Update on delivery of my Ural Patrol. I talked with Jim at Raceway Services today, and his crew is currently getting my rig together. Will know more soon, but am crossing my fingers for a delivery this weekend!

The inventiveness of Ural owners will never cease to amaze me. When Pat on the Ural boards asked about front wheel traction:

“I was wondering if somebody with off road experience could give some advice. When riding on snow packed roads my biggest concern is front wheel slide”

Chris gave a great MacGyver solution:

“When I was in the military and my only transportation was my Honda 350 enduro,I would wrap a hemp rope around my front and rear tire very tight. This works fine until you encounter dry pavement but in snow they last all day.”

Hemp rope for better snow traction — certainly save you a few bob over getting some knobby tires, and could be good in a pinch.

Read the whole thread — IMZ Ural Discussion Boards - Front Wheel Traction? »

What do you use for better traction?

Note: this post has nothing to do with Urals, but everything to do with a somewhat Ural accessory… beer.

Bottling Brigade

On Sunday, Jan. 20, a small party of homebrew devotees bottled the Patrol Porter: me, my fiancee Jodie, our friends Martha and Hans, and our dog, Ella. Together we made short work of the bottling job, from cleaning the equipment to bottling the brew to cleaning up after and, somehow, managing to clean out a few bottles of some other beer in the meantime.

Bottle or Keg?

Just like with motorcycles, homebrewing attracts many fiery, pig-headed, stubborn passionate, opinionated people. I wouldn’t know anything about that personally, that’s just what I understand things to be.

When it comes to homebrewing, whether to bottle or to keg is one of the big fundamental questions. I won’t address kegging; many do it and love it, I’m just not one of them. Jodie and I prefer to bottle our beer. Bottled beer is easily portable, makes great gifts, and is lots of fun. Heck, I even enjoy cleaning out and sanitizing the bottles — but then again, I’m crazy.

Bottling also is a ready-made reason to have some friends over. After all, if someone called you up and said, “Hey, would you like to come over and bottle some beer?” wouldn’t you head on over? That’s what I thought.

The Elixir of Life, in a Convenient 12-oz. Size

When bottling beer, most of the work is in the prep. The rule of thumb is simple: If it touches the beer, it must be sanitized. All equipment — hoses, bottle caps, bottles, buckets — must be cleaned with, say, a solution of water and bleach. All bottles must be cleaned out and rinsed, and de-labeled if they still have the label on them.

Once you have that done though, things go quick and easy. This is also where having friends over comes in handy: now, you have an assembly line.

Our bottling process went smoothly:

• Anthony filled bottles
• Hans moved bottles to capper and then moved bottles to finish area
• Martha capped the bottles
• Jodie took pictures (thanks for the snaps in this post, babe)
• Ella sniffed everything and made sure the operation was up to snuff

Commie Army

Within a couple of hours, 5 gallons of beer was bottled, capped and ready to fizz up. (Later we added some stick-on gold stars, to complete the commie-army-red-bottlecap look.)

As of this writing, the beer is almost ready to drink. Once it’s bottled, beer needs about 10 days to carbonate. In other words, it should be ready to drink by this weekend which, I hope, is when Jim is also going to tell me my Patrol is on its way to Eugene.

And then, once the bike is in the garage, and Jodie and I are standing around marveling at it, we shall crack a cold Patrol Porter — and toast its arrival properly.

Brewer Notes

We based our Patrol Porter off the Entire Porter, Beer #10, a recipe from Eugene’s Home Fermenter Center.

• Added 1 qt. cooled Organic Sumatra brewed black coffee to the fermentation tank (a 6.5-gallon glass carboy)
• At bottle time, the coffee added a nice slightly bitter note on the finish; expecting the coffee to be more assertive after some bottle conditioning
• Beer stayed by our wood stove, to ferment at a comfy 70-76°F temperature

5 gallons of porter was bottled into:

• 7 Grolsch-style bottles (with the flip caps)
• 4 22-oz. cap bottles
• 27 12-oz. cap bottles

Alcohol: 5% (about standard for a porter)

Ready to drink on: Jan. 31, or whenever my Patrol arrives

Or, from the personals: “Emptied-out garage seeks sidecar motorcycle”

A deep breath. Hold it a moment, and release. A sigh. A nod of the head.

The garage is ready.

For a year and a half, the garage has slumbered, not yet called to its destiny. It waited patiently, blanketed in the comfy detritus of its 2 current owners and the leftover crap of our predecessor.

But now — now, the garage is awake. It is ready. It is waiting.

A couple of nights ago, Jodie and I ran a bunch of stuff to Goodwill for donations. Today, St. Vincent de Paul removed some crapped-out, left-behind appliances, including a standing freezer that was older than me and Jodie put together, and massive enough for us, the cat and the dog to hide in.

The front of the garage is clean and uncluttered. All it needs now is a motorcycle, and it will be complete.

Or, we’ve got to get rid of all this crap

And man, do we. Jodie and I moved into our home in 2006. We’ve done some renovation, and are gradually unpacking the rest of our stuff. The garage, of course, has to this point lived a relatively obscure, cluttered existence, full of lumber scraps, tools (neatly organized though), an old crapped-out freezer the seller left behind, and a few piles and collections of crap to get rid of.

With an “anytime now” ETA on my Patrol, however, this stuff has got to go. So over the last couple of weeks, Jodie and I have been organizing and separating, putting things away and getting ready to take things away. As I type this, in fact, Jodie is finishing up her last violin lesson of the night — and then we’re taking a carload of stuff to Goodwill.

Tips for cleaning out your garage

The garage is now ready for the Ural. If you’re looking at clearing out your garage (or rest of the house, or storage unit, or whatever), here are some tips:

• Friends. Say no more. When Jodie and I moved in together, we moved from our own apartments, so we wound up with a lot of duplicate stuff. We checked with friends to see if they were looking for anything, and got rid of a few items that way (such as a coffee table from my old apartment).
• Consider donating your stuff, instead of having a yard sale. We thought about having a yard sale, but ultimately we decided to donate most of our stuff to Goodwill and to a local organization called ShelterCare. The reasons are simple: far, far less work involved, and, while cash in the hand now is nice, your donations usually have more value as tax deductions come tax time. For more info, see Free Money Finance: Give Smart and Give Smart: Money Matters - Yahoo! Finance.
• Sell it on Craigslist. The newspaper classifieds can be useful too, but if you want to move items fast, Craigslist is one of today’s best ways to go. This is not a route we’ve tried yet, but there are some items we may put up for sale on there. I’m keeping Lifehacker’s Hack Attack: A Seller’s Guide to Craigslist in my back pocket as a to-do list and reference for anything we try to sell on Craigslist.
• Recycle, Freecycle and Freebox. Eugene’s Bring Recycling is a great place to donate and recycle unwanted items – and to pick up, for cheap, items that may be handy around the house and the garage. Freecycle is a cross between Craigslist and recycling, in that it’s a network of people swapping items, for free, via the web. You can also try the very Eugene tactic of freeboxing. Take everything you don’t want, and put it in a box at the curb. A sign saying “FREE” helps, but is not required. Your former stuff will be off to new homes in as little as 10 minutes.

The real reason to clean out the garage

Naturally, all of this boils down to 2 things:

• Clearing out space in my garage to park my Patrol
• Clearing out space in my garage to make room for inevitable bike accessories, tools, and parts that mysteriously strew themselves about the place… and for me to have a clear path when frustrated after a padawan’s evening of wrenching

But at least I’m ready. Now to get out those JC Whitney and Aerostitch catalogs…

Homebrewed Ural goodness

In honor of (eventually) getting our Ural Patrol, Jodie and I decided to brew a commemorative batch of beer. On Dec. 30 we brewed 5 gallons of “Patrol Porter.” We’ve given it a nice long time to ferment and come together in the carboy (at right). After bottling it tomorrow night (Jan. 18) Jan. 20 (works out better for us) it will be ready to drink roughly around Jan. 28 31. With a little luck, that’ll also coincide with when our Patrol arrives… but if we have to crack one early, well, I think we’ll manage.

Nothing Like Homebrew

Our recipe and ingredients are from Eugene’s Home Fermenter Center, with two slight mods:

• Added 1 qt. strong black coffee (an organic dark Sumatra), because we love coffee and in honor of all the times I’m sure to be needing both caffeine and a beer while working on the bike
• 20W50 motor oil. [Warning, foilhead in-joke] Well, maybe. We’re still deciding whether to add regular or synthetic, but that’s a whole nuther oil thread right there

New Bike, New Beer

We love brewing a batch of beer in honor of certain events. For example, in 2007 we brewed a Belgian white beer (a Hoegaarden clone we dubbed “Jogaarden”) for Jodie’s birthday, and we also brewed a red ale the same day we got Ella, our coppery-toned pup, that we called “Ella Puppy Red,” or EPR.

And now, in honor of the bike, we’ll have the Patrol Porter. The beer fridge is always open to friends and fellow foilheads!

Since You Know You Wanted to Ask

You’re right. Since we’re getting a Patrol, this beer is, naturally, the “Patrol Porter.” But if we were getting a Gear-Up, then of course we would’ve brewed “Beer-Up!”

Getting a shiny-new Ural sidecar motorcycle from Russia to Oregon isn’t the easiest thing in the world. My motorcycle dealer, the reknown Jim Petitti of Salem, Oregon’s Raceway Services, broke it down to me like this (this is not quoted or paraphrased, and may contain facts intermingled with absolute bull$%&#):

Getting a Ural from Siberia to Eugene

• You finally put your money down with your dealer, and said dealer sends order along to IMZ Ural. Explains it’ll take about 60-70 days to get here. Ish (or, in the Russian, ishtroya)
• Bike built on order, in Irbit, Siberia
• After a few celebratory, dosvedanya vodkas, hungover bike shipped by truck and/or rail to Germany. Has bad headache the entire way.
• From German coast and after a few beers and sausages, rig is put on a freighter.
• Freighter goes to New Jersey. Poor motorcycle.
• After getting mugged… After singing a little Frank Sinatra in Hoboken… After eating some really good pizza, Ural is put on a truck to Oregon and has sudden cravings for Pinot Noir. Curls up in truck with copy of Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion.
• Breathing in the rain- and cedar-scented air of the Willamette Valley, Jim and his crew at Raceway set up the bike
• Then they put it on another truck and bring it to Eugene, where the Ural will get its first, unfortunate, whiff of patchouli (not our house; it’s just a bit of, well, local color, in a local odor sort of way)
• In Eugene, the bike is delivered to my garage. Literally.
• Then one of the lads from Raceway spends a few hours schooling me on the ins and outs of my new rig, from maintenance to riding. He leaves wondering what divine power would ever allow such a non-mechanical eejit novice to own one of these things.
• After much fist-pumping and huzzahs, said eejit novice prepares to go tear-arsing around the neighborhood at long, long elated last.

And that about covers it. About a 2-month gestation and delivery period, for this eccentric, unique bit o’ Russian iron to go from the snows of Siberia to the rains of Oregon.

Granted, my bike hasn’t quite finished the journey. As I type this, it’s most likely on a truck on its way to Salem. But my Ural Patrol is almost here — and that is all that matters.

Ural VIN/Motorcycle VIN breakdown

Ural VIN (Vehicle Identification Number) information from fellow Ural enthusiast (and fellow new Ural owner) Robert Balogh, and from Jim Petitti of Salem, Oregon’s Raceway Services Ural dealership. Please note that any errors are most likely mine, not theirs. Thanks Bob and Jim!

Here’s a breakdown on how to understand your Ural motorcycle’s VIN. Note that when you get your bike, you will also get an MSO (Manufacturer’s Statement of Origin) that serves as a document of ownership.

• Standard 17 digit VIN with the 10th field indicating the model year.
• Fields 1,2 & 3 = International Mfg. code: X8J for Russian or Ukraine made.
• Fields 4 & 5 = Motorcycle Heavy. I think that is code for “Side-car does not come off”?
• Fields 6, 7 & 8 = Model; “037″ means Patrol.
• Field 9 = Security Check digit. (Secret math equation)
• Field 10 = Model year. 2007 is 7, 2008 is 8 and 2009 will be 9, then it goes back to Letters starting with the letter A.
• Fields 11 thru 17 = Sequential production numbers produced in that designated model year. In the case of 2007 it will be probably a 14-month year (as Ural fulfilled 2007 orders through early 2008)

From Siberia to Salem

Just got off the phone with Jim Petitti at Raceway Services, and my 2007 Ural Patrol is at the dealership in Salem! It ain’t in my garage – yet – but it should be here within the next 2 weeks.

Things to do

Of course, there’s still plenty to do before it gets here. Here’s a comprehensive (if probably partial) list:

• Get VIN and other insurance requirements/preferences to insurance agent for quote
• Send Jim Petitti full and final list of accessories to add to bike
• Get my helmet (first stop, Discount Motorcycle Parts in Eugene)
• Order Doggles (dog goggles) for our hack hound, Ella
• Finish clearing out the garage (gotta run a bunch of crap to Goodwill)

That should do it… for now.

Wow. A year in the running, and it’s finally almost here. I can’t believe I’m about to get my bike!

ADVrider boards question - Ride in the rain or don’t ride at all »

What do you need to ride in the rain, especially in the great Pacific Northwest? An inquiring Antsaint (my handle on the ADVrider forums and IMZ Ural boards) wants to know.

All you snow and rain riders, especially those up here in the great Pacific Northwet, what would be your most-recommended mods and add-ons to a Ural, especially for better riding in that good ol’ gray and drizzly “Oregon/Washington sunshine”?

Now that’s what I call a shopping list

Folks have posted some very helpful tips and recommendations, including:

• Wet-weather tires
• Lap robe
• Electric vests
• Rubber/Goretex riding gear (doesn’t have to be armored/heavy-duty, since that’s what your gear underneath the rainwear is for)
• Dialectric grease (a water-resistant grease that is great for water-proofing bike bits and pieces that still need good electrical connections/ conductivity)
• Heated grips (which just sound nifty anyway)

It’s all about the rainwear

For my mind and money, the minimum to start with would be the wet-weather riding gear – generally a 1-piece or 2-piece zip together outfit. Just for keeping the wet and cold off your precious hide, this is also gear you’d keep stashed in your Ural’s trunk, because you just never know when the heavens are going to cloud over and open up.

Arguments could be made for the tires or lap robe, but if you had to get one, I’d say go with the rainwear. Why do I say that? My motorcycle-in-the-monsoon days aren’t here yet, but for the past 4 years I have ridden a bicycle to work. Year-round. Rain and even snow. And it’s all about the gear.

It doesn’t matter how much rain is pouring down when I leave the house in the morning. As long as I’ve got my rain coat and rain pants on, I’m good to go, and dry when I get to the office. More importantly, since I’m not worried about getting soaked to the bone I still enjoy the ride.

Jodie and I will be working on this rainy weather shopping list over time — but we’ll start with the rainwear. From there (and the dialectric grease, which is just good to keep in your rig’s toolkit anyway), we’ll probably move on to the tires or heated grips. All in due time.