Simon (my Golden Retriever) and I camped out at Ocotillo Wells this weekend. Since I suspected that the #162 main jet I had settled on last time out was a little rich, I bought some new plugs and proceeded to do a plug chop with a #160 main. When they say plug chop, the emphasis is on the chop. What you do is cut the body of the plug away so that you can see the color band deposited at the base of the porcelain after a WOT blast. What you're looking for is an approximately 2mm wide band of light brown color.

I did a bunch of work on the 250R today. First, I bought yet another AC Racing product: a new bumper! There's not really any way I can justify this purchase other than pure asthetics, but I do think it looks pretty neat.

I drove over to the Ocotillo Wells SVRA today for a few hours of riding, to test out my new AC pro pegs, grips, and to dial in my sea level jetting.

There were a couple things I really didn't like about my quad when I bought it. It had a cheesy cooler rack and an even cheesier set of nerf bars. I don't really have any use for a cooler rack (I have one of those water backpacks), and it was long enough that it hung over the tailgate of my pickup truck when the quad was in the bed. As for the nerf bars, well, I've never particularly liked the look of nerfs in the first place, and the ones that came on my quad were held on by u-straps and a single bolt on each peg. Yes, they wobbled.

Earl and I went out to the El Mirage OHV area this weekend for a little riding. I got there early Saturday morning, and while I was waiting for Earl I sorted out the correct jetting for the area. The lake bed is around 2800', and we saw an elevation range of 2647-3068'. All altitudes were from my Garmin GPS.

For reference, my TRX250R setup is as follows:

• Stock porting, head, & carburetor
• K&N filter, removed airbox lid
• VForce3 reeds
  
  

After last night's debacle, I dragged the front wheels/tires down to Ron's Tire & Brake in Ramona to let them deal with it.

Today, I discovered something that I will never again attempt to do in my garage with only basic hand tools.

At some point in time, a previous owner of my TRX250R had replaced the original petcock with a generic replacement. The replacement had two major issues:

1. The pickup tube was way taller than a factory unit, which cut the effective tank capacity by about 15%
2. Its position required you to snake your hand up over the hot engine to switch between on, off, and reserve

Thursday, Dorothy, James, Eddie and I loaded up and headed out to Gordons Well for a long weekend of sandy mayhem.