We’ve moved!
Yep, moved here:
http://www.ericfilcoff.com/wp/
It’s a work in progress, but moving to my own server allows for more customization and overall badassness. I’ll try and archive this place as well.
Broken stuff.
Hey, it’s a post about bikes! Amazing. Yes. Good? Not bad, but annoying. What happened? Eric happened. I misread the instructions that I didn’t read and over-torqued the bearing pre-load on my rear Crossmax XL. What does that do, you ask? It makes the bearing go rattle rattle rattle, wobble wobble, tink tink, BOOM, grind, wobble, tink, poop. No more bearing when I was 8 miles from home. RTFM indeed. I decided to keep riding, as it did still spin, just painfully. All fine and good… then another BOOM. The rear tire blew out, probably at the request of my kind of expensive rear hub.
Anywho, I tried to source a replacement bearing from a local used bicycle shop, but they were far less than helpful. So instead, I called Mavic (pronounced “Mavick”, as demonstrated by the guy who worked there. Don’t let bike snobs tell you differently) directly, and they gave me the part numbers. Found the replacements after .334 seconds of searching at cambriabike.com. $19.99. Was that really so hard, local bike shop? I try and support you, but you need to support your customers. Anyway, a couple of days and a hammer later, we have a functioning Crossmax XL. Just in time to cancel my plans to ride at Syllamo due to predicted flash flooding. Kansas will have to do. I’ll post a report that nobody’ll read.
Pictures:
See the squiggly thing below? That and the other mess of crap used to be a bearing.
Yay. Let’s not kill this guy.
Speaking of bearings on their way out, Jeni and I went riding today. Me on the Poprad and her on the Trek. It was very fall-like what with the cold and drizzly goings on, but the trees still haven’t turned. Bummer.
Apple pickin’
Jeni has a list of things that she’d like to accomplish before leaving the great state of Missouri. One of these items was (sort of) checked off today with our visit to Huffstutter Orchard in New Franklin. I say “sort of” because her list item included both visiting an orchard and picking apples… we only accomplished the former. We did get about 15 lbs of really great apples for $10, but the only picking that was involved was out of bins. I guess the trees weren’t up to the task. Sad. A nice side bonus was that she got to pick a pumpkin, so I guess that the day wasn’t a total loss.
More car maintenance.
I figure since Dave gave me this car, I might as well maintain it properly. In this particular case, that meant new spark plugs and drive belts. $30 down the toilet, or so I thought.
The drive belts, which took all of 10 minutes to change, solved the squishy belt noise. This was a given, but still nice to not hear.
No belts! Ahhh!
On to the plugs. Since I do not own a service manual for Butch, I scoured the internets and found a couple of DIY tutorials on how to change the plugs. Each cautioned that it was a total pain in the ass… ok, sure, but it isn’t possible to be more of a pain in the ass than the Boxster plug change. It wasn’t. Turns out that their pain-in-the-assness was totally unfounded when working with even a 2-year-old dog’s worth of common sense. Junebug can vouch, but Bear cannot. Move the crap that is in your way out of your way (battery, airbox) and use proper tools (extensions, spark plug socket, and torque wrench). Easy, takes 30 minutes. 16 ft-lbs. Done.
Interestingly, the OE plugs were platinum “high-mileage”, but the manual stated 30k change intervals. For $6 and 30 minutes, it wasn’t really a big deal. A nice side bonus is much smoother running, and the odd off-throttle lurching and hanging is greatly reduced. I guess copper plugs really are better, at least for Butches.
Oh, since this place is supposed to be about bikes, here:
I rode the titaniumy one a couple few times last week. It was awesome. Unfortunately, you get no ride report.
Magic.
Eric’s magic trick of the day: How to turn $19,300 into $9,100: Buy an IS300, wait five years, and sell! (Kinda hurts when I think about it that way…)
Yes, the IS300 has skipped town to head back east to South Carolina. Sad, but good. But sad… I’ll probably buy another one.
So now we’ll see how Eric does with owning only two cars… it’ll be tough.
(for you car nerds, it’s like having a flat-10, and that’s just awesome. It’s almost like I have a Leopard 1 Tank in the garage.)
Schnell Porsche.
I did what I said I wouldn’t do: I bought something that I didn’t need for the Boxster. What did I buy, you ask? This:
See the difference? Yeah you do. It’s a Schnell upper strut brace. Why’d I buy it? To stiffen the car, obviously. Not to say that the Boxster isn’t a stiff roadster on it’s own, but anything with no roof is going to be a slight bit floppy. How’s it work? By pairing up with the factory-installed-but-different strut brace in an attempt to keep the tops of the strut towers from flexing ever so slightly inward under compression. Why is this important? Well, when the strut tops flex, they’re bending everything around them. This makes noises, and I don’t like those kind of noises. There is also a theoretical handling improvement, but that’s debatable.
It seems to be built well and gets good reviews, so why not? Plus I low-balled the maker on eBay and got it for 33% off.
Oh yeah – beer kit numero three came today!
Elephant Rock.
We took a drive down to Elephant Rock and a Johnson’s Shut-Ins last weekend. Have a look:
Looks like a lot has changed over at Elephant Rocks since I was six or seven… not that I remember. Johnson’s Shut-Ins? Not so much going on there.
You might also notice that I decided to finally enlarge the photos around here. Um, yes, yes I did.
Per Craig’s comment… yeah, of course Jeni did this:
Weekend.
Busy weekend… but here are some neither high nor low lights. Just lights.
Saturday was a blur, but it involved running the Bug, deep-frying veggie burgers and their buns (do it), drinking some water, and making fun of young people.
At some point on Sunday, I changed the oil in the Impreza. I still don’t get why Japanese four cylinders (specifically Honda and Subaru) haven’t figured out a location for the oil filter that doesn’t involve the exhaust system. It never fails – remove the filter and oil dumps on some part of the exhaust, only to be stinkily burnt off over the next couple of days. I also found out that Castrol Syntec bottles have the same thread pitch as a Subaru oil filler cap. Neat. I also also found out that I drove this poor car 6,355 miles in 3 months and 8 days, during which it burned a quart and a half of 5w30.
Muddy:
Smelly:
Screwy:
After all of that nonsense, we took Butch and the bikes on a bike ride in the perfect 68 degree weather:
To close out the parts of the weekend about which I am going to talk, we took Jeni to buy some bike shoes. The problem with that little quest is that nobody makes bike shoes larger than size 43 for the ladies. Well, some people do, but not Bontrager. Write your senator. Complain. Make a difference. Equal shoes for all.
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