Archive for the ‘Nonclassified Nonsense’ Category

I went to Mexico. It was awesome. I came back with dysentery.

Not really dysentery. But by the time I got back from Mexico, I was avoiding food and taking a daily dose Imodium to avoid shitting myself. And it had been a couple of weeks.

As a doctor’s son, I know that most things will get better if you ignore them. Two weeks is too long to have dysentery. Still, I was willing to ignore until I got to work one day it would not ignore me. I needed some 1970’s antibiotics to teach this thing a lesson. I know that, the internet knows that, everyone knows that, but people are stupid and I need a doctor to tell the pharmacist that.

As a doctor’s son, I don’t have a doctor. I do know that it’s hard to get a doctor. No problem, we have this awesome thing in America called urgent care. Urgent care is marketed as, “Need a doctor now, but don’t need an emergency room? Urgent care is for you!”

Because I’m a working American, I clicked on the, “I forgot my password” links to my insurance company and eventually logged in to figure out which urgent care I should go to. It matters, not because my insurance will pay anything, but because if it’s in-network, there’s a limit to what they can charge me. Doctors charge more than insurance companies will pay. They do this for lots of complicated reasons, but the end result is that you want to see a doctor that can’t charge you more than your insurance company will pay. Don’t have insurance? It doesn’t matter who you see, you’re fucked, and there is no free market.

I was really, really, surprised by the results provided by my insurance company. My insurance is Blue Cross Blue Shield Anthem. Or maybe it’s Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield. In any case, it’s a lot of names that shield me from… who, exactly? Doctors that want to make a living?

Whatever. They returned exactly 1 urgent care center within 20 miles of my office. One. This is not right. I redid the search a dozen different ways and still only got one.

Which one? “Colorado Urgent Care Associates”, with an address on north Academy. That was 15 minutes away. Fine.

I drove for 15 minutes past dozens of urgent care centers.

I got to the address indicated and there were two options: Penrose St. Francis Urgent Care and Colorado Healthcare Associates. Hmm. Only one of them says urgent care. Both have the same address.

I walked into Penrose St. Francis and showed them the Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield (seriously? They’re going with that as a business name?) search results for Colorado Urgent Care Associates. I asked if that was them. “No, that must be the people next door,” says the young guy at the front desk. I walk next door. They insist it’s not them, and suggest that since it’s an urgent care it must be the Penrose folks next door. I return to the original guy and tell him the neighbors deny all knowledge. He also denies all knowledge. I would have gone anywhere else at this point, but Anthem has assured me that THIS IS MY ONLY OPTION IN A 20 MILE RADIUS.

I ask him if his phone number is the one that Anthem has listed. He admits that it is. I decide that means he’ll accept my insurance and tell him that I have the dysentery. He gives me forms to fill out.

I fill out so many forms. I disclose the same basic information a dozen times. I promise that I will pay them for services rendered. Magically, after signing this form and returning it, they’re ready to see me.

A nurse types my information into a computer, prints out a hospital band and puts it on my wrist. This seems genuinely fucked yup, but I blame the lawyers and ignore it. She asks me a few questions, tells me that I’ve been shitting too freely for too long and that it’s about time I see a doctor. I glare.

Eventually I see a doctor. He tells me that antibiotics can cure me of this unpleasantness. This is not a surprise to me, because I have Wikipedia. I am surprised that when someone brings in the prescription 30 minutes later that it is precisely what Wikipedia prescribed. Usually, these days, doctors are way behind Wikipedia.

In the meantime, between the 5 minutes a well-qualified doctor spends with me and gives me all the information I had already acquired from Wikipedia, another girl walks in and asks me questions. Like, “Do I have insurance?”

You bet I do! I proudly produce my Western Digital Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield Bullshit Signifier, and she disappears to memorialize it with a photocopy. She assures me that some company I’ve never heard of (that is neither Penrose nor Colorado Ugent Care Associates) will bill me for my visit. I tell her that I wan’t wait for them to do that.

Eventually, I leave the office with my prescription for 3 days of Cipro that Wikipedia told me was the preferred treatment. I stop at the first pharmacy I encounter. I stand in line for 5 minutes and they tell me it will be 4 hours for them to take the pills from the big bottle, put them in the little bottle and put a label on it. I tell them that I’ll pay someone else and drive to the next Walgreens that tells me the same thing. Eventually, I give my well-worn script to a very nice lesbian at King Soopers who tells me it will be half an hour, and that they’ll send me a text message when it’s ready.

I’ve lost all will to live, so I drive across the street to Home Depot to buy some phosphoric acid for my motorcycle tank. Because this is a terrible endeavor in and of itself, when I return to the King Soopers phramacy, it’s been 45 minutes. My phone has not peeped.

The lesbian expresses outrage at computers, but assures me my script is ready. I pay $4 for it, and leave.

I take the drugs, and within a few hours, all is good until I get the bills.

The first seems totally normal and I have no qualms with it. $220.00 billed for a 99203, new patient office visit level 3. I could reasonably argue that the standard of care to which I’d been subjected was far lower than that expected of a new patent level 3 office visit, but how could I prove it? I’d like to say that you should at least have to weigh someone to provide the minimum level of services required for a 99203, but who am I? Now, no insurance company would pay $220.00 for a 99203, so only poor schmucks who don’t have a job or insurance have to actually pay that much. I have insurance, and an insurance is only going to pay $126.36 for a 99203, whether or not they weigh me or take an actual medical history. This is what my insurance company approves, and because I have a million dollar deductible, this is what I will pay.

This sounds exactly what I would expect. And, you know, I worked in billing at a doctor’s office for a good many years, and while this is way more than we would have charged for a 99203, and while this is way less medicine than we would have provided for a 99203… times have changed and who am I? Sure, fine, new patient office visit level 3 by the rule of law.

All is fine until I receive a bill from Penrose St. Francis. This St. Francis guy must have been a real schmuck. They wanted an additional $252.15 for G0381 (Level 2 hospital emergency department visit). My insurance company was happy to approve $184.00 of that as my responsibility.

What? $120 for a 99203? Sure. What the hell is a G0381?

Apparently, because this urgent care is operated by Penrose St. Francis (a hospital company, founded by St. Francis, because he loved fucking innocent people in the ass), they are allowed to pretend it’s an Emergency Room. With a capital E. They have to meet some sort of minimum standard for Emergency Room, and now they are an Emergency Room. Nevermind that this particular facility is not a hospital, it is an Emergency Room.

Wait, what? It says that it’s an urgent care. But, according to their insurance billing, they are an emergency room. Oh, and they’re only open from 8am to 8pm. Emergencies never happen after 8pm.

I contacted Anthem. They assure me the billing is correct. The $184 is for the use of the facility, and the $120 is to pay the physician. They admit that there are nearly 100 urgent care centers in the city of Colorado Springs that would not be able to charge the extra $184, but that I went to the single one that could. Because it’s owned by a hospital, and because it’s an emergency room.

Because it’s an emergency room, had I gone to an actual emergency room I would have been charged EXACTLY THE SAME THING. Think about this a second. This is brilliance for Penrose St. Francis. They buy a strip-mall doctor’s office, call it an urgent care, and are able to bill for EMERGENCY ROOM VISITS. For the money they receive for those visits, all they have to do is keep a strip mall office location open for 12 hours a day. But, you know, Doctors are expensive. Oh, wait, THEY AREN’T PAYING THE DOCTORS. The doctors bill for their services totally separately. $120. $120 is fair, it’s after hours, they have a whole office to maintain… Wait a minute. Penrose is paying for the building, the staff, everything but the doctors and are still collecting $184 for a visit. The doctors are ALSO collecting $120 per visit, which is exactly the same as a doctor with his own office would be able to charge.

This is fucked up.

We have a lot of books.  Most of them are labeled and organized by Library of Congress numbers.

Here’s rare books and A – J or general works through political science (and some beer/mead storage) upstairs:

Opposite are records and more beverage storage:

 

The downstairs bedroom holds CDs and K – P or law through literature:

Here’s the rest of the books in the bedroom, PS or American literature:

(Also some of the books that haven’t been labeled yet.)

The collection ends in Q – X or science through information resources, along with oversized books. The last column except for the last shelf is all cookbooks (TX):

The upstairs guest bedroom holds serials and notebooks.

This doesn’t include the stacks of books on the coffee table, on my desk, and next to my bed.

 

 

 

I got the bike back to the garage and started taking things apart. I ordered some tools, and to save on shipping, cam chain and slipper tensioner at the same time, since I know I want to change that. So here’s the first $200:

Here she is before I start pulling everything apart:

I drained what oil was left in the crankcase. Not much:

After 3 hours on Friday evening, I’d taken more apart than I ever had before, but still had a lot to go. You guys were right, and it was definitely the clutch pushrod seal. I think I’ll be fabricating one of those fancy seal retainers so this doesn’t happen again.

On Saturday morning, with the help of a friend, I finally got the engine out and on the bench. I took the advice of the fellow in the SL350 thread and removed the clutch and oil filter while the engine was still mounted to the frame. Some serious torque was necessary to get that oil filter out… I’d only tried once before, but didn’t have the proper tool and couldn’t budge it. There was only a small amount of sediment in there. Synthetic oil probably keeps most of it in solution.

The worst difficulty was removing the starter. We couldn’t seem to get enough clearance to remove the engine with the starter in place, and there wasn’t enough room to get a good whack on the impact driver to remove both starter screws. I was able to get one without too much drama, but one of them came out like this:

Signs of the oil starvation were immediately obvious. The right side of the top of the engine looked good (and was still wet), but the wear on the left side of the camshaft showed that it wasn’t getting oil. It was dry, and the lobes have visible scoring:

And then it was exactly as TheRadBaron predicted: The left side cam bushing was welded to the cam. Removing that took close to an hour. The technique mostly involved wailing on wooden blocks to pound it out…. Then adding a bunch of oil, pounding it back in, and then back out. After we’d getten it about 1/8th of an inch out, we switched to a technique that worked fairly well. One of us used a rivet gun (sophisticated air hammer) against a a large flat piece of metal wedged in the gap, and the other used a large, dull piece of metal to wedge from the bottom. That worked great, and because we were careful, didn’t mar either flange. We needn’t have been so careful, as there’s no way this can be used again:

The cam looked really bad, but it turns out that most of this metal was actually from the bearing surface, which is apparently softer than the cam shaft:

Here are both sides of the cam shaft:

It obviously can’t be used without being reground, but do we suppose this qualifies as a good core so that I can buy a new one?

Here’s the remains of the oil seal on the left side of the camshaft:

I’d say it got hot.

After we separated the camshaft from the left bushing, the engine spun freely. It turns out that was all that seized. The rest of the teardown went easily, and everything looked to be in reasonable shape (except the fairly well-worn tensioner wheels):

(don’t be bothered by the oil around the valve spring here, that’s runoff from the oil we were dumping on the camshaft to get it loose.

There appear to be some pistons stuck to the carbon:

I’m guessing this insane carbon buildup can explain my detonation problems. Still, I’m at 9,000ft, and I’d think that even with that carbon building up the resulting compression would still be low enough to avoid detonation. Though, the carbon probably also creates hot spots?

When I got the bike it was jetted for the altitude, but perhaps it was running very rich for a long time before?

I stopped shy of pulling the crankcase apart. I thought that the timing chain required a master link, but I see now that it’s actually endless. I was planning to just pull the new chain through with the old one, but now I’m not sure that’s as good a plan. I hate to break a perfectly good cam chain just because I don’t want to pull the cases apart.

But I really don’t want to pull the cases apart. It looks tricky with a zillion things that can go wrong. Everything I can see so far is in really good shape, so I really don’t want to mess with it. That said, pulling it apart seems like the smart option, so that’s probably what I’ll do. I ordered a tube of HondaBond, and I’m hoping that I can pull the case apart, replace the chain and put it all back together before I forget how it goes.

Spring is sluggish where I live, but I’ve been checking the weather every day, trying to scope out when I might get to ride a motorcycle to work. Given that I live at 9,200 feet in Colorado and my work is 45 miles away, the opportunities are not as plentiful as they might be for some folks. A couple of weeks ago, I aired up the tires in both motorcycles, started them up and rode them around the neighborhood. I’ve gotten in a couple of rides to work on the CB1100 this month, both days where the temperature was 33F when I left. 32 is my arbitrary cutoff, and 33 is still pretty cold. I’m okay, except for my hands. Even with my warmest gloves, my hands are pretty much frozen by the time I get down the mountain. I can lean over and rest my left hand on cam cover, but the right hand is simply out of luck. I need hand guards or heated gloves or a windshield or something.

Monday was not a motorcycle day. 26F, and the foot of snow from Sunday was still melting. Tuesday was similarly cold, but Wednesday would be the day.

On Wednesday, Jonah apparently thought that I was joking on Tuesday about riding the motorcycle, so she wasn’t prepared. A perfect excuse to ride Yoshiko. Even though I’d ridden around the neighborhood earlier in the month, the battery was still mostly dead. Not a problem though, she kicked to life pretty quickly, so I headed to work. I figured the 45 mile journey would get the battery nicely charged. As long as the cops didn’t care about the headlight and I used hand signals, I figured I’d be okay. The ride was fine, but sadly, the battery wasn’t showing any improvement by the time I got to work. Turn signals still refused to flash below 5,000 rpm, and even the neutral light looked a bit dim. I figured I’d order a new battery.

I noticed when I got to work there were quite a few fresh drops of oil almost immediately after parking. Not a good sign. I checked the oil, and it was still full. Leak was coming from the left side. Either the crank seal or the clutch seal, I figured. I decided that after I got her home, I would park her until I figured out which seal was leaking and fixed it.

When I left work, it was a bit hard to get her started (took a dozen kicks, which seemed a bit unusual, but I chalked it up to the low battery voltage and poor technique from too much time on the shiny new fancy fuel-injected computer-controlled vixen that needed nothing more than a tap of the starter switch every time. I pulled out of the parking lot, and waited at the stop sign for traffic to clear to take a left. Had to hold the throttle open a little to keep it idling, but that’s not terribly unusual in cold weather since she’s got the coldest plugs I could find. While turning left, she died, in the middle of a four lane road. I rolled backwards to the side of the road to kick her started again. Which is when I noticed the neutral light wasn’t even on. Something in the battery have gone boom, and I realized that I just wasn’t going to make it home on that battery.

Fortunately, it was downhill back to work. I got up to about 3,000 rpm rolling downhill, but that’s apparently not enough to get any juice out of the alternator. It may not even be a self-exciting alternator–I have no idea.

I had been thinking of getting a fancy lithium battery, or at least an AGM battery, but now I was stuck at work. Fortunately, Jonah was able to come get me. We went to Walmart, a thing I’ve managed to avoid for 10 years, but I knew they had the right battery in stock, and it was next door.

What I didn’t realize is that I had to buy the battery separate from the acid. Which meant that it wasn’t going to do me much good until I took it home and charged it. So that’s what I did, leaving the bike at work over night.

This morning, I got work, popped the new battery in, and the bike started immediately. I rode around the parking lot, satisfied that all was good, and played fun car games with a coworker to get Joanna the car so I could ride home.

And the ride home started fine. Yoshiko started on the first kick, the neutral light was bright, and she idled fine. I got on the interstate and was pleased to discover the unusual afternoon tailwind, which only happens when there’s a thunderstorm afoot. Still, I’ll take it, as the CB350 isn’t known for its abundance of power. This means I can cruise at 75mph easily, and not worry about being run over.

As I neared the exit for the road up the mountain, I noticed a loss of power. Still firing on both cylinders, but a sudden, noticeable, loss of power. I slowed to about 65mph, downshifted, and everything seemed smooth, but I was worried about having enough power to make it back up the mountain. I decided to check things out after I exited. I was curious if it would idle, and as I slowed down on the exit ramp, I pulled in the clutch. It died instantly, so I let out the clutch to get it started again. It did, and I tried again. Clutch in, engine dead, clutch out–whoa, it really didn’t want to start there…. but it did. I was able to keep it running with the clutch in if I revved it to about 3,000rpm. What’s going on? That’s when I started to wonder how much oil was left. So I let the clutch back in and let it die, and pulled off on the side of the road.

As soon as I hopped off, my worst fears were confirmed. The back of the bike was covered in oil. This was no leak, this was an empty crankcase. The dipstick confirmed. I hoped wasn’t seized, so less than a minute after starting, I tried to kick it, and was able to stand on the kick starter without it budging. Not good.

I had to call 7 tow companies before I found a tow company able and willing to get me off the side of the road. I was stuck on this stupid triangle between a right turn lane and the main flow of traffic. There was no where for me to go, and I could barely hear anything on my phone with the noise of traffic. With no better ideas, I had her towed to a friend’s house in town, where can she drip the last few drops of oil in piece.

I hope to rebuild her, but I have no idea if I’ll be able to find parts, or how hard this might be, or how much such a project might get in the way of aircraft construction. To top it all off, my newest pair of BDUs have a hole in them. I must have spilled some battery acid.

As unfortunate as all of this has been, I can’t help but feel lucky. Had this happened in the middle of Missouri, I’d be really screwed. Had this happened a few years ago, I wouldn’t have had another motorcycle to ride in the meantime, and probably wouldn’t have had the resources to buy parts to rebuild her. Things could be a lot worse, and if this had to happen, it probably happened in the best way it could.