Duck Boards

Urals come with a rubber mat that fits in the floor of the sidecar.  It provides some nice traction, but water gets underneath and if you don’t air it out regularly, you can get some pretty severe rust underneath.  During WWII, the traction problem was solved by putting slats of wood, called “duck boards”, into the floor.  We ordered this stained oak set from Heindl Engineering and they are quite beautiful and work perfectly.

Hopefully they will help with keeping the sidecar dry.  I prefer them to the rubber mat already because they also make a nice ridge to brace your feet against.  On righthand turns it really helps the driver if the monkey (sidecar passenger) leans strongly to the right, and it’s much easier to do this if you have something to push against with your feet.  These do the trick nicely.

Kill Switch

Some of you may remember that our engine kill switch cover fell off a few weeks ago.  Well, for $2.50, Holopaw Paul sent us a new one.  We couldn’t find a screw quite short enough, so we had to punch through the other side of the plastic.  It’s fine for now, but some time soon we will get a metal file and file down the end of the screw that sticks out.

For a tiny piece of cast plastic, it was quite a surprising pain to attach, as you can probably figure out from the photos.

Trunk Lock

One of the great things about having a sidecar is the instant storage it provides.  Behind the seat is a trunk of sorts, in which we keep our toolkit, voltmeter, wire cutters, test lamp, spare battery, WD-40, oil funnel, tarp, spare tonneau (sidecar) cover, paperwork, tie-down ropes, and helmets.  With all that in there, you really want to be able to lock it, and thankfully there are a few after-market solutions folks have come up with, from ghetto to sophisticated.  We chose the sophisticated route and bought a lock system from Delaware Dave.

Installing it was a pain in the ass (and involved drilling a 1in hole in the side of the sidecar), but the lock works quite well.  It’s a bit counter-intuitive because you turn the key the opposite direction from what you’re used to, but it’s sturdy and it looks professional.  Installing it has made us both wonder why Ural doesn’t just include them straight from the factory.  I’ll post some photos of the inside of the trunk tomorrow, but by the time we were finished it was too dark.

Tarp

Smutyanka’s engine isn’t the most watertight thing in the world, and folks on the forums really recommend keeping Urals out of the rain.  Water can quite easily get into the carbs, air filter, transmission, etc, just by nature of the way these engines are assembled (which is to say, by hand and not very precisely), so it’s good to keep them under some sort of protection.  A few weekends ago we went to a reenactment and it was supposed to storm that weekend, but I couldn’t find a tarp that wasn’t massive.  So, I improvised:  I bought a $1.50 poncho at Target and punched some holes in the plastic around the edges, ran some rope through it, and managed to completely cover the engine and important bits:

MacGyver would’ve been proud.  Marc said it reminded him of stuff he saw when he was living in Africa, but it did the job, and now we have a real tarp:

Eventually we will buy a Ural-specific cover (they’re about $80), but for now, the tarp will do.

Air Intake Hoses

I have mentioned our need for new air intake hoses several times on this blog.  Our old ones were ill-fitting and full of dry rot, and if you don’t have a tight seal around your carburetors, the engine will run too lean and you risk getting dirt and debris in your engine.  Plus, the location of the air hoses on Urals is not the best, and they are very close to where your foot sits on the shifters, making it easy to knock out of place if it’s not secure:

Since this post is long enough already and the frankenstein-style tactics we had to use to create new air hoses and install them were quite complex, you will have to wait until the next post to get more details on that.  I’ll try to get that posted later tonight or tomorrow morning.

I was driving around the parking lot this afternoon, practicing my right-hand turns (which are difficult on a sidecar, because 70% of the weight of the bike is on the left, where the centrifugal force is on a RH turn) and practicing driving in reverse (it’s so much fun).  Our parking lot has one small speed bump, but in general, it’s not exactly filled with pot holes or other hazards.  Besides, this is a bike that is generally meant for abuse, so those things are not generally too concerning with a Ural.

Apparently, it is with this Ural.  When I pulled into our parking spot and went to use the kill switch to turn the bike off, I noticed that…the switch was no longer there.  Well, I should clarify.  The switch is, but the cover is not.  All that is left is a little piece of metal sticking up about 1cm out of the handlebar.  The normal/brights switch for the headlights is also now missing, and a precursory search through the parking lot turned up nothing.  Looks like Marc and I get to order two more parts, though these aren’t an emergency, since the kill switch is still usable and we won’t be driving the bike at night in a situation where we would need the brights.

For those curious, here’s what the right handlebar now looks like: