25-aug-2022
Brown Santa is what I call the UPS driver. He swoops in, drops off presents, and leaves. The local brown Santa here is Craig, a great guy who usually delivers in this area around 2 or 3 o’clock in the afternoon. But today would be different, probably since I was waiting for a package and thats just how my life works out. It got delivered at 7. That’s always my luck. Turns out there were multiple large deliveries to the local college where the session was about to start, and some people had 20 boxes or more of their stuff being delivered. I guess the traditional family days of driving your kid to college with all their stuff has been replaced with UPS and Uber. I also got a shipment from FedEx today. I seriously don’t understand how FedEX makes money anymore. I saw two FedEx trucks drive past the house before a third truck arrived with my package. Three trucks that presumably all started at the same depot. I know they run their International, Overnight, and Ground services as separate business units, but there has got to be a way they could better organize the final stage of delivery that doesn’t involve trucks passing each other on the road.
Anyway, these late in the day deliveries meant that you had two guys sitting in a garage next to their motorcycles, and not enough stuff to do to stay busy. I guess we could clean the bikes until they were spotless.. oh wait, Ralph did that yesterday. So what usually happens when guys get bored?
Yeah, that’s a 4WD emblem on a 2 wheel vehicle. Kind of like the Christmas tree air freshener I used to have hanging from the GPS mount. Totally useless and there for the amusement of others. Hopefully it will make someone smile.
Now that my packages have arrived we got to work. I ordered the crash bar reinforcement bars and crash bar skid plates to protect the cylinder heads off road, and a CanSmart controller to be able to control auxiliary driving lights and other accessories without needing to splice into any of the factory wiring. The CanSmart is a cool device. You can choose what intensity your driving lights are at during day or night, on both low and high beam. Honking the horn is accompanied with a quick flash of the lights. It can also turn off your driving lights when you have your turn signal on so that oncoming drivers can better see it. Pretty slick.
As part of the installation of the crash bar protectors, there is a large bolt that needs to be tightened to 100Nm. Thats pretty tight. I was cranking down on it pretty hard and was having issues getting it tight enough for the torque wrench to make that oh so gratifying ‘click’ but it just wouldn’t happen. Figuring it was just another sign of the ravages of age, I gave it another go and mustered up more strength, only to have a bushing snap very loudly. The sound of snapping metal is never a good sound when working on a bike. The swearing in two languages that follows that sound is often worse.