Since my bike is pretty well done, I'm back in the amplifier business. This means I've taken up the build I put aside this last Spring. It's been frustrating, trying to remember this stuff! Turns out I can't know everything about motorcycles and amplifiers at the same time...
See these two amps?
Same circuit!
The one on the left is my mid-60s Kalamazoo Model One. It sounds great, it's just kinda fragile and a nightmare if you have to service it:
My version will be more robust and easier to service, should service be required.
You know I'm having fun if my desk looks like this:
I usually have a picture of my cat here to reward you for reading through all this boring shit and looking at pictures of stuff you have no idea what it is. Today, I deviate from this policy with a picture of the beautiful dinner I cooked yesterday: Scrambled eggs with cheese, bratwurst, biscuits, super chunky peanut butter and concord grape jelly. NOM NOM NOM
I have a doctor's appointment tomorrow, and it's supposed to be 65 degrees. You know what that means...
Came home, took a nap, then went out to the shop and tinkered with my motorcycle. After making some adjustments to my left footpeg and gear shifter, I finally installed this fork brace that I've had for about a year now (it's a brace that goes between the fork tubes on the front end to force them to work together, making the fork laterally stiffer which improves handling, which makes the bike even more fun to ride).
This brace was designed to fit a different motorcycle, so I had to get creative to make it fit my bike. Here you can see me cutting aluminum strips to make shims...
Now it fits perfectly and that fucker is solid. Yesterday was surprisingly warm, so I went for a ride. You can see the new brace in place. I like how you can watch the reflected countryside slide by in the polished aluminum.
I went back to Draper the other day, had a great ride. It was about 75 degrees and there were hardly any cars on the road around the lake. I saw probably half a dozen other bikes there, everybody trying to get a little lean time before Indian Summer ran out.
As soon as the sun dropped below the horizon, the temperature fell sharply and I was glad I'd dressed in layers. A twenty minute blast through the crazy rush hour traffic on the highway and I was home again, talking shit on the internet.
New Rule: The rest of the world can go back to being completely jealous of America.
Our majority-white country just freely elected a black president, something no other democracy has ever done. Take that, Canada! Where's your Nubian warrior president? Your head of state is a boring white dude named Stephen Harper... and mine is a kick ass black ninja named Barack Hussein Obama!
That's right, everybody, I take back every bad thing I ever said about the good old USA! I've gone from "God damn America" to "God damn, America!" I feel like a hockey mom at the state fair getting felt up by Hank Williams, Jr. while fireworks go off and Jesus appears in my cotton candy. It would be stupid not to be stupid about it!
So I'd like to take this moment, when we finally got one right, to bask in a little unwarranted, unapologetic, irrational faux patriotism... or as Fox News calls it, "regular programming".
Now I might regret this, it's kind of like going grocery shopping when you're high, but here goes, world:
We're Americans. We built the Golden Gate Bridge and Hoover Dam and Joan Rivers. We're the only country that can look at a sandwich made of ice cream and chocolate cookies, covered in fudge and think, "Huh, ya think we could fry that?"
And you know what? YES WE CAN!
They may have 72 virgins, but we have 31 flavors! You know what our favorite burger topping is? Another burger!
We invented rock and roll, jazz, funk, r&b, and hip hop. Without our music, your iPods would be filled with ABBA, Menudo and Men At Work! And you wouldn't have iPods! Not only did we create the internet, we're the ones who filled it up with porn!
Jefferson lived here, and Miles Davis, and Mark Twain and Frank Lloyd Wright and a lot of other people Sarah Palin never heard of! In America, strippers and Disney stars have an equal right to be named Hannah Montana, and I was freely able to make a movie saying there's no afterlife and you could watch it while eating crap that'll kill you! But that's okay because our corn-fed high school sophomores are bigger than your soldiers, and they're better armed!
I ask you: In what other nation would they tax young people to make sure old people can afford erections?
What you call "football" we call "soccer", and what you call "war crimes" we call "football".
So let me just say it again: We elected a black guy, and it was because he was the best candidate, not because it was some cheap gimmick (and we should know, because we're also the country that invented cheap gimmicks!)
Yes, America is like Jessica Simpson: Sometimes it's so stupid it embarrasses you... but on the other hand, how about them titties!
Bill Maher
Rough week for Justin, I think I'm gonna have to quit taking this medicine. It's giving me bad headaches, makes my muscles really sore, and it's making me bitchy!! I've blown up on several people now, and for less than good reasons. I can't function like this, I try to work on something and my hands shake so badly that I can barely operate a screwdriver.
While I'm bitching...
I've been do the driver's license office three times now to take the test to finally get the motorcycle endorsement on my license, and each time they've told me that they were either too busy or that they were closing early. That's no way to run a beaurocracy!
This is interesting: Somebody I actually didn't hate in high school got ahold of me on Facebook, and it's finally made me curious as to who else is online that I might know. I haven't been to either my ten or twenty year reunions because if I didn't like those fucking people the first time around, I doubt I'll like them any better now. That said, it's interesting to go back down memory lane, and I even dug out a bunch of old negatives and scanned them.
Behold! It's 1986 and you can see that my tonsils have been removed!
I have to admit to a little touch of schadenfreude... I'm really enjoying watching the right wingers squirm! Burn! Sizzle! Pop! Fume!
It's not all sweetness and light, of course. Bush will probably never have to answer for his crimes, nor will his henchmen. Now they're intent on wrecking the place as much as possible before they leave office, pushing through a shit ton of executive orders designed to increase corporate profits. It'll take the new administration years to undo the damage that'll be done over the next few weeks.
J'Oklahoma is even more red(neck) than it was before. Sally Kerns was reelected, as was James Inhofe. Horrible, horrible excuses for human beings. I was really surprised about that Prop 8 thing in California, I thought dickhead Mormons were mostly confined to Utah, but apparently not.
Oh well, I did what I could, and now I'm cautiously optimistic.
Nation Finally Shitty Enough To Make Social Progress
A few years ago, I got a $21.50 GPz tank on eBay. It was in terrible shape, all rusty inside, tons of Bondo on the outside. I stripped it down to the bare metal so I could see what I had to work with, cleaned it out with muriatic acid, then neutralized the acid with water & baking soda, braze welded a couple pinholes along the bottom seam, then pushed about a quart of fresh Bondo into the dents and painted it. I would have Kreemed it or used some POR-15 tank sealer, but I was broke at that stage of the process, so I didn't. I should have, but I didn't.
Fast forward to actually using the tank. I put a couple hundred miles on it without incident, but last weekend I decided to take advantage of the beautiful weather and go ride around Lake Stanley Draper.
On the way up there, the bike started cutting out like it was running out of gas... I downshifted and gave it some throttle, putting it on the main jets, and it cleared up. I shifted back into 5th and it ran fine. I made it to the lake and went around the twisty road once just fine, but on the second time it started cutting out and it just got worse and worse until the bike seemed to be running on only one cylinder... then it ground to a halt.
Yard sale.
Oh, the shame!
The culprit:
After a thorough douching of the carbs, I proceeded to derust the tank... again. After some googling I found out that vinegar is good for removing rust, and it's even better if it's combined with heat and salt. I had a couple jugs of old vinegar, and since vinegar gets stronger with age, this was ideal. I dumped about a cup of salt into the tank and ran the vinegar through the coffee maker (it was time to do that, anyway), then poured the boiling vinegar into the tank.
I drained all the vinegar and washed out the salt, rinsed the tank with hot water and about half a box of baking soda, then more clean water, then set the tank on top of a heater with a hair drier in the filler hole for a couple hours:
I went back to check on the tank later, and it was bone dry... but when I picked up the tank I heard this "sssshhhhhh" as huge amounts of rust moved around inside. :x
Time to get mechanical on it's ass.
I dumped several partial boxes of drywall screws in the tank, then spent about an hour rocking it back and forth.
I was able to get a vacuum hose inside and suck out most of the rust, then repeated the rinse and dry procedure. The tank now has the "normal" amount of rust you'd expect inside a gas tank.
Looking around inside, I found where the tank was leaking behind where one of the logo badges used to mount, which has caused a blister to form on the outside of the tank.
Gotta love that JB Weld!
Cleaned up the petcock:
Since rust was obviously getting through the fuel filter, and I'm a broke joke and cheap to boot, I dug around in Ye Olde Junke Pile and found another filter.
Belt + suspenders, right?
I rode the bike maybe 75 miles yesterday and it did just fine! No hesitation whatsoever, revs even easier than it did before the breakdown, sounds suuuuuuper sweet in full song!
This winter, when it's too cold to ride, I'll fix the paint on the right side where it leaked and blistered, plus I'll apply some tank sealer.
Masking tape over the microphone to block wind noise, clear 2" wide Scotch packing tape over the lens to protect against bugs & rocks. I think I need to use another layer of tape over the mic, though...
I've been steadily tweaking on my bike, and today I felt confident enough that I rode to Draper Lake, some 30 miles away. Draper has the only curves around here...
First, I did a quick blast up and down the road to make sure it was running okay.
(Please excuse the shitty video quality.)
Then to the curves!
This thing really, really loves to go around corners, yet I can let go of the handlebars at 40 mph and it tracks straight & true with no headshake or nastiness. It's pretty neutral with regards to corning, it accepts inputs readily enough, holds whatever line you give it, goes where you aim it. I haven't started working on the chicken strips yet, still getting to know the bike before I push it very hard. So far, though, I'm extremely pleased.
I've geared it for top end, so at 70 mph the engine is only turning about 4800 rpm (out of 10,000). By that logic, I should be able to do at least 140, right?
Last few miles, I started hearing some odd noises from the top end, got home and found that my header nuts were loose, and that one had fallen off! I got 'em tightened back down, I'll have to remember to check those over the next few heat cycles.
Did I mention that the seat is on the firm side? Yeah, well, my ass hurts!
