2013 USA Motorcycle Tour: Chapter 1, Preperations (and lack thereof)

Ever since I started riding, I've wanted to do a motorcycle tour. Blasting through state lines and living out of tank bags has an adventurous charm that I find impossible to resist. My 2011 trip to Indianapolis revealed but a taste of what (to me) an ideal motorcycle journey would be like, and I yearned for another trip with more mileage, more scenery and more tight twisting tarmac. 2013 was the year I was determined to make it all happen.

Ah, Indiana. Long ride ...

... but very boring.

The first rule I had set for the trip limited the number of riders to four. Any more riders and every gas stop would turn into a picnic, every food stop would turn into a full course meal and the hotel bathroom would resemble a giant chocolate lava cake explosion. As word of the trip spread, the four spots filled in quick and before long, I had assembled my party of merry men:

Ricky and his bone stock 2007 GSXR600. It was comfortable, 100% stock, 100% reliable and perhapse the most appropriate machine for the trip (out of our group anyways).

Alok and his riced out 1999 YZF-R6. Rattle can black paint, check. Massive rear sprocket, check. Excessively annoying HIDs, check. Did I mention the crank case breather blew smoke like a freight train? If any bike was going to explode, this was it.

Me and my highly tweaked ZX-7RR. Aside from the solo tail, dodgy suspension, barely broken in motor, spotty fueling, and hilariously vicious brakes, my ZX-7RR was the ultimate touring machine.

George and his immaculate 1998 YZF-R1. Taking this bike on a multi-day blast through rough/dirty country roads is like playing rugby with an Armani suit. On the other hand, it would look brilliant in photos.

With our group formed, attentions turned to dates. For reasons that made sense to at the time, we decided to depart on June 29 and return on July 3 which put our journey directly in the crossfire of Canada Day and the 4th of July. But at least we had some great roads in the north eastern united states to look forward to. Weeks before our departure date we plotted out our detailed day-to-day maps with giddy excitement.

Day 1 - Mississauga, Ontario > Lock Haven, Pennsylvania
Day 2 - Lock Haven, Pennsylvania > Utica, New York
Day 3 - Utica, New York > Lebanon, New Hampshire
Day 4 - Lebanon, New Hampshire > Elizabethtown, Vermont
Day 5 - Elizabethtown, Vermont > Mississauga, Ontario

Days before the trip the bikes got some new fluid and were probed to ensure nothing was going to fall off, leak, explode or catch fire (as entertaining as the latter might have been).

With everything ready to roll, the weather forecast for the north eastern United States took a swan dive. Every state that we planned to visit had some sort of extreme weather warning; tornadoes, flash floods, power outages, bridge collapses, mud slides, the lot! You would have thought the north eastern United States were simply going to disappear into the Atlantic Ocean!

Image stolen from accuweather.com

The news hit like a swift kick to the jugular. You see, we had planned the trip with the assumption that there would be fluffy clouds, azure skies, gentle breezes and magical unicorns. As a result, no one had bothered to pack stuff to deal with the wet and cold. Fortunately I managed to scramble some Frog Toggs from Royal Distributing in Whitby. My fellow adventurers however only had Jesus as their rain gear.

Despite only having a prayer for a rain coat, my brave band of riders decided democratically to carry on with the quest to ride the roads of the rain bogged United States as planned. Thus began my first real motorcycle road trip! What will happen? Will Alok's bike explode in the Adirondack mountains? Will George's R1 eject it's rear wheel while rocketing down the interstate? Or maybe we'll all die in a massive freak accident involving an air bus, an oil tanker and a herd of wild bears! Find out in the next chapter of 2013 USA Motorcycle Tour!

My Grand Design 03

More progress on my garage.

First an apology to my whopping audiene of 4 blog readers: I'm sure you are tired of reading about my sad little 1.5 car garage but believe me, I'm just as sick of working on the garage as you are of reading about it. Nailing wood together and mudding drywall is the work of savages compared to the civility of wrenching on bikes. The good news is I can see the light at the end of the tunnle my garage project and I'm expecting more parts soon. So we'll return to our regularly schedule programming soon.

First things first though. I tossed the soft-as-mud wood screws that my main 8' bench was (unfortunately) built with. If your reading this and are new to building things with wood, do yourself a favour and avoid using these fiendishly aluring gold plated wood screws. They are about as good as screwing wood as a stick of butter. Look into deck screws or construction screws.

Wood screws in their rightful place

I got my main 8' bench done and my secondary 6' bench done. I coated everything with a nice thick layer of high gloss lacquer over it for maximum protection. Both benches are shimmed as level as it's ever going to get and I'm overall very pleased with how they turned out.

These new benches double my old work surface!

The next thing I took care of was that annoying shelf you see in the picture above. That shelf had bugged me for years because it was only good for piling stuff onto. You couldn't really organize anything on it and it got in the way of other things I wanted to put up like cabinets. Really, it was the wart on the backside of my garage; not only was it useless and painful in and of itself, but it prevented other things from getting done as well.

As you can see in the last picture, I was a little too enthusiastic with my hammers. The next thing to do was install cabinets. Now when I drew out my garage layout way back when, I used the dimensions of the first set of cabinets I found on the Canadian Tire website. What I didn't realize was that those cabinets were around $170 each! That would sum up to a staggering $680 for just 4 cabinets!

Those cabinets ain't cheap ...

So I went with these cheaper MDF cabinets that hold a decent amount of weight (30 lbs on each shelf) but more importantly cost only $225 for 3. I only need 3 because each cabinet is quite a bit larger than the one in my drawings.

... but these ones are

And up they go!

One thing I would say though is that you get what you pay for. These MDF cabinets were about as weak sauce as any other MDF product I've had the displeasure of owning in my lifetime. I'd eventually like to get some steel cabinets but that's for another day. For now I just needed funcional storage (even if it will far apart in a few years).

While I had been tearing things down and putting things up, my work benches got quite the work out and I'm happy to say that they held up nicely. They're not wobbly, haven't warped and the lacquer held up beautifully to dropped hammers, nails, drills and screw drivers (yes my fingers are very buttery).

After a quick clean up, it was time to restore the most important piece of equipment in my garage, the TV and PS3. I need to be entertained while I work.

So there we are, as of this morning that's what my garage looks like. I still need to install a peg board under the cabinets and some of the wires and cables routes need to be finalized. Other than that, it's just alot of cleanup.

My Grand Design 02

Some more progress on the garage. On monday, George dropped off my Harbor Freight drill press along with the Brembo calipers. In the excitement of touching forged Italian metal, I forgot (neglected) to mention the drill press in my last post.

Good things come in big packages

This will be the first and last time this drill press table will be so neat and clean

Some assembly required

 Anyways, George and Alok came by yesterday to pick up some things I was clearing out of the garage. Specifically, my old 4' bench and motorcycle bench. With those things gone, I finally had a place to put my new 8' bench which is a key component of my new garage layout.

Goal ...

... current state

The one thing that's REALLY bugging though is that I used wood screws to build the 8' bench which I should have used construction screws. The problem with wood screws is that they are litterally made out of gelatin. Not only does it take a massive amount of effort to coax them into the pilot holes but they wibble and wobble about wildy while being drilled... rather like Perez Hilton I suspect.


Constructions screws in comparison might as well be made of Adamantite laced with Chuck Noris. They cut into the wood clealy and effortlessly. In other words construction screws make wood its bitch.

We'll see if the wood screw construction of the bench still bothers me in a few month's time but I can see a rebuild in the future sometime..... probably once things settle down a bit.

My Grand Design 01

Somewhere over the last month or so the crazy idea of FINALLY sorting out my garage workspace entered into my brain, tumbled around, and stuck. Whatever the final design was going to be it had to

1. Fit two motorcycles
2. Contain basic workshop facilities (bench, hydro press, compressor etc.)
3. Contain entertainment facilities (32" TV, PS3, fridge)
4. Fit my wife's Santa Fe (which is a big boy)

After some days with Google Sketchup, I came up with the following design:

This is the target design

Snug fit ain't it?

The fancy paint and tiles aside, the design is quite simple.

The hydraulic motorcycle lift from the last post is actually a crucial part of the design. My old bench (which was essentially a wooden table) was a pain to use because it required two people to push a bike on top, so most of the time there was no bike on it. The result is floor space being taken up by a bike AND a bench. The hydraulic lift on the other hand acts like a permanent parking pad because its easy for me to push my bike on there alone. The result is a reduced footprint and its and handy lift to boot!

So having ticked the hydraulic lift off my checklist, the next thing I tackled was insulating the short wall of my garage (the one which will have the longer bench against it).

Bare studs makes for a cold garage

Now, I'm fairly handy around bikes and cars but when it comes to houses I'm really quite incompetent, so I called in favors from my dad and my cousin Ray.

Putting the fire-rated bats in

Covering up the vapor barrier with fire code drywall (REALLY heavy shit)

All done

Although it's hard to tell from the pictures, there ARE actually vapor barriers everywhere. If there's one thing I've learned from watch HGTV with my wife is that you need a vapor barrier. Watching Mike Holmes, you get the impression that they are significantly more important than ... say your organs.

Next on my list was dealing with the 12 ton hydraulic press I picked up form Harbor Freight along with my hydraulic lift. It came in three boxes and was taking up floor space so I put it together and pushed it into place along with the compressor.

When assembled, these scraps of metal are capable of pressing 12 tons!

A slightly obstructed view of the new hydraulic press. Note the newly taped and mudded drywall too

As of this writing I'm still missing a drill press to go next to the hydraulic press. George is headed to the US again soon and will pick one up for me so for now that corner is a bit lonely :p

While waiting for my drill press to come, I started to build my main 8' bench which is made entirely from framing lumber, glue, and wood screws... which in hind sight probably should have been decking screws... oh well live and learn.

Running out of space to build but carrying on anyways

Just about finished

The main 8' bench is just about done with only a top and some shelving required to finish it off.

While it's nice to have a warm garage to work in, I do find that I get more insects and mice. They don't last long thou because the only things to eat/drink in my garage are usually toxic enough to melt an medium sized elephant. This poor little fella found out the hard way:

Miky here probably drank too much brake cleaner or the mystery mix of engine oil, coolant and solvents in my waste tank

New Bench!

Now that I've got a lathe, I need some place fairly permanent to have it installed. I mean it's a 80 pound machine which isn't easy to heave out every time I need to turn something, plus I also need a place to store all the tooling that the lathe needs.

I haven't worked with wood for a while so I used the plans for a simple bench I found on Hammerzone.com as a guide to get me started. After dropping $30 at Home Depot I came home with a stack of cut 2" x 4" (which actually turned out to be 1.5" x 3.5")

Some pieces were slightly longer than others so I used a hand saw to trim them down

Unlike my previous projects I went out and got some proper measuring tools

I even go as far as marking where my screws are supposed to go ...

... before pre-drilling shallow holes for the screw heads to sink into

In addition to screws I also use glue... I'm not sure if this is overkill but since I don't know what I'm doing it's better to be safe than sorry

Rinse and repeat. Soon, I had the back of the bench complete

With the back lying on the ground, I started to build up the sides

Because I had to drill horrizontally for the side pieces I needed a clamp to hold the pieces together so the screws don't push them apart. I didn't have any wood working clamps so I used my valve spring compressor :)

Hammerzone's plans basically called for two corners of the bench to be constructed first so that you essentially end up with two 'halves' of the bench. Then you would screw the two halves together to make a complete bench. This minimizes the amount of akward angle drilling and keeps the work pieces in a managable size.

When mating the two halves of my bench, I had one problem corner...

... which was corrected using my valve spring compressor

The frame complete... all angles appear to be more or less 90 degrees

I didn't need anything super heavy duty for a bench top since I wasn't planning to be hammering stuff against it so two pieces of glued together plywood was good enough

A little stain gives it some class

This is how the bench sits now while its waiting for clear coat