Spider leaky

Lately I have been smelling the aroma of fuel whilst driving the Alfa Spider. So today was the day to have a looksee. Letting the Spider idle I started examing the various fuel delivery hoses and voila, culprits identified!

Two of the fuel hoses connecting the fuel rail to fuel injectors were leaking...drip drip drip. So I started to removing a mess of hoses and intake bits n pieces so I could get access to these hoses to remove and replace them. Actually a pretty simple job...the toughest part was tracking down the correct diameter. After checking four parts stores I was close to giving up hope when I went to the last one, an Advance Auto store in Deland.

Lo and behold they had what I needed! So I bought a couple feet of it, removed the old bits of hose and cut some new bits to length with my trusty exacto knife and put those on and put everything else back together. Yeah it works! No more leaky!

New hose and chunk of old, leaky hose
















Underneath this mess are the leaky fuel hoses
















Ahhh, nice new hoses in place!

ABS on the Alfa 164L

Well, to take my mind off the Breva crash I decided to head outside and do a little work on the Alfa Romeo 164L. Occasionally the Anti Lock Brake (ABS) warning light illuminates on the dash. Upon investigation I found out that this could be due to dirty ABS sensors at each wheel. These are little electronic devices which measure the wheelspin at each wheel and feed this data back to the ABS system so it can work properly.

I took each wheel off and then each sensor and cleaned each one. They were rather filthy with grime and little bits of magnetic swarf, to borrow a phrase from my friend Bob Alf :) Here are a few pics. I'll go for a test drive and see if it made a difference.

***UPDATE*** It didn't make a difference...the light still comes on :( But I did find some Sierra Nevada Christmas Celebration Ale and am enjoying that :)

CRASH goes the Breva

Today's lesson, boys and girls, is to NEVER let anyone ride your motorcycle unless you absolutely know them and are confident of their riding ability.

A couple days ago a Guzzi riding friend of mine contacted me and asked if I might be willing to allow him to borrow my Breva for a day. You see, his father-in-law is in town for Christmas and my friend wanted to go out for a motorcycle ride with him. The father-in-law was supposedly a lifelong Harley rider with a lot of experience.

So, being the idiot that I am, I agreed to let them borrow the bike and have a nice day of riding.

Read my lips...BIG MISTAKE!!!

I had a voice message from my friend to give him a call when I got a chance. Well, I called, and he told me the father-in-law had gone down on the Breva at low speed.. The father-in-law was ok, a little sore, but the Breva sustained a fair amount of damage, most seemingly cosmetic.

From what I can gather it appears the father-in-law somehow lost control of the bike and hit the back of the car and fell over on the right hand side, all of this happening at low speed when pulling away from a stop light.

The bike got towed to a Guzzi dealer in nearby Ormond Beach so I drove up in the Alfa 164L to assess the damage. A good deal of cosmetic damage to the right hand side, including a destroyed head guard and a valve cover that was hit hard enough to have actually cracked open.

Friends, take a tip from your Uncle Chris. Just don't let anyone else ride your motorcycle, no matter how nice a gesture you think it to be. There's just too much potential for bad things to happen.

Pardon me now, I need to go weep.

***UPDATE***: I just got a call from the dealer. Total repair bill will be roughly $2,300, to be covered by the father-in-law's insurance. Hopefully that will go smoothly.

My New Year haircut

Yes! My jersey has arrived!

I won an eBay auction recently for a Nebraska football jersey. I wanted to get one to wear to the Gator Bowl game in Jacksonville, FL on New Years Day.

So I thought I was getting jersey #30, which would have been running back Mike Rozier's or Ahman Green's #. However, when it arrived I opened the package and was startled to find it was #51. I think that was Bo Ruud's # so that is cool too.

Record warmth in Florida

The forecast for today in central Florida is for a record high temperature of 82 degrees. Wow! Looks pretty good for the 7 day forecast as well, finally getting a bit more "normal" next Thursday, just in time for the Gator Bowl. Perfect football weather!

Preparations underway.....

I have started the process of stocking my refrigerator with the precious elixir sent directly from the sweet Lord in heaven above to this place we call Earth. Yes, you guessed it, I speak of beer. More specifically, ale. My friends Paul and Mike arrive next week to see the Cornhuskers in the Gator Bowl. Paul has an affinity for beer, especially in the form of the India Pale Ale.

And so it is done. The cooler now holds this liquid gold...

Cool gift!

I opened my Christmas/birthday gift this morning whilst enjoying a steaming hot cup of delicious coffee.

Check this out! It is a digital picture frame, made by Kodak. You can insert any USB memory stick or most other types of memory cards which contain pictures you want to display. The picture frame then will "play" the slideshow of pictures or you can set it to a single picture...whatever you want! Very cool!

The picture frame itself is touch sensitive so when you touch it in certain spots digital controls appear allowing you to control the photos being displayed.

Thank you for my cool new picture frame!

Merry Christmas!

I wish my friends and family scattered around the good ol' USA a very Merry Christmas Day!

Farewell my friend and Godspeed

In 2002 I started riding motorcycles and except for 4 months learning to ride on a little Suzuki, I have spent all my time riding Moto Guzzis. I have met and made a lot of really good friends solely because of this brand of motorcycle.

Four days ago, on Friday, December 19th, one of my Guzzi riding friends, Steve Lingg, lost his battle with cancer. Steve was the Nebraska Representative of the Moto Guzzi National Owners Club. Steve hosted an annual campout near Alma, Nebraska for us Guzzi loving folk. He was very passionate about these Italian bikes and his passion rubbed off on me and everyone he touched in this life.

This world has a way of taking away some really good people way before it should. Steve, you will be missed....alot. Godspeed my friend.

Steve (left) and Missouri MGNOC rep Ace Mallot in 2004.

Mmmm hmmm.....I got a gift !

I got what appears to potentially be a really keen gift in a package the other day for my birthday/Christmas! I am waiting til Christmas day, which also happens to be Jesus' and my birthday, to open it.

I am sure Christmas Eve I sha'n't be able to sleep a wink, tossing and turning in my bed, wondering what is in my tidily wrapped present. Look how swell it looks....

The CAP Job

Tonight after work I stuck around with my cohorts Scott the Canuck and Luis a little late to perform a CAP job on Scott's dvd player.

Now this is not ordinary DVD player, but a really sweet model with a big hard drive inside to record video. Recently it went KAPUT. It would no longer boot up, rendering it useless. It's display showed only the taunting phrase "Please Wait".

So Scott and I made a run to Radio Shack to buy some replacement capacitors and some various and sundry soldering related items.

After work we started the CAP job...the job of desoldering some bad capacitors (you can see the two bad ones with split open tops in the pics below) on the dvd's circuit board and soldering in the new replacement capacitors (new light blue ones in the pics below). It was our hope that this would resolve the dreaded "Please Wait" phrase and put this beauty back in service.

Luis and I worked the soldering iron and used a little vacuum operated tool to remove the old solder. Scott did his best to fetch us snacks and drinks, dab our foreheads with a cool rag and stay the hell out of our way!

We then fitted the new, more robust capacitors and soldered those into place.

Finally, we reassembled everything and faced the moment of truth. Would the DVD player finally work again, allowing Scott to record and copy content illegally as he so desired?

The answer...HELL YES!! We plugged in the power and after about 30 agonizing seconds the DVD player booted back to life! Yeah, you can take your $130 repair fee and stick it Panasonic! $4 worth of capacitors at Radio Shack and a little patience did the trick!

Trouser mending with Button Boy

Hi there boys n girls. This is your friend Button Boy! Tonight I am going to show you how to mend a pair of trousers by replacing a missing button.

Lots of people might think you perform such an activity using old fashioned thread and a hard to control needle. "NO WAY!" says Button Boy. I prefer the high tech method of trouser repair.

Enter the BUTTONEER!!! Handcrafted from space age plastics and surgical steel, this miracle of modern engineering makes quick work of the tiresome job of trouser repair.

Load one of the sturdy and resilient fastener clips into the rugged BUTTONEER feed mechanism. Slip your button onto the two RAZOR SHARP Buttoneer fabric piercing protuberances and push them through the fabric in the desired location. Note how easily these razor sharp protuberances glide through the fabric. Are you thinking hot knife carving through butter? I sure am!

Take a gander at the pics below and marvel at the beauty of the BUTTONEER! Button Boy gives the BUTTONEER a Big Thumbs Up!

From the Great Plains to the Southeast

Here's one of the BIG reasons I left Nebraska for Florida.....

Further sprucing of the Alfa Romeo 164L

Today I spent a couple hours in the garage/driveway fiddling further with the Alfa Romeo 164L. Friday I received the remaining fuel injectors I had sent off a while ago to be reconditioned. So I spent a little while again disassembling the chromed intake runners and fuel rail and replaced the remaining old injectors in the car with the newly reconditioned ones. Now ALL 6 of the injectors are reconditioned, fully flow tested ones. The car starts, idles and runs beautifully :)

I also finished putting one of my XM/Sirius satellite receivers in the car. The radio in this car is of course rather old and somewhat antiquated, being a 1991 model car. So I am using a cassette tape player adapter to pipe the satellite receiver signal through the car's sound system. It sounds gd good too, I have to say!

A little nip out to Ormond Beach

I went for a nice motorcycle ride this morning with some riding chums. We headed out about 8:15 for Ormond Beach, with a stop at the Osteen Diner for breakfast.

Andrew (Ducati Monster), Marco (Moto Guzzi Griso), Rob (Kawasaki Vulcan), Rob (Suzuki Bandit) and I (Mighty Guzzi Breva) had a good ride, though it started off fairly cold in the mid 40's. Eventually it warmed up to around 60 or so. We stopped at the Ducati dealer in Ormond Beach, as well as J&P Cycles and the Harley Davidson dealer there. After that we stopped at the Moto Guzzi/Aprilia/Vespa dealer down the road. I test rode a really neat bike with an automatic transmission called an Aprilia Mana. Very nice!

On the way back, Marco got stopped by the fuzz for going 70 in a 50 zone. However, Marco is an attorney and he works with the police so he carries a badge in his wallet. I don't know if that made the difference, but all he got was a cheerful warning and a Merry Christmas from the officer :)

By the way, the big oil slick in one of the pics below was not from our bikes. I think maybe there was a Harley parked there before we arrived :) Heh, just kidding!

Two years with the Breva

Today marks 2 years since I bought my 2006 Moto Guzzi Breva 1100. She passed 29,100 miles the other day. The Breva has been a GREAT bike, taking me to California and back and many other places across this great country with nary a whimper.

Gator Bound!!

Myself and two of my good buddies, Paul "Slacker" Miller from Ohio and Mike "Stal" Caniglia from Nebraska are going to the Gator Bowl on New Years Day!

The Nebraska Cornhuskers (8-4) will be squaring off against the Clemson Tigers (7-5) in Jacksonville, FL.

GO HUSKERS(?)