Bright and Shiny

The bitter cold of the last two weeks finally broke last night. While walking to/from the bus stop yesterday afternoon, it was still below -40°F and since I was walking on the flats below the university, breathing the air with the ice fog felt unhealthy. In case you missed yesterdays post, below is the photo from yesterday and if you compare it with today's photo to the left taken at roughly the same time of day, today it almost feels bright and welcoming at -18°F. Well, maybe that's a bit of a stretch.

I finally received the after market motorcycle turn signals today from an Amazon vendor, and they are very nicely made (very shiny) and look perfect except the LED lights are white instead of amber. So I can't really use them as a turn signal. But I think that I can still use them. Since I wasn't really looking for forward facing lights that would actually illuminate the road, just something that would make me more visible to oncoming traffic, these would work fine for that. Plus, they have a high and low setting and don't draw very much power. And it wasn't an error on the vendor or Amazon but I didn't read the item description very carefully.

Since the right front turn signal on the motorcycle is easily visible from the side, I may not bother with a front turn signal but will probably still search for a rear as the normal right turn signal blinking in the middle of the rig may confuse some driver sometime. Maybe I should consider the little electronic module normally sold for use with trailers where the trailer uses the brake light for both turn and brake while the tow vehicle has separate lights. Hmmmm...

Bitterly Cold

According to the National Weather Service, this how they describe interior Alaska. It is almost sunrise this morning when I walked out to get some coffee around 10am. The ice fog is has been pretty bad for the last couple of days and being anywhere in town has been unhealthy according to the EPA. The university is only a little above the valley floor but it is sufficient to get above the ice fog. According to the SMS messages from the police, there have been multiple accidents due to the low visibility.

The temperature is still pretty cold but we are fortunate that there is no wind to make it feel even colder. I have still been able to get out for some short walks. I've been trying out another iPhone app that uses the accelerometer and GPS in a way that tracks your movement without rapidly draining the battery. It seems to be working pretty well and my battery has been lasting most of the day. According to the app, I'm still managing 10k steps per day. I was thinking of trying out the FitBit activity tracker but this seems to work. Now if there was someway to upload the data.

Is it Spring Yet?

I didn't get out to the garage and do anything with the bike due to the cold weather. The garage door was accidentally left open yesterday for about 15 minutes and that was sufficient to shut down the garage heater. I needed to warm it up a bit using a very old, forced air, kerosene heater. But it does put out a lot of heat (and a lot of fumes) and had the interior heated up to about 50°F in about 30 minutes. Eventually, the water from the boiler started running again and the blower kicked back on. It is barely able to keep up at these temperatures.

The dog seems to be watching the sunset last night or else looking for moose. Initially, the cat was sitting there as well staring out the window but as soon as I took out my phone to take a photo, the cat lost interest. There is evidence that a couple of moose have been bedding down in the side yard next to the dog run.

A short update on the ChromeBook. I'm still using it almost exclusively. As you may notice, I started this post on the iPad using Blogsy as it's the easiest way to get pictures taken with my iPhone into a blog post. They nout sync with iCloud and within minutes after taking a picture on the phone, it is available on the iPad or just about any other Apple device. I haven't figured out a good way to access the pictures on the ChromeBook. The only other time I had to break out the laptop was to edit a locked MS Word document. Google Apps could read the document but I couldn't enter text into the fields. For what they were trying to do, a PDF form would be a better choice.

The new tire levers came in from Amazon today. With these, I shouldn't have a problem with enough leverage. They are made by a company called Ken-Tool. I included the pen in the photo as a size comparison.

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Getting the Bike Together - Again

I must have accidentally deleted this post. Two comments were lost from Dom and Lori. Not sure how but here it is again...

In my last post, I mentioned that I would take a picture of the rim. According to BMW, the rim is designed for only a tube type tire. There is no safety bead on the rim to help hold the tire bead in place on the rim. The sealing area along the edge is wide enough to safely hold the tire bead in place and many owners do run tubeless tires on these rims. The IRC TR-1 tire that I will be installing is a tube type tire.

Given the cold temperature in our garage, I asked a fellow member of our local airhead group if I could come by and use his tire changer. He has a No-Mar changer and it made quick work of putting the tire onto the rim. Longer tire levers really make a difference. It was on the rim and aired up in a little more than five minutes. He was ammused by the idea of dirt bike tires on an RT. Of course, it's necessary to stand around and talk for a while as I admired his collection of bikes including his newest addition, a 1958 Norton.
This evening, I put the wheels back on after cleaning up the rear hub of all of the excess grease. If you have been following this blog, you may remember that grease got onto the rear brake pads after the tire swap in OR so the pads were replaced at this time. The rear brake fluid was changed since I was working back there anyway.
The replacement shim for the carb came in the mail from Bing while I was out of town so it was installed under the main jet. The float level was rechecked since I had the carb bowls off. The carburetors were installed and the throttle and enrichener cables were adjusted (approximately). The battery reinstalled and plugged back into the trickle charger. I picked up a 5-pin flat trailer connector to connect the lights on the sidecar with the bike. Initially, there is just a tail and brake light but eventually I want to put in a right turn signal at least on the rear of the sidecar and some sort of white LED forward facing light to help me be more visible to oncoming traffic.
The wiring is my next project before putting the sidecar back on. Almost there...

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Rear Tire - Attempt 2

Following Dom's suggested technique, I screwed a 2x4 scrap to one of the posts in the garage. I then placed a long 2x4 under it and another scrap piece between the long one and the tire. By pushing down on the long 2x4, the tire bead is easily pushed down and loosened from the rim. This is done on both sides of the tire. The smallish tire levers that came in the factory toolkit were barely adequate to remove the bead from the disc brake side of the wheel.

The tube is removed after removing the nut from the valve stem. Removing the other bead from the wheel proved to be more difficult with the two supplied tire levers as I always wished I had at least one more. This is supposed to be the easy side.

I had wanted to try and do this whole process using only the tools provided in the supplied toolkit or at least using what I would be willing to carry. I thought that the most difficult part was going to be breaking the bead and getting the first side started.

Frustrating....

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