Freezing Rain Commute

The Denver Metro area was under a Winter Storm Warning starting at 3:00PM today.  The weather guessers were right for once, it started raining right at 3:00PM on the eastern side of town where I now work.  The rain quickly turned to freezing rain, thunder and lightning.  It was a very heavy rain too, I watched the cars and poor Natasha get soaked out there and gradually get covered in mushy ice.

Mushy you see because the temperatures were still above freezing at this point.  I got out of work close to 5:00 PM after the heaviest of the freezing rain had passed to the east.  It was just mildly raining, almost snowing as I got to Natasha and took this picture of her in the parking lot.

Yep, that white stuff is ice but it wasn't frozen hard....kinda mushy if you know what I mean.

I rode on home down the usual backroads, there was mushy ice particles/pellets (kind of like a soft hail if you will) collecting on the roads but preceding cars had cleared channels in the parts where it counted so no major concerns.  That is except the one time I allowed my pusher to touch the ice-covered centerline of my lane, then I experienced a momentary wiggle which got my attention!  But that's it for the exciting part; the rest of the ride was without incident.

The only major issue was keeping my visor clear of the ice which would fall out of the sky and just stick to the visor.  Had to keep wiping the stuff off to the side of the helmet, so my gloves were quite wet by the end of the 12 mile commute.  My ATV grip covers?  Well, I'd left them on, they got rained on for at least an hour, so were soaked through and unusable as they wouldn't hold their shape to allow me to slip my hands in and out as I worked the controls; I had to take them off.

Got home safe and on even more positive note, the modification I'd done to the Ural's air box apparently works to keep water out of the air filter.  This is a known issue with Urals of the 90s where air is sucked in from an opening in the top of the air box.  Succeeding models had the hole in the air box on the bottom to try and alleviate this issue but it still exists.  Here's what I did:

Basically, it's adding a second top lid in place of the small "top hat" that my air box comes with.  The OEM "top hat" is only a bit bigger than the opening into the air box and so water apparently gets sucked in during heavy rains, saturating the air filter and causing combustion issues due to lack of air.

Of course, I also had the K&N oiled air filter inside so the test was not as thorough as I'd wanted.  Sure, I'd gotten a heavy rain hitting the rig, rode in rain and everything went fine but I want to try this with a plain paper filter as well to make sure.  More testing to follow.

Here's a belated shot of my sidecar's trunk, now containing two deep cycle batteries hooked up in parallel, giving me 250 amp hrs of electrical power.  So far, it roughly translate to a range of roughly 400 miles with the headlight on, about 700 with the headlight off.  More than enough for a day's ride on the Ural.  Not much for a Beemer but then again....it ain't a Beemer!

Looking in from the right of the sidecar, the batteries are currently on the charger being topped off

Yeah, using a Total Loss Electrical System (TLES) is somewhat limiting but there's hope for a better alternator solution.  I saw the below pics on sovietsteeds.com, and I am hopeful a commercial application will be available someday:

Basically, a car alternator is mounted on top of the engine, and slots are cut to allow a belt that drives the alternator to spin on the flywheel of the engine. 

A side view of the car alternator, driven by a belt spun by the flywheel

Presently on Urals, the alternator has a gear which is driven from the timing gears under the front cover of the engine. On older versions like mine, the gear tends to shear off and destroy the timing gears as well.  On the newer versions with a Nippon Denso Alternator, the bearings tend to dry out and of course destroy themselves, requiring a new adapter for the alternator if you're lucky, a new alternator if you're not lucky; and those Nippon Densos are not cheap! 

So until the above solution is available to me or something as reliable, I'll be using my TLES.