kodiak

Biodiesel 300D

Snow Plows and Snow Drifts

My cabin is just of Highway 88, near Black Station for any of you who actually know the area. While it is not in metro-downtown anywhere, it is also not in the middle of nowhere, relative to anywhere else in the general Jackson-Pioneer area. That being said, you would expect some snow plowing of the roads, but not a whole lot. And I am not quite sure that plowing is good thing. I know it is a good thing, but it does make some things much, much more difficult.

From the front door you can barely see the lights of my car as I lock the doors

Take getting into my driveway for example. I can get to the cabin just fine, but getting in to my driveway seems to require a small miracle or perhaps a work of god. See even though the road is clear, my driveway has somewhere between 24 and 36 inches of snow on it- non-trivial, even in Subaru.

The first night, we had to sort of dig the car out of and into the driveway, tonight was even worse. The road had not really been plowed recently and we were in the middle of a crazy blizzard. Seriously, 10’s of inches of snow per hour it seemed. So while I could get to my driveway, I could not really stop as well as I would have liked, which meant that I sort of slid past it and down the hill another 10 feet or so. No biggie- just back up a little .. yeah that did not work so well either. Meg and I ended up, with a combination of pushing and shoveling, getting the car into the driveway. Which is good, except that I am not really sure we can actually get it out of the driveway in the morning. This should be fun …

After getting squared away and packed up for a day of skiing we headed out to the car, or where the car was last night when I parked it. Parking is a bit of an misnomer thought. I thinking referring to it as “getting my car stuck in a new location” would be more fitting. And thus begun the process of getting the car out yet again and getting headed to Kirkwood, or at least out of my little
woodland development.

Two hours later and after moving about 2 - 3 cubic meters of snow and fitting my chains, which required a bit of engineering as they did not exactly fit, we were moving up the hill and headed out to town to stock up on food, and materials needed for the rest of the
trip. Kirkwood did not happen.

Spotted this Cayman at lunch today

This car looks very, very good in person. Drool….

First ride

Well it has been a while since I have been on two wheels, but the rest of my gear arrived or was purchased this week, so I could not resist. I went for a little ride around the cul’de’sac this afternoon. I felt a little odd being in full gear to toodle around a 500 ft patch of asphalt, but it is asphalt afterall. Safety first! From what I can tell ;-) the bike rides pretty well, the throttle is a little touchy below 1500 rpm, but the clutch is in good shape and the transmisssion snicked cleanly through the first 3 gears. The tach works fine, but the speedo is a little wonky. I knew this when I bought the bike, so no surprise. It kind shows the rolling max speed over the last couple minutes. Not jerky, just goes up and then doesn’t come down until the speed is a solid 10 - 15 mph lower than the max for a period of a couple minutes.

I should talk about gear for a bit here. From my dirt experiences in HS and college, good equipment is worth its weight in gold, or perhaps more appropriately- skin. When I started on the dirt, I had a good helmet, good boots and that was about it. Like so many others out there, I had on camno canvas pants, leather work gloves and thick long sleeve shirt. I also patched up a chest protector that a friend had broken at one point. And that was about it. I think I was out a grand total of about 200 bucks to get started. Over the first summer of riding I picked up some good pants- padded with shin guards, a good jersey with some padding around the elbows and good fit around the body so that it was not getting snagged on branches etc, and a real chest protector with both a solid back and front. Well times have changed, and the street is definitly different than dirt. You have the added elements of cars and their (especially in california) bad drivers, as well as asphalt which would like to do nothing more than rip the flesh from you pink unprotected skin. Equipment in this case is not a precaution, it is a necessity. That is why when I budgeted this whole thing, I set aside about a 1/3 the cost of the bike as being equipment for me.

I will not say that I went all out and bought the best or most expensive gear possible. Motorcycle gear is a lot like watches. Yes you can spend 30k on a watch, but a 3 dollar digital will also give you the time of day. The value adds of a watch are in the areas of style, durability and features- like submersion depth. Just from the cost of the inputs, a good watch will cost you about 100 dollars, that is just what it costs to get a watch that has a solid case, good movement, and saphire crystal. Sure you could spend 65 dolars and skip the saphire crystal, but the mineral crystal in the 65 dollar watch will chip and scratch and be useless in about a year. The same can be said for motorcycle equipment.

Let’s start at the top, a helmet- you can get a good helmet DOT and Snell certified, for around 100 dollars. But there are some features in a helment that are nice to have and will cost you a little more. I opted for a Shoei RF-1000 in metallic black. The metallic paint will reflect some at night, but not too much and it matches everything. The Shoei also boasts the best visor system, which I can verify given my short lived previous experience with an Arai Quantum II. The RF also has visually corrected lens, good peripheral vision clearence (no tunnel vision in this one), a solid venting system, and sized cheekpads. The cheekpads seem like a small thing, but they really matter. The 35mm pads that are stock in the medium RF were too thick and made the helmet really tight, but the large RF was too big and did not fit properly. The sized cheekpads allowed me to buy a helmet that was the right shell size, but also have a super fit.

Then comes the jacket. I knew this would be the bain of my existence. I am about 6′5″ almost 6′6″, most of my height is in my torso and I am about 225 lbs. Let’s just say that the average leather maker did not have me in mind when they tape out jacket designs. After some searching online and trying on about 30 jackets locally here in San Jose, I found a good jacket from FirstGear. FirstGear is pretty much my hero on this one, because the actually make jackets in tall sizes. They were the only people who made a solid leather jacket, with armor, for a reasonable cost that came in a cut remotely approaching my body.

Boots and gloves where actually the easiest. I found a good pair of Forma boots with re-enforcements in the ankles and protection on the shin for about 100 bucks and a good set of gloves with kevlar on the back AND on the plam for about 70 dollars. I am usually pretty picky about gloves and this was actually the last piece of gear that I bought. I tried a bunch of gloves ranging in cost from 20 bux to 240 bux. Theses just fit well and were well made, ‘nuf said.

Now I just need to take care of the rest of the paper work, fix the headlight and speedo and I am good to go!

New Toy!

Well given that gas is about 3.20 a gallon and I wanted one anyway, I have gone ahead and purchased a new (well used actually) toy. It needs some work, but the frame is straight and the motor is strong. Should be fun times! Now if I can just find some gear that will fit my 6′5″ body!

This is a 1998 Yamaha Seca II 600. The faring is missing and the headlight wiring is flaky at best, but that is nothing that little rewiring cannot fix. I am scheduled for my MSF test later this month, so by the time I head to england I should be riding to work on two wheels!

Honest Scion tC review

The truth about cars review of the Scion tC still has me chuckling to myself. On my drive home to Oregon last month I came to the conclusion that the tC was elected “most likely to be pulled over” in the Automotive class of 2004. I saw at least half a dozen on the side of the road with lights flashing behind them. But of course this was all on I-5, because at 8+ seconds from 0 to 60 mph, tickets in the city are much more likely to be parking than speeding.

~dnm

C36 on PCH

Woohoo it works, now only if I had a camera phone, or a blackberry, or a digitial camera or any other modern day device I would be in business.