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oldandcrotchety

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Everything posted by oldandcrotchety

  1. oldandcrotchety
    "....was good. My Son forgot to set timer...." 'Tis a poor mechanic that blames his tools..........
  2. oldandcrotchety
    As a former paint & body shop owner, I would suggest you go with Condor's recommendation. A paint code mix will give you what the paint looked like over 20 years ago. Not what it looks like now. All automotive paint will change a little (or a lot, sometimes) and it won't be noticeable until you try to "panel paint" something and then the difference will be very apparent. It will look like you got the wrong color. Or a bad mix. A good paint mixer or a competent auto painter should fix you up if you do like Condor said and take a piece down and let them experiment until they get a perfect match. I've done many, many times and if it is done right it will match the rest of the bike perfectly, despite the aging.
  3. oldandcrotchety
    Love to help ya out, Bud. You know, give you a shoulder to cry on and commiserate with you, but hey, it's sunny and 65 degrees here and i need to go jump on the bike and go to town.................heh heh
  4. oldandcrotchety
    Fortunately, I have always had a talent for picking out the perfect gift for my wife. One that will be sure to bring tears of gratitude and amazement that I could be so thoughtful. My wife, on the other hand seems to lack that ability to get it just right. Oh she tries, but always fall s just a little short. I will give a few examples. One year I bought her a 12 pack of pot scrubbers. Not the generic ones, but genuine 3M. She bought me a 12 gauge shotgun. It was a nice gun and all, but would it have killed her to include a hardcase, too? Then one year I bought her a whole case of Comet cleanser. The big economy size. What did she get me? A 300 piece Craftsman tool set. Oh, sure, I guess they could be considered useful, but she didn't even bother to properly arrange the tools in the tool box before she wrapped it. And what about the time I got her a carwash mitt, and she got me a Diawa fishing reel? Did she really expect me to put the new reel on my old rod? The Browning Boron rods were on sale for only 149.95 and would have really gone well with the reel. And as much as much as she appreciated the dish drainer, you would have thought she could have done better than just getting me a new Pentax 35mm camera. But as always, she never even gave a thought to a tripod, soft case or telephoto lense. I tell you, some people are just plain inconsiderate......
  5. oldandcrotchety
    you can get a digital gauge from "Roadgear" that reads from 5 to 99 pounds in 1/2 pound increments. mine cost about 25 dollars. when you use it you have to hold it on the valve a second or 2 before it gets the reading. excellnt gauge and has a 90 degree neck for those tight places.
  6. oldandcrotchety
    WAY TO GO!!!! Congratulations!!! :clap2:
  7. oldandcrotchety
    :rotf::rotf::rotf:
  8. oldandcrotchety
    No way, Jose! Back when I was in the army (1969-76) I was 30 inches in the waist and now I'm 36 inches in the waist and probably 40 lbs heavier.
  9. oldandcrotchety
    "I feel sorry for all you people who HAVE to carry guns, to guard against the rest of the people who ALSO have guns. If nobody had guns, then - - ." then we would have to carry knives or swords or clubs or something else to defend ourselves against those who carry knives or swords or clubs or something else.....it's not about the weapon so much as about criminals..
  10. oldandcrotchety
    gosh......why would anyone trade a nice bike like that in on a KIA for crying out loud????
  11. oldandcrotchety
    that's the very reason that there is no where in my house that i can't lay my hands on a loaded gun with no more than 2 steps. any low life kick in my door, he will be face to face with eternity. even as i sit here in the computer room, i can reach out and touch my .44 and next to my recliner is a .357 as well as one next to my bed and several others scattered around within easy reach. all loaded and ready to go. gone are the days when you can feel safe in your own home. only about a year ago i had to hold a scumbag at gun point until the police showed up to cart him off. he was lucky because i caught him at the gate instead of inside the door. hope your brother recovers well, and you might consider providing him with a loaded gun (a substantial one like a .357 or .44) to keep next to his bed in case something like this comes up again.
  12. oldandcrotchety
    I have never had Cheng Shin tires on my venture, but I have had them on a couple of my Hondas without any problems.
  13. oldandcrotchety
    there is an improved o-ring now that is suppose to fix that leak once and for all. the replacement is orange instead of black. you can get it from "flat out motorcycles" online for just a couple of bucks. i ordered one a few months back and then promptly lost it, so i guess i need to order another one 'cause i don't guess i ever will remember where i put that dang thing. should have put in on the day it came in.
  14. oldandcrotchety
    Me too, SilvrT, i thought it was funny and it is obviously "tongue in cheek" after all.....the big smiley face ort to be a clue...........
  15. oldandcrotchety
    my '83 consistently gets 46-48mpg. (i think it is kind of lean since the pipes are always chalk-white.) i check milage all the time just out of curiosity. so a couple of months ago i checked and it showed i had dropped to 41mpg. i was thinking i would look into that soon, but with the very next tank of gas i was back to about 47mpg. have been ever since. maybe a tank of poor gas......
  16. oldandcrotchety
    I typed lifelock into the google search bar and along with the company website i also saw some hits to a lot of information about the guy who started lifelock. seems he or some of his company officers have been convicted of fraud several times in the past. it was a while back when i did the search so the memory is a little fuzzy, but just do a google search and maybe put in lifelock and fraud, or just lifelock. if you look a little you will find it.
  17. oldandcrotchety
    "I guess at times our eyes will see things but if our brain fails to comprehend the info, then it won't process what it should have." That may be so in some cases, but a lot of the time the driver does see you and clearly comprehends the situation, and still pulls out in front of you. i've had my share of those close calls with the other driver looking you right in the eye. just last week i was traveling west on hwy 22 towards fort smith when i saw i young lady in a white dodge pickup come to a stop at the intersection of hwy 22 & hwy 23. hwy 23 has a stop sign and hwy 22 does not. she stopped at the stop sign and looked left and saw it was clear and went ahead and started across before looking to her right (where i was). she was about 5 feet into the intersection before she looked right and saw me and hit her brakes. i was pretty close but could have stopped. had she stayed put everything would have been fine but when i got to the point of no return she (while still looking right at me) started rolling out again. by now i could not possibly stop before hitting her passenger door. my only option at this point was to lean hard to the right and try to get past in front of her. when she saw me speed up and lean to the right she decided to try to beat me across the intersection. i dropped a gear and gave it all i could and gritted my teeth for the impact, but somehow i made it past her front bumper with inches to spare. as i passed her i had to lean back left pretty hard to keep from going off the road on the right hand side. after i straightened up enough i looked in my mirror and saw her go bouncing into a service station drive and come to a stop. i went on down to the bank where i was headed which was just about a 1/4 mile further and made my deposit and went back towards home. as i passed by i saw that she was still sitting there in her truck in the parking lot with both hands gripped on the wheel. i know it must have shook her up about as much as it did me, but why in the world did she pull that stunt. why was it so important that she beat me through the intersection. heck, i would have let her if she had just gave me the chance. just can't figure some people.
  18. oldandcrotchety
    Yeah, I was into CB back in the 60s. Had tube type and crystal CB base and radio shack antenna. got a mobil around '68, but didn't use it much. Always wanted a Navaho base with a Turner Power mike, but went into the army in '69 and by the time I got out in '76 CB was a whole new ballgame with a bazillion people on the airways. back when i was into it there was only a few CBers in Little Rock and I knew almost all of them personally. I didn't like the new crowded CB land that sprang up in the 70s, so i just quit. KCO7659-samson
  19. oldandcrotchety
    when i had my paint & body shop, the cleanest, whitest, brightest white that i could find was 1980 corvette white, DuPont code 5040. not all whites are created equal. probably the white that i found the least appealing (to me at least) was ford's wimbleton white. it had too much red in it to suit me. most whites look ok until you put them up alongside of a different mix and then you can really tell the difference. i also used to mix paint, so i can tell you that there is a plain "mixing white" which is pure white, but you actually get a better white when you mix in small amounts of other colors like blue, black and some others i can't think of right now. having said all that, please take into consideration that it has been almost 15 years since i was in the business and a lot of things have changed since then, but if you are going to use acrylic enamel, then that would be my recommendation, for what it's worth.
  20. oldandcrotchety
    What SilvrT said, plus a pump.
  21. oldandcrotchety
    I had a rear tire go flat twice. first time it happened i was doing maybe 50mph going downhill on a somewhat curvy road on my honda when i started to noticing the bike was wallowing in the curves, then started to get hard to control even going straight. i pulled over and sure 'nuff it was flat. i was only about a mile from a motorcycle shop so i just rode real slowly and kind of herded it down the road and got it fixed at the shop. this was before i carried a tire repair kit. second time it happened was on my present bike. i was over a hundred miles from home when i started noticing that it was wallowing just slightly in the curves. not as much as when the honda went flat, but just noticeable. it was fine on the straight highway, so i didn't suspect a flat. i rode it all the way home and when i got there i checked and i had less than 10 pounds of air in the rear tire and when i put air in it, i saw the hole right away as it spewed out at a pretty good clip. it was a hole about the size of a 16d nail and as it did on the highway, it never went totally flat but stopped losing air at about 7 or 8 lbs left. i gotta hand it to those dunlops. sidewalls must be pretty tough to not go plumb flat like that.
  22. oldandcrotchety
    "and I rarely ride at night to lower the deer incident probability, but" Same here, but it ain't just deer that comes out at night, and i really, really, really don't want to hit a skunk!!!!
  23. oldandcrotchety
    "As for being fast The 83-85 Venture's jump right out there with the others real easy.My 83 if I push it really hard I could easily pull the front tire off the ground,0-70 in a heart beat." Really? I don't find mine to be much quicker or faster than my old harley superglide. A little maybe. especially in cooler weather. the hotter the outside temperature, the weaker my bike gets. when it is around 100 degrees my venture is pretty gutless. I might orta check my diaphrams, (when I can afford to replace them if they are bad). I know my mufflers are almost pure white inside, not tan.
  24. oldandcrotchety
    Thanks guys for all the input. i will check everything that was suggested. might even open it up and look at he stuff Lutz mentioned if nothing on the outside works. and thanks McBrush for the PM with the virago link. i'll check them out, too. I'll let you know if we get it fixed. Great site this is.......
  25. oldandcrotchety
    ok, this isn't a venture, but it is a yamaha. my son's 1100 virago has developed a problem with shifting. he says when he tries to down shift in either 4th or 2nd gear, the shifter is just solid. won't drop into gear. he says if he stomps on it, it will go into gear. i told him he might try changing the oil and see if that helps and also check the clutch cable adjustment, and check for slop in the linkage. i was just wondering if anyone else might have any input. bent shifting fork maybe? any ideas would be appreciated as taking it to the dealer would be a last choice. they have a tendency to run up a huge bill and you never know if it was justified or not. ignorance can be expensive. they might adjust something and say they had to replace gears. any thoughts?
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