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Categories: all aviation bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater Tue, 28 Feb 2006
Cool. So, I just got back from a quick test ride of both the SV650 I liked the SV650 a lot (as I'd suspected I would), but the seat and pegs are far too close together, even closer than the Le Mans was before I changed the pegs. It was very cramped. I could fix it by raising the seat, but I'd have to add 2-3 inches to make enough difference, and that's a lot of seat to add. Then there's the problem with the on-off throttle. Right at that point where you go from acceleration to deceleration, it's very abrupt. I had a terrible time being smooth, and felt like a baby horse going arond corners -- very rickety and uncertain. It's better at higher speeds, but I spend most of my riding time at low speed. Not really acceptable. The SV does have plenty of power (feels like more than the Z, actually). It also feels much lighter and slimmer. Except for those first obvious flaws, the SV would be a great bike. I suspect that my gas mileage, however, would hover around 30, and that's not a situation I want to get back into; that's what I'm trying to get out of. The V-Strom was much more comfortable. Actually, it was a bit too much so in the "sit up and beg" direction. That'd be easy enough to fix with lower handlebars (the only problem I had with the seating position), but there are other troubles. The engine has that same on-off problem of the SV, except it feels like it's got 2/3 the power. It's a heavier bike, which makes a difference, but I didn't think it'd make that much difference. It is a slightly different engine, but it wasn't the change I was expecting based on reports I'd read. So, overall, the SV650 and V-Strom 650 are not for me, at least not right now. I'm still glad I rode them, and now I know. The SV650 would be a great track bike or fun bike, and the V-Strom would be a fabulous touring bike. On the other hand, I already have a decent touring bike, in the form of the Le Mans (at least until/if it sells). So, I think I'll be skipping those two bikes for now. When I got back on the Z after riding the two Suzukis, it felt really heavy. I'm definitely following the right path by looking into a different bike. Impressively to the SV650's credit, the Z750s also felt fairly heavy and slow while riding. It's still fine, but it throws the 2 vs. 4 cylinder engine classes into stark contrast. I'm definitely a fan of twins. In other news, I didn't much notice the seat, which means it's pretty much done. I need to clean up some, but it should only be another few evenings of work before it's done. Hopefully by this weekend. Then I can start cleaning it up to sell. Posted at 18:50 permanent link category: /motorcycle Mon, 27 Feb 2006
Ok, so I'm coming around to the fact that I pretty much need to My thoughts, approximately in order, are:
This time, I need to actually try to ride some of these things. I suspect I still would have made the choice I did when I bought the Z, but you never know. So I guess I'm off to spend the occasional moment riding a few different bikes. I'm not very excited about the various dual-sport bikes, but I've been slightly fascinated with the KLR650 for a while now, so I figure it'd be worth at least test riding. The DR-Z400 looks like it's got a completely painful seat for more than local riding, so I'd either have to fix it or never ride very far. I'm very leery of the Ducati, since I think I'm not all that excited about getting another Italian bike. The Moto Guzzi experience wasn't all that good, and continues to decline as I see brand new, never ridden 2002 Le Mans' available for $7900. Something like a CB-1 is fascinating, and the right size, but really the last thing I want for my one-and-only motorcycle is to have a 10-15 year old bike with questionable parts supply. I've been interested in the SV650 for a while, and I really owe it to myself to try riding one. I'm worried that they get terrible gas mileage, but it may be that everyone reporting their mileage is a wild-eyed acceleration-hungry monster. Unfortunately, I won't know that from a test-ride. Later... I think I need to add the Suzuki V-strom 650 to my list of bikes to consider. I like what I read. I still think a Ninja 250 is the most likely next bike, but this is an excellent time to expand horizons. Posted at 21:53 permanent link category: /motorcycle Sun, 26 Feb 2006
I haven't made any decisions, but I was curious to sit down and do
So, grand total, that looks like about $1000 more or less. None of these things has to happen right away, although the suspension and brake lines would be first on the list. Tires and hyperlites would come up a close second. The seat rebuild and bike computer are kind of fluff items, but I really liked them on the previous 250, and I'll definitely do them again. Besides, they're the cheapest things on the list (although fairly labor intensive). After the drop last night, I put the Z away and didn't even look at it again. I figured I'd probably had enough. I'll take a look at it this morning (I'm writing this at 4:45 in the morning after cat allergies woke me up -- the same allergic reaction which indirectly caused me to drop the Z), and see if I can't finish up the seat. It needs a bit more shaving to fit me, and then some shaping to look nice (it's still got weird lumpy parts on the edges, since I've been concentrating entirely on the parts that contact me). I got some hardware to install on the Z (a pair of strap retaining fittings called footman's loops), but now I'm not sure I want to put them on. There's a real question in my mind as to whether or not I'll even keep the bike another month. It would be silly to drill any more holes if I'm just going to sell it. I guess I'll see what I think after finishing the seat, since the hardware I got is pretty specific to taking longer trips. Don't have any of those planned right now. I emailed the guy who was working on racks for the Ninja 250 years ago, to see if he ever went anywhere with them. He mailed back a week ago to say that he hadn't, but he could build me one if I wanted. That's pretty interesting, since it looked like a good modification, and one I'd use a lot if I got another Ninja 250. Posted at 04:59 permanent link category: /motorcycle Sat, 25 Feb 2006
The Z's seat progress continues, although it's going slowly now. I Now, I'm working on the shape I want, and I've already gone through the 1" layer I just laid down, at one spot. Hopefully it'll be enough (although I think it will). On the positive side, even the first iteration and this moment in the second iteration are thousands of times more comfortable than the stock seat. So, progress is definitely happening. I'm waiting right now for the batteries to charge in my handheld drill, and wondering whether I should bust out the corded drill (which probably turns too fast for this work). In other news, I had someone stop by to look at the Le Mans the other day. No idea if it'll sell this time, but it would be nice. I discovered that you can currently buy a brand-new 2002 Le Mans from Moto I for basically what I'm asking for mine. The new one wouldn't have the comfy seat or luggage, but it's hard to swallow spending new-bike money for an old bike (even if you do the math on what all the included bits would cost you). * * * * God damnit! The fucking Z fell over again, once again at nearly zero miles per hour. Adding more scratches to that crankcase cover (which is strangely covered in a light film of oil with no apparent source). I'm getting really sick of this bike and its obnoxious top-heaviness. In my defense, I was suffering from a moderate asthma attack, so breathing was taking a lot of my attention, but that shouldn't have caused the bike to go over. Someone wrote to me and said, "you know, you sound like a man who's talking himself out of what he wants." That person is right, I'm trying really hard to stick with the decision to get the stupid, top-heavy Z, with its obnoxious gas-guzzling ways and too-much-power. And now, having dropped it a second time (this time in gravel, thankfully, which means more cosmetic damage, but zero chance of structural damage), I'm sure it's worth even less. All of which pisses me off further still, and makes me think (right at the moment) that selling this ridiculous bike and getting a Ninja 250 is a really good idea. I'm going to sleep on it, but this just kind of shoves me even further in that direction. I know I can live with a Ninja 250 -- heck, I can even tour on one. This Z750s is not proving so easy to live with. Posted at 18:40 permanent link category: /motorcycle Thu, 23 Feb 2006
Ok, I went back and read the MCN article (conveniently available in I also took another ride, and at the risk of sounding like a broken record (remember those? big black disc-y things that make noise?) it's nearly there. A bit more trimming, then I'll take another spin and see how things feel. It's my hope that by the end of today (which is weird to say, since it's just past midnight), I'll have the Z's seat buttoned up. How's that for an optimistic statement? Posted at 00:11 permanent link category: /motorcycle Wed, 22 Feb 2006
I took a longer ride on the seat today, and it's pretty good. Now, I just have to find my old materials and see what I have left. I suspect I have enough headliner material, but that I'll need to acquire more vinyl. In any case, there's probably a surface finish of vinyl that I'd like better than the one I used for the Ninja's seat. I was in Bellevue Kawasaki today, and saw that they had a 2003 Ninja 250 for sale. There was a moment of temptation, but I resisted. It's amazing how much physically smaller those bikes are than the Z. I was actually in there looking for these pads which adhere to the sides of the tank, and afford a grippy surface. It apparently quite improves overall control, being another point where you're "attached" to the bike. They had some generic pads, with big knobs on the surface, but I wasn't that convinced. I thought I remembered MCN rating some other brand higher, so I wanted to do some research before spending my $40. I'm sure any of them would work fine, and be a huge improvement, but I can't just plonk down money like that on what amounts to a whim at this point. Posted at 14:48 permanent link category: /motorcycle
Today started well enough, but quickly went downhill. I had just After about 20 minutes of fruitless searching, I finally had a vague recollection of loaning the knife and a set of sanding discs to my friend Jesse. I called him, let a message, checked into irc, but he wasn't responding. Finally, I got hold of him, and he confirmed that he did, in fact, have the electric knife and sanding discs. Hallelujah! We arranged the pickup, and I was soon happily cutting foam. So, in the last five hours, I've got the seat almost completely formed. It's going much more quickly this time, now that I have the Ninja's seat under my belt. I just got the pillion section glued down, and am waiting for the glue to dry so it doesn't gum up the electric knife's blade too much. Surprisingly, I managed to get the shape just about right before my first test ride. I had thought it was sloped too far forward (which is the problem I was trying to fix -- argh), but when I rode it, it was actually pretty well spot-on. There was some pressure on the forward part of the seat under my legs, but that's easy to fix. Posted at 14:42 permanent link category: /motorcycle Mon, 20 Feb 2006
A thing occurred to me the other day. I was driving somewhere (not What's remarkable about this? Nothing on the face of it. However, although it was a bright sunny day, it was also just above freezing. I had seen no other motorcycle riders that whole day. This isn't the only time something like this has occurred to me. I've seen Harley riders all over the place when there were no other bikers to be found. This all flies in the face of the popularly (at least among the motorcycle community) held conception that Harley riders are extreme fair-weather riders. Simply not true, at least not in the Seattle area. On days when I've seen nary a BMW rider, or Goldwing rider, there were Harley riders. They're getting out there, loading up their bikes, and taking trips. It's a model more bikers should follow. When I cruise around the message boards I frequent, I see a lot of Harley-bashing, and I don't think it's entirely fair. There may be a ton of Harleys slowly collecting dust in the garage over the winter, but they're also the people I see out riding more often than anyone else. The sportbikers completely dissappear when it rains, or when it's cold out. There are a few hardy commuters like myself, but not very many. But if I see someone riding on a weekend in this season, they're probably on a Harley. Now if only I could get them to wave back. Posted at 08:53 permanent link category: /motorcycle
I was riding the Goldwing into work today when I glanced down a
That's the Olympic mountain range, west of Seattle. I took the picture around 7:50 this morning. In other news, the Goldwing remains hard to start. The other night I left it parked on the street while I was running a show downtown, and when I got out to start it around 11:30, it took about five minutes to get running. Every time I pressed the starter button, I just heard the starter spin without catching. I'm developing a theory that there's a bit too much oil in the crankcase (but not enough to cause any damage), and particularly when parked uphill, the starter has problems. The starter clutch is apparently sensitive to oil type, so presumably can also be sensitive to oil level. Theoretically, the starter parts I ordered last week will be in soon, and I'll have a chance to do a bit of refurb on the Goldwing's starter. Hopefully that'll solve most of the problems, although the starter clutch will continue to be a problem until I drain out some oil (I hope). Posted at 08:45 permanent link category: /motorcycle Mon, 06 Feb 2006
I've felt like all my bikes are falling apart lately. They're not The Z was also having problems, but of a much more benign nature. I could hear one exhaust pulse louder than the others, which suggested that at least one of the exhaust headers was coming loose. Annoying, but hardly the end of the world. I fixed that today, by tightening all the header nuts, each and every one of which was way too loose. Imagine you've got a nut about a half inch across, and you grab it with your fingers and tighten it just as tight as it will go. That's about 5-6 lb-ft of torque, depending on how strong you are. If you get a screwdriver-shaped nut driver, and really cranked them down, you might get up to 10 lb-ft, maybe 15. Well, these nuts are supposed to be torqued to 12 lb-ft, and they all required at least a 1/4 turn, some of them requiring a half turn. That's pretty loose. I have a theory that if I'd left the situation for another 5-10 heat up/cool down cycles, I would have started losing nuts off the headers. Now that would be bad, but fortunately I caught it well before that point. The Goldwing isn't going to be so simple to fix. Rebuilding the starter won't be bad, that's just a matter of unbolting it and pulling it apart to put in new bits and clean out the dirt. If I have all the parts handy, it'll take less than an afternoon. But if the starter clutch is croaking, that'll mean taking the engine out of the bike. This is not a trivial task. For one thing, I don't really have space to do it. The garage holds the sidecar rig and all the bikes, but not with any room to work on any of them. If I pulled out the two solo bikes and put the sidecar rig in the center, I might have enough space to pull the motor, but then where do I work on it? I could leave the sidecar outside the garage, but I want to move the engine the shortest distance possible to go from bike to work bench. On top of any of those considerations, I have to take the sidecar body off to do it, and once I've got it off, where does it go? It'd have to be outside, which is kind of icky. I'm not looking forward to this one. The other complication is that if I went to all the trouble of pulling the engine out of the bike, I would definitely want to replace the clutch (easy as long as the engine's out) and look at a bunch of other stuff to make sure it's all working correctly. In particular, I'd want to check to see if the top end needs to be rebuilt, which is a many-weeks-long process (the rebuilding, not the checking). Maybe I shouldn't have been so quick to discount that lower-mileage Goldwing... Posted at 14:07 permanent link category: /motorcycle Thu, 02 Feb 2006
First impressions of the Garmin 76Cx. I finally got my Garmin 76Cx yesterday, and have spent some time playing with it. This page details my first impressions -- obviously, if I've only had it for a day, I haven't explored a lot of its capabilities. Background for this review is that I'm coming from a Garmin 12Map, which is basically a GPS III+ in a 12-series case, and limited to vertical orientation only. It's a comparatively limited GPS, with a mono screen, no autorouting, and a 1.44MB memory size. I got the 76Cx to use on a motorcycle, so things like waterproofness, and the ability to use it with gloves on were important in the decision. First off, the 76Cx feels pretty solid. It's light (Garmin claims it floats, although I haven't tested that), but it doesn't feel cheap. It doesn't creak or shift at all, and still manages to convey a good sense of quality, which sparse devices sometimes fail at. The buttons are big, and relatively easy to hit. On mine, they're also pretty stiff, requiring a reasonably hard press to register. My thumb is actually sore from the limited key pressing I've done so far. Inserting batteries was easy, but I noticed that one battery got a coiled spring on its negative terminal, while the other got a leaf type spring. I wonder if one of them will fail sooner than the other. The MicroSD card is truly micro. I fear I'd lose it very very easily -- it's about the size of my pinky nail. On powerup, there's a brief flash of the screen, followed maybe 3 seconds after you hit the button by a series of ascending tones and a welcome screen. The unit quickly switches to the satellite acquisition screen. When I'm outside and doing a warm startup, it already knows where it is by the time the satellite page comes up (about 7 seconds after the first poweron page). In my office (on the ground floor, with two stories of concrete-and-rebar above me), I get zero signal. On the second floor, I just barely got some signal -- hardly the "indoor navigation" Garmin claimed, but it would be amazing if any signal penetrated this building. I took it out with me to lunch yesterday, and travelled a more roundabout route to and from lunch than I normally take, checking out the receiver a bit. It had a hard time with walking speed some of the time, having me going all sorts of wacky directions, and at a variety of speeds. The basemap, I also noticed, is stinky, having only major roads (like freeways) shown, and the one that I passed under in real life remained half a mile away on the screen. It had none of the surface streets which even the 12Map has in its basemap. To be fair, I didn't touch either the provided software or the City Select v7 that I got with the unit, and it looks like the provided software includes a slightly better map than what's preloaded. One of my first problems in actually using the GPS was that I couldn't figure out how to get cardinal directions (N or NW, for instance) and compass heading (358° for instance) to show. I could get one or the other, but not both. I called Garmin today, and confirmed that that's the case -- you're limited to either cardinal letters for direction, or degrees (or mils), but you can't mix-n-match. This is kind of an "oh well" for me, but I can see how some people would be annoyed. I passed on the suggestion that "Heading - degrees" and "Heading - cardial letters" (and so on for the several other bearing-type databoxes) be added to the list of customizable data fields. The 76Cx still uses the PAGE and QUIT keys to move between pages, which I got used to in the 12XL and 12Map. This GPS has the ability to add pages into the page rotation (and take them out), which is quite handy. I've left it in the default setting for now, but I'll probably play with it more as I develop a sense of what I'd rather have available. I think every single data field can be customized to some extent in this receiver, which is a great feature to have. Unfortunately, some fields are missing. As I mentioned above, there's no way to show "N" and "358°" at the same time. Also gone is the compass tape across the top of the screen which the 12XL and 12Map had. The list of fields which can be included, while very long, feels incomplete -- some of the data I'd really like to see doesn't seem to be there. Like voltage. I have a feeling there are others, but I can't think of them at the moment. The screen is pretty quick to respond when switching pages. The CPU is obviously speedy. Route calculation seems quick to me, but I've never really used an autorouting GPS before. I've got it set to the next-to-slowest setting, which is the default. The autorouting (once I installed the detailed maps from City Select) started out pretty good. I had it calculate the routes between a few places I go all the time (work, my house, a business, etc.), and the routes usually made sense. The only one that didn't make any sense was when it routed me through a recent construction zone, so I can't really complain. Then, I tried it on a couple of simple freeway trips. The first one was extremely wacky because I just wanted to go down I-5, but forgot that I'd set it to avoid freeways (I had been seeing what kind of cool route it might come up with for motorcycle rides). It tried to route me off at every exit. The perplexing part of that is that I'd forgotten all about the "avoid freeways" setting. Maybe one just gets used to checking settings. The other funny thing was that, coming back, I went a different way (and remembered to change my preferences); it routed me by a reasonable but traffic-prone route. I took a slightly alternate route (going from Renton to Seattle at 3:30 pm on Friday -- I chose 405 to 90, it chose 405 to 520). But once I took my alternate turn, it spent the next 20 minutes (about as long as it took to go half way along my alternate) telling me to get off at the next exit and turn around. It was remarkably insistent. The screen is quite good, although it looks dim when inside. Under even a dark overcast sky, the screen is very readable, though. The backlight is very good, evenly lighting the screen. It has some large number of brightness levels (21, in fact). Surprisingly to me, the beeper is very quiet. Where I could hear the beeper on either the 12XL or 12Map at 50 MPH with earplugs in, the 76Cx is so quiet that it's inaudible above about 25 MPH on the motorcycle. It's about right inside a quiet car, but far too quiet to be useful on a motorcycle, or with an outboard motor running on a small boat. It's not a big deal, since I usually turn off the beeper, but I can see how that's a useful detail for some people who might read this. Physically, I'm glad to see that the 76Cx still retains the "standard" Garmin plug, the 4-pin circular plug. The USB port on the unit is a standard size, so you're not utterly stuck if you lose the Garmin-supplied cable. The external antenna connector is the standard MCX my other GPS receivers have had. I've had the GPS through several downpours now, and the unit is not obviously the worse for wear. That's exactly what I expected, but there's a difference between "believe us when we say our product is waterproof" and "I just got back from this rainstorm, and it's still working." Posted at 00:35 permanent link category: /gadgets Categories: all aviation gadgets misc motorcycle theater Written by Ian Johnston. Software is Blosxom. Questions? Please mail me at reaper at obairlann dot net. |
