Total Motorcycle Community Forums

*knock knock*

Hello? What's going on with the neighbor then? Are the bikes both healthy and being exercised regularly? What's doing!

Where are you?

blues2cruise wrote:Where are you?

Hiya.

Not really sure to be honest. In cryogenic suspension, perhaps. In the last six months my body has been incredibly busy (it appears) and my mind has been running along behind it screaming at it to WAIT!

I've had some good riding this year: several camping trips to Dorset, and several great bike shows, including the fantastic annual Horizons Unlimited up in Derbyshire (http://www.horizonsunlimited.com/ ) - The site must be as big as TMW, thought not nearly as user friendly. There are some amazing blogs on it.

The Horizons show just gets better all the time. It's always full of incredible people, mostly round-the-world bikers - and also loads of wannabes like me. All the usual faces were there this year . (If you like serious adventure motorcycle travel blogs, try Walter Colebatch's Sibirski Extreme http://www.sibirskyextreme.com/ ). I'll upload some pics of the show if I can find the time.

The best talk this year was from a British youngster living in Oz who suddenly found himself without a visa or a girlfriend, just an Austrailian special-issue 105cc motorcycle. So he decided on the spur of the moment to ride home on it, a journey which took him through Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and the countries of Europe. He was scared shitless a lot of the time, he claimed, but enjoyed every moment of it. Sigh! I'd love to be scared shitless most of the time, so long as I could enjoy it.

There was also a live Skype broadcast with two bikers travelling through the Wakhan corridor in the north-east of Afghanistan (reputedly one of the most beautiful mountainous river valleys on earth) and getting shot at. Phew!

The Daytona has been behaving itself beautifully since I last posted (is there a connection?), but still has a cracked fairing. I'm trying to find some second-hand plastic for it to save paying out a fortune to Triumph. It is very hard to find. Google alerts keep coming up with fairings for sale, but the sellers all live on the west coast (of the US not the UK). Didn't know there were that many Triumphs out there.

I've also bought myself a new bicycle to cope with my own personal catch-22. If I ride my motorcyle all the time because I enjoy it, I get unfit; if I get unfit I don't enjoy riding my motorcycle as much (I get leg cramps and aches in my hands and hips). I'm trying out a new riding technique that I learned at Horizons from a guy who does long-distance trials riding. It seems to work, and it is certainly taking a lot of strain off my wrists when riding in slow traffic. (Hey, this is the UK!)

Now I ride the bicycle more often and the motorcycle less, that way I can spend more time enjoying the motorcycle. I also enjoy riding the bicycle - I like pumping out the energy. It does make sense - really.

Am I going to be made redundant in October? Who knows? Either way, I'm going to treat it as an opportunity. In the meantime, I'm just not thinking about it.

Cheers

Hud

PS. The neighbour is fine - the strong silent type. No problems. He's turned out to be quite friendly, in a strong silent kind of way.

So glad to have you back, we were getting worried.

Physically fit, I guess that's something I should look into... )

What the heck did you do to cause everyone over to be so upset and start rioting over there in your country?

I hope it does not affect you.

blues2cruise wrote:What the heck did you do to cause everyone over to be so upset and start rioting over there in your country?

I hope it does not affect you.

What do you mean? You know he's the one inciting all the youth just to get free bikes when they go after the dealership!

Da youf are revolting. Or looting. Or something. At least the ones in the poorest areas are. And now they are getting some pretty fierce sentencing. Some kids in Stevenage tried to copycat their brothers in the cities - but it was pretty half-hearted. Some of the action came pretty close to my wife's son who lives near Peckham in London, and the Blockbusters near our Clapham office got done over but nothing worse than that. The funniest bit is listening to all the self-declared experts pontificating on what happened. Clearly most of them had never spoken to a working-class eighteen-year old in their life.

Happy man be me. A genius of an auto-electrician finally located the fault on the SV the other day. (It's been sitting in my garden for several months, dead as a doornail.) It took him one hour to find and fix the problem and he MOTd it for me the same day. My problem now is that I can't find the bike's logbook, which means I can't tax it to get it back on the road without jumping through a lot of bureacratic hoops. So, it's still sitting there in my garden - no longer dead but good as...

sv-wolf wrote:Da youf are revolting. Or looting. Or something. At least the ones in the poorest areas are. And now they are getting some pretty fierce sentencing. Some kids in Stevenage tried to copycat their brothers in the cities - but it was pretty half-hearted. Some of the action came pretty close to my wife's son who lives near Peckham in London, and the Blockbusters near our Clapham office got done over but nothing worse than that. The funniest bit is listening to all the self-declared experts pontificating on what happened. Clearly most of them had never spoken to a working-class eighteen-year old in their life.

Happy man be me. A genius of an auto-electrician finally located the fault on the SV the other day. (It's been sitting in my garden for several months, dead as a doornail.) It took him one hour to find and fix the problem and he MOTd it for me the same day. My problem now is that I can't find the bike's logbook, which means I can't tax it to get it back on the road without jumping through a lot of bureacratic hoops. So, it's still sitting there in my garden - no longer dead but good as...

Yippeeeee! Glad to hear your bike is fixed. Glad you are not affected by the rioting. I bet you'll find your book soon. And then....vvvrrroooommmmm

What was wrong with it that the shop couldn't find for the life of them but the other guy found in an hour???

It was just a tiny exposed wire under the seat. It was shorting and blowing more fuses than I knew the bike had (or had any reasonably right to have). They bloke who fixed it for me (Keith) builds and races SV650s which have exactly the same wiring loom as their big brother, 1000, so he knew exactly where the likely places were to look. He also fixed up the horn. The nice people at Suzuki locate this feeble little honker right next to the SV's engine, so that after a couple of month's riding, as sure as eggs is eggs, it's bound fry in the heat from the engine. When I put my first horn query up on the SV1000 website, all I got back was a chorus of knowing chuckles. Sorting the horn seems to be a kind of rite of passage for all SV owners. It's fed by equally feeble cabling so you can't put anything on there which makes a decent noise without a rewire.

Nice thing though: the SV is now so ancient and has so many miles on its clock that I wouldn't get more than £1,200 if I did decide to sell it. That means I no longer have to have long debates with my inner bank manager. I might just as well ride the old girl into the ground and squeeze every bit of fun out of her that I can. There'd probably be no point in me selling her anyway. I just be very tempted just to buy another one. (One of the later ones with the black body work and without the engine knock.) They are dirt cheap! That's good for me, but I just don't understand why such a phenomenal bike with such a great engine never became very popular. I guess it was something of a one-off and riders just got brainwashed into thinking in manufacturer's categories (and it was never going to win the WSB).

There's also something about the way she is designed. I'm biassed of course (people in love always are), but I've rarely seen such a characterful-looking bike.

Hd