It's OK for guys to wear pink

If it has cool things on it, like Hello Kitty, or a Kalashnikov. Or both!

It's aliiive!

"We can do it. We have the technology. We can build it better than it was before..."

Well there it is. Aside from polishing the engine, it's DONE! Everything we've done:

• De-rusted and painted frame
• De-rusted and painted bracketry (airbox, battery tray, taillight assembly)
• Added blanking plate to close up ugly taillight opening
  
• Replaced shocks and forks
• Painted and modified CB100 side covers to fit this CL100
  
• De-rusted and painted tank
• Painted exhaust and polished heat shield
• De-rusted and polished fenders and chain guard
  
• Recovered seat
• Cleaned the carb
• Lubed and adjusted all operating cables
• Replaced front tire
• Added turn signals, including XOR relays for front running lights and rear triple brake lights.
• Added 7.5V Zener diode to help prevent overcharging the battery
• Replaced rubber centerstand stop to keep the chain (!) from hitting it
• Helicoiled stripped mirror mount and added mirrors
  
• Added a proper Honda tool kit to hidden compartment
  

I took it for a little spin to cure the paint we put on the exhaust, and it's such a ton of fun to ride! I think Lemontree's going to love it! :)

Bike update

Today was Bike Day. In the last week the new fork stanchion pipes came from Thailand and I finished the relay modules mentioned in an earlier post so we were able to make a lot of progress.

If you recall, XOR logic can be built with relays thus:
And here we have the real thing:

You'll see the 'X' shaped cross-connects between relays here, just like in the diagram:
First attempts at soldering the relays "dead bug style", i.e., with the relay placed upside down like a dead bug with it's legs in the air and soldering directly to the pins met with failure. Second attempts with my soldering pencil also met with failure because the teeny little holes were too close together and the solder balls of adjacent connections touched and shorted things. A trip to Rat Shack for a fine soldering iron tip and some teeny .022" solder made soldering a real joy as the solder went right where I wanted it and flowed like water instead of peanut butter. Ok, I'll win no awards for aesthetics but the proof is in the results, and the modules work.
You'll see above I had to make two connections to the Common legs of the center relay, so I just used a long lead and bent it over and soldered it twice on the backside.

Finally, the modules got a little protection in the form of hot glue and electrical tape. With the front end re-assembled, we reinstalled the main wiring harness and added in my modules. Some consternation was experienced when the rear turn/brake lights inexplicably malfunctioned. We checked, checked again, and rechecked our wiring and it was all correct. Based on the pattern of the light display, I suspected a faulty brake/taillight bulb, so I broke out the multimeter and started testing. Bulb was fine but the socket had some very strange results -- zero volts between either bulb contact and ground, but 5.5V between the two contacts! That's not supposed to happen. Finally we pulled the lens off and determined that the ground wire for the bulb holder had fallen off, resulting in the taillight grounding itself through the brake light and confusing the heck out of my relay module and confusing the heck out of us. Ground wire reattached, everything worked as designed. Whew!! I was starting to doubt my electrical engineering and soldering skills for a minute there.

With the day almost spent, we made it look like a real motorcycle again. Lemontree put on the mirrors, tank, and side covers. All that's left now is odds and ends -- clean the carb, adjust the front brake and lube all the cables, polish the engine, and... well, that's about it really.

Bike Beautification

Here is a look at the custom pieces I painted. These will definitely give my bike character. I'm not going to put them on until everything else is finished, because I want them to be the finishing touches. I think it would be too disconcerting to put them on an unfinished bike. So they will have to wait for a while.

I have ambiguous thoughts about what I have done here. I sprinkled glass beads on the white paint for a reflective effect. The point is that as I'm riding I want to be seen. Which brings me to the rub. I hate to be noticed. For anything. I want to quietly reside in the background. Don't get me wrong, I love to make a difference. I love to help others live a more quality life if I can, but I don't want to be recognized in doing so. I don't have any objections to people saying "thanks" or "good job" or whatever, but then I want to be quietly forgotten. So comes my problem here. People will notice my paint job, but it's not really something that can be quietly forgotten. This is very custom. Nobody else has a bike that looks like this. I WILL be noticed, and I'm a little uncomfortable with that.

Grape trellis

Today was a busy day. The other day I attempted to drill holes in our concrete sidewalk so I could secure the trellis fenceposts to it (to keep them from tipping over under the tension of the wire). I used a masonry bit with our regular drill. For those of you currently laughing, you already know that this was a waste of time. Lemontree's father was kind enough to loan us a hammer drill that worked much, much better. I was then able to install lead sleeves in the resulting holes and screw fencepost brackets into the sleeves.

On the far side, there was no sidewalk so I drove rebar into the ground at an angle, then ran wire from the top of the fencepost down at an angle to the rebar at ground level. (The cat is a neighborhood stray.) As you can see below I also set up a soaker hose -- these baby vines need a lot of water because they were transplanted and their roots are small, but in future years they should need very little because they grow some pretty incredible root systems.

Finally I ran the two top wires and tensioned them with turnbolts. I have not yet run the lower set of wires as I'm not quite sure where to place them. From Vines to Wines and other viticultural resources say the lower cordon (horizontal branch of the vine) can be 24 to 36 inches high (or even more), but I do not yet understand which height is best for my situation. Until I learn more, I'm just going to wait. The vines have not yet broke bud (nor should they, as it may still frost this spring, which could be disastrous) so I still have time.

Oh, and while we were at it, we also secured our raspberries to our back fence. They are always falling over onto the grass where they get chopped up when I mow the lawn. Considering many prior failed attempts, this year we got some thick nylon string (almost twine) and then made a critical improvement: we hooked one end of each string with an S-hook so that the string can be unhooked when desired.


This hook allows us to temporarily remove the string to ease in pruning, reposition canes, and more easily slide new canes behind the string in the fall or spring should we have neglected to do so when they first grew that tall during the summer.

We have quite a lot of raspberries, as they have been spreading since we planted transplants a few years ago. This year we dug up two more fence section's worth of bed for more raspberries and there transplanted some shoots that were coming up too close to the grass. Unfortunately, some of the canes are of a different variety that produce a more tart and lighter red berry which tends to fall apart. I tolerated them in years past but this year we're going to let them fruit one last time (so we can identify them) and then rip them out to make room for the canes that grow the sweeter dark red berries. In some ways this reminds me of The Allegory of the Olive Tree, which is kind of cool.

Half a motorcycle, still/again

Lemontree did a whole bunch of work on her bike today and yesterday. She recovered the seat and painted the frame, and then together we reinstalled the swingarm, rear wheel, fender, shocks, chain guard, exhaust, and passenger footpegs.

As you can see, the exhaust is now black. The chrome was too far gone to save, so Lemontree used header paint (1,800°F) to make it black. I think it looks good.

That accomplished, we removed the front wheel and dug in for a fight! The two front forks were seriously rusted in place and it took a sledgehammer -- quite literally, a 2.5lb sledge -- to beat them off. Tip to anyone removing rusted fork stanchion tubes on a CL100, get a M10x1.25 threaded rod a couple of feet long, thread it into the top of the tube, and proceed to whale on it.

So the reason we took the fork apart was a ripped gaiter -- that's the rubber accordion that keeps dirt out of the shock absorber part of the fork -- and leaky fork fluid seal. Sadly, the reason the fork seal leaked was because the fork at some point had been chewed up by rocks etc that were allowed in by the ripped gaiter. Now replacing the seal is useless because the rough fork tube will immediately tear it up. :( So... we will have to either replace the fork tubes or weld up and re-machine the damaged sections. It'll be a few more weeks at least. :(

But, the parts that are done look really good!

Sugar: The Bitter Truth

This is well worth the time to view.

Bud push

It's not nearly time for bud break yet, but I think my baby vines are alive because the buds are starting to "push". Once daily temperatures regularly hit 50°F, and they have been, grapevines start to come out of dormancy. Left is an ultra-closeup of a bud that is enlarged and fuzzy. 5 of the vines look pretty good, which is the good news. The last one, one of the Pinot Noirs, has fewer, and smaller, buds but still shows signs of life so it'll hopefully catch up with a little extra TLC.

While I'm waiting for some exciting mini-vineyard action to happen, I'm reading From Vines to Wines by Jeff Cox. No, I won't be making wine, but there's a lot about viticulture as well as dealing with the juice, which I will be doing. I think it would be an interesting read even if you don't intend to grow vines, both because Jeff has an engaging writing style and because wine -- even if you don't personally imbibe -- plays a role in modern as well as ancient society. There are other interesting tidbits, as well: for example, I was not aware that the juice from red grapes comes out nearly clear, so the grapes are first crushed and the skins are allowed to stew with the juice for about a day so that the colors can bleed into the juice. Much of the complex flavors of wine come from the skins as well -- wines from grapes picked and directly pressed without crushing are (at least, according to Jeff, as I have no personal experience in this area) "light" and "clean" tasting, but lacking in depth of flavor. Even white grapes are sometimes often crushed and allowed to sit for 8-16 hours before pressing to enhance flavor, though like apples, white grape juice can actually turn brown from oxidation if left exposed to air for too long. For vintners (winemakers) this is not a problem as the subsequent fermentation by the yeast generally clears it up, but it will be a potential issue I will need to avoid.

In short, this whole business turns out to be a bit more complex than I anticipated, but I'm still looking forward to everything from cultivating to bottling. If anything I now appreciate the high prices for vitis vinifera juice... perhaps they really aren't gouging after all.

Corwin the viticulturist

I've been really excited about wine variety grapes for the past year or so. I'm not a big fan of the "foxy" flavor of the native North American vitis labrusca grape juice; the European wine varieties of vitis vinifera have a much more delicate and interesting flavor that I like a lot more. Problem is, I don't drink wine, and vinifera juice isn't really sold in stores. I did find a couple of places online you can get it, which is wonderful and I really enjoyed the bottles I ordered, but it's really really expensive.

I was all set to order some vinifera vines and grow my own, until I discovered Idaho has some really lame legal vine importation restrictions which meant no nurseries were willing to ship to me. And the local vinyards are not really in the business of giving half a dozen vines to anyone who asks. (And I can't start with cuttings, because they can't be grown on their own roots -- they must be grafted onto labrusca rootstock to give them resistance to the pervasive phylloxera pest.) So, I sort of despaired until we saw some grape vines for sale at Home Depot. I humored Lemontree when she wanted to look at them, knowing they'd just be common labrusca varieties like Concord or maybe Niagara, but lo and behold, they were Pinot Noir and White Reisling -- two of my favorite viniferas!! My head nearly exploded and next thing you know...


We planted three of each on the south side of our house (they really like a lot of sun). We have yet to build a trellis for them to grow on, but they're just babies so we still have plenty of time. In the meantime, they should start budding in a couple of weeks and you can bet I'll post pics as things progress. :)

Progress on the bike

Painting the tank and headlight bucket

One of the side covers Lemontree ordrered from Taiwan (only place to get them) was for the wrong bike. Our CL100 has a high exhaust, so the right side cover must be cut down to provide clearance. Here it's being marked for cutting.

Mesh reinforcement to join cut

Bondo applied

Bondo sanded smooth

Inspecting rear fender

Seat, airbox, and fender removed

Wheel and swingarm removed for frame rust removal

Pile 'o' parts

Funniest thing I've read all week

Says MarketWatch: "Now is a good time to buy stocks". Hilarious. Where do they dig up pure comedy gold like this?

I think this MW reader echoes my own thoughts on the matter:

Honda

As Corwin hinted, this is my post to make.

I bought a motorcycle! It's a bit of a fixer upper. It's also older than I am. It's not very big or very powerful (but then, neither am I-- so it's ok). It will be fun to have a life size project-- and I expect I'll learn quite a bit in the process. Corwin gets to help me figure out the wiring and stuff I'm unfamiliar with, but I'll be doing the work. It runs on a 6 volt battery (which is where his random post and strong hint for me to blog came from). It's a 1972 Honda CL100, and here are a few pictures for your enjoyment.

Fun with relays

As I mentioned in one of my older posts, some electrical relays arranged in a XOR (eXclusive OR) logic circuit can be used to turn your front turn signals into DRLs (Daytime Running Lights). On my motorcycle, I used a trailer light adapter for plug-n-play simplicity, but that won't work for an old motorcycle with a 6-volt electrical system (modern vehicles, and therefore trailer light adapters, run on 12-volts). So, here is a homebrew alternative using 6-volt relays:
Basically, it allows both lamps to light if you turn on your DRLs, or, one lamp to light if you use your turn signals, or, one lamp to stay steadily-on and the other to flash if you have your turn signal on while your DRLs are activated at the same time (the magic is in the crossed wires seen above connecting the relays together). Normally you'd need four relays for this (two for each side), but a double-pole relay reduces our parts count.

Conveniently, this same logic can let you have three brake lights. Especially on an old 6-volt bike, the brake light can be pretty dim in direct sunlight. If you use red rear turn signals (it's not legal to use amber for brake lights!), you can have all three light up when you hit the brakes, yet still allow one side or the other to flash when you turn your signal on (you'll need another set of three relays separate from your front DRLs of course). Just as DRLs increase rider safety so people ahead of you notice you, triple brakes lights similarly help protect the rider from rear-end collisions by inattentive drivers that might otherwise miss that one little dim brake light.

Now, if only we had an old 6-volt motorcycle to try this out on...

Funny name

A long time ago, we got our first digital camera and boy, did it eat batteries. Not only was it annoying, it was expensive, and as you well know -- we're cheap (uh, thrifty). Thus, I got the bright idea to get some NiMH rechargable batteries, since in my youth I had used the older NiCd rechargables to good effect in many devices.

The new NiMH rechargables have a huge edge over the now-obsolete NiCds, and that's capacity. A NiCd AA only holds about 1Ah worth of "charge", while the NiMHs hold anywhere from 2 to 2.7Ah so they last 2-3 times longer.

Since our camera was eating batteries like crazy, we got the highest capacity NiMHs we could find. We were all set, right?

Wrong. High-capacity NiMHs have this nagging little problem called self-discharge. You can charge them up but if you don't use them for a week, they're half dead. A month later, they're now useless and need recharged even though you didn't use them much, or at all! Worse, our camera's "low battery indicator" would activate after taking only a few pictures and die soon after. You see, it also turned out that NiMHs are about 1.2 volts while throwaway alkalines are about 1.5 volts. .3 doesn't sound like much but our camera was not happy about the difference.

We weren't happy, either.

This was several years ago and times have changed. Digital cameras (and other devices) are now designed to operate on both 1.2 volt NiMH and 1.5 volt alkalines, and battery makers have solved the self-discharge problem, if you know what to look for.

You can now get "LSD" or Low-Self-Discharge NiMH cells, but you have to check carefully what you're getting because the labeling is not clear. If the package says "Pre-charged" or "Hybrid" or "Lasts 6 months" or "Holds a charge for 1 year", those are LSD cells. If it isn't labeled as such, they are ordinary NiMHs and you should probably steer clear.

There's just one catch: LSD cells do not hold as much energy -- only about 2/3 as much as high-capacity NiMH... but the tradeoff is soooo worth it. The only situation where high-capacity wins is if you're charging and then totally discharging them the next day, such as a professional photographer doing a wedding or something. Otherwise, LSD is superior in every other application. And in some cases, LSD even beats throwaway alkalines! More on that later.

Though Lemontree was skeptical after our last attempt at rechargables, I put down the money for the best LSD cells available. That's where the funny name comes in: Eneloop. Yep. They're from the Japanese company Sanyo, so maybe something was lost in the translation. But in spite of the funny name, they're the best LSD for all sorts of technical reasons that would probably bore you so we'll leave it at that.

Incidentally, Duracell Pre-charged NiMHs with white tops are actually rebadged Eneloops, so if you can find them at a store they're great (Eneloops can only be ordered online). Pre-charged Duracell black-top, Energizer Hybrid, and Rayovac "4.0" are also LSD and also work fine, but are not quite as nice. I'm told Kodak also makes some LSD but I don't know what they're called.

Anyway, I have a small LED flashlight I carry in my pocket every day that takes an AA cell. With an alkaline, the brightness would start to dim within minutes as the battery was used up. With an LSD NiMH cell like an Eneloop in it though, it stays full brightness for over an hour. That's because an alkaline battery's voltage drops linearly, while NiMH voltage stays steady for most of it's lifetime. And, of course, I can feel more comfortable actually using my light instead of worrying about spending piles of money on batteries and polluting the environment with piles of batteries. Same goes for the camera, we no longer have to be stingy about using the flash so our pictures have better color saturation and are less blurry since the the camera can use a faster shutter speed.

I suspect Lemontree will remain unconvinced until we have logged more hours on the camera using the LSD cells, but Canon (who made our camera) actually says we should be able to get more pictures out of the NiMH than with alkalines (same reason my flashlight lasts longer, the voltage curve), so I remain optimistic.

So... save money, save the environment, use LSD!





...I think I just told everyone to do acid.