A busy day of accomplishing nothing

This morning I decided, against my better judgment, to do something useful today, so I set about taking the sprockets off of the little Beta 250 and putting on the new sprockets that came with the seat, gas tank combination. But par for the course my half hour projects usually take all day.

When I went to take the primary sprocket off, that's the little one, I found that it was held on by a circlip instead of a nut like most primary sprocket's and naturally I had sold my circlip pliers when I sold my house figuring I would probably never need them again.

Now if you've ever dealt with circlips you know that when faced with one the first thing you do is get out some needle nose pliers and a screwdriver to pry with and try to remove them that way which will almost always end up with the circlip popping off and ending up in the next county or getting bent so it doesn't fit right anymore, and that's when you go someplace and buy some circlip pliers to do the job properly even though you will only use them once every 15 years.

And that's exactly what I did today, I went to one of the tool vendors at a Quartzsite flea market and bought some more circlip pliers to replace the ones I pretty much gave away two years ago.

Getting back home I made some lunch and pondered my sprocket project. The new rear sprocket, that's the big one, was red, now I've got nothing against the color red except that in this case the little Beta is predominantly black and silver and I was afraid that with the red sprocket I wouldn't look as cool as I normally do riding through the desert, after all I do have a reputation to uphold and appearance is everything.

So I decided that since I already had some leftover black spray paint that I would spray the sprocket black, and two hours later, after some sanding, cleaning with alcohol, and a couple of coats of black paint the sprocket is good to go and it's time for my afternoon coffee break.

I removed the front sprocket and replaced it with the new one which is one tooth bigger and luckily before I took off the rear sprocket I decided I would see if there was enough adjustment in the chain that would allow it to go around the new sprockets, and lo and behold the chain was too short to even go around the new primary sprocket so there was no way on earth it was going to fit around a bigger rear sprocket to.

So I put it all back together again the way it was, Came inside and it was time for dinner. Eight hours I worked on that project, eight hours and nothing has changed. It's times like this I'm glad I'm paid by the hour.

theboondork

Some of the trails winding through the mountains. This is gold-mining country so there's Jeep trails and old mining roads going every which way.