Thanksgiving and Working in The Shop

Hi.

So First, I want to share some pictures from the very fun thanksgiving party that I attended and made some pies for. As you can see, there were quite a few people (I believe the official count was 29) and there was a lot of wonderful food.


People made legitimate stuffing, 2 large and delicous turkeys were roasted, mashed potatoes of many varieties, real gravy, etc. My contribution was pies, I made 3 apple and 2 pumpkin, but gave one of the apples to the owner of the oven I used, who also helped me bake for about 4 hours. This picture was taken en route to the party, the pies were still cooling as we rode.



Finding pie plates and some of the ingredients was a trial, but quite successful in the end. Everything was from scratch, from Cook's illustrated recipes. There were some goofs, like I forgot to add half the necessary butter into the apple pie crust dough, so had to add it after mixing it together. It ended up being pretty tough and not flaky, but was still not too bad. The pumpkin had a bunch of complicated steps that we skipped, and was still really good. So overall the pies were a great success, as was the party in general.


So moving onto the shop progress, here is a picture of me with a bunch of TC guys, and my translator who is cut off at the left side of the frame. Also, one of the TC guys was to Sai Ha (translator's) right, and is not in the photo. All the way to the right is Leb Krem, who randomly stopped in to say hi. He is kind of the leader of TC. Hopefully he enjoyed seeing the shop. The other important person in this picture is Lee Him, who is the farthest person to the left who can completely be seen. He will become the general manager of the shop, and is really into it. He pays very close attention, which is more than can be said for some of these younger guys. They are generally only really interested when we start using our hands. I think the launguage barrier makes it hard for them to focus.


Here we are tearing the Chaly down. We stripped it completely, except for the wiring harness, and took the head off the engine. This made it much easier to explain the valve train, and do my best to explain timing. We then put the engine back together and it started, which was exciting.



Here is a picture of the white board. The drawings on the right are trying to explain what the valve train does/how it works. The bottom left is how a carb works, I said it was like a straw pulling gas into the air. It worked as an analogy, which was cool. On the top, I was trying to explain valve clearances, which was somewhat less successful.


So I have a video of the guys drawing the 4 strokes of an engine on the whiteboard, and spent 2 hours trying to load it onto the blog. It was like waiting for water to boil, except it never actually happened, and I couldn't be sure it would, when at least water boiling is almost certain to happen. Frustrating. I'll try to get it on next weekend.

As a final note, I found out that the two guys I'm sending to school will be done in four to six weeks, which is good. When they come to the shop we'll start taking in clients moto's I think, which will be terrifying/exciting/etc.

Hope everyone's well, and that you had good thanksgivings.

Ned.