brynndragon | More rambles about things that zoom

Summary: car geekishness, american flag helmet, motorcycle license garnering

My Chiltons and Haynes both came in! Plus my housemate showed me where his copy of Proficient Motorcycling is kept. Now I have tons of reading material to keep me occupied when I'm bored. The Chiltons even has a color section that includes how to get dents out of the body of the car (useful for the dent I made going into a telephone pole as I backed out of my old driveway - man that place sucked on so many levels). Now I need to schedule a junkyard run to see if I can find a new front for my car (the frame looks fine fortunately, it's only the plastic bits on top of it that are an issue) and possibly the metal bit that goes over the top of the windshield. I'll have to undent a few small problem around the bumper as well, otherwise the new stuff just won't go on. I might even try to get rid of the small rust spots on the hood at some point. . . just sand them out and repaint. Well, more importantly is finding that coolant leak and dealing with it - I got some of that stuff you pour into the radiator and let run through the coolant system for a while to seal it, waiting for a time when I'll be on the road for a while to use it. If that helps, great, otherwise I'll see if I can clean the gunk off the engine so I can actually tell if there's a leak there. The guy at Lappens said what I thought was a coolant leak was actually a trans-something (either transmission or transaxle) fluid thing, and now I have manuals so I can check, whee! I'm so happy to have these manuals.

And for the record, yes Sweet Grrl can zoom. She steers like a cow, but she's got a powerful engine that gets her up to pretty much whatever speed I feel like rather quickly. Very useful for those on-ramps around here.

doompuppy reminded me that I'd found an american flag helmet (full face ;) on the web that I'd rejected because it only came in youth sizes, before I knew just how tiny my head is. I'll need to see if I can refind it and possibly order it in a large (after checking out their return policy, or at least their sizing charts ;). I also learned that there's a full RMV on the way to game and it's open late on Thursdays. So I found the certificate that says "you get to have a motorcycle license" and hopefully will be getting that taken care of this evening, as well as geting an address change (and maybe, since I think they give me a new license that includes class M rather than a class M sticker, I'll not have to deal with stupid change-of-address stickers). Yay motorcycle license! Yay car manuals! Yay happy!!!

Update: I've found a helmet that fits - the Shoei RF-900 XXS. Wore it for a good 10 minutes and my head actually hurt less (as it conformed to my skull) and it didn't hurt once I took it off unlike the Arai Quantum which gave me a headache for a good hour). I'm betting its cheaper twin, the TX-1 XXS, will also fit me. Now I just need to find it on the web (I can only get the white or black in that size, unfortunately, but at least I can get it painted something nifty) at the cheapest price and get my hands on a couple hundred dollars. . .