Are we having fun yet?

Last January I spent a fair amount of computer time planning the route for my Spring ride with Jenny and I was looking forward to it.  That's all gone by the wayside now with the shutdown of Washington and California due to the Corona virus.  I'm still doing day rides with my buddies, because we stay at least six feet apart, wear masks (full face helmets) and gloves, but with restaurants closed and motels risky, it's not possible to make a multi-day ride.  When I ride with my friends we bring a lunch along and keep our distance when we eat.

Despite the disappointment of not making the ride, life for Carolyn and I has been good.  In fact, being retired, it's not that much different, and this time of the year is pretty busy, with Carolyn getting the gardens into shape and me making my standard 4.5 cords of firewood.  I also have been doing a woodworking project for Brian, which has kept me occupied on rainy days.  It is a counter for his patio dining area.  He sent me the following plans:

With it being over nine feet long I told him it could not be built as one piece as we have no vehicle that can transport it and it would be too heavy and fragile to load it if we did.  So we decided to make it in two main sections connected by the middle part after it was put in place.  I started first on the left side shelves:

Notice I'm using my motorcycle lift as an assembly table.  This has turned out to be the handyest tool for furniture making as it allows me to adjust the height of the piece and avoid a lot of bend over working.

Then I built the right hand section with a full extension drawer included:

Finally I put it all together with the center section that can be disassembled and reassembled at Brian's house:

Building this cabinet made me appreciate even more all the great tools that I have gathered over the years, and I think I used a majority of them, at least the woodworking ones.  Here are a couple of pictures of my shop in action:

Last Saturday Carolyn and I delivered the cabinet while maintaining social distance from the Tacoma Urbans.  Here is a picture Brian took after he installed a TV above the cabinet.  He plans to have a top made of the same material they used in a recent kitchen renovation.  I had put a coat of Thompson's Water Seal on the cabinet, and Brian intends to let the wood grey-out naturally.

So, with regards to the title of this blog.......yes, we are having fun!

Here is a picture of the final product:

Lowering the Ninja 400

There is an internet forum for owners of the Kawasaki Ninja 400 that I have been lurking on since the bike came out, and it just so happened that there was a recent thread on mods for short riders.  One of the posters referenced a lowering link kit sold by a company called "Roaring Toys".  I looked them up and saw that the kit consisted of a couple of multi-adjustable pieces that replace the "dog bones" in the rear shock linkage plus an adjustable side stand to make up for the loss of lean in the bike when significantly lowered.  The problem was, this kit cost $273!  I figured I could make the dog bones myself and, if I lowered the bike only an inch, I could maybe still use the stock side stand.  I had two problems I had to solve; one was to find out how to safely remove the dog bones, and the other was to determine the length of the ones I was going to make that would result in the desired one inch of lowering.  I found a video on YouTube that showed how to remove the dog bones, and it had some really helpful information.  Then, while searching Ebay for possible cheaper options, I found a guy who was selling some that he made.  He still wanted too much money, but he made the mistake of giving the dimensions for lowering the bike an inch.  I had what I needed. 

It used to be that one of the first purchases I made whenever I bought a new car or motorcycle was to buy the service manual for the vehicle.  I quit doing that for cars quite a few years ago when the service manual became a couple of inch-thick volumes that became so technical and required so much specialized equipment, plus cost close to $100.  I did buy a service manual for my cbr500, but I'm not buying one for the Kawasaki.  I think you can find out just about all you need to know from YouTube videos.  Some are not so good, but some are excellent. 

So the first step was to support the bike in a way that took all load off the rear shock, like this:

And here is where the dog bones are located:

And this is why they are called dog bones:

I went to the local Ace hardware and bought a piece of 3/16 X 1.25 inch steel and made my own, which don't have the dog bone shape, but do the job.  It turns out that to lower the bike an inch, the links need to be a half inch longer than stock......I had sort of assumed they would be shorter, but it's due to the geometry of the shock linkage.  Here are the new ones, painted and installed:

It's not enough to just lower the rear suspension as that changes the steering geometry.  You need to also lower the front of the bike.  This is done by sliding the fork tubes up in the triple clamps.  This was the stock setting:

And this is after:

I only lowered the front 5/8 of an inch.  It seems like plenty, and I was getting concerned about the side stand being too long.  I will have to do some riding to see if more adjustment is needed and how well the side stand works.  It's fine on my level garage floor, but in the real world it may be a problem.  If it is, I can cut the foot off and then cut some out of the side stand and re-weld the foot back on. 

After all was done I measured the seat height and it went from a measured 30.5 inches to 29.5, so it is exactly one inch lower.  It is very noticeable when sitting on the bike and I think Jenny will love it.  For myself, maybe I can finally drag the foot peg feelers when cornering. 

I had texted Jenny before I did this and said I thought I could lower the bike.  She said it sounded like a lot of work, but this is just the kind of stuff I like to do. 

New Horse in the Stable

I've been interested in this bike since it first came out as a 2018 model.  It's a Kawasaki Ninja 400.  I've been keeping an eye on Craigslist for at least the past year, looking for a used one, but since it is a new model it took awhile for them to start showing up on the used market.  What I find most intriguing about it is its light weight.......ready to ride it is 60 pounds lighter than my Honda, but it has almost the same horsepower.  In race track contests the Ninja spanks the Honda by a large margin.  I'm not interested in racing, but it means to me that it does not lack power.  There is even a bigger difference in weight between this bike and my Honda because I have added a center stand and some other bits, plus probably 10 pounds of tools.

From the beginning I thought this would be the perfect bike for Jenny.  She has had some problems with tipovers on her CBR due to the weight of it combined with a seat height that prevents her from flat footing when stopped.   The specified seat heights of both bikes are the same at 30.9 inches, but the Kawasaki's seat feels lower to me.......perhaps the seat is narrower.  Nevertheless, after looking at how the rear suspension linkage works, I think I can lower the Ninja by an inch by fabricating some new "dog bones" and sliding the forks up in the triple clamps.   The bike also has ABS, which was a $400 option when new.  I don't consider it essential for a bike of my own, but it will be an extra margin of safety for Jenny. 

I've had the bike for a week now and today I rode about 200 miles with my riding buddies, so I have had a chance to adjust the controls to my liking and get used to how the bike handles.  The light weight is noticeable somewhat when riding, but most noticeable when pushing the bike around the shop or putting it up on my hoist.  The engine characteristics are quite different.  The Ninja is a real rever, with a redline almost 12,000 rpm versus 8,500 for the Honda, and the bike seems to accelerate like a demon if you rev it.

Although I think it's the perfect bike for Jenny, for me, the Honda is better because it is more comfortable, and because I have put a center stand on it.  It is more comfortable mainly because the foot pegs on the Honda are lower so my old bum knees are not bent so much.  I don't think this will bother Jenny since she is young and flexible, and has shorter legs than me.  The lack of a center stand means that simple maintenance like lubing the chain requires that you have a way to lift the rear wheel off the ground.  All bikes used to come with a center stand, but now only a few do.  So one of the first aftermarket purchases I made was some swing arm bobbins and a stand:

So the plan is to get this bike down to Jenny and bring her Honda up here for me to refurbish and sell.  We have been through this drill before when I traded her current bike for the proceeds from the sale of her first bike, the Ninja 250.  Since emission requirements are different in California than anywhere else in the world, you can not import and register an out of state compliant bike in California unless it has over 7500 miles on it.  Since the new bike only had 4,400 miles on it when I bought it, I figured I would be "forced" to ride it during the summer to get the required miles on it.  However, when I noticed a sticker that mentioned an evap canister, I started looking more closely and discovered the bike is a California compliant bike.  I don't know how it ended up in Portland where I bought it, but it means I could make the swap any time.  The problem is that nobody wants to go anywhere right now due to the Corona virus pandemic.  We will just have to see how it all plays out.

Last Day

Eight days of riding in nine days, and 2,103 miles.  I can say I've had enough riding.......not too much, but enough.

This is my eight days bug collection:

Today I rode the "Devil's Triangle".  This is actually the fourth time on it for me, and Carolyn was on the back for one of those rides eight years ago.  It's not as spectacular as the Dragon, but it's really good and doesn't get as much crazy traffic.  Still, this being a weekend day, there were some bikes.....even a bunch of quads and side-by-sides.  It must be legal, somehow.  The ride is also close to where Carolyn's sisters live, so easy to get to.  I took one picture of a typical curve, and this is not the tightest by any means:

I didn't post any of the pictures from my visit to the AMA hall of fame museum, so I'll end this trip blog with some of those.

I got to the museum shortly after it opened and I was the only one who rode there.

There were bikes and riding gear from all the famous American road racers, motocrossers, flat track racers and off road racers.  Most of them were from my 55+ years of riding and were familiar to me.

This was the first modern 4-stroke motocross bike that started the revolution to modern 4-strokes.
It was an obvious one-off factory special.

This is one of Evel Knievel's bikes and shows some of the many body repairs he had.  I wonder who paid for all the surgery.

Bill Baird was the national champion enduro racer when I started riding enduros.  He was pretty much unbeatable, but only rode eastern enduros, not desert events like I rode.

The guy who rode this bike was incredible.  Read the story below.

I had one of these bikes, only it was black.  They are using it here to provide a simulation of riding.  Carolyn and I rode double on it from Fargo ND over to and around Lake Superior, camping out almost every night.  I crashed that bike on a ride down in Baja, and then later got sideswiped by a pickup truck and got a broken collar bone.  I figured it was an unlucky bike and gave it away.

Jeff Fredette rode this bike in several ISDE's and I had one like it......a Kawasaki KDX, my last real dirt bike.

That outfit that took the crash pictures that I had in my previous post took some photos of me (not crashing), and here are a couple:

Here is another photo taken by a different outfit where I have a little more lean going on:

I Do The Dragon Again!

Carolyn wanted to visit her sisters on this trip, and the benefit to me was that they live relatively close to the most famous motorcycle road in the country, the "Tail of the Dragon".  So while she was visiting, I went for a day ride and in addition to the Dragon, I rode the Cherohola Skyway, another destination motorcycle road.

This ride felt like an Orvie memorial ride.  I've done the ride three times now, and the last one was with Big Mike and Orv.  This was three years ago when Carolyn and I were on our "Grand Tour" of the US.  Mike and Orv flew in to local airports and we all rented motorcycles in Atlanta.  It's covered in this post http://thegoodroads.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2017-01-11T17:39:00-08:00&max-results=7&start=7&by-date=false.  I think it was shortly after this ride that Orv got the diagnosis of lung cancer, so he was really glad that he got to go on this ride.  We each had a helmet intercom, and I remember lots of excited chatter about these two roads while we were riding.

I chose to do this ride on Friday because I thought there would be fewer motorcycles riding the Dragon, but there turned out to be a lot more than when we three last rode it.  The main motorcycle resort is at Deal's Gap.  Orv and Mike and I actually stayed at this resort.  They have some pretty basic accommodations:

 and this is what the parking lot looked like at 10 am on a weekday:

It really is a fantastic road....just the kind of second, third and fourth gear turns that I like and really smooth pavement (except for the gouges made my the cruiser bike footpegs).  However, my gps continues to bedevil me at times and once on the way back to the air b&b it ran me completely around in a circle, including this "road":

One of the features of the resort is the "tree of shame".....a tree decorated with parts from crashed motorcycles.  Last time Orv and I posed in front of it:

And this time I took pictures all around:

There is an outfit that takes photos at various spots on the ride, and you can buy a shot of yourself after they post them on their website in a day or two.  This also gives them the opportunity to catch people in the act of crashing, and they have posted some of these:

They have some cute Dragon-themed sculptures around too:

And I got me a souvenir:

For those of you reading this blog who don't give a twit about motorcycles, here are the scenery pics: