hotter than the sun.
The nice thing about my apartment being 100 degrees when I come home from work is that now, at 11pm, it's 84 in here and it feels really nice and cool.

First of all, I have a minion at work now. Just one, mind you, but soon my evil empire will grow. Yup, I'm a manager now. So far, being a manager seems to mean that I sit in a lot of meetings, some of which only tangentially (at best) involve me. This is somewhat painful, considering that one reason I want to manage is because I have good time-management skills.

Second, Danger is moving to a new building. Every time this happens, we're told that it won't impact us, that all our stuff will be moved for us, we won't have any downtime, etc etc. Right. I'm still missing paperwork from our last office move in 2001.

Third, I'll be out of town for at least one weekend in October; riding, thankfully. I'm going on a Sport-Touring.net ride throughout the northern half of California. Right now it looks as though we'll meet up in the Central Valley, hit Yosemite/Tahoe/Mt. Shasta, traverse the state over to the coast, and end up back near the Bay Area. Yum.

Lastly, and most importantly, Peter and I just signed a lease on a house and will be moving in together. This means weeks of cardboard boxes, truck rentals, fights over garage space...ah, domestic bliss. So most of my free time will probably be spent unpacking. I'm looking forward to moving in with the Superhawk and the VF700. It'll be very nice to be able to work on their carbs in my own garage without carrying them back and forth 15 miles.

more on the new place.
The garage seems pretty nice so far. There's a washer and dryer inside of it, which is marginally annoying, but I should be able to work around them. Neither of us uses a dryer very often, so we don't have to worry about sucking fumes into the clothes and smelling even more like gas/oil/exhaust than we usually do.

The garage door is electric, but we haven't figured out if there's a remote for it. This could be an adventure. We also found a rat trap in the corner, and a child's scrawl on the wall reading "Humans: Cockroaches: " with a bunch of hash marks for the latter. The fun never ends in my garage! Fortunately, I usually end up spilling enough toxic waste in my garages that they cease being able to sustain life. Any future children of mine will probably have fifteen eyeballs and three fingers.

speaking of garages.
Peter, Mark, and I spent some time yesterday hanging out in my garage, working on various bikes. Mark wanted to find his coolant leak once and for all, and I was determined to get the carbs back in the Bandit.

I'd been having troubles reattaching the throttle cable to the carbs; fortunately, Peter was able to hook it up in under 10 minutes. This is why I keep him around, folks. After the throttle was reattached, I got the carbs back on, reinstalled the airbox and fuel tank....and forgot that I had no gas in the tank at all. Luckily, Mark still had some gas in one of those little red plastic gasoline containers, so I "borrowed" (read stole) the gas, and used Mark's turkey baster [*] to inject gas right into the Bandit's carbs.

[*] Bought for this exact purpose. In the immortal words of a message board friend: "Note to self: If Bluepoof invites you for Thanksgiving dinner, you already have plans... "

After a few squirts with the baster and a few minutes to prime, the bike started right up on the first try. Woohoo! The "won't rev above 4k" problem seems to be completely gone -- looks like cleaning out the carbs and adjusting the floats/pilot screws was all it needed.

So, the Bandit still isn't running very far, as it's still missing forks and the front wheel, but at least it's running in place very nicely.

Speaking of the forks, I had the GSX-R forks worked on over at Aftershocks, and I suppose I should pick those up sometime. I've also won ebay auctions for a GSX-R front wheel and axle; now all that I need are rotors and my gixxer front end will be ready for installation on ye olde Bandit. I feel like Dr. Frankenstein before the lightning storm.

What should I do about the paint, here, people? Obviously I have to disassemble everything to get to the frame so that I can "un-red" it. I'm having nightmares of Peter and I getting carpal tunnel syndrome by spending 10 hours a day sandpapering the frame. Should I take it somewhere to be powdercoated? Can I just spray paint it? This isn't anything I should be worrying about (the bike has to be reassembled and running under its own power to get to the new place; only then can I fret about dismantling it again), but a little research never hurt anyone.

mark's yukky thermostat.
While I was installing carbs, Mark was un-installing throttle bodies. The coolant leak had been located earlier in the day; naturally, it was underneath pretty much everything on the entire bike. We played musical chairs with the bikes and moved the VFR into my garage so that Mark could use my outlets and light.

Once he finally got the tank, airbox, throttle bodies, etc. out of the way, it was pretty obvious that the thermostat area was a big ol' mess. If I'm remembering correctly, the leak was in the two hoses coming out of the thermostat; removing them revealed that both were notched and covered with crusty old coolant gunk.

Ewwww!

So, the VFR is sitting naked in my garage until Mark gets the replacement parts (probably tomorrow). My garage is a red bike explosion. I obviously need a new bike, just so that it can be a different color.

andrea is a biker stud!
Andrea's new helmet arrived at Danger today -- a wine red Shoei Syncrotec. It looks really nice. It's a gorgeous color, and I think it'll match her bike really well.

Now that her noggin will be protected, Andrea's ready to hit the streets of Palo Alto on her 1991 Kawasaki Vulcan 500. She's coming over after work tomorrow for her maiden voyage on the motorcycle. Yay! I figure we'll just cruise around the side streets by my apartment for a little while; they're low-traffic and fairly wide.

OK, this was going to be a short entry, and it wasn't. My bad.