leapinggnome.org

Well I finally got a new seat on my motorcycle. Technically only the vinyl covering of the seat was replaced, but it’s pretty much like a whole new seat. First of all, the cover is the only thing you normally see anyway. Secondly, I took the whole seat apart and sandblasted/painted the seatpan. It was almost rusted through in places and was greatly in need of some help. Also, the old (original) seat cover was being held together by duct tape. Or maybe I should say the duct tape was failing to hold it together. I don’t have any pictures of the seat before I worked on it, but rest assured the old seat just looked bad and took the look of the rest of the bike with it.

Here’s a few pictures of the seat as I was putting the cover on. First, just the seatpan after sandblasting/painting/protective trim:

Then we put the foam back on and begin to attach the new seatcover (upside down):

Seatcover is now on and centered properly:

And then we hook the vinyl up underneath the seatcover and pull it tight to remove any slack:

And that finishes it off. I have one more pic of the bottom of the seat, you can sorta see how the vinyl is attached. It’s not worth posting directly, but you can look at it by clicking here. So that’s what has occupied my freetime recently. The Honda now has a nice new seat.

Welcome to summer everyone! Up here in the UP it finally is starting to feel like it. The first 2 weeks of June (and most everything before that) felt a lot like early spring with lots of rain and lots of cool temperatures, mostly mid-50’s or cooler. I’ve been rather busy the last 2 weeks, mostly due to my trip downstate a week ago. I took a few days off of work and went downstate to attend the wedding of a friend of mine. I also hung out with other friends and family and took care of some errands.

Included in these errands was making a trip to my favorite place for motorcycle stuff, Dwight’s Cycle Salvage in Newago, MI. You may remember my posts back in April where I talked about the broken cam chain guide in my Honda CB360. Well as luck would have it Dwight had a parts engine I was able to grab a chain guide from. I spent most of the afternoon Thursday and a good part of Saturday morning taking my repaired chain guide out and putting the new one back in.

Somewhat to my surprise, the cam chain guide I repaired was still in one piece! Here’s a picture (in new window) of the two side by side. I was really unsure that the JB Weld epoxy would hold up to the temperature changes and vibrations it was subject to inside my engine. I must’ve put at least 50 miles on it. I guess it’s just another testament to the strength of JB Weld. Now I can ride around without worrying about catastophic engine failure 🙂

I’m also working on a couple other Honda projects right now. I’m putting a new seatcover on the seat, as there was pretty much nothing but duct tape holding the last one together. I’m also working on rewiring part of the charging and lighting system — right now the lights act weird and the battery doesn’t really charge very well. Finally I’m bondo-ing the dents in the original gas tank, which then needs to be repainted. Perhaps more on those later.

To continue where my last post left off, I was most disappointed to have my main machine fail — taking 4 months of unarchived data with it! Really need to get into a regular backup scheme again. Anyway, after getting the harddrives in my windows machine replaced and installing a fresh copy of Vista 64-bit, I was getting a little antsy to have my data back.

I had found out already that if I force one of the drives back online, I can read information off the degraded RAID 5 array for about 3-4 minutes or so. That was while the drives were still confined in my computer case. Sounds to me like they will work until they warm up a bit, so I put together a ‘spare’ socket A system (pictured above) on my workbench to do recovery. I screwed on some large heatsinks to the failing SCSI drives and put them in front of a 120 mm fan to keep them cool. Also connected to this machine was a CD-ROM drive (to boot knoppix, of course) and a 40 GB IDE harddrive to copy files to.

Data recovery was ultimately uneventful. After partitioning the IDE drive and forcing one of the failing SCSI discs online, I was able to grab my entire iTunes library, savegames, documents, etc. No errors were reported and I’ve not had any trouble with the files I rescued. I’m very thankful about that! If I had one complaint about the whole data recovery process, it’s that copying files (almost 20 gigs) took quite a long time and I’m not sure why. I mounted a Samba share on my Vista machine and copied everything over a 100 mbit/full duplex connection. Transfer rate was only about 1 MB/second. CPU and disc load on both machines was far from peak. I poked around on the makeshift workbench PC for a while and couldn’t get much higher throughput using ping -f, so I’m thinking it’s either the NIC on that machine or there was something up with the cable I used to connect it. I highly doubt the latter. <shrug>