Scooting with Dru

Now that the frenetic days leading up to the holidays are done, and we are in that quiet week between the christmas holiday and  the New Year,  it is a time for a bit of recovery.  Personally, I find this week the best of the holiday season because it offers a relief from the stress of getting through the holiday, but hasn't returned to the normal workload. 

Of course, I am at the office today, but it is a quiet day there as well, so I'm getting caught up on some other things.  One of those is a backlog of camera pictures.  Hopefully some will be worth posting, but I won't know that for a little while longer.  Somehow, I accumulated enough pictures to fill up 3 8gb CF cards.  They are downloading into Aperture now.  I'll dig through them next :-).  

I did however have a scooter adventure to talk about though.  Saturday I had to get a new battery for the BV500.  I'm not surprised, it spent half of it's first year sitting gathering dust on a Dealer floor, and then spent a couple of months in someone's garage before I gave it a daily riding home.  The original battery never got any care and after 6 months of abuse, it was really starting to struggle on cold days.  So off to get a replacement, which turned out to be the easy part.  The BV500 comes with a 'wet'cell lead acid battery which requires and overflow tube for draining away any excess/overflow acid.  On the stock battery, this is on the left side and the tube is already there.  The replacement was on the right side though.  

So, after getting the battery home and in place, I needed a new overflow tube, and the one that arrived with the battery was about 2 feet too short.  So onto Lil Barney, my Kymco People 250 and over to Home Depot I go.  Grab a 20 foot roll of tube and head home.  Lunch sounded good, but I didn't want to stop and get off the bike, so a quick loop through the drive thru was in order.  

Now this is a one of those priceless experiences.  A scooter in the drive thru line is always an attention grabber for some reason.  Three employees hanging out of the window to check out the scooter, while people walking in just grin and point.  I'm not complaining though, the Chick-Fil-A sandwich was excellent  when I got home.  Anyways, the ride home was uneventful, but highlighted the reason I'm having a hard time getting rid of the People.  It is still a great fun ride and switch from the BV. 

Anyways, back home, it was time to put the tube in.  Turns out, this is a pretty complex process.  Taking the entire left side plastics off to find and replace the current hose with a new one that is 10 inches longer and routes to the opposite side of the battery casing.  After about an hour, most of my vulgar vocabulary and a couple of nicks and dings to both hands, I had a completely rerouted drain tube, complete with an alternate tube so I can use a battery that goes to either side, along with a battery tender lead that runs under the plastics down to the service port by the left foot rest.  All in all, a great project, but wow, that was ton of plastic to remove for suck a little change :-).