Greetings and welcome!
The snow the other day did not add up to much, maybe an inch.
From what I have seen in my travels the trails looked pretty nice. We have good coverage and a decent base. Now it is up to the riders to make them bumpy and the clubs to flatten them out again. On the couple of trails that I have seen the clubs are winning. The local trails looked pretty nice. People’s ride reports are all coming back that they had fun and enjoyed good trails.
I have been seeing a fair amount of snowmobile traffic on the trail past the GF’s house. That is good to see in the Christmas to New Year’s stretch. There have been far too many years recently that we couldn’t ride until January or worse.
The big New Year’s Day storm is looking like it will hit our friends in northern Illinois and southern WI. None of the models showed any snow north of Green Bay. The NAM model showed it hitting Green Bay with up to 6″ on one run, but later runs are showing it back at the state line again.
We have a cold weekend coming up. We won’t get the snow, but we will get the cold air behind it. Friday looks nice at 29, but Friday night goes down to 7 above. After that Saturday and Sunday are forecast to only reach the mid-teens and overnight lows around zero. Bring the good gloves.
I got a little shop time in last night working on the first Indy Trail. It was all of the way ready for that suspension tune up. I cleaned and greased shafts, replaced bearings and fixed stubborn grease fittings. One shaft gave me a hard time though. It is a key pivot point on the front arm. Apparently it had seized on my last ride, the bolts were starting to back out.
Let the battle begin. It is only about 8″‘ long but that aluminum shaft and steel tube have become very good friends. I heated it up with a propane torch till it smoked, no joy. I drilled out the grease zirk in case that was holding it in. I shot about a half can of Free-all down the cracks and it flowed in. Still a couple of hours of beating on it with a 4# sledge hammer did not set it free. (Picture Curly from 3 Stooges doing the face wipe and barking…) Hopefully tomorrow I will take it to a buddy’s house and go after it with a press and acetylene torch. Maybe an extra day to let the Free-all to work will do the trick. I have had decent success with the stuff when it had a chance to soak.
If all else fails I have located another arm assembly for well under $100.
I considered putting in an Xtra 12 suspension that I have stashed away out of an old 96 XLT. The suspension is stored indoors and should be saveable, but I looked into it and it would be more work than I want to do with snow on the ground and trails open. While it would be cool to have a vintage Indy Trail up on a cushy 12″ suspension, that sounds like a summer project. I can have this set up on the trail in 3 hours once I get the parts.
That’s it from here. Have a good weekend and thank you for visiting!
RJB