Time flies ...

Another week gone, not much to tell about this week.
Monday & Tuesday - life as usual, not much happened at the shop we're doing a lot of spring maintance right now, getting everybody ready for the riding season.
Wednesday - went out and got a truck load of mulch for the flower beds, got all the soaker hoses laid out and hooked up, started working on fixing up the cook shed.
Thursday & Friday - pretty much same as Monday & Tuesday
Today - Finished up most of the work on a bagger I started yesterday and due to the cold wet rain outside, decided to hibernate the rest of the day after work.
Tommorow - big fun, Monday is the annual mass trash pick-up day, you can pile as much as you want to on the curb and the garbage company wont charge you extra, so that meant I'll be carting all the garbage and junk I've been piling up behind the garage out to the curb tommorow, rain or shine.

Boring isn't it?

Deck the Halls (or at least the back porch)

Been kinda one of those weeks so far, had monday off due to Easter, actually what happened was that the boss got talked into something by the wife and kids so he called me monday morning and told me not to come in. It was fine by me, did some running around and worked in the garage a bit. As for tuesday, well, I bolted a couple a more of those shiny go fast chrome bits on the fatboy, rewired the driving lights, can't remember what else I did, I guess that shows how exciting that day was, LOL. Oh, I did haul a load of my bike parts home and started sorting out the stuff, one truck load down, about two or three more to go. Today on the other hand, while not as exciting as building a cool chopper was a busy day. When we built the addition onto the house a few years ago, my bro built a small landing at the back door that had three short funky steps going down to the deck. Everybody complained about them because they were kinda short and stumpy, not to easy to walk up and down, plus the landing outside the door was kinda small. Trying to get in the back door with the groceries while three big dogs are trying to get out/in/see/sniff everything was a bit of a feat. So today out came the building tools and after a trip to Lowe's to get building supplies I re-did the landing. I extended it all the way to the cook shed, about four feet, and built a new set of stairs going down the front part. Didn't completely finish it today, I still have a set of stairs to put in on the backside and then do the hand rails and such, but it's looking a lot better and everyone's happy with what I got finished today. You can now walk up a nice set of stairs to a landing that's big enough for everyone including the dogs to get on and move about. Once I get the rest finished, I've got to buy some Thompson's water sealer and hose everything down so that it doesn't go to hell.

Well that's about it for now, Asta.

Good Friday ?

Well, it was a pretty good friday for me, I'm not really the religious type so I didn't even realize it was Good Friday untill Jeannie at the shop mentioned it. I finished working on a custom softtail this morning, it had a rats' nest wiring job under the seat, I had talked to the owner late last summer when he had bought it and told him then that he might have some problems with it. The bike is in really nice shape otherwise and he did get a good deal on it. He managed to make it through the end of last season without too many problems, but he brought it to the shop earlier this year for us to fix a couple a bugs. One of them was the tail/brake light, it was acting funky. We had the shop kid start on it yesterday, thinking it was just a loose wire, but after a bit of fooling around with it, the boss put him on something else and had me take over. After I got it on my lift, the sparks started flying literally, I managed to get the battery unhooked before it exploded. The way the battery was sitting in the bike it was able to tip forward, the positive cable didn't have any protection on it and it welded itself to the oil tank, not a good thing. LOL After that little incident the decision was made just to rewire the rear end of the bike. After a little wiring tracing and marking I ended up cutting out a bunch of wire, about a dozen scotch-locks and three of the four load equalizers I found, leaving just one mounted up under the dash. This morning I finished up re-routing and cleaning things up, it all looks good and actually works, and now I've got three spare load equalizers in my toolbox to boot. LOL

The job I started this afternoon is a pretty straight-forward one, changing out stock parts with shiny go-fast chrome ones on the front end of a fatboy. Of course I won't be able to finish it this weekend, I'm still waiting on the new rims to come in, but I'll get done what I can.

Started working on Sweety's V-Star tonight, I bought a set of hard bags for Old Blu' but I decided that they didn't look right after getting them and they've sat on a shelf for a while. I got to looking at them the other day and decided that they were the right size for her V-Star. So tonight I started working on the mounting brackets, I managed to get things figured out so that I only have to make four tabs and two support bars to get the racks mounted. Now all I have to do is fix the couple minor problems with the bags and repaint them to match her bike, do a little rewiring, rework the license plate mount since I'm removing the stock turn signals, etc., etc., etc., just another simple job. LOL

Well, that's about it for tonight, time to hit the shower and then crash for the night. Asta!

The Sunday To-Do List

Well, it's sunday. It was yard work day today nothing exciting or funny. Trimming and pruning trees, working on the flower beds, and general clean-up. Checked out the lawn mower as well, Dad ran over a big rock last year and broke it, I pushed it out of the shed today and cleaned it up enough so that I could see what got broke, went online to check out the parts, it's going to be about 90.00 in parts to fix it, but it's worth it. It's only a year old, so I can justify the cost. Not much else happened, just have to wait until tommorow to see if anything good happens.

Somedays

Somedays are best forgotten, I've had a couple this week. Tuesday was so-so until amost the end of the day, I was installing a new clutch cable on a bike that I had put new bars and controls on to dress it up. I don't know excatly how many of these I've put on since starting at the shop, lets just say so many that I don't even think about how it's done anymore, I just do it out of habit. So anyway, I've gotten the cable run and snugged into the trap door, next I bolt the trap door back on the trans and tourqe it to 100in/lbs, next I pick up my wrench to give the cable it's final snug, as usual, then snap, the cable end breaks off. Yippie!?! The previous post explains thursday, so I wont go into that all over. Today, I finished wiping down the bagger and moved it and the trailer up to the third floor until the customer comes for it. Then I started reassembling a bike that I did some fab work on about a month ago. Part of the work I did previously on the bike was removing the tail/brake lights that were on it, the plan was to install a tail/brake light on the side mount, It ended up being a bit more of a project than it really should have been, the light that we wanted to use wasn't designed for the side mount that was on the bike, so instead of getting a new side mount the decision was made to make an adapter plate to mount the light to it, not really a hard job, just takes a bit of time to lay it out so that it loks good and then make it. That didn't take a real long time, but I need to rework the light itself some so that it would work. As it was, the light mounted with two 1/4-20 flathead bolts from the backside, well that wouldn't work with the adapter I had made so I subsitituted a couple of smaller bolts that would work just fine, except now I had to use nuts on the inside of the light housing. After getting everything mocked up, I realized that the nuts would contact the electronic board that the leds were mounted on, so I had to clearance things so I wouldn't have a short. Easy enough, I made up a quickie jig to hold the light housing in the drill press and chucked up an end mill in the drill to cut down the mounting spots inside the housing. The first one worked great, I eased the end mill into the housing and it easily cut the mounting spot down cleanly, then I shut the drill press off and repositioned the light housing so that I could do the same on the other end. I was just about finished when I noticed that I was off just a bit and it was leaving a bit of an edge on one side, what I should have done was finish the cut and then take my dremel and use a burr bit to clean the little bit out, but that wasn't what I did. I released the lock on the press table and nudged it a bit to the one side, BIG MISTAKE, the end mill caught the edge of the housing and yanked it to the left, chewing half the side out of the housing before I could slap the off switch. And there we have it, a sixty dollar tail light ruined. I was so pissed off at myself that I just cleaned up my tools and work area, showed the ruined housing to the boss, then told him I was done for the day and went home. The weather outside reflected my mood on the ride home, a cold dreary dampness, defently not an enjoyable end to the day. I just rode home dodging the cell phone chattering nitwits in their cars, parked the bike and went inside and made myself a pot of coffee and turned on the boob tube and vegged out. Hopefully tommorow will be a better day, I've got an appointment with the accountant to go over last years taxes. Yippie.

Ten Minute Job

Gotta luv those ten minute jobs, had one today that lasted five hours. LOL Wiring up a trailer plug on a bagger, sounds easy doesn't it, especally since I had already worked on the bike and had pre-wired a pigtail down to where the plug was going to be. The only reason I didn't finish it when I was working on it the first time was that I didn't know how the customers trailer was wired. Normally on cars and trucks there is a set pattern as to how a light plug is wired, but knowing bikers the way I do, I didn't take it for granted that they had followed any set pattern. Since I wasn't sure about the wiring and the customer couldn't tell me either, I asked him to bring the trailer to the shop so that I could verify the wiring pattern. He dropped the trailer off late tuesday, so it was on my board to do today. It took me about five minutes to decipher the pattern. The pattern was fairly normal, the only goofy-ness was the wire colors on the trailer itself, they didn't run along standard color patterns, but it didn't really matter as long as the plug was ok. The fun came with the bike, I decided to test things before doing the final hard wiring, so I hooked the wires together and put a bit of black tape around each one to keep things from shorting. Then I grabbed my test light to check things out, running lights were fine, brake lights were fine, turn signals - a dead short, or at least that was my first guess. It defently acted just like a dead short, I could pull the main plug going to the rear of the bike and the turn signals would work ok, so I started with the easy stuff, I pulled all the light bulbs from the rear and started trying to isolate where the short was, couldn't find it, then I pulled the bags off and dropped the shocks so that I could get to the underside of the fender, no problems there. By now I've killed about two hours tracing wires, finally yelled at the boss to come over and put his two cents in, he fiddled for about twenty minutes before giving up and telling me that it's got to be in the wiring job I did putting in the pigtail and he wants me to cut it all out and then start over. After lunch we messed with it some more and finally decided it wasn't the wiring job it had to be the turn signal module. On older baggers this module is in the fairing - somewhere. Usually it's just behind the headlight, so all you should have to do is pull the headlight assembly out, needless to say it wasn't where it was supposed to be. Like I said, it's an older bike and has been worked on before. I ended up having to pull the front part of the fairing off, about twenty misc. bolts later I had it off and was digging through the wiring nightmare looking for the module, finally found it zip-tied to the back side of the fork leg, and of course it was the older style unit, spent about twenty minutes digging through the cabinets before I found another one, I've got a whole box of the new style on the shelf, we've pulled a lot of them rebuilding bikes. That turned out to be the problem, the module was failing, it had enough strength to work the bike's turn-signals, but it couldn't hack the additional ones on the trailer. Got to spent the rest of the afternoon rewiring all the wiring I cut out, then putting the bike back together. But it's all done now and ready for the road. You know this is the second time that turn signals have really messed with me, the first time was on my '76 750ss, I spend two weeks tracing a dead short in it, the sucker would blow the main fuse as soon as I turned on the key, that ended up being the turn signal flasher, turns out that the expensive honda flasher needs to be grounded, but the cheap replacement one doesn't, as soon as I pulled the ground wire off, everything was fine. Oh well, another lesson learned.