Tim – Page 37 – Mechanical Sympathy

Macro Ice Crystals on a Windshield

Using the Canon EF-S macro lense on a Rebel T6i DSLR to get up close with ice formed on a windshield on a cold, December morning.

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Rubber Maths

I’ve looked into the savage world of motorcycle tires before. Way back in 2016 I got fixated on customizing the rims and putting new rubber on the Kawasaki Concours, and got introduced to the expensive nature of buying half as many tires that wear out way faster. That first time left me with a $500 bill for getting 2 Michelin Commander sport touring tires installed and left me wary of the expense.

More frustratingly, I ended up using the Counteract balance beads anyway because the caveman weights used on a traditional balance machine still left the wheels with a wobble, so that $500 bill ended up being even higher, though it did make me feel way better about using those beads – they work better than weights and a technician half paying attention to the balancing machine.

In 2017 the Tiger’s tires were getting tired, so I was once again at Two Wheel trying to get in for service (they suggested a one month wait was likely that time – local car tire places really need to look into this market). At that time they were pricing Michelin Anakees at about $420 for both, with another $100 for installation which was only the tires because if I wanted service within a week instead of a month I had to remove the tires and bring them in myself. With taxes and incidental costs that crept in on the bill, those two tires ended up costing me almost seven hundred bucks, and I had to take the damned rims off and put them on myself!

Fast forward to 2020 and supply chains are in tatters (not that they were that good a couple of years ago). After trying to contact Two Wheel and getting no response to multiple attempts, I started looking elsewhere. No local tire companies do motorcycles – you’re missing a market there everyone. Motorcycle tires wear out quickly, get replaced often and cost more! The only motorcycle focused company that could be bothered to raise a response was Revco, who were responsive and delivered the tires quickly and efficiently, even beating expectations I’d have had pre-pandemic. If you need motorcycle tires in Canada, Revco can and do deliver!

Where am I at with costs this time around in the expensive world of motorcycle tires during a pandemic? Counteract Balance Beads were just under thirty bucks, the two tires were $126 & $155, so the whole bill came out to $310. I’m at $360 including taxes and delivery. Lloyd installed them for $100, so now I’m at $460 for this round of motorcycle rubber. That’s 35% cheaper than my last pre-pandemic tire buying experience.

Just out of curiosity I looked up the same Michelin Anakee tires I put on the Tiger three years ago that ended up costing me $500 just for the rubber. They’re starting to square off and have a fair number of kilometres on them, so an over-winter tire change is likely this year. On Revco three years later they’re $382 delivered with taxes, or 24% less expensive. Even Lloyd’s newly updated shop costs for installation at Mostly Ironheads are less than dealer costs in 2017, and are done in 48 hours. I’d be at $482 ready to roll when it cost me $700 before.

I know where I’m going and how I’m getting tires fitted from now on – and I’m even supporting my small, locally owned shop in the process. The only thing preferable would be my own tire installation machine, but I can barely fit in the garage as it is, so that’d only come after a house move. With the deficit in service around here, maybe I should just be doing motorcycle tires out of my garage anyway.

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Bike History, Ancient Rubber & COVID-proof Supply Chains

Ontario gets you to buy a vehicle history when you transfer ownership. The main reason is to make sure you’re not buying something with an existing debt on it, but I like it for the history lesson; you get a good sense of a bike’s life from that list of dates and owners. I’m the third owner of the Tiger. The first one owned it for most of its life. The guy I bought it from owned it for a short time (I think it was his first bike) before passing it along to me.

The Fireblade’s history also tells a tale. In July of 1996 it was sold to a guy in West Hill, Ontario (part of Scarborough in the east end of Toronto). He sold it to McBride Cycle in Toronto (Percy’s name is still down as the owner on bikes they brought in then) less than a year later in May of 1997. McBride Cycle moved it on to a guy in Mississauga two months later in July of 1997. The previous owner to me bought it in April of 1998 and owned it up until his divorce when he gave it to his ex as part of their separation. It then sat with her through the divorce until her new boyfriend dropped it off for me last September, 2019. Timeline wise, the owners of this bike have lasted:

10 months
2 months (dealer)
10 months
and 21 years, though it looks like it was unused for most of the last decade of those.

I’m the 5th owner of the bike, and if I hold on to it for more than ten months I’ll be the second longest owner it has had. This 23 year old Japanese super model only has twenty-five thousand kilometres on her and sat unused for long enough that the petcock that metres fuel out of the tank failed and flooded the engine, then it sat broken in a garage.

This Honda is a ‘supersport’ bike with ‘hypersport’ tires, meaning they’re soft, grippy and don’t last long. I once heard a story of a guy who used to drive his supersport bike to twisty roads in his van, ride it hard for a couple of days, and then open up his van and change to new tires using the tire mounting equipment he kept mounted in there. Heavy handed riders can burn through a set of these types of tires after a single track day.

Lloyd at Mostly Ironheads measured the depth and determined that the ‘Blade needed new tires to meet safety requirements. I’ve got the ‘Blade raised up in the garage at the moment and had a good look at the tires today, and found these:

But the numbers didn’t make sense to me because I’ve never had a bike with tires made before 2000. Tires after the year 2000 have a four digit code printed on them showing the date of manufacture, so you know if they’re getting stale (rubber goes off over time). If you see a 3507 stamped on your tire after the DOT designation it means they were manufactured on the 35th week of 2007. But the ‘Blade’s tires show a 038 on the rear and a 395 on the front.

Pre-2000 tires only had a 3 digit code on them. The first two are the week and the last one is the year, but you get to guess the decade, which is why they updated it in 2000. If I’m reading the Fireblade’s tires right, the rear was made in the 3rd week of 1998 and the front was made in the 39th week of 1995. The tire model is a Bridgestone Battlax BT56F, and they were kicking around in the 90s. It appears the “Blade’s tires are well over 20 years old.

Sorting out tires during a pandemic should have been a real headache, but it was another COVID19 supply line success story. I fired out requests to Two Wheel Motorsports, my local dealer, but they couldn’t be bothered to respond. I also tried to reach out to all the local tire stores and not one had the tech to do motorcycle tires. I tried other local bike shops, but once again, radio silence. It’s like some people just don’t want to make money during this situation. Perhaps getting handouts from the government is all they need.

The only reply I got was from John at REVCO.CA, an online tire company out near Ottawa. He was straight up with me, saying that they can usually turn around an order in a matter of hours, but it might take up to a week right now. What convinced me to spend nearly four hundred bucks with him was his responsiveness and openness, so I ordered the tires. REVCO outdid themselves, delivering the tires within 48 hours. Fortunately Lloyd at Mostly Ironheads can install tires, but not balance newer rims (he focuses on heavy metal from the 20th Century with spoked rims, not racing alloy rims). It wasn’t a worry though because Revco also had Counteract balancing beads, which I’m a bid fan of. I removed the old fashioned balancing weights, installed the beads on the new tires that Lloyd installed on Saturday morning, and the ‘Blade feels like it’s walking on air, wearing her first new pair of shoes in over two decades.

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Waiting for it to Heat Up

It was a 6° morning, so I waited for an hour or so until the sun warmed it up to double digits. The goal was to enjoy some curves on the last weekend before it’s back to work.

I pushed north to Grand Valley and got a quick coffee at Brewed Awakenings before pushing on up past Shelburne and onto River Road out of Horning’s Mills. Finally, here were the twisty roads I’d been looking for. South Western Ontario is a patchwork of tediously straight roads. The exception is the Niagara Escarpment and this is one of the closest pieces of it.

Playing with vanishing point electrical lines

South out of Terra Nova Public House after a quick (and fantastic) bowl of hand made fish soup, I pushed south down the spine of the escarpment into Mono Cliffs and Hockley Valley.

By this point it was early afternoon and a warm, 22° late summer day. Leaving the escarpment I pushed back across the barren desert of straight roads.

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Good Will: it’s what holds the education system together

As thousands of young teachers are handed pink slips and those left behind are looking towards a system intent on cramming as many students into a classroom as possible, good will is drying up in Ontario education. You might not think that this matters, but it does. Good will is what has teachers doing hundreds of hours of volunteer work each year to maximize student experience in school. All of the teacher coaches and club leaders spend time enriching their schools with these efforts. I’m hard pressed to think of a single teacher I work with who doesn’t do some kind of volunteer work in addition to their paid work.

Beyond the volunteerism, there is a general misunderstanding in the public about how well teachers are paid. From reflective edu-blogging and sharing best practices on a Saturday to marking on a Sunday morning, most teachers aren’t work free when they aren’t at work. You might think this extra effort is well funded, but it isn’t. With five years of university and the massive debt that accompanied it, ten years of industry apprenticeship and experience, five summers of additional qualification training and fifteen years of teaching in Ontario classrooms, I take home about $58k a year. I don’t work all year round, true, but on the weeks I do work I typically average about 10 hours of work a day on teaching related activity and about five hours per weekend. I typically put in at least 6-8 hours of work a week during holidays as well, just to keep up on marking and planning. Out of my fifteen teacher summers off I taught summer school on five of them and took additional qualification courses that I had to pay for myself in another four. On other years I’ve presented at conferences and learning fairs. I don’t think I’ve had an actual summer off yet, so don’t get too carried away with those ‘summers off’. The vast majority of my summers have been work related, and often at my expense.

Some Teacher Math:
2000 hours of work while teaching daily (40 weeks per year, 5 days a week, 10 hours a day)
+160 hours over weekends (40 weekends per school year, 4 hours per weekend)
+25 hours over stat holidays (Xmas and March Break, Easter, etc)
=2185 hours of work. That’s not counting the week before school starts when I’m usually in pretty much every day until things are ready to go, or extended field trips when I’m essentially at work 24 hours a day, or the times in the summer when I’m training, or presenting at educational conferences. Nor is counting any of the hundreds of hours I spend working on Skills Ontario, CyberTitan or other extracurricular student enrichment. Sure, not all teachers hit it this hard, but you’d be surprised at how many do.

At my $58,000 take home a year that’s about twenty six bucks an hour – and I had to spend huge amounts of money and years of my life to get myself trained to the point where I could even begin to do this job – a job that I still have to do even when I’m sick (teachers plan their own absence when away ill). I then had to spend fifteen years teaching at lower salaries and paying for additional qualifications to get to where I am at the top of the pay scale. If you factor in all the extracurriculars that many people believe should be a requirement of my job, my take home pay for the amount of time I put into this gig is about twenty bucks an hour. If you think teaching is about the money, you have no idea what you’re talking about.

When I left millwrighting in the early 1990s I was taking home $918 a week for a forty hour week. If I took an extra half shift, which I often did, my take home was more than I make now as a teacher some thirty years later. Of course, when I did overtime in the private sector I got paid for doing overtime. When I do overtime as a teacher, I get attacked by my employer.

I think teachers get paid sufficiently, but you’d have to be nuts to say it’s extravagant. Unlike provincial politicians, Ontario teachers haven’t seen cost of living increases that keep up with inflation in the past decade, and we’ve had all sorts of contractual obligations illegally stripped in the same period. So, if it isn’t the money and safe working conditions that keeps people at this, what does? It’s good will. Teachers go above and beyond for their students. All they ask in return is to work in a system that honours that effort with equal bonhomie.

When we get into a situation like we do now, where a government uses our profession as a scapegoat for all of society’s ills, that good will evaporates at a startling rate. A difficult but satisfying job becomes just difficult. Young teachers who have been battling for years to find permanent work are shaken out of the system and the best senior teachers start thinking about all the other ways they could make a living with less hassle elsewhere.

Good will is a fickle thing and it seldom beds well with politics. As our populist regime with a mere 23% of Ontarian’s votes steamrolls our public support systems while paying off friends and family, the feeling that this is about balancing a budget feels less and less true. If Ontario were to attack its financial imbalance in all areas, I think education would be more than willing to do its part, but when MPPs are voting themselves cost of living increases while removing many teachers’ ability to make a living at all, it’s hard to feel like we’re all pulling together. As things tip further and further out of balance, there will be a brain drain from Ontario, which is a loss that is already hurting our classrooms and one that will cost the province for years to come.

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The Mood I’m in When I Return from a Ride

BIKE magazine had a travel piece where the writer paraphrased a French pilot talking about how flying takes him away from the minutia of life. I’ve flown planes but I find riding a motorcycle much more what I thought flying would be like. The check listed and tedious process of operating an aircraft along with the strictly regulated flight paths don’t lend themselves to a sense of freedom. You’re much more likely to slip the surly bonds of earth and touch the face of god on a Hayabusa than you ever are in a Cessna.

I was reflecting on my mood when I returned from a ride with my son Max on the weekend. It wasn’t a big trip but I came home relaxed, as I always do from a ride. Riding a bike involves you. You can get lost in the complexity of operating it. Even once you get familiar with the controls the subtlety of working them all together harmoniously becomes a never ending aspiration. You can always ride better.

I started writing this in October when we went for our ride, but it’s the beginning of the new year now and it’s been weeks since I’ve ridden. At this point I’m reduced to driving a damned car which offers nothing like the sensory thrill you get from riding a bike. While everyone else wrings their hands about how dangerous being out in the wind is, I’m addicted to it. Riding a bike makes even the most tedious commute an adventure.

Coming back from that ride all those weeks ago, I was blown clean by the wind. I’d been in the world in a way that seems foreign to me now, encapsulated in winter. About the only redeeming feature of having a long off season is the growing anticipation of getting back out there again.

I sometimes wonder how my son Max feels about riding. I’m always worried that with his autism he finds the sensory overload overwhelming, but he loves going for rides. Even on very long trips he’s a trooper who is always ready to hop back on the bike. He isn’t generally interested in being cool, but I don’t think the cool factor is lost on him. I don’t get many images of him on the bike behind me, but I love seeing him doing his wings in these images.

It’s been snowing for days. We’re buried in the stuff. The thought of jumping on the bike and going for a ride is still months away. Sigh.

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A Lighting Storm For The Ages

This spectacular light show passed over us in Elora, Ontario, Canada last night (Tuesday, June 2nd) at about 10pm. All photos taken with my Canon T6i DSLR with the kit 18-55mm lens. All shots taken on full manual with shutters ranging from 30 to 10 seconds (I actually had to segment the shots to shorter shutters because there was too much lightning in each shot). F stops ranged from F29 while the sunset was still bright and and I was looking for long shutter shots to catch the approaching storm down to F6.3 as the sunset faded and the storm rolled over us. I tried to keep ISOs as low as possible, usually 100 or 200, to keep noise down. Photos were touched up in Adobe Lightroom, usually just turning down any noise.

Of interest, not a drop of rain fell and we didn’t see any ground strikes, this was all cloud to cloud lightning. My son and I felt like it was trying to tell us something. My three favourites are the lightning dragon, the pinwheel and the electric jellyfish – you’ll probably guess which ones those are as you look at them. You can always click on one to see it in more detail full screen.

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A Lighting Storm For The Ages

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Throttle Control Sensor System on 2003 Triumph Tiger 955i

The issue: The Tiger stalls occasionally on idle. Sometimes it seems to hold regular idle around 1000rpm, other times it drops down to 3-400 RPM on the verge of stalling and if I give it gas it cuts out. It always restarts.

What I’ve done so far: replaced the fuel filter and spark plugs.

Next target: The idle stepper motor:

MOTOR, STEPPER, ISCV T1240888 $123.61
O-RING T3600037 $1.37
HOUSING,ISCV,3 CYL T1241064 $42.79
GROMMET, ISCV T1241063 $3.84
TUBE,CORRUGATED,200MM T1242502
2000MM $18.45
TUBE,CORRUGATED,145MM T1242501
145MM LONG $18.45

$208.51US = $281.34CAD
From Bikebandit’s online parts diagrams: https://www.bikebandit.com/oem-parts/2003-triumph-tiger-955i/o/m121594#sch565827

Visual inspection: Gasket (#4 on diagram) is partially squashed, may not be sealing. One of the pipes was loose going into the back of the unit.

Next step: remove the gas tank (again) and remove the entire throttle control/idling system, including pipes, and inspect for breaks. Replace pipes if damaged. If no pipe damage evident, look into getting a new stepper motor from Inglis Cycle.

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Lyndon Poskitt and an inside look into the 2018 Dakar Rally

If you’re new to the Dakar Rally and you love motorbikes, I’ve got a way in for you.
Lyndon Poskitt has raced in the rally a couple of times now but this year he has raised the degree of inside media coverage to a new level. If you follow his site you should get daily inside looks into what it’s like to ride in the toughest class (Malle Moto is only the rider with no support crew doing everything from maintenance to navigation to riding over thousands of kilometres for almost two weeks, alone). Riding a motorcycle in Dakar is the hardest thing you can do. Some bike riders retire onto four wheels as they get older, but the bikers are the hardest of the hard core.

Lyndon’s media crew made an hour long documentary that reviews his race from last year. It introduces you to both the sheer physical exertion, luck and talent, both technical and riding, that is needed to get through the race as a malle moto rider. After watching this it’ll seem nearly impossible, but Lyndon’s back at it again this year.

You get a bit of background on Lyndon from the video. This isn’t a rich guy playing at racing. Lyndon’s magic power is being a mechanical engineer. His mechanical sympathy and technical talent allow him to prepare his bike as well as any mechanic would. For the past couple of years, since a near death experience, he has been riding around the world participating in races and rallies as he goes. He has sourced all his own support for this.

The Dakar is the mother of long distance rallies. It used to run from Paris, France to Dakar, Senegal in Northern Africa back in the Twentieth Century. The BBC made a great documentary about it called Madness in the Desert, if you’re interested in a detailed look at how the Dakar started.

Political instability in Saharan Africa moved the rally to South America in 2009 after decades of running from Europe through the desert to Dakar. The move didn’t make things any easier.

If you enjoy motorsport and watching people pushed to the limits of endurance and skill there is little that approaches it. While there are many factory riders and teams on their fully funded rides, the Dakar always has a healthy bunch of privateers racing, so it doesn’t seem like the millionaire’s club that a lot of motorsports do. There is something very genuine about the Dakar.

If you’re interested in other forms of motor racing beyond bikes there is everything from quads to cars to massive trucks. None of it is easy and all of it challenges competitors with thousands of miles of racing through every conceivable ecosystem, from jungles to Altiplano to desert dunes. This year it’s running from January 6th to 20th.

LINKS

Follow the Dakar on Twitter. On Facebook. On YouTube. Carlton Kirby on Twitter (my favourite announcer on the race if you can find him on Eurosport)

Countdown to Dakar.

Dream Racer: another great documentary on privateering in the Dakar.

Last year’s Dakar: A Dakar with teeth!

Ever wanted to get old knowing you did something exceptional while you still could? Dakar Dreams…

n00b’s guide to Dakar.