Project Daily Driver: Strange Observations In The Hinterlands

More posts about ongoing “project daily driver” are below:

• Project Daily Driver / Gift From Past Me
• Project Daily Driver: Coming Apart At The Seams
• Project Daily Driver: Who Are You Calling An Antique?!?

As part of “project daily driver” I finally changed the oil and did a test ride on Honey Badger, my fun little Yamaha TW200. Poor Honey Badger has been sitting in my shop waiting for that oil change all winter. Around the first snowfall of last year I pushed it in the shop, parked it, perched a quart of fresh oil and a filter on the seat, and ran off hunting.

After that? Nothing.

I get busy. The bike was ignored in a cold shop.

Sometime in March I serviced the battery, which is new-ish but also had been sitting in a frozen shop for months. I topped it off with distilled water and hooked up a battery maintainer I’d bought months earlier. Sheesh… I feel so bad that I didn’t install the maintainer right away.

Battery Maintainers:

I haven’t had the best luck with battery maintainers. Everyone with a motorcycle seems to recommend “Battery Tender” brand. That’s what you’ll see in lots of motorcycle / ATV shops. When I’ve used them they’ve been hit or miss. I experimented on my own to find better gear; which I have.

Warning, I’m about to get pummeled by what I say:

I think Battery Tender is like Stanley, Craftsman, Briggs and Stratton, etc… brands with a history of good quality that have since declined and are coasting on past reputations.

The three brands I mentioned (and others) come with rabidly dedicated followers. They’ll tear you apart if you complain about “their” brand. They don’t just “like” the brand, they joined the cult of the brand!

They’ll tell you all about the thing they bought many years ago which has served them well. I’ll ask something like “It’s great that the Battery Tender you bought in 1998 works great, what about one made in this century?” This never helps. Once someone joins the cult, they’re in the cult forever.

I noticed the same thing when I bought my farm tractor. People would tell me all about Pappy’s awesome 1943 John Deere Model A “Johnny Popper”. Don’t get me wrong, Johnny Poppers were pretty cool for their time. But that was literally almost a century ago! A John Deere in 2022 has nothing to do with a John Deere made in 1934. Is a John Deere in 2022 worth the massive price differential over a Massey Ferguson in 2022? “Well, let me tell ya’ about the Massey Ferguson my cousin’s uncle’s hairdresser’s neighbor bought back in 1973!” Ugh!*

Anyway, I’ve had better luck with NOCO battery maintainers than other brands. My data comes from the real world… in this century… under hard conditions. YMMV. I will revisit my evaluation if something better comes along. You’ll never find me putting NOCO stickers on my truck or wearing a brand loyalty t-shirt.

I bought a NOCO Genius 1 for my Yamaha TW200 just before winter and installed it around Easter… because I suck. Here’s the link to a NOCO Genius 1. It’s a small maintainer but the battery on a motorcycle is tiny. It’s stupid to hook a monster maintainer to a battery the size of a box of poptarts! The maintainer will set you back about $30 which seems a fair price. They work very well.

Note, little batteries for little things (like motorcycles) don’t do as well in cold as bigger batteries for bigger things. Physics y’all. (Actually chemistry but whatever.)

The Yamaha TW200 is so small it’s said that a modern LiOn battery the size of a cigarette pack can be installed and it will do the deed quite well. How cool is that? When the OEM battery kicks off I’ll probably “upgrade”.

One other note, little batteries for little things (like motorcycles) used to have little prices so I didn’t really sweat it. Then Bidenflation kicked in. Batteries easily cost at least 50% to 100%  more than they did a few years ago. A $30 maintainer on a $30 battery may be silly but the same maintainer on a $80 battery is brilliant.

A third note: I hate alligator clips! If I have to pull the seat or a body panel to get at my battery to put on alligator clips I be lazy and not use the maintainer.

Don’t look at me weird. I’m busy and I’m lazy. So what? We’re all like that!

The solution is to use the NOCO’s spiffy (and idiot proof) connection. It allows you to ditch the clips. You just click the maintainer’s cable to a pigtail you’ve permanently installed on the battery terminals. It’s slick and easy.

The “normal” pigtail is too large for motorcycles. I had to order a “motorcycle sized” pigtail. The size you’re looking for is NOCO GC002 X-Connect M6 Eyelet Terminal Accessory. I’ve used the same pigtail on two motorcycles and plan to install a third on an ATV. NOCO evilly charges like $15 for the friggin’ pigtail! This pisses me off. It’s unreasonable for the pigtail’s components. The person who set that price should be thrown into a volcano. However, it works great and life it too short to rail over corporate asshattery. I got over it. I’ve hooked pigtails permanently to each of my motorcycles. They look reasonably professional and work flawlessly.

(Amazon disclosure, I get tiny kickbacks if you buy from any link on my blog that goes to Amazon. It costs you nothing. All hail our marketing overlords!)

With fresh oil and a perfect battery I set out for a test run. The trails are still impassible so I just rode dirt roads. It was too cold to ride far anyway.

I stopped first at a gas station.

Red alert! Gas stations now invoke political rants. Feel free to skip a few paragraphs:

I’ve got old gas slips in my pack. Some are from back when Orange Menace was president. Gas was dirt cheap and lefties complained about all the bad things Trump might theoretically do. Now Biden does the things Trump didn’t do and that’s supposedly OK now.

We were told that Trump was a menace to America but it’s not Trump that jailed American political prisoners!

About when some of the receipts were printed, lefties were pissed off and shrieking at Supreme Court nominees. Trump was in charge and they were livid. Now their party is in power and they’re still livid. They’re pissed off and shrieking at Supreme Court justices. It’s as if all they can do is shriek about the Supreme Court.

It’s exhausting. A child who throws a tantrum to get a cookie will at least shut up while they eat the cookie.

Gas is at the highest price in American history. The man who got more votes than any president in American history caused this. (If I deny Biden got all those record vote counts, I’m guilty of mis-information. That’s how “free speech” works now.)

I compared two gas receipts and it was unreal. It’s almost impossible they’re from the same universe. Luckily, all I needed was a tiny bit; less that a gallon. My motorcycle sips gas like a hummingbird.

I remember people going apeshit at Carter during the OPEC embargo. This round seems more self inflicted. I don’t know if that’s the true or not. Carter was a long time ago so I can’t remember for sure.

There was an “I Did That” sticker on the pump. They amuse me. I never thought any human could be less popular than Carter. I think Biden did it. From record highest vote count in history to least popular president in history, quite the wiplash!

Pay attention folks: the events of this year and the last few should NOT be forgotten. Remember! Spend time to memorize specific facts and figures before they’re thrust down the memory hole of our censored media. Take time to observe. “It’s time period X and situation Y is like this.” Observe what matters to you and watch how it changes. Don’t let your own memory fade. Stick with what you experienced and you’ve seen with your own eyes. Don’t just accept what the TV people say.

They’re trying hard to spin gas prices as Russia’s fault. Russia, Russia, Russia! It’s dumb thing I’ve been hearing all my life. I thought it would go away when the Soviet Union collapsed. That was decades ago! It seems like people got caught in the cold war and they never left. It sticks in people’s cult like brains just like brand names. Buy a John Deere in 2022 because Pappy’s awesome 80 year old tractor was super cool. USSR is long gone. But, I digress…

I rode a lonely dirt road through a protected wildlife area. It’s a shitty lake or awesome duck habitat depending on your opinion. The shore is too muddy and brushy for shore fishing. Last year, in a drought, the waterline was waaaaaaay out there. This spring, it’s closer to shore.

I pissed off a bunch of ducks when I walked to the bank and sat down. I saw some turtles. It was mellow. I sat there and watched the sun lower on the horizon.

A half hour before sunset I turned around to loop back on a second dirt road when I discovered the mystery.

Three dead beavers in a pile! Just sitting there at the boat access area. In the middle of an open space. They were reasonably fresh. No signs the coyotes had gotten to them yet. (I don’t know, maybe coyotes won’t eat a beaver?) They didn’t smell bad… yet.

WTF?

I hopped off the bike and circled the pile. I formed a theory. There’s a trapper around here. He’ll be back for his excellent results soon. Trapping is a legit thing where I hang out. I’ve no idea of seasons but whatever. I spend 99.9% of my time in the woods solo. It might be fun to meet a trapper and shoot the shit. But no trapper leaves his hard earned quarry in a pile in the road.

I also noticed the tails were cut off each beaver. Is it a bounty? Can there be a beaver bounty? “Bring us the tail and we’ll give you ten bucks?” From a wildlife preserve?

Why leave the pile in the middle of everything? It’s like someone gut an elk on a highway! In general, people chuck yucky shit into the adjacent forest. This beaver pile looked like someone was proud of their beaver harvest. Or maybe it was a warning to other beavers?

The missing tails have got to mean something. Maybe there’s a redneck out there that likes beaver tail? Is there such a thing as beaver tail soup? It sounds awful!

The sun started getting low on the horizon and nobody showed. No sound of an ATV. No humans at all. I never did figure out what was going on. I decided I wasn’t going to be there after dark waiting for the beaver tail death cult to show up. I rolled out.

I’m open to theories. Put them in the comments. I haven’t the slightest idea.

A.C.

*I believe if I ever meet a person who owns both a Harley Davidson motorcycle and a John Deere tractor I’ll go bankrupt on the spot. The combined marketing power will form it’s own gravity well and hit me with a public relations tractor beam that remotely drains my bank account. I’ll wake up in debtor’s prison with no money at all but I’ll be wearing a really spiffy hat and a super cool t-shirt.