17-inch wheel going back on the front of the motorcycle.
Having wasted so much blood and treasure on the front wheel conversion and coming up empty I decided to try the tire everyone told me to get in the first place: Continental’s mostly off-road TKC-80. Originally made for giant, 600-pound ADV bikes I figured the TKC-80 should hold up well on the lightweight Husqvarna.
The improvement is so dramatic even I can tell something good happened between the Husqvarna’s handle grips and the ground. The Husky actually steers in the dirt now. It goes in the general direction you point the handlebars. I can take a corner in the dirt leaning the bike over like I’m on pavement and the front end feels planted. It’s like I have a whole ‘nother end of the motorcycle to work where there was nothing but push before. Soft sand is no problem, graded roads with a thin layer of dust and pebbles feel almost grippy. I haven’t been in the mud yet but the 80 has to be better than the slick tires I was running.
Needless to say I’m sold on the TKC-80, so naturally there is some confusion (on my part) about the future availability of the 80 series. Apparently, there was a recall on a bunch of Continental tires including the 80 series due to tread cracking. The best I can sort out from the Internet is that TKC tires built between January 2019 and April 2022 are affected by the recall. I’m not even going to look at the date code on my tire because I’m not taking it off. One of my moto-insider buddies says Continental is discontinuing the TKC-80 series. I haven’t found confirmation on that but as of today you can still buy them. I have noticed that TKC-80s online have gone up quite a bit since I bought mine at $120 a copy.
If you own one of the Super Motard type bikes with 17-inch rims and want to play around in the dirt without having to convert your front wheel to 21-inch, the TKC-80 is your tire. There is no cheaper or easier way to improve the front end of your motorcycle. I can’t speak to the TKC- 80’s longevity as I only have around 500 miles on mine and it shows little wear. If the thing lasts 2000-3000 miles it’s well worth it for the offroad performance. Hopefully I’ll be able to buy another one in the future because it’s about the only option for a 17-inch knobby that will fit the Husky’s wide rims.
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