2005 ZX6R Overhaul (Cosmetic Transformation)

A few months ago I bought the bike I've wanted for years, a 2005 ZX6R. It was not quite as pretty as I might have liked, but it was VERY well cared for and a great price (plus I enjoy doing body work, so I don't mind buying ugly).

Anyway, here's how she started out - the day I brought her home:

The first thing I did was to take off as many of the decals as I easily could and replaced the stupid windscreen and put on some new rubber. Very quickly I discovered, to my dismay, that the Monster logo still on the bike in the picture at the right, as well as the "Cabron" and the star seen on the pictures above were not decals, but painted on. I was planning to leave some of this work until this winter, but vulgar hispanic slang isn't the kind of thing I want painted on my vehicle...so I started work sooner than anticipated.

I initially planned to just sand and prime the lower fairings (to rid her of the vulgarity), leave the Monster logo, and leave the rest of the work until winter (which is why the lower piece is missing in the above picture)...but I had so much fun that I that I just didn’t want to stop…so I started stripping everything off of her to sand, prime and eventually paint.

By this point, I had already come up with the “concept art,” if you will, and knew basically how I wanted her to look once all was said and done. In order to accomplish this, as this stripping, sanding, and priming was going on, I ordered a whole bunch of extra goodies to go on to her. I ordered Kawasaki Green rim tape, gold shorty levers, black and gold bar ends, gold windshield and fairing bolts, carbon fiber triple tree decals, plastic stencil sheets, carbon fiber vinyl, a HID conversion kit, and some supplies to modify the headlights (make it so that both are used for both high and low beams). Most of these little accessories went on as I got them in the mail with the exception of the windshield and fairing bolts, of course.

While everything was taken apart, I also took the opportunity to install a SpeedoDRD, a Gorilla 8007 alarm, and lime green Core stainless steel brake lines. I also took the opportunity to remove the PowerCommander 3 the previous owner had installed (so I could sell it and buy more goodies), flush the brake fluid, flush the coolant, change the oil, and adjust the suspension.

The idea for the final look was to make her a bright metallic/pearl green and put some carbon fiber vinyl on as accents. The paint came from a local place that mixed it up custom for me (and pretty cheaply). When they handed the paint to me over the counter, however, they told me that it would really be best to paint it over white otherwise the color wouldn’t turn out right. Since everything was already primed and finish sanded, I just sprayed two coats of white over all of it and called it good.

When it finally came time to actually lay the paint on, I invited myself and my grandpa over to my

dad’s house to use his garage and yard to work in. The green went on much thinner than I expected and, consequently, we ended up doing extra coats on many of the parts to make sure the coverage was complete – which it was in the end. After taking a break for lunch, we laid down two coats of clear (which needs to go on much thicker than I’m used to putting anything on) and I let the parts all hang overnight.

When I came back the next day to pick everything up, I couldn’t have been happier with what I found. Overnight, the clear coats had self-leveled as they dried – which was expected – but had done so to a much greater extent than I had expected. When I took a part out into the sun to check out the final product, I swear if it wasn’t lime green I could have used it as a mirror it was so smooth!

The whole thing was finished off with the carbon fiber vinyl bits I cut out in the hopes that it would work well with the green. I really wanted to stay away from the boring black or white stripes and stuff that everyone else does with Kawasaki green.

After putting all the carbon fiber vinyl decals on their respective panels, I put the whole thing back together and this is how it turned out:

Comets, Asteroids, Meteoroids, Meteors, and Meteorites

I had a visitor at my work today who interrupted me while I was talking about the movie Armageddon to tell everyone within shouting distance that a comet almost hit Earth a few days ago and a piece of it broke off and hit Russia. This illustrated to me that with all this stuff in the news lately about an asteroid coming near Earth and a meteor blowing the windows out of Russia, people are a bit confused about the terminology being used - not to mention how confused they are about what actually happend. Before I move on to actually talk about terminology, let's clear up that the asteroid coming near Earth and the meteor that hit Russia were completely unrelated.

Comets - Comets are pieces of mostly ice, some rock, and organic compounds that can be up to several miles in diameter. They formed in the outermost parts of our solar system, beyond the orbits of our outermost planets - we get to see them because their orbits out there were disrupted. It is relatively common that a comet will come far enough into the center of the solar system that the ice gets vaporized by light from the sun and forms a kind of atmosphere called a coma, while the dust that was at the center, gets pulled out into a tail. A common misconception with comets is that their tail is opposite their direction of movement - like a tail of anything moving though our atmosphere would. However, the tail of a comet actually opposes the sun because it is the sunlight moving past he comet that pulls the tail out.

Asteroids - An asteroid is an object that is usually composed of mostly rock - many have some amount of metal (mostly nickel and iron), but the amount varies. They are generally quite small but anything from a small bolder sized rock up to something hundreds of miles in diameter can be classified as an asteroid. Asteroids orbit the sun and really don't do much normally. They have very regular, predictable orbits and the vast majority stay within particular zones of orbit, called belts, that never intersect with any planets.

Meteoroid - Any small particle orbiting the sun in our solar system is referred to as a meteoroid. The size of a meteoroid can range anywhere from a grain of sand, to a bolder-sized object. These objects are known as meteoroids as long as they are orbiting the sun and not hitting anything. As soon as they enter our atmosphere, their designation changes.

Meteors - A meteor is what we commonly call a "shooting-star." A meteor is a very small meteorite that has entered Earth's atmosphere and relatively quickly burns up due to the speed it is moving at and the friction with the air with which it comes in contact.

Meteorites - A meteorite is a meteoroid that enters the atmosphere, but doesn't completely burn up as it enters. Any meteoroid that hits the ground is classified as a meteorite. These are generally the larger objects and are more often than not made out of more densely packed, often metallic material. Most meteorites that have impacted the surface of Earth have are believed to be fragments resulting from the collision of asteroids.

Cydia Tweak to Change iOS Default Browser

Safari haters who have jailbroken iOS (iPod, iPhone, iPad) devices, I have good news for you! Developer Ryan Petrich recently created a tweak that allows users to set their default browser just like you can on a computer. BrowserChooser is free to install and does exactly what it is advertised to do. It completely takes away the annoyance of having apps open links in Safari rather than your preferred browser.

To get this tweak you will need to add Ryan Petrich's repo to your list of sources in Cydia. To do this, go to Cydia, then Manage, then Sources and tap the Edit button in the top left and then the Add button in the top right. Once you have the menu up to add a source, type in rpetri.ch/repo. Once you have entered the information, Cydia will add Mr. Petrich's repo as a source so that you can find the desired tweak.


Now you need to go to Search in the lower right corner of the Cydia main screen. In the search bar at the top, type in "BrowserChooser" and you should see BrowserChooser come up. From there all you need to do is tap on it to open it up and tap Install to install it.

After installed, you can open the app and tell it to use any other installed browser as your preferred default browser. Once this is done, other apps may have links that say "Open in Safari," but this tweak will force them to open in your chosen browser instead.

Kawasaki Ninja ZX-6R Aftermarket Fuel Pump

The picture to the left here is my 2001 Kawasaki Ninja ZX-6R, Lola. Lola is fun, fast, and good looking, but far from perfect (especially mechanically). Recently, I was on a pleasant ride having just filled Lola up with gas, when she completely lost power and started feeling like she was running out of gas. As it turns out, it was actually the fuel pump dying. I considered trying to repoint the pump, but given that I've never done that before and didn't know if that would actually even fix the problem, I decided to investigate another route.

I did a ton of research trying to find aftermarket options to replace the pump because the OEM pump costs about $200 from Kawasaki. Everyone I talked to in every forum I visited said the same thing, "there are no other options, just suck it up and replace it with the OEM pump." None of those people realized just how stubborn and cheep I am :)

I didn't want to spend $200 on a stupid fuel pump, so I went about another option. I started trying to figure out what the specifications on the OEM pump are so that I could try to match it up myself. As it turns out, it's pretty easy to find out that the OEM fuel pump for my bike has a cut-off pressure of between 1.6 and 2.4 psi. However, nobody seemed to have any clue what the flow rate would be. I got guesses everywhere from 5gal/hr to nearly 50gal/hr - not all that helpful. In the end, I just decided I didn't care that much.

I called Facet, a company that makes about a million different fuel pumps and asked to talk to an engineer. The engineer I talked to told me that based on the specs I wanted it to meet, and she gave me the NAPA part number for the pump I should get. The pump is NAPA number 610-1052 and has a cut-off pressure of 2-3.5 psi and a flow rate of 28 gal/hr. I bought it from my local NAPA store and spent an afternoon swapping out all the tubing, figuring out where to mount it, and getting it connected to the same power source as the original pump.

After getting everything put back together and hooked up properly, I took Lola out for a ride (in November......in Michigan). It was not nearly as pleasant as the ride that started the whole process, but, on the other hand, she ran better than she ever has :)

Moral of the story: if the OEM version of whatever you're trying to replace seems to expensive, there's always an aftermarket alternative.........even if it's a pain to figure out what it is...it always exists

Motorcycle on Wheels

There's really no writing going into this, but I needed to share this photo. I pulled this off an add for a car I was looking at online a couple days ago and it is still making me laugh:

Migrating Macs - Outlook Calendar Issue

This is another one of my posts highlighting some of my issues with computers. I am quite certain, at this point, that most of my issues are at least partly self-created. Whatever the case with that, however, they do always need to be solved.

My most recent issue was with migrating from one mac to another. They actually make this process incredibly easy to do so I'm not going to talk about that at all, but I had a few problems after it was completed - mainly with Outlook 2011.

The biggest issue was that after I migrated everything, Outlook imported the new data very nicely, but it put all my mail, contacts, calendar events, etc. into the "on my computer" folder instead of the regular default folders. What I mean is that instead of putting everything into the normal location they would go to when you create a new contact or calendar event or whatever, it was all in a different location. Mostly this was not too big an issue.

To fix this problem for the contacts and mail, I simply selected all using command+A and draged them all to the folder I wanted them in - no big deal really. The big problem was the calendar. I would have loved to do the same thing with the calendar, but could not figure out how to select all the events so I could drag them. I spent a few days messing around with trying to import the calendar in different ways, syncing them both with a separate calendar, etc. and couldn't get anything - then I found the solution I had been looking for. Here's what I had to do:

• Go into the calendar tab on the left and click the "organize" tool bar tab
• In the "organize" menu, choose "list" - this will allow you to drag and drop
• Click in the search bar, then choose the "advanced button in the tool bar below
• Click the drop-down menu that appears below the tool bar and choose "Folder"
• Then make the other two say "Is" and "On My Computer"

This allowed me to see all calendar events for all time in a list, use command+A to select all and drag them to the other calendar folder.

Hopefully this solution will be helpful to other people - I know it alleviated many of my frustrations.

Motorcycle Helmet Law and Seatbelt Law

Dear readers,
It's time for another rant. Today's topic: Michigan's change to the motorcycle helmet law and the comparison to our seat belt law.

For those of you who don't know me personally, I enjoy having fun and I enjoy somewhat dangerous activities now and then. However, I always partake in these ventures in the safest way possible. For instance, I ride my motorcycle quite often in the summer, but in addition to always wearing my helmet, I also always wear full riding gear (armored pants and jacket, gloves, boots...). I also always buckle my seat belt, never drive if I can feel any effects of alcohol, and think if you do anything other than that, you're an idiot. However, that doesn't mean I think you shouldn't be allowed to do (some of) those things (I do think it should be illegal to drive after drinking).

This is maybe a little different from how most people look at these sorts of things, but then, I'm not most people. In my (humble) opinion, one of the best things about this country is our liberty. The Oxford dictionary defines  liberty as "the state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one's behavior or political views." It is, in short, our freedom from having other people's opinions forced upon us. Now, the obvious and necessary restriction on that liberty is if we are endangering other people with our behaviors - hence the law against drinking and driving.

Michigan voters seem to think (and I agree) that the requirement for motorcyclists to wear helmets was infringing upon their liberty - it was an oppressive restriction on motorcyclists' behavior. The issue, for me, comes in when we start to also consider Michigan's seat belt law.

If someone can help me understand why we are spending gobs of money on the "Click it or Ticket" advertising campaign for our seatbelt law and, at the same time, getting rid of the helmet law, I'd appreciate it. Personally, I'd rather have them just get rid of both laws, but it's honestly the apparent inconsistency that bothers me more than anything else.

I was planning on writing more, but I've now thought better of it. As always, please feel free to comment and let me know where we disagree.