Busy Doing Nothing

I did do some TLC on the bike yesterday which went moderately well except for the headlamp which appears to be unwell. The original bulb has a filament missing/broken which I presumed was the cause of the headlamp not working except that it made no difference when I plugged the new bulb in (with a healthy looking filament).

I fiddled with fuses and sprayed WD-40 in appropriate looking places before discovering that the full-beam rocker switch is (also?) knackered. Like on a car (assuming the main-beam is on) you have the opportunity to pull a lever and have the full-beam on until you let go or push the level and the full-beam remains on until you pull the lever back. On a bike there's a main-beam/full-beam rocker switch and also a little button to flash the full-beam. The flasher button is fine, the rocker switch has no effect. I wonder if something in the switch is keeping the headlamp off as well as not enabling full-beam. It had a healthy blast of WD-40 to encourage it.

Any thoughts are welcome.

Of course, having fiddled with a mucky bike for the afternoon my jeans (my only off-bike trousers) are now also mucky. Start as you mean to go on...

AM came round in the evening and we toddled off down to the Ambience Mall, or rather another Ambience Mall, this time in Vasant Kunj in south Delhi, for a few beers. AM committed a cardinal sin of actually following the rules of the road on the way out rather than take the expected short cut up the wrong carriageway on the way out and had to apologise profusely.

I've spent today repeatedly trying to clean my air filter. They tell you to pour on the cleaner, wait 10 minutes, brush the filter (I don't have a brush so skipped this part), then flush it through with warm water. Plenty of black gunge came out which looked very positive. Unfortunately, the filter cloth merely turned from pitch black to a slate grey. The instructions don't tell what colour represents clean -- when it first turned up it was pre-oiled and therefore red.

I gave it another go which cleaned more muck out but didn't have much effect on the colour of the filter. It'll have to do. Each time I do clean it I have to de-gunge the sink, there's something about this cleaning chemical that causes the gunge to weld itself to porcelain. Anyway, the filter has finally dried and is currently soaking up oil ready to go back in.

In the meanwhile I was perusing the map, wondering how far I might get tomorrow afternoon if I can get the paperwork off of customs reasonably promptly and then turned my eye to the Manali-Leh-Srinagar route. The Manali-Leh part is the more interesting as careful analysis reveals that there are four passes over 4900m including one that is only 30m short of the Khardung La at a little over 5300m.

Should be interesting.

Time to go grease my filter.