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.

A Winter Solstice Compilation

 I hope you had a good Winter Solstice today.  We had warm and sunny weather mostly, which allowed me to get in some hiking along Coal Creek.

I shot a pic of my shadow at around Noon, supposedly that's the longest it gets with the sun at its highest point in the sky due to the solstice/Earth's Axis Tilt.

Views of Coal Creek and it's trees which border all along its route:

Here's a compilation of pics taken during or very close to Winter Solstice over the years since I've been motorcycling:

Chasing a Leak on Yagi, a Pronghorn Sighting and Beef is Whats for Dinner!

Monday, Dec 18

Yagi, my TW200, had been displaying signs of a oil seepage over the last few months.

It's gotten bad enough that she sheds a few drops when parked after a ride, not to mention also evidence of oil from her splashing onto the front bumper of the VRRV when Yagi's mounted on the front rack.

I spent some time this morning washing off all the oil/grime/dirt of the last few months worth of camping and I suspect the leak is coming from a worn seal on the front valve cover gasket.

At least, I hope that's it, based on the flow of the oil/grime that took a while to remove!

The seal: P/N 93210-57634-00 is on order via Amazon.   Not due till the end of the year.

Tuesday, Dec 19

Today I drove Scarlett on a 55 mile meandering trip mostly on the western edge of the Colorado Eastern Plains.  Not much out there but some ranches, some oil/natural gas wells/drill equipment and lots of brown grasses.

Didn't really find much to take pictures of, just enjoying the warm weather (65°F (18.3°C), the sun shining through somewhat cloudy skies, and the purring sound of Scarlett's engine.

While driving along Jewell Avenue, I saw this in the distance in the middle of a field:

FAA VOR:

Very High Frequency Omni-Directional Range

Navigation Aid

Riding to get closer to the VOR above, I happened upon a small herd of Pronghorn Sheep.  I stopped and swapped to the telephoto lens:

A bit blurry, sorry, no chance to deploy the tripod

They mooned me!

FYI:  The above pics were post-processed to increase scale and clarity.  Here's the original pic of the first one:

A few more miles and I was home after refilling the spare gas cans in preparation for the next camping trip.  Probably next month sometime.

My loving wife Martha prepared a sumptuous prime rib dinner with Brussels Sprouts mixed with bacon and maple syrup.  Yummy.

December Doings re the VRRV (Vehicle Recovery RV)

Stuff I got done when not sitting in front of the TV streaming shows...

Let's see, there was yard work of course, got most of the Fall leaves mulched back into the lawn before we got a couple of inches of snow on the 9th.

I replaced the ladder I'd bought while in Arizona two camping trips ago with a telescoping one from Amazon.  It extends out to 12.5 feet and I tried it out on the VRRV, works fine.

Several of the keys on the laptop I use for blogging and photo processing had been giving me fits over the last few months.  First the N key, then the T key...you get the idea.  So I bought a small wireless keyboard from Amazon and seeing if it'll work as a substitute, sitting atop the laptop's keyboard.

I replaced the house battery on the VRRV as it had degraded from an original 112 Amp Hour battery to perhaps a 40 Ah battery!

At RichardM's suggestion, when I queried him on best way to check water levels on the new flooded battery, I bought a cheap endoscope:

The new battery you see, has the usual caps one can remove to check the water level in each of the six cells.  However, with the battery in place inside the VRRV's battery compartment, it's impossible to look down into the cells.

Since I don't want to be yanking this heavy battery out each month to check water levels; I will use the endoscope's camera to look for a reflection of the camera's LED lights from the water in each cell.  I tried it the other day, worked fine.

Today, the weather was warm enough to install the replacement window blinds on the two main windows of the VRRV.  The stock ones had suffered breaks in the string used to keep tension you see.  They would no longer hold position and we'd come home with velcro straps holding them secure when traveling.

The mini-blinds I got, custom-sized via an outfit on Amazon, proved good in terms of fit but crappy in terms of ease of install!  It was a PITA and I'm still not sure how "locked in" the blinds are, we'll find out next time the VRRV moves I guess.

One similar feature to the stock blinds, you pull down and push up on the lower bar to lower/raise the blinds.  There's no strings to pull like in regular mini-blinds.

Oh, and while compiling the "year in pictures" video for this year, realized the Year in Pictures archive page was missing a couple of years, corrected that.  Apparently, I didn't do one for 2009.