Saturday, December 05, 2009

A test ride in the Eastern Prairies

A brisk and sunny day today here in Colorado. The temperatures were in the low 30s with colder temperatures and possibly snow forecasted for the rest of the weekend.

The plan this morning had been to get a regular "paper" filter for Natasha, vice the K&N Oiled Filter that she came with. The object was two-fold: Find a viable and cheap alternative to see if it worked fine for her and try it out as a permanent solution instead of using the K&N filter. It's very easy, you see, to over-oil the sucker when doing servicing and it affects the Ural's performance tremendously!

The Uralisti keep a couple of sites listing alternative part numbers to the stuff available from Ural dealers. One of these was for a NAPA air filter #702204. I picked one up at the nearest NAPA auto parts dealer, stuck it in place of the K&N filter and went for a short ride along the prairies bordering Quincy Road.

The new air filter worked just fine, Natasha seemed as peppy as ever.....well, as peppy as 40 horses can be anyways. : ) The cost? $7.29, can't beat that with a stick! I think I'll order a "spare" to carry along in the trunk if it works out over the next few weeks.

Here's some views of what I could see while on the test ride:

Looking west on Quincy Road, that's Mount Evans in the distance

A wider view of the Front Range

Hay Rolls, see below for why to took this shot

An amusing note: The part from NAPA came packaged with a small picture of a tractor. Seemed kind of suiting that a part which was designed for a tractor, also works fine for my Russian "tractor".

2 comments:

Unknown said...

The first of those pictures immediately brought to mind that evil sequence toward the end of the Morgan Freeman / Brad Pitt movie "Se7en"... but lovely photography all the same!

Good choice on the paper filters, by the way. They are not only cheaper and less labour-intensive, but also have been proven to do a better job of filtering the airstream than oiled-foam filters.

Diamond Dave said...

Peppy? compared to what? Bulldozer? I think my neighbor's snowblower is about as powerful ( but probably due to more modern technology ).