| Author |
Message |
    
Captpete
| | Posted on Tuesday, September 10, 2002 - 02:32 pm: | 
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JB2
I finally started sorting through all the crap in my airplane hanger and, lo and behold, found that piston. A little mistake in my shop put a dozen or so stitches in the palm of my left hand which will prevent me from riding for a while, which in turn will prevent me from delivering it to you at Bonneville. If the above mailing address is good(?), I'll send it on its way.
Capt. Pete |
Blake
| | Posted on Tuesday, September 10, 2002 - 03:31 pm: |
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Captain,
Take the damn car! |
Captpete
| | Posted on Tuesday, September 10, 2002 - 08:10 pm: |
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Blake,
This is “the damned car.”
The rust & cellophane wind-wing are irrelevant. Here’s what is relevant:
1. Real seal leaking.
2. Front seal leaking badly. (Overfill situation self-corrects automatically in about 5 minutes. Remainder of oil good for about 25 applications of the brake. Add oil when pressure drops to zero in a corner.)
3. Tranny seals leaking.
4. All “freeze” (casting) plugs have been replaced twice, the second time w/ brass… except for the two hidden by the tranny… they’re due.
5. No windshield wipers. (Thank the lord for Rain-X)
6. Valve guides gone. Head drain holes clogged up. First start in the morning takes care of the mosquitoes for a while. Plugs foul out every 500 miles or so.
7. Differential shot. Positraction locked up most of the time. A tight corner will sometimes break it loose, evidenced by a loud ‘clunk’ and a little rear-end hop to the outside of the corner.
8. Front rotors warped. Medium braking turns it into a hobbyhorse. No such thing as heavy braking.
9. No front shocks. (One set of tires each way to Bonneville & back.)
10. And last, but not least… no AC & the starboard window won’t go down.
But… it’s a movie star! They shot a movie in town last year, and one day during the shoot, this stranger knocked on my door and said it was the rattiest-looking truck they had seen in town, and they would pay me $100 to use it in a scene for one day. I didn’t have the heart to tell ‘em that for an extra hundred, they could keep it. (Saw the movie a couple of weeks ago – “Sunshine State” - It’s the worst I’ve ever seen. But the truck did great – for all of its one-second of fame.) |
Court
| | Posted on Tuesday, September 10, 2002 - 08:20 pm: |
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Slap me with a shovel for saying this, but ain't that the way it always goes. Just as you get to "know" a vehicles quirks and a real bond evolves some SOB shows up at your door and wants to take 'er away!
Good job Capt'n, I say keep'er and I'm thinking there HAS to be a class to run that thing in. Problem, right off the bat, is gonna be buying the 3 miles of tarps to comply with the "no oil on the Salt" rule.
Court |
Captpete
| | Posted on Tuesday, September 10, 2002 - 09:10 pm: |
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Court,
Gettin' there's a problem, but makin' the run's easy. 30' of tarp sewn end to end - sorta like a tracked vehicle, and a periscope out the window for steering.
I'm still thinking about the stopping part, though. Best idea so far: Let Rocket drive it. |
Fogcity
| | Posted on Tuesday, September 10, 2002 - 11:25 pm: |
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Capt. - Is that a canon in the back of that there truck? |
Captpete
| | Posted on Wednesday, September 11, 2002 - 02:04 am: |
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Fog,
It's a long-line fishing reel - with a fresh coat of zinc from the galvanizing plant. (Capacity: about 45 miles of 900 lb. test monofiliment line.)
Here's one of the hydraulic reels we use for bottom-fishing in deep water, 500+ fathoms. (3000+ feet) Takes 8 minutes free-spooling for the 35 lb. sinker to reach bottom.
 |
Captpete
| | Posted on Wednesday, September 11, 2002 - 05:35 pm: |
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Hans,
The ocean is teeming with biomass @ 3000 ft., but of course, all variations are not found everywhere. If you’re trying to make a living harvesting these resources, there are many pieces of the puzzle that affect the bottom line; gear technology, electronic technology, work ethic (perseverance), etc. But probably the most important is figuring out where everybody lives, when they are home, and where they go when they aren’t home.
There are lots of clues that help in the hunt though. As an example, I spent some time fishing for shrimp in these depths off the western coast of Costa Rica. All commercial varieties of shrimp that I’m aware of are predominantly bottom dwellers, and they all live on muddy bottom. We pulled nets across the bottom to catch them, and the neat part of that fishery is that we caught everything in the path of the nets that wasn’t too small to pass through the webbing. 90+% of the crustaceans in that depth are bright red in color. If you’re doing it right, the majority of the catch is the target species, but you would be amazed at the variety of goofy-looking critters that hit the deck as by-catch. Some with soft shells, like shrimp, and others with hard shells, like crabs. We found very few fish in the by-catch, but that was because there aren’t a lot of fish that call muddy bottom home.
Another example, to show the other side of the coin, is a fishery that I was involved in a few years ago off the coast of South Carolina. We were using those deep-water bottom reels to catch a variety of sea bass in 2500-3000 ft. There was no sonar available that would show us the fish, but we learned that those fish liked to hang out on the edges of some under-water cliffs that were located there. The sonar would tell us how hard/dense the bottom was, and the harder, the better. It turn out that we had found the spawning grounds for these fish. They were amazing critters. They averaged 30 lbs. each, although I did catch one that went 99 lbs., dressed. There’s not much light at those depths, and these guys had eyes that were about 2 ½ inches in diameter. They looked a bit pre-historic, with gill plates that looked almost like armor.
It’s kind of interesting how that fishery got started. A sword fisherman had set his gear out there, which consists of one of those 40+ mile long-lines. The line is kept afloat by buoys, and has a bunch of hooks dangling from it. It turns out that he got into a mess of sharks, and when they die, they have negative buoyancy. He caught so many of the things that they drug his gear to the bottom. There were still some baited hooks on the line when this happened, and when he hauled his gear back, there were a few of these big sea bass hooked up.
Those fish became quite the curiosity when he unloaded his catch, and some inshore bottom fishermen asked where he caught them, and that was the beginning. Two guys went to the spot, a couple of hundred miles off shore, and started poking around a little that first year, but with little success. The second year, I joined the fray, as well as a few others. I think there were eleven of us out there. All the other guys had bottom-fishing boats, about 40 ft., and they were using the same technique that worked in shallow water, which was to anchor the boat, hopefully on top of the fish. My boat was a 73 ft. trawler, which I rigged up to anchor as well.
Well, that technique didn’t work so well, especially for my bigger boat. After losing $16,000 worth of anchor cable and probably two-dozen anchors, it became obvious that a new plan was in order. The smaller boats had come to the same conclusion, although at a much lesser cost. We were all going broke, but the good part was that, for the first time in my fishing career, I was in a situation where none of us were actually competing with one another, but rather working together to figure this thing out. We were all a couple of hundred miles off shore, too far to call for help if we got in a jam, and scattered over a hundred-plus miles of bottom. If we got into trouble, we were each other’s help, and stayed in radio contact continuously, looking out for each other and sharing ideas.
After about a year, we finally figured it out, and talk about the floodgates opening up. We caught the dogshit out of those fish. My best trip, I put 30,000 lbs. of fish in the hold in four days of fishing. Had 3,000 lbs. the first day, and that night found a little keyhole canyon about 1/8 mile across and a half-mile long. Did over 10,000 lbs. the second day, and stomped the hatch cover closed the end of the 4th day. $48,000 trip for 4 day’s work.
Two months later, there were 125 boats out there and it was dog eat dog until the government jumped in and regulated the fishery. Sadly, they were a little too late. Most of the fish were gone by then.
Some day maybe I’ll get around to telling that whole story. A lot of those 100+ boats that jumped in at the end were guys who had never fished out of the sight of land before. We had to cross the Gulf Stream to get to the grounds, and in the winter when those cold fronts slam through every week or so, if you weren’t willing to ride out 25 ft. seas for two or three days, you had to get out of there before it got rough, or you were in for an enlightening experience when you tried to cross the stream. Some of the guys and some of the boats never should have been out there to start with, and some never made it back.
Sorry, Blake, I know there ain’t no Buells in this post. I’d try to blame it on Hans – he did ask – but I did get a little off the subject.
Capt. Pete
P.S. - Put me down with Bomber & Ferris |
Jocklandjohn
| | Posted on Thursday, September 12, 2002 - 02:26 am: |
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Captpete - thanks a bunch for that tale. I appreciate you taking the time to tell it.
"Sorry, Blake, I know there ain’t no Buells in this post. I’d try to blame it on Hans – he did ask – but I did get a little off the subject."
Wrong my friend - your tale is EXACTLY what Buells are about.......its about who and what you are, what you do and why.........and I think this board has plenty space for stuff like that....and if it didn't I'd not hang around here....... |
Hans
| | Posted on Thursday, September 12, 2002 - 06:54 pm: |
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Captpete, I want to get off the hook for blame as it was you, who showed us another winch when your big one was supposed to be a gun in the back of your car. You started me thinking and reading more carefully when I realized that the yellow plastic reel (in my estimation) could never be loaded with 45 miles of 900 LBS line. Well, I am more than happy I did ask: You brought us for a while in a unknown dark world, almost with the feeling as when we were riding high seas.
Thank you verrry much. Yes, it IS Buell related: Different in every sense. 
Hans. |
Captpete
| | Posted on Thursday, September 12, 2002 - 08:51 pm: |
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First, the obvious: Thanks to Jocklandjohn, Blake, and Hans for keeping the blather-police off my back.
Next, since I might have a couple of hours of residual immunity, a quick example of why I need to get my butt back out to sea where my world is only a few feet long, and I have enough control to avoid the fixes that seem to eternally plague me here in the real one:
When I bailed on the Buell-ganza, Blake posted, “Take the damned car.” I initially bagged that idea for the obvious reasons that I posted.
But I ain’t no quitter, and I started looking for alternatives. “What about the damned ex-girlfriend’s car,” I thought to myself. Or, was it, the ex-girlfriend’s damned car? Whatever; I made the call.
Well, I’m in there. But with a few conditions. The current estranged boyfriend threatened to “splatter her brains all over the wall” with a fireplace poker three months ago, and she left town in fear for her life, leaving the car behind… in his possession. He won’t give it back, and she’s afraid to come back to confront him, or even get the law involved. But I can certainly use the car if:
1.) I find and steal the thing back, and
2.) bring her to Bonneville with me.
“Oh, Pete,” (I keep telling her it’s CAPTAIN Pete, but she just won’t listen.), “I’ve never been west of the Mississippi. We’ll have such fun.” Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I did a little stint as a repo guy... nearly forty years ago. But, I’ve got a spare key, a borrowed car for security (this guy hates me), and darkness is falling. So here I go. This Buell-ganza better be good!
CAPTAIN Pete
If I haven’t posted after three days, somebody please notify my next-of-kin. |
X1glider
| | Posted on Thursday, September 12, 2002 - 09:11 pm: |
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HAHAHA Pete, you make me laugh with your youthful spirit. Boostin' wheels. If we don't hear from you by Monday, I'll call your ex-girlfriend to notify her instead of your next of kin! She might need consoling.![:]](http://www.badweatherbikers.com/buell/clipart/proud.gif) |
Awprior
| | Posted on Thursday, September 12, 2002 - 09:13 pm: |
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Captain,
After a message like that, you should win "most dedicated Elf" award for sure!!!
Good luck brother! |
Pammy
| | Posted on Thursday, September 12, 2002 - 09:26 pm: |
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Yeah, Petey's in.
I had my lips pooched out when you said you weren't goin'.
Pete is full of stories. That IS what yer full of, ain't it Pete? |
Ocbueller
| | Posted on Thursday, September 12, 2002 - 09:36 pm: |
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Capt. Pete,
Best of luck, bud. I've stolen back my own car in NYC with my lucky screwdriver.
SteveH(recently traded same car for a Buell) |
Bomber
| | Posted on Monday, September 16, 2002 - 05:39 pm: |
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Capt
I'm in trouble again? sheesh . . . you need a deck hand in case I need to blow town for a while?
worked on a salvage tug on the great lakes for a day once (lost a bet . . . . )
not much of a reference, but I make bull goose coffee, and I'm trainable |
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Captain's Courageous