An Ode to Anti-Seize

Oh lustrous golden-brown ooze

Oh wondrous copper goop,

That plates the parts that mate

Inside this motorcycle,

Especially those that vibrate.

I paint them all

With the brush inside the can

Then put them back together

And see? How well it ran!

I knew I was in trouble when I first put a socket on the exhaust header flange bolt on the front cylinder of the ’99 Sportster that recently showed up in my garage.  One clue was the 92,000 miles showing on the odometer when it arrived.  The other was how it lived in a carport its entire life, and those pipes had never been off.

On an EVO Sportster, the two studs holding each head pipe in place are 5/16” diameter, and every time this bike was ridden to work, rain or shine, those studs would warm up to cylinder head temperature, then cool back down, while the vibrations introduced by the 45-degree V-twin engine rigidly mounted to the frame helped to gall the threads on the studs or the nuts enough to freeze them in place.  So when I put the socket to the first one and loaded the 3/8” Snap-on breaker bar with enough torque to feel the stud begin to flex under the load I was well aware that the force needed to break that nut loose might well exceed the force needed to twist that stud in half, or strip the fine threads at that spot.  That is known as testing to destruction.

In a mess like that, you have several choices, of which I had the good fortune to learn about by way of working for some 25 years with Bob Bentler, one of the true metal magicians, in the Machine Shop at the City of Seattle.  Bob raced in the SCCA Class C Sports Car leagues, and owns several Lotus cars, including a 7 and a 23, just for fun.  He taught me how to braze, and silver solder, and how to straighten a drive-shaft with a torch, and how to rebuild engines, and many other things over the years, but, mostly, I learned from him how to take things apart.

The first of the old tricks I learned was a process called “upsetting the metal”.  That involves a precise blow, or series of blows, delivered to exactly the right spot on the frozen fastener at exactly the right angle with exactly the right punch in such a way as to deliver a shock load through the threads, so as to break the rust that had formed as the two metals bound themselves together with oxides of iron formed at the point of contact.  After the initial blow, a generous portion of penetrating oil is a good thing to introduce to the joint.  The smell makes it seem like you’re working again.  GM X-88 is the shit here, though some swear by Kroil, but any light oil works, really, even Hoppe's Gun Oil.  In the case of a nut on a stud, a tap with a bit of hollow tubing or a hole punch along the axis of the stud will sometimes help.  Then you work the socket back and forth, each time hopefully going a little bit farther until you achieve one whole turn, which is usually enough to spin the nut free.

If that doesn’t work, you need heat, or time, or both.  I knew one old guy who, about trying to remove the cylinder block from a 650 Triumph engine that had laid in the grass behind someone’s barn for a few years, told me this one:  “I built a wooden frame that clamped to the cylinder block in such a way as to hold the engine in the air about one inch, with all the base nuts removed and all the weight of the bottom end on those piston rings.  Then I poured about a half-cup of penetrating oil in each bore, and went away.  Every few weeks, I would check on it, and add a little oil if it looked dry, and maybe tap on the top of the pistons with a block of two by two.  Then one day, about six months later, I checked on it and found the crankcase on the floor.  It just took patience, of which I had plenty in this case.”

If you must resort to the hot wrench or the nut breaker, I consider that a failure.  It really depends on the situation.  In the case of the Sportster, I used a propane torch to heat up the nut, then sprayed more oil on it as it cooled, then worked it back and forth with the breaker bar until it finally came loose.  I bet I spent 6 hours on those 4 nuts over two days.  Good thing I didn’t charge myself anything to do it, I couldn’t afford me.

Part of the reason why that Sportster was a good buy for the guy who came and got it was the fact that, as I went through that bike and replaced every bearing in the wheels, swingarm and steering head, I coated every nut and bolt that went back on that bike, other than the ones for which Loctite is called out in the Service Manual, with a good thick coat of Permatex Copper Hi-temp Anti-Seize Lubricant.  As I have learned, that means he can park the thing in his carport and ride it back and forth to work for the next ten years, and those nuts and bolts will stay right where I put them, and still come back off with ease.  That’s the beauty of that stuff.

Both Honda Shadows that I am currently working on exhibit the same neglect brought on by exposure to weather and lack of maintenance that is experienced by all too many motorcycles when they get to the point where their storage cost exceeds their value and they get abandoned to the weeds and the weather.  This is especially true when you have steel cap screws torqued into aluminum castings.  I’m finding every screw is coated with yuck as it comes out, requiring a visit to the wire brush wheel before the application of the anti-seize, and another one is saved for posterity.

So that’s the point of this story.  If you want what you put together to come back apart someday, goop it up!  That stuff works up to 1800 degrees Fahrenheit, because of the colloidal copper suspended in the solution, and it works on stainless and high-carbon steel, cast iron, aluminum, Monel (that’s the metal, not the painter), brass, copper, nickel, just about anything you want to spread it on that is not toast.  It’s enough to make a guy wax poetic, or something...   :-{)}

Old Friends

The road stretched on ahead straight as an arrow through the scrublands into the distance, where it could be seen curving up out of sight around a distant mesa.  My motorcycle rumbled comfortingly under me as we sailed together under dreamy skies streaked with pale yellow as the rising sun at my back found the horizon.  Up ahead, in the morning light, I saw another rider going solo through the desert.

I caught up with him on the curves going up the hill, but did not pass out of courtesy.  The bike, an old Shovelhead, looked somehow familiar, as did the man in the saddle, an obvious old-timer by the leathers and the ancient Bell full-face helmet with the white hairs blowing about underneath.  As if by signal, we both pulled off at the overlook where the road crested the hill.

Bikers on the road are a common family, so when you pull in to a stopping point and see another bike already parked, that’s where you go, automatically.  I’ve met world travelers that way, and old friends, but nothing that prepared me for the shock when the old man climbed off his bike and pulled off his helmet.  It was Stoney.  A man I had not seen in ten long years, a man who rode with me through thick and thin, stood at my back when I got in a beef at the bar, and always had a good word on him somewhere.  The thing was, and the reason it was such a shock, was that Stoney had died out on Highway 50 one night, alone in the dark in a snowstorm, ten years ago.  We called him Stoney because he always had a joint hanging out of his mouth, and because he could be hard as a rock when he needed to.

I wrapped him in a bear-hug.  “Stoney, you old dog!  Where the hell have you been, and tell me how it is I’m seeing you now, when it seems like yesterday I was at your funeral?”  He held me off at arm’s length and smiled, then turned me around with one hand on my shoulder while he pointed out across the vast open spaces all around us. “I been ridin’,” he said,  “That way goes north into the mountains, and they go on forever, and that way goes to the ocean, where whales cruise near the shore and you can get on a boat and sail the seven seas.  I came back here to pick you up.  You startin’ to catch on now?”

Suddenly, I remembered another funeral, more recent.  I looked down at my own leathers, and realized they were all brand new.  I glanced at my bike, and saw that all the chrome was polished, the paint was perfect, and the tires were new.  “Yeah,” said Stoney.  “I been waiting 10 long years for you to die, too, so I could show you around.  Now let’s get riding.  You’ll notice that your gas tank never runs empty here in heaven, and the beer is always cold at the place we’re headed for lunch, Saddle up!” :-{)}

Avian Wisdom, or feathers on the brain

Much is made of old stories and legends, the sort of forgotten lore to which Poe often referred, or Coleridge in his opium-induced dreams.  Generations of herbal expertise and wisdom are forgotten as elders die in sad circumstances without proper respect, and other wisdom is purposely ignored by those in power for whom personal economic considerations outweigh the common good.  That’s why I was happy to have an opportunity to bring out just one tiny fragment of an old wives’ tale that just might be based on ancient rumor which in turn was first noted on a fragment of stone tablet from an early Egyptian dynasty that pointed out some peculiar properties of hummingbird shit.

Now the hummingbird, when you think about it, is something close to the perfect machine, that intakes purest sugar water from my feeder, along with the most delicate of pollens and blossom effluvia that emanates from the various flowering plants that populate the grounds around here as they buzz around and dive bomb us when their feeders get low, pure energy on display, with attitude.  Ask yourself, have you ever seen a hummingbird shit?

I mean, compared to the chickadees, nuthatches, finches and flickers that mob the seeder and the suet cakes, with the resulting random pile of guano, sunflower seed shells and millet hulls piling up on the ground below, the hummingbirds leave no sign under either of the two feeders hanging off our deck that what goes in must somehow come back out, if for no other reason than to show they’re alive.  It was only after long periods of time spent nursing a beer in the Adirondack chair placed strategically under the feeder that I was able to observe the eliminatory function in operation in the genus.  It seems that, in the act of taking flight after a session at one of the ports on the sugar water feeder, and, precisely as the momentary pause to hover above the perch and scan the area then decide what direction in which to fly ends, a miniscule droplet of perfectly clear fluid is ejected from under the tail of the bird as it rockets off into the distance.  And it was only when, as I reached for my beer, and felt that tiny drop land on the top of my head where the forest is a little thin for lack of trees, that I achieved enlightenment.

At the time, I chuckled, of course, said a bad word at the retreating derriere of the offending bird, and forgot about it.  It was only after I woke up the next morning, and realized that my usual aches and pains were gone, there was a spring in my step that wasn’t there before.  I wandered through a very fine day in a pleasant haze as everything seemed to work out just fine.  It was only later, after the effect had worn off, that I began to suspect there might be something about the hummingbird shit, and started doing some research on the subject.

Sure enough, the ancient Egyptians found some mystical properties about hummingbird shit, and decided it was to be reserved only for the pharaohs and their most favored concubines, for whom its aphrodisiacal qualities alone were a special treat.  In the right quantities, and when applied with the proper rites and prayers, godlike powers would be awarded to those who lived through the ordeal, it was rumored.  I was determined to find out if the rumors were true.

Day after day, in the interests of Science, I took my position under the feeder, with my arm strategically placed to occupy the most likely trajectory of any ejected missiles of mystical awareness that might emanate from the miniscule anus of the subject bird.  I believe I might have been impacted by a couple of them during the collection phase, but can’t be sure, as I was asleep at the time.  I did get crapped on by a crow, however, but nothing came of it beyond him learning a few new words.

Long as I don’t run out of beer, the quest will continue, if only in the interest of bringing hope to the masses.  Look for the Fund My Great Idea campaign, which should be announced in time for the Donald Trump Vice-Presidential Announcement (I’m not saying I’m under consideration, and I’m not saying I’m not).  Those who contribute will be among the first to benefit when I wake up with super powers on the morning of the New Day.  Peace, Brothers and Sisters, and may the Hummingbird Be with you.  :-{)}

Montana teaser

There is a road that leads to heaven, and it starts in Salmon, Idaho.  You could argue that it starts well before that, and I would concede at some point, but Salmon is still the jumping off spot, in my mind.  If you come in from the South on State Highway 28 out of Idaho Falls, or up the western valley on US 93 from Butte City, that would be two sides of the same coin.  If you snuck across the National Forest from Sun Valley up through Challis on 75, then the rest of the way on 93, that’s extra points in your cool road file.

But it all starts the next morning as you tank up belly and bike, then head out into the cool morning air northbound on 93 along the Salmon River Canyon.  The road leaves the river at a place called North Fork and winds up a long canyon to the top, where, at a place called Lost Trail Powder Mountain, you are presented two choices: stay north on 93 as it comes down into the valley of the Bitterroot River on the way to Hamilton and Lolo Pass, a worthy destination in itself, or turn right on Highway 43 and drive through heaven on your way to Montana.  I say take that right, every chance you can.  Just past the turn is a parking lot surrounded by trees, among which more than a few people have chosen to have their ashes scattered as their final resting place.

Highway 43 doesn’t roll, it meanders, accompanied on either if not both sides by the classic stream like the ones in “A River Runs Through It”.   The two-lane blacktop was smooth and freshly paved the last time we went this way, and the clean fresh air combines with the wide open sky and the heartbreakingly green fields completely devoid of any signs of civilization beyond the macadam itself to bring on a bad case of traveler’s grin.  Then it gets better.

As the highway exits the hills it sets up an automatic reaction that occurs in most riders at that point.  The trees fall away, and the road cuts straight as a slightly dog-legged arrow across a wide open valley with the small town of Wisdom clearly visible in the far distance.  There is no stock in the fields, no obstructions or traffic on the road, so what else can you do but lay down on the tank and hold the throttle wide open until you see God or attain Wisdom, whichever comes first?    You’ll know you’re there when you see the floozy on the false front above Conover’s Trading Post.

So if you’re thinking about a road trip this summer, there are no bad choices in Montana, beyond Cut Bank and Browning, about which more can be said later.  In the meantime, let’s get out and do some riding!  :-{)}

Soapbox

Soapbox

… man goes into back yard, digs through pile of junk, comes up with sturdy wooden crate.  Man takes this crate out to the street and places it, upside down, on the edge of his property line, steps up on to it, and speaks thusly:

“All Right!  I Have Had Enough!  I have heard enough of your lying, enough of your exaggerating, enough of your Point-The-Finger distractions to know when I’m being scammed!  Enough Already!”

“It’s time to let go.  Your weasel has popped.

And I’m talking to both of you, on the right and on the left.  This presidential election in America, just like the one in Brazil, is the same old stuff.  The poor people have the votes, and the rich people have the money.  Oh, yeah, and there’s a lot more poor people.

So all of you, with the possible exception of Bernie and Elizabeth, are trying to disguise the true nature of the conflict, which is why all the violent reactions don’t make sense at first.  It’s Science and Truth against Lies and Religion, and for some it will look like the second American Civil War.  For others it will be the end times, unless they get disappointed, and the Anti-Christ fails to appear.

So for the rest of the Silly Season, you can stop all the bullshit, please.  When you root in the sty to find shit to pick up and throw at them, you get some on you, along with all the shit they toss in reply.  After a while you both look like nothing but pigs, happy in shit.  Then you realize that most of the shit is coming from people who are paid to produce that shit, and it’s all being broadcast by networks that make more money on shit than they do on real news!

This is not just a request, here’s what I’m going to actually do to you:  I’m going to tell Facebook, every time I see a picture of what’s-his/her-face, to block everything from that source.  No clicking on the click bait, no forwarding, no comments, no reply.  I’m just gonna use Facebook to talk to my friends.  I don’t wanna hear any more of your shit.  Trolls, stay under the bridge.

So if one of your analysts comes to you one day and says, “We’re seeing a disturbing trend where more and more people are tuning us out, and we’re not sure why.”, tell them it started right here.  Call it the Enough Already Movement.”

Man steps down off crate, picks it up and carries it into the back yard.  This time, he uses it to store stuff, and gets organized. Then he goes back to work.  :-{)}

The worst tool ever made

There’s a thing that happens in a man’s brain, sometimes, when he steps in the door of a place like Harbor Freight, or opens a mail-order catalog.  It’s as if the air is a bit lighter, the light a bit brighter, maybe, there’s a willingness to suspend disbelief, perhaps, that’s the only way I can justify the decision in the cold light of day.  You see something, and it just speaks to you… it says, "buy me, and you and I can go off and have fun together…”

I suspect a similar process is at work when my wife steps through the doorway at Joann’s Fabrics, but, in the interest of continuing enjoyment of domestic bliss, which can be defined as the avoidance of spirited conversations, we won’t go there.

I was quick to adopt the multi-tool, when the concept first arrived, in the form of the Swiss Army knife.  They had the scissors, and the all-important but soon lost toothpick.  As the form mutated, the knife blades became less important and the main tool was now a pair of pliers, as in my Gerber.  But this!  This was truly something new.  A Combination claw hammer, pliers with pipe jaws and a wire cutter built in!  And it’s Red!  Just like a Swiss Army knife! What more could anyone ask?  So I bought one, of course.  Then I got it home, and really looked at it for the first time.  Ugh.  Whatta piece of junk…

Here’s a picture:

Yes, that funny bent rod sticking out the back is one handle of the pliers.  The back jaw with the claw is fixed, so only the hammer nose moves.  As you can imagine, that skinny square handle is not very comfortable. And the shape of the hammer makes it the opposite of needle-nosed.  Call it a hammer nose pliers. When you want to use it as a hammer, you capture the end of the handle in the little swivel clip at the bottom, which sorta matches with a hand-ground notch in the otherwise sharp-enough-to-stab-yourself end, if you haven’t already impaled the meat of one finger on the leaf spring that doesn’t go out quite as far as the handle.

Then when you secure the sharp ends with the clip and try to strike something with the blunt end of the hammer, you quickly discover another design feature.  The body of the hammerpliers is so short that the sharp end of the claw will rebound into the meat of your hand by your thumb and draw blood in two places at once.  You see the lengths to which I am prepared to go in order to bring you the results of scientific, thorough product testing, and I hope you’re grateful.

Then we get to the blades concealed in the handle of this wonder of modern tool design.  The first little short blade on the bottom is supposed to be a P-38 can opener with a screwdriver tip.  Unfortunately, the prisoner in whatever Chinese dungeon that produced this garbage did such a lousy job of grinding the P-38 edge that he wiped out half the screwdriver tip while making sure the P-38 was dull enough to have trouble with a cube of butter, let alone a tin can.  The blade is only .060” thick, which means it would have twisted in half the first time you tried to screw something with it, making you the screwee in this deal.  Opposite that is another weird little finger that is so stiffly locked in place it will pull your thumbnail loose and hurt for two days if you try to open it by hand, only to discover that it is a tiny little rounded finger that barely clears the hammer snout when deployed, bringing up the obvious observation that it has no useful purpose at all.  Maybe it’s for the reset buttons on a Gameboy.

The next blade is full length, about 2 ½”, and combines a sharp serrated edge with a crude nail file on one side and a tip that looks like a flat screwdriver blade but is only tapered on one edge, which means it is a scraper chisel for built-up crud on a flathead Ford engine block in a junkyard, or the guano deposited by a flock of seagulls on your garbage can lid the last time you made gumbo.  Be careful when using it, because there is no locking mechanism, which means it can and will bite you.

The adjoining full length blade is just that, a knife blade, albeit one that is only .070” thick and thus useful for only the lightest of whittling chores, and also lacking a lock.  And when you use this thing with either long blades deployed, the claw of the hammer fits nicely into the heel of your hand, where the sharp ends mark their spot and dare you to do something stupid.

On the back side of this egregious waste of steel is one slngle round Philips screwdriver blade, which, because it pivots from the middle of the handle, only sticks out a short reach from the handle on one side, and even then would only be useful if the immediate area around the screw on which you were trying to use it had room for the entire body of the hammpliers to swivel like an ice skater spinning in circles while balanced on one leg.

So then I take a good look at the body of the hamliers, which is quickly revealed as two formed rubber pads held in place by a cheap stamped tin cover that is secured top and bottom with two tiny bent tabs, like a cheap toy from the ‘50s that sparks and dies by the end of Christmas Day.  With the cover off, the true nature of this misbegotten excuse for a tool is revealed:  two thin stamped side plates held together with 5 little pins, guaranteed to fall apart within minutes of any attempt to accomplish any meaningful tasks.  The cheap covers are likewise guaranteed to fall off in your toolbox under the influence of gravity, which is where it should stay, unless you foolishly take it out and try to accomplish something with it and injure yourself instead.  Truly a jack squat of all trades.  One can only imagine the committee meeting at which this design was approved for production, and wonder at the quality and quantity of the drugs and alcohol that must have been involved in the process.

It would only be natural to give some thought to consideration of the type of person who would be foolish enough to buy something like this.  In my defense, I can only offer that it was red, very red. And it was for science!   And stay out of Harbor Freight!  :-{)}}

Blasphemy

There was an article in Sunday’s Times about a local Imam, Jawad Khaki, from Kirkland, who was quoted as follows when asked about his individual responsibility as a Muslim to respond to the radicals: … “Absolutely, because of the teaching in the Quran: When you kill an innocent individual, it’s as if you killed the entire humanity; when you save a person’s life, you saved the entire humanity”…

The point of his article was to say that most Muslims were peaceful and not extremist, but I noticed the very careful wording of his reply.  He said it was wrong to kill an innocent person, but what he did not say is, What about a guilty person?  Is it okay to kill them?

Furthermore, does not a statement like that automatically call up other questions, such as, What are the crimes that, when you are found guilty, receive the dispensation from God to ignore the First Commandment, Thou Shalt Not Kill?  Among those crimes for which God thinks you should be put to death, does the modern, moderate Muslim include Blasphemy and/or Heresy?  Therein lies the rub, as they say, because here in America, we have decided that Freedom of Speech trumps Blasphemy and Heresy every time.

It wasn’t always like that here.  Back in the days of the Pilgrims, while the Spanish Inquisition was going on about its campaign of genocide against native people everywhere, Heresy could get you hanged in the Colonies, and Witchcraft could get you burned.  And even in these relatively enlightened times in the West, there are still lots of Christians who fundamentally believe that it’s gonna come to blows at some point, and God is on their side.

Thoughts are energy, preserved in chemical reactions inside our brains, and when we remember them and transmit them to others by talking or writing them down we in effect send that energy out into the world to join the vast shifting flow of karma, or grace, or whatever your particular sect calls it.  Those thoughts can take the form of calls for Jihad, spread over the Internet, and set a person to action that causes innocence to die.  They can take the form of online bullying, and cause an innocent but fragile person to take their own life.  Perceived or not, all those negative thoughts from those whose minds are filled with hate are out there everywhere, a dark cloud over everyone.

Fortunately, there are positive things going on out there, too, that tend to counteract the bad stuff, a dialectical Yin and Yang of ebb and flow, action and counter-action, life and death.  The pendulum swings.

To a person with the ability to reason, it makes sense that the positive energy in the universe can be deliberately increased on purpose, by doing positive things like helping other people, having children, doing good useful work.  Quite often you see volunteers trying to directly save and heal the victims of the bad stuff right on the scene, as in the refugee camps throughout the world, the Habitat for Humanity builders.  Education is a positive thing, especially for those to whom it has been denied.  That’s why so many bad men, whose positions at the top of the food chain are threatened by it fight so hard to deny it, especially to their women.

So to our local Imam, and to all the others in the world who write articles and talk on TV about it, I ask for this favor:  Every Time some radical Imam in Pakistan, or London, or Paris stands in a pulpit and issues a fatwa calling the faithful to Jihad, would you please, all of you, promptly issue your own fatwa cancelling the Jihad!  Tell your faithful not to give those bad guys any money or help, and not to go kill anyone.

I’m basing this request on the guess that, if one Imam can issue a fatwa any time they want, why couldn’t you also?  Do Imams have levels, like, say, you gotta be a Bishop or higher to issue a fatwa?  And if a majority of Muslim priests, just like a majority of Catholic, Bhuddist, Hindu, Baptist, and any other one you want to name would be glad to do all jumped on those bad guy fatwas every time they came out, well, you’d think that would be pretty effective.

And it sounds reasonable to me, like something a reasonable person would do, and they’d have no reason not to.

So how about it, can you get that fatwa out pretty soon?  While you’re at it, be sure and tell them that Heresy and Blasphemy are not a big deal anymore, it’s just people exercising their God-given right to speak their minds, and, if you don’t like it, their Constitutional right to pick up their arms and blow your shit away!

Oops, I think I just commited Blasphemy… :-{)}