This page is a collection of random photos and stories.

Restoring an old Motorcycle
Winter, 2006
 

25 year old bike in January, 2007

Over the next couple of months I fixed or replaced the broken or worn out parts. I finished putting the bike back into riding shape, started it up, and rode it around the snowy neighborhood. While I didn't restore the bike to showroom condition, it's now in good riding condition and looks nice for a 25 year old piece of machinery.
 

Replacing a Transmission
May - July, 2005
 

Eric drives the family's old Isuzu Trooper, bought new in 1986. This venerable old car was our main vehicle for a decade and has made countless trips between the San Francisco Bay Area and Utah and been the sag wagon on many self-supported mountain biking trips to Moab and Mount St. Helens.

One Saturday evening in May, 2005, Eric called to say that something was wrong with the Trooper, only 4th gear worked. He and his friends were able to limp the car into a parking lot. The next day, Eric and I went down to Redmond and drove the car home. Here's a puzzler in the spirit of Car Talk. How did we drive the car home with only 4th gear available? The hill to our house is far too steep for 4th gear alone. Furthermore, it would be very difficult to slip the clutch enough to get the car moving in 4th gear. The answer is at the end of this story.

On Memorial Day, Eric and I spent three hours removing the transmission and transfer case from the car. We tried draining the oil from the transmission first, but only a drop came out. When we took off the front transmission cover, the gears from the main shaft driving the secondary shaft were completely worn away and melted. 4th gear only worked because it's a 1:1 gear ratio and in that position, the transmission simply connects the front shaft to the rear driving shaft.
 

Looking on the internet, I discovered that a rebuilt transmission costs thousands of dollars. For a car as old as the Trooper and worth virtually nothing, a rebuilt transmission wasn't a viable option. Instead, I ordered a used transmission from Japan through a broker in California for about $400. When it arrived, I had to order several replacement bearings and gaskets. We spent a few hours moving parts from the ruined transmission to the "new" one and put everything back together with new gaskets.

On Saturday, July 3, we spent six hours putting the transmission (and all of the associated brackets, wires, hoses, etc.) back in the Trooper. All's well that ends well and the Trooper is back on the road. Hopefully, Eric learned something, but it's probably not what I wanted him to learn.

Puzzler answer: we put the car in 4wd-low and in that range, the car not only had the power to start from a standing stop, it had the power to drive up Union Hill (at a top speed of 25 mph).
 

This photo is a picture of Eric and the Trooper when they were both relatively "new". I imagine he's saying to himself, "Some day this baby's going to be mine!"

 

Building a Zipline
Spring, 2005
 

In the spring of 2005, we decided to make a thrill-ride zipline as a family project. We bought 250' of 3/8" galvanized steel cable and a Petzl tandem double pulley. How hard could it be to install a zipline? It turns out that it's a lot more difficult than it seems. Our first attempt was to install the line between a tree at the top of a treehouse platform down to a tree at the bottom of the property. It's probably a drop of 40 or 50 feet. We used three come-a-longs connected in series to tension the wire. Before sending down one of the kids on an inaugural run, we connected a bucket weighing fifty pounds to the pulley and sent it down the line. The bucket screamed down the wire, hit the stop bolt at the bottom, and kept right on going. The bucket continued another 30' through the air before crashing into the blackberry stickers. From the launching point on the treehouse platform, we saw a large deer jump out of the thicket from the sound of the crashing bucket. We tried a number of adjustments to that particular zipline location, such as moving the endpoint higher up the terminating tree and adding more slack to the line. It was to no avail. There was still too much vertical drop and any potential rider would smash into the tree at the end of the ride.

Our second attempt was to move the zipline over to another set of trees with less vertical drop. Still, the end of the zipline had to be attached nearly 30' up a tree at the endpoint and the rider would hit the end with too much speed. In addition, getting off the zipline at that height was difficult.
 

The first two zipline locations went down a long hill in the backyard. In order to ease the amount of vertical drop, the third and final location cut transversely across the hill. Half of the 250' ride begins in the woods. We hacked a path through the trees and dug a channel through a berm.
 

A rider is prevented from slamming into the anchoring tree by an old dirt bike tire. The zipline is threaded through the tire and the tire acts as a shock absorber. A rider ends up about eight feet in the air, which is low enough that Allison and her friends can easily jump off. A short trailing rope allows a rider to tow the pulley back to the starting point for another ride.