super-structure

…but A Song of Fire & Ice has not. I’m actu­al­ly sev­er­al sea­sons behind on the show so I did­n’t even watch the finale last night. While I’m some­what avoid­ing spoil­ers, I’m not too con­cerned about it. Because it became very clear to fans of the books series from about sea­son 2 or 3 that HBO would fin­ish the show long before George R.R. Mar­tin ever fin­ished his nov­els. So how­ev­er the show end­ed; if it is any­thing like the books ulti­mate­ly end it will be more of a coin­ci­dence than any­thing. Frankly, I doubt they’ll be sim­i­lar at all but time will (hope­ful­ly) tell.

My then girl­friend (now wife), Angela, bought me a paper­back copy of A Game of Thrones from the uni­ver­si­ty book­store in Blacks­burg, VA for a birth­day present after I’d fin­ished the orig­i­nal Dune nov­els. I was start­ing to read for fun again (five years of work­ing towards an engi­neer­ing degree means you don’t read for “fun” much). That book was rec­om­mend­ed to her when she told the book­store clerk I liked Dune. Basi­cal­ly, it was all about pol­i­tics and fam­i­ly intrigue, but only in medieval times. And I real­ly did enjoy it. The third book in the series, A Storm of Swords, had just been released and these books were start­ing to gain pop­u­lar­i­ty. Also, that time, GRRM was crank­ing out these nov­els about every oth­er year!

I did­n’t read the sub­se­quent nov­els for a while as I stopped read­ing much genre fic­tion for a few years (out­side of Dune pre­quels). When I did get back to them, I had dis­cov­ered the joy of audio books. Par­tic­u­lar­ly, get­ting to lis­ten to audio­books to pass the time rock­ing our baby daugh­ter to sleep. That’s when I also dis­cov­ered Roy Dotrice. As much as I enjoyed the first book, hear­ing his nar­ra­tion brought the series to life in a way that’s still hard to describe. I’ve been a fan of Peter Din­klage since “The Sta­tion Agent” but I will always hear the phrase “A Lan­nis­ter always pays his debts.” in a Welsh accent thanks to Dotrice. Don’t get me wrong, the HBO series is fan­tas­tic and the act­ing is won­der­ful. But there’s a rea­son that GRRM want­ed no one by Dotrice to nar­rate the audio­books and it’s clear why.

“Roy gave his all in the stu­dio,” said Dan Mus­sel­man, a pro­duc­er who worked with Dotrice on the series, by email. “George R.R. Mar­tin want­ed Roy to nar­rate his books, and he was absolute­ly right. Roy was the per­fect nar­ra­tor for the series and no one else could pos­si­bly have done what Roy did with the nar­ra­tive, the sto­ry lines, and espe­cial­ly the char­ac­ters. It was an enor­mous under­tak­ing and worth every minute.”

And he was metic­u­lous in his work and research. The night before record­ing, he would go over pages of notes on the next day’s char­ac­ters. By the end of record­ing all five books, he had every char­ac­ter name list­ed in alpha­bet­i­cal order on more than a dozen pieces of paper. 

The Man Who Spoke ‘Game of Thrones’ Into Exis­tence

And it’s not just that they’re the books and books are always bet­ter than the movie (nay, tele­vi­sion series). When Dotrice was­n’t avail­able to nar­rate the fourth book the pro­duc­ers got John Lee, one of the finest nar­ra­tors alive today. I have lis­tened to a dozen books he’s read (most­ly Alis­tair Reynolds or Peter F. Hamil­ton), but it just was­n’t the same for A Feast for Crows.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, Dotrice passed away in 2017 and he won’t get to fin­ish the series. No one knows when those books will be done and who’ll nar­rate the audio­books. I’m sure to read and lis­ten to them once they come out, regard­less of who nar­rates them — or who the HBO show run­ners put on the iron throne. But I’ll still have Roy Dotrice’s voic­es in my head as I read the words.

We down­sized from a Hon­da Odyssey mini­van last year to a Hon­da Pilot. It’s been a great vehi­cle (despite the lack of a vol­ume knob). How­ev­er, one of the biggest dis­ap­point­ments last sum­mer was that we could no longer toss four bicy­cles in the back of our vehi­cle and go to a park for a fam­i­ly bike ride. Our neigh­bor­hood is ok for very short rides, but we enjoy park­ing at one of the area green­ways and going for a car-free ride, often on a shady path.

So I’ve been plan­ning on get­ting a trail­er hitch-mount­ed bike rack to solve the issue but of course, that meant hav­ing to get a trail­er hitch first as our vehi­cle does­n’t come with one. I did­n’t want a third-par­ty hitch because 1) they hang below the bumper, which is an eye­sore and 2) I had real­ly bad luck with the wiring on a U‑Haul tow hitch on our old Ford (the dam­age it caused to the sys­tem wiring cost me more than the hitch). My son has been real­ly want­i­ng to or more bike rides, so I fig­ured the time had come to order some parts.

I did some research and found a cou­ple of videos on how to install the oem Hon­da tow hitch for a 2017 Hon­da Pilot. It’s about as sim­ple as it could pos­si­ble be, with only six bolts to mount it. The part comes with the replace­ment bumper inserts and bolts. I ordered the part from Ama­zon, but you can get it cheap­er (though not with free ship­ping) from https://www.hondapartsguys.com. It does not, how­ev­er, come with any instruc­tions per se; just a note on the box that you have to down­load them. The first thing the instruc­tions state is that this is not a job for do-it-your­selfers. Oth­er than the fact that you need a torque wrench, I hon­est­ly can­not image why not. Well, except that they want to fun­nel some busi­ness to deal­er­ship ser­vice depts. But no way am I pay­ing some­one hun­dreds of dol­lars to tight­en down a half dozen bolts for me. I can’t deep-link to the PDF on Hon­da’s site, but it’s easy to search for the year and mod­el and then find the trail­er hitch instruc­tions.

The first steps, and in my opin­ion, the most dif­fi­cult (or at least time con­sum­ing) is to remove the old bumper insert. It’s just a bent piece of plas­tic but it’s held in by mul­ti­ple screws, bolts, and clips. The only real trick is to under­stand how the pair of cen­ter-push clips work. This video does a great job of explain­ing how to eas­i­ly pop the cen­ter down to slide them out. You save a cou­ple of met­al clip-on-nuts to reuse on your replace­ment insert that has the open­ings for the hitch. Get­ting the new insert back in placed required some per­sua­sion, but once it was aligned onto all the clips and holes, it was very easy to reverse the process.

Mount­ing the hitch itself was­n’t hard to do by myself, either. I lit­er­al­ly just sat it in my lap and the slid myself under the bumper. I was able to rest the hitch in the insert’s hitch open­ing and get two of the bolts start­ed to then sup­port the rest of the weight. I used my small pow­er dri­ver to get the bolts snug tight (I set it to 20, which I assume is Nm). The bolt heads are 19mm, but you can safe­ly use a 3/4″ if you only have SAE sizes (19 mm = 0.748 inch­es; which is with­in the tol­er­ance of most sock­ets any­way). I did­n’t use an exten­der, but rather just a 1/2″ to 3/8″ adapter on the 3/4″ sock­et and was able to get all six bolts tight­ened to spec. The instruc­tions men­tion a 22mm sock­et, which I did­n’t have but pur­chased at Lowes for 99¢. How­ev­er, I nev­er need­ed it and hon­est­ly don’t even know what it was sup­posed to be used for!

I saw at least one video where the installer only low­ered the spare tire but I’d rec­om­mend get­ting it entire­ly out of the way. The spare wench sys­tem on Pilot allowed me to just drop it onto a fur­ni­ture dol­ly. I also saw where one per­son detached the muf­fler to get bet­ter access to one of the mount bolts. As I had got­ten that one very tight using a small ratch­et, I did­n’t need a lot of room to get it to the full 70 ft-lbs of torque with the large torque wrench. I had nev­er used a torque wrench before, but it’s pret­ty straight for­ward. The rel­a­tive­ly cheap ($25) one I pur­chased from Ama­zon seemed to work fine and was easy to set to the desired torque (loosen a small nut, turn the han­dle to the mea­sure­ment, tight­en the nut back down). Just tight­en until it “clicks” (which sounds a bit like a ratch­et going back­wards). This video demon­strates it nice­ly; though they appar­ent­ly were using some after-mar­ket part and men­tion “140 pounds” (sic: foot-pounds) but the oem part was far low­er torque.

Just for esti­mates, the dif­fer­ence between 30 ft-lbs and 60 ft-lbs was less than a full turn of the bolt, I think. The dif­fer­ence between 60 ft-lbs and 70 ft-lbs was maybe only 1/8th of a turn! But that last 1/8th of a turn required me to get into posi­tion for each bolt and brace my knees to the frame to pull. You’re not like­ly to acci­den­tal­ly over tight­en these bolts to the full ten­sion using a dri­ver (unless it’s an air-pow­ered ham­mer tool) or a small­er ratch­et. I’d strong­ly sug­gest buy­ing or bor­row­ing a torque wrench and get­ting these tight­ened up right, though. They are so much more unwieldy than a dri­ver or small ratch­et, I would only rec­om­mend them for going from snug (or tighter) to full torque, though. Sure, $25 is a bit much for a tool you use so briefly but it’s good know­ing the hitch is on to stay.

The nicest thing about the oem Hon­da kit is that it’s hard­ly notice­able once installed. It does­n’t stick out past the bumper (it’s actu­al­ly recessed a bit), so no one is going to lose a knee cap or shin bone to this thing. It came with a lit­tle rub­ber Hon­da insert to stick in the receiv­er when it’s not in use, too.

I also ordered a Yaki­ma Long­haul bike rack. It appears this mod­el is intend­ed for RVs or sim­i­lar vehi­cles, where you would like­ly leave it in place. It does­n’t move out of the way or fold down. Fur­ther, it attach­es with a large thru-nut. How­ev­er, it was the cheap­est Yaki­ma-brand rack for four bikes sup­port­ed on a trail­er hitch. I’ve had very good expe­ri­ences with their equip­ment so I decid­ed to go with this one. It’s fair­ly mas­sive but does the job. The bikes were easy to mount onto it using their zip-tie style straps and did­n’t budge at all to-and-from the bike trail.

One down­side we not­ed to the bikes mount­ed is that the back­up sen­sors con­stant­ly think col­li­sion is immi­nent. So any time you’re in reverse (such as back­ing out of the garage), there is a con­stant beep that must be ignored.

As I was installing this for the pur­pose of a bike rack, I did­n’t spring for the addi­tion­al $175 wiring har­ness. I think I’ll like­ly have to take the trail­er hitch back off to place it in the mount, which is not going to be fun (though at least I’ll get some more val­ue out of that torque wrench invest­ment!). That’s some­thing to con­sid­er if you’re look­ing at doing some­thing like this your­self as well. I’m not sure a deal­er will be will­ing to install only the trail­er hitch with­out the wiring har­ness (they’d prob­a­bly still charge you just as much even if they did).