Daughter - killer of trees (and tires too)

 So my daughter was known as "killer of trees" when she ran into a recently planted peach tree with her dirtbike and knocked it flat over.  Now she is also "killer of tires" after a blowout on I4 between Lakeland and Plant city.  

We were blessed that it wasn't raining and we were not up north in the snow.  The worrisome aspect was that she was on I4 (which is notoriously busy) around 7pm (dark at that point) and in a section with concrete barriers and very little room.  We were very impressed she got the car over safely and didn't bump the barrier.  She was only a few inches from the barrier on the right side though.  Before my dad and I got there to help her - I asked her to get out the right-hand side and see if the tire could be patched, etc - it took her a few minutes to get out but she came back with a "I don't think so Dad.." which is pretty self-evident now. I had thrown in a small "pancake" air compressor which I had pre-filled just in case.  Didn't need to bother. 

She only had few feet on the drivers side front (which is where the tire blew).  My dad parked behind and hugged the side of the road a bit to "convince" drivers to stay to the left a bit.  That helped a bunch.  I had not had the spare tire and jack out of this car before - was wishing I had brought a speed jack.  I just slowly worked the jack up - taking a bit of a rest here and there for my knees and to enjoy the very cool breeze from the tractor trailers speeding by a few feet away.

As I was sitting there getting the car jacked up, I started to wonder how she got out of the car from the passenger side - it seemed like there was no room.  All I could visualize was her climbing out the window onto the concrete barrier (with a drop-off on the other side) - sort of "The Dukes of Hazzard" style. She told me later she had just enough room to squeeze the door open and get out - only because she was at slight angle was that possible.  

It is kind of funny the way some obvious things escape a person at certain moments. When I was getting the jack, etc out of the back of the car, I found a short bright rod/stake which I thought was in with the jack, etc.  It was just cheap plastic and my mind just jumped to guess it was one of the "emergency items" which you could use to either wave cars around you or put out behind a car to make it more "visible".  I wasn't impressed by the cheap plastic though.  The next day though - I went back out and found it again..  As I looked at it in the daylight I was thinking "something is odd"..

I rotated it a bit and when I saw our last name "Case" written on it, I suddenly knew what was odd.  It wasn't an emergency item - it was out of an old kids horse shoe game and this stake simply ended up in with the spare tire, etc.   I got to laughing with my mom and I told her about it and said I was glad I didn't have my daughter out behind the car waving it at traffic.  We got a big laugh out of that thought.

Trying to find replacement tires now - it is an odd size of course.  Seems like only one or maybe two (less common) brands even make tires in the required size.  I had planned on putting run flat tires on as replacements but there are none in that size.  It is hard enough to find someone with a set of those tires from the 2 tire types.  

1 Thessalonians 5:18
King James Version

18 In every thing give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you.

DL650 front turn signal replacement/graft

As many other people mention, the DL650 turn signals are easily broken.  I found this out when I bumped the bike over into the riding mower one day which broke the front right signal beyond repair.

I wanted to replacement the front signals with something a little smaller and less fragile.  I had concern over replacing them with flush mount or short stalks due to DMV inspections.  What I finally decided on was grafting Lockhart Phillips units onto the stalk from the OEM units.  The end result was reasonable and meets the goals I had.

This image shows the OEM and the replacement for comparison.  

Here is the mess of pieces from my broken signal.  I hadn't cut the "extra" portion of the stalk off the broken signal at this point. A hacksaw worked fine on the rubber stalk but takes care to cut neatly.  Note that I had to cut the connectors off the unit so I could feed it through the hole in the OEM stalk.  A little soldering was done to connect the OEM connectors which made reconnecting to the wiring harness easy.

This shows what I kept from the OEM.  First remove the lens cover and take the hard plastic portion on the left off of the rubber stalk.  Below, I had already cut the "extra" portion of the rubber stalk off at about the point where it enters the hard plastic lens enclosure.

The basic reassembly is something like below.  I did put the black wire protector on but don't show that here.  Putting that black cover on was pretty time consuming.

Here is the basic result.  A little black gasket sealer was used to join and seal the new unit with the salvaged rubber stalk.  It holds together fine and the gasket sealer matches the fairly matte black of the rubber stalk portions.

Here is a comparison of OEM to the grafted result.  It looks slightly better on the bike. Using the OEM portion at the fairing prevents needing to find a way to cover the rest of the opening (that would not be covered by the new unit by itself) which would likely be somewhat difficult. 

[Edit 2014/02/25] Took a couple quick pictures of the end result.