With apple picking season in full swing across the northeast, I knew it was only a matter of time before Chris would stop by and let me know that we were going to make some cider. This visit always makes me a little bit anxious because, to be perfectly honest, my relationship with cider is at best, shaky. Don’t get me wrong, I love cider dearly. I often have a gallon in the fridge and I am known for my mulled cider recipe. But when it comes to making it, things just seem to fall apart.

It just never seem to go as planned. Our first time ended in everyone getting a bit sick after drinking it, but that was only after we started out with a few totally failed attempts at fermenting pasteurized cider with bread yeast. There was also the time in under my bed in my old dorm room that I try not to talk about. But this time, we hoped things would be different. Firstly, we were considerably more experienced, and second, I was not in charge of it this time, Chris was.

Winemaking is a family tradition. My dad has been making it for almost 15 years, starting out with a trash can and some grapes in a cold back attic in his shop and graduating to a full range of equipment and techniques. It was only a matter of time before I learned the ropes.

I actually find it funny that it took so long to get around to making wine. My foray into alcohol production was done in reverse, starting with the most obscure and moving down the line to the most popular kind to make. That being said, it is always an enjoyable experience when you are doing something you have never done before.

After a long month of scraping off gasket fiber and waiting for parts to arrive, the reassembly process is about to begin. The pistons are free, cleaned, and outfitted with new piston rings, and the engine is scraped, sanded clean, and shining with oil. During the next week, my friend Nirav and I are going to rebuild the engine, fix some holes found in the gas tank, and then see if we can get this thing started.

In order to reassemble an engine, you always need to replace the gaskets, which involves totally cleaning off the engine block of the old gasket. And depending on the kind of gasket used previously, this is either pretty easy or painfully annoying. In the case of my engine, it was the latter. The 1971 engine uses fiberglass gaskets which stick pretty strongly to the engine block, and can only be removed with hours of patience, lots of semi-paste paint remover, and an flat x-acto blade. I tried all kinds of gasket removers (CRC Gasket Remover, Permatex Gasket Remover) and solvents (WD-40, Strypeeze Semi-Paste Paint Remover, Acetone) and different blades (x-acto holders, putty knives), and the best combination I found was just a flat x-acto blade with no holder and soaking the gasket in the strypeeze and then WD-40 to get as much of the gasket as you can, and finally finishing it off with some plumbers cloth and more WD-40. It takes patience and perseverance, but its worth it.

We are now down to the main event. I got the the camshaft out and the cylinder head off this afternoon, and then spent a while cleaning a lot of the carbon buildup. It looks like the pistons are in fact seized, so we are soaking them now in some pb blaster, and we will see if we can get them moving in the morning. I’m going to have to head over to the Honda dealer soon and get a gasket kit and make some friends, because I will probably be a frequent customer in the coming weeks.

The engine is off! It took quite a bit of negotiating on my part, but I finally convinced it that it would be better off on its own. I needed to take it off because much of the access is through the top, and having it separate is going to make things easier in the long run. Now, I need to do a bit of reading before I jump into pulling it apart. Hopefully, it will be a seized piston issue, so that I do not have to get into pulling the entire transmission apart.

And, as you can see in the other pictures, I ran into a nice little home last night while opening up the engine covers. It looks like the bike was the humble abode to a mouse family in the past few years.

So, after weeks of cleaning, organizing, preparing, and mostly doing other stuff, the work on the bike has begun! As you know, the list of obstacles that need to be overcome include: a seized engine, stuck brake lines, no keys for the locks, bad carburetors, bad tires, misaligned shocks, and general rust. And these are the things I know of right now; As work progresses, I am sure more issues will present themselves.

So, first things first. I need to get it running. That means freeing the pistons, which involves taking the entire engine block off the frame, pulling it apart, cleaning it, and perhaps boring out a few millimeters from the engine wall. Currently, I am in the process of taking the engine off the frame, which so far has been quite the adventure. It is of course complicated by all of the things that are blocking its departure, like the gas tank, the foot pedal frame and the exhaust pipes. But it is only a matter of time.

Needless to say, I could not be happier.

So, it finally happened. I bought my first vehicle, and to my, and everyone else’s surprise, it is not a car. It is a 1971 twin-cylinder Honda CB350. It has a seized engine, uninstalled carburetors, a stuck front brake, worn tires, a questionable rear suspension, and no keys. Its red. And it is beautiful.

To give a bit of back story, my best friend Raji and I are leaving for India this winter, and are going to be traveling from the southern tip of the country all the way to Tibet, which we will free at the end of the trip. We have no idea how long we will be gone, or how we will be getting around for that matter. We assume that we will be doing a bit of everything – walking, biking, taking the train, and, hopefully, riding motorcycles.

So, because I have always been interested in engines, because I am going to India, and because it is just plain amazing, I bought a used bike on craigslist for cheap after some extensive research, picked it up, and am about to commit the next few months of my life to yet another project.

I will keep you up to date with how it is going.

So, this may be somewhat of a personal post, but I wanted to provide some kind of description of the past few months to help me get over the guilt I feel for not posting. I grew up on a medium sized farm in Connecticut. It is beautiful in every way, even the unbelievably messy wood shop, the weed-filled pumpkin patch, the leaky roof on the machine shed, and the peeling paint on the barn – it is all beautiful. Really, if I were to be honest, it is less of a farm, and more of a collection of unfinished projects. And through the past five years, I missed home and working quite a bit. So you can imagine what it is like to be home and hard at work with my Dad and brother.

Typically, I spend my time planting, building, fixing, weeding, string trimming, picking, eating, cooking, shoveling, haying, lifting, digging, and a host of other activities that keep me occupied. I have lists that look nothing like my Dad’s lists that we are trying to check off from. We are working on three gardens, with tomatoes, peppers, onions, garlic, potatoes, corn, beans, asparagus, pumpkins, and squash in all various states ranging from struggling to flourishing. We are trying to get some organization and general cleanliness to the whole place – so far we have half of the barn, and most of the house cleaned done, and we are now waiting on a dumpster. We put up seven hay fields and over 1,000 bales last month, which was spectacular. We have all kinds of animals that practically own the place. We have three trucks that don’t work, but we are working on. We have a leaky roof to fix. We have unsplit wood. And the list could go on forever.

So in the next few weeks I hope to post about at least a few of the things that I have learned and discovered in the past few months, and on some of the projects I am working on.

Like most Bostonians, I tend to ride bikes.  Biking is an amazing way to get around, be outdoors, and be a part of a community.  As you find yourself biking more and more, you tend to refine the relationship between yourself and your bike, which is when things start to change.  You might begin to catch yourself wondering what kind of handlebars are right, drop or commuter?  Or you find yourself arguing over the pros and cons of fixed gear vs. single speed.  Or you somehow know the names of everyone at your local bike shop.  Fortunately, you are not alone – there is an amazing community out there to help.

As you bike more, you will undoubtedly learn a little bit about your bike.  If nothing else, you will at least learn to change a tire.  But the more adventurous may start to learn the in’s and out’s of their bike.  Bike building and repairing is both meditative and inspiring. When you work hard to gain a complete understanding of something, I always feel that you find an incredible feeling of satisfaction.  This certainly holds true for bikes.

Because Nirav, Chris and I are all interested in anything DIY, we wanted to try out making our own homemade still. There are countless versions and variations scattered throughout the internet, and we tried to choose some of the best ideas and modify them to our own needs. There are a number of characteristics that we wanted it to have. First, we wanted it to be a pot still because we understood the mechanics and principles behind them. The downside of a pot still is the near complete lack of reflux – meaning that you will end up with less pure alcohol, which tends to be fine for rum where you want some extra flavors, but is not so good for vodka for example, where you want it to be as pure as possible. Second, it had to be small and adaptable enough to use indoors on a standard kitchen stove instead of a clunky propane stove that you have to use outside. Third, it had to be relatively cheap. And fourth, it had to be easy to make.