still hotter than the sun.
leather is more comfortable than skin grafts.......

off-topic.
This has nothing to do with motorcycling, but I just wanted to say that I can't really believe that Douglas Adams died yesterday. That's just....surreal.

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Chai's speedometer and tripmeter weren't working, so that's the first thing we looked at; a quick peek at the back of the instrument panel showed that the cable had come unplugged. So that was a quick and easy fix. :) After that we did an oil change on his Ninja; nothing exciting about it, it was a standard oil changing. There was some excitement when Chai went to remove the old oil filter, but he and Peter eventually just removed the lower fairing, and I guess the filter removal was much easier after that (I was working on Peter's valves at the time). Personally, I think the Ninja looks nicer without the lower fairing, but to each their own. ;) While the oil was draining, we adjusted the throttle cable play; Chai felt there was too much. There was definitely more than the 3-4mm recommended by the service manual, so we tightened that all up. And this time, I knew what I was doing with the throttle cable play, thankyouverymuch. See? I can learn. :D Chai's was easier to understand, though, since there was only one cable with a locknut/adjuster screw on it (the second cable didn't have any adjustment devices). So we had half as many things to screw up. :)

Meanwhile, Kim was charging the battery on her CB-1 and washing it thoroughly. After we were done with Chai's oil, he washed the Ninja, too. Pretty bikes! Yay! During all of this, one of Peter's roommates had some friends over, and it turns out that one of the friends is a biker, too. So he hung out in the garage with us for a while and chatted. He has a Honda SuperHawk (yum) which he's selling for a VFR (yum). I tried to convince Peter to buy the SuperHawk, but it was all expensive and stuff. :( Speaking of which, Peter never did hear back from the people that were selling the cheap '95 VFR. Peter assumes that they sold it immediately and just aren't responding to all of the people that called them about it. I guess that must be the case, since it's been a week now (unless they like placed the ad and then went on vacation in Uganda or something), but I dunno. I can't see people around here rushing the VFR like that; it's not like it's a cheap apartment or something, for god's sake. But I guess it was a good deal and it's the beginning of riding season. Feh. Oh well.

I took some pictures of the SVS with her new little magnetic tank guard on it, too, so you can see for yourself that it isn't horribly ugly. Even Peter said so.

the clutch plates saga continues.
It's a good thing that Jan and Keith are visiting from Seattle this weekend and therefore I wouldn't be working on Peter's bike anyway. So last week, Peter called the dealer and ordered a new set of clutch plates, four new sparkplugs, and a couple of random gaskets. No problem. They quoted him $90 or something, and told him they'd be ready by today. Yesterday, he went to the dealer to pick up the goods....and found out that whoever had placed the order had neglected to specify any quantity. So they had, waiting for Peter, one sparkplug. One gasket. One pair of clutch plates (the VFR takes 6 pair). As you can well imagine, this was pretty useless and Peter was pretty annoyed. It turns out that the $90 that they quoted him was, in fact, for one of everything, so when the parts guy "kindly" offered to re-order the parts for him in the correct quantities, Peter would end up having to pay at least an extra hundred dollars. Feh. I believe he ended up buying the remaining three sparkplugs, since those are only a couple of dollars each, but we're turning to the Power of the Internet to find the rest of the clutch plates. :P I've gotten in touch with a couple parts suppliers that I know through people on mailing lists, and I think I've got a pretty good deal going. So hopefully we'll have the rest of those parts by next week or the following weekend. Jeez.