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Where Were You Mike?

Two weeks ago I was on a road bike ride when I flatted. Go read Thanks Mike and come back, I’ll wait.

Today is Sunday and I didn’t take my usual Sunday morning ride out to the end of Lakeshore Drive and back. The Oregon Interscholastic Cycling League was holding a big race near the mid-ride point, so I thought it best to avoid the area. I also started the ride a little later than usual, so I opted for the mountain bike and just rode the local alleys, a bit of a couple bike paths and some neighborhood roads.

While headed home the front tire started to buzz more than expected of a knobby tire on pavement should. As I continued on, the buzzing increased in volume – whirrrrrrrrrrrrr. I had a puncture. I made it a block and a half before the tire was so flat that if I turned the handlebars it would probably squirm right off the rim.

I have a seat bag that has a spare tube and a flat kit just for this occasion. so in theory I should be able to fix my problem. But I didn’t even try. At this point I was just 6 blocks from home so I didn’t need a Mike rescue this time, I just walked the last 4/10 of a mile home.

And to answer my parenthetical question of two weeks ago, it is not always the rear wheel.

Another Internet Hole Sucks Me In

A couple of months ago I posted about a YouTube Ferrari engine swap that sucked me in.

Mike Burroughs’ original intent for the Ferrari/Honda build, when he started in December 2020, was to finish for SEMA 2021. Because of COVID, SEMA in 2021 was canceled and it was a good thing too because he never would have been finished on time. Now he is shooting for SEMA 2022 which in November and just a few weeks away.

Well, its happened again. About two weeks ago there was a guest in the video who was sand blasting the engine compartment ahead of getting it painted. At the end of the episode Mike tells us that the fellow who did the sand blasting was doing an engine swap too and we should go check out his YouTube channel.

So I did. Talk about parallel universes. This particular build started around the same time, with the same finish goal of SEMA 2021. The same “wouldn’t have finished it” applied to him as well. Also his first name is Mike too (last name is O’Neal.) This is not a Honda engine into a Ferrari, but a Subaru EZ30 into a 1969 Porsche 911.

So far he has created 97 videos and I have watched almost half at 47 of them. I have not peeked ahead, but because I have subscribed I see whenever he post a new video and from the thumbnails it looks like the car is at about the same stage as the Ferrari one. I have my fingers crossed that they’ll both make it to SEMA this year, but I won’t be surprised if they are not.

So, to possibly suck in a few more folks to his channel and this build, below is the intro video and it’s only about 8 minutes long. Give it a spin. Also, here is the entire playlist link.

Baby It Was Cold Inside

Not in the house, even though the morning temps are now consistently in the upper 30s to very low 40s, but inside the engine of the Miata. A couple weeks ago, possibly on the last trip to pick up a pizza, I thought that the temp gage was very slow moving and as I got close to home the Check Engine light came on.

I loaded a car scanner app on the phone that reads codes, plugged in the Bluetooth OBDII dongle and got back – P0128. This indicates that the “coolant temperature is below the thermostat regulating temperature” and the most likely culprit is a stuck open thermostat. This causes your coolant to be always directed through the radiator keeping the engine cooler than it is supposed to be. It could be a few other things, but predominantly it is a bad thermostat.

I read a few posts on the Miata.net forums and the repair is spoken of as being simple enough. I then watched a couple of YouTube videos, including one entitled “changing a Miata thermostat in 7 minutes, but I’m getting to the point in my life where I’d rather pay to let the pros do it. I called my local go to shop and they were scheduling appointments 2 weeks out. Yesterday was the CTBNL’s day.

Thanks Mike

Today is Sunday and I took my usual Sunday morning ride out to the end of Lakeshore Drive and back. This gives me a nice little 15 mile ride, but today I only made it about 4-1/2 miles. At first it sounded like I sucked a tumbleweed into my back wheel, but when I looked back, there was nothing visible, but audible was a different story – hisssssss. I had a puncture.

I did a quick U-turn thinking maybe I could ride a ways back towards home, but that wasn’t happening. As soon as I got going in that direction the air had all escaped. I walked a few steps to get out from in front of someone’s driveway and settled in to see about patching my new hole in a tube.

I’ve been carrying around a modified water bottle with flat repair stuff inside just for this occasion. It used to be on the tandem so the spare tube in there wouldn’t fit the road bike, but there was a quick patch kit, 3 tire irons and a CO2 inflater with a couple cartridges so in theory I should be able to fix my problem.

I had just removed the rear wheel (why is it always the rear wheel?) when a fellow in a Honda CRV stopped next to me and zipped down the window, “Need some help?” I replied, “Not sure, but I might.” I told him I thought that I had the stuff to fix the issue, but hadn’t really checked yet. He pulled over, walked back and asked if it would be easier if he just gave me a lift home. It took me roughly 38 milliseconds to run through the hassle of doing the work on the side of the road in my head and the possibility of failure before I said, “If it isn’t too much trouble, I’ll take that ride.”

Turns out, he is also a cyclist and knew first hand the hassle of trying to fix a flat on the side of the road and the indignity of walking several miles home pushing, not riding, your bike. And one time when he had a flat someone stopped and offered him a ride home, so this was his way of paying that fellow back and leveling the cosmic score.

Later in the morning, for a test I attempted to fix the flat with the stuff inside that water bottle. I could, but in 10 minutes in my garage, who knows how it would have gone out there in the wild.

Thanks Mike.

Car Wash Day


I got a nice mountain bike ride early this morning around Moore Park and I really should wash that thing (and then re-lube the chain) because it is quite dusty from the very dry trails. Instead, I washed both cars this afternoon.

Halloween Is Getting Close

That means it is time for another Wintercroft paper mask. All the photos below are from the Wintercroft website, so they are copyrighted, but they probably won’t complain as this is sort of a free ad for them. 🙂

In the past I have made 5 of these. The skull was the first in 2014 with the pumpkin following in 2015. After a year off I did the fox in 2017. I didn’t do anything in 2018 because I had retired and back in Aiken we typically only had a handful of Trick or Treaters so it wasn’t worth a costume. In 2019 we were in Oregon, but living in an AirBnb while looking for a house.

In 2020 I absolutely had to go back to doing something because our new house is the epicenter of Halloween festivities in southeastern Oregon. They close our street down from 5:00 pm until around 10:00, and hordes of trick-or-treaters are given free range of about 8 blocks. So that year I made the Devil mask. Last year I went with the gas mask and it turned out fantastic. But, the only problem was it didn’t breathe very well and after 2 hours of wearing it, the paper was getting soft from my exhalations. And two hours was all it took, to give away about 1200 pieces of candy.

I’m not sure which one I’m going to make for this year, but I’ve narrowed it down to the following five. The first three below are half masks, meaning they have no backs, and are easier to make and a bit more comfortable to wear. So I’m kind of leaning towards those, but the enhanced skull mask, which fit around your whole head, are just so awesome looking.

What a problem to have…

Jurassic Overload

We sign up to get Peacock so we can watch the Tour de France and Vuelta a Espana bicycle races. We even opt to spend the ten bucks a month to have the no commercials option.1 One of the big banners that show up at the top when you open the Peacock app is for the new Jurassic Park movie – Jurassic World: Dominion.

Hey, what the heck, I enjoyed the first movie way back when and its free, so I thought I’d check it out. I lasted 15 minutes before turning it off, Chris Pratt on a horse roping dinosaurs like a wild west cowboy… So this past Monday while the Vuelta cyclists were on a rest day, I talked Donna into watching the 1993 original movie.

Wow, amazing how much you forget in 30 years. Not the main bits that have become pop culture touchstones, the water class vibrations as the T-Rex approaches or the lawyer in the out house, etc, but the acting. Jeff Goldblum’s over the top smarminess, Lora Dern’s poorly acted wide-eyed innocence, Sam Neil’s character arc of kid hating to kid loving and Wayne Knight’s whatever.2 I did forget that Samuel L. Jackson was in it though and I kept waiting for him to drop a Mofo, but alas I was disappointed.

Anyway, turned out the first movie wasn’t as great as I remembered it was, so I thought I’d give to new movie one more try. This time I made it to right around the hour mark when the movie sort of morphed into the Star Wars cantina scene and then flipped immediately into a Jason Bourne movie which where it lost me…again.

Along with the latest Jurassic World: Dominion, the first 3 Jurassic movies are available for watching on Peacock right now, but The Lost World & The Lost World: Fallen Kingdom aren’t for some reason. I have a copy of The Lost World that someone gave me and I probably watched it back in 2015, but I can’t remember anything about it. I have seen the third movie, Jurassic Park III, and I seem to remember thinking it was OK, but that was 20 years ago.

That left the second movie, The Lost World. Jurassic Park, left to see on Peacock. Guess what? This one is another steaming pile a dino droppings. I made it about 45 minutes before hitting the stop button. The only thing remotely noteworthy about this movie was there was a young guy that plays a photographer that goes to the island with our core group of Jeff Goldblum, Julianne Moore and Richard Schiff that sounded a lot like Vince Vaughn. I had to stop the movie and check IMDB. Holy Crap! It was a 27-year old Vince Vaughn.