hi,first of all i want to say im sorry for badmouthing the cruiser site when i kept getting knocked off,and was kidding about who is the it guy running it,ha
i think this site is really nice,and the people on here are so great,and have such beautifull bikes! not like some biker sites iv been on,where you have all these wiseguys thinking they know it all! i always would help anyone i can and i dont care if they have a moped. i wrote a couple of blogs and people actually read them,ha so here goes it again!
i would like to tell all the bikers things i learned lately,probly most know things im gonna say,but maybe this might help someone out there. most people that have brand new bikes dont have to worry about these things,but may in the future. i would tell anyone that plans to do work on their bike to get a shop manual and a torque wrench,almost all the nuts and bolts on your bike have torque values,some are critical and some not as much. a for instance,the rear axel,even if you just adj the chain,if you over tighten it,which i used to do,cause i was afraid my wheel would fall off,so i would sock it home,ha but it will burn your bearnings out quick if its too tight! and other parts that are alloy,you will put more stress on them by overtighting. like the forks and risers,which if they break while your doing 80 or so,could give you a problem,ha a lot of people buy used bikes,they look like new,but if they were laying somewhere for a few years,you schould change all the fluids,i had a bike i sold to my brother,my last bike i had,he used it for a while and then it was in a garage for 15 years. i told him i was thinking of getting another bike to mess around with,i asked him what he did with the bike,he said i still have,and you can have it if you want,but you will naver get it running. i got it running in 2 days,pouring gas into the carb with a funnel and hose,but couldnt use it cause i had to get a fuel pump,i got it on ebay,took 3 days,ha i had problems with the clutch and front brake,i drained the fluid,it looked like mud,and cleaned the resovoirs. the cables were all gummed up too,and the fork oil was mud also. so just because the bike looks good doesnt mean everythings ok you dont want to go on the road and get stuck in the boondocks with a broken cable,or your trottle gets stuck wide open going around a turn,ha its worth it to put a little 3 in 1 oil on all the moving parts every now and then. and if you have a chain,clean it good with diesel fuel,then lube and adj it,i used to use that spray on lube,i didnt like it,my bike calls for 90 weight gear oil,and lube every 300 miles. i was riding with a friend of mine,and he started skidding out of control,i cant belive he didnt fall,when i stopped,i said whats wrong,and he said i dont know,i looked and his chain fell off and wrapped around the sproket,i tryed to put it back on and the links wouldnt even bend,i said your lucky you didnt get killed,he lubbed it after that,ha
another thing i just learned is if you replace plugs in your car or bike,if the heads are alloy,you schould use antiseize grease and boot grease on the wires,the plugs almost get welded in,and the wires break when you have to pull them off next time. i always say,i learn something new everyday! so take a little time and lube all the moving parts and check the air in your tires,and dont just lube your chain,clean and lube it once in a while.
cause you dont want to get stuck in the boonies,or get killed cause you didnt oil a cable. i know this is a long blog,but maybe it will help someone who is new to bikes! oh by the way,i still my torque wrench,i bought from sears 30 years,its a cheapo beam one,they still have them,it works pretty good,so if you dont want to spend a lot of money on one,check them out. so for the people just starting to work on their bikes,buy some good tools,junk ones wont last,i know and 1 more thing,a impact driver,i used to strip all the phillips heads that were really tight,1 wack with the impact driver,and no problem,but switch to allen heads,(chrome of course)wiitch are better,ha and a set of easy outs too,my friend has a yam warrior,he broke his exhaust bolts and has 2 vice grips holding it on,ha when i get some time im gonna fix it for him,ha so do the work on your bike,it makes you feel good when your done,and ride safe!
nick
This is one of those stories that you almost have to be in the presence of the storyteller to really appreciate, but I’ll try to give it my best shot. I have a couple good reviews on a couple of my misadventures so what the heck, this to date has been the one everyone who ever works with me tells the new people to have me recall for them. Hope you like it. To give some background for the story I will begin by telling you about my pretty wife, her mother, and their love of gardening. My mother-in-law, God rest her soul, was never a great gardener but she loved the smell of the earth and seeing the fruit of her labors being enjoyed by her family and of course, my wife followed suit, starting as a little girl who loved mud squishing between her toes and ending up as a beautiful woman who loves mud squishing between her toes. My wife and I would frequent her mother’s often and throughout the temperate periods of the year, we would assist her with keeping her place up, tilling the garden when needed, mowing the lawn, trimming the weeds, raking the leaves and so forth and doing so is how this whole ordeal started. It was in the spring, warm enough outside in the day to work up an honest sweat if you tried but still cool enough in the evening to require a light jacket. My wife, Renee, and I had taken our girls to visit grandma and had been sweet-talked into helping her outside, as things needed attention as they often did. I cannot remember whether I was refueling the lawnmower or attending to the gasoline trimmer that I had brought, “just-in-case” my mother-in-law needed the trimming done, (I hated her electric weed-whacker) while Renee and her Mom were working in her vegetable garden. I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop on what they were talking about but they were several yards apart and they were speaking loudly mind you. I could blame them for the entire thing if I tried I guess, but my own silly... I’ll get to that later. For now, it’s only necessary to say that my wife and her mother were discussing the problems of having birds stealing from the garden. My wife’s garden was always a tangle of tomato stakes with small aluminum pie pans tied to them to flash and bang and make noise to frighten the birds away, or put simply, lots of mess, little success. Her mother, however, had gone high-tech and purchased a sure-fire method of scaring birds. Propped on a stake, actually an old bent two-by-four smack in the middle of her garden, was a plastic owl. Now I’ve seen some pretty high-tech plastic owls at home and garden centers like Lowes, Tractor Supply or Home Depot, I mean some of these things would give little kids nightmares. Actual size, big glowing yellow glass eyes, some even have their owl heads mounted so that the slightest breeze will make them turn their heads all with the purpose of scaring the crap out of smaller birds. This thing in her Mom’s garden however, was the most God’s awful thing I had ever laid eyes on and still be considered a plastic owl. It looked for the world like someone asked a five year old to draw an owl and that’s what they used to make the mold, overly fat, far to short, painted eyes, no movement what so ever, and so obviously effective that the top of its head was covered with bird shit because that’s where most birds stopped to eat their ill-gotten gain. So there I knelt in the fresh cut grass, soaked in sweat from creating the fresh cut grass, working on a hot piece of yard equipment, listening to my mother-in-law as she was extolling the endless virtue of the plastic owl and observing my wife as she listened intently, sucking up every word. After her mother had finished, my wife announced, “I guess we’ll have to get one of those for our garden.” I shot my wife a ’when hell freezes over’ look but said nothing and she shot one right back at me. Disgusted, I wiped the sweat from my eyes and fired up the machine, happy in the ensuing white noise of domestic yard work. Later, on the way home, the ugly little owl came back into the conversation. I don’t remember who introduced it, but it became the center of a very vicious debate. I was adamant in my condemnation of the miserable thing and my wife was its champion. “Well I think we need one.” “You ARE NOT putting one of those ugly-ass things in my yard.” “It’s MY garden.” “That is in the middle of MY yard.” “It scares the birds.” “Yeah, I could tell. They were so terrified of it that when they landed on it, they shit themselves.” Grumble, grumble, grumble, bitch, bitch, bitch, went the remainder of the argument until my wife finally let out a disgusted “FINE!” and stared out the window for the rest of the ride home. Satisfied that I had asserted myself as the dominant alpha male, I smirked and thoroughly enjoyed the rest of the ride home. My satisfaction was to be relatively short, although I was blissfully unaware of it at the time. As a week or so passed, payday rolled around and it was time for my wife to do the bi-weekly grocery shopping and general running around and taking care of things that she always does. I was busily engaged with work that day and had not given the whole ordeal at, or coming home from, her mother’s a second thought until I arrived home from work at about 12:45am after a decidedly unpleasant evening at the State Penitentiary. Now I had stopped and gathered the mail on my way home to our little place overlooking the lake, and when I stopped in the drive, shut the car off and proceeded to skim through the letters, bills and general junk mail, for some odd reason I paused and looked toward the house. Sitting on the rail of the deck, right up next to the house in the shadow created by the overhang of the roof, was the silhouette of an owl. I knew what had happened in an instant, she bought that God-damned owl. She bought the piece of shit when I told her not to! Damnit! I got out of the car and stood beside it, trying to calm down, so I leaned against the car and lit a cigarette. This did not work as the more I looked at that miserable outline in the shadows, the more aggravated I got. Actually, aggravated isn’t the correct work for what I was. I was mad. For once in my life, the cigarette wasn’t having the calming effect and that was adding to my frustration at this damned plastic abomination gracing my deck. Right then and there I made my decision. I hope she bought it at Wal-Mart. That ugly thing’s going back tonight! Not in the morning, tonight! I don’t give one red damn if she goes in her night-gown trailing two crying upset little girls who had to be pulled out of bed, she’s going to know I mean business! I may not get laid for six months, but I’m putting my foot down! I scrubbed out the cigarette in the gravel of the drive and headed for the house. As I closed toward the stairs and the rail where the outline set in the shadow, I began to realize that this was not a copy of the ugly thing that sat in her mother’s garden, this thing was at least twenty-two inches tall and about ten inches wide and was actually shaped like..., well, an owl. The closer I got the more I thought to my self. “Huh. That might actually scare a bird or two.” I got about four feet away when I stopped and took a hard look at it and I remember thinking, “Right shape, right size, painted to look the part, holy crap, she must‘ve spent a fortune on this thing.” and I reached out to take it and examine it better in the moonlight. Now I’m sure that somewhere, deep, deep in the recesses of my brain, for about a millisecond, some little part of me went, “Oh oh, that’s soft.” But far before it registered with the rest of my body, the very un-plastic owl woke up and was not at all happy with the human hands around it. Giant yellow eyes flashed open, wings at least five feet wide flew apart and the most blood-curdling scream I have ever heard in my entire life emanated from the owl at a volume I never would have thought possible. The only thing even close to the sound was me. I let out a scream that sounded like a five year old girl who just woke up to find Freddie Kruger in bed with her. I really don’t know which one of us was more scared, it or me, but I think it was me. Now for anyone who has never seen them up close, owl’s feet are armed with claws that really, really deserve the title of talon, maybe even something more diabolical than that, and they were going everywhere. The only thing that comes close to a good physical description would be having a little Mantis Roto-Tiller held up to your face while it runs full throttle. Anyway, the owl kept screaming, I kept screaming, and I was being beat around the head and face with really wide wings while shanks were flailing at me about a hundred miles an hour and I started back pedaling, somehow not realizing that I should let go of the owl. Somewhere in the eternity of backing up, my jacket from my corrections uniform got shredded, my badge went flying off of my shirt and I got shanked, really, really well. Damn bird tore my chest like it was tissue paper, enough for nine stitches on the outside and three more underneath. At any rate, you can’t back up forever and I ran smack into the deck rail, backward, at a full head of steam and over I went, crashing onto one of my wife’s prized rose bushes which snapped off at the ground. The only good thing was that the owl and I disjointed somewhere between the rail and the ground. I can only assume this of course, since when I hit the ground it was nowhere to be seen. Now I was off the deck, flat of my back in the yard with an ass full of rose thorns, terrified that the damn bird would come back for a second round so I started quickly backing up, reverse crab walking, sliding through the wet grass until I crashed into the side of my car where I let out another yell simply from pure terror. About this time, my loving wife comes crashing through the door onto the deck from inside the house, .357 revolver in one hand, Mag-Light in the other hand, bathrobe flying open in the breeze, naked as a jay-bird underneath, finds me in the beam of the light with my chest slashed, my ass perforated, my clothes shredded to pieces and I’m bleeding everywhere and she yells out, “What the HELL are you doing!?” All I could do was sit there shaking in fear with my arms out the side trying to flap as a demonstration of my now unseen tormentor and all I could say was, “Uh... Uh... Uh... Uhh Uhhh. OWL!” All of this led up to the inevitable trip to the emergency room where of course the attending physician and nurse assumed that I was at work when I received my injuries and the doc asked me how I managed to get cut so badly, so I told him. He started laughing so hysterically that he couldn’t finish sewing me up and had a new nurse come finish since the nurse who was with him wasn‘t much good anymore either, but only after giving me orders not to tell the new nurse how I got injured. Explaining why I need a new coat, shirt and badge was a lot of fun too, let me tell you. A lot of people had a good laugh at my expense I can tell you that. The final piece of the story has to do with the missing badge. We never found it. Not in the yard, not in the remains of the rose bush or the ground cover it was planted in, not under the deck, not on the deck, just gone. I can only vision, as a friend I work with who enjoys the story more than I do so vividly describes, “There’s a great horned owl somewhere see, strutting around his nest wearing a Corrections Officer’s badge looking at the other birds with a ‘Yeah. That’s right, mess with me again.’ look in those big yellow eyes.” At least someday I can pass on the hard gained knowledge, “Never hug birds of prey.”
Sorry gents and gals, real grass:
This morning I was bitching about how soaked the yard was, just a slipping and sliding all week to the barn and to the street, Starting to look like a mud bog track. of coarse no one could here me, but had to hear the sound of my voice anyway, thats when I got to thinking, In the states here, How are u folks doing from say Tenn, on down, Alot of ya here on CC. are down that way, I know for sure Snake06 and ftelenta are two anyway, I'm sure ftelenta is not washing the ride in the garage right now, Kind of all or nothing for rain in the south. Hope you all keep dry feet and houses, and this rain has not put to much of a pinch in your ride time.
Hope ya dry out a bit soon