Floribama Riders

Monday morning dawns cold, rainy and dreary, looking like a winter day instead of Jul 7th. No big deal, as a sizable percentage of us are headed into Gunninson this morning, instead of riding. Greg's KTM 525 is overheating, and the best consensus we have is that it has a blown head gasket. Mark and Todd are going to seek a medical opinion from the previous day's crashes, and Doug and Sarah are in search of a 4-wheeler skid plate, and a wi-fi connection to handle a little school work.

Greg and I hop in his truck, and head for the KTM dealer in Gunnison. This is a 35 mile scenic drive, and one section of several miles has cattle along the road, and in many cases, in the road. Here's your chance to pretend you are a cowboy, from the comfortable seat of a diesel pickup truck, while listening to satellite radio. Surreal.

We get to the KTM dealer about 9 AM, and like many bike shops, they are closed on Mondays. A short distance away, however, is Gunnison Motorsports, a Husaberg and Arctic Cat dealer, and they are open. Greg goes in while I sift through the 100 or so emails that have accumulated on my Blackberry while I was out of range. In a few minutes he comes back out and drags me in to meet the owner. The owner is Fritz Kadlec, a multi-time ISDE gold medalist and off road champion. For those who don't follow the International Six Days Enduro, this would be sort of like dropping by a Honda shop and finding Freddie Spencer working the parts counter.

Gunnison Motorsports is quite busy for 9 AM on a Monday morning, and I've never seen anyone in a dealership working as hard as Fritz. He has time between customers to chat with up about his racing career, riding in the mountains, and life in a small town. Seems like a great guy. Oh, yeah, and he can order the KTM parts Greg needs, and have them there on the Fed-Ex truck by 10 AM the next day. Great, we may be able to get Greg's bike fixed and save a portion of his week after all.

We headed back to Taylor Park. We rolled Greg's 525 into his enclosed trailer and spent the afternoon taking the KTM apart. In a fine example of engineering, we discover that KTM puts the water pump on the end of the camshaft, and there is a cast in water passage going through the middle of the cam chain tunnel. This means we cannot pull the head and replace the head gasket without breaking the cam chain. Greg had picked up a cordless Dremel in Gunnison, which made short work of breaking the cam chain.

Once we got the head off, there was not an obvious defect in the head gasket like I have seen on cars with blown head gaskets. After quite a bit if looking, we discovered that on one side of the rolled metal ring around the combustion chamber, the rolled metal is split, allowing combustion gasses to escape through the center of the gasket.

During our excursion to Gunnison, the weather improved dramatically. You hear a lot of people say "If you don't like the weather here, just wait 5 minutes, it will change". That is really true of this portion of Colorado. The remaining Dirtbags who were not on a mission to Gunnison went out on a strenuous dirt ride of about 100 miles.

Mark and Todd come back from their foray into the medical establishment with no plaster, no braces, and just a prescription for some pain meds. X-rays showed a lot of old injuries, but no new ones. They are told to take it easy and let the pain be their guide. Yeah, right.

Tuesday is a nice day. Greg has to go retrieve his KTM parts, and Jimmy needs some work on his bike's brakes, so they head into Gunnison to be there when the bike shops open. I figure they will be back around 11 or 11:30, and I plan to be there to help re-assemble the 525. The hard core riders are planning another big day, but Sam is sore from the previous day. He and I decide to take some easy nearby Jeep trails, get some good photos, and be back by the time Greg is back from the parts run.

Sam and I first head to Mirror Lake. A beautiful spot, with a couple of people fishing. http://alabamadirtbags.tripod.com/colorado2008/P1010003.JPG 

 The road beyond Mirror Lake runs right on the bank of the lake. The water is high enough that we actually splash through the edge of the lake, on the way up to Tin Cup Pass. We make it to the pass after a quick detour around a snow bank, and find that the St. Elmo side of the pass is still impassible due to large snowbanks. http://alabamadirtbags.tripod.com/colorado2008/P1010011.JPG

Back down, past Mirror Lake, into the town of Tin Cup, we take a left and head for Cumberland Pass. We came through Cumberland Pass on Sunday, hungry, tired and cold, and did not stop for pictures. This trip was all about the pictures.

After the photo op, Sam's GPS showed an alternate route back from Cumberland Pass. We figured we had time, so we took it. Another short detour around a snow bank, and we were on a great jeep trail back down the mountain toward Tin Cup. It got rougher and rockier as we went, but it was a blast. It also took more time than we planned. http://alabamadirtbags.tripod.com/colorado2008/P1010015.JPG

Back at camp, Greg and Frank had already started re-assembling the 525, and had hit a snag. After getting the head on, and the cam back in place, they tried to turn the engine through. It locked up at TDC, with a metallic click. We spent a pretty good amount of time shining lights into the spark plug hole, and probing around with cable ties and safety wire, trying to figure out what was on top of the piston to make it stop like that. Finally, Mark, a 30+ year bike mechanic, comes by and say "You must have the wrong head gasket". Couldn't be, could it?

As usual, Mark is correct, we have the wrong head gasket. KTM has relatively few parts, and they make umpteen different bikes out of those various parts. Small bore, short stroke = 1 bike, big bore, short stroke = another bike, small bore, long stroke = a third bike with the same displacement, and big bore, long stroke = yet another displacement. We tear it back down, and Greg heads back to Gunnison. It turns out they had order the correct part, but the warehouse had put the wrong head gasket into the right bin. The parts were re-ordered for delivery on Wednesday, along with another cam chain master cylinder. http://alabamadirtbags.tripod.com/colorado2008/IMG_0116.JPG

After dinner, we gathered in the living room to watch the "World's Fastest Indian" on the 17 inch screen of my laptop, and crashed for the day.