6.14.2008

Motorcyclemania

Some of you may have noticed that after a burst of energy toward getting my bike running, I have been strangely silent on the matter...

We've been traveling and absolutely slammed with activity, so I haven't touched it for ages. Today, however, I got a taste of riding again and it got the juices flowing. I had gone over to my friend, Sean's, to pick up some beef we purchased together.

Somewhere, Sean found beef that had been grain fed, unstressed, unweathered, guaranteed to have been far above average for a cow IQ, only exposed to muted colors and generally to have enjoyed the most relaxed life a steer could have up until the point where they killed it so we could eat it.

Sean owns a motorcycle...a KLR 650, to be exact. He noticed me drooling over a running motorcycle in his garage and loaned me a helmet. In three minutes I was in gear and tooling down the road.

It should be noted that a KLR 650 is six to eight inches too tall for me. Eight inches doesn't seem like that much while you're driving, It becomes a bit of an issue, however, when you stop. Of course, I dealt with this by not stopping. I did a quick blast through the neighborhood and brought it back before embarrassing myself by dropping it at a stop sign. I even managed to negotiate it up the driveway, past my Suburban, into his garage and to a complete stop on the kickstand without laying it over. Praise be unto God and Kawasaki (in that order).

My bike is nothing like Sean's. His is built to go off road, has one huge cylinder and, even at idle, shakes like a black lab climbing out of a pod. My bike is a street bike, and even though it has roughly the same displacement, divides that displacement between four cylinders, causing it to run smoothly, uh...were it running.

After getting home and doing some yard work (20 bags of mulch, about half of what I needed....), I tinkered a bit more with my bike. I'm convinced it's a fuel delivery problem (translation - it gets no gas) but am kind of stuck as to what to do. My custom choke mechanism is not working - I need to break down and really buy the right part. Even then, I'm not sure...aaaaghghghgh.

I really want to ride this thing and Sean did not help.

1 comment:

P said...

Thats it, Im calling a fast. We need a breakthrough. It is clear to me that when the efforts of men (or a man) have failed, there is no alternative but to gather the people, and stand between heaven, and the garage, and seek the face of the almighty.

There IS a solution, and it is clearly time to ask for divine intervention. Without a serious move of God, we are destined to stay in a place of trans-motive decay. We find that our neighbors are hurtling headling into a crisis, one in which they are completely unaware about, or perhaps even worse, frozen like a fly waiting for the windshield on the freeway ***

It is that time again. Time for the annual fast and pray because if we dont we might get bored. Im calling a sacred assembly, to convene before our God, at the Bohlenders house. This time, fasting is going to at the forefront.

We will be fasting bad Chinese food, beer, and those cute little chex mix combo packs. This is serious, and it is a time for the dread warriors to rise up in the spirit of Lee Iococca, to redig the wells of our forefathers like Edsel, like Shelby, like Burt Munro, and bring something new, something fresh to transportation.

Would you please consider joining me in this pan dimensional, inter-galactic mega event?