So I have a 26 year old honda 250 superdream.  I changed the engine for one with 8.5k miles on it and it has only done 4k miles since then.

 

It was getting a little noisy so I checked out the Haynes manual and did the requisite service interval tasks.  Seemed to work.  However it's been being a pain and getting slower by the week so I had a look at the balance shaft tensioner again.  I loosen the locking nut and, hey presto, nothing happens.

 

Hmm

 

So I look the manual up.  The bloody spring tensioner is buried righ inside the engine.

 

Bugger.

 

Looks like a spare engine but just about nobody wants to part with them except for silly money.

 

I think I'll have to send mum & dad to hull to pick up two £30 one's on offer.....

 

Ah well.

It's been a while since I blogged about the state of the Cryosphere.  However it's been an interesting time.  Virtually NO ice in the Swedish Baltic Arctic Circle.  Basically No winter for Stockhom.  I do mean NO winter.  They don't count the odd day at -1 and the odd flurry of snow as "Winter".  They talk about 5 months with below 0 temperatures and lots of -15 to -20.  So no winter this year.

 

The reports from the Arctic have been varied and interesting.  Bering straights with 100km open ice polynias.  Old Ice moving at high speed and flushing out of the Arctic.  Vary sparse cover with many areas less than 100% Ice.  Relatively warm temps (-17 to -24 instead of -40) which mean the ice is not thickening in the same way.

 

We still have the March high point to come, but we are moving into the Feb meltback right now and I wonder what March will bring?

 

All good clean fun.  After all, if you don't know it's coming then you can't prepare.

 

Oh and on that point, the scientists recorded a 1.5 meter loss of Ice in Greenland during the melt last year.  Which is somewhat "significant" but you won't hear them talking about it too much right now.  Not till they can prove a trend.  But the thing is, by the time you can see the trend, you are already so far in the shit you can't do much about it.

 

Oh well, as any married man will tell you, it's only the depth that varies....

Well it's been a long time. But I'm sitting here at 20 minutes past midnight waiting for a bunch of files to copy from my laptop to my desktop.  So I guess that I have some time to blog.

 

Well I didn't destroy quite so much hardware as I thought.  Only the Netgear wifi card.  When I removed it and replace it with the Belkin card, the machine began to behave itself.  Small mercies.  However the Library is further on in it's build stage now so the PC has had to move further away from the wifi box.  So I ran a long ethernet cable and linked it via a netgear router I have and hey presto, I have high speed network again... <Sigh>.

 

I guess I'll just have to use that 500 gig external drive I bought to back up my Raid0 volume before putting a new board in for something else.  I suppose I could find *something* for it to do.  Beside being backup which is what it is today....