SV-Wolf's Bike Blog

[Hanson]

It can't hurt just to go for a look, no not at all.... but I think it likely that just going to look at a motorcycle for a motorcycle man is not at all that dissimilar to taking your kids to just go and look at puppies.

The Fireblade will check off your box for a street bike, then you just need to find your trails bike.

As far as the gardening issue, there are only high maintenance and higher maintenance gardens. The only low maintenance garden is one that someone else is tending, or a car park. If you are enjoying it, then fine, it is a healthy activity, but if you hate working in the garden then I can easily think of a great many other ways of using my days.

Safe Travels and keep us posted
Richard

[blues2cruise]

That's no easy task in my garden. Rather than a place to take tea and eat buttered scones on warm afternoons it is now approaching the condition of a jungle. Two years ago it was invaded with a vine and I now have bunches of grapes hanging everwhere. Last year, a bramble got over the fence. Now I have ample blackberries but the paths are unpassable. My wife, who created the garden , always insisted that it was low maintenance. But that's like saying a 1953 Royal Enfield Bullet is low maintenance. Ninety feet of shrubs, trees and ornamental features doesn't look after itself. And I wasn't up for doing it justice. Are you guys with me on this? What incentive could there possibly be to stay at home attacking ivy and lopping boughs on sunny Sunday afternoons when I could be out riding with mates?

Now it's different. I have the time and the motivation. I'm still not sure, though, whether I have developed a new and unexpected interest in gardening, or just discovered in myself a vicious desire to attack green things and rip out roots that are in my way.

Try some Round Up. It's not soil reactive. It is systemic and works only on the green stuff.

[sv-wolf]

Try some Round Up. It's not soil reactive. It is systemic and works only on the green stuff.

Thanks for the advice, blues. I've always resisted using weedkiller but I think you are right. I don't have much choice if I want to keep the garden in decent shape. I almost bought some from a local garden centre last week, but conscience got me at the last minute. I will just use it on what will eventually be the paved area where I intend to keep my bikes. Having cleared the jungle floor near the house, I've discovered that the or the crazy paving I laid down 14 years ago is still there and still in good condition. That means I won't have to concrete or repave the whole area, just dig up the roots of a couple of ornamental trees and shrubs and lay down a few slabs in corners that were once flowerbeds. That will makes life much simpler.

I heard late on Monday afternoon that the insurance company has written off the Daytona, and they are offering me what I regard as a good sum for it. I didn't buy the Fireblade in the end. Good sense eventually prevailed. Hanson is exactly right, if I had seen it I would have bought it and then I might have ended up with two sports bikes I was so attached to I couldn't let either of them go. I've been really attacking the garden the last few days, anything to stop me thinking about things on two wheels.

This year I got a discount on my bike insurance by organising it through my union. The company they use, Liverpool Victoria, was cheap and it looked like a good deal. They weren't able to offer home rescue as part of the package which worried me a bit but I decided to take the risk. Since the accident the company have been quite remarkable. They cocked up on the rescue vehicle which took three hours to get to me at the accident site and they were a day late giving me their assessment, but they have been otherwise remarkably user friendly. The day after the accident, I got a call to arrange for the bike to be picked up from my home. A day later it was picked up on time and very efficiently. That morning I also got a pack in the post from LV explaining in detail what would then happen. The pack included the telephone numbers of an adviser and also of the engineer who would be making the assessment and it invited me to call them if I needed to discuss anything. The following day I got a call from the engineer to introduce herself and make sure I understood the process and explain what my options would be when she had made her assessment. She was remarkably frank in answering my questions. Yesterday, I got a letter setting out and explaining the assessment followed by a telephone from an adviser to see if I had received it and discuss the contents. She then asked me how much time I needed to make a decision and has arranged to ring back. I think that's pretty good customer service for a UK insurance firm. I might stick with them.

[sv-wolf]

The deed is done - almost. With the Daytona declared a write-off and not worth buying back, I took a trip down to Croydon to look at the Blade. Beautiful. Just like her pic. I agreed the sale and put down a deposit. She's ten years old but in great condition, and will set me back just £500 more than I will get for the Daytona which had twice as many miles on it. A good day's work I'm thinking. Now all I need to do is to arrange payment and in a couple of day's I'll ride her home.

http://git.me/photo/2014/07/24/17514308 ... t-sale.jpg

[blues2cruise]

That blue is very nice.

[Hanson]

Hud,

It sounds like your confinement to moto-purgatory is nearly over. That is a very clean looking bike, and I like the color.

Safe Travels,
Richard

[sv-wolf]

Yeah, I love the colour. Not many royal blue Fireblades were ever made. The livery caught my eye the moment I saw the bike on the online bikes-for-sale pages of MCN.

I paid for her and picked her up today and rode her home. Lovely! The biggest surprise was how fast she feels - I mean, subjectively. With all that extra power, I had imagined that at lower speeds (anything under 120 mph!) she would seem slower than the Daytona, in the same way that the Daytona seemed slower than previous, smaller bikes I'd owned. Exactly the opposite. Whatever speed I ride her at she seems fast, not at all bored. I like that. But, comfortable as she is at lower speeds, she is, of course, always ready to go faster. She's going to teach my throttle hand a little more discipline, I'm thinking.

I didn't check her weight before I bought her, but she seems surprisingly light when wheeling her about. And for someone like me that weighs in light himself, that's an advantage. She seems light when under power too, and handles nicely. So far, I've only ridden her on London roads and the M25, so I haven't had much of a chance to put her through her paces. In the next few weeks I'll take her out on the local twisties to see how she handles - or perhaps, more realistically, to see how well I can handle her. I'd grown so comfortable with the Daytona; I suspect I will now have to upskill myself a little. The gearbox is luvverly, and the engine very gentlemanly. I suppose I was unprepared for how smooth and controllable the power delivery is, even at slow speed and in midrange. I like the riding position also. I don't think it is as extreme as it was on the Daytona - another surprise. That gives me greater comfort and more control at the bars. There is only one problem I can see: a hard seat and a bony arse do not go well together. I'll have to do something about that. There may not be an off-the-peg gel seat available on an old model like this. If not, I will have to improvise or get someone to customise something for me. I don't want to damage her lines though. She's also very beautiful to look at. I love the underseat exhaust.

I realised quickly that it would be a crying shame not to take a bike like this out onto a track at sometime. It's one of those things I've always wanted to do but never did.

I guess I will have to change my profile picture. But perhaps not yet. The Fireblade is still a stranger in my life, a welcome stranger, but a stranger nonetheless. I'd had the Daytona for so long that it had begun to feel like part of my own body. Now that I think of it, though, the Daytona always fitted comfortably into my riding style, right from the start. The Blade is less companionable. When I start to feel at home on the Blade it will be time enough for a photo change.

On the way home on Monday night a car pulled up beside me at the lights and its occupants, two youngstes, indicated that they wanted to race. That never happened to me on the Daytona. I let them go. I wonder, though, if this will set the pattern for the future.


Cheers

[sv-wolf]

I've taken the Blade out for several rides now and I'm loving almost everything about it except for that damned seat which is horribly uncomfortable. In fact, it is so uncomfortable that it makes the bike virtually unrideable except for very short journeys, and as much as I love it in other ways, if I can't sort it out, I'll have to sell it on. I don't want to do that without first seeing if I can solve this problem, so my first plan of attack has been to order an Airhawk inflatable seat pad. That was on Thursday. On Friday morning, much to my surprise, it arrived by carrier. The seat pad was expensive, but I've heard good things about it, and if it makes the bike rideable, it will be worth it. So today I tried it out.

I've just got back. For its first test ride with air pad fitted, I took the bike down to the 'poo palace' at Crossness on the south bank of the Thames Estuary in the Erith marshes. The 'poo palace,' aka Crossness pumping station, is the work of Joseph Bazalgette. Back in the 1860s Bazalgette was commissioned to build a new sewerage system for London, a gigantic undertaking, and the biggest single engineering project anywhere since the Romans abandoned these islands 1,600 years ago. He designed a network of feeder channels that drained all the districts of London, west to east, into two gigantic main sewers, which ran beside the Thames, one along the north bank and the other to the south. The poo flowed eastwards towards the estuary where it was stored in tanks until ebb tide, and then discharged into the river. By the time the main sewers reached this point, though, they were deep underground. To bring all their contents to the surface again for discharge, Bazalgette had two huge pumping stations constructed. The one on the north bank has long since been demolished. The one to the one to the south, though, still exists and still houses all its original mechanisms. For twenty years these were left to decay, but since the 1980s they have been gradually restored by a team of volunteer steam enthusiasts. The buildings are spectacular, but the big draw is the four steam engines, which are almost certainly the four largest steam engines ever built.

Engineering to the Victorians was the new religion, and its major projects were the new secular cathedrals. The sewers, the pumping stations and the engines were not just constructed as practical pieces of hardware but were designed to the highest architectural standards. As a result, London has the most aesthetic sewers anywhere in the world. They are all hugely over-engineered. Mostly they are constructed in polychrome brickwork, as elaborate and decorative as any ceremonial building in the city. The Crossness pumping station was built in the form of a grand Romanesque palace and fitted with painted wrought iron work. The poo no longer goes into Crossness, but is incinerated in a new facility nearby, and the resulting heat and gasses recycled.

The four engines were named after members of the royal family. 'Prince Consort' is now under steam again, and the team estimate that they will have a second engine, 'Victoria' operational in about ten years time. One Sunday a month the public can visit and see 'Prince Consort' under steam and the other engines in their wrought iron palace.

Crossness is about an hour-and-a-half ride from me, mostly round the M25, the London ring road. Taking a trip down there to see the engines provided a good opportunity to meet some friends and try out the the new Airhawk pad. It was good to see friends again, but the seat is still a problem. The Airhawk makes it bearable, but it's still not exactly comfortable. The ride home was better than the ride out, though, and maybe that means I'm getting used to it. I hope so. At the very least, I'm no longer sitting on bits of anatomy that no bloke should ever be required to sit on. Time will tell.

[blues2cruise]

[blues2cruise]