Archive for motorcycle
Practicing with a Leatt neck brace
Posted by: | CommentsA few hours of sunshine is enough to make me feel I should be on the bike and this morning I was out and about looking like a Dakar rider who lost his way. I was wearing my new neck brace that I mentioned previously to get used to the feeling of it in preparation for my trip to Wales. It felt rather awkward at first and seemed to sit higher than desirable, I think because the distance from the front chest piece to the back piece is a little short and it rides up over my jacket with its built in back protector. I would undoubtedly fit better over bare skin and under body armour but I am not thus equipped and besides, the weather is cold enough for me to need my jacket!
In any case, after a few miles, I get used the the feeling and was able to turn my head sufficiently to do a “lifesaver”. It still remains to be seen how it will be when off-roading but I don’t anticipate any great difficulty after today’s experience.
Service, Neck Brace and stuff.
Posted by: | CommentsI took the Goldwing to Doble’s yesterday. Traffic was absolutely solid
all the way there and back. How glad I am not to have to fight that
sort of thing every day! It gave me a good chance however to compare
the filtering abilities of the Wing and the little Honda 600 courtesy
bike I used to get back and forth. Whilst the smaller bike can
certainly go through smaller gaps I found that I preferred the Wing for
its road presence, lights and low down grunt. I seemed to have to rev
the nuts of the little bike (its redline is at 11,000 rpm and below
4000 it really does nothing) to accelerate smartly and felt very
vulnerable facing oncoming traffic whilst I scooted down the middle of
the road. On the Wing, it was plain that the oncoming traffic could see
me and moved more to its side of the road – which was not the case when
I was on the smaller bike. The service cost me £275. The technician
noted that my rear tyre was getting squared-off. Inevitable I suppose
given the proportion of motorway miles I have done since the tyre was
replaced (a mere 4000 miles ago) but it underscores the fact that tyres
don’t last long on this big heavy bike.
The postman brought me a
belated Xmas pressie – well actually something I ordered only a couple
of days ago, namely a Leatt neck Brace. I have been watching the Dakar
rally on the TV and every rider is wearing a neck brace. It gave me
pause for thought and I ran through memories of times I have been
pitched off riding off-road. There were certainly a few when my neck
was jarred and I decided that a neck brace was probably a good thing. I
haven’t use it yet and am still in the process of fitting the thing. I
expect it will feel constaining and uncomfortable at first – I just
hope it’s like seat belts in cars. When they first became mandatory, I
hated the feel of them but nowadays feel quite naked without one. It
was expensive at £260 but I got a £215 discount (down from £475 ) from Dirtbikebitz
so I feel that it is probably good value – it certainly wll be if it
saves me from serious injury although I surely hope it won’t need to!
Backdating is Possible!
Posted by: | CommentsFor Blogger posts that is. I have been able to extract my old WordPress posts one by one and am now in the process of bringing them over here. It is a long-winded way round but as far as I can see, it’s the only way to do it and I am glad that it is possible at all.
I am rather counting on Blogspot being around for a long time and for the software that powers it to be updated painlessly with no input needed from me when and if it happens. At first, maintaining my own web site was fun but it now seems just a chore and even though the WordPress installation I had on it was not difficult to manage, it had developed some irritating quirks like substituting double apostrophes for a single character.
I gave up maintaining a gallery of photography on my own site some time ago in favour of a SmugMug hosted account and that has proved a good decision, it may not be too much longer before I find a way to offload my remaining stuff on woodwork and genealogy and can get out of the site management lark altogether.
Out and about
Posted by: | CommentsFresh from the triumph of fitting my new crash bars to the BMW yesterday, I celebrated by having a short ride on it today. Having both been laid low by the flu for two weeks, dearly beloved and I have postponed our Xmas jollifications until New Year – assuming we (still) feel like doing so by then, so today there were no distractions like presents to open or any such nonsense – it was on the bike and off! More accurately, it was about 11 am when I dragged myself to the garage, determined to prove to myself that I was still capable of getting the bike off the centre stand and out of the garage, mounting it and riding it.
I accomplished all of the above, only to discover that far from the imagined peace and quiet that would be prevailing on the roads at this time, countless, godless, antisocial idiots were already abroad, cluttering up the place just like a normal weekday. I turned as soon as I could onto the byways and quiet country lanes but found them so covered in mud and water that even with my new TKC-80s, I felt a mite insecure and given my kitten-like feebleness, I reckoned that it would be quite beyond me to pick the darn bike up if I fell off so I headed for home a lot sooner than I planned.
Aside from anything else, it wasn’t that warm. The bike claimed 5 degrees but my thumbs were sure it was sub-zero. Ah well, time to look at Gerbings heated gloves I reckon..
Welcome to my latest attempt at a blog
Posted by: | CommentsWell if you made it over here from my old blog, you’ll understand that I am totally pissed-off with WordPress. Trying to upgrade to version 2.7 completely hosed my blog and all the archived entries have become inaccessible. I don’t know if I’ll have better luck here but it’s worth a try I guess.
If you have stumbled across this for the first time, then I’ll just say that this blog is about my experiences on two-wheels – a BMW F800GS and a Honda Goldwing 1800. These are very different bikes and designed to do different things but I enjoy both more or less equally.
Ils sont arrivés! Or the Eagle has landed!
Posted by: | CommentsMy crashbars and bash plate arrived from Adventure Spec this morning. They were delayed apparently because the guys at AS had been unable to get up a snow-covered hill to their workshop on top of some god-forsaken moor and as a result were not posted until Monday. They arrived as shown in a rather unprepossessing bag but also as shown, were actually very well protected from the slings and arrows of Royal Mail by various bits of pipe insulating foam and carefully positioned brown paper.
First impressions are of a very solidly made bit of kit with nice neat welding and excellent powder coating. I just had time to fit the bashplate before it got too dark and cold.
The bashplate makes the BMW supplied bashplate look really poor. Mine had split a weld somewhere on the trails of deepest darkest Wales in September and when you compare the welds it is easy to see why. The black AS plate on the right is welded inside and out whilst the BMW plate is welded only on the outside. Where the split occurred I can see only very limited penetration of the weld metal. Also, the AS plate is made from 4mm ally whilst the BMW plate is only 3mm thick. Also, the BMW plate has a welded seam running up the middle, whilst the AS plate is a single piece of metal at that point.
I hope to fit the bars tomorrow and if they go on as easily as the bashplate, it should be a doddle. All the nuts are in stainless steel and the five spaceers that come with the kit are in balck anodised ally.
Finally I got my map and other good news.
Posted by: | CommentsWell TomTom came through in the end although the communications through their web site still drive me potty. I had to create a new email address and set up a TomTom Home account in the new name, then the company switched my map authorisation to the new mail address and I was able to to download it. It seems like a needless palaver to me, caused basically by their desire to a) make their products secure from piracy and b) use a system that is designed for people who don`t have a clue about computers. Good intentions and roads to hell come to mind..
I also got a phone call from Chris at Adventure-Spec from whom I ordered crash bars and a bash plate. He says they were being sent off today so with a bit of luck I should receive them tomorrow. I ordered these as a replacement for the SW Motech bars that I had so much trouble with when trying to fit them ( and which I sent back to Nippy Normans for a refund). I sure hope the new ones fit! I do have a bashplate already – the BMW one but that has cracked as a result of some darn rocks jumping out at me and in any case I wasn`t sure if the new bars would fit around the BMW bashplate. Also the Adventure-Spec plate looks more robust than the BMW one. I shall try my hand at welding that up with my little MIG welder, it’ll make a useful spare for someone.
F800 Updates
Posted by: | CommentsI took the BMW over to South London Motorrad yesterday for a set of factory mandated checks and updates. These involved re-routing the ABS connections, checking various fasteners on the brakes, replacing the fuel pressure sensor and a software update.
Not unnaturally, I have not noticed any difference as the bike was running fine beforehand anyway. What I did notice was just how different the 650 GS loan bike I used felt (I had to leave my bike there for most of the day, and I needed transport). It seemed very low in the seat, rather underpowered, or at least lacking in the torque department and contrary to my expectations, the steering seemed very slow and the bike reluctant to tip in at corners. I didn`t check the tyres closely but they were road tyres, not TKC`s like mine – how much and what kind of difference this makes, I don`t know. I do know that I vastly preferred my own bike to the 650. Perhaps this had more to do with familiarity than anything else but the difference surprised me, I had thought the two bikes would feel much the same.
The weather was absolutely dreary and in the morning, cold with it. The heated hand grips are great but particularly my thumbs get cold even with them on. I guess it`s time to don winter wear.
Still No Joy From Tomtom
Posted by: | CommentsI have had a couple of emails from TomTom in response to my moaning, with a promise to do something – so far that represents absolutely nothing. I am getting very cross with them. After all, they have been sitting on my money, surely it`s easy enough to let me have the maps?
TomTom Woes
Posted by: | CommentsIf you are thinking of getting a Tomtom GPS unit, my strong advice is not to bother. They are inherently less capable than Garmin units, notably in their inability to be programmed via a PC for routes etc. and Tomtom`s convoluted update process using the most awful piece of software this side of PC hell (Tomtom Home) is enough to cause you to lose the will to live.
Being at some stage naive, I bought two of these bloody units – a Tomtom Rider for the bike and a Tomtom Go 910 for the car. I no longer use the Rider, having switched to a Garmin on the bike but I still use the Go 910 in the car. As it is now a couple of years old, I decided to buy a new map for the 910. It turns out that I can pay for the map over the web that`s nice.. but I can only download it through the Tomtom Home program and then only if it recognises me. Well it kind of recognises me but only as owning a Rider unit so it won`t let me download the map I paid for using an email address that is associated with the Rider unit.
I spent an age trying to find out how to email Tomtom support but they are one of these companies that deliberately set out to make it hard to email them unless you have been through every bit of irrelevant useless “online” advice that they have hidden under various icons more suited to TeleTubbies than thinking adults before finally emerging on the other side a gibbering idiot.
I have managed to use their contact form which was finally revealed to me after a sort of D&D quiz, to ask for help. An automated reply tells me to expect a response in 2 business days. Well, I understand they have more important stuff to deal with but I am naturally concerned about the £60 I just spent with nothing to show for it.
I`ll keep you posted!