Friday, April 17, 2009

Minnie lives!

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Minnie, our 600/750M, has been languishing for about 4 months now, ever since the day she intermittantly failed to proceed on my trip to register a business name. But I had a bit of spare time yesterday due to a bike not coming in so after I'd done as much office work as I could find I had a play and fixed her. Not what I was expecting as it turned out either, but intruging, ultimately easy and expenditure free. I went for a quick blast to remind myself of what a nice bike she is to ride.

I've had a fair variation of work in, everything from checking valve clearances on a K1200S (hadn't done that before) to reminding myself how a Multistrada comes apart. Fiddly. But it's all been good fun so far.

Last week I did manage to reset the high bar on my "wtf do I do that for" index by turning on the tap on a 20 litre drum of oil with a measuring jug under said tap then walking away, intending to come back within a short enough time frame to get the required amount of oil in the jug. As expected, the next time I thought about the oil running into the jug was about 6 litres after it had its 5 litre capacity in it. Luckily it was the cheap stuff, as it's also the thick stuff and had covered an area about 1m square. Had it been a hot day and the synthetic Ultra 6 litres would have just about covered the whole 118 square metres of factory floor. So I raced around to the cabinet makers behind me and grabbed a big bucket of sawdust to soak up the mess and left it at that for a couple of days as I had quite a bit of stuff to finish. Not surprisingly my motivation for cleaning up stuff like that can be rather low at times. Rather. I think it was the oil smell that got to me in the end.

Sensational purchase of the week award (for a couple of weeks ago) would be the Samsung 943BW computer monitor for the workshop computer. This monitor allows you to rotate the screen 90 degrees (in my case) so that it's tall and narrow, allowing me to see a full page of a pdf workshop manual. Very, very useful. Quite popular for doctors reading X-rays as well I'm told. Although the software that comes with it is as cryptic as it gets, and I really have no idea how I finally got it to do what I wanted it to. And my screen saver is now the back half of Raymond Roche's 1990 title winning 851.

I will get to putting up another photo of the factory soon. I have it much more organised now. I just keep forgetting to take the camera into work.
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