OK here are the pictures before and after

Before I go for my walk today I’m going to make a quick post with the pictures of how the steering arms fit after a little filing on the register bits. This first pic is the one I did last night after finishing my walk. Note that the bits fit flat against the machined spots they are supposed to fit flat against on both sides now.

And this is the one I didn’t do yet. Notice that the peg part of the arm sits on top of the machined hole in the spindle. There is only a few thousandths of an inch interference there but it is enough to make the part unusable without modification.

The difference is about 3 hours of work, 2 of actual filing and another hour of letting my hand rest so I could control the file better. I have to admit the ravages of age are catching up to me. I used to be able to rough shape bike fenders by pinching them with my fingers, now I have to take frequent breaks just lightly using hand tools. And this is the fun bit for me, the tedious fiddly bits that nobody will see unless they know where to look and what to look for.

Now that that’s done I’m going to get dressed for outside and go for my walk. My books on how to control the EFI on the donor engine came today so I have reading materials that have to be read soon, and the bike pump is due in tomorrow so I can cover more territory out hunting check-ins on my phone game, and get exercise without killing my foot.

Billed @€0.02, Opus the Unkillable

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That was easy, time consuming but easy

I feel accomplished today. I went for a walk and picked up something for Mrs. the Poet, then got some tools (files) from the hardware for working on the mid-bucket and the Mini Sprint-T, got a present for the B-Day party I was invited to on Saturday, and fitted one of the steering arms to the spindle all by 2100. I had to walk 4.2 miles to get all of the stuff done that I had to leave the house to do, and then spend about 2 hours filing tiny amounts of metal off the steering arm until it fit flat against the spindle registers. It’s a snug fit, almost an interference fit, but fit it does. The material is so hard that there were no actual filings, just a dark powder that got my hands dirty but didn’t actually spread anywhere. I used a mill bastard file that was designed for precision work by the captive brand for Lowe’s, Kobalt. It worked very well. Tomorrow I will take some pictures of the arm I didn’t work on and the one I did work on and show the difference in fit on the spindle.

I also used the walk to rack up check-ins on my phone game that pays me money to play. I hit my limit again. I may not be racking up the big points, but I’m still racking up points to get more gift cards. And then next month I start selling plasma to make up for the gigs I lost in 2016. So Yay! me.

PSA, Opus the Unkillable