Dave Brown

At home with Chie

A few days ago, I spent over seven hundred yen at 7-11, which was cause for them letting me draw a ticket from a bucket in case I won something.

I was lucky, and did! A can of Sapporo Mugi and Hop. Which is a bit of a booby prize for beer drinkers—it’s happoshu, which is a beer-like drink that you can get in Japan which cleverly skirts rules about what officially constitutes “beer”.

Well, I finally had a good reason to crack the can today—it was LUDICROUSLY hot, and I needed something that was (a) cold and (b) not actually necessarily good. The free happoshu fit the bill perfectly!

I let Chie have a taste, although she didn’t really see any reason to. But you never know, it might actually turn out to be good (there’s a novelty happoshu from Osaka, for instance, called “Hemp High”, a stoner brew that uses hemp in place of malt, and is actually very drinkable).

It wasn’t very good though. The odds were against it right from the get-go. She said, “Yup! That’s definitely happoshu. It’s actually kind of a nostalgic flavour.”

I said, “A reminder of the days when you had no money?”

She said, “That’s about the shape of it, yup.”

“Your university days?”

“Half a year ago, more like.”

Well…I guess she’s doing well for herself, at any rate.

Speed demon!

Since I decided to keep the little toy scooter (well, it’s fun to ride, for one thing) instead of giving it away or selling it, I’ve decided that I might also use it to learn a thing or two about doing Manly Work With My Hands—in other words, I would do my own maintenance on it.

To that end, I decided that, as the first bit of maintenance I would do by my own self, I would replace its drive belt. It has a CVT transmission which connects the engine to the wheels by means of a V-shaped belt and a pulley with springs connected to these little metal saucers to vary how fast the engine drives the wheels. It’s quite ingenious really. But one of the bits that wears out is the belt itself.

So I popped round to my local motorcycle bits store and picked up a new belt. I could have gotten an official Suzuki belt, but I chose to get a Daytona-brand Reinforced Drive Belt™ from the “tuning” bit of the store, just to see what (if any) impact a performance drive belt would have.

Well, I managed to get the transmission open, after quite a lot of fiddling. Lacking an impact wrench to dismantle the gear assembly, I had to sort of wrestle the belt off, and then wrestle the new one on (which was actually much harder than taking the old one off).

Somewhere along the line, I managed to make the bike so the starter motor can’t turn over any more. Whoops. I think I did something wrong with the starter widget thing so that it doesn’t fit in properly any more, or turn around, or something. At some point I’m going to have to fix that, I suppose.

I put the bike back together, which went a lot smoother than taking it apart because there weren’t so many confusing puzzles to figure out along the way, and then kicked it to life to take it for a test drive.

When I first got the bike, it had a top speed on flat ground of about 52km/h (by its own speedometer). By the time I changed the belt, it could just barely manage 50km/h. With the new belt, on the other hand, the new top speed on flat ground is about 63km/h; and going downhill, it can get up to nearly 70km/h!

Stay tuned (heh!) for my next exciting installment, where I get it up to 80km/h, whilst at the same time (because I’m a genius) disabling the turn signals.