Bob's Eyes

Monday November 6, 2023 Guerneville CA.

Ride in the forest

I joined my brothers for a dirt bike ride up into the forest. We had to wait for a rain shower to pass before we took off. It came down hard for a few minutes, then mostly stopped. We are getting ready to take off.

We rode around for an hour or so. We had a few real light drizzles once in awhile but not enough to get wet. We looked around to see if any new edible wild mushrooms came out from the rain, but not much yet.

Break spot

We eventually made it up to the hill top where we take a break for a spell.

Smoke

We noticed what looked like some smoke out in front of us.

It was smoke all right, but it was rather brief, like they tried to start some wet brush on fire but it was too wet. I think this house did a lot of cutting for fire prevention last summer and they were trying to burn the brush piles without much success.

We left there and rode around some more and then headed back to my house.

Bike problem

Once I rested up, I went on YouTube to find out how to adjust spokes on the wheels as my rear tire was a bit wobbly and was hitting my chain causing it to make slamming noises as I rode around. So, I needed to try to adjust it to take the wobble out of it.

I set the bike up on it’s jack stand and used this old chair bottom as a pointer to check the tire run out as I turned it to find the spots that needed to be adjusted.

I used the tip of the chair mount as a pointer which I placed by the rim as I turned it.

This worked pretty good and I was able to take out most of the wobble. I then went around the spokes a few times to tighten them all up as they were pretty loose.

I got most of the wobble out. I need a new chain as it’s about worn out and it’s loose which is part of the problem the tire hits it.

I ordered up the chain and some better tools to do this job, like a much better spoke wrench then the adjustable one that was starting to round off the spoke nuts.

Crab

Both brothers were out crabbing on Saturday, opening day, so Barry brought me over another crab for dinner tonight. Yum.

Nice day.

Sunday November 5, 2023 Guerneville CA.

Rainy day

It was raining lightly when I got it going today, so what to do?

New tires for the dirt bike

I’ve e had new tires for the dirt bike for about a month or so. I put off installing them  as my bad back was giving me a bad time but now it’s a bit better so today was the day.

Tire tools

But first I  had to find the special tire changing tools. I looked where they should have been more than once and couldn’t find them. I didn’t give up and finally found them in a cardboard box I was going to get rid of eventually, so I now had no excuses not to do them.

Guy on YouTube

About a month ago I was checking out YouTube for how to change these kinds of tires as I haven’t done one of them in years. One guy I watched was really good at it so I saved the address to his video but I had to remember where I put that and finally found it.

I watched it several times and also watched the part I worked on for each step just before I started each step and things went pretty good doing it that way.

Let’s get to it

Now that I had all the tools and the video knowledge I jacked up the bike and took the front tire off as that one was supposed to be the easiest one to do and it was.

All I had to do was get the old front tire off the rim and put the new one on. It did go pretty easy especially watching the guy on YouTube do it first.

Back tire

I put the new front tire back on the bike and took off the back tire. It was supposed to be the harder one to do and it was, but I got it with a bit of effort.

I got the old back tire off without much trouble.

But getting the new back tire on was a bit more of a problem as the rubber is a bit thicker than the front tire, but I got it with a bit of persistence.

Test drive

It started to rain some more just as I got the new back tire on the bike. I got the wheel with the new tire all adjusted and needed to go test it out with a ride, but it was too wet to go far, so I just rode it around the yard a bit.

Clunky sound

There was a clunky sound from the back tire area that took me a bit of time to figure out what was wrong. After a few test rides I determined the tire was hitting the chain once in awhile causing that noise which wasn’t good. I put the bike back up on the jack stand and started the bike and watched the back tire go around. Seems the tire was a bit out of round for some reason which was causing the problem.

The spokes needed to be adjusted but that’s not an easy task and I was too beat to attempt that anyway.

Re-adjust it

I was really too beat to do that too, but it needed to be done so I adjusted the side of the tire away from the chain to hopefully miss the chain and took the bike for another test drive around the yard.

The clunk was gone. I’ll have to give it a good test drive up in the hills soon to really test it out. I only have a little adjustment left so I hope it’s good enough to work ok, otherwise I’ll need to get the wheel aligned to true it up.

Good to have that task done.

Nice day.