Weekend Part I

Still busy here at work but wanna get something posted up here today. The weekend is over and overall it was another successful one. Saturday found me around and about the homestead, doing work on the yard, the house, and the bike. No need to bore you with the household chores, so let's move on to the bike real quickly.

I'd noticed a few days ago that my bike had been winking at oncoming traffic.Not one to tolerate wanton flirting, I made the trek to the dealership and picked up a replacement bulb and put a stop to that nonsense.

While at the dealership, I picked up a couple of the antivibration/support brackets that we talked about a few posts back. Get this; when I was talking to the parts guy, I said "I don't remember what the right name for this thing is, but it's a bracket ..." and he cut me off and said "It's a support bracket inside your fairing, right?" Yep - this problem is so rampant that the parts guys know what you need before you can even say it. Wonderful HD technology again. And get this; the guy tells me that Harley is on their FOURTH iteration of bracket! In the pic below, you can see the part # ends in "-96C". Apparently the stock part # is just "-96". Well, those were breaking left and right, so Harley came up with a modification and it was called -96A. And that one sucked, so they re-engineered things again, and that was -96B. And I guess that one sucked, too, because we're now on -96C. I wonder how long this will last for? Maybe, just maybe, instead of wasting all their time fixing the brackets, maybe they should be focusing on reducing all the vibration? Ha! That's just crazy-talk, Magraw!
Anyway, here you can see the broken one still in place, and the new one lined up below it. It certainly has more meat on it, but will it be enough? Time will tell...
I don't rememeber why I took this pic but I'm sure it was for a good reason, so here you go.

Why? Why does Harley make things so difficult? For example, why do they use two different bolt-heads for the same piece? It's not even that they're different sizes, they require two different types of tool. (Left bolt = Torx head, right bolt = Allen head.) Someone, please help me here.
Without any real trouble, here is the new bracket, in place and ready to do its thing.
Ta da! And there you go. Replace the one on the other side, and you're good to go. Ok, not really, I still need to get the main brackets mig'd, and then everything will be good to go.

Next up will be the write-up for Sunday. The grand plan was to assemble the masses and make our last pilgrimage of the season down to our home away from home; the Pot Belly Pub. Naturally, things didn't go as planned, but all was good, for those of us that did make it had a fantastic time.

With any luck, I'll get that one up here tomorrow. In the meantime;

Ride Hard, Take Chances