SV-Wolf's Bike Blog

[blues2cruise]

What do tassels have to do with anything?

[jaskc78]

i think he means the prominence of leather tassels on fully dressed touring bikes. i don't get it, either, i can't think of anything that'd be more distracting than small strips of leather slapping me at 70 miles an hour.

[sv-wolf]

i think he means the prominence of leather tassels on fully dressed touring bikes. i don't get it, either, i can't think of anything that'd be more distracting than small strips of leather slapping me at 70 miles an hour.

Maybe you've just converted me!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[fireguzzi]

Mr. Wolf.

But think, if you got a cruiser with saddle bags your dominatrix can sit on the back and pull out various implements stored in said saddle bags. All kinds of things could happen at 70 mph then.

[sv-wolf]

Meet Colombo and 'friend' out in India a couple of years ago.

Colombo got his name because he fell asleep at Colombo airport and missed his transfer flight to Goa. He acquired several other names as the journey continued - all well merited. He's a pub landlord.

[blues2cruise]

Oh,good grief.....he travels with a blow up doll?....and you were concerned about tassels?

[jaskc78]

i think that's actually a manequin, which means he really does want his women to just be eye candy.

[sv-wolf]

LOL It was a game everyone was playing.

Here's a few more examples of how to decorate a bike (or biker) in India.





















Some, though, didn't care about artistic expression
(Last night's balls-out party might have had something to do with this.)





And some found alternative ways to travel.
(Kevin, a top professional off-road rider back home in South Africa, is here seen bringing a little dignity to an otherwise balls-out sport.)

[sv-wolf]

It has become strangely peaceful in the Hitchin Triangle in recent weeks without all the traffic. Elderly Edwardian gas mains have been leaking regularly and creating so many emergencies over the past five years that National Grid has finally been persuaded to renew them. The major feeder road into the Triangle has been closed off except for access. The work, we are told, is going to take three months. This means I no longer wake to the muffled burble of traffic beyond my double glazed windows, or leave home to the smell of petrol fumes. In the evenings, people no longer hurry through the streets, but wander casually, chatting to one another as though they were actually enjoying each other’s company. Kids and teenagers loiter with their bikes and BMXs on street corners or climb down under the red-and-white-striped safety barriers into the holes in the road. The tempo of life here has changed utterly.

The current heat-wave has played its part too. It is far too hot to do much more than amble about vaguely and stare at neighbours with glazed eyes and fuddled brains. People are stripping down to t-shirts and shorts - and less. It is great weather to hang around and it's great weather to be out on a bike, so long as you keep moving and create some wind blast.

But fuddled brains are not so much fun on the road especially when they belong to drivers in your vicinity. I’ve seen some spectacularly goofy driving in the last few days. Three bus drivers in Stevenage town centre lost it in the space of fifteen minutes this afternoon and within a hundred yards of one another. One nearly drove into a tree, another side-swiped a wall and a third mounted the pavement beside a bus stop, dismantling about twenty feet of kerbside railing. Unremitting heat is diffusing through everybody’s cranium and softening their brains.

With so many bike problems it’s perhaps less peaceful inside my own cranium at the moment, though for once, my brains are fairly unfuddled. But if I've been going through a bad time with my two-wheelers recently, at least things are not getting any worse. The SV is back on the road with a new slave cylinder and a replacement seal for her alternator casing and she’s sounding good. The new cylinder seems to have resolved the clatter in the clutch which is excellent news, since it means that neither she nor my bank account will now need major surgery. She’s looking remarkably clean too – sparkling even - thanks to her trip to the dealers. Or perhaps I should say, thanks to my embarrassment at presenting a dirty bike to the dealers. Shame is a powerful motivator for furious motorcycle cleansing activity, I’ve noticed. (I still wince when I think of the amount of crud I removed from the inside of her fairing.)

The Daytona… Ah, well, yes, the Daytona! The Daytona is still over in Aston Clinton with OnYerTriumph. I rode her there on Thursday to get her electrics sorted or, to be rather more precise, I started to.

Cast your mind back to what had happened the previous week? I was riding her back from a service when the electrics had died suddenly not far from Hatfield and I had to be rescued by another biker with a mobile phone. By that time it was about quarter to six and well past the witching time of night when dealers close their workshop doors against the dark. I had no choice but to get her recovered to my home.

The problem I now had was, how would I get her back over to Aston Clinton without paying through the nose for it. The dealers said they could pick her up for me at a price - cheaper than an independent commercial firm – but as I had already spent over £500 on bike servicing and repairs that month, it would push up the cost further than I could reasonably afford.

I had managed to recharge the battery and she had fired up on it, but that was no guarantee of anything. I had no idea what the risk was of her dying on me again miles from anywhere. Having had her rescued once, she was no longer covered by my insurance. And, in any case, I didn't want the hassle of ending up on the side of the road for a second time with a dead bike.

On the other hand, I was signed up to ride her in the National Rally during the coming weekend. What to do? Eventually I bit the bullet, put ideas of cost out of my head, called the dealers and asked them to pick her up on Thursday morning.

On Monday night, though, I had an idea. I kept the Daytona’s battery on the smart charger through the night and the next day, and the following evening rode her all round town (the flat bits of it) for several hours, keeping close to home. The battery held its charge. On Wednesday morning, with a fair degree of confidence, I rang the dealers, cancelled the pick up and told them I would ride her over.

Bad idea!

On Thursday morning, I set out with her for Aston Clinton. She ran well most of the way down to Welwyn but then the throttle control started to feel slack (that was the first warning sign, as I'd noticed the previous week). Then, half way through the Hatfield tunnel, the digital screen winked out. This was a big anxiety moment. Breaking down in the Hatfield Tunnel is not the best of ideas. It means offering up your arse as a ritual sacrifice to the next idiot who wants to smash into it. The tunnel is grim, fast and relentless and there is nowhere to stop. It carries an impressive body of disaster folklore. In my anxiety, I found myself trying to establish a neural connection with the SV's electrics, willing them to keep her running for just a few yards more.

And they did. The Daytona kept running long enough to get me out of the tunnel, long enough to get me off the motorway and up the slip road beyond, and even long enough to take me several hundred yards along the 70 mph A414. It was only as the traffic finally began to slow down for the longabout, just 20 feet before the safety of the Coney Heath turn-off, that her electrics finally went pop and she drifted meekly to a standstill.

Is there such a thing as a special providence for motorcyclists? I think there must be. Last week I’d been rescued by Trevor who just happened to have the telephone number of my insurance company in his wallet. Now, having escaped a messy immolation in the Hatfield tunnel, here I was, drifting to a stop just yards from the only safe spot for miles in either direction. I pushed the Daytona to the turning, then up the kerb onto the pavement and took stock.

Now as it happened, I hadn’t been entirely without forethought that morning and was carrying a fully-charged spare battery in my tail pack along with some basic tools. I removed the dead battery and inserted the live one into the bike, wondering all the while whether it would see me the rest of the way to Aston Clinton. There was a moment of truth, or two actually. I turned on the ignition. The dash lit up at once (joy oh joy); I pressed the ignition and… pop! Out it went again. There was plenty of voltage in the battery but the bike wasn’t interested. I looked at the fuses. Once of them was cracked and I didn’t have a spare.

I waited till nine o’clock and rang Bruce at the dealers. Could he send someone to collect? Yes he could. Forty minutes later I was standing at the side of the road watching as the OnYerTriumph van drove away towards Aston with the Daytona tucked away neatly inside her. There was no point in me going with it. It would just have meant a longer journey home on the very uncertain public transport system that serves this part of the world. But that left me with the problem of how to get back to Hatfield station, about four miles away in the opposite direction.

I decided to walk. I'd taken the day off work and the rest of the morning and afternoon was mine to fill as I pleased. It was two miles along the footpath to the head of the dual carriageway and a further two through town to the station, not a gret distance. But it was a blisteringly hot day; I was in full leathers and carrying a pack and lid; very soon, I was also discovering a tight spot on the heel of my new Alpinestar boots; and the traffic fumes were gross. But I wanted to be out in the open air not sitting in a taxi or hitching a lift.

In all that heat it might have been a wearisome trek, if I hadn't discovered a vast profusion of wild flowers along the side of the road. I haven’t seen such abundance in Hertfordshire since I was a kid and before the widespread introduction of chemical agriculture. Motorcycling is supposed to connect you to your environment but in all the times I'd ridden this road I'd never before noticed what a haven for wildlife this was. I became so absorbed in trying to identify as many plants as I could that I forgot completely about the fumes and the heat and the traffic noise. By the time I'd reached the university roundabout at the head of the dual carriageway, I'd counted over fifty different species, including some which were rare in this part of the world.

About twenty minutes into my walk, I ducked down into the wide but sparse hedgerow that parallelled the road and walked between the brambles and under the trees. There were rabbit droppings everywhere, badger tracks and a strong smell of fox. In the fields beyond there was also something else. Pastured in the long grass were three English great horses, standing quietly and majestically in the sunlight. They were of a breed that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before - a bit like a Suffolk Punch, but taller and with a different shaped head.

Great horses always seem to me to belong more to the world of Tolkien and Middle-Earth than to the English countryside. What do you do when faced with such magnificent beasts with their huge bodies of pure slow-moving muscle...? What can you do but simply stop and admire them. Each of them stood about 18 hands high, a third larger than any standard breed of horse and infinitely more solid and stately. I automatically wanted to offer them respect.

I come from a family of jockeys and stable boys, but I’ve never been much into horses, myself. Great horses are an exception to that rule. I remember when I saw my first Shire horse at the age of six or seven at a county fair. I was terrified and amazed. I'd never seen anything like it before. I thought it was so beautiful with its furry hooves and great sweeping mane. Even then I recognised that there was something particularly handsome and special about it.

http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2008/0 ... 68x348.jpg

Historically, the great beasts were used in Europe as war horses. The breeds reared here in England were much admired by the Romans when they invaded. Later they became draught-animals and for centuries were the main motive power on English farms. They nearly died out in the nineteen-seventies, but there was a revival of interest in them twenty years ago, coinciding with the rise of the organic farming movement. Since then they have been increasing in numbers. Today, they are reared at special centres where devotees keep the various breeds alive. And they are now finding a useful life once more on a growing number of farms experimenting with traditional forms of agriculture. But I found it strange to see them here in Hertfordshire in an open field so close to this familiar bit of dual carriageway.

The following day, Friday, I got the SV back from the Stevenage after work, rode her home and prepared to ride up to Birmingham for the weekend. I was attending a summer school. The days would be filled with talks and lectures, but the evenings, by report, would be an excuse for a giant "pee" up. I was looking forward to it. The journey up to Birmingham on the SV was going to be the furthest I'd ridden her for nearly a year and would be a real test of how she was performing. Watch this space…

[noodlenoggin]

Those "Great Horses" are a bit more pedestrian over here. We call 'em "Clydesdales," and they feature prominently in the advertising for a mass-market beer, "Budweiser." I think most people here just think of them as "the Budweiser horses" and lump them in with race cars that say "Bud" on the door in meter-high letters. (see, I know my metrics!!)