The hawk is out

TRUE ENOUGH the hawk is out, the living, breathing feathered one, and the one that swoops in as the mercury drops.

I think the first time I came across that expression was in the late Michael Herr’s Dispatches: When it’s colder than cold the hawk is out.

Both kinds are in this pic I snapped in the backyard a week ago. Brrr…

The Arctic’s melting more and more every summer, and the Northwest Passage is open to navigation for the first time in recorded history. But now and again, a polar vortex dips down into wintry Little Rhody and makes for frozen-knuckle work of the sublimely frozen kind.

I got out for a blast on the highway this morning. That wiring helps. It puts all-day, 12-volt heat into my winter riding gear.

I was in Pawtucket to meet with a writer friend. To talk about… take a guess…

Writing!

You catch on fast, always amaze me…

A little detour into Phantom lore: Remember this strip from October?

The Phantom’s daughter, Heloise Walker, had whupped the Nomad, for an infamous terror master is not nearly a match for 21 generations of Phantom blood.

The cop’s body cam captures audio and video, so Heloise is known to the authorities. They keep it quiet, though, and publicly deny her existence.

Since then, Heloise has collected her friend and roommate, the Nomad’s daughter, Kadia Sahara, and they’ve taken refuge in the Bangallan consulate in Manhattan. The entire U.S. security apparatus wants them both for questioning. Lamanda Luaga, president of Bangalla, won’t allow it. He’s come to New York to get the girls out.

His helicopter pilot, incidentally, is the Phantom, disguised as… a helicopter pilot.

So last week, this is where we were…

In the strip published today, Heloise is cool with the cover story, but won’t agree to live a secret life when she gets home to Bangalla.

Note the expressions Mike Manley gave to the traumatized Kadia in these strips. And note her posture.

Visually literate readers will see that for what it is.

Enough said about foreshadowing…

The rest of this post is just wrenching and chainsawing and blah blah. The bride’s out of town, I’ll yak at you all night. Feel free to X-out here and I’ll see you next time.

For those of you sticking like Flick’s tongue on a triple dog dare, here are a few tasks I’ve been trying to get accomplished in the frozen outdoors; this, whenever I can step away from the keyboard.

To get out of the wind I rolled the piglet into the garage next door, at the invitation of our neighbor, Steve. No heat, and not much for lights, but the open door provides enough wattage to work by.

I pulled the wheels to mount and balance a new set of skins I plan to ride down to nothing in the Arctic this spring. Also pulled the tank to get to the carburetor and remove it.

The piglet has always been hard to start in the cold. And then she wants the choke for too long. So I’m trying the easy fix first: remove the fuel bowl and set the float a bit higher. Higher than the service manual recommends.

Carb’s upside down here, bowl removed. With that straight edge in the alloy as a reference, note how the seam in the plastic float is lower on the left than the right. That’ll bring more fuel into the bowl and let the vacuum pull a little more gas through the idle circuit.

Through all circuits, actually. So if I’ve got the float adjusted too rich now it’ll be like going up a size or two on the main jet, which I don’t want.

Will give it a whirl, see how she starts and runs.

If I can get back to Alaska on two wheels in the spring, I want to carry the bear cans as low as possible. ‘Cause they’re heavy. Carrying weight high poses a handling issue. Especially on gravel. It’s easy to get whipsawed off the road and pitched into the weeds. Oh, and mash your Jetboil flat. Oops…

The bear cans are too big to carry in the Pelican cases I’m using for panniers now. So I cut a hole in the lids of both cases.

I’ll make them weatherproof again by fabricating a couple of bump-out covers.

Here’s what it looks like with the bear can inside, lid closed. I used the metal brake at Mike Connelly’s shop to form the parts I need to make covers.

It’s overkill to use 16-gauge steel but that’s what I had in the shed.

I’ll weld these parts together like so, cut out the waste, mount the covers inside the lids. Each piece will have a sealing flange all the way around when I’m done.

Apply a little caulk where the steel mates to the plastic, a few pop rivets, a coat of rattle-can black…

Should work, and not look terrible. Which I don’t care if it does.

Bear cans, if you don’t know, are where you store your grub at night. Set them 100 yards downwind from where you plan to sleep. Then Bad Mr. Grizz doesn’t step on your head when he’s sniff-sniff-sniff-sniff following his nose to the grub cans he can’t open. Can’t because he’s got no thumbs.

You likely won’t even see him. Ever. Just don’t get lazy. Keep good grub discipline out in the wild.

And don’t sleep on a game trail.

Iron Piggy needed a little frozen-knuckle work last week. The starter had been slow to turn over all winter, even with a full battery charge. It felt like resistance somewhere in the circuit. Which it was.

Easy fix: sand the crud off the contacts in the starter solenoid.

I installed an aftermarket cover while I was at it, the chrome piece. Don’t worry, I’ll have it rusty in no time.

The new cover has a push button that can get you out of a jam if your starter switch fails, or the relay fails. You can close the circuit and start the motor by pressing the button on the solenoid cover.

One of the factory bolts broke when I removed the old cover, so I drilled it out and tapped new threads.

Tight spot! If that oil hose was any more in the way I would have had to remove the starter. And the starter won’t come out unless you drain oil out of the primary drive and remove the cover.

Kind of a pain to do that much futzing out in the driveway in January. And then the wind’s blowing, sand flying everywhere… best not to open the primary.

When I got home from The Modern Diner this morning, I built a fire and balanced the new tires I had mounted on the little bike’s wheels, the 650 piglet. Had an assist from two chairs off the front porch.

I could have balanced them outdoors but it’s better with the wheel bearings warm, get the truest possible reading on the heavy spot.

In closing, the always-with-us tree work, ’cause winter’s the time to buck up next year’s firewood.

Remember that 19th-century oak in the backyard?

I’m still sawing 4-foot wheels off what’s left.

Sawing them thin so I can split them by hand without undue effort.

They split hard at the usual 18 to 22 inches wide, so I’m making two wheels for every one I’d make if this were locust, and not oak.

I’m finding nails I’d rather not. Nails from the 1930s, going by the ring count.

That splitting wedge is pointing to the first nail I struck.

I dug for it with an ax. Then, as I got closer, with a timber-framing chisel and a mallet.

Striking a nail instantly turns a new chain into scrap. I hit the first one, put on a new chain, three-quarters of the way through its very first cut, damn… another nail.

So there’s 70 bucks that won’t go to wine, women and song.

Tony DePaul, January 28, 2019, Cranston, Rhode Island, USA