Removing Oil From Concrete

For those of you who follow Ghetto Garage you might remember a few posts back I related how a few weeks back I had my own minature Exxon Valdez disaster, which leaked significant amount of oil onto our small apartments even smaller patio.
Since then I have tried various methods to remover, or at least significantly reduce, the damage.

Here are some of the methods we have tried.

1) Dishwashing detergent and stiff plastic scrub brush. No Bueno.

2) Dollar Store spray on orange cleaner. No Bueno.

3) Plain old bleach. Had some effect, but mainly just spread the stain a little around the edges.

4) Carb Cleaner.



Above: my first test of the carb cleaner has had promising results.

Tomorrow I will continue the experiment and keep you posted.

BMWeerman...out....

U-Hauling Bikes

Couple of long overdue tips from the Ghetto Garage here.

Tip #1.

If you are going to tie down bikes in the back of a U-Haul or similar conveyance, PLEEAASE do a couple of things.

A) Take off any tall or non retractable windshields. The new Road Show Beemer had a beautiful after-market windshield on her, which was actually one of the reasons I did buy here, and it got trashed in the move from California to New Mexico.






Above, one of the few extant pictures of the Road Show Beemer with the windshield intact. There are no after photos because I just took the remains off threw them away and was too bummed out to even take a pic.

The picture and the caption above pretty much tell the story. You can see that she was torn down for a clutch replacement at the time, but you get the idea.

Point IS those floors are slippery and it is extremely easy to slide and get crossed up and have a little crash into the side of the truck.



B) Put the bikes in LAST! The Wrench Wench tried to warn me but NOOOOOOO.... Beemerman had to have it his way and put them in first. That is bad for a couple of reasons. Reason number one...see A) Reason number two, if you don't have to pack around the bikes then there is less likely hood of anything coming crashing down and breaking your freaking windwshield, or denting your tank or whatever...

Tip #2.

If you are going to be tying you bike down for hauling ...follow the link below and buy a set of these immediately!



'till next time....BMWeerman...out.....

Wrenching has been wrenching

It has been a while since I posted here, but certainly not from a lack of material. In fact, it has been exactly the opposite, too much has been going on on the wrenching front.

A whirlwind of activity started sometime last week when our next door nieghbors Corvette broke down. Long story short, from my understanding the steering columns on some 'vettes have a tendency to lock up and there is really no way to fix them except at a dealer. I was really suprised at this given that the owner is a graduate of UTI and a Toyota mechanic. Not just a Toyota mechanic though, he is pretty amazing with all cars and has saved us A TON of money on our little beat-up Saturn.



Tim, mechanic and grill-meister extraordinaire

After much debate and many phone calls, a team effort finally got AAA out and it took two rather impressive trucks to pull it out of the tight parking place, turn, it and eventually lift it onto a flat-bed. I am kicking myself for not shooting pix of the procedure.

In addition, over the last few days I have made some alarming discoveries regarding the rear-end of red. Most of this having to do with my state of mind at the time I reassembled her. Which was not good!

Most alarming of all was the slop in the swingarm bearings. I was able to do a Ghetto Garage style repair by removing the inside bearing journal (one of two large pins that holds the whole damn thing on) in its parking spot at the apartments. What is scary about that is I should not have been able to remove the journal without heating it because it should have been, and I thought it was, locktited in. Apparently not because I got it out by wrenching on the 30 mm locknut. Ironically the locknut and the threaded journal were locktited together so I had to take them out on the porch and heat them to get them apart.

Ultimately I got the thing back together the way it is supposed to be, although I think I overdid it with the red locktite stick...

A Rather Overdone Job

After wrenching on all of this I went into the pad to rest for a moment and ended up crashing. While crashed the New Mexico monsoon rains hit and when I got back out to the bike I found this....



The Beemers trunk box after being left open in the monsoon rain


So... the moral of the story is...

No rest while wrenching!!!!!!!!!!!!!