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May 18, 2011
Your father, now, who is he?
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Oh yeah. Who's your daddy now? Here's the XR650L stripped down, ready for the new Clarke 4.7 gallon tank. Of course, I don't have any manuals or anything. I hard a hard time figuring out how to get the seat off. But, at the end of the day (literally), I got the seat off and the tank off. The new Clarke 4.7 gallon desert tank went on no problem. They suggested cleaning it out first, to get all of the "plastic shavings" out of the tank. Wow. That was a primo suggestion. Sure enough, it had plenty of plastic shavings inside the tank. Dumped them out. Put my old fuel cock onto the new tank. Torqued it all down real good. Got it all put back together, with only a few parts left over and a few hoses that lead to nowhere.
The fuel tank air vent tube that goes down into that tree-hugger charcoal canister is a little tight. And it's sort of a tight route now from the fuel cock into the carb, as the fuel cock sits a little lower and it's got to route around some other little tree-hugger contraption. But I have a feeling that I'm going to get off work and "uncork" this thing officially before I take off on the big adventure.
Just for the record, the plan is to go to Alaska in August. Now...I'm not saying at this point whether I'm going to Juneau or Anchorage, but I'm going. In August.
So, that's sort of the end-game here.
Also, I installed my new left rear turn signal, but oddly, I couldn't figure out which wire was hot and which was ground, but it didn't seem to matter, as it worked either way. However, the left turn doesn't blink for whatever reason. It's just on or off. So, I'll have to work on this, of course.
Also, I tried adjusting my headlight again. Trying to get it down from the stratosphere. It's better, but I still am not thrilled with it. I think the trick is to adjust it at night while you're riding it, which is about as dangerous as you can imagine. But it's the only way, IMHO.
Of course, the first thing I did was to drive straight to a gas station and fill it up. I managed to empty the contents of the old tank into the new one, which is not easy, since you have to take the drain cock off of the old tank and put it on the new one, so think about that for a while. In any event, I got the gas out of the old tank into the new one and so, it has (I'm guessing here---let's say 1.3 gallons) in it.
At the gas station, I fill it up and it says 3.418 Gallons @ $4.319/gallon = $14.76. Now, the trick is to monitor my gas mileage very closely and try to figure out a) exactly how much the tank holds and b) exactly how far I can go before I run out of gas. I don't want a repeat of my near-death-experience in the Punta Prieta desert in Baja California del Norte. You'll never know what that feeling was like, but it was bad bad bad.
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Posted by Rob Kiser on May 18, 2011 at 10:47 PM
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