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Saturday, 2005/06/11 (cont'd)

Gila Bend Trip Blog

I've been thinking of taking this ride to Gila Bend for a few days, ever since I noticed the 283 highway cutting west from Maricopa through the hills. I was looking at the route to Puerto Penasco, and the 283 is actually a shortcut that keeps me off the I-8 if I go to Mexico. Not that I'd care much, given that I'm getting more comfortable with superslab, and the I-8 out there is fast, flat, and open. But this is a promising and attractive diversion.

The weather couldn't have been any better. Big, flat clouds dotting the sky kept the temperature down on the ride out, though the winds were up and in my face. They stayed steady, though, making the trip back a literal breeze.

I didn't take any pictures on the way out, but remembered some good spots on the way back and found a couple more.

12:47 pm, 0 miles

Left home. Didn't look back. I used a piece of the I-10 to get from Pecos Road to Maricopa Road. They've really shortened that jog. I never had to leave the transition lane. Strolled past the Gila River reservation gambling and resort. It's a beautiful place. High-end resort/spa destination with a pair of first-class golf courses (the Nationwide Tour plays there every October), and a big gambling. A genuine oasis.

1:17, 22.2 mi

The turn onto the 283 is now the north end of the Maricopa metroplex. They're building a ton of stuff out there. Most of it upper-middle-class strip-mall generic. Won't be able to tell it from anywhere else soon enough. I spent a buck on a small bottle of water. I had a larger bottle in my bag, but that was for emergency use.

1:20

Back on the road. The road less travelled this time. No cars in front of me. None behind. Occasionally, the cars of a freight train beside. Very busy rail line. I'd see about eight trains on this little trip. I've heard there's a serious rail-freight capacity problem going on. I can believe it. Half of the trains were stopped at signals waiting for the line to clear. It's a simplex communications channel running packets in two directions. Easy in theory. A million tons of trouble in practice.

I tried waving at a Union Pacific engineer, but he probably didn't see me. I got no wave back.

I missed the speed-warning sign for one cattle guard, and I may have gotten airborne when I hit the bump in the asphalt at its backside at about twice the recommended speed.

2:05, 65.1 mi

Arrived at the far end of Gila Bend, having trolled the whole mile through town.

I snagged a diet coke at the McDonald's, and considered tooling back to the little mom-n-pop taqueria mid-strip for some of Gila Bend's finest (and almost only) cuisine, but chomped down a protein bar I had in my bag instead. It was gooey from the heat, but tasty enough.

I got my camera case out of my other bag and hung it across me. The case rested right on the corner of the pillion, so I'll have no worries that it'll take too much stress and fall off. It's taken worse on hikes, but there it wouldn't hit the ground at 70 mph; I could just see the memory card spinning out across the mesquites and ocotillos. Simple as it is, it sits securely; no flapping or dangling of any kind. I could get used to this.

So here are the highlights of Gila Bend, non-Chamber of Commerce version.

Warning: Graphic scenes reduced to thumbnail size. DO NOT click to the point of repetitive-stress injury.

2:28

Back on my bike.

Well, the Chamber of Commerce gets a mention in the credits, after all.



I guess this is why gas prices are so high. You have to get yourself on the list and keep checking the notice board.



Les must have some kinda juice. But probably the most interesting feature of the town is this sign.



It's out front of a building that was probably motel rooms, now offered as apartments for rent. I have no idea what the code at the top means,



nor what the vessel at the bottom was for.



Perhaps it was a landing beacon for aliens. Who would have been comfortable staying here:



and holding their offsites and seminars in the adjoining, target-marketed conference facility:



Farther out of town I spied this scene:



It isn't quite a crop circle, but I think the "desert sofa" would make a great candidate for the next rash of infamous evidence-of-alien-visitation hoaxes.

"Perhaps the aliens used it to relax and take in the beautiful sky and mountain scenery," I was thinking as I realized I was standing downwind of a rather strong source of the smell of putrefaction. I turned towards its origin, and found myself nearly on top of it:



A dead cow. Perhaps the victim of an alien probe. Maybe the sofa had been placed facing it to allow comfortable observation of the procedure. Which would make the desert sofa meme just a subclass of the cattle-mutilation meme. Ecclesiastes got it right 2500 years ago. There really is nothing new under the sun.

Whatever. The carcass had been there a while, and perhaps had been helpful in keeping the local coyote population booming.



I considered "processing" the artifact shown here, and had this been a dead horse I might have, but I'm not risking that smell permanently attached to my saddlebag for a cow's hoof:



Whoever wanted a free cow skull for their trailer wall wasn't quite so aesthetically prescient.



These fellows happened by with their too-practiced naivety and ran me off by inducing laser precision boredom. I'm not sure, but I thought I saw feathers and wattles on them:



So I got back on my bike and sped away. Farther on, attempting to return to the purpose of the adventure, I stopped for some attractive landscape photos. This is a shot of the foot of Montezuma head from the south. This outcropping and the canyon it borders are a historical place, the details of which can be found on the few websites describing the Sierra Estrella, the mountain range of which this is the southern tip.



Turning around, a view southeast towards Tucson and Mexico.



And turning back towards the road...what's that? In the middle there?



That color. That texture. That shape. Is that what I think it is?



Why yes. It is a potato. And road-kill, by the looks of it.



The roadkill potato was on the junction of the road to this garden spot.



I mention it because of a coincidence. On the way to Gila Bend, I'd made a mental note to stop here on the way back to explore this side road until I discovered what the fence was for. Because the fence is topped with barbed wire. Rather redundant, as it's also surrounded by miles of nearly empty desert. What's most puzzling is that the wire is canted to keep people in, not out.



At least, I presume it's for people. I'm not sure I want to know if the sign is a facade for the dumping of material contaminated with some sort of mutating radiation.

Apropos of that, here's evidence of my trying to low-side by finding the deepest gravel on the asphalt while braking from 1 to 0 mph to take the previous two shots. I blame this on my sudden mutation into a creature with tentacles, flukes, and a beak.



And then, when I got the bike turned around, what did I see but an acre-foot of water. A mirage. This one more elaborate than most. Note the shimmering illusion of a well-pump and beveled catch-basin caused by the refractive effect of rising heat.



And no, I did not go for a swim only to find myself stuffing my mouth with sand. I simply started up and rode off.

4:09, 131 mi

Home again. Be it ever so humble.

All in all, a good first highway trip for the sake of airing out my spokes and stretching my chain. Plenty of excitement, plenty of bugs to clean off my visor, and a few laughs realizing that the whole thing ties up a lot of loose ends about Roswell and Groom Lake.

(Thursday)
Sorry. Picsplace.to seems to be useless for image hosting. I'll find another and edit the entry.

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(Friday)
taking longer than expected to find one that works...

I'll just work on the blog entries from the last week, then...

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(much later)

Alright, this is just silly.

There's no such thing as a reliable, long-term free photo storage on the net.

So they'll just have to remain broken links evincing the URL of the idiots who broke it.

And I'll get on with normal blogging here.

Stuff that's happened in the past couple of weeks:

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My chain was really loose after the Gila Bend trip, so I tightened it. Meanwhile I was checking my oil, but got distracted and didn't screw in the filler-cap/dipstick. So when I went to start the bike, instead of brap-brap-brap I heard phuff-phuff-phuff and noticed something puffing against the bottom of my thigh. I figured I'd somehow not attached the exhaust properly (it had to be removed to reach the right-side axle nut, which had to be loosened to move the wheel back to tighten the chain, then torqued). I looked down and saw oil spitting from the filler hole, spraying in a fountain up, right, and to the rear. It got my pants, my panniers, the handle of the borrowed torque wrench (which didn't quite fit in the panniers), and the cul-de-sac for about ten feet, soaked in oil.

Haha. Funny stuff.

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Got fooled by the heat one day. The weatherman said 107. So I wore my jacket instead of my vest. But it was only about 97. So I sweated instead of evaporating sweat.

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Dealership managed to screw up my bike's registration. They hadn't checked the title when they handed it over to the DMV, and the guy who'd sold them the bike had filled out the back wrong. The DMV kicked it back, and the dealer blames a vacationing factotum for not expediting it until after my temporary had lapsed. I had to buy a restricted temporary for $1 and print it out, cut it out, reinforce it with duct tape across the back, and bolt it to my bike. Then it ran out between their getting my permanent tags and being open so I could pick them up. I asked a police-officer friend of mine, who told me that as long as the permanent registration was official, I could ride the bike without a valid tag displayed. Technically, if I was stopped I could be written a ticket, but it would be dismissed when I showed proof to the judge, but no cop would bother writing the ticket given the information was in the computer.

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After I'd tightened my chain, it was still kind of loose, but the indicator on the frame was way past the "replace" mark. So when I called the dealer to complain about the tags I also ordered a new chain and sprockets.

They'd estimated two hours to do it, and on a Honda Shadow some simple things are really complicated to maintain, so I figured that might be right. But they did it in an hour. Which was a good thing and kind of made up for the registration screwup.

And now I know what a new, clean, tight chain looks like. Maybe an inch of play rather than the 2-3 inches I was used to. They recommended replacing the chain every 10-12k miles, and mine had probably never been changed, even though there were 19k miles on the bike. And the O-rings were obvious; I'm pretty sure the old one either had no O-rings, or they'd all been worn away, because I couldn't remember seeing them.

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While I was on the temporary registration I'd printed out, I got a parking ticket. Hey, Tempe in the Summer looks closed like it's Sunday, so it didn't occur to me that the meters were active. $28, and if the "restriction" on the temporary tag doesn't include hanging out at the coffee shop, then maybe it was a registration violation and there's a blot that will show up next time I'm stopped and run for warrants... we'll see.

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The heat's come on strong. Over 110 on some days. Riding on the freeway at high speed you get a major increase in effective temperature; the opposite of the severe wind-chill you get in mild weather. It's like being in a convection oven, and not very pleasant. But neither is sitting at stoplights in the sun. Moving about 30-50 mph is the only really tolerable situation.

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For various reasons one day, I didn't get a chance to go home and switch to my car before going to the bar to watch the Sun Devils lose their last chance at making the College World Series. I didn't drink (except 3 oz of beer handed to me by one of the Miller Beer girls conducting a taste test) but right at the end of the game, a storm rolled in. So I couldn't ride home. So I had a friend pick me up, and we went out for pizza, then she dropped me off at my bike, when the ground was dry. This time of year a thunderstorm is violent and short, and the ground dries within a couple of hours or less, so I was safe going home.

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But the rain and dust had made my bike a mess, so I detailed it. I have this aerosol orange-based cleaner that really cuts through road grime. I used a hose to get rid of the mud, then the cleaner to get the greasy stuff, and a natural chamois to dry it off. Looked great.

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Checker Auto sells a motorcycle jack for $50. This is similar to the one that Sears sells for $100 and lots of other places sell for $200 or more.

But you get what you pay for.

1. The release valve is really touchy; I have to lower the bike by letting it jerk down in steps.

2. The safety lock doesn't latch on one side at the top detent, but I don't need to raise it that high to get the wheels off the ground, so it's not important for me. A bike with a higher clearance at the center might have more trouble with it, but another unit of this jack might not have that problem.

3. Both beams were off-level by the same amount. The base was level, but either the struts on one end were too short or too long on the other end, or one pair of mounting holes were in the wrong place. I fixed it by placing a stack of washers between the frame and the casters, but the nuts holding the casters on are now only halfway on the bolts. But they shouldn't take too much stress.

Otherwise, hey, it cost less than the rollastand, and with the bike up on the jack the wheels move freely rather than heavily, so I wish I'd known about this deal before I'd seen the rollastand ads. Would've saved me a few bucks and a lot of time.

Thursday, 2005/06/30

Hot time, Summer in the City

Lots of riders out despite the threat of 112F (50C) this afternoon.

Took my industrial thermometer (range -328F to +2498F) out on the road with me.

I didn't measure any temps while I was rolling; the mounting ideas I came up with were far too fiddly for me to want to mess with. I just tossed it in my saddlebag and brought it out when I parked.

Some data:

When the air at waist hieght in the parking lot near a just-parked bike at work reads 118F, the walkway between the lawns to the front door reads 104F.

In a few tests, I placed the thermocouple under the Jesus-strap on my pillion. It's made of the same fake, black leather as the rest of the seat.

Without any cover, in 105F ambient air and direct sun, the seat reaches 177-181F.

With a loose, white, elastic-fitted seat-cover (resembling a shower cap) in the same air, it reaches 145-150F under the strap.

Parking the bike in the shade of a small tree with no seat-cover at ~110F ambient keeps the seat at 110-112F.

So maybe finding a way to make the cover looser, and to ventilate it on the sides, is the key to the most comfort when returning to the bike.

Riding in 105-110F with a vest on wasn't so bad today. But I did mostly short, direct routes, and didn't ride on the couple of stretches of road where I've noticed the most amplification of heat in the past.

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I haven't had a decent wave come back in a week or two.

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I've been riding my own bike for just over two months and 2200 miles now.

I'm very good at turns in all situations including starting out in a perimeter turn.

I treat traffic the same as I treat it in my car; my observations and reactions are more natural and comfortable, less paranoid and skittish.

I have almost no fear of the freeway, though I get very wary when cars are starting to box me in; and the wind makes shoulder-checking a very deliberate move. I don't act like I see a lot of riders act, climbing up the bumper of a car before changing lanes. Crotch-rocket riders are especially prone to this. It's something I used to do in the first car I ever had that had enough torque to pass reliably. Part of it is just being young and stupid. I can still do it when evading a closing safety window, but I look for wide, clear space when changing lanes normally.

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I ran into one of the few normal-traffic hazards left to me today: a person who refused to use reasonable speed when approaching stopped cars or starting out at a light. This left me moving slower than I should have for longer than I should have been, and creeping up into his rear. Very uncomfortable situation. Motorbike stability increases with speed, even a few mph. Another justification for fender-mounted car-tazers.

Sunday, 2005/07/03

I crashed!

Okay, so it was on my bicycle, not my motorcycle.

And it was at 0 mph (maybe even -2 mph, really).

And it was in my own driveway.

But it reminded me that it's possible, no matter how experienced, educated, talented, capable, smart, and intense you are, you can completely eff-up in the least-dangerous of places.

So, what happened was, I'd just finished a 28-mile tool around the neighborhood, and spent the last 5 minutes of it circling in the cul-de-sac cooling down, and, as I always do, I shifted into 39/21 (second gear) to get into the driveway.

I popped up the rollover curb, cranked twice up the 15 feet of concrete drive, realized I was half a crank too far to twist my "regular" foot out of the pedal, maybe 18 inches from the garage door and going about twice as fast as normal. I resigned myself to defeat, pranged the front wheel into the door, bounced off, shifted my butt into ground-acquisition position, and crumpled in a heap on my right side.

That's only the second time I've gone to the ground since 1989, and only the third since 1973... Have I mentioned that I never crash? Have I also mentioned that I can't track-stand?

My critical error was made well before, when I took an unfamiliar route out of the last loop of the cul de sac. I knew it, too, and didn't think it was a big deal. But it was crucial to determining the angular displacement of the crank at the stopping point. I took an unfamiliar route because I wasn't paying attention in the normal way. I was distracted by the boredom-inhibitor in my brain, which inserts stream of consciousness whenever I'm riding so that I don't go cockeyed looking at the road, the wheel, the crank, the computer, the road, the wheel, the crank, the computer, the road, the wheel, the crank, the computer, etc... normally it's turned off by the time I'm headed in, but I've upped my distance about 25% on the last two rides, and maybe I'm not quite trained-up aerobically and maybe I'm a little hypoxic and need another minute or two of cooldown... at any rate, it kept me from adjusting and back-pedalling half a turn on the climb, which stymied me.

I sat on the ground for a bit, chuckling; I clipped out, untangled my legs, got up, and posed for the judges. Luckily, none were in attendance. So I took everything inside and laughed my spandex-covered patootie off.

No bruises visible. May get a couple on my inner thighs...falling while clipped-in is a funny thing. I think my bike is fine, too. What the hell...it was due for a dish-and-true anyway.

I think it's More Proficient Motorcycling that has a long chapter describing this phenomenon of a crash being caused long before the situation of the crash arrived, the cause being complacency and a failure to remember that no situation is repeated the same way twice, much less every time. I got lucky, going so slow, seeing it happening, and being on a machine 1/10th my own weight. If this had been a missed turn at 65 on something 2.5 times my weight, I'd have been thrown into Mexico and smashed like a piñata. I recommend that book, and the original, Proficient Motorycycling to everyone. I'm reading them again.

blair wrote: Have I mentioned that I never crash?

Well almost never... Great blog....

Saturday, 2005/07/08

Yesterday and today.

Yesterday:

Riding home from the gym, I made four different shifting errors.

First, I couldn't get into neutral with about 8 tries before starting the bike.

Then, I shifted back to first just a hair before getting the clutch pulled in, and stalled the bike.

A little bit down the road, I downshifted into neutral instead of first.

Finally, nearing home, I downshifted instead of upshifting.

The only things I didn't do was upshift instead of downshifting, and try to start the bike with the gears meshed.

Today:

Dead solid perfect from beginning to end. Totally quiet in my lane, zero shifting errors, no stumbles or wobbles stopping or starting. Just fluid and sweet.

You can never tell.

Sunday, 2005/07/24

Nothing much to report lately. It's getting pretty routine. Including the part where I leave my key in and have to get the bike towed and the towing company says "45 minutes" and takes two hours and three angry phone calls and two lies before I get the truth and a tow.

I'm thinking of carrying a charger and 50 feet of extension cord in my saddlebag...

Riding is nearly effortless now. My muscle memory has learned the dynamic grooves in the turning and braking and starting sequences. I have to set up practice situations where force is needed. Just a little more outside the envelope each time. I'll be scraping the pegs on purpose soon, maybe.

Monsoon season is here. (Not really a <i>monsoon</i> according to at least one local former meteorology professor, but why argue with an innocuous tradition?) But that means I have to watch the skies carefully and head directly for home when I think a storm might track across my path. The heat drops about 10 degrees, but the humidity jumps about 20 points; it's a bad thing normally, but on the bike it's a bit more comfortable this way.

Monday, 2005/08/02

So I wanted to change my oil over the weekend. So I go to Checker Auto, and I get a recycling drain pan, a funnel, two gallons of standard Pennzoil 10W-40 (because all the discussions of "motorcycle" oil vs. regular oil have convinced me; and I'd have got 20W-50 if this was May, but it's August and the worst of the heat is past and this oil change will probably last until November or December), and a filter wrench. I'd picked up the filter a couple of weeks ago, just because I was in AutoZone and they had one that fit. I was a little worried about clearance for the wrench, so I got a jaw-type wrench that was $15, about 3X what a strap wrench would cost. And if I couldn't get it under the bike, I could always return it and try something else.

But the wrench fits fine and I can get about 1/8th of a turn out of it.

The problem is, the funnel is too big for the filler hole (the cap on the hole is big for the hole and the hole is smaller than I thought), and the drain pan is too tall. It won't fit under the bike. Which is silly, because it's molded with a pointless extra inch of popped-out ridge on the bottom. And I can't just jack the bike up because the jack goes right where the pan needs to be.

So I couldn't change my oil.

I returned the bogus parts and now I'll have to look for a lower-profile recycle pan, or bail and use a plain basin and dump the oil into something else to recycle it. So much for modern conveniences.

No big hurry. I'm a few hundred miles shy of 3K since I got the bike, and the dealer said they'd changed the oil when they cleaned it up for sale. So I should be good for a week or two.

Wednesday, 2005/08/10

Okay. So I solved those problems. I got a plain basin and a funnel with a long neck that I could cut to custom-fit to the filler hole, which has an angled top so it's horizontal when the neck is tilted outward from the bike.

But of course, nothing is ever simple.

I went looking for crush washers. AKA oil drain plug washers. They're disposable, because you're supposed to torque the drain plug pretty tightly (because it's got oil lubricating its threads all the time and won't hold a weak torque with all that vibration). The tight squeeze crushes the washer partially, helping it seal better.

On my bike the standard crush washer is aluminum.

Neither Autozone nor Checker had 14 mm aluminum crush washers. And I couldn't find them anywhere online. Which is bizarre considering they're standard on a lot of Honda car engines, too, and there must be a few million consumed in this country every year.

One online site talked about them, and said the high torques are hell on the threads of the oil pan, so a fiber washer was recommended. But of course they're even more rare.

So I punted. I got a plastic one (for 85 cents) from Autozone and figured I'd just do without one if that didn't work.

I discovered then that (a) the drain plug is located such that there's no way I'm getting a socket wrench on it, much less my torque wrench; and (b) it was torqued on there really tight by the last guy to change the oil, so an adjustable wrench just slips off.

So I had to go out again, to buy a 17-mm box wrench.

Home Depot doesn't have them except in expensive sets. Lowe's had one, but it was $11. I bought it on spec, and went to Ace Hardware. And scored. $8 for the exact right thing. I'll amble into Lowe's sometime in the next week to return the overpriced one.

By chance, my car needed an oil change, too, so I took it to the Jiffy Lube, and got a brainstorm. I asked the guy there if he had any 14-mm aluminum crush washers. I doubt they turn Honda customers away just because they don't have drain plug gaskets. He went down into the pit (it's like a big basement down there) and came up with three aluminum ones and three made of what looked like steel with rubber o-ring inserts.

And he gave them to me for free... And I immediately wondered why I hadn't thought to ask those guys before...

Got to love the Jiffy Lube.

I'd love them more if they did motorcycle oil changes, but hey.

So I used the new wrench (and a rubber mallet) to break the seal on the drain plug, drained the oil, swapped out the filter, replaced the plug (used one of the rubber-insert washers to see how well it works) didn't torque it too much, inserted my customized oblique-canted funnel into the filler hole, loaded up 2.1 quarts of oil (2 gallons was a bit of overkill...for some reason I thought I'd need 5 quarts...), checked the level with the dipstick, screwed it back in, and took my ride for a ride down to the grocery store to get some fresh fruit to celebrate.

I saw a drop of oil in the parking lot when I came out, so when I got home I torqued the drain plug a little better. I have a paper towel paperweighted under the bike to watch for strays.

If it goes back to dripping, I'm going to be in a pickle, as I have no way to swap out the washers without dumping the oil, and until I can find a container in which to recycle the old oil, my basin is taken...

Thursday, 2005/07/11

Torqued three times now...still dripping...maybe 4-5 drops a day. Shoulda gone with the aluminum washer.

I may have to live with the "why didn't you get a Harley? They don't drip oil..." jokes while I figure out what to do...or get a really big recycling jug...