Last week we had unseasonably warm weather culminating in odd skies. Living in the SE when the sky gets a weird color that pretty much means one thing, a tornado is brewing.
This is a shot Reggie took looking over the top of my favorite LBS here in Huntsville (borrowed w/o permission for my own vices). A few hundred yards behind the shop it touched down wreaking a bit of havoc on the neighborhood. Just crazy. No direct effect on my life though, just had to wait at work for the tornado warning to subside before heading home.
The bike has been creaking, squeaking, and clunking, so it got a tear down and lube. The clunk is in the new rear shock, so it is on the way back to the mfg for a rebuild on their dime. Hopefully that gets sorted quick as I was really enjoying the shock aside from the clunk. The Heckler had it's longest clean spell since I built it up last year due to weather and owner lethargy. The latter reason is a bit rediculous. I am just not feeling like fighting the weather this month, so I haven't. My mileage for the month is pathetic. I would need to put in about 25mi this weekend just to eclipse last months feeble mileage. With another storm coming in tomorrow that isn't very likely to happen.
My only solice is that I am not the only one getting demotivated by the weather. The other blogs I follow are about as stale as mine. That makes me feel a bit better, but at the same time the lack of appropriate lunch time reading is a bummer.
New parts? Not much love for the Heckler in that respect. I picked up a couple of wrenches so that I can work on the Saint hubs. I ran my M800 hubs a full year on the Sultan and never even needed to adjust them. Now I have 3 wheels built around the hubs, so I should get the tools to work on them. That includes 23mm & 24mm cone wrenches and a 12mm allen key. Still waiting on the local shop to order up the allen.
Playing Mr. FixIt
Yep, been doing a lot of this lately. Erin's truck has been going through a tough spell. The quarters that the kids put in the CD player finally shorted something out, so that the radio would create a deafening squeal without warning. I remedied that situation by yanking the radio. In process I managed to knacker up the hazzard light switch. So for a week I cludged together different methods of holding the switch down. Most failed, resulting in the hazzard lights going off until it killed the battery. During the week I went around to find a replacement switch. Turns out that the hazzard switch is not sold individually, but is packaged as an entire unit of almost every control on the column (hazzards, brights, turn signals, CC, etc). Dealership had one in stock for about $250. God only knows how much they would have charged to swap it out. Judging by my half day of work and complete disassembly of the dash to do so I am guessing it would have been $500-1000 in labor.
I was able to locate an replacement part online for under $100. So I was feeling a little better about things. Big improvement from $250 down to $100. Fact still remains that the broken part is only a $2 piece of plastic. It can be swapped individually, it was replaced under a recall in 2002. But outside of the recall the switch lever is not available individually. Lame. So there I was all morning on Saturday grunting and contorting to get all of the hidden fasteners off of the 5 dash panels that needed to be removed. Then there was the fun of figuring out how to unsnap the panels and release all the electrical plugs. Have I mentioned I don't really like working on cars yet??
At any rate, all things worked out and her truck is back to working as well as it had before the whole radio fiasco. That is, of course, running poorly and sounding like death.
Other fixit lately was our desk chair. I guess it wasn't designed for a 240lb ape to lean back on it. I snapped one of the arms clean through. After putting it in the corner for a week I decided to heck with it and fixxed it up. An evening in the garage, some scrap plywood, and a few fender washers and we are back in business. Not necessarily pretty, but functional. At least we don't need to go out and spend another $100-150 on another disposable chair.
Next up the heat pump decides to start acting up. $350 later it is supposedly fixed. Funny part is the fan that went out is the one that they replaced 13 months ago. At that time the repair only cost $250. Lame. Last night was the first real cold we have had since the service. Guess what, heat pump issues. The heat pump can keep up, but the blower is running continuously. I mentioned this to the tech last week and he blew it off (no pun intended). Well, time for round 2 with the heating and cooling guys. Wish me luck.
1 comment:
haha, this could have easily been typed out by my own fingers. I abhor paying labor rates for car repairs, but I'm not so eager to do it myself either. Crazy that rear shocks have gone through a decade of refinement, and they're still knocking and clunking. Damn I must have replaced 4 or 5 Fox Float shocks for my Superlight.
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