Cook's Comes Through, NH Falls Through

As noted in my last post, I'd intended on being in NH today, staying overnight, doing a chit-ton of riding, then heading home on Thursday.  Well, that plan go bunged up.  I needed a new rear tire so I'd made arrangements with Cook's to hook me up this morning (he'd even rearranged his current job load so as to take me in first thing).

Things were going well until he found that on the left rear exhaust clip; the rear bolt on it had stripped out (F'n dealership - probably some knucklehead using an impact wrench and going too tight with it).  Anyway, since the receiving nut is essentially welded to the pipe, there was nothing else to do but drill it out, tap it, then drill out the hole on the clip, cut down a 3/8" bolt and use that.

Jon went to some serious lengths to accomplish this, too.  When drilling out the nut, he obviously didn't want to drill down into the pipe, so he used a tiny, thin gauge sheet of steel in between the nut and the pipe (there was about 1/32 of an inch gap to work with).

When he was drilling, he watched for the thin sheet to move, indicating the bit had touched it.  Then when tapping the expanded hole, he did the same with the thin sheet to make sure he didn't score the pipe.  The problem was that the tap was tapered at the end (naturally), so the tip of it was hitting the metal before the full width of the hole had been tapped.  So what did Jon do?  He cut the taper off of his tap!  Yep, he essentially ruined his tap, just to fix this issue for me.

With the modified tap, he was able to get a good set of threads cut in, and things were moving again.  He wizzer-wheeled a bolt down to size, then wizzered a bit of a taper onto it, and voila!  The exhaust was secured nice and tight.

A quick stop over at the cash register to settle things up and I was off and running.  The problem?  It was now almost 2:30 in the afternoon and I knew if I hit the road then, I was gonna be slammed with traffic.  The heat and humidity were pretty bad, and I didn't want to spend another afternoon sitting in it, not moving (I'd hit a traffic jam on the way home from the dealership yesterday and had been at a crawl for almost an hour before finally moving to the breakdown lane just to get some air across my cylinders).

So, what to do.  Well, in addition to everything else, the forecasts were now calling for thunderstorms and rain in the Wolfeboro area in the morning.  That meant my best option was to still leave tonight and get there dry.  But it also meant that I'd  arrive after the food stores were closed up for the night (they roll the sidewalks up pretty early up there), which meant no late night snacks, but more importantly; no breakfast food.  And if the rain wasn't done until about 10am, then it meant Dave was going to be a miserable, hungry boy, right out of the gate.  It also meant that my long day of riding would be compressed, and it was already planned out to be a full day, anyway.  (Back roads up to the western end of the Kancamagus, ride that, then more back roads out to the eastern end of Hurricane Mountain Rd, then up to Mt Washington, then keep going north and take a chitload of back roads to make my way back down to Wolfeboro.)

The more I thought about it, the more I felt like I was forcing things with this trip.   The whole reason for taking this time off and heading up there was to relax and destress, but if anything, I was getting more stressed by trying to keep to a timetable which had already been busted.  What was the point?

So, I bagged the trip.  I'll find something to do with the days off - I started in on a small project for the front lawn, we'll see if I can complete it.  And aside from that, I'll try and see if I can relax and destress a bit.  NH isn't going anywhere, and neither are the awesome roads up there.

I'll get back up there at some point.

Ride Hard, Take Chances