The last (almost) of the remaining parts for the GS are installed and the bike is back to (almost) 100%.
Thank you Michael and David for your hands, brains and eyeballs in this task. As always happens with this kind of thing, one discovers stuff that’s buried and basically invisible to a cursory inspection, that creates challenges which require, um, creativity.
How one little 10mm nut can eat up a solid hour plus ……………….. hey, it happens.
New windscreen, new engine guards and several small parts like a turn signal assembly and a hand guard bracket and a few other little things. Bike’s back on the road. Now it’s time to start spooling up for the June ride.
The “almost” stuff? Just a few more minor things that need to be addressed. None critical to the operation of the motorcycle, nearly all could be skipped. Most are cosmetic in nature, one is a bag latch that can’t be bent back in to shape, so has to be replaced.
Fared pretty well, actually. Picked one of the most unsettled and stormy days to ride 20-ish miles through driving rain and gusty winds to get to the bike reassembly location. The nerves are subsiding – slowly, but subsiding. Forgot all about that aspect of things as soon as I got home, though. After backing my bike in to one of the motorcycle parking spaces in the garage under my building, my access card and keys fell out of my jacket pocket. Normally that’s not a problem. In this case, the motorcycle parking area that I’m using happens to sit on top of the grate for a large ventilation unit located the next parking level down. I figured I’d end up dropping something down there one day, I just hoped it wouldn’t be the card and keys I needed to get back in to my apartment. And this was on a Sunday at around 5:30 in the afternoon and the drop location isn’t “coat hanger distance” – it’s a good six or eight feet down, through a damper. Luckily the after hours emergency folks are used to letting people in who’ve locked themselves out of the building, so it was a short wait to get let back in and grab my spares. Maintenance retrieved my original card and keys from the bottom of that air handler the next morning.
First teaching assignment of the new season is coming up this weekend so it’s back to actually getting paid to ride!
Once in a while It’s not a bad thing to remind yourself that you really do live a pretty good and lucky life.
Thus ends today’s coffee klatch.