Pre-Christmas Miscellany

Yesterday, I did a test ride to check the security of the mounting straps/bungie cords used to carry a bicycle in Scarlett's sidecar.

Why would I carry a bicycle you might ask?

Well, I'd found that the Sand Creek Greenway Trail that I'd been exploring on foot, was much longer than originally thought.  The trail is open to bicyclists but not motorcyclist so I broke the bicycle out of storage in the garage.

Once she was pretty much road-worthy (rear brakes need further work), I took it to the Triple Creek Trailhead which is the northern end of the trail it seems.

The bicycle stayed securely mounted throughout today's riding I'm happy to report and is simple to unmount as well.

I rode perhaps 5 miles total on the trail and was unsurprised at how out of shape I've become over the years.  Still, as I type this the next day, my leg muscles aren't hurting much at all.  I'm definitely going to have to improve the rear brake performance though as going downhill on dirt can prove interesting without good brakes.

This morning, Saturday, I spent a couple of hours replacing the rear brake pedal on Scarlett.  

The wooden block that I'd zip-tied into place you see, had snapped off sometime during the ride and I was back to doing the ballerina toe-down maneuver to get any kind of response from the rear and sidecar brakes.  Annoying. 

It took me a while but I finally realized it was just a missing wood block, not a failure of the brake lines or such.

The replacement was pretty straightforward.  The only bummer is once again realizing that at my age, laying on the cold garage floor  and working on the motorcycle kind of sucks!  Oh well.

Here's the stock pedal, which try as I might, I couldn't get it set up to give me a decently short pedal travel arc to engage the rear brakes.

Here's the modified brake pedal done by (I dimly remember), the now retired Ural dealer in Fort Collins, CO: Randy.  He'd offered it to me years ago and I hadn't installed it till now since the wooden block was working just fine. 

The desired travel arc is once again on tap.  ☺    No more need to angle my foot like a ballerina going on tip toe!

Looks like we'll be getting some snow later tonight, with perhaps more tomorrow on Christmas Eve, so we might be having a White Christmas here in the cesspool that is the Metro Denver Area.