Wilsons Sandbox

Sorry for repeating this post but the potential buyer changed his mind and my need to sell the bike is now even more urgent. I joined here in April after buying a 2002 KLR because I was becoming too ill to safely ride my street bike, and I wanted to get off the roads here in New Mexico. Thanks for the many helpful suggestions you posted about lowering it to fit my 29" inseam and so forth. I lurked here for a while and learned a lot, while waiting a month to receive the lowering links and short stand. By the time I had the bike sized for me, the cancer thing was making it too hard for me to ride, and I have put less than 50 miles on the bike since I bought it. Be that as it may. I am still getting around some, but there's no way I can ride the bike and I'd hate to see my wife stuck with the burden of selling it when I die, which may be in the next 1-3 months. It's a 2002 with 6K miles, and has Progressive suspension, a large plastic gas tank, fork brace, Corbin seat, metal-reinforced handguards, a steel skid plate, baqs, and other improvements which I can't recall but will refresh. As I recall, the doohickie has been done also. As I said, I rode it only a few miles, mostly home from the seller's house via back streets and a dirt road, so I didn't shake it down for any problems. As far as I can see and hear it appears very healthy. I do have all the original parts as well as the add-ons, and there are receipts for much of them and for service visits. It does seem to have been well cared-for. Obviously the bike is in Albuquerque and would need to be ridden or shipped to you. I know nothing of the costs for shipping a bike like this, but I was quoted $750 to ship my huge Valkyrie street bike 1350 miles, professionally crated and loaded by a freight service. At half the weight I'd expect the KLR to be less. I am posting it here first because you're familiar with the brand and may be interested. If it doesn't sell here, can you suggest other methods? I'd appreciate any tips. As I recall, I paid $3700 for it, and about $200 for the lowering links and shortened stand. My wife will probably insist on recouping the price on resale, so the asking price is $3900. PS I'll also selling my 98 Honda Valkyrie Standard with extras. Great road bike but I can't ride it anymore. Please forward this to anyone who might want a nice, fast, healthy street bike. Thanks for your help and advice so far. Too bad I didn't get to plug into the community and find some fellow riders before becoming too ill, but so it goes. We make the best we can, and I can't complain much at all. Thanks again. David Covell

Caltech, MIT Chemists Look for Better Ways to Use Chemical Bonds to Store Solar Energy PASADENA, Calif.-With gasoline prices hovering at $3 per gallon, probably few Americans need convincing that another energy crisis is imminent. But what precisely is to be done about our future energy needs is still a puzzle. There's talk about a "hydrogen economy," but hydrogen itself poses some formidable challenges. The key challenge is, of course, how to make the hydrogen in the first place. The best and cheapest methods currently available involve burning coal or natural gas, which means more greenhouse gases and more pollution. Adopting the cheapest method by using natural gas would merely result in replacing our dependence on foreign oil with a dependence on foreign gas. "Clearly, one clean way to get hydrogen is by splitting water with sunlight," says Harry Gray, who is the Beckman Professor of Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology. Gray is involved with several other Caltech and MIT chemists in a research program they call "Powering the Planet." The broadest goal of the project is to "pursue efficient, economical ways to store solar energy in the form of chemical bonds," according to the National Science Foundation (NSF). With a new seed grant from the NSF and the possibility for additional funding after the initial three-year period, the Caltech group says they now have the wherewithal to try out some novel ideas to produce energy cheaply and cleanly. "Presently, this country spends more money in 10 minutes at the gas pump than it puts into a year of solar-energy research," says Nathan S. Lewis, the Argyros Professor and professor of chemistry. "But the sun provides more energy to the planet in an hour than all the fossil energy consumed worldwide in a year." The reason that Gray and Lewis advocate the use of solar energy is that no other renewable resource has enough practical potential to provide the world with the energy that it needs. But the sun sets every night, and so use of solar energy on a large scale will necessarily require storing the energy for use upon society's demand, day or night, summer or winter, rain or shine. As for non-renewable resources, nuclear power plants would do the job, but 10,000 new ones would have to be built. In other words, one new nuclear plant would have to come on-line every other day somewhere in the world for the next 50 years. The devices used in a simple experiment in the high school chemistry lab to make hydrogen by electrolysis are not currently the cheapest ones to use for mass production. In fact, the tabletop device that breaks water into hydrogen and oxygen is perfectly clean (in other words, no carbon emissions), but it requires a platinum catalyst. And platinum has been selling all year for more than $800 per ounce. The solution? Find something cheaper than platinum to act as a catalyst. There are other problems, but this is one that the Caltech group is starting to address. In a research article now in press, Associate Professor of Chemistry Jonas Peters and his colleagues demonstrate a way that cobalt can be used for catalysis of hydrogen formation from water. "This is a good first example for us," says Peters. "A key goal is to try to replace the current state-of-the-art platinum catalyst, which is extremely expensive, with something like cobalt, or even better, iron or nickel. We have to find a way to cheaply make solar-derived fuel if we are to ever really enable widespread use of solar energy as society's main power source." "It's also a good example because it shows that the NSF grant will get us working together," adds Gray. "This and other research results will involve the joint use of students and postdocs, rather than individual groups going it alone." In addition to the lab work, the Caltech chemists also have plans to involve other entities outside campus--both for practical and educational reasons. One proposal is to fit out a school so that it will run entirely on solar energy. The initial conversion would likely be done with existing solar panels, but the facility would also serve to provide the researchers with a fairly large-scale "lab" where they can test out new ideas. "We'd build it so that we could troubleshoot solar converters we're working on," explains Gray. The ultimate lab goal is to have a "dream machine with no wires in it," Gray says. "We visualize a solar machine with boundary layers, where water comes in, hydrogen goes out one side, and oxygen goes out the other." Such a machine will require a lot of work and a number of innovations and breakthroughs, but Lewis says the future of the planet depends on moving away from fossil fuels.