My young Labrador female Nellie (Meridien Benelli Black Eagle JH) qualified in the senior stake at the Madison Retriever Club hunt test this weekend. John Miner handled her, and she ran great. Congrats to Nellie and John. Next weekend is the senior stake at the Mid-Iowa hunt test.
GPS is coming
I bought a Garmin 2610 gps system on eBay, and received it yesterday. After installing the mapping software on my laptop, and a bit of futzing around to get it unlocked, I loaded maps into the gps and took a short drive to see how it works. Actually, I’m impressed. I will undoubtedly learn to use the features of this unit over time, there are a lot of options to set. Basic operation is fairly intuitive, but learning the other features will make it even more useful.
By all accounts, this is one of the best units for use on a motorcycle as it uses compactflash (CF) cards to hold the map files, rather than an internal hard drive. Hard drives are not as forgiving to motorcycle vibration.
Mounting it will take some thought to get it right. I will probably just buy an AC adapter and cut the cord off to hardwire it into the bike’s electrical system. You can buy a power cord but it’s more than twice the AC adapter’s price and the power cord includes an audio connection that I won’t use on the bike anyway. Also, if it were to be stolen or damaged, my insurance only covers it if it is hardwired. Cigarette lighter plugs and sockets don’t count. Think about that before you wire up a socket for your gps power.
Torque recheck
After returning from the breakfast ride (about 120 miles total) I rechecked all the fasteners to be sure nothing had loosened up. All were good and tight to specs. Some people have had problems with front fork seals leaking after reassembly, I’m happy to say I have seen no leakage. We were very careful when disassembling the forks to keep the seals oriented the way they were installed so that we could duplicate the setup when reassembling them and it seems to have paid off.
Breakfast ride
Left Saturday morning to meet John for breakfast and to see his new bike, a Shadow 1100. I turned around fairly quickly and got some gloves, it was cooler than my trip out with the dogs made it seem. The ride was great, I know a way to get almost all the way to Geneva without going through any towns. Met John, then we went to DuPage Honda. I went home a different way, via Fabyan Parkway.
Maiden voyage
Well, almost. It IS the maiden voyage for the newly minted changes: wheels, tires, turn signals, headlight wiring, front forks, etc. No problems, looks and sounds great. Photos soon to be forthcoming.
Rear wheel installed
The rear wheel wasn’t too difficult to reinstall, just took some fine adjustments with the bike jack to get the frame and the axle lined up. The brake caliper took a little work as I didn’t install the caliper on the bracket before installing the rear wheel so I had to come up with another way to get it installed. Took some head-scratching, but got it done. Next is the under-tank wiring.
Rear turn signals and final drive installed
The turn signals were installed and the wiring checked before buttoning up the rear fender wiring. Work fine, look great. The final drive reassembly required some moly paste for the driveshaft splines and it’s a mess. I used some vinyl gloves to keep the mess down and they worked fine. The drive shaft installed easily and the left side shock absorber was all that remained.
Front wheel reinstalled
I had to work a bit to get the forks to line up just right, but I got the front wheel installed. I cleaned the brake calipers and pads, and installed them also. Spinning the wheel shows no excessive drag from the brakes, and the brake lever works the brakes as it should. Front end work finished.
Front fender installed
After some work with a 6mmx1 tap, the front fender is mounted. The screws in the front end are black oxide coated so they blend in with the black paint on the sliders. Next is the front wheel itself.
Front forks reassembled
Black Magic Customs painted the sliders and tubes, the paint work is superb. I had replacement seals and slider bushings as well as new 10w fork fluid. We taped up the sliders and tubes with blue tape, and started. The left fork went together fairly easily, but to tighten the special castle nut we fastened the slider to a wooden post. Adding the fluid and final assembly was easy. The right fork was another story. It took Mark, Regina, and I to get the fork compressed enough to slip the washer on the damper rod. But, once that was done the final assembly was easy. Later, Regina helped to insert the forks in the triple trees and then they were tightened to specs.