what did you wrench on today??

[trevor]

Well I'm excited to post here as you guys all know I'm not much of a wrencher..lol. Rob told me "you can do it grasshopper, you are ready"...

Ordered a bunch of parts for my DR....from a small dealer in Sooke BC...Kenco...love going in there. It's a ma and pop shop and the service is great and Ken is very competitive in his pricing. As a matter of fact he was better than most online prices. And the best part...I ordered Tuesday morning and some parts came in the next day but all of it on Thursday morning! Wow...They do online business too.

The stash...New tires, chain and sprockets, rear rotor, front and rear brake pads, and fork seals...



Got it all apart and ready for new rubber tomorrow and slap it back together...Feels good actually.



I did have some four legged help...

 

[Guest]

The best kind of helper! Freakin' awesome Trevor. All this time...who knew?

 

[dorkburger]

........ up to my armpits in house work. Our 1955 windows are not vintage cool, and were 30 years overdue when we moved in 5 years ago. They are being replaced, along with 2 equally bad doors.
Ill be spending most of the winter doing the interior trim work. Also need to make time and garage space to squeeze in needed GS work. (New rear tire for Christmas, still need to buy a front and rebuild the forks). Luckily our contractor was able to save the window sills on the double dining room window and the big living room window. I modded them to fit today and trial fit them. Then set out to remove multiple layers of paint- probably a good 1/8 inch worth.

Dig the avocado green.

 

[dorkburger]

Apologies if my priorities seem backwards

 

[trevor]

Done...chain, sprockets, rear rotor, pads, fork seals and new tires. And final cleaning before I take pics to apply for collector plates.
Thanks to Mark for spending his Sunday in my garage giving me a hand.

 

[fred smailes]

Hey trev looks pretty good! Should be a walk in the woods,,,,,

 

[fred smailes]

Apologies if my priorities seem backwards

Everybody has to put out the fires. Better now than summer riding weather.

 

[dorkburger]

More house work... 2 exterior doors painted and ready for install.
Finished stripping both and painted 1 window sill.
Roughed in dining room window trim. A carpenter I'm not and a poor craftsman blames his tools. The tool in this case is my mind... need to redo the piece up the middle. I measured and cut it too narrow. The short pieces were holders of the correct width to check the fit of the rest.[URL=http://s1285.photobucket.com/user/dorkburger/media/Mobile%20Uploads/20160117_175942_zpsll0lic3i.jpg.html][/URL]

The living room window is twice as big.... oh boy.

 

[Charlie G]

More house work... 2 exterior doors painted and ready for install.
Finished stripping both and painted 1 window sill.
Roughed in dining room window trim. A carpenter I'm not and a poor craftsman blames his tools. The tool in this case is my mind... need to redo the piece up the middle. I measured and cut it too narrow. The short pieces were holders of the correct width to check the fit of the rest.

The living room window is twice as big.... oh boy.

Like I tell my clients,....... it looks perfect from my house. Which it does!

cg

 

[dorkburger]

.... or the hvac equivalent. . Its warm at my house.

 

[sinkankan]

You may want to invest or puruse the Craiglist for an automotive engine stand. Makes live a hell of a lot easier, and the carry brackets can be made out of slooted angle, probably available from disposal or hardware stores.
This photo shows the motor on a custom bracket I made, and the tube is the part that goes into the engine stand, it lets you rotate 360' (carefully)

 

[Brendan W]

The electric power steering in our Fiat runabout has been playing up. It draws up to 80 A.Quite a punch for the electrical system of a 1.2 litre car. Tracked down the problem to the pcb relays inside the electric motor. Replaced them both but boy is it tight in there and my soldering skills on pcb tracks won't win any prizes. Looks good for now anyway. Fingers crossed.
For anyone having trouble getting Chinese cloned ELM327 cables to see some car modules, there is a resistor that shouldn't be there bridging two of the CAN lines.

 

[dorkburger]

Shoveled untold amounts of snow.
Then finished this.


I'm happy with the result, and uncharacteristically for me doing home projects, I kept my cool the whole time.
The camera caused a weird effect. .. the top and bottom really are straight. I swear....

Also learned a lesson. I have an electric brad gun i was using. It was causing me much grief in the garage.
I used it in the dining room this afternoon and it worked pretty good. The electric heater i was using In the garage was sucking up too much power it turns out.

 

[Grimly]

Shoveled untold amounts of snow.
Then finished this.
View attachment 43856

I'm happy with the result, and uncharacteristically for me doing home projects, I kept my cool the whole time.
The camera caused a weird effect. .. the top and bottom really are straight. I swear....

Pincushion distortion - fairly common on pocket cameras / cellphones, etc.

 

[Charlie G]

Pincushion distortion - fairly common on pocket cameras / cellphones, etc.

I didn't notice the distortion, till you pointed it out. I'll have to look at my pictures more closely. The window trim does look nice!

[/URL]

Here is a walnut mantle and trim I finished a week ago. I've waited most of my career to do this type of work on a regular basis. Does the ceiling crown moulding look to be "crowned/arched" upward to anyone else?

 

[dorkburger]

Charlie, that looks beautiful. And yes, It does appear to arch up slightly. I looked back at my in progress pic and it has the same effect.

 

[Guest]

It looks great. The craftsman who makes something is usually his own harshest critic. Stick a straightedge next to it to check it. A taut string will do. Optical illusions happen.

 

[Buffalo Bill]

As a photographer, that is clearly wide angle lens distortion.
The human eye will also distort the same way, but the brain corrects the distortion.
Perception is arbitrary.

 

[Grimly]

A bit of lens barrel distortion - just the handmaiden of pincushion. Various photo manipulation packages can correct that.
Here's something that's quite informative...
Place your hands either side of your head, like a set of horse blinders / blinkers and move your head up and down. Observe the strange effect on previously horizontal lines in the scene. As Bill says, we unconsciously correct for that all the time, but the camera is a simple device, and while good quality lenses faithfully transmit all that's in front of them, they have to be tweaked in design to correct for that, else we don't think they're much good. Of course, worse ones exist, and the worst of them are pretty bad.

As far as wrenching today ; nothing much, but with the tail end of Storm Wotsitcalled dumping its remnants here I decided to get the remaining items off the floor, just in case...

 

[Buffalo Bill]

Ok, inspired to work on my GS1100G this winter, progressing towards more sport performance overall.
Modded an upper tree from a 1100E to fit clip-ons, I wanted clip-ons so I could lower the front. The front was a bit high because I installed .95 Sonic Springs this last summer.
One thing leads to another…