We were invited to the house of the parents of Katrina's boyfriend, Bradley (now, that was a mouthful). We had a very nice time with a fun bunch of people to be with, so we thank them deeply for their hospitality.
As things were being set up, Katrina and Brad drove over to the local Best Buy store to see how other people were spending their Thanksgiving holiday. Here's a picture of several anxious shoppers camped out on the front walk of the store, waiting for it to open tomorrow to snap up the "Black Friday" Christmas deals that might be available. Seems to me that the 'human animal' is losing sight of what the holiday season is all about...
Saving a few bucks on a sale is not half as important as being with friends and family on Thanksgiving day.
Anyway, back to our originally scheduled 'program'...
I gave Katrina my camera to take a couple of pictures of our time spent with Brad's family and what's the first thing she does...? Snap a picture of Brad...
Introductions were flying around as we were greeted by one and all. You can see that several dishes have already made it to the table, with much more to follow.
Ah, it's time to set up a plate buffet style and find a seat.
Everything turned out to be wonderful and there wasn't a thing out of place on our plates. Kudos to Bradley's mom, whom worked hard (and with some help) to put this very nice and cozy gathering together.
Of course, after having a meal such as that, you need to work a little bit of it off, so we went geocaching. We hadn't looked for many of them in Brad's neighborhood, so this would be a perfect time to do so, and here is our first find.
For the second find, the teenagers went on ahead and made the score. They seem to look a little excited by their find. Well, sorta... kinda. Uhm...yeah.
After putting the container back, we posed the kids for this neat 'Couple Between The Trees' shot. It worked.
And yet another geocache was located. I happened to see the container as we pulled into the parking lot. We also found an unregistered geocoin in the box, and when I emailed the geo-seeker that dropped it off, she said that we could do what we pleased with it.
What a nice way to end your Thanksgiving Day. Just swaying back and forth in a rocking chair built for two...
Actually, this was a setup shot so we could distract geo-muggles, so they wouldn't notice we were grabbing the geocache container located there. It worked, we got the logbook signed and the container replaced, and nobody was the wiser.
We took Dave's bike out to test and tune it and to put some mileage on it. We actually did a little work on the bike and took a couple of small runs around his house before showing up at this industrial park for the 'Test-&-Tune'. Here is Dave, taking it for a spin.
Here we are, Dave's buddy Dave (funny about that) and I watching him driving the RD around.
We kept tweaking and tuning the bike, checking settings and such, but we couldn't get it to come alive at anything above 3500 RPM.
I even set the timing with a timing light, and was sure I had the electrical system set up right.
The bike was running decent enough to give rides to Katrina & her boyfriend, so here I go with Brad on the back.
Next, was Katrina's turn.
When further adjustments and tuning didn't get the bike to run any better, we packed everything up and followed Dave back to the house.
Here we are, unloading the bike from the back of Dave's truck. I held it this way so it wouldn't fall over when the ratchet-straps were released.
Well, 'Baby' is back home after it's first driving experience after who knows how many years...
It was a bunch of fun riding it again, and there are a few things to take care of, but otherwise it is a nice machine.
We were so close to getting Dave's bike running from the last visit there, that I just couldn't wait to finish it up. So, I went over to Dave's desk at work this afternoon and told him I wanted to hear his "Ring-Ding" SING tonight. It turned out to be a good-ole time as Luann, and eventually, Tom and Sue Hackney came by to help out. Tom helped us crawl underneath the bike when needed, while Sue took Sadie out for TWO walks tonight (they were both tired after that) and Luann went for dinner for us and then went on one of the walks with Sadie and Sue.
Well, after overcoming some obstacles, we finally got it started and running real nice. I call this photo the glamour shot. The exhaust turned out to be a tuck-under design, so the center kick-stand would not fit and had to be left off.
As you can see, the different components that Dave selected have come together nicely. Having the pipes ceramic coated really highlights them, which draws your eyes to the contours. The labels on the engine and the detail given to the side covers and tank make this something of a 2-wheeled piece of art. Lots of attention to detail.
A top view, too.
Wait a second, what does that say on the back of the seat for this Yamaha RD400? You know, I think Tom might've had something to do with this...
Well, I told you that it was running, so how about we show you what it looks and sounds like too?
At the end of the video when I say "Watch this" and the video stops, I grabbed the kick starter and with a quick flick, cranked the motor right up. The timing and setup is well balanced and it fires up immediately, ready & willing. (Man, I can see that I do need to lose some weight though...)
I imagine Dave will be spending some time polishing, cleaning and detailing his labor of love. There are a couple of minor things we have to take care of, but we should have the bike tooling down the road in about a week or so...
It was time again for another stop by Dave's house to work on his vintage RD400 restoration. We made some pretty good progress tonight, getting to within a point where one or two more sessions should be all we need to finish the job.
Before I showed up, Dave had placed the fuel tank on the frame to see if it would clear the aftermarket coils he mounted on the frame. You can see that we still haven't mounted the carbs yet because a yellow towel is still stuck in the carb ports of the engine.
A little closer shot. Dave had installed the coils with the yellow wiring connected to the spark plugs, and everything looks pretty good.
Here is one of the carbs after it was rebuilt. Looks like Dave decided I should be a 'Hand Model'...
Progress at the end of the day. On this side we:
Installed the oil pump hoses, pressure bled the oiling system, adjusted the throttle cable pull to the pump, connected the motor electrical harness to the chassis harness, wired up the ignition coils, to include making a Y-splitter for the coils and removing the ballast resistor, trimmed the yellow spark plug wires to length, installed the crankcase ventilation breather hose, installed the rebuilt carbs and mounted fuel crossover tube, installed all of the drain hoses on the carbs, rebuilt the kickstarter assembly, rebuilt the tachometer drive carrier, flipped the tacho-drive cable core because it was in backwards, pulled the oil tank float sensor cable through and plugged it in.
On the left side, the clutch actuation mechanism was adjusted for free play, the oil tank was installed and all of the hoses were connected (4), the tank was filled with oil in order to prime the pump, the gearshifter was installed and the throttle cable was installed (and removed because it was the wrong part). Unlike the too-short clutch cable, this one was too long. We're going to have to get a replacement one in.
As we were working on pulling the the throttle cables out of the bike, Katrina called to inform me it was 10:30 and it was a work night. Oops! We were having so much fun, we didn't realize it was that late. Well, time to head home and regroup for another whack at it later.
This weekend, I decided to work on the Magnum to find out why the driver's side speaker cut out and discovered that the speaker frame was made of plastic, which had disintegrated and the big magnet fell off the back of it. I ended up having to trim the housing used to mount the round speaker to the door in order to put a 6x9 speaker there (it was all I had on the shelf). It came out ok, but the passenger side speaker will need to be replaced too. Other than the speaker issue, the Magnum is fine.
As for the van, I did some work on the electrical system, cleaning up some of the aftermarket wiring and also replaced the round, 6 1/2" rear speakers with some 6x9 speakers (again, it was the only size that I had on the shelf, but I'm running out of them now).
It was a royal bear taking apart the rear trim of the van because they used some weird 'hidden screw' method to assemble the trim panels, and it took a bit of work to get everything back into place again.
I bought a replacement throttle position sensor (TPS) and a new exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) valve because I'm tired of the van surging occasionally while it's going down the road. I talked to a few people with Chevy experience and they said that these are the 2 common items that cause this. I'll let you know how that goes.
I'm also very tired of the rumbling sound coming from the rear-end of the van, so I ordered a differential bearing overhaul kit, the bearing separator/puller tool and a pinion depth gauge in order to rebuild the rear end. I hope that takes care of it once and for all...
We attended a concert by the Trans Siberian Orchestra (TSO) last night and it was something else. We only had a cellphone camera with us, so unfortunately, the pictures we have to show you are only somewhat decent. Connie and Steve came out with us (see their pre-halloween bash weblog) and Katrina brought Bradley with her (of course).
We were positioned on the second deck of the Ice Palace, right near the front edge so the view was great.
The TSO concert was literally an explosion of light and sound, with all kinds of computer-controlled effects being displayed. They were able to change the colors and types of lights, then they were able to motor-control the overhead racks too. You will see the over-stage appliances moved into all kinds of positions in the following pictures.
They played all of the favorite Christmas pieces that have become popular recently, to include our favorite, Wizards In Winter.
This video of a Christmas display created by Carson Williams, of Mason Ohio, uses TSO's 'Wizards In Winter' piece (which we hadn't heard until seeing this video) and is what convinced us that we would like to see TSO in concert some day.
Sometimes the lighting was so intense on the stage, you couldn't see anything that was going on down there. You can see that the area in front of the stage was also sold out. I mean, the place was packed. I don't know how the people survived the evening sitting that close to the speakers. The audio was so overdriven and unbalanced that many of the softer passages were overpowered by sections that should have been in the background to support the softer passages. Kind of like the light show. Too much, too much, too much...
Eventually, they kicked on the lasers and those things were tracking eveywhere. You can also see that there were directional lamps on scissor-extenders that dropped down from the fixed, overhead racks.
They did the typical fan-style laser shapes, mostly with green units, but they also had a multi-colored unit at center stage. You can see it starting to fan out in this image.
I was interested in the targeting of the lasers to see where they were hitting and I could see that each laser point was carefully laid out to hit some wall, balcony face or ceiling surface to keep from blasting somebody in the eyes. As you can see, one of the green laser points was directed right at the balcony wall in front of us.
Different song, different lighting. The staging was pretty well done, with the exception that the intensity of the lighting tended to visually overpower the stage.
This is when the narrator was speaking, telling a continuing story that was something of an introduction to each piece that began to play after he was done speaking.
And the music plays.
You can see what I meant by the overhead appliances moving around in this picture. The whole system tilted to the left side.
Then it folded into itself and tilted to the right (with more laser shots going off).
They even had pyrotechnical displays to include fireworks and fireballs synchronized to fire off (pun intended) in time with the music. In this shot, you can see the timed and staggered fireballs at the back of the stage and some shooting up from a stand in front of the mini-stage to our left. The neat thing was that they had different colors of flames shooting up, from the regular orangey flames to intense blood red, brilliant jade green and cobalt blue. I don't know what gasses they used to make these colors, but I could see the array of different tanks used for the gas jets by the mini-stage. I wonder how many tanks were in use for the monster fireball array behind the main stage?
There was a sequence that included a dance sketch on the mini-stage, which rose up on cables and had smoke and fire efects dancing around it. Unfortunately, the lighting was so intense, I practically had to close my eyes. This was the best shot I could get because it was like trying to stare at a strobe light constantly going off in front of your nose...
The final scene where the overhead appliances were tilted up and the white spots were turned on. Time to head out now...
It's going to take some time to get all of these people out of here. In talking later on with some people about the concert, it seems that TSO had a show last night and one for this evening in California. We were wondering how they could do 2 shows so close together in time, yet so far apart in distance and we found out they have 2 touring groups. Unfortunately, we had the 'B Group', which might explain the issues regarding the unusual audio intensity, the strange musical balancing and depth and the overpowering lights.
To be honest though, it was still an awesome concert, and it was so weird to see the huge amount of people in the stands that were well beyond 50 years in age. We were watching one older gentleman near us who would start knee-slapping and toe-tapping when the music was seemingly charged with energy, then he would stop moving whenever the lead and backup guitars performed their renditions of 'Eddie Van Halen Goes Nuts' riffs, thereby breaking up the continuity and flow of the rhythm. When it was good, the old gent was feeling it, and when it got weird...
Well, the old gent just waited them out...
All-in-all, it was a good time for everyone though.
Well, it was time to stop by Dave's place again and work on his RD400. This time, the goal was to mount the engine in the frame and hang as many things on it as we could before it was time to head home.
It didn't take long at all to get the engine rolled into the frame. And actually, I picked up the motor and muscled it into place while Dave was putting his dog Sadie out back. And I was kinda surprised to discover that the motor was fairly light (compared to the one in my Yamaha 650). Sorry to say, Dave was a little disappointed to come back into the garage and see that the motor was already sitting in the frame because he didn't get to witness the 'magic moment'.
As we were working on the bike, we suddenly had visitors! Tom and Sue Hackney dropped by to see how we were doing. After talking for a bit, Sue took Sadie for a walk while Tom pitched in to help out. We started out by working on the carbs, and found out that there were some problems with some of the hardware, so Dave got to work on that while Tom and I began by installing the reed pods in the back of the jugs and then we put the alternator and ignition system together on the left side of the motor.
After that, we tightened up the output sprocket and put the drive chain on. Unfortunately, when we tried to put the clutch cable in, we found out it was about 2 inches too short. It looks like the cable might be for an RD350, rather than for an RD400. Then, Dave got the parts we needed for the carbs together and we started rebuilding the carbs. The first one came apart and went back together with no problems, but when I opened up the second carb it smelled bad and was varnished up pretty badly, so we ended up having to soak it in carb cleaner overnight. Since there wasn't much more that could be done, it was time to head home.
We made quite a bit of progress tonight, and it's really starting to take shape.
I can't wait to fire this thing up and hear that characteristic Yamaha RD, "Ring-Ding" sound...
