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!!!!!!!!!!!!!