Cal 24

Update: I finished 7th! Ride report here.

This weekend is the Cal 24 endurance rally. It will be my fifth Cal 24. It was my very first rally in 2003. I showed up in Antioch that year not knowing a soul, or knowing very much at all about rallying. If you had told me then that in 2009 most of my friends would be LD riders and that I'd be riding in the Iron Butt Rally, I would have said you were crazy. Now it's me who's crazy - crazy for this stuff!!

I've replaced my Star-Traxx satellite tracker with a new one called SPOT. You can track my progress during the rally (7AM Saturday to 7AM Sunday) at THIS LINK.

Or you can click over on the right where it says Where Am I Now? to see the SPOT reports before and after the rally.

I may leave some audio blogs here during the rally, so check back on Saturday.

The Bionic Subframe

(This is my post from the FJR Forum. I thought it was worthwhile documenting it here too.)

On my way to the Superior RTE (ride report linky) my rear subframe broke. This is the part of the bike that supports the seats, saddlebags, and topcase. I was using a Garauld support rack and a Pelican 1550 for the topcase. This setup has been fine for 10K street miles. What killed it was 12 miles of rocky washboard up and back (24 total) to the Ancient Bristlecone Pine forest. Once we got back to pavement, my riding partner noticed my topcase bouncing way too much. We took a closer look and saw broken metal. Made it home with some good straps, took it apart, and here's the carnage. The entire piece broke off completely, as well as the two mini gussets.



I vent my frustration.



To reattach the tail lights, I tied a knot in the end of a rope, ran it through the bolt hole, and tied it to the part of the frame that didn't break. Bodywork is back on, and now I can ride to the welder in safety. This shot also shows the blank space above the taillight assembly where the luggage support is supposed to be.



Update as of March 29

I spoke with Garauld. He says he doesn't sell a 5 point mount unit. He also reminds me that the rated weight for the rear rack is 7 lbs, per the sticker underneath the passenger seat. Gary offered to buy back my unit, which I thought was great. However I opted to keep it and reinforce the subframe instead. I weighed my Pelican case - the base weight with Star Traxx unit mounted is 17.2 lbs. I might have had 2 or 3 lbs of contents at the time of the incident.

I have a subframe from a salvage yard on its way to the fabricator in Sacramento. Today I removed my existing subframe and put it back on again, just to get familiar with the procedure. Next Saturday I'll ride up to Sac. While he works on the new subframe, I'll take off my old one. When he's done, I'll install the new one. I bet the whole deal won't take more than half a day.

Update as of June 7 - It's fixed!

Yesterday was welder day. Though actually, John Van Dyke is more than a welder, he is an artist with metal. He's also a cool guy who tells great stories. He's just the kind of gearhead you want to hang out with for a day. His shop is really cool, filled with all kinds of big metalworking machines that I cannot name today. He started with the concept used by Ignacio's repair, but made it his own. He fit and refit the subframe reinforcement plate until it was perfect - punching, grinding, smoothing. Most of his time was spent forming a piece of 3/8" plate, but he did grind the Yamaha frame as well.

Here he is grinding a bit of the frame to get the plate to set down closer to the joint with the main frame.



Here's the finished plate. Check out all the angles and notches. It fits perfectly.



This plate fits the subframe in front, rather than from behind.





Before he could tack it into place he had to remove any paint from the welding area. Here he is at work in the bead blasting machine.



This is what the bead blasting operator sees - the view through a hazy window. The bead gun shoots invisible glass pellets at the work object.



Here he is tacking the plate into place. Warning to reader: Put on your welder's mask before viewing this photo.



Next he made some gussetting arms to lay alongside the central rib of the luggage mount, which is also the passenger seat support tab. These are shaped like a triangular L.


Here they are in place on the unit, prior to being attached.



Everything now fits and is ready to weld. While John is busy at the welding table, I wander around the shop and take some photos. Mixed in with the fabrication stuff is some bike stuff. John told me about his barn at home with 32 bikes in it. The upstairs is like a Guys Den, with couches and big screen TV. His buddies come over and watch MotoGP at 4 AM.







John's shop is a regular Saturday hangout for the neighborhood gearheads. Here's one of the kibitzers getting a closer view of the master at work.



And now we have the finished product.



Rear view.



Top view. Notice the difference in thickness between the frame and the reinforcing plate.



One final shot.



On my ride home from the shop I thought of the old TV show, The Six Million Dollar Man. In the opening credits, Steve Austin is in a fiery rocket crash. In the next shot he's in the hospital and they show the doctors saying, "We have the technology. We can rebuild him. We can make him better." That's what happened with my subframe - though it cost slightly less than $6M. Only slightly.

Done!

On a rainy spring morning, in the garage of Sierra Research of Sacramento, CA, I tightened the hose clamp on a fuel tank vent line. With that turn of the wrist, my motorcycle was ready to rally. The fuel cell came back from BLM at 4.69 gallons, bringing the total capacity of the bike to 11.3 gallons. The rally limit is 11.5, and I calculated that by being two tenths short I'm giving up about 9 miles of range. I can live with that.

It's been a busy and expensive few months since acquiring the FJR, and now all the major work is complete. There will doubtless be minor adjustments ongoing between now and August, but the big stuff is over. It feels good to be at this point with nearly four months until the start. Hopefully it will translate into better sleeping too.

The cell went on just in time for my weekend trip to LA for Steve Hobart's surprise retirement party. (and here too.) Tom Melchild and I rode together, and I dragged him to the Monterey County Courthouse on the way down. 54 down, 4 to go.

Project Update

As mentioned below, I took off the major bodywork on the front of the bike to take care of some lighting upgrades. My nose cone now houses four ballasts for HID lights. They are really shoehorned in, and I honestly think I may be taking a risk with longevity. All they need to last is about 14,000 miles in the hottest part of summer. Keep your fingers crossed! I'll post some more shots when it's all back together and I can light 'em up in the dark.

Here's a shot of the inside of the nose cone. Low beam ballasts are on the left attached to the exterior of the glove box. High beam ballasts are in the center between the factory light assemblies.



This is a shot taken during testing. The new low beams work!



All major electrical work is now complete. I made a schematic which I will laminate and bring with me. Now I can forget how everything is wired and use that brain space for rally business.

Bits and Pieces Everywhere

My fuel cell is back in the shop of its manufacturer, BLM Accessories. After I sent the dimensions to the IBA tech team, I found that it's too big for the rally. Bill M is going to install a bit of displacement metal, and then ship it to Tom A for measurement, blessing, and certification. Better to get this fixed now than in a parking lot in South Carolina.

Another part miles away from home is my Autocom unit. This item had a defect right out of the box which prevented the cell phone from working. Even though I bought it from a dealer in the USA, I had to mail it back to England to be repaired. Hopefully it survived the US and international postal system and made it to its home country.

I also have a big chunk of bodywork off. The PHID aux lights that came with the bike have always needed attention. Unfortunately I didn't notice this until after I bought the bike, but the ballasts had been installed so that they interfered with the windshield motor. Every time I adjusted the windshield up or down, it would rub against the ballast. So off came all the bodywork. I relocated the ballasts to the center of the nose cone where hopefully they will fit properly.

Also going in at this time is the HID low beam kit I bought back in October. It shouldn't be a problem to properly squeeze in another set of ballasts and ignitors, but we'll see how that goes. Miscellaneous jobs were a repair to the glove box door latch, and a minor windshield motor farkle. Last but not least I have to fix something I broke while doing this job. The windshield mount is made of extremely soft metal. Part of it broke in my hand while I was removing it. That part should be waiting for me when I return to the office next week.

My training rides are just about done. April is an off month. In May I'm finishing the courthouse series, as well as doing a bit of off road practice with some LD pals. We're celebrating with an RTE in Hanford, featuring a house party and some home made gumbo. We've gotten a pretty good response already to the RTE. I'll post a reminder closer to the event and see if that snags any more attendees. Then in June I'm doing the Cal 24, my only rally this year prior to the Butt. And that's it. The SJC10K may turn out to be less than 10K. And that's OK.