alpha whiskey hotel

Rick, manager of Geronimo, left Japan recently and left behind his 50cc 2001 Yamaha Vino moped (actually Victoria’s moped which she hasn’t learned how to ride yet). I have been wanting to learn a bit about how to work on bikes, so I have taken over the moped and will work on it during the summer.

In general the bike seems to be in decent shape mechanically — the clutch is smooth, whereas the clutches on 50cc mopeds tend to go gravelly after a while. Also, the bike has no problem getting up to 60 km/h which suggests to me that the drive belt hasn’t worn down (or has been replaced). There may be a bit of a problem with the choke, since it’s hard to start when it’s cold.

There are a couple of “roadworthiness” issues that I need to address — the tail light is not firmly attached to the bike, the horn does not work, and the lenses are missing from the turn signals. After that, I can get cracking on the cosmetic issues, where I will learn how to repair body work and paint plastic motorcycle panels.

So, here is Part 1, where I reattached the tail light to the moped.

Here’s what we’re starting with.

I must say that the rear fairing made of duct tape is not very attractive, and it may be a bit of a safety issue, as the tail light is not secured to the bike and is moving freely.

I took off the duct tape and found that some of the plastic from the rear fairing is missing entirely. It seems to have been kicked in at some point.

Here is the bike with the side fairings and rear fairing removed. Scooters are not very attractive without fairings; I guess that’s why they’re so expensive.

I took as many of the pieces of plastic as I had and cleaned them off, and then held the jigsaw puzzle together with masking tape. It’s still missing a lot.

I used a fiberglass repair kit (which consists of some sheets of fiberglass cloth, some resin, and some hardener) to build up some fiberglass from the inside of the panel to give it some structural integrity and hold all of the existing plastic in place.

Here is the repaired panel from the outside. The panel still doesn’t look very good, but it is strong enough that it can hold the brake light in place. I have put about 100km on the bike since then and it seems to be holding up well. The next step, once I take care of more roadworthiness issues, will be to fill in the cracks and missing areas with Bondo, then sand and repaint the panel.

Big sister and little brother together in the parking lot!

Stay tuned for Part 2 of the project, where I will address the issue that the bike is insufficiently horny.

Shane Sakata from The Nihon Sun recently put out a call to Japan Bloggers to take a snapshot out their window and post it along with some narrative. I did this same thing a couple days ago as the inaugural entry in my new incarnation of Picture of the Day, but I thought I’d post a higher-resolution photo and longer narrative here.

This view is from the window directly behind my desk in my 6th-floor office by Higashi-Nakano Station. The view looks Northbound at the construction on Yamate-dori, which has been ongoing since I came to Tokyo and probably for a while before then. The main result of the construction was the (so far) 6-kilometer Yamate Tunnel on the C2 Loop of the Tokyo Metro Highway. Now that the tunnel has been open for a year, they’re going through and refinishing all the roads that they tore up, as well as building interlocking brick sidewalks and a row of trees on each side of the road.

Having this bird’s eye view has not only given me something to look at when I need to take my eyes away from the computer (my coworkers are now all convinced that I should have been a civil engineer), but it’s also given me great insight into the road construction process. Great care is taken to minimize interruptions to traffic flow. In the attached picture, you’ll notice that the 2 northbound lanes have been shifted onto the sidewalk (rather than simply reduced to 1 lane) to allow for the construction on the island in the centre of the road. You should also be able to see in the right-hand side of the picture, some leftover lines in the road from where the southbound lanes were similarly shifted to allow for the construction there.

This construction (at least on the section of Yamate-dori that I can see from my window) will be ongoing until October, 2009. After that, I guess I’ll have to find something else to look at.

Years ago, I had a feature on this web site called the Picture of the Day; it was one album in my online photo gallery where I’d send a single snapshot from my mobile phone’s camera every day.  Problem was that it was costing about 6,000 yen/month just to mail the photos from my phone to the blog, and I wasn’t disciplined enough to update it every day if I couldn’t do it from my mobile phone.

Now that Softbank has finally included email traffic in its unlimited data transfer fee, I can finally start up the Picture of the Day again, and I won’t have to worry about going broke doing so!  Note that we’re not talking about high quality photos here, just a quick mobile-phone snapshot of something interesting that I saw that day, along with a couple sentences of explanation.

The Picture of the Day will be posted on this blog, but so as to not take over the whole blog, the entries are hidden from the main page and do not show up in the main RSS feed, and will not be automatically forwarded to LiveJournal or Facebook.   You can see the Picture of the Day by selecting that category in the category list to the right, or if you would like, you can sign up for the Picture of the Day RSS feed.

I’ve been a bit too busy to post much of anything lately, so I thought that I’d be lazy instead and just post a few snapshots that I’ve taken over the past little bit…

This is how you have to travel if you are planning on taking a suitcase anywhere by motorcycle. Coincidentally, this was also how I got a monitor home from Omiya just a week before…

I must admit that this is something that I never expected to see at a concession stand: Turkey Drumsticks

I was on my way home from the Grand Prix motorcycle race in Motegi, Japan, which as you might expect is a pretty testosterone-filled day. Luckily this car pulled into the 7-11 that I was stopped for a rest at, which balanced out the day nicely.

I really hate that the post office requires you to write “Small Package” right under your name and address like that. IT’S NOT TRUE, DAMNIT!

If I’d known that “Foreigner with Glasses” was an acceptable Hallowe’en costume, I could have saved myself so much time and effort!

Woke up this morning to a rare treat, an actual ground cover of snow! It was so unusual for Tokyo that I had to take some pictures while doing my walk from Nakamurabashi to Fujimidai to get my traditionl weekend-morning coffee and muffin.

My moped, which I had parked right outside my building because I was doing some pre-sale maintenance, had a generous helping of snow.

Some poor guy doing deliveries on his moped for the local drug store. Doesn’t really look like a very fun day to be riding.

The show is so wet and slushy that this guy might have been driving for miles and miles and still have this mountain of snow on top of the car.

As a Canadian, I still find it bizarre to see Japanese people carrying umbrellas when it snows. It makes sense, I guess — snow is, after all, just frozen rain — but I can not bring myself to do it. I wonder if the people who live in parts of Japan where it snows often carry umbrellas when it snows.

Japanese snowmen have only 2 balls. Somebody explained to me that the “model” for snowmen here is some religious guy who is always kneeling, not standing like North American snowmen. Note the snowman in the background is shaped like an Oni, to celebrate Bean-Throwing Day.

Getting the forts ready for battle. Note that it’s only adults who feel the need to carry umbrellas — kids out for a bit of a play in the snow with the other neighbourhood children know perfectly well that a bit of snow never hurt anyone.

Ah, snow chains. The perfect driving accessory for a day with a little bit of slush on the road. Well, now I know why the roads here are forever being resurfaced…

When all you have is a broom, everything looks like a dusty floor.

CIMG0677
Originally uploaded by awh_tokyo

Just returned from Cebu again a couple weeks back, posted my pictures yesterday. This also serves as a test of Flickr’s “Blog This” feature which should post to LJ automatically.

Edit: It only linked to one photo, not a whole set, for some reason. Here is the link to the set.

I’ve posted some new photos.. A couple of new things in “Everyday Stuff”, some pictures from a day trip to Kamakura last November (I just found the files recently), and some pictures of cherry blossoms.

The other week I drove out to Pearson with my new 70-210 lens in tow. I have pictures from both 06L and 24R (the wind changed while I was there). The results are in my airliners gallery, starting at picture #8.