Saturday, February 27, 2010

Riding!!!

Finally, after what seems like the longest winter we've had since we lived here, there was a ray of hope today that it would soon be over and spring is coming! It couldn't have come sooner, lol! The last 3 weeks have been almost complete chaos at work, we got put on mandatory overtime 3 weeks ago. I'll definitely take the hours without complaining, but it makes for long, stressful days as the shop foreman and safety officer, I am definitely ready for some road therapy!

Today was our nicest day we've had in a long time, sunny with a little haze and topping out at 38 degrees. I got my 1st good day of riding for 2010 in today and my 1st real ride on my Sportster. I covered about 200 miles on Kansas back roads today and it felt great!! The sporty rides great, nice and smooth on the highway and the new pipes added some great tunes to the day. My single complaint of the day is the stock seat on the sporty absolutely sucks. My tailbone was killing me 20 minutes into the ride and is really hurting now. The only saving grace was that it's still too cold for my wife to ride so I was solo, enabling me to put my feet back on the passenger pegs. Being able to change up positions frequently made it tolerable, along with some ibuprofen, lol! One thing I really like about the sporty is the factory thumbscrew throttle lock. It's kind of a pain in the ass to set due to it's position and me wearing gloves, but once set it was more than good enough to shake out my right hand occasionally. So far, I'm really impressed with the sporty and like it more and more every mile I ride it. Other than the seat, it's a great scoot. Hopefully the weatherman is right and tomorrow is a little nicer so I can put some more miles on her!
Kansas is pretty flat, lol!
Obligatory poser shot-
my ugly mug, lol!-
Ride safe!!


Friday, February 5, 2010

Now it sounds like a Harley!!

The big brown truck showed up last week with a big brown box from Hooker!! I love getting parts, lol! The pipes showed up on Tuesday, that made for a long week waiting for today to install them. There's no heat in my garage, but at least it's out of the weather and it wasn't too cold, so with temps around 35 I headed out to the garage this morning and went to work. Pulling the stock pipes off was easy(isn't it always). Hooker's instructions were a joke, so it was just a matter of figuring out what went where and putting them together. It was relatively easy, the only real pain in the ass was getting a torque wrench on the exhaust stud nuts, there's not much clearance there. I think they're a huge improvement in looks and the sound is great, not too loud at idle and have a hell of a roar when you twist the throttle. Anyway, onto a couple pics-

Unfortunately, I won't be getting any seat time anytime soon, winter's not ready to give up just yet. This is the view out of my garage today-
Oh well, it is February in Kansas, it's to be expected. Maybe it's time to look into moving south, lol!