By Robert Emslie
Here’s three-quarters of the legendary band Led Zeppelin riding trail bikes. They all appear to be on Suzukis, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant’s rides each looking like your standard two-stroke trail bikes, while the fat tire on John Bonham’s bike indicates that it might be an RV-90. No idea where John Paul Jones is, but then I guess somebody had to be taking the picture.
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Jeff Glucker
Catboats!
I haven’t seen any cool cars on my vacation, but I have gotten to ogle some of New England’s catboats, which for some reason aren’t as popular on the west coast. Catboats are rather wide (beamy) and thus pretty slow, but can be sailed easily by one person, even the large ones. If there were hipsters on the water, they would be the single-speed bicycle of the sea: not fast, but dead-nuts simple.
El Toro’s are reasonably popular up in the Puget Sound. They’re also beamy, slow and dead-nuts simple. I liked Lasers better, also dead-nuts simple, but low draft, plenty of added lightness and surprisingly fast. Both are on the small side. I wouldn’t go far from shore in either.
In general, catboats were developed for very shallow water (fishing and gunkholing in Chesapeake Bay, for instance). On the West Coast, most of the sailing waters are deep, so there was no need for the beamy, shallow catboats. However, there is a sleeker, modern catboat in production in Santa Cruz: http://www.wyliecat.com/index.html
Every glorious picture of the band that I have enjoyed since I was old enough to strike a BIC lighter, the band that was legendary for the “Red Snapper” incident in my home town, is now colored by Jimmy Page’s storied abduction, rape and long term kidnapping. Facebook sucks.
This week I successfully installed my first Helicoils. Of course, a successful Helicoil is proceeded by a failure.
Over the weekend I put my daughter’s Protege in the garage to repair an exhaust leak. The pipe from the cat down under the engine had rusted and separated from the downstream pipe. In the process of removing the nuts from the cat, two of the three studs sheared off and the third threaded out of the flange. My initial thought was to replace the cat, but an exact fit was $250+. So, off to NAPA for a 10mm X 1.5 Helicoil kit and a 13/32 drill bit (about $50). Long story short, got the holes drilled mostly in the same place, the Helicoils installed and everything back together. One bolt felt like it was just spinning, maybe my sloppy drilling left the Helicoil to loose. Her car’s drivable again and no longer sounds like flatulence, so I’m calling it a success.
Did you get original helicoils? I bought cheap ones once, and the tool that’s supposed to set the coil and brake the “nose” of the coil twisted and bent under the load… but aside from that it worked rather well, eventually.
Yes, I assume so anyway. They were co-branded with the Helicoil and NAPA logos on the package. The tap, tool and the Helicoils worked well, it was my sloppy hand drilling that likely caused the trouble. With two of the three tight and one mostly tight, hopefully it’ll hold well enough.
Twice as expensive as mine (for M8) – well worth it next time, I guess.
I still have a 1/4″-20 HeliCoil kit I bought at NAPA (it’s got the old Balkamp name on the box) in 1978. I used it to fix air cleaner stud holes in the air horn of a Holley 5210c carb on my first car, a ’75 Vega.
So I removed the rhs doorcard of the p-car to put some plastic foil there, to protect the doorcard against moisture.
I removed a spoonful of glass debris from the bottom of the door frame, greased the window lift, and ordered some new rubber stripping.
Then I realized: the garbage bag I wanted to abuse as moisture dam was bio-degradable, probably not the smartest choice I guess? Need to see if I get some old-school PVC or something.
My source for quality plastics at very reasonable prices:
http://usplastics.com
Thanks! My neighbor said he’d have some vapor barrier leftovers from his current carpentry project, so that will do I guess. I hope I’ll never see it again anyway… but I’m also naive.
any confirmation from fellow australian hoons that that is a NSW plate on the bike on the left?
That’s what I was going to ask – it looks like an Aussie plate to me, too.
and i have been reliably informed that those are gum trees (or eucalypts of some sort anyway) in the background so it appears we spotted correcctly