SLP/TC and a rant against hybrids

Saturday the 22nd I rode up to SLP by myself, and met Leb Ke there. We checked out another option for setting up the shop, and then went to Tramung Chrum.

Let me start the description of the trip with a picture I took on the way to TC. There is a new Wat being built here, and it added something to an otherwise generic picture of the landscape. As is true of many beautiful aspects of nature, the countryside here is difficult to capture through a lens. I thought that in addition to taking footage of the traffic in Phnom Penh by mounting a camera to my helmet, I could try and capture the grandeur of the Cambodian countryside by documenting a trip to TC in the same manner. Then I realized that this would produce about 90 minutes of footage dominated by me looking at a road. So I’ll work on coming up with a better solution. Maybe mounting the camera on the side of my helmet would be more interesting. But it’s still a lot of footage that would not necessarily illuminate the beauty here.



Maybe part of the beauty I perceive while on the road comes from staring at a road for the majority of the trip, and then looking to the side and thinking “holy skaflnasflnsdvnlodwn this place is amazing.” These trips to SLP and TC are the first time I have travelled for a fairly long time in something not enclosed (car,bus,plane,train) and the experience is, in fact, extremely different. It’s partly due to the fact that things are more tactile. You smell things, bugs hit you and not a windshield, your sense of frailty is heightened by about 1000000 percent as massive trucks speed by you, etc. Nothing made me feel like a piece of the scenery more than almost getting blown over by a bus passing me. The pressure created by the front of the bus pushed me away, but once I got behind that arc of high pressure, I got sucked towards the bus. It was pretty enlivening.

For a more robust and eloquent description of why riding a motorcycle is wholly different from being in a ‘cage’, I would recommend reading some of the excellent books written with motorcycles in mind, namely Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainence by Robert Pirsig and Jupiter's Travels¸by Ted Simon. As a disclaimer, I have not read the second recommendation. Many people have pondered the attraction of motorcycles, though. It’s something that occupies my mind as well I guess.

Let me get back to the point. After arriving at SLP and finding Leb Ke (this is pronounced ky, like sky) he showed me a new place that could potentially be used as the shop. It has already been built, and has accessible water and electricity lines. The rent is not much higher than just renting land, it’s closer to Route 5 than any of the other potential sites, and finally, it’s across the street from the SLP market.



Here you can see the front door of the shop, along the right edge of the picture. At the left edge is the market, where I bought some fruit to give to Leb Krem, the head of TC. Food is cheaper here than in PP, which I guess is to be expected, and my monthly rent would drop by a factor of approximately 5, which is also something I’m looking forward to.

This location seems to be the most accessible of the available locations; it already has a building with available water and electricity access and is only about $20 more per month than a site without a building. Assuming a building would cost $2000, which is a fairly low estimate, it would take 100 months, or 8.3 years, for the building cost to be recouped by the lower price of renting the land.

NON SEQUITER SECTION, aka a totally biased rant against hybrids.

This is basically like the argument against hybrid cars. Yes, they get roughly 1.5 times the mileage of a normal small car in a city (the bonus is very small on the highway, and almost entirely due to lower drag coefficient, not drive train efficiency), but you pay a several thousand dollar premium for that mileage, reducing the economical sense it makes to buy a hybrid.

Also, the environmental impact of constructing a building is obviously higher than renting a pre-existing one, and in this age of everything being as green as possible, this would be the TC shop doing its job to be environmentally responsible.
In the vein of enviro-responsibilty, Hybrids are not as good as people think they are. While they use less gasoline and therefore produce slightly smaller amounts of greenhouse gases, in order to produce the car’s batteries and other assorted electronics all kinds of gnarly heavy metals need to be mined, refined, and crafted into their respective parts. So they loose their ‘green-ness’ there as well.

So please buy a manual Honda Fit, or something similar. Or pretty much any used car, which is better for everyone than buying a new one. Except Detroit. But they are basically toast anyway.

END OF NON SEQUITER SECTION

So I was excited about this new shop option, although the inside is pretty grim. It’s big enough for a small operation, but I’m not sure it will be capable of encompassing living quarters as well, which would be important for preventing theft. Here is the inside of it, with a double or queen size bed to provide a sense of scale. The bed is not quite to the front edge of the room, so it’s a little bigger than this picture makes it look, but still could be accurately described as ‘cozy’.



Leb Ke and I then were off to TC, which was an adventure in and of itself. I had never driven with a passenger, and the road surface was extremely dicey at points. There was one section that was sandy. Sand + inexperienced driver + Two People + Street Tires = Danger. Fortunately we never fell, but it was tense. The dirt bike will be much safer, if it ever gets successfully registered. Still, we made it to TC, and hung out on the porch-y area of the mosque. Meeting Leb Krem and everyone else from TC was good, but we didn’t actually spend that much time talking about the moto project. Leb Ke mostly talked to everyone about how things were going, including the agricultural initiative he has been working on.

It was nice for me to find out how many people were interested in working with me, there were about 6 or 7 people who raised there hands when Leb Ke asked who was interested, and there were others busy working in the fields, so more may end up going through whatever program we set up. They were of more widely varying ages than I expected, from teenagers to guys in approximately their mid-late 30’s.

I tried to show some books I brought, but it didn’t amount to much, which was sort of disappointing. The books were my notebook from school, which has pictures of parts and their phonetic translations, a book of the same type except everything is in Khmer, and the trophy of my collection, Small Gas Engines by Alfred C. Roth. It gives an overview of how all the systems of engines work and how to fix them. It is a textbook that my mom bought me when I was a lawnmower mechanic. I don’t think I realized what an incredibly brilliant gift it was until now. (thanks Mom!) I brought it to school with me, and the teacher from the next stage up came in, and was super amped about it. It turns out one of the engines in the book that they have a lot of pictures of is the engine he uses as a demonstration tool. So that was a cool coincidence.

The trip back from SLP was uneventful, and that about does it for this entry. I’ll wrap things up with a picture of me in front of the mosque, taken by Leb Ke.


I hope everyone’s well.
Ned.

School.

This is different from college. My last term at Union i had class two days a week, and it never started before.... i dont even remember. Maybe nine o'clock, which i believe students at Union find a struggle to get to. I now have it 6 days a week, and have to be there at 7:30. So i try and get up at about 6:00, which i haven't done since i worked construction. It takes some getting used to. I'm afraid I've missed some morning sessions.

Let me tell you about my school. I wish that sentence could be supplemented by a terrific visual cutaway of my school and the activities taking place within it, a la The Life Aquatic. Unfortunately i only have 4 pictures to try and explain this place, although i may add some more as things move along. It's weird to take pictures of my school though, as no one understands why i am doing it.

Here is a blurry picture of my classroom, with my teacher sitting on a bench in the back right of the room, and some of my classmates sitting and standing on the left. This room is on the fourth floor of the building, and behind the point i am taking this picture from is a balcony with a pretty nice view. Across a few streets, you can see a building in the middle of construction, with a massive sign roped to it that says "Coming Soon! Rooms for Rend!" I find it hilarious, and enjoy looking at it every bleary-eyed morning.



The school was founded in 1978 according to one of the students who speaks some English, and I am probably the only barang (foreigner) to ever go here. I get a lot of incredulous looks from people in other departments of the school. They teach several levels of automobile repair in addition to moto-repair.

I did succeed in explaining to one kid that I attend the school so I can later teach people how to fix bikes who otherwise could not afford it. Interestingly, people from many different provinces of Cambodia go to my school, some of whom live in a room next to the classroom. This is good, because if I decide it would be good to send some students from T.C. here, they would have a place to stay and integrating with everyone probably wouldn't be that bad, as people are from everywhere, reducing the likelihood of intensely clique-ish social interaction.

There are 3 parts to the moto-repair course. I am in the first, which is where you take apart beat up old engines and learn the names of all the parts in Khmer, with a significant dose of French. For example, the clutch pressure plate is knows as the ‘Plateau de pression.’ Or at least that is how I phonetically wrote the pronunciation. Brief interlude about french - I went running at the olympic stadium tonight, and while resting at the top of the stairs (I'll take some pictures, it's pretty cool) an old man came up to me and asked where i was from. I said the US, and he said "ah, parlez vous francais?" I missed the connection, but said "oui, J'ai etudie en ecole, mais je" and made a motion of things coming out of my head, because i can't remember how to say forgot everything. He laughed and said "oui, J'etudie en ecole quand je tres juen". I think. Basically, he said yeah, i studied it when i was very young. It was so random, but really cool. People are super curious and nice here, which is very refreshing.

Once more aside about running. While i was running, i heard someone following me in flip-flops. I started speeding up and running about as fast as i was comfortable with on the sketchy concrete, and the person kept-up! as i turned around to start walking and cool down, i saw a pretty tired looking kid, who gave me a high five and said something like "i win you". I think he meant he beat me, because i stopped before he did. I laughed and started wandering around the stadium, which is when i encountered the old man who spoke french. Later i went back down the stairs and ran into the kid. We had a hilarious conversation involving questions like "why you run so fast?" and "is my pronunciation good?" (it was very good) He was learning english at "jesus christ", also known as church, because it was free, or at least cheap.

Sorry for that random set of stories, getting back to the school. We draw all the parts in a notebook, and it is broken up into sections of the engine. So the first is the cylinder head and cylinder, the second is the clutch (there are actually two, a normal one and a centrifugal one, which is cool and a clever way to make the clutching automatic whilst having different gears) etc. We take the engines out of a cabinet full of them, seen below, and then take them fully apart, as seen below that.






So we learn the part names, which for two of the engines are written on boards like the one in the picture below, and do it for several different engines.
The first is a Honda cub engine. They are tremendously prolific and have been produced in subtly different forms for decades. The next one i learned about was a Honda Chaly engine, which is like the cub engine but is kick start only, and is fully automatic, only having a centrifugal clutch. I've more recently been working on Suzuki engines, one of which is from Japan and one of which is from Korea. I believe the final step in this process is learning how to work on two stroke engines.



Once you have everything memorized, you move to the next section, which is in a different room. I think once I get to this stage I will need a translator, because this is the part where you learn how things actually work. In the first part, they don’t explain how the clutch works, or the generator makes electricity and translates that into a spark. I know how the former works and mostly know how the latter works, but learning more complex ideas like that in Khmer would be a distinct
challenge. I'm not sure people will be excited about a translator telling me everything the teacher says in English, but i'll cross that bridge when i get to it.

After you get through the second stage you arrive at the final one, which is where you work on bikes that are whole, and actually work. I occasionally hear them start up in the next room. That part i will almost certainly need a translator for, although I have a feeling there is less teaching going on here, and more like testing. I would guess the teachers set up a machine with a problem, i.e. a carb setting purposefully off or a manufactured short in the wiring, and then give people a chance to try and fix it.

This would be a reasonably good way to try and teach the least tangible yet most important aspect of being a mechanic, which is the ability to diagnose what’s wrong
with the machine. I'm not sure how well this can be taught though, even with manufactured problems in a machine. I think it just takes experience earned from time spent working on broken things.

I have a teeny-tiny bit of this, but it's like being in first grade and you become a mechanic when you get your PhD. For example, when we were working on my dirt bike (pictures of which i will try and get up soon), the carburetor settings were messed up and it took several days to figure out exactly what was wrong. Several of the jets had been drilled, and tuning a not-stock carb is next to impossible, because everything affects everything else.

The engine would run well at idle and then struggle as revs raised. I had experienced this problem with my motorcycle in the US right after I bought it, and while riding mine around realized it wasn’t getting enough fuel because the airbox was off, increasing the amount of air going through the carbs. So I would close the choke partially to richen the fuel/air ratio while riding. I tried this on the dirt bike, and it worked.

Most of that carb was eventually tossed anyway, and a new one was built out of several other ones. So my realization didn’t really have that big of an impact of the end result, but it was something that I only knew about because I had previously experienced it, which is basically the rule of repairing machines.

So I don’t know if that kind of thing is taught, and how I would be able to pass it on to my students. Being a good mechanic is almost entirely about having the right mind set. You need to be objective, inquisitive, analytical, and patient. I’m sure you can teach that, but through a significant language and culture barrier it is a serious challenge.

As things develop with the school i will try and keep everyone updated. It's an interesting place, and i feel lucky to be going there. If people have questions about it that will better illuminate what it's like, please ask them in the comments section.

Thanks for reading/commenting!

Ned.

SLP adventures and moto stuff

Hello!

So it has been quite a while since I last updated the blog, and I’ve got several posts that should be up soon. This post is about my trip to Sala Lehk Prahm, where the shop is supposed to be built. I went with two guys who work with The Harspwell Foundation who have been tremendously helpful to me. They are in one of the pictures, and their names are Leb Ke and Yousos. I went with Yousos to where they grew up, which is about 10 minutes outside of SLP. Yousos showed me his home and I got to meet his parents, who were very nice. I should have taken a picture to give people an idea of what the Cambodian countryside is like, but that will have to be next time.

The main point of the trip, though, was to check out the building sites where we may rent land to build a shop, and to try and get an idea of what the competition is up to. And since I am probably going to live in SLP for quite a few months, I was eager to see what it was like.

I’ll start with a description of the trip out there, which was quite lengthy. SLP is about 53km outside of Phnom Penh, and I was riding this wild steed the whole way. (the one with the purple seat)



It’s a moto I have been renting while the dirt bike I am buying is getting worked on (more on that in a later post). It’s 100 or 110cc’s and tops out at about 80 kph (kilometers per hour, about 50mph) which is actually really fast on what is basically a large bicycle with a horrifically bad front brake. The back brake slows the scooter down well, but it’s less efficient than a good front brake and locks up more easily, so you have to be very sensitive and not brake too hard. I have seen several people here get really squirrely when it has been wet out because they lock their back brake and start to slide.

Brief interlude - Because of weight transfer, having a strong front brake makes much more sense. When you use the front brake, the vehicle (cars included, not just those with two wheels) wants to rotate around the front wheel, pushing it into the ground. Using the front brake gives the front tire more traction and allows you to apply more force to the brake without locking the wheel up, which will slow the bike down much faster than primarily using the back brake. When you use the rear brake alone the moto doesn’t want to rotate, so you don’t get the amplified traction on that tire. This is the major reason sporting cars and motorcycles have larger and more powerful brakes on their front ends, and why if you watch motorcycle racing, the back ends of the bikes wiggle around when the riders are braking. They are just on the threshold (and sometimes cross it) of having the rear tire lift off the ground, making it very unstable. Depending on the corner, this can happen when decelerating from 180-ish miles an hour. It’s pretty awe-inspiring to watch.

Anyway, while I was following Yousos up there, we went 50 kph or less the entire way. The way back is when I found the top speed of the scoot, I promise I was careful and was only travelling at that speed for 10 seconds or less at a time. Going out there took about an hour and a half, coming back took….. less….. Here is a picture of the road on the way up there, with a neat almost-canopy of trees.



So we arrived in SLP and got some noodles. My first impression was that there was not a lot of stuff in SLP, but it does get a fair amount of moto traffic, which is promising. The nature of the moto traffic is important as well. I have been going to a moto repair school for a week and the course I am taking is for the oldest and most basic moto’s, because it seemed logical that outside of Phnom Penh the older, cheaper moto’s would be most prevalent. As it turns out, that assumption is not entirely correct. At our competitors repair shops, we saw some nearly brand new machines, or at least new enough to be different from what I’m learning.



Above is a picture of the largest and, according to Leb Ke, the most prestigious shop in SLP. On the left is the owner, who is just finishing rebuilding a wheel. He has already finished lacing new spokes to a rim, and appears to be truing the rim, which means making it round and straight. In the center of the photo is what I think is a Suzuki Viva, which is a 100cc bike similar to the one I rent. Its engine is basically the same as the super old moto’s, just a little bigger and with some updates, like a CDI ignition system instead of a points based one. However, outside the frame of this picture is a newer type of moto, with what I think is a shaft drive system that also makes up a single sided swingarm, and the new moto’s are more compact than the old types. I’ll try and take some pictures that better explain the differences I’m talking about, although people are probably are more interested in food, the Cambodian people, and lots of other things. So if anyone wants to see more pictures of the bikes, let me know and I’ll throw them up. Otherwise I guess I’ll try and focus on stuff with a broader appeal. But I’ll probably end up having more descriptive posts about the bikes, because they are a (perhaps the) major part of my experience here.

Getting back to the sites we were looking at, the first picture below this paragraph is a view down SLP’s main street (which is Route 5, the road to Phnom Penh). In the second picture you can see Route 5 crossing a dirt road which I think is one of the bigger intersections. The first potential shop site was actually immediately to my right when I took the picture. So it only requires one turn and is probably 150 or 200 feet off Route 5. The other two lots are on the road you can just see in the bottom right corner of the second photo. The third photo is a picture of one of these other lots. This is actually a bad picture of the lot, which is on the right side of the frame, and only half of it is shown, but it has Leb Ke on the left and Yousos on the right, which I thought was important. Plus the building behind them shows the size of the lot, about 4 meters by 20 meters. Also, all the lots basically looked the same, and I’ll describe their positions and best I can, but I can’t put up pictures of all of them because it takes way too long to load pictures on the internet here.







So the lot in the third picture faces Route 5 but is one ‘block’ away from it and another lot is across the street so it’s physically closer to Route 5, but faces away from it. These two lots are actually behind an established repair shop (the last picture in this post shows it’s machining capabilities). I’m looking for advice on what site would be best, and am concerned about the fact that none of them are actually on Route 5, which would obviously be ideal. Apparently that is much more expensive though. I’m curious as to whether people think that it’s good to be behind another shop, keeping in mind that businesses in Cambodia tend to be grouped together by their purpose, or if the proximity would have a negative impact. I also asked Leb Ke to try and get an idea of how much it would cost to build some sort of building.

One last note is that the established shops were surprisingly well equipped. It appeared that each shop did its own machining of parts, because they both had fairly large drill presses, and impressive lathes. Here is a picture of the second best shop in town, you can see the substantial set-up. The more prestigious shop had a larger lathe, but my picture did not include as much of the other stuff.



That’s about it for the trip up to SLP, I have more pictures but can’t put them up here. I think I’m going to start a photo album somewhere, and when I get that up I’ll post a link so everyone can check out all my pictures. I hope everyone’s well, and I’ll post more stuff up as soon as I can.