Bike Updates

We got my bike back together yesterday; here's a picture I took this afternoon of it all put together. No pictures of me on it at the moment - I'll need to get Tracy to take some tomorrow.


I rode to work today, which was fun and a little terrifying at the same time. It's a lot like learning to drive a car again. Or, even better, like learning to drive a manual when you've been driving for a bit but only automatics. There's a lot of trying to make sure you're doing the right thing at the same time as being safe.

Tracy went to Goochland today to pick up her aunt's bike to borrow for a bit until her dad's bike is fixed. So now we both have bikes! Here's Tracy sitting on the bike before she rode it up and down our street a handful of times.


Then we drove over to Barron together, paused there ('cause we'd gotten separated), and then drove along Hydraulic to Four Seasons and back home again. So basically around a short-ish loop. It was fun and enough for Tracy for this evening. We hope to do Free Union Road early Saturday morning (so there won't be many people out and we can go nice and slow).

"New" Bike

Tracy and I got our motorcycle licenses two weekends ago. And last weekend, I looked at and made an offer on a used 2004 Yamaha R6. We picked it up on Monday. Also on Monday, a coworker lent me his tilt-shift lens to play with; he's planning to sell it back to B&H Photo/Video because he doesn't use it very much. Which means you not only get to see some pictures of my "new" bike, you also get to see some examples of what you can do with a tilt-shift lens.

The bike is in great shape - if you're talking about the engine & drivetrain. The electrics are a bit of mess, however. It was used as a race bike, so the engine is new-ish (rebuilt a couple of years ago), the clutch is new, the chain is new, the brake rotors and pads are new.... You get the idea. But since it was used as a race bike, things like proper headlight operation and turn signals weren't terribly important. And it's missing its horn (or so it seems). So even though we've ridden it up and down the street a couple of times, we can't even get it inspected yet (because it would insta-fail).

So we took off the cowl assembly yesterday so I can a) sand down and repaint the rusty stay (iron-looking tree-like thing at bottom right) and replace the bit of the wiring harness that sits up in the cowl (because it would seem that the relay for the headlights is bad, at least). I got an extra wiring harness for the bike, so swapping in a new bit of that is "easy" (as in, I don't have to buy it). Here a picture of the disassembled cowl assembly:


That picture was taken with the tilt shift lens tilted so that I could "lay the focal plane down" across the table. With normal lenses, the focal plane is always parallel to the sensor. This works great if you're taking a picture of a person, or a bunch of people standing side-by-side, but poorly if you've array stuff on a table and want to take a picture from any other angle than straight down. But tilting the lens, the focal plane is tilted relative to the sensor, allowing all the pieces on the table to be in focus. For comparison, here's the same mess of pieces taken straight on (no tilt):


Now, because these images are so small (low-resolution), the difference isn't terribly noticeable. To make the effect clearer, I pulled out two details in each image: the first is of the tach (at the bottom center of the image) and the second is of the cowl, below and including the "nose" where the windshield comes to a point. Here they are not tilted (straight-on):



The lack-of-focus on the cowl is pretty clear. But check out what happens when the lens is tilted:



Now both bits of the image are in sharp focus. Pretty cool.

As for the rest of the bike, it doesn't look like much at the moment, since the plastics (fairings) are all pulled off so we could get to the electrics (there are turn signals in the back, too, after all). I'll post some pictures when everything is cleaned up and put back together. I'm hoping it won't take too long!