Tech Day 2010

May 15th was this years tech day held at a local riders (Rick) house in the Spokane Valley. We had about 13 KLRs show up and many of them took a turn in the garage for anything from minor repairs to valve checks and Doohickey replacements. The KLR has pretty much been the same motorcycle since 1987 and has only had one fairly major re-work beginning in 2008. The only real issue that the KLR has is what is called the Balancer Chain Adjuster or in the KLR world a "Doohickey" We had two of our riders crack open the case this year to replace the weak part from Kawasaki with the proven parts from Eagle Mike. When we got the side covers off of Kent's 2005 and removed the flywheel we noticed that the tensioner spring was completely gone. Sadly a common issue with this bike but we now had to try and find the spring before it ended up like this one from my bike.

We ended up completely removing the water pump and clutch side cover and digging the spring out of the oil passage screen where it was lodged in. This is a bit of work but seems to be a common place to find things lost in the engine. Obviously much better to do more work than have a trashed motor. Kent was a busy boy for most of the day as he also lubed his steering head bearings, and put bigger spacers above his fork springs to pre-load the springs more.

Norris made some really cool little kickstand pads that made the footprint of our kickstands a touch larger so when we park the heavy bikes on soft dirt or hot asphalt it spreads the weights out some so the kickstand won't sink and cause the behemoth to fall over. It may just look like a big dirt bike but mine weighs in at 430 pounds. For just a small disc under the kickstand it was a good improvement.

After many more wrenches turned we all decided it was time to go for a little bit of a ride. I mean what good is it to work on on your motorcycle all day and then just park it. We decided to head into Idaho a little ways and fuel up then head towards Mt. Spokane and ride the back roads and see if we could get to the top and drop out on a different road. We cruised all around and came upon some dead ends and typical kelly humps blocking the roads. We stirred up lots of dirt and had a really good time. It is so interesting riding with people of all different skill levels and set-ups on their bikes. Dual sport motorcycles offer a range of tires then can really effect how they perform on and off road. I have fairly aggressive knobbies on mine but it does surprisingly well on the street.

A beautiful day for a ride with good people and looking forward to the next one. These are a great group of guys with a whole bunch on knowledge to pass on to keep these great machines on the move and running for a long time to come.

Ride Safe

-Charlie-

The wave.

I have been meaning to write about this for a while now but was not really sure how to approach it without pissing anyone off. I guess I just decided I don't care if it does or not. Basically the purpose of this blog is to simply ask why some people on motorcycles wave and others do not. I am sure it must have to do with what you are riding as to whether or not you get a wave. My personal view of it is that I wave because I am on two wheels and so are you. It is funny at times when I wave at people on certain types of bikes and they almost refuse to wave back. I don't know about anyone else but when I wave and get nothing back I feel a bit annoyed. I don't go out of my way to wave or anything just really a small acknowledgement that we are both on motorcycles. I won't wave if I am making a turn from an intersection but will give a nod. I wish when you got your endorsement they had some sort of section on "wave ettiquette". that way when I wave at a guy on a BMW and he for whatever reason looks the other way and ignores me I at least should have known better. I am not trying to pick on BMW riders at all. Harley riders or in more general terms "baggers" sometimes ignore me too. When I see someone on another dual sport some of them seem to get a little too excited at seeing another of their kind on the road. Sometimes I laugh out loud at this ritual.
     I will admit there is one time of year that pretty much all bikers wave all the time. That is the first really nice day of the year when you see a hundred bikes on the road. I think the joy of finally getting the cover off the bike and the feeling of riding again makes everyone happy. No matter what you ride. Even the scooter riders get waved back too. I wave at the scooter guys myself but it is amusing to see baggers wave at them on the first nice day. About a month or two in to the riding season the waves begin to dissipitate. Must be that we are getting used to the novelty of two wheels again and loyalties become stronger.

What baggers usually mean when they wave to me.

     As the season goes on I find it interesting at who still waves at me. BMW guys must see the KLR and think I am a wannabe or something. Baggers are just too cool. Scooter guys are just happy and wave all the time. Metric cruiser people seem to be stuck in the middle. Sport bike riders tend to wave quite often if they see me as they go buy. Mostly because they saw a flash of a motorcycle and figured they should wave just in case. Other dual sport riders like the DR and XL, KLX-s almost seem like they know they will get a wave from me and wave more vigorously than others. I am sure some of these people have opinions of me for what I ride and that is fine. KLR riders are generally known to be slightly frugal or whatever your favorite term is for penny pinchers. Like I said I wave at them all and love to see the salute back. Makes me feel some comradery with people I will never know. I am sure many will read this and say what an idiot but oh well not the first time. When you boil it all down we are doing the same thing just in a different style. I would love to have a GS Adventure but can't afford one I would love to ride a HD V-Rod or Fat Boy in all black or the side of me that would love a Ducati 900 Monster. Hell I even wish for a scooter too because they look like a lot of fun to ride. I tend to drop my left hand and point two fingers out. Seems to be the general way of doing it. Occasionally I see someone almost do a parade wave and I usually don't wave back because I am trying to figure out the point of it and realize they have passed. Everyone has their own way of doing it in their own style that is what is great about riding motorcycles. We are doing the same thing but in our own way. Let's keep the fun in motorcycling and remember we are all doing it because it makes us feel free. It is the one thing that puts me in complete control and gives me a grin every time. Like in a picture on Lady Riders blog you never see a motorcycle parked in front of a psychiatrists office. As a closing when I see someone on two wheels I know they are enjoying some of the same things I am no matter what their lifestyle. That is what makes us different in the same kind of way.

Two wheels rule!

-Charlie-

Lisa got a road bike!

     So finally after months of looking a trying out different styles and seating positions and the like Lisa found the machine she had been looking for. She located a 2006 Honda Rebel 250 in Pullman (about 60 miles from us) on good ole Craigslist. I knew she was looking for a while and when she finally made it clear she was serious I started looking up blue book prices and gettin an idea what she would be paying. I noticed that these models ranged from $800 to about 3k depending on the year. Apparently not too much has changed with the bike and it seems they hold their value very well.
     I was not too sure at first if the 250 would be ideal for her as she does not mind healthy acceleration in her car or on her 4-wheeler but when she knows what she wants........well she knows. I am leary occasionally on Craigslist due to the scams and mostly people thinking they had something that was worth much more than it was. After much looking and talking to the owner I was encouraged enough to hook up the trailer and head south. When we got there the owner had it parked out front. I watched Lisa's face as we pulled in and could see the excitement. I couldn't help it either as the Rebel looked fantastic. Like I said earlier it is a 2006 CMX250 Rebel. Black with lots of chrome and an aftermarket windscreen and it also has leather saddlebags. The bike only has 5900 miles and just looked great. It is the perfect size for her to get going on as she has never ridden a motorcycle before. I know in a few years she will want something bigger but for now she could not be happier.                                   

Last Saturday she woke up at about 7:30 in the morning no thanks to Earl texting her notifying us of the beautiful day outside. We got up and Lisa went on her first ride on the road. We went all through the neighborhood, stopped and had a coffee and then visited my mom who could not believe how nice this bike is. I am so happy to see her excitement when she rides it and now she can understand why I will just "go for a ride" some days and be gone for hours.

-Charlie-

Rare February ride

I just love wearing so much gear. Actually makes a KLR look kinda small when I am on it.

So it is not too often we can get out for anything but a quick errand ride up here in Spokane this time of year. One of my riding buddies posted up wanting to see if anyone was interested in a ride on Saturday. Well since I have been doing almost nothing due to my lay-off and the crappy financial situation I decided to take him up on the ride. We ended up riding about 190 miles round trip and since the KLR averages about 50mpg and I only bought a water and a sausage stick the whole trip cost me a whopping $16. Not too shabby for a full day of riding with a few friends. We rode up north to an area we want to camp in this summer and had a pretty good time. We came across some pretty gnarly roads and had to turn around once or twice but as usual it was worth it. Here are some pics of the ride.

A cave that we stopped at on the way home. Finally some sun!

A little snow never hurt anyone. Should have seen the campers faces when we rode by!

One of the roads we turned around on. Got a little too icy.

Ride safe.

-Charlie-

Cabinets 2009 Part Deux

Berlin Flats Campground

When Earl and I were up for our ride in the Cabinets back in June we dropped down out of the hills and actually hit pavement for about 25 feet. Just long enough to hang a hard right back onto the gravel of forest service road 412. We stopped to check the map to see where we ended up. I saw a sign a short way down the road and realized that we were about 7 miles from the town of Prichard Idaho and a few miles from a U.S. Forest Service Work Camp. We decided to head away from civilization following our practice for the week and wanted to gain some altitude again. On our way up the road I saw several campgrounds and noticed a lot of good places to camp and adventure during the day. A few miles into our ride and at about 5500 feet Earl and I came across snow and mud that was impassable and we ended up taking a different route and dropping into Heron MT. I vowed that I would be back and follow the road where it was covered with snow.

Where this picture is taken is the cutoff that headed up in altitude to Earl's and my ending point from the snow. This time though I could not be as careless since I had my friend Casey on his bad ass little KX65 and his mom Lisa (my woman of course) on her Polaris 4-wheeler. We followed the road all the way to Gem Pass. This put us at another crossroads that went 3 ways. Up to the top of 2 peaks and another back down into a beautiful valley. As my exploratory nature took over we headed up a hill into a area that had been badly burned by fire within the last year. What an eerie and dismal place. This finally turned into a road/trail of nothing but slate stone and shale. Not the easiest thing to ride on. By this point we were cresting 6000 feet and and Casey's two stroke 65 was not a happy camper at all. It was either all or nothing on the throttle. I adjusted the carb a few times and it ran better as I made adjustments. By the time we got to the top of this mountain we felt on top of the world. We had a gorgeous lookout over Montana and Idaho as we were riding the border. We ended up on Idaho Peak at 6508 feet. I know many people get to higher places but man what a feeling to share this with my friends.

We hung out here for a while and decided to drop down a bit and have lunch in a grassy area a little lower down. We finished the days adventure by following a few smaller roads back down to good old 412 and went back to the campsite. We had a nice spot just about 50 yards or so from the North Fork of the Couer D' Alene river which was running pretty good for August too. There was only one other group in the whole campground and they were all the way on the other side. Peaceful and quiet and really nice. We got up the next day and decided to head out once again but elected to go a different route down FS151 up to Porcupine Pass and once again the Idaho/Montana border. We made our way up to about 5500 feet or so and found it easier to stay below there so Casey's bike would run a little better. Both Casey's bike and Lisa's Polaris had minor issues during the day but were taken care of pretty easily. We road up and around several passes and followed small canyon edges. Adventured up roads that were supposedly closed to wide open forest roads that Casey and I could race down and really make his 65 scream. I guess it looked pretty humorous seeing us take off from behind with my KLR being so tall and the 65 so much smaller. I am really impressed with the power of that little Kawasaki. Next one will be a 4-stroke though.

We ended up riding about 100 miles in two days and was impressed how well Casey did keeping up. There is a lot of difference between my KLR and his KX as far as putting on miles. Lisa being on the 4-wheeler just hung on and enjoyed the scenery. She even pounded through a mud puddle or two like and old pro. We will be back up in the area again for sure. This time we will be there a little longer and find more neat places to see. Anyone want to join in?

-Charlie-

Cabinets 2009

East Fork of the Bull River

My friend Earl and I have this affinity for the Cabinet Mts in Idaho and Montana. They are fairly close to home and just absolutely beautiful. The picture above is at about 5500 feet up on Gem peak just below the lookout tower. We could not get to the top because of some snow but we did hike to the top anyway.

Our adventure started out in Spokane WA and we headed east to Sandpoint ID. Enjoying the scenery that part of the country offers we continued east further towards a little town in Montana called Noxon. We headed north on hwy 56 off hwy 200 to my friends cabin located a ways off the highway on the west side of Government Mt.

This is not a good picture of the cabin but it gives you the idea of what we were staying in. This cabin was built by a friend of mine over several years and it is very comfortable with all the amenities you could imagine. For the most part we cam back from riding the back roads and trails only to cook up some dogs on the fire and then crash on the cots in the loft resting up for the next day.

The first day of riding brought us all over the place with about 160 miles logged on everything from highway to forest service roads. We adventured to the top of every peak we could make our way to. Some of them still had snow and my favorite.......mud. Earls KLR is more oriented towards the street and has on Avon Grippsters. Those tires are about a 25% off road and 75% on road tire. Believe me it made for some amusing trail rides watching him go through snow and then mud and then snow all over again while the back end of his bike was whipping back and forth really fast. I started laughing so hard at one point he could hear me over the sound of the motorcycles and through helmets. We had to pull over and get it out of our system so we could continue. I have pretty aggressive knobbies and was having a blast tearing up the roads and trails.

After the first day of riding we convened at the cabin with out dogs and a nice cozy fire to relax by for the evening. We were sitting around the fire shooting a .22 and being the general noisy people we can be and in a short lull in the action we were amazed at how several deer approached the area around the cabin. I seem to recall about 5 of them and two were bucks. A 4 by 4 and a 3 by 3. Beautiful animals so close. One of the does actually walked all the way around the cabin munching on the soft grass for about an hour. All in all a relaxing evening.

The next day brought some really interesting adventure. It was the absolute best day of riding I have ever had. We rode the Idaho Montana border most of the day and came to Porcupine pass and dropped down into Idaho towards the town of Pritchard. We worked our way back up the hill and hit some snow about 5500 feet. It made for some interesting travel as we had to traverse this road with patches of snow with mud holes in between. We took most of the gear off the bikes and hiked it up to where we thought we would end up to load back up. I hopped my my bike and tore through the snow and mud grinning all the way. Now once again back to Earl and his less than knobby tires. We actually walked his bike through the woods a few times simply because it seemed safer to do with his KLR. Especially since his is an 08 and has a lot more fairing to damage. We worked through about 300 yards of this until we got to a point that we could not get any further no matter what. We back tracked about 100 yards and got on a road that lead towards the town of Heron MT. We got about 5 miles down the forest service road and as I cam around a corner Earl was stopped with a flat tire. Well we tried to be prepared and I had some slime and he had a CO2 pump for the air. OF all things he picked up a nail up there somehow. We pulled the nail, removed the stem, squeezed in the slime and used to CO2 pump. Up went the tire and we noticed that there were still leaks all over the tire. Uh Oh. We had 3 more cartridges so what we ended up doing was actually kind of fun. Well for me anyway. Earl rode as far as the air would remain in the tire and when I caught up I would lay on the road, hook up the CO2, pump the tire and Earl would tear off like he was on a NASCAR pit road. Needless to say we got about 2 miles from the town before we had to stop for fear of ruining the tire completely.

I am going to let Earl finish the flat tire part of this story as it becomes very amusing. Even a little bit of thievery involved. (there was a trade though)

The above picture is the next morning at the cabin where a convenient stump worked as a perfect bike stand. Earl had to ride my KLR about 90 miles to get his tire fixed.

There is so much I know I am forgetting to write about but all I know is I can't wait for next years adventure ride.

-Charlie-

What the heck is a Doohickey?

So this past Saturday a local KLR rider hosted a tech day. My friend Earl Thomas was there with his camera as usual. Check it out here; http://thevampireduck.blogspot.com/2009/05/tech-day.html

I ride a 2002 KLR 650 and for the most part it is one of the most reliable motorcycles available and has pretty much been the same bike from 1987 until 2007. Says a lot for the design and capability of the machine. I read an old Cycle World article recently from I believe 1991 that said the KLR was good at everything but not great at one particular thing. Basically an all around good bike. I really can't disagree as I have challenged myself on the thing and it still leaves me grinning from ear to ear.

The one downfall that the Kawi has is the cam chain tension adjuster. AKA the Doohickey. For some reason Kawasaki used two pieces welded together to make this adjuster and a really weak spring to retain tension. For some reason the doohickey "also referred to as the Doo" tends to break and can cause severe damage to the cam chain and other parts. When this tech day came about I figured it would be a good day to get this done and make sure everything was ok on the bike. Needless to say when I open up the left side of the stator housing and got to the Doo it was broken.

If you look at the picture and see the cam shaped adjuster at the bottom of the case you can see where it is supposed to be a whole piece that goes around the shaft. Not good in my book. We used a magnet and searched and dug all over the case looking for the broken piece but was not able to locate it. The spring for the tensioner had descent tension still but I replaced it and the Doo with a very high quality part from Eagle Mike. (Thanks Mike) Got the bike back together and fired it up to immediately notice a little less noise from the cam chain. Good day all in all and even got a little over a hundred miles logged by days end. Thanks to all who helped!

My broken Doohickey

-Charlie-

Maps - Yea I need one.

So being that I have Mondays off I like to get out and have a little me time. I saw the sun was out and hopped on the KLR and headed out the Palouse highway towards Freeman. I have lived up here in Spokane for the most part about 30 years and have seen Mica peak in the distance forever. It is said in this neck of the woods that you never plant your garden until the snow is melted off Mica peak. Mica peak is 5205 feet high and it has the local Doppler radar radome atop it. I have wanted to find my way up for years and as I left home elected to try and find a way up. I don't carry any maps on my bike and my handheld Garmin Etrex Legend is on the fritz. I figured no matter what I would have a good time trying to find my way up. My first attempt was going through the town of Mica itself and as I rode up every side road heading towards the peak off the main route from town I never got more than a mile or two before the road turned into a private road with no trespassing signs. What a bummer. I worked my way around the whole west side of the mountain until I got to the south side and finally found a road that seemed like it was a little promising. I followed the road for about 5 miles until it finally turned into the usual switchback you see on these kinds of roads. Gravel turned to dirt and inevitably the dirt turned to mud from the snow run off due to our record setting snowfall. Well I have a fairly knobby tire on the bike and it tractored it's way up the hill well until I came to a spot where it apparently was a driveway. I backtracked a bit and saw a better spot to go up but will have to wait for the snow to subside a little further. Needless to say I will be getting a map and using my GPS next time but I will find a way up that hill yet this year. It is amazing what a few hours on your bike can do for your outlook on life. I love it.

My new too me scoot

Well since I have had this blog most of my posts have been about my job. I strayed a little from this in December when I decided to put down a very personal post about a tragic incident that happened back in 99. Well as the title states "Random Thoughts" I figure I will throw in a little two wheeled blog about a recent day.
Back in March of 2008 I got a call from my friend many of you know as Earl. He had a tone in his voice I recognized as excitement. He had just purchased a 2008 KLR 650 in green. I knew a little about the bikes and had more than once engaged in a conversation with him about what a good bike it would be to have. Well finally after wanting one for about 20 years he had one. When I finally got to see it I was amazed at how large it looked for a dual sport type bike. Anyway as I watch him get more into his adventures with his KLR and his continued "farkling" which is a term used a lot on KLR650.net for modifying your KLR I could not help myself but see what this dang bike was all about. So on Saturday March 7th I found me a 2002 model and picked it up. Kind of a humbling experience when you ask your friend(once again Earl) to ride your new pride and joy home for you because you are working and actually have no motorcycle endorsement. I guess the way I look at it is that I would want no one else to take that first ride on my new cycle. When we get to the house he tells me it must be re-geared because of highway rpm but the best part is he said it rode very well.
So as typical in March around here when you want it to be nice it freakin snows. It took about two more weeks for the weather to be descent enough to hop on and take a ride. So.........for the first time in knowing Earl for the last almost 20 years we got to take a ride together on our own bikes. We had talked about this for years but were never able to make it happen due to the many issues that life throws out there. Not that it was any sort of epic ride by any means but I got to share it with a good friend.
I guess to be honest I just want to tell everyone that I now have a KLR of my own and am absolutely taken by the riding experience and also that I am looking forward to many many rides with Earl. (also my dad who has a HD Road King and said he wants to ride with me but good luck keeping up) HA!