As you all know, Coffee (Dean) passed away a couple of years ago. I am Dean's ex-wife's husband and happen to have spent my career in tech. Over the years, I occasionally helped Dean with various tech issues.
When he passed, I worked with his kids to gather the necessary credentials to keep this site running. Since then (and for however long they worked with Coffee), Woodschick and Dirtdame have been maintaining the site and covering the costs. Without their hard work and financial support, CafeHusky would have been lost.
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working to migrate the site to a free cloud compute instance so that Woodschick and Dirtdame no longer have to fund it. At the same time, I’ve updated the site to a current version of XenForo (the discussion software it runs on). The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.
Unfortunately, the new software version doesn’t support importing the old site’s styles, so for now, you’ll see the XenForo default style. This may change over time.
Coffee didn’t document the work he did on the site, so I’ve been digging through the old setup to understand how everything was running. There may still be things I’ve missed. One known issue is that email functionality is not yet working on the new site, but I hope to resolve this over time.
Thanks for your patience and support!
Learned something new about the bike which anyone else thinking about strapping luggage like the Giant Loop bags on might like to know.
I went away for the weekend. 350km trip away and another 350km back. After the trip out, the bag worked great. Halfway home on the return leg I found that the heat shield on the left side had melted into the exhaust pipe.
I figured it wasn't going to get any worse, gave the bag a minor adjustment on that side, and headed home.
The heat shields on the exhaust are held on by two torx screws at the top, and a rubber stopper at the front, on the side, to hold the heat shield away from the pipe.
Here's the cause. The rubber stopper has gone missing. This allowed the shield to bend more than usual and hit the pipe and melt. Looks like an alternative solution to the rubber stopper is required here.
This would be a somewhat simple task for the owners as a slightly larger version would be fine. Just pull them off, wax them , and lay up some carbon fiber with epoxy resin (high temperature epoxy resin for this project) on top of them. Let it cure at room temperature, separate the two, cure it further with a heat sorce, sand smooth or just leave them. Paint them with automotive clear coat to protect the epoxy from UV rays. This is a simple and good first carbon fiber project. Don't worry about vacuum bagging or anything technical for this project. Car wax, a throw away paint brush, epoxy resin (high temp two part mix), and a 5.4 oz. carbon fiber sheet (one yard will do it for both sides) is all you need besides the safety equipment (nitrile gloves, a good face mask, safety glasses and work clothing to cover every inch of your body. White vinegar works good for clean up. DO NOT GET ANY EPOXY RESIN ON YOUR SKIN OR ANY OTHER PART OF YOUR BODY. THIS IS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT, ESPECIALLY DURING CLEAN UP WHILE THE EPOXY IS THINNED.
You have a 3D printer! I love the idea of these things and what the future holds for them. Very envious here.
Objet Eden260V...fun toy to have :-P
Had a massive 3D Systems SLA7000 lhad to sell it because I became allergic to the resins
Thanks for the warning! I sort of wondered about this, but didn't think much about it due to the fact some exhaust systems are made out of carbon fiber. Did an experiment today and the epoxy melted at the same time the plastic did. Researched and found some high temp epoxys that should be used on this project.
Yeah, I really like that Sterilite things: seems like it will make the space easier to use!!
