Powder Prep

I’ve been spending a few days preparing several items for the Calgary CVMG club ‘powder coating day’ this coming Saturday.  Should be interesting as I haven’t actually seen this done before – other than on television of course ! I hope to have two motorcycle frames ready to go – both are Suzuki’s, one being a 1973 GT750 and the other being a 1977 GT500. I’ve spent the past few days disassembling and getting them stripped down, taken lots of photos and bagged and tagged many of the smaller bits and pieces, nuts and bolts.

Today I spent some time washing off the accumulated dirt and  oil from 30+ years of use.  I had briefly thought of  doing this in my driveway using my pressure washer, but very quickly rejected the idea as it would flush small amounts of oil and grease down the storm drain. Instead, I took everything over to a local Shell car wash as they (supposedly) are set up to keep this sort of debris out of the storm water system.

I’ve touched on Shell’s marketing folks and what an odd lot they are previously. Some time ago (before I retired !) I had suggested to the same brilliant marketing folks at Shell that keep closing filling stations so you can’t find one when you need one, that they start to consider the value of putting Shell’s name on the roofs of our buildings. When you consider the number of people using the various free mapping services offering satellite photos that show tons of detail, you would think it would be a no-brainer. A few companies have actually done this in the USA, and Microsoft offers this capability in a virtual fashion with Tim  Horton’s coffee shops and Petro-Canada filling stations in some parts of Canada using their Bing mapping service. In the photo to the right, you can see the Shell station and car wash I used – or at least you can now that I’ve pinned a label on it with an arrow !  Imagine how it would look with a big Shell pecten on the roof – this of course hasn’t happened. As I may have mentioned previously, our marketing folks border on genius in much the same way that hammers do – not very much at all actually, but I digress ……

The parts are now all freshly washed, and tomorrow I go over to the good folks at Consolidated Compressor here in Calgary to sand blast all the bits and pieces. I wrote about them previously here , and this time I will be using their indoor glass bead blasting cabinet for the smaller items and the outside sand blasting stations for the two frames. I have to admit, for someone like myself who doesn’t have to do this sort of thing for a living, there is a certain fascination about watching the old paint, rust and anything else that happens to get in the way and isn’t firmly attached get blasted into oblivion – it promises to be fun ! If all goes well, I’ll have Friday to blow out any bits of grit and make sure everything is ready to go for the main powder coating event Saturday morning.

I’ll let you know how it goes !

Broomsticks and Shock Absorbers

We just had a short weekend away in the Kootenay Lake area of British Columbia – it’s a very nice part of the country, and we were staying with some friends who have a house there. It’s about a 6 hour drive from Calgary, making it just beyond what most people would consider an easy commute for a cottage, so it isn’t quite so heavily built up as some vacation areas and this seems to suit the local folks just fine.

Since we were not too far from Nakusp, we travelled up there for a day to stop in at Wolfgang’s Laverda shop which is nestled away in the hills above Nakusp. It seems like an unlikely location for what is probably North America’s largest supplier of vintage Laverda motorcycle parts and services, but obviously it must work. Wolfgang also stocks parts suitable for other makes and models., and I particularly was interested in picking up a pair or two of the Ikon rear shock absorbers he sells which are made in Australia, very good quality and more importantly are the correct length to fit my GT750’s. We had a good look around his shop and warehouse, sorted out the parts and then had a very nice drive back down to where we staying. The next day we stopped in at Crawford Bay to see the North Woven Broom company. Again, it seems an unlikely place to find something like this, but North Woven Broom has supplied brooms as props for movies and television shows like Bewitched, Road to Avonlea and Shanghai Noon as well as for the Canadian distributor of the Harry Potter books ! Needless to say, we bought a broom for ourselves and it is currently looking very nice in our front hallway !

As I’ve written previously, we generally look for Shell stations as we travel as they are the folks paying my pension, but they sure don’t make it easy. On the way home, it was disappointing to note that we were able to drive 942 km (585 miles) without seeing a single Shell service station the whole time ! Weird.

Victoria’s Quilts

Giving something useful back to the community is always worthwhile, and as every family at some time or other is touched by illness, accident or tragedy, if that ’something’ can provide a bit of comfort during a difficult time then I think that is doubly good to do. Victoria’s Quilt s Canada is probably not very well known – certainly people always seem surprised to hear about it when we talk about it, but this is a group of volunteer quilters from across Canada that produces hand made quilts as gifts to patients dealing with cancer. The quilts themselves are beautiful, and the amount of donated material, craftsmanship and time that goes into each one continues to amaze me. These are offered by Victoria’s Quilts Canada to cancer patients in response to requests by a family member, friend or relative – and at no cost to the person receiving the quilt. Here in the Calgary Victoria’s Quilts Chapter, there are about forty-five full time members plus probably an additional thirty or forty quilters who contribute time and additional resources. Its a very good cause.

Shell Canada Ltd. offers Community Service Fund cash grants of varying amounts to specified groups, charities and organisations in which Shell staff and retirees participate, and in 2008 Shell Canada Ltd. donated more than $490,000 to some 350 organisations across Canada benefiting directly from this programme.

Today I was very pleased to present to the Calgary Victoria’s Quilts executive, a generous cheque from Shell Canada Ltd. , which was gratefully received, and which will be used to fund the cost of materials used in the production of quilts for cancer patients in the Calgary and surrounding area. In the presentation photo to the right we have the Calgary Victoria’s Quilt executive who are (from left): Laura Deschner(Vice-President), Sharron Blaine (President), Marilyn Lichtenstein (Treasurer), myself doing the presentation and Donna Sandy (Secretary).

If you want to make a contribution of either fabric (please be sure to check the specifiations before donating fabric) or money, or if you are a quilter and want to donate some of your own time just contact the national office or the branch closest to you.

At the moment, this is a North American group, but I suspect groups will eventually pop up in other countries – I think its needed.

9,574 km Later …..

We are safely back home again after our trip down east – we were away 20 days, although just nine days were ‘travel’ days and we covered a total of 9,574 kilometres. The average fuel consumption over the entire distance with the Volvo while hauling a trailer, turned out to be 10.6 l/100 km or about 26.7 miles per Imperial gallon and we averaged 84 km/hour over the whole trip. I improved on the fuel consumption from what I was able to get last year, by just lowering the rear tail gate on the trailer to reduce its wind resistance – doing so basically paid for about three tanks of gas and so was well worth it. We had good visits with both my brothers, a few friends and also relatives on my wife’s side of the family, and best of all spent some time with our two son’s. The high point was the graduation of our younger son Derek at York University.  All in all, a very successful trip.

We took the trailer so we could deliver a load of items to our sons in Ontario, and rather than come home ‘empty’ we dragged back a 1973 Suzuki GT750 basket case seen in the photo to the right which is in a very sorry state, but which does have a few parts and pieces I can use elsewhere if I don’t actually try and restore it. As well, tucked away in one of the boxes, was a possibly rare Clymer repair manual – it is a third printing covering only the 1972 380cc through 750cc Suzuki triples, is dated 1974, and appears to have not been used so I’ll add it to the collection in my library. I need to clear away a few of my other projects before I decide what I’m going to do with the basket case, so it will probably just sit in a heap in a corner of the garage till next year at which point I will include it on my project web site.

While travelling we usually try to use Shell fuel stations as they are after all the folks paying my pension, but after having travelled to both the east and west coasts of North America a couple of times in the past year I can say with some authority that Shell really doesn’t always make it easy for expressway and turnpike travellers to buy their products. We several times fuelled up at Esso/Exxon or some other brand simply because they had advertised ahead on the highway so we knew they were there when we needed fuel – while a Shell station may have also been available, we many times didn’t find out about it till we had passed it. The other thing was being able to easily get to a station that you knew existed. Many years ago, a fellow I worked with by the name of Jerry Beneteau told me that the secret of a successful service station was ‘good dirt’ – it appears that this useful insight has been lost by Shell retail in the USA and Canada, as in a few cases, having confirmed that a Shell station existed, getting to it was not convenient from the perspective of a highway traveller wanting to just fill and go with the least fuss and time investment.

The other thing I really started to find annoying was in the USA being sometimes asked to enter a zip code at the pumps when paying by credit card – of course, being from Canada I don’t have a #$%@ zip code so I then had to go into the office and negotiate with the sales clerk which sort of defeats the whole idea of speed and convenience in today’s self serve world.  In one case (not a Shell station) , I actually had to prepay and then go back and get a refund for the amount I didn’t put into the tank !  I can accept the idea of doing something to reduce fraud, but modern credit cards have PIN numbers so rather than creating a new, non-standard method I don’t understand why they wouldn’t just use what already exists ? It seemed to me to be a slightly stupid, non-customer focused process.

When I was working at Shell, I recall regular discussions amongst the retail folks about how to boast sales – I think one easy way would be to stick a few senior executives in a couple of cars for a few weeks, and have them do some actual ‘on the ground’, coast to coast highway learning to see what it looks like from the customer side, rather than from the inside of their offices.  I’m pretty sure there would be a few changes made really quickly if they did !