ReconRat

oh great, now I got a BeeGees song stuck in my head...

http://www.intermot-koeln.com/ Intermot Cologne 2010 (Koln) October 6-10 An hour and a half to get there. Nürburgring, Nuerburg, Germany is an hour and a half to the East. You won't see the Superbike races there. They start Friday Sep3, oops. Learn to say this. I said this a lot... "Ich bin amerikanisch. Mein Deutsch ist nicht gut." But I could say it like a German, so they would always help me out. (Well... at least they didn't laugh at me....)

Small towns, but you won't be far from Frankfurt, Brussels, Amsterdam, Luxembourg or Paris even.

There's an Ohio PRO MOD Busa runs in Ohio. Didn't see anything from Ohio that's faster. 2009 AMA Dragbike Track or Treat Nationals - Pro Mod Summit Motorsports Park, Norwalk Ohio 6.655 192.55 6.742 198.17 6.641 198.82 6.692 202.45 No clue if he's on the forum...

And a few standards, not cruiser, not sport.... standards... gotta love them...

I do freeways, and in heavy traffic even. I'm not a big fan of the stop and go though. I generally stay in the slow lane or the fast lane, in heavy untrusted traffic. I will and have whipped off the road onto the berm. Many times. Better safe than sorry. The other traffic seems to always understand, and let me right back into traffic. Of course, there is always one nut out there in the crowd. Too bad they are often hard to spot. Disclaimer: Freeways can be, and are, dangerous. Decisions have to be made faster, or at least without hesitation. I've got a lot of practice. It's still not the best place to be...

Surprise again! The Chinese mega traffic jam is back, on a different freeway. This one is smaller, about 1/3 the first one. Some estimates are gridlock within 5 years. http://www.asiaone.com/Motoring/News/Story/A1Story20100830-234637.html

Or I could use my Biker Name... which nobody on here actually knows, heheh...

Better Now?

Having blown out several tires while moving... I don't skimp on tires. Especially the front tire. I like nice new tires with no holes in them. And I'll pay extra for a better tire. I had to take off a rear tire that had only about 500 miles on it, and replaced it. And no, tires aren't fragile. I've worn several rear tires down to the cord. But not past that...

Not really, lots of close calls. Unless you want to count that really weird ride down the mountain that ran over thousands of snails, cockroaches and frogs. edit: wait.. I've had birds fly into the side of the front wheel. Didn't go well for them...

How's that look?

I'm sorry, but I really can't get past the concept of a nearly 2 trillion increase in debt in a single year...

Fixed it for you...The Wiki information, now showing the increase per year in Trillions of dollars...

ummm, debt and spending aren't the same. Although doing both excessively is a formula for disaster.

Yup, it finally passed. It only needs the Govenator to sign it. I'd expect other states to try something similar. There are already laws for noise, but this is an EPA law, requiring the EPA sticker on the muffler can. That makes it easier to enforce without using the decibel meter test stuff. At a previous go around, it had been considered to make the stock muffler system mandatory. That's pretty close to what this does. The Mercury News Considering how many motorcycles are running modified cans or pipes, this is a huge change.

That reminds me, I saw two newbies on sport bikes last week. The second one stiff armed the left turn. He straightened out his outside arm and leaned away from it twisting his body. Like, putting his back to the street inside the turn. Umm, that's not the way it's done... It looked really odd, I had to stare... oh and they were both squids w/ no helmets...

A rumor that I remember from back in the 1980s, was that a thorium-fluoride reactor was built and operated overseas. The information about that vanished. They aren't very big, you could fit one in a big garage with a tall ceiling. Yes, that means the setup is simple and just about anyone could build one. I knew a fair amount about them back then, and was honestly trying to figure out how to downsize one and fit it in the back of a van. No can do...

http://www.facebook.com/ReconRat fixed it...

A bit expensive to get progress, but it could easily replace the electrical power grid we now use. Even better, we could sell or give them to other countries without worry of somebody building a nuclear weapon.

Agreed, but I try to watch every car behind me, no exceptions.

I used to really like marking my tires. But it would always wear off. I hope this new stuff lasts longer. I might try again. (Ok, the old stuff wasn't much more than a crayon...)

Yes, stay to one side or the other, so you can get out of Dodge. Watch your mirrors, you probably should have seen that one coming. I can't count how many times I've moved out of the way. I've been hit three times from behind on a bike. Twice by cars and once by another motorcycle. All three times were stationary. That's an average of once every 14 years. Most of them were at night in bar districts. And I missed one last year or the year before, by sliding down the gutter on the right side of a van. I don't even think the van knew I did that.

It seems to me one particular bike was getting better than 200hp on the dyno...

I can believe that. Let's say that 80% could be corrected if caught early. And I didn't think about electronic controls masking the problems. Bummer... I'm an old time mechanic, youse youngsters with your fancy stuff, geez... edit: I did read in the hotrodders.com forum that a bad 1-2 solenoid can cause a failure to shift to fourth. There's no diagnostics for that, and it doesn't even make sense. But apparently it worked for someone. A typical trial by error seems to be to replace both solenoids and see what happens.