Our little bird feeder is just the bomb.
Best $25 I ever spent.
You wouldn’t think it, just looking at them, but chickadees are at the top of the food chain in the little ecosystem that’s sprung up in the back yard. They’re the only ones that eat right out of the feeder, and it’s only because they’re messy eaters that there’s a constant rain of food to the ground, and all the other critters stay fat and happy. There’s a dozen entrances to the snow caves where the squirrels live, and on a sunny day, I can wash dishes and watch squirrel whack-a-mole in the holes in the snow on the hillside. It’s very cool.
And then an owl started hanging out, hoping for some squirrel guac-a-mole.
I don’t know if you’ve ever watched an owl watching for squirrels in a snow storm from 10 feet away, but it is impressive. 
After the re-build and the crash, and the post mortem updates, C3PR is still alive.
Mechanically, it is close to where I need it.
I have 8 pair of welding gloves. Filthy, stiff, charred chunks of leather.
And I have Dad’s heavy duty walking-foot leather stitching machine, which I’ve never actually used.
So when I downsized my welding glove collection, I cut them up, and the insides were unexpectedly nice, and I tried my hand at stitching.
My Valentine’s Day dilemma was solved.
Remember the Honda?
My 1978 GL1000?
They call it that because it’s in 1000 pieces in the shop, where I’d worked on it during the pandemic. I’d been about to put the engine back together when I realized I’d ordered the wrong piston rings. The right ones were back-ordered for weeks, and when they finally came in, messing with my motorcycle was near the bottom of my list. So I put the rings on the top of the pile, and I never went back.
That was 4 years ago, and I’ve felt bad about it ever since.
Well, now that C3PR is in a good place, I was looking for a change of pace, and finishing the Honda sounded like a good idea.
It ought to take me about a month, I thought to myself. Of Sundays.
I got started by sorting through the motorcycle bench in its corner of the shop. It was like Pompeii. Tools and parts in a pile, abandoned as though I’d taken a break for lunch 5 years ago. All caked in dust and worse.
And as I sifted through the pile, it started to come back to me, and I knew what I had to do.
The right piston rings finally came in the mail in ’21, and I found them on the pile on the bench. Top dead center, under a little less dust than the rest of the pile.
So far, so good.
Now, I have worked on pistons before.
Some of my best work has been on pistons.
And anything I ever botched, piston-wise, I’ve always managed to un-botch.
That said, no two piston jobs are alike, and it took me 2 days to ruin 4 pistons.
I’ll spare you the details, but even after I figured out the problem, I didn’t feel as stupid as I usually do, because my botch was pretty subtle.
And now that I understood it, all I needed was a jig and a new set of pistons.
I made the jig. I bought new pistons. The first piston pin pressed right in. Yay!
The rest of them went poorly, though, and soon I was well on my way to ruining 3 out of 4 of my new pistons. I pulled out all the piston pins and pondered the problem.
It turns out the jig had bent under the force from the first press, and the rest of the pins were being driven crooked.
Sigh.
OK, so now I’ve got 12 pistons on my hands, and all but one of them is at least a little fucked up. WhatamIgonnado?
I did not buy another set of pistons to ruin.
I found me a bigger piece of steel, and I made me a sturdier jig. Size matters.
I bought me a Flex-Hone and I managed to repair the scores in the piston pin bores of the 4 least-damaged pistons, so I could try it one more time.
I put the pins in the freezer. I put the rods under a heat gun. I put on some gloves, and I pressed all 4 piston pins home without a hitch.
Perfect!
And since I (hope I) am never going to open up this engine case again, ‘now’ was a good time to check on my oil pump. After all, when the bike died, it briefly pumped a slurry of shattered bearing bits through it, so chances are good that the pump is bad.
Yup. The vanes were trashed. Bad.
Ebay to the rescue, though, and the pump is in the mail.
Stay tuned.
Nobody’s going to bend this baby!
Not ready to rev.