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Categories: all aviation bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater
Thu, 02 Sep 2010The pre-08 Ninja 250 comes with some of the weakest suspension springs I've ever encountered. It feels like a goofy toy bike when I sit on it. I decided that, although it's "against the rules" of the Cheapskate Cup (which I'm never going to win anyway, so no one really cares), I would change out my suspension a bit. I've done it with every other Ninja 250 I've owned, and it was impossible to imagine taking this thing to the track without doing it. The first thing I did was look through the Ninja250.org FAQ section on rear suspension. This is definitely where to start. I liked the look of the 08 rear shock upgrade, so I poked around on Ebay. Within minutes, I'd won a 2008 rear shock for a grand total of $26 shipped to me. Deal. Gotta love all the racers upgrading their new shiny Ninjas. Of course, all was not beer and skittles -- I immediately got an email from the seller, saying they were going to be on vacation for the next week, a fact which was not called out in the auction anywhere. Not pleased about that. However, they did ship it promptly the next week, and despite the shock's best efforts to escape, it was still in the box. (Seriously, people, it's a heavy, linear spike. Don't just throw it in a box with some loosely crumpled newspaper. Every used shock I've bought has arrived with several holes in the box where the shock tried to escape during shipping.) But it did arrive, and in perfectly functional condition. The installation (I'd forgotten) is almost desperately simple: remove two bolts, pull the old shock, put the new one in with the two bolts, done. Takes 10-15 minutes. I set it on the heaviest preload, knowing that it was going to go head to head with a seriously stiff front end. It felt ridiculously firm with the old front springs, but it was clearly a huge improvement, even for me. I started in on the front forks, but discovered after I'd pulled them apart that I didn't have any (so I thought) 20 weight fork oil. Of course, by the time it was time to give up for the night and go to bed, I discovered that I did have some 20 weight fork oil. Ah well, the next day would work. Today being the next day, I got everything reinstalled. I am using .95 kg/mm springs from Sonic, which seems pretty hefty to me (my street bike only has .75 kg/mm springs, but this was what their calculator said I should use for racing). It all went back together pretty easily, and the first time I sat on the bike, it was clear I'd made a huge difference. Someone guessed at one point that the stock front springs in a Ninja 250 are .44 kg/mm. I more than doubled the spring rate, if that's true. It's clear I made a dramatic change. The front springs are slightly but noticeably stronger than the rear spring now. It's not bad, and shouldn't cause any real problems, but I'd like to get them closer together for next year. I'll probably look into either replacing this shock's spring (if that's possible, which is unlikely) or upgrading to a better shock. I strongly suspect that with the resurgence caused by the remodel in 08 (which takes the same specs, shock-wise), there's a wide variety of rear shocks available to choose from now. (Interesting side-note: when I went to look for rear shock information just now, it was amusing to see that most rear-shock knowledge available online is traceable directly back to an article I wrote in 2006.) Anyway, I'm definitely happy with the mods, and I'll probably be all excited about getting a better rear shock in there after I go ride it, mostly for the better spring rate. Posted at 22:54 permanent link category: /motorcycle Out of curiosity, I decided to check out a different kind of glasses frame. The glasses I've been wearing for the last few years are cool, and I like them, but they're comparatively spendy now that my insurance has basically punted on paying anything for frames (side note: VSP is an awful provider, and my preferred optometrist had to drop them after too many gross experiences, and their compensation fell too low; I don't have any other choice through my employer, though, and prefer to have insurance for emergency coverage). So, my old glasses cross the line at $150 just for the frames. I found something that's close, but, as you can see below, a bit more... cartoony: the Titmus 70F prescription safety glass frame. Aw yeah.
I'm not committed to using them, but they're $27, vs the $150 for my old frames (which are dying and need to be replaced soon). Plus, as you can plainly see, the new ones are ANSI rated as safety glasses, a bonus for working in the shop, or riding a bicycle. I can even get side-shields for them, if I want to go all-out safety nerd. I'm actually kind of disappointed they didn't come with side-shields (the copy on the website was ambiguous). I'm not convinced I like the look, but it's different, and a hell of a lot cheaper... Posted at 13:49 permanent link category: /misc Wed, 01 Sep 2010I was able to replace the rear engine mounting bolts on my new track-only Ninja 250 last night. I fired it up for its hopefully-last road ride, and was very pleased to find that the vibration that had so worried me was completely gone. Isn't it amazing what properly tightened engine mounting bolts will do? With that problem positively fixed, I brought the bike back to the garage, and started stripping it of road parts in earnest. It was surprisingly easy to take off all the street parts and reduce it to a much more visually spare motorcycle. All those missing pieces only really take off a few pounds, but hey, that's a few pounds, and less stuff to break. Hopefully the number plates will arrive soon, and I can get it all tarted up in racing drag. I've got my belly pan ready to install ($1.99 at Goodwill, but I had to visit four thrift stores before I found a 9x13 brownie pan). Fork springs and brake line are in but not yet installed. I hope to see the rear shock soon (and probably won't do any suspension work at all until I have everything here -- the bike would be horribly unbalanced with only forks updated). Frankly, it's starting to look like a race bike!
Posted at 14:46 permanent link category: /motorcycle Tue, 31 Aug 2010The new Ninja 250 had a number of problems when I got it. The most obvious and worrying was the grinding and general unhappy feeling from the final drive. Obviously, the chain was in a bad way. The front sprocket was a bit hooked, but not excessively so. There was also the camchain slap, but that was pretty much cleared up when I cleaned the camchain adjuster before I bought the bike. So, last weekend, I took the bike apart some to check things out and do some of the work that needs to be done. I flushed out the coolant, and replaced it with water (no coolant allowed on the track, as it's slippery as hell if it spills, and nearly impossible to clean up), also drilling the drain bolts for safety wire as long as I had them out. I shot a bit of video showing the initial state of the bike, but it's pretty low quality, and I don't think I really have enough time to properly document what I'm doing -- it's looking like a tight squeeze to get the work done, much less jockey a camera around. As long as I had the bike apart with the tank off, I decided to check the valve adjustment. About half the valves were too tight, so I adjusted them. In the process, I tried a new method of doing the valve adjustment that I really like: I removed the front engine mounts. The rear bolts are enough to hold the engine up while the front mount is out, and it makes access to the head absolutely amazing. I'm doing it that way every time from now on. In the process of doing that, I had occasion to notice that the big fat bolt that goes through the front engine mount was actually backed out about 3/4 of an inch! That's nowhere near a good thing. When it all went back together, I was liberal with the loctite, and it shouldn't be backing itself out again. I also drained the oil, and drilled the oil bolts for safety wire (all fluid-retaining bolts have to be wired per race regs) today. I considered changing the filter as long as I had it out, but I didn't have any spares handy, and it looked to be in pretty good shape. I'll change it after the race, which is the last of the year. I'll have to winterize the bike anyway, since the water in the cooling system will be a freeze danger if I leave it in over the winter. Fortunately, the new sprocket came in today, and I was able to install it and the new (non-o-ring) chain I picked up last weekend. Most of the grinding went away, but there was still some disconcerting feeling about the engine, as I rode it around a little bit. I had a little brain spasm, and checked tonight (far too late) after getting back from a theater event: sure enough, both rear engine bolts are loose, and their threads munged up pretty badly. Off to Tacoma Screw with me! Two new M10x140 bolts will be mine soon. That should sort out the remaining odd grinding feeling. I knew it was somewhat familiar -- my 2006 Ninja had an engine mount bolt come loose like this (the nut was actually completely gone), and it was a very similar feeling. So, if you're keeping track at home, you will have counted three engine bolts that were loose. If you consult with the manual, you'll find that the Ninja 250's engine is held in with... yes, three bolts. That engine was only loosely held in place. That's a disconcerting thing to think about. I noticed a sticker on this bike (which is a 2005) that said "Made in Thailand." I recall vaguely that Kawasaki switched to the Thai factory (although I recalled it being Taiwan, not Thailand) in 2004, and I guess I'm not surprised to find little things like missing loctite on engine bolts in common between these two non-Japanese made bikes. It's inevitable when you switch factories like that, I guess, although it's disturbing that it should have spanned so many years. Once I get the new mount bolts in place, that should be the last reason I need to ride the bike (to confirm that those bolts nixed the vibration), and then I can start aggressively stripping off street parts. Right now, I have to leave it legal enough to drive for testing. New fork springs arrived today, and I expect to see the new rear shock in the next few days. The new front brake line arrived last week, but hasn't been installed yet. I'm stalling on those changes so I can take care of essential "race requirement" modifications before "wouldn't it be nice" changes. I can tackle the nice mods after the race, but I can't even race it if I don't make the required changes. So hopefully, after this coming weekend, I should have the bike race legal, and then I can ponder nice changes, or I can actually take a few minutes off to not be doing something. That would be nice too. Although I'm excited about the opportunity to race a Ninja 250, the additional time commitment of prepping the bike is a bit overwhelming. Posted at 01:26 permanent link category: /motorcycle Fri, 27 Aug 2010Today was another one of those days that inspired me to grab the camera on the way out the door. Glad I did.
Posted at 13:43 permanent link category: /misc Wed, 25 Aug 2010My parents have taken off on their latest adventure -- a sailing trip aboard the SV Sequoia to Mexico and points south. I had my first radio contact with them last night, from 8:00 to 8:08 pm PDT, using 80m (3.870 MHz). It's a very noisy band, and we were only just able to hear each other. I really wish my dad's radio included a DSP to clean up the audio. It makes a substantial difference. As of 8 pm last night, they were southbound about 15 miles off the coast of Oregon, 20 miles from the mouth of the Umpqua river (Reedsport, OR). I didn't catch whether they were north or south of the river. They had the third reef in the mainsail, and the staysail out, so they must be working with quite decent wind, although if they said windspeed, I didn't hear it. The radio contact thing is interesting, because it's so variable in its reliability. At least this close, 80m is a very reliable choice in the sense that the signal is practically guaranteed to get there. The question is whether the atmospheric noise will overwhelm the signal or not. So, wish them luck! Next stop is San Francisco, probably in about 3 days. Posted at 09:09 permanent link category: /misc Mon, 23 Aug 2010This may be the fastest I've ever acted for something like this. Last week, maybe Thursday (it being Monday as I write this), I got a message from one of my fellow racers: he was looking for help checking out a Ninja 250. I asked why he was all hot for a Ninja 250 all of a sudden, and he pointed me to this thread on the WMRRA forums, which was closely followed by this one. Racing Ninja 250s? Hell yeah! I've always wanted to do that, but never wanted to make the leap after it became clear that the only people who were racing them (I met one, and one only, nearly three years ago) were wannabe big-bike racers with attitudes. Not where I want to hang out. But with people like Bateman and O'Mahoney racing 250s, that starts to sound pretty appealing. So, I set out to look for one, turning to the One True Source for all things of a classified nature: Craigslist. The first one that my eye lit upon was a 2005 listed for $1500 just a half mile south of where I live. I contacted the seller, and we set up a time to check the bike out this weekend. I met him and looked the bike over: it looked to be in pretty good shape, although it had obviously gone boom onto its side a couple of times: the right muffler was pushed in and rubbing on the swingarm a little bit; the upper fairing had a 3 sq-in section broken out of it on the lower edge under the turnsignal stalk; there were scrape marks here and there. Everything seemed to be present, though, and nothing vital was bent or broken. I got the key from him and started it up, only to be horrified at the awful clattering noise coming from the head. It sounded like there was a low-speed grinder rattling around inside the head. Not encouraging. I asked Tom (our seller) about the noise, and he said it'd always sounded like that -- he'd just assumed it was normal. It did basically go away when the engine sped up, so I clambered aboard and took the bike out for a spin. Everything about it was loose and sloppy-feeling, which wasn't really unexpected. It's only a year older than my street 250, and has 4000 fewer miles, but has clearly lived a harder life, with some abuse, and some time spent sitting in the rain outside. There was nothing obvious, but there were little signs: the ignition keyhole cover didn't slide to like it should, and the finish on some of the painted parts was characteristically dulled. There was no rust to speak of, though, and nothing seemed structurally wrong with the bike, which is all I actually care about. I liked it, and told him so, but said I had to come back the next day to finish the test ride. He was very willing to humor me, as I think he'd had no nibbles on the bike in a week of having it up on CL. So I came back the next day, and he agreed that I could take it back to my house, adjust the chain, and try cleaning out the camchain tensioner to see if that would take care of the rattle. Several hours and a trip to the hardware store later, the rattle was gone, and the chain was actually the proper tension again -- when I rode it the first time, I pulled up the bottom run with my toe, and it hit the swingarm without any resistance. Not a good thing, and doubtless a source of some of the loosey-goosey feeling I got from the bike. Riding it with the chain tensioned correctly was definitely a mixed bag. On the one hand, it wasn't so loose, but on the other, there was an exciting new grinding feeling when the bike rolled forward. I pulled off the front sprocket cover, and discovered that the front sprocket was moderately hooked (a bad thing), and the chain pulled far enough off the rear sprocket to see a bit over a millimeter of daylight under the link (a bad thing, indicating a new chain is needed). There was an odd thump when the bike rolled over some bumps. The throttle cable needed about 10mm of adjustment to be correctly tightened. I'm hopeful that with a new chain, a lot of the grinding feeling will go away (although some of it is obviously in the transmission too, so I'm equally hopeful that the tranny doesn't need new bearings). As you may have already guessed, I made an offer, and Tom accepted it, and I now have a fourth motorcycle taking up precious space in my little garage. Something's gonna get booted out to tarp-land soon, but I haven't decided what. I really need to get to work on planning for the backyard shed I was just sure I was going to build this year.
Posted at 11:15 permanent link category: /motorcycle Tue, 10 Aug 2010Every once in a while, I'll shoot a theatrical press photo that's just a really great photo. With Penguins, it's pretty easy for me to work with a huge grin on my face. Check those pictures out. They range from pretty good to fantastic. That's largely due to the content, though. With Clubfoot (a show about stories from an EMT), I wasn't expecting to have the same reaction. What can you do with three people and more or less no action? Certainly not anything like what you can do with Penguins. Which is why it was odd when I found myself grinning like an idiot over this picture:
It's really a fantastic picture. The composition, the lighting, the coloration, the expressions; everything came together. The subject matter isn't enough by itself ("three people looking at the camera" is not, on the face of it, a compelling idea for a picture) to grab you, yet this one does. Anyway, it's nice to come away from something like this feeling so good about my work. These are the odd little moments that I'm reminded how much I enjoy what I'm doing. Posted at 00:35 permanent link category: /theater Thu, 05 Aug 2010
A Children's Book of Revelations
You ain't seen nothin' yet.
Come down to Annex Theatre for a showing of Penguins to catch this film in all its big-screen glory. Runs from August 7 through August 27, don't miss it! Posted at 13:52 permanent link category: /theater Thu, 29 Jul 2010Feel free to skip this one, it's kind of heady, and may not make a lot of sense. So, think about how a normal consumer transaction goes. I make a widget, and it costs me $5 to produce. Let's say I spend another $5 on packaging, distribution, marketing, etc. My total cost to put a widget in a customer's hand is $10. I charge them $3 on top of that to have some profit, total $13 charge to the customer. They pay their $13, and go away happy with their widget. Don't dwell on the amounts here, just get that process in your head: cost, product, price, overhead, etc. The end of that process is that I'm out my $5 product, and the $5 I spent on marketing and overhead, but I'm up by $13, so I've made $3 at the end of the day. Pretty straightforward. Do that a lot, and that's the basis of most trades. Theater, however, is an entirely different beast, as occurred to me the other day. In theater, you spend various resources to put together a product (a show) -- time, money, reused materials, etc. Rent costs a certain amount. If you assume a fixed-length run of a show, the product cost (the cost to put on the show) is pretty much fixed. However, unlike many other transactions, the customer doesn't diminish your supply of the product. Whether you have three paying audience members, or a full house, one night of a show costs the same, and uses up the same amount of your product. You end up with the same amount of product left whether you cancelled for lack of sales, or completely sold out. So income is, effectively, completely disconnected from cost. If you spend $100 on a show that is for whatever reason a hit, your profit would be enormous. If you blow $10 grand on a show that's a complete flop, you're out $10 grand. And through all that, the amount of product you have never changes -- your show is always (within the limits of what fate doles out in the form of actor performances, tech successes/failures, etc.) the same. Time is the only thing that diminishes the amount of product you have. I don't really have a point here, it's just such a weird business to be in. The normal rules don't apply. Posted at 16:22 permanent link category: /theater Mon, 26 Jul 2010After the questionable focus tests, I decided that the only real way to test was to take the lens out and use it. So, I wandered around Fremont and took pictures, being sure in each case that I was holding still, the subject wasn't moving, and the focus was locking on a reasonable thing. The end result was that at a variety of focal lengths, and a variety of subject distances, the lens focused pretty well 95% of the time. There were a few missed shots, particularly closer up. Basically, it's Good Enough. I'm disappointed that this is the result of spending $900 on a top-of-the-line lens, but I'm not sure what else to do about it. In the realistic light of day, no lens gets perfect focus every time, because the camera can't always get good focus. Obviously this one is well enough adjusted to work most of the time. So I'll keep plugging away with this one, and if it comes up obviously deficient in some other situation (such as the much lower-light environment of the theater), I'll sell it on to someone for whom it'll be the right thing, and look into other choices. In the mean time, it's nice to have my "good lens" back, and not be limited to primes (which take beautiful pictures, of course, so long as you want that specific focal length). Posted at 15:05 permanent link category: /misc Wed, 21 Jul 2010I sat down with a notepad and did some ordered and logical testing with my 24-70 last night. With no adjustment in the camera, the lens was focusing about right in most cases. This is good and bad. When I say "about right," that means that in something like 20% of cases, the focus was pretty unacceptably soft. When I dialed in +20 on the AF adjustment, the results were less predictable, with the focus sometimes right on (what?) and sometimes dramatically back-focused, like I expected. I didn't collect statistics last night, but I'll post a gallery of the focus shots later (I need to redo them with better light, to ensure that low light wasn't contributing to errors, although the lens has to shoot in low light in practice), and come up with some numbers. The bottom line is that right now I'm not comfortable with this lens's ability to focus correctly. This will probably end up with me renting that Canon 24-70 f/2.8L lens from Glazers again, to compare. The Canon L lens is pretty much the gold standard, so it'll be a good control result. Posted at 14:33 permanent link category: /misc Tue, 20 Jul 2010I got the lens onto the camera last night, and I'm honestly a bit confused about what I discovered. The best I can say is that the linearity of the focusing data seems questionable. With the full (+20 toward distance) adjustment dialed in, my 70mm at 1.5 feet test looked alright. Not ideal, but close enough. However, with that same adjustment dialed in, shots further away were dramatically back-focused (what you'd expect with this adjustment in place, and a correctly-functioning lens). With other tests, it looked like I was getting in focus consistently on the second shot, but not the first, and not by the huge difference I found in some other shots. I didn't have time to sit down and approach the problem systematically last night, but the answer I have right now is that I have no clue what's going on. I don't trust the lens to focus correctly. Once I get some rational test results that hit the situations I mostly find myself in, I'll have a clearer picture. I was too tired last night and fiddling with too many variables at once to have anything conclusive to say right now. More to come. I just need to approach the problem rationally and I should end up with a workable solution. Clearly the lens is getting close, and my messing with the AF adjustment in the camera was a lot of the confusion. Posted at 11:41 permanent link category: /misc Mon, 19 Jul 2010A quick recap of our story so far. Back in February, I took the plunge and bought myself a very nice lens, a Sigma 24-70mm f/2.8 HSM lens. It's roughly equivalent to the $1500 Canon lens of the same specs, but for $600 less. It was, at the time, the most I'd ever spent on a single piece of camera equipment; that includes the camera it was going on to. Fast forward a few months to June. I was talking with a friend, and we got to talking about autofocus, how it works, and how to test that it was working right. He recommended a test page, and I tried it out. Lo and behold, my new 24-70 lens was front-focusing a bit (the point that was actually in focus was about 10mm in front of where it should have been). So, I contacted Sigma, confirmed that they could fix the problem, and sent it in. A couple weeks later, it comes back. I excitedly fix the lens to the camera, and check it out. Nope, it's still out of focus. Oh wait, once I take out the camera's adjustment (which I'd put in before), it's way out of focus! It looks to my critical but unpracticed eye that they adjusted the focus point by 10mm alright, but in the wrong direction! Ok. Call Sigma back, explain the situation. They're very nice about the whole thing, offering to ship the lens back to them at their own expense. Get it shipped off, and the waiting starts. Almost two weeks after it was shipped off (having requested expedited service, since I'd already had the lens in once before), I got a phone call from them. It was one of their techs, and the (fairly confused) conversation boiled down to them saying, "Our calibration procedure doesn't cover the situation your test shows," and me asking, "So, the lens isn't guaranteed to focus in that situation?" The answer seemed to be that sure, it should, but that's not what we're testing for. (For the nerds in the house, I was testing at 70mm focal length, f/2.8, focused ~1.5 feet from the lens -- which is within its nominal capabilities.) There was a strong undertone of "Why would you do that? It's not a macro lens. You're an idiot, aren't you." Now, nearly two weeks after that phone call (the lens came back to me three weeks to the day after I sent it, so take all my "two weeks" descriptions with a grain of salt), it has arrived at my desk again. The note that came with it says:
IF YOU WANT THE BEST RESULT WE NEED YOUR CAMERA WITH THE LENS. CHECKED ALL IN GOOD WORKING ORDER. That sounds to me like they helpfully left the lens with its even-worse calibration in place. I'm not sure why my camera should be that different from their camera. I know that I saw the exact same error with two very different camera bodies (an XTi and a 7D), so it's hard to imagine that their test 7D could have been so vastly different. Perhaps the most galling thing about the whole experience was that phone call. The tech sounded like he was rolling his eyes and making the yapping-mouth gesture with his hand to the other guys in the room as he talked to me. It's news to me that a lens should be expected to not accurately focus within its design parameters. The fact that it has the problem doesn't make me feel very confident of its ability to accurately shoot the demanding photos I'm taking (low light, moving subjects, etc.). The fact that I had to send the lens back twice with a $900, top-of-their-line piece of equipment is very worrying, particularly if (as it appears) the second trip to the factory resulted in them leaving things exactly as they were after the first trip messed it up. The half-suppressed "You're a complete idiot" vibe is just icing on the cake. Of course, the real test will come tonight, when I can bring lens and camera together. I'll have an update soon with the outcome, but if at all possible, I'm never going to deal with Sigma's warranty service again. The method I've heard described for dealing with this is to buy 3 copies of the lens you want, then send back the two with the worst focus. An expensive way to do it, but it honestly sounds more surefire than going back to the factory for adjustments. Color me seriously unimpressed. Posted at 13:43 permanent link category: /misc Fri, 09 Jul 2010I had a free day today, and decided to take a little ride before it got too hot. Seattle's been dealing with fairly bipolar weather lately, and a week ago, it was in the 50s and raining. Today it topped 90 with perfectly clear skies. I loaded up Google's map page, and started scrolling around. I found a little road near Carnation, called Griffin Creek Road. It looked delightfully twisty and interesting, and I'd never heard of it before. I figured there was a reasonable chance it was a dirt road, but it was worth a trip to find out. I loaded up the Camelbak with ice and water (a fine idea, and it stayed very cold until my return home several hours later), and headed out on the Ninja 250. My usual route for this kind of trip is to take 520 out to Avondale (520 really just turns into Avondale where it terminates), then turn right on Union Hill Road, and follow that through its twists and turns to Snoqualmie Valley Road, which runs up the west side of the Snoqualmie Valley, and eventually leads to some of the best twisties in the area (although they're brief, and relatively high traffic). This time, I continued out to Carnation, and south a bit to pick up Griffin Creek Road. I got there, and it was indeed a dirt road, but with an internal shrug of the shoulders, I headed up, figuring I'd turn around if it got too uncivilized. I finally stopped a few miles up, where the road suddenly narrowed from a wide single lane to a narrow single lane. I didn't have anything to prove, and paused in a convenient pool of shadow to take off some of my gear and spend a few minutes without earplugs in. It was very pretty, although not particularly picure-worthy -- the picture would have been titled, "Trees." Any follow-on shots would have been titled things like "More trees," or "Bike with trees." I turned around, and on a whim, decided to turn south on Carnation-Fall City Road, and make my way to Snoqualmie Falls. I was most of the way there, so why not? I made my way to the falls, and, sweating in my gear among the tourists, took a couple of quick, "I was really there" photos.
I made my way back to the bike, and back down the hill, the way I'd come. I stopped at the delightfully deceptive "$1.00 sweet cherries" booth ($1 buys you a miniscule amount of cherries, although you can certainly get those few for a dollar). I rolled on. As I was coming back along highway 203, I was reminded of something Jeniffer and I had experienced and discussed in our trip around the North Cascade loop last month: no one knows how to pass any more. So, the way it works is this: on any two-lane road (ie, one lane each direction) where passing is permitted, well, passing is permitted. Generally speaking, to do it legally, the vehicle in front of you should be going less than the speed limit, and you shouldn't exceed 15 MPH over the speed limit in your overtaking maneuver. In Washington, at least, it's illegal for any vehicle to detain 5 or more vehicles behind it, and it's required to pull off the road to let the other guys go past. I suspect other states have similar rules, and it's certainly a common-sense idea. Anyway, it was interesting to me how atrophied the skill is. Everyone who drives on a multi-lane freeway is used to simply having a second lane available for overtaking. Someone in front of you not going fast enough? Pull into the next lane, and overtake them at your leisure. On a two-lane road, it's not that easy, of course. First, you have to determine if it's safe to pass. That is, is there oncoming traffic? Do you have a dashed line? (If there's a solid yellow line in your lane, passing is prohibited, usually for a very good reason.) Is the guy in front of you behaving predictably? Sometimes the best course of action is to back off, or pull over for a few minutes to let them get ahead. If things are safe, turn on your turn signal, gun the motor, and jam past the slowpoke. Signal back into your lane, and slow down to something approximating the speed limit for the benefit of the local constabulary. It's really easy, particularly if you're on a motorcycle. Of course, not all motorcycles are created the same. The Ninja 250, while it embodies many fine attributes, will never be mistaken for a powerhouse in the modern pantheon of motorcycles. With the 250, you have to plan your strategy with a bit more care -- find somewhere with good visibility, a useable gap between cars ahead of you if you can't pass the whole line in one go, etc. It's actually a pretty interesting challenge. On our trip on Highway 20 last month, Jeniffer was riding her BMW F650GS (a confusingly-named 800cc vertical twin), and I was on my Ninja 250 (a rationally-named 250cc vertical twin). Her bike produces something like 80 HP, mine screams along with maybe 28, for a not terribly substantial difference in weight. It was with interest, therefore, that I would pass people, and wait a surprisingly long time for Jeniffer to catch up, despite rolling through some prime passing areas. When I asked her later what was happening, she said she's just not comfortable passing, and deferred to my decade-plus of experience. This is by no means an attempt to rag on Jeniffer or her riding skills, it's just interesting to me that we have such different approaches to it. But similar to both my ride today, and our ride last month, was the fact that very few other drivers showed any inclination to pass. We'd come upon these long trains of cars unhappily guttering along behind a slow vehicle, and I'd pass them in one or two leaps as conditions warranted, and Jeniffer would catch up to me a bit later. Therefore, I'm urging you, fellow drivers, break free of your multi-lane roadway habits, and actually take a chance on your next road trip. If you're driving a modern car, you have so much power available to you in most cases that passing is little more than a trifle, to be accomplished with as much difficulty as most people execute the pouring of a cup of coffee. You can do it. You can break free of the mental chains. And you can get around that slug ahead of you. Posted at 18:22 permanent link category: /motorcycle Tue, 29 Jun 2010Well, here it is months later, and I finally have the dyno chart posted. Here's the chart that shows what happens when you install a well-timed cam in a CL175:
What you're looking at is two runs: the first (the more jagged line) being with the stock cam. The second (the smoother line, with the big bump at the start) is with the timed cam, this spring. The line shows power (HP) vs. speed in MPH. Click on the image for the dyno chart page. Basically, the power smoothed out, so I've got a chunk more area under the line (a good thing), but the power didn't go up a couple HP like I was hoping. Progress is a good thing, though. Posted at 10:51 permanent link category: /motorcycle Fri, 25 Jun 2010I got my 24-70 lens back from Sigma today (in for adjustment due to about 10mm of front-focus, which I couldn't adjust out), and I excitedly put it on the camera to test it out. The test shot came back ok, but it wasn't quite right still. Unhappy, I went to check and see if I could adjust it out, figuring it might now be close enough. Haha. No. The adjustment was still maxed out. When I pulled the adjustment out, the lens was actually further out of adjustment than when I'd sent the damn thing in. Sigma? Wrong. You have failed. So, in order to illustrate the problem (since apparently "front focus" doesn't mean the same thing to me that it does to them), I give you this terrifyingly graphic demonstration of the problem. Focus distance: around 1.5 feet
Posted at 01:00 permanent link category: /misc Mon, 21 Jun 2010I took a troll through Motorcycle Daily today, and came across this interesting article. The relevant portion for today's discussion: Imagine my surprise when, after having my ass kissed for several years, I attend a press event where I am scolded, along with several other journalists, by the manufacturer's rep. That's right, most manufacturers want to "make nice" with the media, for obvious reasons. Piaggio's North American president, however, had a different idea. The media wasn't doing a good job of selling motorcycles as transportation in the U.S. The traditional buyer here, of course, is focused on entertainment, not practicality. Piaggio wants that to change (although they still want the occassional buyer to step up for an expensive Italian superbike). To which I say, Cool! The article goes on to explain that of all the bikes available at the Piaggio press event, none of them were of the small-displacement, "transportation" variety Piaggio was worried about. Ok, so, irony aside, this is the kind of thing I want to see. Europe has boasted a robust two-wheeled transportation sector for a long time, in large part because gas has typically been 2.5x what it costs in the US, making even economy cars seem pretty spendy. A 110 MPG scooter looks pretty nice when you're dropping $8 per gallon of fuel. The comments on the article are revealing, although hardly surprising. Small bikes are too small. The US isn't Europe (bigger cities, further distances, etc.). US buyers won't buy based on practicality or transportation value. Where's the Bigger-Better-Faster? That's where I get frustrated. It would take years of work to change the minds of a significant number of Americans as to the transportation value of motorcycles. That's years of advertising dollars, years of editorials, years of advocacy, and years of legislation. None of which, of course, will happen. Why? Because that's not what people want. They want Bigger-Better-Faster. We know. Why? Because we told them that's what they want. Yet here I am, freshly back from a trip around the mountains on my diminutive 250cc motorcycle, where I got a trip average of 64.5 MPG. My riding companion, on her 800cc BMW, got 62 MPG. Despite my small-bike "handicap," I was riding at the pace I wanted (which was more or less the speed limit, occasionally hampered by slow-moving cars, which were passed in short order). Granted, this was a trip more about fun and vacation than transportation, but it breaks a common notion held forth in the Motorcycle Daily comments: "Oh, a 250 is too small for American roads." Bullshit. I just did it, and if I'd needed to do it at an average speed of 80 MPH, the bike would have complied. My "little" 250 was more than a match for I-5, and it was adequate to climbing mountain roads at 4000 feet, and it was able to do all that for less fuel than any car yet produced. That's a bike that's "too small" for American roads? Bzzzt! Try again. My point is really that there are US riders who ride for transportation, and we do it with a wide variety of bikes. I'd be thrilled to see more 250cc-and-smaller bikes in the US market, and see them marketed as daily transportation rather than crap-your-pants adrenaline machines. Well, perhaps my point is too diffuse to really pinpoint, since I've touched on marketing and popular expectations and practicality, but hopefully you can see where I'm headed. We're using too many resources as a nation, and it's really in the public consciousness with the oil catastrophe ravaging the Gulf of Mexico (and soon to ravage the Atlantic, if the spread happens as predicted). Reigning in our transportation choices is one way to reduce our oft-belabored (but otherwise ignored) "dependence on foreign oil." Lose the SUV and pick up something that uses less gas to get around. Consider a motorcycle or a scooter -- imagine what happens to your budget when you're buying gas in 2 gallon doses instead of 20 gallons at a time. Posted at 10:31 permanent link category: /motorcycle Sat, 19 Jun 2010
A moto picture post, for a change
My friend Jeniffer and I just got back from a trip around the North Cascade Loop, and it was a fantastic trip. I took a zillion great pictures, but was playing with (shame on me!) HDR a little bit. It's like crack for photographers, and I had to try it, 'cause who doesn't like an exploded heart? Well, it's a bit safer than crack, I guess. Anyway. I thought you might be interested to see the self-portrait we took at Rainy Pass, in central Washington, on Highway 20. It was, you might say, a freakin' beautiful day, and well worth photographing. This was shortly before we made it to our end point yesterday, in Winthrop.
I'm not really sure which is better, the color or the black and white, so you get both to admire. Posted at 19:48 permanent link category: /motorcycle Fri, 18 Jun 2010
In which Ian ceases communing with the fishes (part II)
When we left off, I had just gone to sleep after an uneventful but death-march-like 11 pm to 2 am watch at the helm. I was deep in the throes of seasickness after having failed to take anti-nausea medication, and essentially couldn't keep anything down. I was getting concerned about deydration, because among the things I couldn't keep down was water. I was scheduled for the 8 am to 11 am watch, and I was awake ("up" is really the wrong term) at 7:30 to get ready for it. However, my dad, upon ascertaining that I was awake, told me that he was going to take my watch. I fought a very brief inner struggle, then thanked him and gratefully lay back down. Although I could have stood watch, it felt increasingly like a bad idea. I listened guiltily as Craig and Dave planned out the new, two-person watch schedule of four hours on and four hours off. At some point during the day (this was Thursday), I was up and (after visiting my old pal the sink for a minute) we were discussing the situation. We were north of Grays Harbor, which is about 1/3 up the coast, and which would provide shelter from the waves that were causing me so many problems. The Washington coast is nearly bereft of safe anchorages, particularly in the northern half. Examine a map of the coast, and you see that from Neah Bay at the NW corner of the Olympic Penninsula to Grays Harbor nearly a hundred miles to the south, there's nothing. At a roughly 6 MPH pace, a hundred miles is quite a distance. The question of the moment was, do we turn around and make for Grays Harbor (some distance behind us, and offering the considerable impediment of its own hazardous bar, which might require careful timing to cross without undue danger), or press on, and make for Neah Bay? Neah Bay was a greater distance, but lay in the direction we wanted to go, and was navigationally not as challenging. The center of the question, of course, was me. I had had moderate success taking miniscule sips of water, but nothing like the several liters that I probably required. I was in serious danger of dehydration, and although I wouldn't die of it in the timeframes we were discussing, it could still be debilitating. I asserted that it made far more sense to press onward to Neah Bay. I didn't know for sure what the distances involved were, but I had the impression that the ratio of distance was about 2:1 Neah Bay:Grays Harbor. It simply didn't make sense, as long as I was able to lie down and avoid being sick, to backtrack so far for the questionable shelter of Grays Harbor. Dave and Craig were willing to take on the longer watches, and so we eventually decided to remain on course up the coast, and make for Neah Bay. The rest of Thursday, honestly, passed in something of a blur to me. I vaguely recall that we shifted to a port tack (I was later told that we'd actually hove to for some reason, and it only felt like a port tack compared to the 30° starboard tack we'd been on for so long), and there was a period where the engine started up for a while. Apparently the engine was an attempt to see if the ride could be calmed by going a bit faster, but what actually happened was that we ended up crashing hard into every other wave, instead of every third wave, so they gave up on it. The next thing I clearly remember is waking up on Friday to the boat sitting perfectly flat and calm. I emerged to find that we were anchored in Neah Bay, and it was about 8 in the morning. As I'd predicted during my brief period awake the day before, calm waters had cured my seasickness. I still felt strange, but I no longer had an urge to throw up at the slightest inclination of my head.
I even managed to have a bit of breakfast, and went up on deck to take pictures of our miraculously flat anchorage. Neah Bay has a long, man-made breakwater stretching on the north side, which keeps the ocean swells out of the anchorage, and makes for miraculously flat water. It felt good to be over the seasickness. Now that we were in the Strait of Juan de Fuca ("Wan D'Fyooka" in local pronunciation), I should be home free. Our goal for Friday was to reach Port Angeles. It is a fairly short hop from Neah Bay to Port Angeles, perhaps 50-60 miles. Now that we were in calmer waters, our speed would pick up -- crashing through big waves takes a lot of energy. I went forward and raised the anchor (so pleased to have that electric anchor winch!), washing the mud off the anchor with the washdown hose (helpfully labeled WASH ROWN on the breaker panel below -- the boat was built in Shanghai, and they didn't get every last detail right). I got the fore locker ship-shape, and we were off! The trip to Port Angeles was practically boring, in comparison to the trip up the coast. The wind was directly behind us, but not strong enough to be worth putting up the sails at first (it takes a 20 knot wind to push the boat 4-5 knots downwind), so we motored. All three of us were in the cockpit, as the weather was pleasant (cold, but not raining, and not oppressively overcast).
The miles passed by quickly, and we traded watches on roughly a three hour schedule. Everyone had gotten enough sleep the night before that all anyone really needed was a nap. For the latter half of the day, we put up the sails and tried to catch what wind we could. We reached Port Angeles around 5 pm, having left around 9 am. The arrival in Port Angeles is a story in and of itself, with which we will commence in the next episode. Posted at 10:42 permanent link category: /misc Categories: all aviation gadgets misc motorcycle theater Written by Ian Johnston. Software is Blosxom. Questions? Please mail me at reaper at obairlann dot net. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
