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Categories: all aviation bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater Fri, 25 Feb 2005
In a fit of randomness, I decided to stop by Ride West BMW today. This is a bike that's been recommended to me more than once as being a decent sidecar tug. Out of curiosity, I asked the hovering salesman how much they were asking for it. $3900 came the answer. No, wait, it's actually $2900. Hmm! I signed myself up for a test ride, and took it around the block, more or less. I was probably out for 20 minutes, but it was long enough to do some slow-speed residential street crawling, one full-power blast onto the freeway, and some more sedate city street riding. Overall, I was surprised by how much I liked it. Power delivery was probably typical for a 4 cylinder 1000cc engine, coming in a rush around mid RPM and higher. Unfortunately, the way it's geared, you don't get to the rushy part, even in first gear, until you're well past sane city street speeds. Before that surge of power, it's kind of gutless (for a litre bike). It was heavier than I was expecting, seemingly outweighing the Le Mans by about a hundred pounds. I wouldn't be surprised to find they're about the same weight, but the Concours felt really heavy. It wasn't a problem, just a thing I noticed. It wouldn't be too much of a factor with a sidecar hooked up to it. The seating position was very comfortable, and I think it had some variety of aftermarket seat. The riding position was clearly more touring than sport. I realized as I was riding it, though, that if I was going to drop $3k on a Concours, I would inevitably spend about $2000-2500 getting a Ural or similar sidecar for it, and another $1000 or more hooking it up. By then, I would be better off buying Aaron's Goldwing/EML for $5k, which is already set up, even though the bike has 84k miles on it. It's also occurred to me more than once that I could get that rig, and if I liked it, find a less-used GL1100 to fit to the sidecar. It could even be done for a very minimal overall loss on the trade, probably around $1000. Anyway, the Connie was interesting, and I'm very glad to have ridden one. If I needed a cheap sport touring bike, that one would definitely be on the list. It's not quite the right thing for what I need right now, though. Later... I was just looking over some of the things on my motorcycle site, and realized that I've had remarkably little "churn" lately -- for the first three years of my motorcycling life, I didn't settle on a bike for very long. But here it's been nearly a year and a half since I've either bought or sold a motorcycle. I must have stumbled across some bikes I really like. Of course, it's a subject that's never far from my mind. The radio I installed on the Le Mans started acting up from vibration, and is basically unusable now. This makes me question the whole Le Mans thing. The Ninja is great, but feels underpowered sometimes. But, these are things I think about all the time. I'm no closer to doing anything about them now than I was a year ago. The only change that I'm pretty sure will happen is that I'll get a sidecar rig before too long. That may shake things up too, as I don't know how I'm going to store two bikes and a sidecar in my little garage, without some major rearrangement, and consigning one of the vehicles to the status of "pain in the ass to get out." Posted at 20:46 permanent link category: /motorcycle Categories: all aviation gadgets misc motorcycle theater Written by Ian Johnston. Software is Blosxom. Questions? Please mail me at reaper at obairlann dot net. |