leapinggnome.org

Hello again. Well, I’m a week into summer classes, and they are officially a drag. 8 hours of class a week plus 32 hours working at Aux Tech could be quite a bit to juggle for the first part of the summer here. I think it’s manageable, but I may have to drop a couple of hours at work.

I snapped a couple of pictures of the Honda, and they are posted below as promised. I took this picture right after I got both wheels (look at that pretty new rubber!) and the chain and the clutch on the bike. I was so happy with the amount of work I had completed saturday afternoon I just had to take a picture. Plus I thought it might be nice to have a few more photos to document the work I’m doing on it. After this picture was taken, I proceeded to reassemble all the important parts of the bike and ride it around a bit (see post below).

Tomorrow I think I’ll go down to the police station and have them do a police inspection on it. I think that is the first step I have to have completed to get a title for the thing. I sure would like to have it on the road legally so I can ride it without worrying about being pulled over.

Well, it’s been a long LONG time. In case you haven’t heard, registerfly (the company that I used to have this site registered under) had some internal problems and got their registration abilities withdrawn by ICANN (the big organization that controls website names). Long story short, leapinggnome.org was unavailable for at least a month by anyone using a DNS server that reflects recent changes in global DNS. Charter’s DNS servers apparently stay pretty on top of things, I couldn’t pull up my site from here at home although I was able to resolve it using MTU’s DNS servers.

Anyway, that’s why there’s been no updates. Summer is here, and I just finished up exams 2 weeks ago. It’s nice to be done but classes start up again…on monday?!?! Yes, they do for me, as I am taking summer school this summer. 7 whole  credits. It’ll be an experience, and hopefully not one I’ll regret. I feel the need to get some things done in regards to my degree this summer so that I can actually graduate from here in a reasonable amount of time. For another bit of news, I actually rode my motorcycle around tonight. After hours upon hours of brake work (still in progress), engine work, carburetor work, clutch work, and electrical work, I’ve left no system on the bike untouched and I was able to rack up 1.7 miles on the bike’s odometer, on it’s own power nonetheless! That’s about all I have for tonight, I’ll have pictures of the bike and more updates very soon. I promise!

Well, the air is warm and Spring is upon us, even here in the Copper Country. The weather today was 53 degrees and sunny. The last few days have been moderately warm and sunny too, but today was the first day there wasn’t a 30-40 mph wind blowing to keep all the MTU students bundled up. The warm weather has melted a majority of our snow, and the ice is beginning to break up across the portage canal.

Having all of our snow gone makes it hard to snowmobile, so with the warm weather the focus of my free time has shifted from snowmobiling to a motorcycle I acquired over spring break. If you look at the picture above you can see maybe about half of my new project, a 1974 Honda 360. Mostly visible are the frame and engine — the rest of the bike’s parts are scattered between the back porch and my bedroom. I had to disassemble a whole lot of it in order to fit it in the back of my car. I really thought I had more trunk space than that…ah well. It is here now and I can start at the top of a somewhat lengthy list of things that need to be done before I have it on the road this summer. It should be a fun project. I’ve wanted to get a motorcycle in about this condition for the last couple of summers, but I wasn’t able to afford any of the bikes I’ve seen up until now. I’m working on cleaning the carburetors at the moment; I’ll post an update when I get the engine running.

As a neat side note, if you look more or less closely in the picture above you can see my motorcycle, my bicycle, my snowmobile and my car. Have a good one.