IronButt/SaddleSore 1000 debriefing

As I mentioned a few posts ago, a friend and I were going to do a SaddleSore run. Well, last Thursday we did it. Sad to say, I don’t have pictures. My phone died on the way, and luckily I didn’t find my camera before I left, or it would probably have met it’s demise in the same way.

The route

Our route including fuel stops

We planned a route using Google Maps, looking to do a bit more than the 1609 km or 1000 miles required for the actual ride. The final result was 1637 km according to Google Maps (1646 according to my odometer). I was a bit worried about the time it would take for the run, so the entire ride followed the largest possible roads. We didn’t hurry things very much; our speed was mostly legal, and we took our time at stops – necessarily, as it turned out, and in the end we got our final gas receipts just about 22 hours after our starting receipts. A single person in a hurry and with more comfortable gear could probably do the same ride another couple of hours faster, which only goes to show that a SaddleSore 2000k run is entirely possible here in Sweden.

The ride

Short version:
It was wet, cold and miserable, and I’d do it again without a second thought.

Long version:
Rijad and I had been talking about doing this ride for a while, and I’d told him I was going to be free the week from the 16th to the 22nd, and said I’d like to try it then. Saturday to Monday, I’d been in Norway with Tanja, showing her the Hardangervidda area and the fjord country south of Bergen. Tuesday and Wednesday I spent working on the house, and Wednesday afternoon, Rijad came over to me to ask if we were going to go. The weather report for Wednesday had been way off, promising rain when in fact we had fair weather with scattered clouds. The weather report for Thursday said that we could expect rain when passing Stockholm, and then another two areas of rain clouds with possible precipitation near Norrköping and near Kalmar, and in the end we decided to go for it. What’s the worst thing that could happen, right? So we did a final check of our bikes, adjusting his chain, checking oil and air levels, lightbulbs, bearings, the works.

Contrary to the weather report, it had been raining heavily the entire night before we left. At about half past six in the morning, the rain had gone, and we were scheduled to meet up at the first gas station at eight. The clouds were bluish and hung a few kilometers inland, straight in our path.

Half an hour into our ride, we got into the first proper rain. Rijad had brought real rain gear. I hadn’t. 15 minutes later, it was clear to me that this was going to be a wet experience. I was sitting in a puddle and felt the icy-cold water down the front of my neck and up from between my jacket and my pants. Thanks to not having installed the comfort kit on my Buell, the engine heated my puddle to an almost comfortable level, not very different from what it must be like wearing diapers. In other words: The water from below didn’t really hurt, but my T-shirt was draining body heat off of me, and I was recognizing the symptoms of moderate hypothermia just a couple of hours into our ride. Without the heated grips, I would have aborted the ride then and there.

First gas stop was in Karlskoga. I thought for a while, and decided to ditch my wet T-shirt and shorts, changing to two layers of clothing, saving the final long-sleeved T-shirt for later. I also bought a magazine to put between my riding gear and my clothes. Donning three layers at once would have allowed me to build back heat faster, but I wasn’t sure about how effective the magazine would be when it came to keeping my clothes dry, and I was desperate to have something dry for the night. We also had some food, and I drank some scalding hot coffee to warm up a bit from inside. I was going to call Tanja, and realized my phone literally had drowned in my pocket – there was a puddle on the inside of the screen.

As we continued on our way along route E18 to Stockholm, the clouds shrank back a bit, even letting some sunshine pass through, which was exactly what I needed. I still wasn’t warm, but I was a lot more comfortable than I’d been up until then – I even stopped shivering for a while. We entered the actual city in the afternoon, and so our speed was low practically all the way past Bromma airport and down to the E4 on-ramp. We found a place to fill up on gas, but the pumps didn’t write the station’s name on the receipts, so we had to get them stamped and signed by the owner. Luckily, this was the only place where this was a problem during the entire trip.

The road down to the next stop was pretty much uneventful. After the stop in Stockholm, I took out the magazine for comfort reasons, but somewhere between Norrköping and Valdemarsvik, we got into another area of light rain, where I put it back, and then I let it stay there the rest of the ride. It was late afternoon and the sun didn’t do anything when it came to heating anymore. The rest of the ride was simply cold – but not violently so.

We got off the E22 and rode into Västervik to fill up and find a place to eat. We got directions to a pizza place from another customer at the gas station, but on the way to it we found a fastfood restaurant called the Corner, and decided not to lose more time. We had a giant burger with extra everything each, since it was more than six hours since the last time we ate, and we didn’t expect to eat much more during the trip. After dinner, I put on the last of my shirts and hoped it would keep me warm enough, while we headed back to E22 and the road to Kalmar and further.

The next few hours were interesting to say the least. We had to make a quick stop at a gas station around 10 in the evening to clean our visors. There were so many bugs and mosquitoes that it was impossible to see anything through them, and the light drizzle that had helped us to keep them clean earlier had stopped. The road varied from superslab level to main street through small towns, and every few kilometers there was a warning about the fence ending and the possibility of deer or elks or wild boar crossing the road. Often we kept up with cars for a few kilometers, freeloading on their superior headlights, but either they were driving too slowly or way too fast for me to risk keeping up with them considering the very real chance of hitting a wild animal. At this point, Rijad began keeping a bit of a distance to me. Given the choice of more light or a bit of a safety margin should something jump up in front of me, he selected the latter.

From Kristianstad, we turned south again, towards Ystad, for almost an hour worth of riding on relatively narrow roads through the deer-infested countryside to get a few additional kilometers worth of riding to qualify for the SaddleSore. From there, we went almost all the way to Malmö, and turned onto the E6. After a few hours of riding with the knowledge that we’d be dead, or possibly even worse off, if an animal jumped up in front of us, it was very nice to know that the next four-five hours or so of riding would be almost guaranteed animal free. At this point I felt my mind begin to wander, and my eyes began to move sluggishly. Fortunately, it was enough to stand up on the footpegs and flex my muscles for a bit to get a bit of circulation to my brain again, to keep me awake until our next gas stop near Falkenberg, where I filled up with some hot chocolate, since I felt my stomach wouldn’t like another cup of coffee right then.

Except for me still being cold and Rijad fittingly considering our ride having a bad case of saddle sore, the last bit past Gothenburg and upwards was a breeze. The sky was almost clear, allowing for a great view of the stars and, later, of the sunrise.

When we stopped for our checkout fill-up of gas at Knäm, Rijad asked me if I’d do another one of these rides back-to-back to this one if I’d get a million Swedish kronor for it. Of course I would. I did this one for free, didn’t I? From his question, I suspect his ass really didn’t like the ZX7 seat.

Lessons learned

Preparing for a 24 hour run is overrated. Make sure you’ve had enough rest beforehand, and make sure you begin with a mechanically sound bike. I kept putting the ride off, thinking I must have missed something crucial. In the end, our preparations consisted of googling for gas stations in 250 km intervals, and that was basically it.

Extended highway riding eats tires like crazy. Make sure your rubber is good before the ride.

Two things to bring for long rides: Clothes and rain gear. The latter isn’t just “nice to have”. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have felt really cold even once during this ride if I hadn’t started it by getting soaked and sitting in cold clothes for a couple of hours.

We stopped for fuel 8 times including the final/check-out stop. It turns out a Kawasaki ZX7 is a somewhat thirstier than a Buell XB12X, so Rijad’s bike decided the distance between stops: In the end we didn’t want to risk much more than 250 km per tank, even though I wouldn’t be afraid to ride somewhere around 300 km at a time with my Uly. With that amount of gas stops, no additional stops were needed, contrary to the IronButt recommendations. More stops would cost more time, but wouldn’t do anything good from a comfort perspective.

The food found along the way is good enough for a 24 hour ride. I would think more about what I ate if I was to spend several days in a row on the bike, though.

Another interesting thing I suspected but didn’t know for sure, was that you simply don’t get sleepy on a bike. Your brain may turn to mush, and your reflexes get slow (to a point), but you’d definitely need more than 24 hours in the saddle to actually risk falling asleep from exhaustion. One thing I noticed at one point was that I was starting to associate incoherently, almost feverishly, but once I noticed that, I just focused and made it to the next gas stop with no further problems, after which my brain worked fine the rest of the way.

Radio communications and MP3 players are overrated. We ended up not using my radios at all – it was enough to just overtake the other person and pull over when needed. When it comes to music, I got so much sensory input anyway that music in addition would have been too much for me. I hummed along with my engine and that worked fine.

Helmets. Get one you can wear for a few hours on end. I’m ditching the Lazer and getting a more comfortable and less noisy one next year.

Of all the farkles I can think of, heated grips is right on the top of the list for useful features. I don’t think I could’ve made it without them.

I found out what to use auxiliary lightning on a bike for. I didn’t expect that to be a useful feature here in Sweden, but for late-season night-time riding? Definitely.

The Buell XB12X truly is a capable touring bike. For high-speed cruising on the Autobahn, maybe less so, but for real-life riding in speeds below 130 km/h, definitely. I’ve said it before, but I can say it again: I’m keeping this bike.

Neckmike first impressions

I ordered a communications package for use with the bikes a few days ago, and it arrived yesterday. The system is the Cobra MT600 + Neckmike combo from Bikeman I mentioned in the Preparing for the Iron Butt post.

The contents of the box

I ordered the double package, which comes with two Cobra MT600 radio units, rechargable NiMH batteries, a charger with a Y cable (to charge both units simultaneously), two Neckmike bundles and one set of small + one set of medium size earbuds each.

Along with that, I also ordered an MP3 player extension – and some extra earbuds, since I’ll be using the system while training a couple of friends for their rider tests.

The Cobra units (manufacturer’s spec sheet) are vanilla two way radios in a retail package. They’ve got the standard features with availability of both CTCSS and DCS “channels”, and a theoretical range of 5 km.

The Neckmike all bundled up

The Neckmike system basically consists of a throat microphone of the kind used by tactical units in noisy environments, in-ear headphones, and a waterproof send button. The pick-up part of the unit is mounted on a springy piece of rubber covered metal, that feels solid enough. Because of how a throat mic works, it’s pretty sensitive to placement, in an almost digital way: It needs to sit right next to the jugular to pick up the vibrations from one’s speech, or you won’t hear a thing. Other units I’ve seen solve this with an elastic or velcro-fastened band around the neck. Further use will have to prove if the Neckmike approach to the problem is good enough, but I can see why one wouldn’t want to have a fastened band around the neck while riding a bike. In case something happens, you really don’t want to be stuck with things wrapped around your neck. This shouldn’t happen with the Neckmike system.

The problem with other communications packages for motorcycle use, is that they tend to depend on speakers mounted inside the helmet. This is alright if you never ever need to ride at highway speeds, or if you’ve got a windscreen like a barn door. Otherwise, riding for long periods without earplugs is a pretty good way to get permanent hearing damage.

The in-ear phones of the Neckmike come with interchangeable heads in three different sizes (the largest one can be specially ordered, but the small and medium ones are included in the package, as I mentioned earlier). They work very well in protecting from outside noise, and from what I could feel, they should be no problem to wear for a while, although I will write something on this when I’ve had time to try them for real.

A real road test review will follow.

Mac Mail and fonts

It’s time for a little mac-related rant, for one of the few things that disturb me when using my computer at work.

I immediately fell in love with Mac Mail: Lightweight and nimble, but at the same time offering a much more powerful experience than Outlook/Entourage, very much thanks to the speed and ease of use of the search function, which plays in a completely different league than the “Advanced Search” in Outlook 2007.

The only problem I have with it is so trivial that I was really surprised to see that it’s been a regularly re-occurring question on forums for several years, namely the little question of fonts.

My gut feeling is that a modern mail software should be more or less WYSIWYG. Most of today’s mail programs solve this by encoding the contents of mail using regular HTML tags. Mac Mail uses Rich Text Format instead, but that’s just a technicality – it should do the exact same thing as ThunderBird or Outlook, which is to have some kind of a header containing information for the reader’s rendering software to use font (or font family) x, in size n, etc, so that the reader gets a similar experience as the writer probably intended her to have.

In a corporate environment, this is even more important, since PR departments often define a graphical policy for the company to use, so that customers get a homogeneous impression of the company even if they have to deal with different employees.

Now, consider the following screendump and try to find the problem:

A mail sent from Mac Mail, received by Outlook and replied back to Mac Mail

Sorry for the size, but I really want the horribleness to stand out in all it’s gory.

If you’re slow on the uptake, don’t worry: I’ve described the problem in the actual screenshot, but to recap:

• The mail was written in Mac Mail, using a font set by me according to company standards: Arial, 12pt.
• The signature was explicitly set to “Always match my default message font” in Mail Preferences.
• Upon reception in Outlook 2007, the recipient’s software obviously does not receive any kind of information about what font to use when rendering the email, but instead defaults to Times New Roman. This time the size is right, at 12 pt. I haven’t experimented enough to see if that’s just a coincidence, but judging from the character of the rest of this problem, it probably is.
• The signature, however, is a different font, namely the font I chose when I created it: Calibri.  But the size is wrong. When I created the signature, I wanted it to be size 11; slightly smaller than the other text in my mail. But as stated above, I checked the box to make Mail adjust the font properties of the signature to match the rest of the mail.
• It’s obviously not a general problem with Mac Mail’s ability to handle different fonts, though, since it obviously shows the message exactly as it was received by Outlook, and the replied text is rendered exactly as it was displayed in Outlook when I wrote it.

I’ve seen a number of different workaround tips, and these are my comments for them:

• Write the entire mail, then select the entire text and manually set the font properties for it before sending it
  Yes, that’s a completely serious response on a Mac forum, along with a fanboi rant about how it’s really Outlook’s fault that Mac Mail doesn’t define fonts properly when creating the RTF information for the message, and that Microsoft should choose another default font in Word.
  The problem with this workaround is of course that it’s a lot of time down the drain if you write more than a couple of mails a day.
• Create a custom signature using the font you want your message to use. Start the signature with an almost empty header, so that you can write your message inside the font definition tags for the signature.
  I understand this one. Also, it’s not a lot of work. But this is something I might have accepted from an obscure, non-supported, free (as in beer) software package for a Linux based system in 1996. Having the same kind of “solution” for the main communications package bundled with an Apple operating system in 2010? Yeah, right. And by the way, I’m still not sure if the font size is correctly transmitted with the message.
• Use plain text for the messages
  This is actually the best solution of them all. Except for the little fact that plain text will be rendered as Courier New by Outlook, and where does that look professional in a corporate environment?
  Also, 1982 called and wants it’s ASCII table back – it’s needed on another BBS. What’s the next big thing in email? ANSI “graphics”? Don’t get me wrong, these de facto standards were great, but when there is a working way of solving the problem in a way that looks good regardless of the viewing software (yes, a text-only software might strip formatting tags it can’t render), then why oh why not simply fix such a simple thing that does so much (relatively speaking) for the credibility of a system in the corporate world?

I really want to continue using Mail. It’s a great program with great features, which does what I want to do as fast as I want it to. I’ve filed a bug report to Apple regarding this problem, as have, seemingly many others.

Follow this link to join the movement and file your own report on this bug – Mail is a good program, it just needs some fixing to be usable in a professional environment. With enough people complaining, we can become a bunch of complaining people.

Preparing for the Iron Butt

The mission

I intend to become a member of the Iron Butt Association by riding a Saddle Sore 1000 run – “At least 1000 miles in less than 24 hours”, according to the rules – this summer.

The original plan was to ride solo, but now a friend wants to tag along as an introduction to his driver’s license. The reason I’m even thinking of accepting is that even though his papers will be new, he’s reasonably mature, has been driving cars at least as much as I have, and also has been riding motocross for a couple of years, so he’s by no means a rookie when it comes to riding on two wheels, staying awake and to traffic in general.

Also, if he has a driver’s license, it doesn’t really matter if one of our bikes would break down on the road, or if one of us would have to abort the ride, since the other one could finish the run independently.

The route

Each leg of the ride starts and ends at gas stations. The oligopoly here in Sweden means that you can find “your” brand of gas station almost anywhere, and use your brand specific credit card at all stations, which makes planning for night-time stops a lot easier. My route is planned from a safety perspective: I know more than half of the road like the back of my hand, and the final leg is almost all super slab, which makes for less chance of deer encounters during the time when I expect my reflexes to be toast.

The route follows the main roads from the westernmost town of Sweden, across the country to Stockholm, down along the east coast to the southernmost point, and back up along the west coast to the starting point. I will be passing Sweden’s three largest cities, which means I will need to plan my time to avoid traffic jams.

According to the Google roadmap, the trip is supposed to take about 20 hours, which leaves 4 hours of margin. Counting 200 km between gas stops, gives 8 stops á 10 minutes – say up to 1.5 hours including a couple of snacks. Four proper food/toilet stops á 1/2 hour each (separate from gas stops, as per advice from the more experienced), gives a net margin of half an hour. Given that we should be able to ride perhaps 10 km/h faster than the posted limits in most places, we should be able to save up another couple of hours, which could be used for an additional rest/nap stop on the last leg of the trip.

The bikes

I will be riding my almost-stock ’06 Buell XB12X Ulysses. I have mounted the pannier racks, but expect to do without the top box. I feel I can trust the bike now, having ridden it almost two thousand kilometers after putting it together earlier this season.

Rijad will, if he chooses to go, be riding his Kawasaki ZX7. It too has been along for a few hundred kms, so I’m not particularly worried about it.

Since I have the stock windscreen and Rijad doesn’t have a screen at all, orangutan arms will be an issue – extended highway speeds will be limited to well under the point where our licenses are in danger. I am confident however, that he’ll have more of a sore butt than what I’ll have: The Uly saddle is great.

The gear

My current riding boots are done for and need to be changed. I just bought a new pair of Lindstrands Max Tour which I got at a good price at Hansson’s Skinn & MC. They’re a bit thicker than my old boots, so I’ll have to adjust the shifter accordingly stop sissying around and just get used to moving my foot a bit more, but they’re so much more comfortable that I actually just threw the old ones away in a dumpster right outside the shop. I’m pretty sure my feet won’t go numb after a couple of hours on the bike in these boots.

I’m still unsure of what jacket to wear: my leather jacket has less lining than my textile one (both are of the Halvarsson persuasion) and will be more comfortable during the day, but the night part of the ride might get pretty cold, depending on how late in the season we go. On the other hand, I can just compensate with more layers of clothes.

I haven’t given rain gear any great thought, simply because I don’t intend to ride in rain. The area we’ll be covering is small enough that the weather should be predictable within a margin of a couple of days.

For communications, I plan to use a NeckMike/Cobra MT600 radio combo from Bikeman, along with a cable to connect the headset to an iPod.

When it comes to food, the overall advice seems to be to eat lightly. Cous-cous based salads are readily available on most gas stations and should do the trick, along with regular water.

The tools I will bring will be the most basic set: duck tape, a good knife, pliers, a small hammer, screw driver with bits, a tube of Loctite and a can of puncture spray. What I can’t fix with that will probably require more tools than I can bring anyway.

“Accidents” on top of trains

Every summer there are articles like this one, from Swedish Aftonbladet (warning: yonder site hath huge flash ads) about people getting themselves killed on top of trains.

What I find extremely weird, is that there are several such articles every summer just in little Sweden!

I mean: OK, some of these cases probably are pure suicides, though I don’t understand how a person could choose being cooked alive with a small but non-negligible chance of actually surviving for a few hours or days as a suicide method – there’s got to be smarter ways.

But what about the actual “accidents”? Any school teacher with the least bit of knowledge about physics can tell you that direct current wants to get grounded. That’s actually how trains work – they let the current in the cable ground itself – after running through what basically is a huge electric motor.

So let’s get the facts straight: Here in Sweden, we have 16 kV lines over our train tracks. That’s 16 000 Volts, or about 70 times the voltage in our electric outlets.

It’s also direct current, as opposed to the alternating current in our outlets. What does that mean? Alternating current changes directions tens of times per second. While the change in directions is happening, the current can be said to decrease, pass zero and start increasing again.

Direct current on the other hand, doesn’t “let go” once it starts flowing. And at the voltage and current levels in a high voltage train line, you don’t have to make physical contact with the cable to get the current going through you: the flashes you see over a train at night, is ionized air making room for the discharge from the line to the receptor on the train. What this means, is that you don’t actually have to touch the power line to get electrocuted. Actually, I wouldn’t even dream of trying to get within a meter of the power line. Standing on a train roof is stupid at best.

So I’m simply saying that people getting electrocuted on train roofs isn’t to be looked upon as accidents, but as the practical application of natural selection.

First real ride

Today's ride - about 300 kms of great fun

Today, I finally got my shit eating grin back: I woke up at 6 am to have my bike inspected. I left the house at 7, and rode to the gas station in Skee. From there, I rode straight up to Bengtsfors. Conditions were simply great – I had about 20 minutes to wait when I got there. The Uly passed through the inspection with flying colors, even though it had the race kit mounted. The guy who inspected it obviously liked the Buell bikes, and showed some knowledge I didn’t expect, which was kind of nice. Not being very tall, he didn’t want to risk dropping the bike, and simply skipped the test ride they usually do, but instead immediately took up the payment and let me go.

The bike cooling down while I adjusted my earplugs

So I proceded to rip up from Bengtsfors up to Årjäng, back to Hån, Norwegian Örje, down to Tistedal and Halden, and finally back to Strömstad to have a cup of coffee with Tanja.

The ride was actually pretty cold, and it made me glad I decided to mount my grip heaters. Without them, I don’t think I would have taken the long way back home. But as it was, I’m really glad I did – this part of Scandinavia is beautiful and offers great riding even at almost-legal speeds thanks to the rolling hills and the many twists and turns.

MacBook Pro as a sysadmin tool

So, I got one of the new Arrandale MacBook Pros a few weeks ago, and I just realized I haven’t commented it yet.

I went with the base model; a 2.4 GHz Core i5 with the normal resolution glossy screen. This allowed me to get an Apple Wireless Keyboard, a Mighty Mouse, a Mini DisplayPort to DVI converter and Parallels Desktop 5 and still stay within the same budget as I would have used on a Lenovo T510 with a docking station, which was my plan B.

My work mostly consists of administrating our server farms, which means that most of my time is spent remote controlling machines anyway, using RDP, ssh and a Citrix connection in that order right now. I use the opensource Cord remote desktop tool, which provides me with functions Microsoft’s own MSTSC application doesn’t: an alphabetical list of servers, non-standard resolution to connect to servers without the dock or menu bar getting in the way, instant switching from full-screen to windowed mode, including scaling so the resolution is kept when going back to windowed mode, etc.

For my mail and productivity needs, I’m actually using Apple’s own tools; Mail and the iWork suite. The Snow Leopard version of Mail has no problem at all connecting to our Exchange 2007 server, and from what I’ve read, it should keep working just fine when we upgrade to Exchange 2010. It also is lightweight and lightning fast in all operations.

Parallels hasn’t actually seen much use on my computer yet. I’ve installed a Win7 and an XP client as a security measure, if I would encounter anything that needs the Microsoft environment, but I simply get everything done from OS X, and so I’ve had no real use for these virtual machines yet.

The glossy screen hasn’t been any problem in real life either. I’ve seen a lot of complaints on it, but I don’t know, maybe I’m simply not a gamut nazi. Everything looks good, and if I should get glares, I can simply change the angle of the screen, or move the computer a bit. It’s portable, you know. And for the first time for me, the laptop screen is brighter than my main screen at work, which means I can turn the brightness on the MBP down about three notches and use it comfortably as a secondary screen. Trying something similar with my old Lenovo T60 was extremely uncomfortable.

I’ve had three gripes with the machine as yet:
One drawback compared to a Microsoft based workstation has been using our SharePoint based Intranet system: It’s not possible to click-to-open and then automatically save documents to the SharePoint server even from Microsoft’s own programs, but instead the procedure is to check out, download, edit, save, upload and check in the document, which gets tedious after a while, so for this kind of work, I’ve started using Citrix.

The second drawback (which might just be a configuration problem), is that the default for a Citrix desktop connection seems to be to use all available desktop space and still not show the Start menu bar, so you have to resize the window before you can access it with the mouse, and also, I need to start it running the computer in single screen mode, or it will drag itself out on both screens no matter what.
UPDATE: This seems to be related to starting the Citrix client via Safari. It doesn’t do this when running Firefox.

The third problem was something I managed to solve: The Juniper SSL/VPN client we use at work isn’t compatible with Snow Leopard, and has to be hacked to work properly.
UPDATE: The version 6.5 client seems to fix this problem. Update your SSL/VPN server if you’re having this problem.

So to sum it all up, I’m a happy Mac-wielding camper. I won’t ever become a fanboi – I’m way too pragmatic for that (2016-10-17: OK, I admit, dammit, I did become one) – but for my laptop needs, the MacBook Pro is very close to being the ultimate solution. It’s snappy in a way that no Microsoft-based machine has ever felt to me since I moved away from DOS, and it’s instantly useful in a way that no GNU/Linux or Free-/Net-/OpenBSD distribution has managed yet.

Motorcycle season is here!

It seems I finally got everything on my Ulysses together, just as temperatures went up to summer levels.

The kickstand arrived yesterday. Having worked my proverbial donkey off for a few weeks, and with more work coming up in the evening, I took half the afternoon off to get the bike done.

To get at the bolts that hold the kickstand fastening bracket, the muffler needs to be removed. I managed to do that without removing the drive belt tensioning wheel as per the service manual, but it was a lot of work – especially when replacing it. Without the proper tools, however, I didn’t have much of a choice.

The main difference between the original ’06 XB12X kickstand and the new one, was the pivot bolt, which was replaced with a solid-looking, machined pivot pin. I hope this one will stand up a bit better to normal use.

Now I have a time for the legal part (checkup) on Monday. Hopefully, they’ll accept my race muffler, or I’ll have to do it again within a month – but anyway, at least I’ll be able to ride until then.

Yet another Uly status update

I finally got the last pieces of the electrical system together today, and took the bike for a shakedown ride. Everything felt good – the red light on my new voltmeter  turned off when the engine started running, the heaters worked as they should, nothing looked or sounded unusual, that I could see, so basically, I think I’m pretty much done with the ride inhibiting problems with the bike, and it doesn’t seem as if I’d introduced any more of them.

I’m still waiting for the last parts for the kickstand. From what I heard, they should’ve arrived in Belgium on the fourth, so hopefully I might even get them during next week.

Another Uly status update

Today I finally found the time to do some more work on my Buell.

Status right now is that the new stator is in place, and the primary case is closed again.

Remaining tasks:

• New voltage regulator needs to be mounted.
• New Deutch connector needs to be installed on alternator cable to connect to the voltage regulator.
• I still haven’t gotten the side stand from Bike – I need to check on the status there. I hope it’s just another consequence of the Icelandish volcano eruption.
• I decided to switch to the (known) street legal muffler since I have to remove the race muffler anyway to install the side stand. After inspection, the race kit goes back on.

I feel like I’m getting somewhere.