leapinggnome.org

I have great news! We’ve had beautiful weather in the Copper Country the last couple of days, and the nice weather is expected to continue. Along with this nice weather comes the urge to get out and enjoy it on my motorcycle! I’ve been getting it ready for this season lately. Mostly I want to take a look at a few things inside the engine and seal up a few small oil leaks.

But this is the real great news: Monday night I was poking around inside it and found out my spark timing advancer was rusted together and not working at all. Why is this a good thing? It means the performance and fuel economy I get on it will go up significantly now that it’s fixed. Let me try to explain.

The engine needs the spark plug to ignite its fuel mixture faster and faster as RPM’s increase. At low RPM’s, ignition might occur 5 degrees before the piston hits Top Dead Center (TDC). At higher RPM’s, the fuel mixture takes the same time to burn, but the piston is moving up and down faster. The solution is to ignite it sooner, maybe 12 – 15 or even 20 degrees before the piston is at TDC. Without a functional advancing mechanism, high RPM power (the only power my little 360 cc twin is really able to make) is severely limited.

Well last week Wednesday was a bit of an occasion for me. April 2 is my birthday, and once again this year my friends made sure I remembered it. Last year was the infamous ‘Tank Cake’ — a confectionery masterpiece almost too beautiful to eat. It was a complete surprise. This year I figured my buddies would have some kind of a cake up their sleeve, but I was still surprised when they brought it out.

I’ll leave you in suspense a bit while I rewind to earlier in the day. The waterfront restaurant in the Ramada in town has a promotion where you can get anything on the menu for free on your birthday. I took advantage of their promotion and got a juicy 2/3 lb burger. It seems a lot of my friends were busy that evening, so we ended up going to the Ramada with myself and just 3 other people.

Around 10:30 that night is when everyone got un-busy, so we all headed downstairs to Nutini’s for drinks. Little did I know special arrangements had been made and the guys down at the bar brought out a huge ice cream cake from Dairy Queen! We sat around eating cake and having a jolly time, and it was really great. Wednesday night is live music night down at Nutini’s, so we listened to a couple of bands play in the basement.

Last week was pretty amazing. Friends and suitemates made sure I had plenty to eat and drink Wednesday, Thursday (wings night!) and Friday. Thanks again guys, it never ceases to amaze me when you get together and do stuff like that.

What’s this? A timely update to the website? Craziness! Well I’m trying to update this site on a more regular basis. Weekly updates would be nice, but more than a couple of times a month would be a huge improvement. Someone who actually reads this site should harass me the next time it’s due for an update 😉

We’ve been enjoying sunny — but still unseasonably cold — weather up here in the Copper Country lately. We had rain last week Monday, but a surprising amount of snow was still on the ground this weekend. All yesterday the sun beat away at the open areas of snow and I think things are now noticeably greener than they were last week. Checking the weather forecast today after church I had to chuckle when I saw that we’re looking to get significant snowfall this week.

It’s funny because almost exactly the same thing happened last year. Things were a little warmer and a little greener late spring and then we got sacked with ~2 feet of snow here in Houghton, and 3+ feet in some of the surrounding higher elevation areas. It was great because it gave Chris and I the opportunity to do some more snowmobiling. Happened right before my birthday too, so it was kinda like a present.

This morning they said we’re going to get up to 10 inches of snow or more — now they are saying 4-8. I guess we’ll see what we get. I was kinda hoping for spring but what the hey — let’s have some more snow!