January 29, 2026

Hello Bike Savers! This is getting frustrating. This is not snow, this is something else. I wish that I had something 'bikey' to impart to you today, but Mother Nature continues to be a little bitch keeping us in the deep freeze - and I do mean DEEP FREEZE! 

We are almost one week past snowstorm Fran, and all that crap that came down upon us has settled and turned into almost solid ice. I finally got sick of not being able to go anywhere yesterday, so got busy trying to get the car out through the compacted ice that coats everything. 

Oh, I made it - it took me a while, but it was like being an ice breaker plowing through Arctic sea ice. My driveway is probably a hundred feet long, and as I slowly made my way through the hard surface it would make this crunching noise very much akin to ice breaking, which I suppose it was. I'd move forward a little, break it all up making a path, back up a little just to make sure I could back up, and then move forward again.

I made it to the road, which was clear down to the pavement, and since I was out, I went to the store and got some more stuff we needed, but unfortunately the shelves were devoid of a lot of the milk, no butter, and NO CREAMER! It seems a small thing, but once you're used to creamer in your coffee, well, nothing else will do. Quite bougie of me, I know.

I got back, put everything away, and since there was nothing else to really do, I went backout to take my frustrations out on the icy floor that covered everything. I'm of a certain age where you should really be careful with over-exerting yourself, and there's nothing like hard, compacted snow-ice to remind yourself that Death could only be a shovelful away, so I took my time breaking it up with a regular dirt shovel, the only shovel hard enough to let me crack off sections at a time.

This wasn't 'shoveling' snow; this reminded me a lot of breaking up the concrete pad to my old garage. This snow didn't come up in shovelfuls, but SLABS! Heavy slabs of ice-snow, compacted into blocks that sounded just like concrete when you threw them away.

I was trying to make a turnaround for the car so I could back it up next to the house after I got back from the store, but the ice just would not let the car's wheels turn through it. I took my time, and did make some progress, but by the time the sun started to go down I was pretty beat, so I packed it in for the day. This pic below is all the crap that was tossed to the left of the other pic.

Yeah, it sucked. But before I went in, I tried using my erstwhile turnaround, and it wasn't happening, the snow underneath all that crap was like sand. I did manage to back the car up though and called it a day.

I guess in the meantime, while we wait for the Earth to rotate a bit and warm things up, I can relate what I'm trying to do in the garage.

This is the 1972 Honda JDM CB500 I currently have spread all over my workbench...this was right after I got her home, I was doing a bit of triage on her, spraying all the bolts with PB Blaster and Kroil to help loosen them up. 

This model was only sold in Japan ('JDM' stands for 'Japanese Domestic Market'), and I suspect it was originally owned by an American G.I. It turned up pretty close to my house, so of course I had to have it, and since I'm a veteran too, I thought it would make a great project; and it will, but Man! The more I get into it the more I'm finding wrong with it!  

One of the first things I did when I was taking her apart was to check out the carbs. This bike had been sitting outside for God know how long, and it shows - I mean, all you have to do is look at the above pic and you can see it's pretty weathered - simply getting the carbs out of their boots was struggle enough but I opened them up and was greeted by this -   

Yeah, that's pretty fugly...baked-on old gas and rust! it took me a while, but I did get them all cleaned up. I haven't put them back together yet because I ran into another anomaly while I was disassembling them...

A block of wood in the holder?? Yeah, I'm pretty sure that doesn't belong there! I had to scrounge up the little spring and anvil that belongs in there. I have it, now, but while I was waiting for it, I got busy stripping the bike to get her ready for paint.

Oh, I found all kinds of weird shit with this bike - check out the headlight - 

Not only is all the wiring shorted and frazzled (no biggie - that's pretty normal to find), but there is also this extra bulb in it, something I have never seen before in a 'US' bike...I have no idea what it's for - I don't think it's a High or even Low beam, it's way too small...

And this is pretty cool too: A speed warning light! This is on top of the main triple tree nut, and from what I can find out about it, it lights up when you get past a certain speed! Apparently, that's what the little Japanese sticker there says: "Speed Warning Light". 

This one also came with the original fuse holder in the tool tray! Very rare to find! No fuses, obviously, but still a great find! 

The points were surprisingly in pretty good shape too, so I figure I'll put it all back together again and see what happens.