mark's new bars!

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• I got the Ride-In registration confirmation card in the mail yesterday! Woo!
• I found out, quite accidentally, that Tim over at Pashnit.com has some pages about Zion Park, the Grand Canyon, and a couple of the highways in NV I'm considering. Good reading material.
• I signed up for the AMA Grand Tour this year -- take a picture of your motorcycle at 50 national parks or sites. The contest runs from March 1 until October, so I thought it'd be worth a shot (no pun intended), given all the parks I'll be going through on the Arizona trip.

adventures a-plenty.
I've been sick for the past few days, which has annoyed me enough that I dragged myself out of bed today and spent nearly all day in the garage. This probably wasn't the brightest thing I could do, given the dust in the garage and my predisposition to respiratory infections, but cabin fever was setting in.

I spent the latter part of the morning taking pictures of Mark as he put his new Suburban Machinery handlebars on his Bandit. Here's the write-up; nothing terribly exciting. The new bars look gorgeous, though. Mark came back from his test ride grinning, so I assume he approves.

Most of the afternoon was then taken up puttering around on my own Bandit. I'd been charging the battery over the past couple of days, but it just didn't seem to be holding a charge. I got Mark to help me remove the fuel tank so that I could remove the battery (thanks, Suzuki!). With the tank off, I could really clean the airbox, cylinder head covers, etc., so I grabbed some paper towels and attacked the 10 years of built-up dust, respiratory system be damned.

Eventually I cleaned off enough dust to notice that there are sparkplugs going into the cylinder head cover, so I figured, why not take them out and check them? Whee! These sparkplugs belonged in a horror movie, not a motorcycle. I'm trying to remember if Nat told me that the bike had had a tune-up -- I'm really curious to see whether some shop actually told him that they changed the plugs.

[Note: I just looked at the paperwork from Nat, and I'm utterly mystified by some of the items on the diagnosis by the last shop. In addition to my personal favorite, "right engine seal blown", we also have "cable inner broken". It's like a little riddle.]

But back to the plugs. All of their gaps were within spec, but they were the nastiest bunch of sparkplugs I've ever seen. All of them had dark sludge covering the first part of the threads (none on the electode, though), and on two of the plugs, the sludge had attracted every piece of dirt, leaf, and bug within a mile-wide radius. One of these plugs, the number three plug, also had a thick and knobbly layer of rust all over it. With a sinking feeling of impressed horror, I took a flashlight and looked down into the number three sparkplug well. Have you ever seen those documentaries of the Titanic? That's what it looks like. I expected to see fish and submersibles float by as I peered down there.

So I don't know what the hell I'm going to do about that. Replace the sparkplugs, obviously, and wait until I've got the engine out, I suppose (y'know, to check on that blown "right engine seal"). Hopefully a scrub brush and WD-40 will clean out that well, and I won't need to replace the cylinder head cover. Grumble. I'm just keeping my fingers crossed that none of that rust got into the cylinder head.

kragen and target and wal-mart and another kragen, oh my!
Right about this time, Peter came by to hang out for a while. We went over to the neighborhood Kragen Auto Parts to pick up a new battery, and possibly some sparkplugs, for the Bandit. I went over to the battery section and found a box labelled 9-BS, which is the Bandit's battery size. I opened up the box...and found a Yuasa battery. This would not be so remarkable, except that it was a Champion box, and it was a usedYuasa battery. I walked up to the battery help desk. An employee saw me carrying my old battery and told me "the motorcycle batteries are over there", gesturing to the same shelf I was just at. I asked if they had any other batteries than what were on the shelf. "Not for motorcycles", was the reply. I explained about the used Yuasa battery in the box -- the only 9-BS they had, naturally -- and he just sort of shrugged and smiled. This pissed me off. Some poor clueless person is going to go in there and pay fifty dollars for a used Yuasa battery if they don't have the foresight to check inside the box first. The more I think about this, the more angry it makes me. I think I'm going to call the store tomorrow, and hopefully get a manager.

Needless to say, I didn't buy a battery there. Peter thought that the nearby Target might sell batteries, so we drove over there. They didn't, but Peter promised they'd have batteries at the Wal-Mart across the street. Now, I mean no offense to any Wal-Mart shoppers in the audience, but this was a nasty Wal-Mart. They did have the battery I was looking for -- though the first box we looked in contained another used battery -- but the store was such a disgusting zoo that we gave up. We actually waited in the check-out line for at least fifteen minutes, with no hope of actually being checked out at any future time, so we set down the battery and just left the store.

At this point, I was determined to actually buy a battery, and so we drove down to Mountain View to another Kragen. This time, they had an actual new battery which hadn't been used or opened and wasn't actually a Yuasa. I felt on a roll, so I went up to the help desk counter to ask about sparkplugs. The employee instantly fell in love with my hiptop when I busted it out to get the sparkplug type. This began a nice, long, involved, conversation about Danger with the Kragen guy. After approximately forever, during which I learned about the guy's computer programming history, operations experience, the first home computer he hand-soldered together ("look! I still have the scar from the soldering iron!"), and five cars, it was finally determined that he couldn't order the sparkplugs. I found Peter -- who always seems to disappear for these personality-building conversations -- and went to buy the battery. When the cashier handed me his personal pen to sign the credit card slip, I felt very uplifted that it was from "Bill's Bail Bonds -- Because Momma Wants You Home!". This really made the whole evening for me.

Tomorrow, I'll actually put the battery in the bike. The fun never ends, I tell you.