camos

Not absolutely positive but I thought I noticed the VicPD Victories had LED headlights. Might be an aftermarket thing or an optional extra for special bikes.

I don't know whether HID Country changed their name or went out of business but considering their poor practices they should have gone out of business so they don't inflict themselves on any other customers. They sent me incompatible parts and then sent me replacements that were totally wrong again. They didn't charge me for the replacement parts but I had to pay shipping both ways several times with added up to much more than the parts were worth. Anyway, mine was a very bad experience. Apparently I was not alone. Here is a link to their BBB rating. Good riddance I say.

You say filter with o-ring. Would that be the o-ring on the filter cover? On my Virago not only does the cover have an o-ring but so does the bottom cover bolt. Lots of people lose that one. If you pull the cover and look at the inside where the bottom bolt goes through you might see a circular depression that is supposed to seat an o-ring. [ame=http://www.amazon.com/Wix-24936-Cartridge-Canister-Filter/dp/B000CSGT1Y]Wix 24936 Cartridge Metal Canister Lube Filter, Pack of 1 : Amazon.com : Automotive@@AMEPARAM@@http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41idE2WJ8vL.@@AMEPARAM@@41idE2WJ8vL[/ame] That link shows all the o-rings with the filter. Just a guess but might be worth a look.

I like MEK too because it is inexpensive and adaptable to various repair situations. As a source I've been using left over bits from plumbing pipe repairs. Mix MEK and some cut up bits in a small seal-able Mason jam jar and overnight it will have dissolved into a paste or a slurry depending on how much MEK was added. MEK is very volatile and evaporates almost instantly. A hypodermic needle is the best way to inject it into a crack. With a broken off tab, lay some on each side of the joint and hold together for 30-40 seconds and it will be bonded. Use the paste to spread on the back side to build up a reinforcement. It can be molded and shaped using just your fingers by scooping out a suitable amount and letting it dry until it has the consistency of clay. That takes maybe 5 minutes depending on what you are starting with. I used that method to repair the left dash attachment points just above the speakers where the outside edges had broken away and were gone. Once it set for a bit the plastic can be cut and shaped with a knife and then drilled. With the screws in the attachment points look as good as the original. On the VR I made a couple of repairs using this method in June of last year. Been on a couple of trips, to Nelson and Kelowna and was my daily rider until Nov when the VR went into the barn for maintenance. Also use some MEK mix to fix the bottom attachment point on the windshield of the Virago which had cracked right through the bolt hole. Had tried repairs using various other methods but they all failed after 2 or 3 weeks. There is quite a lot of movement of the windshield when riding but the MEK fix is getting into 7 months now of daily riding. Anyway, this MEK repair method seems to be simple, reliable and economical. And, no I don't have shares in MEK suppliers.

The VM on the dash looks like it is reading about right. The line between 12 and 16 is 14v. I would expect the DVM to be the more accurate one though. Reading 12.94v is high when the system is shut down, it should be no more than about 12.5v at the battery. Anyway, that does make me wonder about the accuracy of the DVM. Might be worth checking it while waiting for the new R/R to arrive.

Would these be what you were thinking of?

I bought a gimballed black plastic cup holder at the Walmart in Cody WY 1 1/2 years ago for $9.00. It clamps to the handlebar, looks OK and works well...still. Unlike the stainless one SilvrT won there then gave to me which lasted about 2 months before falling apart. Not complaining Rick, just saying.

Sure that will work but "Best Practice" is to connect red directly to battery + through a fuse and black directly to the battery - and connect the green to the frame. The reason for doing this is both red and black will have a guaranteed connection to the battery which is necessary for the R/R to monitor the voltage output and feed the battery from the stator output. Connecting the black to the frame ground will most likely work BUT the connection could be less than adequate due to a possibly torturous route through dis-similar metals that can get easily corroded or through possibly painted joints that are bolted. Think about the well known issues regarding the negative wire that runs from the battery to the starter which often needs attention. more

Not sure what you are disagreeing with but according to the Shindengen site the FH020AA R/R has an output of 30 amps with no cooling and with 1m/s cooling it will do 50 amps. I don't know if the extra capacity is necessary but what I was saying is cooling does make a difference.

An aftermarket AT fuse box of some sort came with my VR but it seems to be integrated with the trailer wiring and I'm not exactly sure what it all does. There was also terminal bloat on the battery so what I chose to do when installing the R/R, at least for the short term, was to add a fused covered terminal strip that I picked up from a marine supply store. It's bolted to the inside top edge of the left fairing pocket. The terminal strip is connected to the accessory circuit so it is only is hot when the ignition is on. I will also be adding a few relays for lights and horns so the terminal strip will keep things tidy. Below the terminal strip can be seen the top edge of the Shindengen R/R that was mounted in the pocket. The cassette deck was removed to do this. As mentioned earlier, I'm moving the R/R to behind the engine but the terminal strip is a simple and tidy way to add a few more power leads. About the comments regarding the need to cool these R/R units: They apparently do not need to be cooled to handle the output of the OEM VR stators but they will handle higher output if they are cooled. Not sure if the high output stators put the capacity into the range of needing more cooling for the R/R but I figure what the heck cooler is probably better.

The pic shows a 3 prong plug that would be plugged into the OEM bulb plug powering the HID system through the OEM headlight wiring. My HID setup came with an extra harness for a relay that plugs into the OEM headlight plug which is then wired directly to the battery. The OEM wiring then only powers the relay. This setup reduces the load running through the small wires in the headlight switch. Something that needs to be done when installing any HID system in the Venture it to remove the RLU, Reserve Lighting Unit, otherwise it will cause the bulb to switch between Hi and Lo until the bulb wears out in about 3-6 months or so if I remember correctly.

As far as I know a modern mosfet R/R will not mount where the OEM one is located. That one is bolted to the frame to act as a heat sink while the new ones use air flow and reportedly run much cooler. I got the Shindengen R/R from a group buy a while ago and mounted it in the left side fairing. It is screwed to the plastic liner in there and shows no indication of excessive heat. I'm in the middle of doing a valve job so have that area all apart. There is what I think looks like a perfect place to mount the R/R with a couple of U-bolts to a frame cross member just behind the engine. There are a bunch of hoses running on the aft side of that cross member. It can be seen better with the plastic heat shield removed. I'm pretty sure Tim Gray mounted his R/R in that spot. Anyway, I going to try moving my R/R to that spot after I get the damned valves set. Oops did I say that?

I hate Yamaha!!! It's going to cost $100.00 plus tax to get replacement shims and it will take a week to get them here. Oh, did I say I hated Yamaha, well multiply that times 2.

I found the answer in the manual... who'da thunk? Round the shim number to the nearest .05 whether it is up or down and follow that column. Of course the manual does not mention whether the clearance number should be rounded up or down. I guess going with thinner would be the best choice here.

Crawl back in your hole Kevin. Thanks for the heads up on Savage Cycles though.

Went and had a look at the chart and the 280 stands for 2.80 mm while the 285 stands for 2.85 mm which makes the chart differential .05 mm per column. So what you are suggesting is to go with the lower number column? Good to know about Triumph. I'll check with both Yamaha and Triumph tomorrow. Thanks Randy.

Ended up getting the short pick set from Princess Auto which was about the same length every other store had. They were good enough to do what was necessary although a slightly longer set would have been better. The issue here is about trying to see around the hand holding the tool. Started to pull the shims yesterday, got one out and back in with no problem but the second one was being difficult. Tried for 30 mins with no success so had to walk away from it. This morning started again at 10 am and finished at 5:30 pm. Had a few breaks, stretching and lunch, but what a freaking horrible job and unfortunately that is only half of it. Now I need to order the shims I don't have then go through the whole process again to put the new ones in. There must be some reason, unknown to me, for using the shims but it seems to be the stupidest system I have run into yet. Setting the valves on the Virago is 30 mins tops and most of the time is taken freeing up the bolts on the valve covers. That's my rant for the day. I have a question: The chart in the manual is in 5 mm increments but if the shim size falls between EG: 282 mm what column should be used, the 280 or the 285? I seem to recall reading somewhere to round up but I'm not certain about that.

As others have mentioned, I have no use for FB or any other social media site. VR.org excepted of course. I got an old, not so smart, iPhone 3G for $50 and bought some minutes from 7-11 which uses the Rogers network. It will connect to Shaw WiFi at a lot of access points around town for free. Good for email and browsing the Web. Use it to sync with my Outlook calendar, track the weather, play FreeCell but mostly to keep my shopping list. Beats the heck out of using paper. Might use the iPod music feature eventually on the VR but haven't got there yet. Seems worth the price to me. I went one less than you. Bought 25 minutes for $25 five months ago. One phone call and three text messages later and still have 15 minutes left.

I did not set up anything because the Linux install does not complete. This is going on an empty HD as in it is not dual booting. I could boot to DOS and have a look at what files are on the HD but it's Linux and I would not know what to look for. I have to ask, is two tons of fertilizer leaner than Linux?

Oh really Brian! Define monitoring. I have stated before that if I decide to run Win7 on this box the hardware will need to be upgraded. Re-read the thread you just answered and you will see I only installed Win7 to see if all the components were working. The fact that it did work, if not particularly adequately, does prove at least the hardware is operational. Since it is operational one would think Linux could at the very least be installed and probably run "better" than Win7. This box as it stands did a credible job of handling XP Media Center back in 2006. I have 2 GB RAM kicking around here somewhere, unfortunatly it is in a safe place for now. Besides it is more like a half ton truck.

SSH in from where? When at the flashing cursor the MediaCenter PC can not be seen on the network so I cannot do it from my workstation. It definitely does not get that far. There are an endless number of chances for me to be confused but I don't think this is one of them. Read this page which is where I got the "minimal" terminology from. That would be my understanding too. No need to apologize. Following your suggestions and possibly a few others that I come up with has taken me a fair amount of time. Last evening I got unetbootin and created an XBMCbuntu package. A little different but essentially the same as Rufus with the the same result in the end.... flashing cursor. After that I d/l the Ubuntu desktop version and put that on the flash drive to install. That possibly got me close to a desktop but it errored out and suggested I click on an icon to continue installing Ubuntu but nothing apparent happened. That takes me to 11pm when I had the brilliant idea to try installing Win7. Didn't finish until almost 3am. A totally bone headed move. Anyway, it installed OK and ran, very slowly of course with only 500MB RAM. When I opened MediaCenter it said it needed 64MB video RAM to operate properly. So it was a given that to run Win7 MC would require some upgraded hardware. The point of this exercise was to see if Win7 would install at all. Since it did that it seems to indicate all the hardware is working as well as it can and should run XBMC or Linux even if not optimally. I have not yet tried installing Mint but will get to it. It is very helpful and I very much appreciate the time you have spent helping me. It's not over yet and I still hope to get some flavour of XBMC up and running. As a side note, I found the original XP Media Center 2005 that was installed on this box. Not the disks, unfortunately, just the .iso's that I had backed up in my storage system. Stupid me, I did not think at the time that I might also need the install key so they may not be of any use. Oh well....

I'll check that one out. Thanks for the heads-up.

Yah, can't help you much there since so far all I can get is the flashing cursor. The XBMCbuntu is, I believe a minimal, version of Ubuntu that is enough to run the XBMC Media Center. Essentially the XBMC is the desktop but is designed to use the Microsoft Media Center remote control in place of a mouse and expects to be viewed on a 16x9 TV rather than a monitor. The Linux command line, if I recall correctly, is more than just a flashing cursor. Like a DOS command line but with a minimal prompt. There are quite a few cool things that can be done with the DOS prompt to ramp it up. The Linux prompt seems to be only a greater than > although I never really looked into doing any customizing of it. I used to be a DOS person before Windows developed into something useful and never really got into Linux mostly because it is so disorganized. I probably have a corporate soul. I don't think there is much, if any, difference between a server and a desktop version of Linux except the GUI which is not of much use on a server and the clutter of drivers and other stuff that is necessary to run desktop apps. Like you, I've been wrong before. But only once.

I have two motorcycles, one of which is my only transportation while I attempt to keep the Venture from disposal. I used to be a computer nerd until I re-discovered motorcycles. While I'm not much of one anymore, my computer and the Internet are my only entertainment which does cost about $60/mo. After that I do have almost $0.00 left for further entertainment which would include the cost of cable. All of that is somewhat off topic but as it is the reason why I'm attempting to put a Media Center on an old-ish computer without spending any/much money it may not be too far off the topic. Huffy isn't good, glad to hear you are not.

This post is getting rather long with all the quotes. I'll try to answer all your question though. Answer for #1: No. So far I have not tried to access a virtual console. I'm not exactly sure how to go about doing that. The flashing cursor does not allow keyboard input. When booted to the flashing cursor I can not see the MediaCenter computer on my network from my Win7 machine so I can't SSH in from Windows. Answer for #2: XBMCbuntu is XBMC and Ubuntu combined and is a bit different from each package when individually installed. The XBMCbuntu.iso is a live package and an installer combined. There is the choice to either run it off the CD or flash drive or to install it to a HD. I believe XBMC is supposed to act as the desktop in this case. This is where I got the XBMC package. http://xbmc.org/download/ Click on the XBMC AMD link which will D/L xbmcbuntu-12.00.Intel-AMD.iso. First I spent an hour or so exploring the live package but did not do any testing to see how well it worked with media such as movies or music because it was quite slow running off the CD. Then I installed XBMCbuntu from the CDROM and got the flashing cursor thing. After that I tried running a newer version of XBMCbuntu from a flash drive with the same results as the previous attempt. After that I tried installing a minimal version of Ubuntu without XBMC and still got the flashing cursor on first boot. This could very well point to a video issue as the cause. As you suggested, perhaps I should next try installing a complete Linux package and see if that will load to the desktop.