Mix Canyon Road Mount Vaca and Accessory Outlet Install

In a previous post I showed my roadside emergency kit which included a small 12v powered air compressor I figured that I would just clip the ends of the plug and put some spade connectors on the wires and just connect it directly to the battery when I needed it.  I was met with mixed opinions on the efficacy of this solution.  There were a lot of suggestions that I wire in a accessory socket with people expressing the valid point that I would add a lot more capability to the bike such as powering a heated vest or charging a phone or powering a GPS.  Some said that it would work just fine others bemoaned the amount of space it took up and suggested that I go for a CO2 inflation option for the space/weight savings.  Not too long after purchasing the components of my kit I had a chance to test out its usefulness when I got a second flat tire.  I was not at all impressed with the small pump it hardly seemed effective and being that I was close to a gas station I limped the bike over to their air pump after plugging the tire and filled it quickly.

After that incident I decided that I may start carrying the CO2 inflater that I have on my road bicycle with the bike and carry enough cartridges to quickly fill the rear tire.  After posing the question: How many of these bad boys do you think it would take to fill my FZ1's rear tire (180/55-ZR17) in road-side flat tire type situation," on the forums I frequent (listed at the bottom of my blog) once again I was met with mixed response.  It would appear that the people who prefer a pump stayed quiet when I posted about the Air Pump but became vocal once I showed interest in the CO2.  Arguments ranged from you would never be able to fill that size tire with CO2 to pointing out that once you use up you're cartridges and you flat again you're stranded.  Both were good points!

After doing a little research on my air compressor (a cheap jobber from harbor freight) the reviews all reflected my sentiments about how slow it fills a tire but they did also point out that it can and does fill a tire to full pressure given enough time.  Though you need to give the pump a change to cool down every 10-15 minutes and then proceed again once it has cooled.  It realistically could take me 30+ minutes to fill up the rear tire with that pump.  Being that I already had the pump and I already had the CO2 inflater and I'm not super strapped for space on my bike I decided that for now I will carry both with the plan being to use the CO2 cartridges on the first flat which should take 5-12 gram cartridges to fill my rear tire to 32 psi according to the chart a member on FZ1OA shared with me...

...and then top off with the pump if necessary and then deal with the pump on the off chance I have a really shitty day and end up with two flats on the same trip.

After deciding this I also decided that I would install the accessory outlet after all to simplify any road-side repair situations and also add some more flexibility to my motorcycle.  I found a basic accessory socket at the NAPA store and picked up a in line fuse holder some fuses while I was there.

I have seen others buying kits that come with longer wires or "waterproof" caps but where I was going to install it I don't think that much water ill be getting to it and I have a ton of automotive wiring at home so I knew I could just splice, solder, and shrink tube the connections I needed to make.

I chose a spot on flat area to the left of the tank near the dash to as a location for the install.  I had a speed bit that was the correct size for the hole which made quick work of the relatively thin ABS plastic.  I also found an illuminated switch in my box-o-random parts that I decided to wire in as well in the oft chance I was on the move and for whatever reason wanted to turn off whatever it was that I had plugged into the socket and didn't want to stop to stow a dangling plug.  It stretched out the install time a bit but as it has been of late with my motorcycle projects the planned task was going to end up taking much longer than I would have ever anticipated.

I was making good progress with the wiring and was to a point where I was going to take the body panel and the newly-mounted socket onto the bike and run the wire back to the battery.  That meant that I would need to lift the gas tank to zip tie the new wires to the outside of the wiring harness that runs to the battery.  I busted out my trusty set of long, metric, Craftsman allen wrenches.  The tank is held down by one socket-head cap screw.  When I went to loosen the the screw it with the Allen wrench either it or the screw or both at the same time decided to give up the ghost.  And for the second time in as may weekends I felt that sinking feeling you get when you know you have exceeded a part's mechanical limits.  I held in my hand a nicely rounded out Allen wrench and the socket portion of the screw matched the end perfectly.  It was time to go to bed and re-assess in the morning.  I put put things back together enough so that should I need to ride the bike before I finished I could and called it a night.

The next day I woke up knowing I had two options, neither of which I looked forward to:

1. Slot the top of the screw and hope that my impact driver would be able to loosen the screw.

2. Drill out top of the screw and try to use an EZ out to remove the remainder of the stuck screw and then possibly drilling and tapping the the hole if it would not come out.

Things were complicated again by not having a garage, while I had an extension cord it was not long enough to reach to the parking spot (that I'm "not supposed to be working on my bike in") where my bike was sitting at.  So I went for option one.  I grabbed a hammer, my impact driver and some chisels to slot the screw with.

For as as easily as the screw rounded out it did not relinquish to the chisel (which was made of some derivation of butter apparently) without a fight.  Eventually though I did have a slot in the top and I went to it with the impact driver.  The only issue was that there was a hole in the center of the crew so the flat head bit only had a small area to act on which ended up not being enough and the bit also succumbed to the screw!  By this point I was pissed and determined to get this screw out.  I was going to take great satisfaction in watching that drill bit sink into the the head of that screw.

I finally decided that I was going to push my bike through the courtyard, between the two the two condo units and around to the other side of the porch from our condo so I could just throw the extension cord over the wall and power my droll and soldering iron from there.

This also had the added benefit of being out of the sight of most of the residents not that I think any of them actually care if I work on my bike or not but there's always one legal eagle in each bunch that seems to pop up so it was nice to be able to be able to work with a little less scrutiny.

The drill did the trick I made sure to start with a bit that was just slightly larger than the hole in the center and worked my way up until the head of the screw broke free to avoid any snapped bits with the way the day was going I felt that was a real possibility!  After I got the head off the screw I lifted off the tank and found a nice surprise.  See the video below:

So at least I didn't have to use the EZ-out or tap a hole!  Obviously I didn't have an exact replacement around so I found the tiny section of metric fasteners at Home Depot and used the closest thing I could find.

Here's a shot of the final product installed and ready to go.

All that work took me the bulk of the Saturday.  At least the parts that were cool enough to want to hop on a motorcycle and go for a ride.   I was hoping to get out that day and check out a view that I was told about by our on-site maintenance guy (Clay).  He is a beekeeper as well and was telling me that he had some hives up on Mount Vaca which is the highest mountain in the area.  He had mentioned how he had hiked up to the very peak and said that the view was spectacular being that you could see down into the valley on one side and out to the bay the other direction.  I had been meaning to check it out for a couple of weeks and it looked like I had missed the chance that day.

I need to break away from the the story for a moment and go off on a side track for the rest of the story to (hopefully) make sense.  This particular weekend was the weekend before the seven year anniversary of a good friend of mine's death.  His name was Jeremy Eckerman.  I was not with him at the time of his death but he was out on a weekend river rafting trip; the kind where you party at the campground and then hop on a raft and party all say as the river carries you along.  The Wolf River has a lot of cliff areas and and people sometimes stop to climb up to the tops and jump off into the river.  Jeremy had decided to do that this particular day.  Back then we were all pretty hard charging partiers and I'm sure Jeremy was "feeling pretty good" by that point.  Accounts differ but he either lost his footing and fell or jumped from the 20' cliff and while he was on his way down he hit his head against the cliff.  When he landed in the thirteen feet of water he never came back to the surface.  Rescue divers found him later and he was pronounced dead.

As I mentioned Jeremy was a partier but in many other ways he liked to grab live by it's horns and shake the best out of it.  He was a wild-man, outspoken, funny, and sensitive when you least anticipated it.  I think most of his friends (myself included) prefer to believe that Jeremy jumped that day grasping at the highest fruit on the tree of life experiences than to to think that he was just the hapless victim of a drunken misstep.

In the years following Jeremy's death we tried to commemorate his passing by getting blindingly drunk and partying to the later hours of the night.  However as time passes you just have to come to accept that while Jeremy will forever be 27 years old we have gone on living and are getting older.  I decided that this year; instead of getting hammered alone at home that I would try and commemorate Jeremy's life by attempting some other sort of "Ecker-manly" act.  As my Saturday was drawing to a close I was sitting in my living-room about to have a beer and then go to bed when it dawned on me.  If that view from Mix Canyon Rd was so spectacular during the day then it must be just as spectacular if not more at night!  It was 10pm and the temps were going down and I said "fuck-it" grabbed my gear and headed out to the bike.

Mix Canyon Rd is only about a half an hour ride from my house so it didn't take long to get there and once there, it didn't take me too long to figure that this would definitely fill my "Ecker-Manly" act quota. Mix Canyon road it turns out is as narrow as a driveway at points and except for the lights on the porches of the few homes that are sparsely scattered along the road there is absolutely no lighting along the road.  It snakes it's way up Mount Vaca with very steep inclines and tight sometimes off camber turns.  With only the FZ's headlights (which are quite bright even without the high beams on) to guide my way up the road I found that on an ascent such as this they were not the most effective.  With the bike point it's way up the incline whenever the road flattened or dipped it just looks like you are riding into blackness as the headlight is still pointing up.  Another issue is that with an unpainted single lane road with a 2-4 inch lip where the pavement ends and transitions to a ditch or a steep drop you really want to be able to judge your bikes position on the road but the headlights give you a sort of tunnel vision and while they illuminate your way forward I could not see to the sides of my bike.  Consequently the five mile trek up to where the road becomes gravel was completed at 10-15mph.

Speaking of the gravel it took me about 100 yards to realize that I was on it.  Clay had warned me about this and suggested that I hike the rest of the way up.  Being night time I did not want to try that but I was keeping an eye out for the road transition.  I reached a point where the road flattened and widened to what appeared to be a turnaround  and that was when I noticed that I was on the pavement/gravel transition.  I eased the bike to a stop and looked around I was definitely up as high as I was going to be getting that night.  I could see that the road was just as narrow as before but there was a wide gravel/sand turnaround area.  I cranked my handlebars to the left and started to back the bike up to get it perpendicular to the roads path so I could drop down off the roads 2-4" lip down to the turnaround area.  Feathering the clutch and covering the front brakes I eased the FZ's front tire off the road when it hit what I anticipated to be hard-pack sand and gravel the front site sunk another 4-5 inches into some very loose gravel having both feet on the ground for balance I only had the front brake and when I touched it to slow the bike the front end washed out and went down and just like that for the second time in as many weeks I was staring at my bike on it's side.

I shut it off and picked it up and wheeled it over to a flat spot put the kick stand down, got out my flashlight and inspected things and the bike was none the worse for wear.  I hopped back on thumbed the starter and she fired right back up and I proceeded to make my way back down the road.  As soon I made it around the first bend I realized that in my intent to not die on the way up I had not noticed the breathtaking views going on behind me.  I made it a quarter of a mile back down the road when I discovered another turnout where it looked like campers or highschoolers looking for a place to drink beer might stop and hang out and enjoy the view. I decided to do the same.

The above video shows nothing of what I saw when I was up there.  Some things I guess just aren't meant to be shared with the world.  I was high enough up and far enough away from the city lights to be treated with a bowl of a starry sky above me with a bright moon and a twinkling jewel of a city down in the valley.  It was the perfect place to take in the silence and stillness and feel a little bit closer to my friend than possible in my day-to-day existence a perfect moment so shortly after such a failing one was unanticipated.

The trek back down the mountain was just as treacherous I alternated between braking and engine braking so as not to over cook either with the most unnerving part coming when I encountered an oncoming vehicle and not being able to see the sides of the road thought I was going to fall off the edge.  When I made it home I had that beer I had been intending to earlier and went to sleep feeling much more accomplished than I would have had I just stayed home not to mention more at peace.

The next morning I realized that when the bike had tipped over on the mountain the gate opener for out Condo complex (basically a garage door opener) must have fallen out of my tank bag.  Knowing exactly where it should be I decided to take the opportunity that morning to go back up the mountain and take some daytime pictures (below) and the above video.

That's it for me for now.  I already have the content amassed for my next post (an impromptu ride to Monterey and Laguna Seca Raceway for the MotoGP race) I will try and get that put together for you ASAP.

Until then I hope you've enjoyed this post and as always; Thanks for reading!

First Rainy Days, The Move, The Oil Change

It's been a bit since I've written a post, sorry about that but really there hasn't been that much moto-action for me.  Mostly commuting and doing the daily grind.  The fact that it has been in the 100s for a the last week and off and on before that hasn't been making me feel too inspired to get out and ride either.  I did get to experience my first two sequential rainy days since being in California.  I believe that brings my rainy day tally to three so far.  As you can see in the picture above my old motorcycle cover left something to be desired.  It's not surprising that the thing is ill-fitting.  After all it fit my SV650s nearly perfectly and that a much smaller bike than the FZ1 and my luggage rack makes it even longer yet.  You can see in the picture above that the luggage is even off the bike because there was no hope of the cover fitting on there with them on the bike.  One sad think that happened with trying to squeeze the FZ into the cover was that I ended up bending the front right turn signal enough that the flexy rubber mount gave way and the signal broke (more on that later).  So it was time for a new cover.

This little number is (due to lack of options) a Walmart motorcycle cover it cost me $29 the brand was ADCO I think and the size was specified for an 1100cc bike.  It's a little billowy but as you can see in the picture it covers the bike very well with all the luggage on it and it doesn't take up too much space when it is in it's bag.  It's not the most durable material but it seems to be doing the job.

On thing that I found to be an issue over the two rainy days was that my waterproof gear is too warm to be wearing when during a summer rain.  I am going to have to find some lighter more breathable waterproof over-clothes that I can just hop in and out of if I am going to be riding in the wet more often during the warmer months.  The Tourmaster items I own are uncomfortable at best on an 80 degree rainy day.

Some good things have been going on though.  I moved out of the Extended Stay America on June 25th which was a joyous day.  After living there for 70 days I was definitely ready to gone from there!  There was one small detail that I was going to have to deal with and that was the furniture wasn't going to be delivered from Wisconsin to California for another two days.  I figured it wouldn't be a big deal to sleep on the floor.  I will tell you this; when I was in my early 20's it was no big deal to crash on someone's floor for a weekend.  Now... Well I've never felt so old after sleeping that first night on the floor. I use the term sleep loosely because I was tossing and turning trying to get comfortable the whole time.  The next day I got a call from the movers telling me that the delivery driver had a death in his family and had to turn back and that my delivery was pushed to following Monday.  Fack!!!  That added 5 days to be without a bed or any other sort of furniture! I wasn't going to make it.  So I decided that I would at least need to get a cot to sleep on.  I should have taken a picture of the thing strapped to my motorcycle.  The box it came in was about 3 feet long and I had the thing strapped perpendicular to the longitudinal axis of the bike so it stuck out pretty far on each side!  The cot was no better it was the folding type and in the center there was a tension strap that didn't sag at all and that did my lower back no favors.  Sunday night I was so sick of the cot I decided to sleep on the floor what was one more night right.  Well Monday morning I got a call saying that the delivery was pushed back to Tuesday because there were issues with the trailer so tack on another night on the floor.

Did I mention that there was no other furniture either and that it was the hottest week I have experienced since moving to California?  So for someone that only had a motorcycle anywhere you go you are going to be cooking.  So my choices were hop on the bike and go somewhere cool but be sweaty as all get up once I got there, or stay at the Condo where my options were stand up, sit on the floor, lay on the floor or lay on the uncomfortable cot and watch shows on Xfinity (at least the cable guy showed up on time).  Suffice it to say beer played a role in me getting through that week I was almost ready to go back to the Extended Stay!

Things are good now though the movers showed up last Tuesday, you have no idea how much shit you have in your house until someone shows up and dumps it all in your doorstep in one sitting.  Well they carried it into the house and unpacked things and set it on the nearest open spot.  Once again it was hot as hell and I couldn't just sit around and drink beer while they were working I and to check everything they moved in because as soon as they were done and I signed the delivery forms they were free from any liability for broken items so I was opening and unwrapping things all day.  Once we were finished at the house we had a second stop at a storage a unit to put what was basically seasonal stuff and garage contents into a storage a unit (our condo doesn't have a garage just a covered parking spot more on that in a little bit).  Anyhow if the condo was hot the storage unit was insane, no AC and of course the unit was indoors.

I had had the guys follow me on the motorcycle to the unit and when we were don there I released them from their responsibility and headed back to the condo.  The facility is gated so I pulled up to the gate and when I was going to get off the bike and go key in the code; I don't know if was the heat and then the combo of sleeping like crap for all that time but I could have sworn I put the kickstand out and when I got off the bike I was hanging onto the handlebars and all of a sudden I didn't feel the bike stop at the normal spot where the kickstand should have started supporting the weight of the bike.  Too late... It was on it's way down... Luckily I sill had my hands on it and was able to slow it down and basically just gently laid the bike on it's side.  A few seconds later after I adjusted my position to a better lifting point I had the bike back up with only a slightly bent clutch lever and a bruised ego to show for it!  It just goes to show you that motorcycle riding takes concentration even in the simple act of putting the bike on a kickstand.  It's important to be sure you are in the right state of mind to be riding.  Unfortunately being solo-moto sometimes you end up riding in non-optimal states the trick is to recognize those times and avoid hopping on the bike if at all possible.  I'll need to me more cognizant of this in the future; a lesson learned with a fairly cheap price $11 for a new lever.

That makes for a nice segue onto the story about what I did yesterday.  Sorry about the lack of pics at the start of this post lets get to some multimedia shall we.  Yesterday was the first day in a while that was going to be a comfortable temperature and with the contents of the home delivered I now had a full range of tools at my disposal.  On the list of things to do was:

-Fixing the aforementioned clutch lever

-Fixing the front right turn signal (I broke it putting on the bike cover)

-Changing the oil

-Changing the air filter

I wanted to see if I could find a shop nearby to buy the stuff and the only two moto shops in Vacaville are Motoexotica and the HD dealer.  Motoexotica is OK but they specialize in dirt and scooters so they weren't going to have anything for my FZ in stock and if a shop is going to have to order something I might as well order it myself on the Internet and save myself some money.  So Fairfield and Suisun had a few shops I wanted to check out or at least they were supposed to... 

The first stop was Cycle Gear (which I understand is a chain?) they were right off 80 and they were open so those were both pluses but after walking in the door I knew the drill.  There were two guys working and I was the only one in the store.  Nobody welcomed me, they were stocking shelves and bullshitting with each other.  Luckily they had the parts catalog out by the levers and after about ten minutes I found the part number I needed and they actually had one in stock, off to a good start then! However I must say that there seemed to be absolutely no rhyme or reason as to how they had the brands and models arranged no alpha numerical logic anyways.

It was dumb luck that I found the entry for a 2001 FZ1 in there.  It was a printed out Cycle Gear list too not a manufacturers catalog if that says anything.  Having found the lever I moved onto the oil filter they had only a small selection for Hiflofiltro brand and a much larger selection of K&N and why wouldn't they? After all, they cost twice as much!  They did stock the K&N for my FZ though the catalog only went back to 2006 models so lucky for me a quick visit to K&N's website on my iPhone got me the correct part number, god forbid a sales person would have approached me.  Once again there was a sea of K&N air filters but no other this was more of an issue than the oil filter because I have some concerns about adding a K&N to my bike.  The previous owner installed the Yoshimura slip on on the bike and didn't re-jet the carbs it runs a little rough at idle this way but it's acceptable, I can see why he didn't bother.  My concern is that once I introduce a more free-flowing air filter in the intake side the bike may lean out to the point that I will need to re-jet the bike.  No matter, after consulting the website again it turned out they didn't have one for my bike anyhow.  Finally I had to interrupt the guys discussion about employee discounts to have one of them ring me up.  I decided to check and see if any of the other shops had a stock air filter.

I tried to find Fairfield Cycle Center and I couldn't.  That may be partially Siri's (Apple GPS) fault as she seems to get confused when there is a dense area of stores/shops around.  The area this store was supposed to be at if it was still there was not prominently marked and would have been a small storefront at best.

I managed to find Xtreme Cyclez in Sisun... But they were closed and had no hours posted on their door so who the hell knows when they open.  I tried to look up the website listed on the window but the two attempts I made with my iPhone redirected me to the App Store to buy Candy Crush Saga!?! What the Eff!?!  Add that to the irritating way they spelled their shop name and that was enough... On to the next one...

The next one I tried to find was House of Power but they appeared to have gone out of business.  So I decided to just order the air filter online and do it another day.

The weather was still great when I got back to the Condo above you can see a pic of the covered parking spot that comes with the rental.  I haven't met the owner of the ZR-7S yet but the two bikes make a cute couple I think it's a 2001 as well.  The Hyundai Genesis coupe in the background gives a great primary color composition as well.  I have to do a little more looking into this but the day I moved in the on-site manager gave me a letter called "Condominium Community Living Tips" which basically is a bunch of common sense suggestions about how to get along with your neighbors.  I did take exception to one portion of the letter which said: "Do not wash or work on cars on the premises." Now I am pretty sure that when we were signing the lease that this did not come up and I'll have to do some checking into that but I would have definitely said no to the place had that been brought up or been on a legal document I was to sign.  Either way being a motorcycle rider sometimes means being a bad-ass rebel so I decided to change the oil in my spot anyhow!  And heck the letter says "cars" so there... As you can see it's not as if there isn't a huge oil spot in out spot anyhow.  I did put down some cardboard to be considerate though.

As you can see in the pictures above something went amiss during the oil change, I ended up enlisting an old tactic to get the old filter off check out the video below for my explanation... DESTROY!!!

It got ugly there for a bit,  it just goes to show you that sometimes even the simplest jobs can turn into an unexpected mess!  I would never have though that I would be reaching for my tin snips to change the oil on the FZ that day!

As luck would have it the on-site manager happened to stop by while I was working on the bike and don't get me wrong; her and her husband are both super nice and I like the both of them.  She did bring up the letter and I kind of explained to her that when it comes to motorcycles you can't just ride up to an oil change place and have it done for you in 30 minutes, let alone any major work.  In so many words I explained that my situation with my bike being my only mode of transportation that I would have to work on my bike at the condo.  Shew was understanding and didn't really know that was an issue and basically said that the idea is that you don't want to encroach others personal space and I could see how working on a car in one of those spots would make me concerned about someone banging up my car if I had one.

I got the clutch lever replaced and threw the bent one in my tool box I carry on the bike in case I have an incident where I have an off and break the lever clean off.  I didn't take any pictures of that because its a lever... nothing special.

The last thing I needed to do was fix the turn signal you can see in the above pic that I had already started the repair.  Basically the part still attached to the bodywork is a soft rubber meant to flex and the housing for the turn signal is hard plastic.  So I got out the safety wire and first looped it around the housing and then poked the other end through the soft plastic.  I did the same thing again only the other direction so that I would have two ends to twist together using my safety wire tool.

When it's all said and done it's not the best cosmetically but functionally it is back to normal and the safety wire isn't too strong so it should break away in a lie down situation if one arose.  Either that or the soft rubber would tear so job done!

I was so happy with the days work I went and bought myself a 6-pack of beer and to my surprise I found the first beer that I would actually say was great since moving to California.  Though it was brewed in Oregon.

That's about it for now, I'll leave you with this picture of a Yamaha RD 400 Daytona Special I saw when I was a the library the other day.  Super clean... Someone wither took really good care of it  or did a great resto-job!

Thanks for reading!