SV-Wolf's Bike Blog

[roscowgo]

Hi guys

Ping! I hadn't figured you for a mind reader, Rosco

I'll let you into a secret. (It's a secret because, until recently, I've only been half-admitting it to myself.) The reason I'm thinking of a trail bike is that I've been working myself up into chucking my job and doing some serious long-distance riding. I need a do-anything, off-road, on-road bike.

I've been putting off "the big trip" for a while, largely for financial reasons, but I'm getting to the stage where I'm thinking, sod it! I don't care. With the present slump, and the government talking about cutting back on the public sector (where I work) by 40% (!) the chances of me being made redundant are pretty high, anyway. Time to make good use of my assets.

Apart from that I'm getting grey enough to start calculating how much active life I might have left. Putting it all together, right now seems to be the time to get serious. I'm prone to passing enthusiasms which don't last, but this idea has been sticking round for a while and growing more attractive all the time. It is starting to form itself into a definite plan.

I've looked at the KLR. It's cheap. It's comfortable (so some say... but...). It is decently reliable (though some disagree...) and simple enough that even I could work on it with some hope of success. I need something that is robust and something not too big but with enough power to cope with conditions on and off road. In many ways the KLR sounds just the job. What's putting me off it at the moment is that it is heavy, it seems to be very hard on tyres (even for a thumper) and is a damn serious oil-guzzler as well - cheap to buy, good on fuel economy, but with hidden costs. (There is a kit to fix the oil problem! - That's nuts. Why don't Kawasaki just sort it?) The idea of having to change tyres every 2,000 miles (at least - not counting punctures) doesn't sound too inviting either. It seems like a great bike for someone who loves to spend their Saturdays tinkering and installing mods. (Am I just being a wimp here?)

Anyone got any first-hand experience of this bike, or know if Kawasaki has done anything to address these issues in recent years?

I know they fixed the infamous "doohickey" problem with the newer bikes. And one of my cousins has I think an 08 or 07 model. He rides the tar out of it. I think he's up to 15 or 20k (miles not kilometers). He's a nerd, so his idea of a good time is to ride like a maniac up our twisty coaltruck infested mountain backroads, leap off of the KLR, and begin to hammer away at rocks on the side of the road looking for fosslils.

Me being a nerd I think this sounds like great fun and a stellar way to give myself heat exhaustion.

He really likes his KLR. It doesn't have much in the way of highway skills. But will get you down the road that way if you need it to. And it's a 650cc thumper, so you're pretty much riding a 4000 rpm paint bucket.

I've just lately had this ungodly urge to buy up an old ct90/70/110 whatever frame and stick one of the 140cc lifan engines in it for my dose of idiocy. I need to check and see if the lifans have the dual range transmission.

[noodlenoggin]

Where is Richard?
Did he buy the KLR?
Is he somewhere in Pakraqiganistan?
Is he caught up in a reeeeally good novel?

Inquiring minds (maybe not plural) want to know!!

[fireguzzi]

He is busy co authoring a novel three words at a time, hating people that are above him and sometimes saying the first word that comes to mind. No time for the quality writing these days.

[drumwrecker]

Sv is Ok but he has been pretty busy of late. SV1000 out of action again blowing 30amp fuse on switching on the ignition, cause unknown at this point. Triumph going in at end of week so he is bikeless at the moment. Shall be seeing him tomorrow.

[sv-wolf]

Drumwrecker is being kind. (Thanks for covering for me, R. You are a good mate.)

"SV" is actually pissed off at having to shell out again on bikes that leave him bikeless half the time, especially when he books a holiday off from work and wants to go riding. "SV" is also fed up and grouchy, tired and lacking in motivation. With a seemingly bottomless hole having opened recently in his finances, he is also leading a life of near-monastic abstinence, foregoing even those few shiny things that used to float his boat and keep him happy.

In general terms "SV" is spending his evenings sucking on the end of his blanket and hoping the pain will all go away soon. Mostly he wishes his bikes would let him ride them.

All sympathy is gratefully received. Be aware though, that wellwishers may get nothing in return but a scowl and a snide remark as "SV" fills his lungs and throws his toys out of his pram in sheer frustration.

'Part from that, most things are hunky dory.

Cheers

Hud

[Wrider]

I'm sorry you're having so much troubles buddy. Honestly if I were you, I'd seriously consider trading in both of your bikes for something else. Especially since you seem to have an electrical bug that started in the SV and ended up multiplying into the Triumph. Maybe if you get rid of them both the bug will go away too?

[sv-wolf]

No, it's not just me, I realise; the world itself, the whole damn, flucking world has suddenly veered off course. I know it; I saw it; I heard it for myself this afternoon.

It was a lovely, warm October day; one to savour now that the nights are drawing in and the days are getting meaner. I'd taken a walk into the town-centre to fritter away an hour or so wandering around the local market (and to drown a few sorrows). There are always a lot of music stalls on the Friday market, and there is one in particular which sells vinyl from the 1950s. That was where I ended up, floating in the golden glow that suffuses the world whenever I leaf through rockabilly albums and 45s. The vinyl on the stall is pricey (the good stuff anyway) and I can't afford to buy any of it, but just looking through it is enough to quieten me down and take the edge off not having a bike to ride. Rockabilly, I've discovered, is the world's only known (albeit temporary) antidote to severe motorcycle withdrawal.

They go together, motorcycles and rockabilly. Somewhere in the early 1960s they got tangled up in my adolescent brain and the two have been wired to each other ever since. Now, I can't think about one without imagining the other. There was a kind of inevitability about this. Rockabilly and motorcycles were the twin poles of teenage rebellion when I was a kid growing up in the '50s and '60s. (At least, they were in the village where I lived). Rockabilly and motorcycles were all that my mates and I ever talked about back then (apart from the obvious, of course). This is not just historical and personal though: rockabilly is almost the only popular music that is worth listening to, just as motorcycles are the only vehicles worth riding. (If you didn't know that before, you do now!). Rockabilly is raw, lean and uninhibited. For millions of years it lay bound up in drops of pure adrenalin ready to be squeeeeeezed out of waiting glands and into the eternally throbbing bloodstreams of teenagers (and 50-year olds). Motorcycles like rockabilly are part of the same genetic reality. And, back in the 50s they pissed off adults very satisfactorily, too.

Need I elaborate? Those who don't get it, never will.

Then suddenly, near the end of the decade the music stopped; everything stopped. The so-called "British invasion" of American music had begun - the greatest cultural disaster of the twentieth century: all those poncey, pretentious British bands like the Beatles exported themselves across the Atlantic and succeeded in muffling the hot, gutsy music of the American south. (OK, so there are one or two worthwhile British bands like the Stones and the early Animals, but I can count them on the knuckles of one fist.)

The Northern states of the US were just as much to blame, of course, emasculating and deadening the music of the South almost as quickly as it was produced. As soon as the executives of big northern record companies got hold of it, they tamed it and packaged it and made it suitable for an increasingly cloned musical audience. Have you ever heard northern rockabilly (so-called), the stuff that came out of the Big Apple, for example? It's the saddest, tackiest corpse that never lived. Whenever I hear it, it makes me think of 1950s corporate advertising.

Anyway, to get back to this afternoon: there I was up in the market, flicking my way through boxes of 1950s Sun and Decca records when something hit me unexpectedly in the ear-holes - something so painful that I almost retched up over all that precious vinyl. And it wasn't just painful: it was psychotic, abnormal, creepy, something that should not have existed in a rational universe. It was...

Picture the scene. I'm bent over, rifling through the 45s. Behind me is another music stall run by a Carribean guy: dreadlocked; bewhiskered totally-out-of-it, man; and looking like he'd just fed deeply on blackeye peas and goat curry. This is Carlton. He's the genuine article. He comes to the market every Friday without fail with his CDs and vinyl. To get past his stall, distressed, white middle-class shoppers have to run the gauntlet of mega-decibels and the heaving sounds of reggae and ska. Sometimes, more congenially, he treats everyone to the lush tones of the seamiest southern blues. (I don't particularly like reggae. It makes me feel like I'm crossing the North Sea in a ferry. But blues is another matter. So I forgive him.)

This thing that happened came at a psychologically critical moment. I was leafing through a pile of Johnny Cash and Dorsey Burnett 45s, my thoughts drifting pleasantly back to the 50s and all my defences down. I was so engrossed I hardly noticed that all those jerking reggae sounds from behind me had slid to a stop. What came after the brief silence that followed, though, I did notice, but it was so extreme that it took me about ten seconds to process what was happening.

Daniel O'Donnel was what was happening.

What could I do? What could anyone do in those circumstances? I started thrashing around in my mind, trying to protect myself from the sickeningly sweet goo that was suddenly oozing across the market place like a sugary toxic wase. For two long minutes I was a fly caught in a vat of honey, a very distrubed fly, remembering what it was like to grow up alongside the record collection of a very sentimental Irish mother. But, as horrible as this thought was, it was not what really appalled me. What was so terribly appalling was that this... this... oily, fake slush, so smooth you could bottle it and sell it for hemorrhoid cream, was issuing from the speakers on Carlton's stall. What was even worse still, Carlton was playing it apparently by choice.

Have you ever heard a Carribean guy playing the worst kind of Irish music? I haven't; not before today. Goat curry and the syrup-laden sounds of Daniel O'Donnel informing his listeners what it feels like to get a christmas card from a certain "she" do not mix. Such combinations are just plain wrong. They upset the stomach. They revolt the senses. They play havoc with a person's ability to stay sane in a dangerous world.

But at least the experience made me finally understand: my unnaturally bikeless condition was not some individual piece of bad luck as I had imagined. Nor was it some private punishment for an unknown transgression. Nothing could explain what was happening short of a rift in the fabric of the cosmos itself, something so extraordinary that all individual events in the natural order of things had been thrown out of joint. Nothing else could explain Carlton's sudden impulse to play this music. Nothing else could explain what was happening to my bikes.

I would like to be able to say that in retrospect this realisation has helped me to accept the strangeness of my bikeless condition a little. I'd like to say that, but I can't. I'm not sure it is even possible. What has happened is that I am no longer merely inflicting on myself all the miserable torments of self-pity at having no saddle to sling my leg over, I am also feeling vaguely guilty and weak in the head.

I decided this afternoon that I will get the bike running, even if it means going insovlent to achieve it.

[sv-wolf]

I'm sorry you're having so much troubles buddy. Honestly if I were you, I'd seriously consider trading in both of your bikes for something else. Especially since you seem to have an electrical bug that started in the SV and ended up multiplying into the Triumph. Maybe if you get rid of them both the bug will go away too?

Hi Wrider

They are gone, mate. Believe me, they are gone. I will ride the Daytona for another month or so (presuming that it is worth fixing) while I do some serious research, and then I will look for another bike.

I used to be employed as an sub-editor. If necessary, I'll find some freelance work in the evenings to put the money together to keep riding.

Cheers

[dr_bar]

I think it's time to implement the SV-Wolf's bailout program...


Can you imagine if you recieved an average of £1.00 from every registered member? I think that would put you better than £14,000 to the good, enough for a new bike and that trip to the colonies so we can all meet you....

I've already got a few pounds to send when the program gets the go ahead....

[sv-wolf]

I think it's time to implement the SV-Wolf's bailout program...


Can you imagine if you recieved an average of £1.00 from every registered member? I think that would put you better than £14,000 to the good, enough for a new bike and that trip to the colonies so we can all meet you....

I've already got a few pounds to send when the program gets the go ahead....

Hi Doc

Hey C'mon. You know as well as I do that it's only the bad and the wealthy that get bailed out in this old world. OK, I am a bit bad sometimes, but wealthy...? Not a lot!

Anyway, those who have to rely on handouts always get it in the neck, nomatter how little they deserve it. Not sure I could cope with being the butt of public opinion here on TMW. Not from you guys!!!!!!!!!!


Cheers
Hud