Home again in Muak Lek

 

We have been in Muak Lek now for two days suffering from jetlag.  I have been trying hard to force myself into the new time zone which is not easy with jetlag fogging my now more mature mind (read old and slow).

Putting our trikes back together was a challenge.  I can usually get mine in one piece within 3 hours, but this year it took nearly 5 hours and two days due to jetlag. We stopped for dinner the first night and by the time we had finished dinner neither I or Myron were able to stay awake any longer.  On the second day in the morning we finally got our bikes together and went out for a shake down ride.  All seemed OK until the next morning when I noticed that the idler on Myron’s trike was laying over at a 40 degree angle.  At first I thought the bolt had come out of the frame, but it was still in and badly bent from the chain torque.  These bolts are fairly large, but made of stainless steel which is very soft.  Stainless is used to prevent seizing of steel on steel so when ever the idler should need to be replaced the bolt will not have seized in the steel frame.   Of course we could not find the proper stainless steel bolt in this little town and in fact could not find any proper bolt at the local hardware store.  At last I remember my Thai friend that owns a motorcycle shop and we wandered over to see if he might help.  First we had to remove the bent bolt which meant cutting off the bent part and removing the remainder from the idler and two bearings.  A grinder with a metal cutting disc made short work of the bolt, but finding one the correct length and thread pitch was harder.  My friend turned over a large pile of spare bolts salvaged from every kind of motorcycle and eventually found one of the correct thread pitch and length.  Lucky for us the original bolt was metric and we are in the land of metric so finding the bolt was much easier than say in the states.

 

Took Myron down to the local creek which runs through Muak Lek.  People come from many places to play in the water and cool off.  Remember this is the dead of winter January 2nd, 2014.  Can’t imagine swimming in the any river in Wyoming at this time of year.