motorcycles

Deer Island, NB

/ 650thumper / Leave a comment

Deer Island

After a stressful day of mechanical problems and then almost missing the ferry, I was happy to be on the ferry munching my fish & chips. This photo was taken off the bow and looks toward the campground, which is right on the southern tip of the island. It was a short crossing and soon we were landing.

I came to Deer Island on the suggestion of a retired colleague who teaches sea kayaking at Seascape Kayak Adventures, one of the small businesses on the island. It’s situated in the Bay of Fundy between Maine and the New Brunswick mainland. (Not to be confused with Deer Isle, which is in Maine.) It’s officially in New Brunswick. The adjacent island, Campobello Island, is famous for being the summer vacation spot of Franklin Roosevelt, and his estate is still open to the public to view.

But while Campobello is touristy, Deer Island is rustic! Remote. There’s no potable water at the campground, and they don’t accept credit or debit, so make sure you don’t make my mistake and arrive with little Canadian cash and have to pay mostly in USF. Ugh! I was mad about that one because I make it a practice to carry cash when travelling, but stopping at the bank was literally the last thing on my To Do list and I just didn’t get to it before crossing the border.

I was tired, and the ramp up from the shoreline is loose stones, but I managed them no problem. What I didn’t manage so well was the final turn of the day. I don’t like parking the bike facing in at a site because then I know I have to turn it around before I leave in the morning, so I always try to do that U-turn before parking the bike. I did the turn okay, but lost my concentration at the last moment on the uneven ground literally as I put my foot down. It was a fitting end to a long, difficult day.

Fallen Bigbea

It looks worse than it was. It was a gentle roll onto its side on grass. I removed the top bags and easily lifted the bike back up, and soon everything was right again in the world.

Deer Island Campsite

After two long days in the saddle, the next day was a planned day of rest, so I spent it putzing around the island and checking out The Old Sow. The Old Sow is the largest natural whirlpool in the Western Hemisphere. It forms just offshore from the campground, the product of three water systems converging in one spot. The waters rise about 10 feet and there are some serious currents happening in these waters. It’s called the Old Sow because the water will actually make a sucking sound. I went down at high tide, and while there was some swirling water, I didn’t see a whirlpool. I heard from someone later that the best time is actually three hours before high tide.

The island is quaint and fun to ride with the hilly twists and turns, but there are parts like this one where something has been left to rot. No one’s going to take care of this mess, it seems. (Yes that is a collapsed ramp in the foreground.)Lords Cove

Yet despite these eyesores, the island has a charm about it. It’s very quiet. You can sit and be still and listen to nothing but birds, and that is something increasingly rare these days. There’s one restaurant, and no ATM machine, or so I was told, only to come upon one at the general store during my exploring. Oh, my chance to get some Canadian cash, I thought, but discovered there was no money in it because the person who tends it (same person who runs the restaurant) has been too busy to fill it. That’s kind of how life is like on Deer Island. It’s pretty in the summer, but I imagine it’s pretty brutal in the wintertime.

I was supposed to meet up with my ex-colleague and friends for dinner, but there was a problem with the ferries that delayed their return from a kayak excursion, so it was curried lentils for dinner. curried lentils

Not so swanky. I didn’t get many more photos of the island because I was mostly riding it. But this shot of the eastern shore at dawn will give you a good idea of how peaceful it is out there. I’m glad I visited and will go again when I’m out that way. There’s nothing quite like it.

Dawn at Deer Island

 

Learning the S.M.A.R.T. Way

/ 650thumper / Leave a comment

There are two ways to learn how to do something: trial and error, and getting some instruction. When it comes to motorcycling, I’m in for the latter. I’ve seen vids on YouTube of guys heading out onto the trails with their adventure bikes without any training. They seem to spend more time picking up their bikes and getting them unstuck from mud puddles than they do riding. It doesn’t look that fun. Then I stumbled upon Clinton Smout’s instructional videos and knew I would visit his school as soon as I got my licence.

Horseshoe Riding Adventures is located in Barrie, Ontario. I recognized the location from my teen years of skiing at Horseshoe Valley. Since I now live in Quebec (and start time is 8:30 a.m.), I decided to ride out the day before and camp nearby. I looked up the KOA in Barrie and gulped when I saw they want over $50 for the privilege of sleeping on a patch of their ground. Then I saw Heidi’s Campground at $18.50 and booked for the night before my class.

I was blessed with good weather and had a glorious ride out—once I got going. Two minutes into my ride I discovered a crack in my windscreen radiating from one of the mounting holes, the byproduct of a close encounter with some mud at the Dirt Daze Rally the previous month. I decided to turn around and fortify it with some super glue and add a rubber washer to allow some movement of the screen. This required a stop at the Rona in Vaudreuil for longer hardware. When I finally hit the highway I also hit the mandatory lane closure, this one at Coteau-du-Lac because, well, this is Quebec, and that’s the law! I lost another 45 minutes there and couldn’t get out of Quebec fast enough. My gas light was on for the final 40 kilometres before I limped into the MacEwan in Lancaster. (I knew I was cutting it close but had extra fuel on the back of the bike. I put 13.4 litres in the bike and the tank is 13.6, so I was close!)

Finally with these stresses behind me, I settled in for an amazing ride up Highway 34 from Lancaster to Alexandria, then west along the 43 which turns into Highway 7 and takes you all the way to the shores of Lake Simcoe, where I turned north up 12 and over the top of the lake. This ride took me through the farmland, scrubgrass, and vacation area of SE Ontario (in that order). I noticed that the driving gets more aggressive as you approach Toronto, with people forcing their way past a line of vehicles on a two-lane road, only to encounter the same people in beachwear and flip-flops at the next gas station. I was several hours behind schedule so kept my breaks short, arriving at Heidi’s just in time to pitch in the last of the light.

But all this is precursor to the raison-d’être of my trip: the full day class of dual-sport instruction. Since I’m on teachers’ summer schedule (groans please), I was able to visit the school on a Tuesday so had a smaller class than what I expect they have on Saturdays. I was in a group with two other people: Cheryl, who wanted to get more comfortable on her 800GS, and Bruno, who rides a Harley but felt he needed a little something extra; yes, dirt riding makes you a better and safer rider on the road too. Our instructor for the morning was Graham, one of Clinton’s sons and who, by virtue of his good genes, had the best summer job of any of his classmates, I’m sure. We would be on Yamaha 230s for the morning part of the class. He had us start by just riding a few laps of a course laid out in what staff refer to as “the pit.” It’s a large, open area of dirt and some sand with a few jumps, surrounded by a grassy hill with trails cut into the bank to practice hill climbs. After assessing our abilities and needs, Graham started with the instruction.

I had a burning question going into this day, one that stemmed from my experience at Dirt Daze, and Graham provided the answer early on. While riding the back roads of New York, I’d experienced the front end sometimes slide out while peg-weighting and wondered how you prevent that. Graham demonstrated that you actually hold the bike up with your thigh while counterbalancing. So if you want to turn right, yes, you weight the right peg—I knew that much—but you lean your body to the left (as the bike tips to the right) and prevent the bike from low-siding by pressing your inner right thigh into the tank. Later during a water break, Clinton came by and suggested we try standing pigeon-toed on the pegs; this position presses the thighs into the tank and stabilizes the bike. But where YouTube, reading books, and listening to instruction is helpful, the real learning happens when you get to practice specific skills in a controlled and relatively safe environment. The little dirt bikes allowed us to try things without all the weight (and potential expense!) of our own bikes to deal with. We did some slalom in the dirt, some hill climbs, and different types of descents. Then the real fun started: we headed out onto the trails.

There’s little that I’ve experienced that’s more fun than riding a dirt bike on forested trails. I won’t make comparisons with sex, flying, writing poetry, scoring, or music—my other passions—because such comparisons would be impolite to some and unfair to others. But it’s really, really, (really) fun, and that’s before you get to the mud ruts. I went down in the mud a few times at Dirt Daze so was under-confident and nervous about riding in the mud. Horseshoe Adventures provided some “deep-end” opportunity to get over this fear quickly, again, in a controlled environment, on a smaller bike, and with the guidance of an instructor. We were given three options for getting through a huge mud rut. One was to paddle with our boots on either side as we ride through the rut; the other was to ride seated but feet up, and the third was standing. I was going to do the easiest, but once into the rut I felt comfortable enough to ride it out and didn’t paddle. The second time through I stood and made it through without dabbing! Okay, it was better than sex, maybe like sex in a mud puddle while watching the World Cup and listening to Sex Pistols.

Graham also had us practice tight turns, throttle control, log crossings, and some pretty big hill climbs and descents in both rocks and sand. This is where the practice in the pit really helped and I could see the application of skills learned there in the real world of trail-riding. After a full morning, it was time for lunch.

In the afternoon, I headed out with a new instructor, Emily, on my own bike. I was a bit nervous because of my 85/15 tires, but was assured they’d be okay for what we were doing. A few times around the course and I immediately began to see how the skills I’d learned in the morning on the dirt bike were applicable to my 650GS; it’s just more weight to manage. Emily took me to another network of trails and we began bombing through them on our dual-sports (she was on an 800GS), that is, until I misjudged a turn, drew on asphalt muscle memory, hit the front brake, then the dirt! Umph! Lesson number one: you can get away with that shit on a 230 dirt bike with knobbie tires, but not an a 650 with street tires. The next lesson, then, was emergency braking in the dirt. We went to a dirt road and Emily had me lock up the back brake, getting used to the back end fish-tailing; then she added a little front brake.  Her first question to me when I’d picked myself up off the dirt after my fall (after “Are you okay?”) was “How many fingers did you have on the brake lever?” I couldn’t remember but probably all of them except the thumb. A hand-full. Two fingers only, she advised. Graham had said the same about the clutch hand in the morning.

We also did some rocky descents, 2nd gear, a little front brake. Then back to the trails where I found my redemption when Emily took me through the same infamous corner that had bested me before. We also did some pretty big whoops at speed, some of them muddy, and some more climbs and descents but this time on the trails, not the road; each context changes the skill slightly. It’s like how they say a dog has only learned a command if it can reproduce the desired behaviour in five different contexts. This was made more evident in my next exercise, which was throttle control, doing figure eights in a small grassy area with uneven terrain. I’d practiced this fairly successfully in the gravel parking lot back at the pit, but doing it on uneven ground with a slight grade made me realize I’m more confident with my right turns than my left. I needed to reproduce the body position I felt comfortable doing on my rights—hanging out with my right calf against the bike holding me up—but with my left. Emily also spotted that I needed to twist my body more; small, subtle changes made all the difference, and soon I was turning both ways full lock.

Back at the pit, my final exercise was recovering from an unsuccessful hill climb. This is a skill for when you’re partway up and realize you’re just not going to make it and want to bail. You use the back brake, stall the bike, but let the clutch out and the engine will hold the bike. Then you turn the handlebars, feather the clutch to let the bike roll back in an arc until it’s perpendicular to the hill, all the while leaning the bike uphill and keeping your uphill foot down. Then rock the handlebars back and forth until the bike is positioned where you can safely pull in the clutch and roll down the hill. You can see Clinton demonstrate it here. Emily showed me how it’s done and it looked so easy-peasy I was overconfident when trying it. It’s actually a lot harder than it looks! You have to keep concentrating the whole time because if you lose your balance and want to plant that downhill foot, you’re in trouble. That’s what I did, and then muscle memory kicked in and I did what I always do when riding and get into trouble: I pulled in the clutch. Doh! Next thing I knew the bike was on its side and I was on my back. We couldn’t rotate the bike because the crash bar had dug in, so we grunted it up, and I finished the manoeuvre. Then I tried it again, and a third time, until I was confident I could do it when needed in the field.

My experience at Horseshoe Adventures was everything I’d hoped it would be and more. As it turned out, Emily is from Cape Breton, where I plan to tour next week, and she gave me some recommendations on restaurants and trails. There’s one called Highland Drive (of course) that traverses Cape Breton from Wreck Cove to Chéticamp, and another from Meat Cove, where I plan to spend a night. Of course I’ll do The Cabot Trail with the Harley boys, but then I’ll cut back through the bush and do it all again. I have a bike that is not restricted to pavement but my skills were holding me up. Now I feel I have the skills to ride these roads safely, which is exactly why I went to Clinton’s school.

I can’t praise the instructors at S.M.A.R.T. riding adventures enough. At lunch, Clinton and I got talking pedagogy, and he said they spend a lot of time choosing and training their instructors. It’s evident. Yet what makes this place special is not just the level of instruction and professionalism of staff but how you immediately feel like family. That sounds cheesy, I know, but there’s definitely a personal touch to this school. Clinton is always around, flitting in and out, asking how the day went and making sure all his clients are happy.

With my bike re-loaded and my head filled with new skills, I headed off toward Guelph, where I planned to spend a few days with my parents. There’s some beautiful geography between Barrie and Guelph, and my GPS took me through Creemore, Orangeville, and Fergus along county roads. Halfway towards Guelph, with the sun low and glowing across the farmers’ fields and massive wind turbines rotating in slow motion, I realized I was riding with two fingers on the clutch, two fingers on the brake.

 

Adventurero Heroico: a review of The Motorcycle Diaries by Ernesto Guevara

/ 650thumper / 2 Comments

chehigh

We’ve all seen it, the iconic photo of Che Guevara, silkscreened on the T-shirt of a slouching teenager as a sign of a budding ideology or subtle form of protest against The World as he or she has come to inherit it. It was snapped in 1960 by Alberto Korda while Guevara listened to Castro’s oration at the funeral service of 136 people killed in an act of naval sabotage. Even converted to duotone, the implacable and determined expression is remarkable, the eyes gazing off toward a distant point of revenge and justice.

I’d heard that Ernesto (Che) Guevara was radicalized while riding a motorcycle around South America, visiting up close, in a way that only a motorcycle can do, the poverty, hardship, and exploitation of its proletariat. His eight-month journey on a Norton 500 (affectionately named La Ponderosa II—The Powerful One) with Alberto Granado, a doctor and specialist in leprosy, is captured in The Motorcycle Diaries: A Journey Around South America, now turned into a major motion picture starring Gael García Bernal.

Guevara’s radicalization cannot be found in any specific moment but occurs over the trajectory of his journey. What is evident at outset is that he comes from a privileged life. At first, the two seem more interested in drinking and carousing than visiting leper colonies or talking to the working poor about their plight. In a typical scene, they get into trouble after drinking copious amounts of wine:

Chilean wine is very good and I was downing it at an amazing rate, so by the time we went on to the village dance I felt ready for anything. It was a very cosy evening and we kept filling our bellies and minds with wine. One of the mechanics from the garage, a particularly nice guy, asked me to dance with his wife because he’d been mixing his drinks and was the worse for wear. His wife was pretty randy and obviously in the mood, and I, full of Chilean wine, took her by the hand to lead her outside. She followed me docilely but then realized her husband was watching and changed her mind. I was in no state to listen to reason and we had a bit of a barney in the middle of the dance floor, resulting in me pulling her towards one of the doors with everybody watching. She tried to kick me and as I was pulling her she lost her balance and went crashing to the floor. As we were running towards the village, pursued by a swam of enraged dancers, Alberto lamented all the wine her husband might have bought us.

There are, however, moments when an innate sensitivity and political empathy toward the poor come through in the writing. Soon after that escapade, they meet and are invited to stay with a married couple, Chilean workers who are Communists, and Ernesto hears the man’s tragic story:

In the light of the candle, drinking maté and eating a piece of bread and cheese, the man’s shrunken features struck a mysterious, tragic note. In simple but expressive language he told us about his three months in prison, his starving wife who followed him with exemplary loyalty, his children left in the care of a kindly neighbour, his fruitless pilgrimage in search of work and his comrades who had mysteriously disappeared and were said to be somewhere at the bottom of the sea.

The experience leaves a deep impression on the young man. That night he gives a blanket to the couple and he and Alberto wrap themselves in their remaining blanket: “It was one of the coldest nights I’ve ever spent but also one which made me feel a little closer to this strange, for me anyway, human species.” Writing later about the couple, Ernesto makes clear his own budding political ideology:

It’s really upsetting to think they use repressive measures against people like these. Leaving aside the question of whether or not ‘Communist vermin’ are dangerous for a society’s health, what had burgeoned in him was nothing more than the natural desire for a better life, a protest against persistent hunger transformed into a love for this strange doctrine, whose real meaning he could never grasp but, translated into ‘bread for the poor,’ was something he understood and, more importantly, that filled him with hope.

Guevara is a good writer. I read the book in translation (trans. Ann Wright) but the strength of Guevara’s voice rings through. He is articulate, possessing a broad vocabulary, funny, and perceptive. His powers of observation—essential for any writer of travelogue—extend to the landscape as well as the people he meets. At times, the sentences are lyrical and poetic, such as in this passage, where he personifies the Chuquicamata mountain that has been industrialized into a copper mine:

The mountains, devoid of a single blade of grass in the nitrate soil, defenceless against the attack of wind and water, display their grey backbone, prematurely aged in the battle with the elements, their wrinkles belying their real geological age. And how many of the mountains surrounding their famous brother hide similar riches deep in their bowels, awaiting the arid arms of the mechanical shovels to devour their entrails, spiced with the inevitable human lives—the lives of the poor unsung heroes of this battle, who die miserable deaths in one of the thousand traps nature sets to defend its treasures, when all they want is to earn their daily bread.

Guevara’s critique of the exploitative power of Capitalism is expressed in the language of war and personal suffering, both of Nature and humans, in a telling indication of the major themes that would later occupy his political life. He sees Capitalism as a plague on Nature and human society, a force that devours if left unchecked.

His critical eye does not stop with economics. In another passage, he shows distain toward the Church that dominates Latin American society:

In a moment of boredom we went to the church to watch a local ceremony. The poor priest was trying to produce the three-hour sermon but by then—about ninety minutes into it—he had run out of platitudes. He gazed at his congregation with imploring eyes while he waved a shaking hand at some spot in the church. ‘Look, look, the Lord hath come, the Lord is with us, His spirit is guiding us.’ After a moment’s pause, the priest set off on his load of nonsense again and, just when he seemed about to dry up again, in a moment of high drama, he launched into a similar phrase. The fifth or sixth time poor Christ was announced, we got a fit of giggles and left in a hurry.

Always there is a tone of understatement, a dry irony that runs the risk of appearing sanctimonious, but I would rather have a strong, personal voice in a travelogue than a weak, objective one. He does not hold anything back, even when describing the hygiene habits of the Native Chileans:

The somewhat primitive idea the indians have of modesty and hygiene means that, regardless of sex or age, they do their business by the side of the road, the women wiping themselves with their skirts, the men not at all, and carry on as before. The petticoats of indian women with children are veritable warehouses of excrement, since they wipe the kids with them whenever they have a bowel movement.

As shocking as this is, the most surprising aspect of The Motorcycle Diaries is that they don’t travel by motorcycle for much of it. The bike dies a dramatic death on page 44 of my edition, and they spend the rest of the journey bumming rides from truckers, travelling by foot, raft, and boat when necessary. In this way, the book is like George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, which documents Orwell’s self-induced months of hunger and poverty while squatting in Paris and tramping across England. And perhaps like Orwell, there might have been a desire in Guevara to purge himself of the privileged lifestyle in which he was raised, or at least open his eyes to another strata of society of which he had had only a passing familiarity and a superficial understanding.

They do visit leper colonies and are regarded there as heroes, more for their humane treatment than their medical treatment of the lepers. Where others fear and shun these people, Alberto and Ernesto mingle amongst them for several days, drinking and playing music together, and when they leave they shake the lepers’ hands, a gesture that in itself is more healing than any medicine the doctors can offer.

This is the picture of Ernesto that we get by the end of their adventure—a caring and principled young man ready to take the hippocratic oath, not the Guerrillero Heroico of the later portrait, the fighter who was ready to kill to incite revolution. For that, he would have to meet and travel with another man, not the affable Alberto but the militant Fidel.

The Motorcycle Diaries is a fun and easy read at just over 150 pages. There’s a lot of local history woven into the storyline, including a political history of the Incas, and anyone who’s interested in the history of South America would get something from this book. Readers who are interested in the biography of Che Guevara or the germination of South American and Cuban Communism would also enjoy it. But the star of the book is South America itself, the land and its people. Readers will get a strong sense of the majesty of the mountains, the rugged terrain, the Latin American architecture, the friendly and welcoming people. My edition provides a map with the route of their journey, and chapters are titled after the places they visit. My ultimate ride is down into South America and this book has only piqued my interest all the more for that adventure.

Off Road, On Course

/ 650thumper / 1 Comment

offroad

Photo Credit: Red Sky Adventures

When I was a kid, I would go to police auctions to buy my bikes and bike parts. These were auctions of the stolen, then recovered but unclaimed bikes. You could enter a large area before the auction where all the bikes were ticketed with a number and on display to inspect them before the auction began. Then noting the number of the bike you were interested in, you’d wait until it came up for auction. My outbidding with my paper route money some father always elicited some snickers in the crowd.

I always looked for a certain type of bike. Basic. Didn’t matter the colour, because I’d paint it later, always black. Didn’t matter the condition, because I’d strip it down to the ball bearings, clean and re-grease everything before putting it back together. A little steel wool and elbow grease removed any rust from the rims. Didn’t matter the handlebars or the tires because I would change them, putting on wide handlebars and knobby tires. I was making my own motocross bike.

Then we would go to the little forested park near my house and race them. We built berms and jumps. We also dug up a few suburban front lawns with our terrorizing of the neighbourhood. I learnt how to wheelie and we had competitions with that too. I could wheelie the entire street if I got a good one going. When Evel Kneivel attempted to jump the Snake Canyon in 1974, I was eleven. It didn’t matter that the jump itself was a disappointment. All the hype leading up to the jump led us to start jumping our bikes—really jumping. We built ramps by turning a municipal steel garbage can on its side, wedging rocks behind it to stop it rolling, and laying scavenged wood on top. I bent a few back wheels doing those jumps, but never broke a bone. No one ever wore a helmet in those days, but the Gods smiled on us. The worst of it was some serious road rash.

Eventually I gave up the custom 3-speeds and bought a 12-speed Supercycle mountain bike from Canadian Tire. I must have put half a million miles on that bike, especially the summer I was a bike courier in London, Ontario. That bike still lives, repainted black, of course, with red pin-striping from Canadian Tire down the side.

So when I went to buy a motorcycle, I knew I wanted a dual sport. Yes, I want to tour, but I also want to play. And it had to be black.

On Friday, going in to the long weekend, I decided to get my ya-yas out and go for a ride, my first full day ride since getting the bike out of storage. I headed toward Ontario, taking my favourite route out, which puts me in Lancaster. There’s a short story I know by Hugh Hood called “Getting to Williamstown” in which the narrator describes in detail a drive to Williamstown, ON, just north-west of Lancaster. The story was written in the 70’s. Would the road he describes still exist? The one-lane bridge? The gas station with ice-cream? I was curious.

What does any of this have to do with off-roading? By going to Williamstown, I stumbled into my first off-road ride. While exploring those concession roads, I saw a dirt road leading off of the main road. I turned around and studied the sign at the entrance. No cars, but to my surprise, snowmobiles, ATVs, and motorbikes allowed! It didn’t look that hard.

It wasn’t . . . for the first 100 metres. No sooner had I started when I came to a section completely washed out, a huge puddle of muddy water spanning the width of the trail. I knew enough from watching YouTube that you don’t try to skirt the puddle by sneaking around the side; that only leads to the tire sliding out sideways and you and the bike going down. You have to go through the centre, hoping it’s not too deep and that there are no big rocks or logs down there. I stopped and pondered. Turn back or risk forward? The trail looked clear ahead except for this puddle. I did the imprudent thing and went for it.

It’s hard to estimate how deep it was. In the moment, I was concentrating so hard I didn’t take note. But it’s an unnerving feeling heading into the centre of a puddle the depth of which you do not know. (If I had had my adventure boots on, I might have waded in to find out first.) I knew that if I’m going for it, there are no halfways and I didn’t want to be tentative. So I gave it some throttle and saw water plough up around the fairing—probably easy stuff for an experienced rider but not so easy for a newbie. Safely across, I whooped into my helmet.

The trail beyond was a mixture of dirt, gravel, with sections of larger rocks that were tricky. I found it difficult to operate the throttle smoothly from a standing position and shifting was awkward. This would take some getting used to. After a brief foray into 2nd gear, I decided to keep it in first. This was, after all, my first time off road. At one point, I passed a father and son going the other way on ATVs.

There were other sections washed out—not one big puddle as before but several muddy puddles to navigate through. I thought of shooting rapids and skiing moguls, how you have to look up ahead and select your best line through. I could feel the bike sliding around beneath me but kept my cool, my weight over the bike, and my hand off the brake. I was nervous but tried not to grip the handlebars tightly, letting them and the bike move around. And I understood why you’re supposed to steer the bike by weighting the pedals rather than turning the handlebars, because even at that speed, when it’s that slippery, turning the bars can lead to the front wheel washing out. It was exhilarating!

I’m convinced that during those sections when the bike was sliding around under me, I was drawing on muscle memory from those early years on my bicycle. It’s the same principles, just a lot more weight involved. I’m hoping this might be something I take to easily, even at this “advanced” age.

I probably shouldn’t have been doing that alone. When I spoke to my dad later in the day, he said the same. Even at that speed, anything can happen. If the bike lands on you, you could break a leg and then you’d be hooped. So I messaged my off-road partner and suggested we go back together. I also looked up on Google Maps the trail and discovered I only rode a small section of it; it continues in the other direction all the way into Quebec and ends near Saint Polycarpe. In June, I’m going to the DirtDaze Adventure Rally in Lake Luzerne, NY, where I’ll get some beginner’s instruction and go on some guided rides down there. I also plan to do the full day adult course at SMART Riding Adventures.

It’s going to be a fun summer.

The Moto Show!

/ 650thumper / 1 Comment

motoshowbig

There are a few signs here in Montreal that signal for me that the end of winter is nearing. They are like the conditioned stimuli that get me salivating for spring. I’m referring to the Saint Patrick’s Day Parade, the return of Canadian geese, and the Montreal Moto Show, or as it’s called here, the Salon de Moto. So far there have been no geese sightings, and the St. Patty’s Day parade is still three weeks away, but last weekend was the Moto Show, the first sign that things are about to change. People come out of hibernation, and if you’re a biker, your first stop is the Palais des congres.

Last year was my first time going to the show. I went with my son and after some initial apprehension we got into the spirit of it and started climbing on bikes. This year we went with some members of my club, so it was even more fun, but thank God we had phones because it’s really easy to get separated from a group in a crowded showroom! You get stuck staring at a bike and when you turn around five people have disappeared into thin air as if beamed onto another planet. “Where are you guys?” was the common text sent about every half an hour. Then bike manufacturers become place names: “We’re at Honda,” or “We’re heading toward Harley,” and you have to decide whether to catch up or go it alone for a while.

I didn’t have any particular agenda this year except to look for a deal on that LS2 Pioneer helmet on my wish list. As it turned out, I could get it at the show for a little cheaper, shipped to my door, than online at the big superstore, so took advantage of the opportunity. I was also interested in the new BMW G310 and some 250 enduro bikes because now my son is talking about taking a course and starting to ride. As a parent, I have mixed feelings about this: I know riding is dangerous, but I also know it’s really fun, and the time to learn riding skills is when you are young and the brain is still plastic.

I thought maybe we could start by doing some off-roading, which would develop those skills better than any other kind of riding and is a lot safer than road riding, but while he says he could get into rally racing (the navigational aspect appeals to him), he’s more interested in using a bike to get around town. My second choice is for him to start on a small bike. As I’ve written in a previous post, I’m a strong believer in the European stepping-stones regulation system in which beginners start with a bike restricted to 20 hp, then after two years graduate to a bike with up to about 47 hp, and finally after another two years have no restrictions. It’s a little more complicated than that (okay, a lot more complicated) because age and power-to-weight ratio are also factors, but generally the idea is to start small and work your way up to heavier and more powerful machines.

So I was steering him toward smaller displacement bikes. He seems to have a fancy for naked bikes, so I suggested he sit on this Honda CB300.

cb300

You can tell a lot about a bike just by sitting on it. Climb on a sport bike and reach down for the grips, you’re almost lying on the tank. You’re tucked in behind a tiny windscreen, your knees are bent 120 degrees and you just know that a few hours in this position is not going to be good for your back or sex life. But you are one with the machine, your knees tucked into the hollows of the tank and you are ready for speed. By contrast, throw a leg over a touring bike and you’re weight is evenly distributed between your bum and your feet, you are upright, staring down the horizon, and the handlebars reach for you instead of the other way around. Oh yeah, and there’s a cup holder. Each bike is designed for a specific purpose, and you feel it right away.

Then there are more subtle aspects of design. I don’t like a huge tank dominating the cockpit, and some bikes feel like there’s a wall of plastic in front of you. Others have a seat that slopes down into the tank, making you feel crowded. Wide handlebars or narrow, digital or analog instrumentation, the width of the faring, position of pipes, etc. are all aspects of a bike’s design and comfort, any one of which can be a deal-breaker. Once in a while you come across a Goldilocks bike. You sit on it and everything feels just right, like when you find your soulmate and know after the first night that this relationship is a biggie. One bike that did that for me this year was the Triumph Street Scrambler.

20170225_143346

It not only feels great but also looks really cool. Triumph have done a great job with their direction of putting out the modern classic bike, taking essentially the classic Bonneville design of the 60’s and building modern technology into it. Okay, the Bobber goes too far and is to my taste a bit pretentious, but this Scrambler looks like the quintessential motorcycle yet, according to reviews, for all intents and purposes rides like a modern bike. And with the rack on the back, you could tour with this, even do some light off-roading. I’m really happy with my 650GS, but if money were no object, I’d be heading to Triumph tomorrow.

There are some bikes that are clearly built to get attention, and others where practicality is predominant. On one end of the scale is this Victory Mello Yello, which is anything but mellow in its appearance.

victory-mello-yellow1

Then there’s the Kawasaki H2, the most powerful motorcycle ever produced—and looks it.

h2

This beast has 998 cc of supercharged power, and I’m not using that term euphemistically. It actually has a supercharger with an impeller that turns at up to 130,000 rpm and compresses air 2.4x atmospheric pressure. It’s also got something called “the planetary gear.” If you think that sounds like something from outer space, you wouldn’t be far wrong. This gear system was designed by KHI’s aerospace division and is incredibly efficient at transferring power. Yes, we humans are amazing tool makers, and we’ve come a long way from that opening scene in 2001 Space Odyssey where a tibia bone becomes the first tool when used as a club. One look at this thing and you have a pretty clear picture of our incredible tool-making ability. Unfortunately, for all that ingenuity, we haven’t figured out how to stop killing each other and share power and wealth. Maybe we aren’t that far from the bone-as-weapon mentality? We are in essence still children in a sandbox, unwilling to share a bucket and spade, even when those toys have evolved to harness 326 hp.

But back to my dilemma about what bike I would feel comfortable my son riding. Not the H2, that’s for sure. The bike I was most interested in him seeing was the brand new BMW G310. It’s taken five years of development to get this bike off the line. Apparently, the biggest hurdle was getting the manufacturing, which is done in a new plant in India, up to BMW’s standards. The result is an entry-level bike that is under $5,000, has all the advantages of the German engineering we’ve come to expect from BMW and, according to initial reviews, is super fun to ride! It’s light and nimble, and despite being only 313cc (35 hp) in size, can keep up on the freeway thanks to a sixth gear, which even my 650GS does not have. Did I mention she’s a beaut? BMW are going to sell a lot of these. Apparently the plan is to bump their annual sales from 150,000 to 200,000 worldwide with this machine and introduce the BMW brand to a new generation of riders.

bmw-g310

It’s a single-cylinder, of course, liquid cooled, with ABS. Above is the R version, but an adventure GS model is coming in about six months. It would be fun to do some touring together and BMW says the 310GS is okay for light off-roading, so pretty much the same as my 650GS and would mean we would not be restricted to asphalt. They didn’t have the GS available at the show but here’s a photo of it grabbed off of Cycle World.

cw1116-2017-bmw-g-310-gs-image-01_0

It’s got the distinctive BMW beak, an extra couple of inches suspension clearance front and back over the R model, adjustable rear suspension preload, and ABS can be turned off when you leave the pavement. That’s a lot of bike for a little over $5,000! Cycle World is calling it a legitimate contender for the mini-ADV crown. It will take Gabriel a year or more to get his licence if he decides to go ahead with this, and hopefully by that time there will be some aftermarket accessories, like a more comfortable seat (are you hearing this, Seat Concepts?) because I know from personal experience that BMW do not put money into the seat.

In the end, I’m in the uncanny position I put my wife in when I announced I wanted to ride. To her credit, she didn’t freak out and threaten to divorce me, as some wives would do. She has told me she didn’t because she trusts me, trusts that I’m going to do everything right to minimize the risk, and I guess I’m going to have to do the same with my only child. He’s 23 this month, so there’s not much I can do about it anyway.

 

All Roads Lead to Pirsig: a review of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

/ 650thumper / 4 Comments

pirsig

There’s a strange phenomenon that happens when you let on in conversation that you ride. Soon after you casually drop a reference to “the bike,” the conversation starts to steer toward Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It’s like how all roads lead to Rome; all conversations eventually lead to Pirsig.

First published in 1974, Zen has become a classic, selling over 5 million copies. It possesses that rare quality of being both popular and academic. It’s the one book everyone has heard of that contains the word “motorcycle” in its title, so naturally, once it’s known that you ride, you will have to give your opinion of it. Ironically, the book isn’t about motorcycling at all. It’s about technology and mental illness and the Cartesian Duality and the Romantic and Classical traditions of Western thought and fatherhood and a host of other things but not motorcycling. The riding is really just a trope, the frame narrative to contain the philosophical musings in the Eastern tradition Pirsig calls “Chautauquas.” It’s these Chautauquas that are the real journey in the book, a deepening exploration of the Metaphysics of Quality. They occur during a 17-day road trip from Minnesota to Northern California with Robert Pirsig’s 12-year-old son, Chris, riding pillion.

Much of the book is highly abstract, and when I want to torture my wife, I read a passage from the book’s middle section:

“Quality . . . you know what it is, yet you don’t know what it is. But that’s self-contradictory. But some things are better than others, that is , they have more quality. But when you try to say what the quality is, apart from the things that have it, it all goes poof! There’s nothing to talk about. But if you can’t say what Quality is, how do you know what it is, or how do you know that it even exists? If no one knows what it is, then for all practical purposes it doesn’t exist at all. But for all practical purposes it really does exist.”

“Stop, stop!” she screams, and I do, before Public Security shows up at my door.

I had been warned inadvertently about the middle section. I happened to overhear a conversation involving a colleague who had decided to teach the book for the first time. He was lamenting that middle section, wondering how he was going to keep 18-year-olds, whose attention span is limited to 500 words of celebrity gossip, to keep wading through that philosophical muck. So when I got to it, I started to skim the abstract stuff, which isn’t really necessary to understand the discoveries at the end. It helps to have some context, but you don’t have to touch every stone on the Yellow Brick Road to get to the Emerald City. And in the end, when Pirsig finally comes to the much anticipated answers to his questions, he does so in a paragraph that doesn’t require all the contextual trappings for us to understand. This is a major flaw in the book. Despite it being a classic, it very much needs some serious editing. No wonder it was rejected by 121 publishers before being picked up, more than any other best-selling book, according to the Guiness Book of Records.

Fortunately, there are some passages that bring us back to the concrete world, literally: “We bump along the beat-up concrete between the cattails and stretches of meadow and then more cattails and marsh grass. Here and there is a stretch of open water and if you look closely you can see wild ducks at the edge of the cattails. And turtles. . . . There’s a red-winged blackbird.” And at other times, Pirsig provides another level of abstraction with insights about the concrete world and our experience of it. Here he describes, better than anyone I’ve read, why we ride:

“You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other. In a car you’re always in a compartment, and because you’re used to it you don’t realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You’re a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame.

On a cycle the frame is gone. You’re completely in contact with it all. You’re in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming. That concrete whizzing by five inches below your foot is the real thing, the same stuff you walk on, it’s right there, so blurred you can’t focus on it, yet you can put your foot down and touch it anytime, and the whole thing, the whole experience, is never removed from immediate consciousness.”

This is Pirsig at his best, when he gets outside his mind and provides description of physical detail and insights glimpsed during the ride. I found myself invested more in the frame narrative and the lives of these “characters,” and became annoyed each time I was dragged away from this narrative to the philosophical musings.

At the heart of this book is the relationship between Pirsig and his son Chris, a relationship strained by some violent rupture in its past, and one gets the sense that the bike trip is in part an attempt to heal this wound. Pirsig’s relationship with his son is very different from mine with my son, and  I longed for Pirsig to find a way to speak more openly to his son about his feelings and fears. He never does, and this is another disappointment in the book. The most touching moment of writing comes in the afterword, if you have the Harper edition.

With so much going against it, what, you must be asking, makes this book so popular? Well, it was one of the first popular books to examine our relationship with technology. I remember a roommate in first year undergrad talking about it excitedly, mentioning the contrast between Pirsig and John and Sylvia Sutherland, the couple they ride with through the first 9 days of the trip. Pirsig is able to repair his bike when things go wrong; John and Sylvia cannot, but rather fear and avoid maintenance on the bike, a relationship that extends to technology in general. In an era dominated by technology, Zen is an opportunity to reflect on our own feelings about the world as we’ve made it. Pirsig’s position is clear: we must embrace technology or risk becoming enslaved by it, victims of third-rate motorcycle mechanics and their inflated costs. There’s a moral obligation, according to Pirsig, to learn how to fix your bike.

And while I’m not a philosopher, I think Zen was one of the first philosophical treatises to bring Eastern thought into the stream of the Western dialectic. Pirsig’s goal is ambitious: nothing less than to bridge the Cartesian subject/object divide that underlies Western thought. It was probably also ahead of its time in casting a spotlight on mental illness, a subject that only now, over 40 years later, we as a society are starting to acknowledge and discuss more openly.

Yes, the bike is you, and you must work on yourself like the bike. I’m a strong believer that everyone has to do some serious personal work at some time in his or her life; otherwise your shit catches up to you, like the skunk stripe of mud that gets flicked up your back. It can be a divorce, a series of failed relationships, or a deep depression. I spent the bulk of my 20’s reading Carl Jung and Robert Bly, journaling, and doing dream analysis. Pirsig has opened a conversation about mental illness as much as presented an inquiry into values. He folds Buddhist spirituality into social critique, and I believe it’s this combination of personal and social inquiry that has given the book its wide appeal through the decades. Despite my misgivings, I believe it’s an important read. Just skim the middle sections.

The Wish List, 2016

/ 650thumper / 2 Comments

santa_moto

My wife and I have a difference of opinion on gift-giving. In her family, it’s common to send out gift suggestions around birthdays and Christmastime. They come over the phone or via email from distant family, or they are dropped—maybe not an entire list but a single suggestion—into a conversation on a completely unrelated topic, seemingly innocuously, as if accidentally, usually with one’s back turned. I get it: you’re trying to help the other person out, who legitimately might have no idea of what you want. If this is a distant family member, that makes sense. But if it’s your spouse, well, you have to wonder how well your soulmate knows you.

I, on the other hand, love the element of surprise, and am willing to gamble my gift receiving in the hope of being pleasantly surprised. I also like giving gifts. I like the challenge of trying to think of that very thing someone has always wanted although he or she doesn’t realize it until the epiphany of opening my gift. My sister says I have gifting issues, but I say I’m just a kid at heart. The best part of Christmas is not the turkey dinner, the family visits, the work parties, the chocolates, sweets, egg nog, the smell of pine in the living room, the decorative lighting . . . no! It’s opening gifts, damnit! It’s getting to be both a kid again and Santa at the same time, if only for a morning.

It is therefore completely against my gifting policy to write this blog, which is a composite wish list of my most desired motorcycle gear. These are the things I would buy tomorrow if I happened upon about $4,000 and had my debts and mortgage paid and about three times what I actually have in my RRSP and child poverty worldwide was a thing of the past. It’s not meant so much as a wish list to my spouse or anyone else but a dream list to myself. Fortunately, I don’t need any of this stuff to fulfill my plans for next season, but they sure would make my journeys more enjoyable.

First up is a new seat. The BMW’s Rotax engine is the best thumper going, but their saddle sure does suck! I noticed it immediately upon going for my first ride. Well, what I noticed immediately is that the seat is sloped forward so it feels like the boyz are constantly crushed against the airbox. What took about another five or six hours on the seat to notice is that it’s not just the boyz that have complaint. After that first tour, when I put 800 kms. on the final day, I had a new tactile understanding of the term “saddle sores.” So if there’s one item I am somehow going to purchase at the beginning of next season, even if I have to sell body parts to get it, it’s the Touratech Comfort Seat, Extra High.

ttsaddle

Yeah, BMW has a comfort seat, but why reward them for putting a cheap seat on an otherwise excellent bike? I’m really happy with my Touratech panniers and I have a lot of confidence in this German company, which seems cut from the same cloth as BMW itself. I’m going to go with the extra high because I can easily afford another 2 inches on the height (my mom’s nickname for me is Longshanks), and it will change the ergonomics and make me less cramped. I would go with the FreshTouch version, which is covered in some technical material that somehow doesn’t retain heat as much as regular vinyl.

I plan to start some off-roading and I saw at the Simon Pavey school that motocross boots are mandatory for their courses, so a pair is on my list—not that I’m going to Pavey’s school in Wales, but I understand why he thinks they are necessary. The body parts most likely to be injured in a fall are your feet and lower legs, and when you are off-roading, especially learning to off-road, I imagine you fall a lot. The bike can fall on your leg or you can clip something like a trunk or rock when you plant a foot to corner. Now I don’t need a premium boot, not even an intermediate boot; an entry-level should do just fine and from the research I’ve done, Alpinestars is the brand. So on my wish list is a pair of Tech 1 AT’s.

tech1

If I were going higher end, I would probably get a pair of Sidi’s, but these are the only boots under $200 with a hinge/blade system for increased flexibility. I also like that they have a sewn sole, so you can have it replaced by your local cobbler when it wears out. The buckles are plastic but you can swap them out for the metal buckles found on the more expensive Tech 7’s if desired.

My next purchase will be an off-road helmet. I love my Arai Signet-Q touring helmet. It’s light, comfortable, really well ventilated, has the Pinlock anti-fog system, and SNELL certification, but . . . it was $800! I simply can’t afford another Aria helmet, even though the XD-4 is an amazing helmet. I went looking for something less expensive that wouldn’t be a huge sacrifice in quality and found a company named LS2 which makes quality lids at a fraction of the price of the big boys. The one I’ve got my eye on is the 436 Pioneer. It’s got a polycarbonate shell so it’s light, has a tonne of venting, an optically correct, fog-, UV- and scratch-resistant visor, a drop-down sun visor (great for touring), and is ECE rated. Best of all, it’s built for long-oval head shapes, which is what I have and right in line with the Signet-Q. I was so stoked about finding this helmet I almost bought one last summer but held back, hoping (praying?) they would release one in 2017 in a blue and white graphic to match my jacket. In writing this blog, I went to their site and lo and behold:

ls2_436

I’m a happy man.

Next up would be some auxilary lighting. That first tour to New Hampshire taught me that it’s not always possible to get to where you are going before sundown. Also that there are animals crossing the road at night. That road-kill incident sent me looking for secondary lighting and the Denali D4’s are on my wish list.

denali_d4s

These babies will send a beam almost 700 metres down the road in front of you. Better still, the combo beam and wide-angle lights also illuminate the surrounding roadside like it’s daytime. Because they are LED’s, they pull only 3 amps per pair. Wiring is easy, and you can wire them either into your high-beam switch or, as I might, a separate switch; I have an empty switch next to my four-ways that I could use or save for some fog lights. There is bike-specific mounting hardware so these will tuck in nicely at the top of my forks.

denali-mount

Okay, now we get into the practical stuff. Sleeping. If I’m going to camp while en route across the continent, I’m going to put the money I’m saving on motel costs toward the best inflatable mattress money can buy. My ultralight Thermarest is okay for 5 nights of canoe-camping, but for anything longer, especially when daytime concentration is essential to staying alive, I want a better mattress. I remember seeing one at La Cordée a few summers ago when I was buying a new mattress. It had a built-in pump, inflated I believe to about 4″ thick, was puncture resistant, and packed up smaller than a sleeping bag. Why, oh why, didn’t I buy it then? On my list is something like it. Suggestions, anyone?

Even more practical are tools for fixing a flat. So far I’ve been flirting with disaster. Anyone touring in remote areas has to carry sufficient tools to patch a puncture. Unfortunately, my bike uses tubed tires. The tubeless kind are so easy to fix with those plugs, but on a tubed tire you have to be able to remove the wheel, remove the tire, patch the hole, replace the tire, and re-inflate. The patching is the least of my worries. I’ve been patching bicycle tires practically since I was pre-verbal; it’s the other stuff that concerns me. I want to be able to break that bead and get the tire off and on without damaging the rim. On Adventure Rider Radio, I heard about BeadBrakR by BestRest Products. beadbrakrIt’s a series of tire irons that fit together to create a tool to leverage the tire off the rim. So you have your bead breaker and tire irons in one convenient pack. BestRest also produce the CyclePump to re-inflate the tire. Yes, you can use CO2 cartridges, but you only get one shot with them. The CyclePump is small enough to pack easily and runs on your 12V port, so if your patch isn’t perfect, or if for some reason you can’t patch the hole, you can use the pump repeatedly to get you to the nearest service centre or, if you’re really in the sticks, to phone service.

Speaking of safety, another little tool that I think would bring my wife peace of mind is the Spot Gen3. gen3_productIt’s a small, clip-on device that works with satellite technology to do a number of things. It can track your movement, so your wife will always know exactly where you are. Hmm . . . Okay, so don’t take it to your high school reunion then. Press another button and you can check-in with family to let them know you’re okay when out of cellphone range; it will send an email with GPS coordinates or a link to your location on GoogleMaps. This will be handy even on group rides to The States to avoid texting charges. Press another button to alert them you need help in non-life-theatening situations, and still another to hail the helicopter ambulance.  So if you’re planning a solo trip up to Deadhorse, AK, on the coast of the Beaufort Sea, as I am, this should be in your stocking.

Finally, we come to the most important items and the ones that, at about a thousand dollars apiece, will probably be on my list next Christmas too. I love my Joe Rocket leather jacket. I bought it as a starter jacket off eBay for a song and it’s been my one and only jacket so far. I zip the quilted liner in and out as needed, sometimes several times a day as temperature fluctuates, and throw a cheap rain jacket and pants over everything if the skies open up. But what I’d love, eventually, hopefully in this lifetime, is a Klim adventure jacket and matching pants.

Badlands.jpgKlim are the undisputed leaders in riding apparel and for good reason. They spend a lot of money on research and development, and all their products are premium quality. For example, the armour in their jackets is D30, which feels like soft, pliable rubber but molecularly stiffens upon impact; you can wrap this stuff like silly putty around your finger and then take a hammer and whack away to your heart’s content. And they’ve developed something called SuperFabric which is five times more abrasion resistant than leather with only half the weight. Gore-Tex means no need for an exterior waterproof jacket or zip-in liner. Warm in cold, wicking with vents in heat, this bad-boy is a one-jacket, climate control centre for four-season riding, and when the only thing separating you from the elements or the asphalt is your clothing, your jacket is the most important investment next to the bike itself. A Klim jacket will take me from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego in comfort and safety. I haven’t decided yet whether I want the Induction or, for a few hundred dollars more, the Badlands, but one thing I am sure of is that whichever model I eventually get, it will be in the hi-viz colour. When Marilyn and I drove the Cabot Trail a few summers ago, we definitely found the hi-viz jackets caught our eye at a distance. I don’t even think hi-viz comes at a coolness cost these days; rather, as I’ve claimed in a previous post, I think hi-viz is the new cool.

Most of these items are to set me up for the adventure riding I’m longing to try. Now I’ve got the bike and the licence, but if feels like those things are just a start. I remember during my first theory class in my licensing course, the instructor warned us that “this sport will latch onto your wallet worse than your ex-wife.” Having experienced the financial cost of one divorce, I almost fled the building. Now I see what he was talking about. But he continued by suggesting to pace ourselves, to “not go crazy” but slowly build up our gear. And to avoid a second divorce, that is what I’m going to do. In the meantime, a wish list is a fun way to dream and plan, research, and select, without the messy consequences of actually buying. Like window shopping.

No doubt your wish list is different from mine. What do you hope Santa leaves under the tree? Merry Christmas, and happy and safe travels in 2017.

Screw You!

/ 650thumper / Leave a comment

20161127_121432

You’d think that my biggest frustration last week would have been when I accidentally broke my gas cap. It was the final fill-up before putting the bike into storage, more final than the fill-up which is part of my winterizing for storage. You see, I usually add the fuel stabilizer, then fill the tank, then go for a little ride to mix the stabilizer into the gas and work it down into the injectors, as well as heat the chain wax and oil. Then I top up again. It was on this final top up that I broke the cap. Jung would have something to say about this but I don’t, not about the breaking anyway. I’m going to write about the fixing.

Or you might think my biggest frustration would have been when I heard how much a replacement cap was going to cost. It’s a gas cap, right? How much can it cost? Okay, this is a BMW, so whatever figure you have in mind, triple it. Then triple it again. You’ll be pretty close. I wasn’t that surprised when the nice parts guy at BMW told me the amount and I said so. He missed the irony, but then maybe it was a language thing. Then he said, “You’re not surprised? Oh, then, actually it’s $ __________!” (tripled again). Big joke. (Laughing.) This time I missed the irony. Did I say he was a nice parts guy?

No, the biggest frustration of the week was in trying to remove one screw to replace this gas cap. After I had ordered it, received the call that it was in, gone and held my nose and paid for it, I figured the worst was over. But I was wrong.

The gas cap is all one unit, which is why it costs so much: the cap, the hinge, and the flange are all one piece, so while I just broke the hinge, I had to buy the whole shebang. The upside, or so I thought, was that swapping the old one out would be easy. Six screws. You undo the screws, you take the old unit off, you put the new unit on, you replace the screws. This is Motorcycle Mechanics 101. But what they don’t teach you in MM101 is that nothing, no job, never, ever, is simple.

Five screws came out like a charm. The sixth did not. At first I thought the screw must be stripped, so tried pulling up as I turned. Sometimes you can skip over the stripped thread and get the next one to catch and you are out of the woods. But I soon discovered that what the screw screws into was also spinning. Now normally when this happens, you simply get hold of the nut on the other side with another socket or wrench or, if necessary, vise-grips—whatever it takes—but you can usually stabilize one side and turn the other and, again, get out of the woods.

But what do you do when the fitting that the screw screws into is embedded in the side of your plastic gas tank and covered with a metal flange? You can’t get at what is spinning, not with a socket or a wrench or vise-grips or even pointed-nose pliers, not with a screwdriver (trying to jam it down and wedge it somehow enough for the screw to release), not with a pick, not with the bent-nose pliers you just bought hoping they might do, not with a chisel to cut off the damn thing since you are replacing it anyway, nope—not even the miracle tool advertised on late-night infomercials is going to get you out of these woods. “Are you fucking kidding me!” I bellowed at the top of my lungs, and since I was in my shed, the acoustics were such that the preschoolers across the park must have heard me. For sure my wife did, for she soon arrived, presenting herself and the dog as Cheering Party, offering tea and biscuits, and helpful advice like “Why don’t you phone Nice Parts Guy and ask if he has any ideas?” But I happen to know why Nice Parts Guy works in Parts and not Service. And I know that Service doesn’t give free advice; they say “Bring the bike in,” which in this case was not an option.

But then she said something brilliant, so brilliant that my grease-monkey brain had overlooked it. “Why don’t you take a break and look online?” Now it’s not like Siri is going to know how to remove a slipping screw from the side of the gas tank on an f650GS, but one of the “inmates” of The Chain Gang probably does! The Chain Gang—so-called because the 650 was the first chain-driven bike BMW made—is a user forum consisting of 11,493 members, all of whom own my bike or a close cousin. It is a veritable fount of knowledge on all things relating to my specific motorcycle. Whatever issue you might be having, someone else has already had it and solved it. What did people in my situation do before the internet? Oh yeah, they belonged to real user groups.

So I posted my problem and before the day was out another user replied, not with an answer but to say he’d encountered the same problem. Since his cap was merely rusted, not broken, he simply replaced the other five screws and lived with it. He said he was curious too if anyone had an answer. Then someone did. He suggested drilling off the head of the screw. My concern with this plan is that I’d still be left with now a head-less screw seized inside a still-spinning fitting, so it wouldn’t solve the problem. A little back-and-forth and soon we, yes now “we” because that’s the nature of a bike forum, had another plan: I could use a drill, not to drill the head off but burn the fitting out of its socket. With the other five screws out, I knew there was enough play to get my fingers under the ring and pull as I spun the screw and fitting. With time and patience, eventually the plastic would give and the fitting would release. Then I could grip the fitting with some pliers (or my teeth, perhaps, by that point might be preferable) and unscrew the screw, then glue the fitting back into the empty socket. That was the plan.

But first I needed this tool. All new jobs require one new tool.

20161127_132133

This allowed me to put any of my 3/8″ sockets on my cordless drill. I put the torx socket on, drilled (counter-clockwise) and pulled and in no time the fitting was out. Here is what it looks like out, next to the screws.

20161127_124347

It’s brass and the rounded end goes down into the plastic. It is “gripped” by surrounding plastic which had deteriorated and given way. The top is squared.

Here is a photo of the emptied cavity with the remaining five fittings.

20161127_124257

Yes, that is gasoline sloshing around inside.

The next part of the job was glueing the fitting back in. I decided to use epoxy glue since I’ve had good luck with it on plastic before. This is where I get to play artist, mixing the epoxy and hardener on my palette.

I’m sure others have their own methods for mixing epoxy but I use waxed paper and a nail. This particular brand fortunately ended up the exact shade of grey I needed.

20161127_175628.jpg

The first time I tried, I made the mistake of putting glue in the cavity and then trying to press the fitting back in, thinking the glue would squirt up into the vacant space at the sides and surround the fitting. But it didn’t, perhaps it was because it was 1 degree Celsius out and the epoxy was stiff, but the fitting sat too high. So I quickly cleaned the fitting and cavity before anything set and started again. The second time I put epoxy just around the “neck” of the fitting and none in the cavity. I guessed the quantity just right. The fitting bottomed out and the epoxy came just flush. I had just a little excess to clean away. Then since it was cold, I used a hairdryer to help it set. All in all, it looked pretty good.

20161127_131147

After that, it was just a “simple” matter of replacing the rubber seal, the metal flange, the new gas cap unit, and all six screws. I did not tighten the new one but will wait until the spring when I’m confident everything has set hard before completely tightening it. I’m now thinking I might put some anti-seize grease on it, just in case I have to remove it again in the future. That particular fitting seems to be especially tight.

I’m no expert but I’ve done quite a lot of mechanical work, including changing a clutch on my car this past summer. But this single screw sure had me stumped! It’s funny how sometimes the seemingly simplest jobs can be the hardest. Most jobs involve approximately 25% familiarity with tools, 25% understanding of basic mechanics, and 50% problem-solving. It’s one unforeseen snag after another, some bigger than others. You have to keep your cool, take your time, seek advice where you can, and persist. It also helps to have a partner who injects a little something foreign into the mix when needed.

Thanks to my wife Marilyn, and Phil (aka backonthesaddle) at The Chain Gang for getting me over some hurdles to the finish. The bike is now ready to ride first warm weather next spring.

20161127_141231

 

The Big Sleep

/ 650thumper / Leave a comment

winterizing

It’s the saddest time of the year. The leaves are down, the birds have flown, and the bike is in storage. A part of us goes into hibernation, only to reawaken when crocuses push through the last of the melting snow.

I love living in this part of the world. The ability to experience all four seasons is actually restricted to relatively few people living in a narrow geographical band circling the earth, and I happen to be one of those lucky few. When it’s stinking hot in the summer, we long for the days of sweaters, tobogganing, outdoor ice hockey, and skiing. When the wind-chill factor makes snot freeze and there’s two feet of snow to clear from the driveway, we think of summer soccer, swimming at the cottage, and lounging with a good book in the backyard. There’s little that’s more spectacular than the natural beauty of autumn in a boreal forest (maybe the aurora borealis?), and you’d have to be a zombie not to have your heart quicken a beat in spring when everything comes back to life, including your sex life. Maybe even zombies come back to life in the spring; I’m not an expert.

I’m thinking of the seasons of the Canadian south because, as much as I like all four in their own particular ways, I wouldn’t mind being able to ride year-round. Winters in Europe, or most of Europe anyway, are like early spring here: cold, grey, drizzly. Okay, not very enjoyable but you can ride in that. And if I lived in southern United States, I could ride through the winter. In fact, some bikers migrate south for the winter, taking their tours in late fall and riding towards the heat, then shipping their bikes back in the spring. That’s not an option for a teacher so, this weekend, the bike went into storage.

Another thing I long for? A heated garage. My house is a converted summer cottage so no basement and no garage. It would be so, so nice simply to pull into a garage after the final ride and park the bike, pull down the door. Then everything I’m about to say I did with numb fingers on my driveway in the cold of late autumn I could do in a warm garage, plus more. I could putz and play, do those big maintenance jobs over the winter instead of cutting into valuable riding time during the summer.

The main purpose of winterizing the bike is to protect it from the effects of time and humidity. I change the oil so the engine is not sitting in dirty oil all winter. For my bike, which has a dry sump system, that’s a full afternoon job. I start by removing all the bodywork which allows me access to the upper oil tank, which is located where a “normal” bike’s gas tank is. There’s also a plug at the bottom of the engine on the oil pan, and that sump plug is covered by the engine guard. So the engine guard has to be removed as well as the bodywork. So I’m basically stripping down my bike just to change the oil.

But here’s where it gets interesting. I need to heat the oil before draining. Do I remove that stuff after the ride or before? I’ve become pretty quick at doing it but it still takes me long enough that I decided to remove it first, ride the bike, then drain the oil. Yeah, I could have just idled the bike on the driveway to heat the oil, and I’ve done that before, but the chain also has to be cleaned and lubed before storage, and I wanted to heat the chain too so the new lube works into the 0-ring seals. It’s these seals that must be prevented from drying and cracking, thus shortening the life of the chain. So with both the oil and the chain to be heated, I stripped the bike and went for a ride. Anyone seeing me riding along the 20 Ouest with no bodywork on the bike must have thought I had either lost my mind or my fairing.

Next I removed the battery, which cannot freeze, and brought it into my house. Then I removed a spark plug, squirted a little oil (about a tablespoon) into the cylinder, and rotated the engine a few times to coat the piston rings and cylinder lining. This prevents the rings from drying and the cylinder from rusting through the winter. Actually, I lie. I started to rotate the engine—putting the bike in top gear and rotating the back wheel by hand—but realized this way is too much work so put the battery back in and used the starter to rotate the engine. (Note to self for next year.) Since my bike has a kill-switch on the kickstand, a safety feature so I don’t ride off with it accidentally down, I used that to prevent the engine from firing.

Next I clean the engine. This year I discovered a fantastic new product called S100. Since I had the crash and engine guards off, I decided now was the time to give the underside of the bike a thorough cleaning. I was going to use an auto engine cleaner to cut through that grease and grime but was worried it might be too strong and would damage some of the components. I asked at my local shop and was told about S100. It’s amazing! You just spray it on and hose it off with a strong jet of water. For the real tough stuff, I used a soft-bristle brush, but really even that is not necessary with this product.

With the engine clean, I coated a rag with light motor oil and wiped it down, again as a rust-inhibitor. Last year I used another great product called ACF-50 that my cousin Mark told me about. It was tough to find here in Canada and I had to mail order it and didn’t get ahead of that this year, so used the light motor oil instead. ACF-50 though is much better. It stops corrosion on contact and coats and prevents future corrosion. It was designed for use in the aerospace industry and is safe for electronics, so you can spray it on indiscriminately without worry. It’s good for 12 months so I really should just apply it each year as part of my winterization. Ironically, ACF-50 is made in Canada, so you’d think it would be easier to find here. Last year as part of my effort to track some down I drove to some remote abandoned building east of Montreal on the promise that someone there had some. I tell you, it’s that good. Yes, this is like a hard drug for bikers and you have to speak easy to the right people to get some. When I got to the building I knocked and looked in the windows but no one answered the door. Then I saw the blinds in an upstairs window move and noticed bullet holes in said window and decided maybe it was best to buy online. This is the honest-to-God truth. ACF-50. It’s good stuff, man! The light motor oil pales in comparison.

I paid particular attention to the exposed steel of the front forks. I even squirted a drop of oil on the fork rings, then compressed the forks a few times to work the oil into the seals. This prevents them from drying during the winter. Next I replaced all the bodywork and gave it the full clean and wax treatment. I know, most of my panelling is plastic, but I still feel the wax helps protect against acidification and oxidation, especially since I live near an airport and it rains jet fuel around here. The last step in protecting against moisture was to spray a little WD-40 (why do all these products have some cryptic combination of letters and numbers, like an internet password?) in the exhaust pipes and cover each with a plastic bag tied off with a rubber band. I plugged the air intake ports too, preventing critters from making those cavities their winter home.

Finally I backed the bike into the shed, put it on the centre-stand, then used my new motorcycle jack to lift the front tire off the floor of the shed so both tires are suspended. This prevents flat spots from developing. I also dropped the air pressure in the tires a few pounds. I covered the bike to protect it from getting scratched should one of the garden tools fall on it. Then I hummed it a little lullaby but there was no kissing, and no tears. It’s a lot to remember, and I found this wikiHow document helpful to review so I didn’t forget something.

I won’t be posting as much through the off-season but watch for sporadic posts on book reviews, trip planning, and my current gear wish list.