graduation

Awe. I have a lot of students who graduated this year from J&M and even more who took classes with me. I'm going to really miss this group.

thermoset printer

small town bmw shop

My Brother-in law recently posted these picks from the BMW shop in IN that he regularly rides to on the weekends. Seems a guy with a slash2 sidehack showed up this particular morning. It looks great. You have to love the old BMW shop too. 

I miss the days when motorcycle shops were places where you could hang out and shoot the breeze and kick tires on a weekend. There used to be a few shops like this one around my hometown. One of my favorite places used to be an old Bultaco dealership in the middle of nowhere. I used to drive past and stare in the windows even after Bultaco went out of business. It was like they closed the doors and never touched anything as it was preserved pretty well for quite some time. It's funny how some of these non-established brands would open up dealerships almost anywhere (including in the middle of nowhere) and they would be owned by small town individuals. My Dad used to tell stories of Ducati, Bultaco, and BMW shops scattered around the surrounding areas back in rural IL. That wouldn't happen now. You pretty much have to be near an interstate exit to be able to open any business back home and even that doesn't insure success. Sad to see, but good to see this little BMW shop is still alive.

jmk trip

We had a good day today. Took a trip to Sheboygan to the John Michael Kohler Arts Center. Checked out some work, made some work with the kids in the "ARTery", got some custard,  and then came home to do some work at home. I cut the kids hair tonight. Maya loved her new dew (light and fluffy). She was dancing around the rest of the night so she could feel it bounce. We hated to cut it, but it was just getting to be unmanageable and it should make life easier for Mom when the new baby arrives.

jay's 911

While I was on the South side, I stopped and looked at Jay's Porsche. He made a cool fuel injection system for it using Mikuni throttle bodies from a Suzuki motorcycle and electronics from a Ford Ranger. It looks killer and uses the stock Porsche linkage. He's getting close to having the interior done, once he gets his seats back from the upholstery shop.

honda

Went to pick up some hardware on the South side and spotted this little Honda. I talked to the owner (nice guy) and he had another little Honda that he was riding around on as well as a Triumph Trident. Thought I would post this one up if anyone is looking for an original vintage Honda. It ran really good and has a clear title.

shinya

blown

Geoff Mann

jerrycan

This is the Wehrmachtkanister or Jerrycan, as it is now known today, “Jerry” being Allied slang for German.

Armies need fuel almost more than water, so in Nov. 1936 the German Army launched an invitation to tender for a new model of container to replace the old cans and equip all their motorized units. The firm Müller of Schwelm under the direction of the chief engineer Vinzenz Grünvogel developed a revolutionary new design that is still as good today as it was almost one century ago. 

With rectangular form and curved edges, it was constructed from two pressed steel plates, needing to be assembled by just one single weld in the central gutter, or “Equator”, and an X-shaped indentation on each side which ensured its shock protection, never leaked, and had a capacity of twenty liters with a weight of only four kilos. Maybe the most interesting part is the handle with three bars. And you may think why three?

For two reasons: One, when a soldier placed two cans side-by-side, the handles on the edge of each can touched and could be used as a single big handle, meaning one person could carry four cans. Two, think about unloading a bunch of these off of a truck, how would you do it? The extra handles on the side meant it was easy to make a bucket brigade line of troops and neatly hand cans off to each other. The caps could be opened and closed by hand, no tools necessary, and the extended neck meant you could pour without a funnel in a pinch. Each can held an even 20 liters, making it easy to calculate bulk amounts (whereas the Brits had to multiply everything by four). There was even an airpipe leading to the air pocket above the spout and below the handles so that the contents would pour smoothly and would even make it float in water even when full!

In contrast the Allies were carrying fuel in the so called “Flimsy”, which was a flat sided, unergonomic, pressed steel container, in which all flat sides needed to be individually welded together at the edges. You needed a wrench to attach and remove the cap, a funnel to fill the container and a spout to empty it. The containers held four Imperial gallons… and tended to leak at the corners, where the welds would fail, and there why the containers became colloquially known as “flimsies.”

Such was the superiority of the german design that as soon as the troops on the battlefiled realized of the Wehrmachkanister, they rapidly used the captured units for their own service, and obviously it wasn’t long until the Allies had their own knock-offs made in factories all across the world. 

via: http://elsolitariomc.com/2013/05/the-wehrmachtkanister-aka-the-jerrycan/