Timothy King – Page 14 – Mechanical Sympathy

stupid is as stupid does

Digital technology has gotten this reputation for curing all our ills as far as student engagement goes. The logic you hear often sounds like, “give the digital natives the technology and sit back! Prepare to be amazed!”

I happened to see “Chalkboard Jungle” on the weekend before my first year teaching in 2004. In the (1955) film the new English teacher is desperately trying to engage his angry and disenfranchised inner city students. He eventually finds that the ‘new’ film projectors catch their attention. He has a talk with one of the older teachers who asks hopefully if the new technology will cure their students’ lack of interest. The young teacher shrugs, but he’s not about to put down the one thing he’s found that takes the heat off.

The frantic grasping at technology hasn’t changed. This week someone kindly tweeted this:

http://www.hastac.org/blogs/cathy-davidson/its-not-technology-stupid-response-nyt-twitter-trap

… and she’s right, it’s not the technology. It won’t make the teaching work, it won’t make people wiser or smarter than they are. Our unwillingness to adapt to change is certainly causing chaos, but what might be worse is our belief that technology will somehow make better people.

In 2006 one of my students brought an Orwellian piece of media futurism into our media studies class:

http://robinsloan.com/epic/

The part that stuck with me was:

“At it’s best, edited for the most savvy readers, EPIC is a summary of the world, deeper, broader, and more nuanced than anything ever available before. But at it’s worst, and for too many, EPIC is merely a collection of trivia, much of it untrue, all of it narrow, shallow, and sensational.”

Pretty good description of modern media use, eh? This piece of speculation was originally written in 2004, and whether or not we end up in a Googlezon meganopoly or not, the simple truth that the internet and digital technology looks to empower its user with access to information remains true. Given great access to information, ignorant people will do ignorant things. Stupid people will enable their stupidity in new, interesting and more encompassing ways; digital media gives you what you ask for.

Believe it or not, technology will not magically cure idiocy, or make all students eager, insightful or, in some cases, even vaguely useful. Technology, be it cell phones, computers or even just internet access, has no inherent ability to improve character, or intelligence. While being morally ambiguous it also tends to hand over information with minimal effort, negating attempts to build self discipline and improve mental stamina around task completion. In the process academic skills, especially complex skills that require long developmental times (literacy, logic, etc), become a foreign concept to a mind that has trained itself around short term narcissistic social media navel gazing.

The brain is a very flexible organ. If we train it with asinine navel gazing, it will end up in a feedback loop that develops a very inaccurate sense of our abilities and self value; social media and technology focused around our wants and needs will kill humility stone dead.

The idea that teaching needs to change into facilitation only seems to feed this vacuum. The act of teaching involves a great deal more than making sure students know how to get to information and providing them with technology to do it. Teachers don’t just model learning, they also model civil behavior, intelligence in action, and many other traits you hope students will notice and eventually emulate. Left to their own devices (pun intended), many of the digital natives develop habits that make the digital tools we are developing look more like lobotomy instruments rather than tools to maximize human awareness and learning.

Burying your head in the sand at the onslaught of change doesn’t help; ignoring this will just make you irrelevant very quickly.

Adopting a pie in the sky belief in some kind of intuitive magic power children have over technology is ludicrous, actually quite akin to the burying your head in the sand (you’re really just transferring responsibility to the magic children).

As mentioned in Davidson’s article, we need to start recognizing that people are the prime movers and the technology just amplifies the activity, whatever it is. Until we start rationally looking at what is happening in our rapidly evolving mediascape and assigning responsibility to people’s choices, we are going to find ourselves creating fictions and blaming gadgets. In rough seas like these, we need to appreciate some hard truths.

How to Break/Resize/Install a Master Link on a Motorcycle Chain

A 2007 Ninja 650R with its pants down (chain and front sprocket cover removed)

If you’ve never done chains and sprockets on a motorcycle before, there is more to them than what you’ve done with a bicycle chain. Being an open part of the drive system, they offer a relatively easy way to modify your bike’s performance. With smaller (faster) sprockets you can produce a revvier, shorter geared engine. With a shorter chain you can close up your wheel-base creating a bike more willing to change direction. Chains and sprockets are a bike fettler’s delight.

On top of sprockets, you also have a pile of chain choices. O-ring chains are the cheaper, lower efficiency alternative, while X-ring chains offer more efficiency and less maintenance at a higher cost. They also come in a rainbow of colours and a variety of sizes from little dirt bikes all the way up to thousand plus cc super-bikes.

Chain sizes and dimensions

From little dirt bikes to bike motors.

Chain sizing is based on the width of the chain and the length between the pins in the chain. You’ve got match all these up with the right sprockets or it won’t all fit together. With so many factors in play, it pays to get a handle on chain mechanics before you take a run at changing the chain on your motorbike.

Here’s a primer on how to break a chain. Some people say cutting a chain but you aren’t cutting it, you’re breaking it by popping the rivet out and dismantling the chain links.

How to Break a Chain:

If you’re removing your old bike chain, find the master link (it should be the one that’s different from all the rest)
Put a chain breaking tool on the chain and push the rivets out – do a bit on each side at a time until the chain ‘breaks’ open. I did this with a bicycle chain breaker (see bottom) and it worked fine.
Once you’ve ‘broken’ apart the master link the chain will come apart and you can pull it through and free of the bike.

To reduce chain size on a motorcycle:

if you have a 520 or smaller chain and a good motorcycle specific chain link breaking tool you can simply push the rivet through (see the video at the bottom)
if you don’t have specific tools, grind or file down the rivet and then tap it out with a hammer and punch pin. If you grind down the rivet you can also use a bicycle weight chain breaker (see a pic at the bottom) to push out the worn down rivet.
triple check which link you want to pull and use something like Gearing Commander to make sure you’ve got the right number of links in your chain. (This is what I’m kicking myself for not doing).
Using the bicycle chain puller on filed down pins, I pushed on side and then the other and then repeated the process and the rivet popped loose along with the outer chain links. Since you’re only filing down the outer link (which you’ll chuck after) it doesn’t matter if you file into it a bit.
With the chain dismantled you should now have two inner links ready for a new master link.

Installing a New Master Link:

Install the little rubber washers on the master link rivets and slide it onto the chain – do this on the sprockets as it’s easier to do with some tension on the chain.
put the last two rubber washers on and the end plate and then use the chain tool or some other kind of clamp to press the side plate on.
if you’ve got a rivet type master link you need a light hand and some patience to press in the rivet ends. If you’re too heavy handed you’ll bind the chain and swear a lot.
The more traditional type of master link is the kind I was familiar with from bicycles. It comes with a slid on clip.

Don’t freak out if you’ve got the rivet type master link, just make sure you have the right tool handy. The rivet type link is very strong and performs pretty much like all the other links if installed properly, which is why you’ll find it exclusively on high performance chains. Check out the youtube video at the bottom for a good primer on how to do this.

If you take your time and work through it slowly, you’ll have a new chain on in no time. If you want to get into sprockets the rears are remarkably easy to do. When you remove the rear wheel bolt the wheel drops down and the floating rear caliper on the Ninja 650r simply disengaged and I hung it on the frame. You can then remove the wheel. The rear sprocket is held on with your typical nuts and was easy to swap out.

This front sprocket is a f&#*er.

The front sprocket was in good shape, so I gave up on it. Others online have said that they are pretty straightforward if you have an air gun, but even with a breaker bar I couldn’t budge the damn thing and I can pick up a car by the fender. You remove the front sprocket by bending back the holding washer, putting the bike in gear, stepping on the rear break to hold everything still and removing the nut (it’s a good fit on a big 27mm bit). If there’s a trick to this (other than getting a compressor, air tank and air tools), I’d love to hear it.

Follow up with Chain And No Agony for how easily the new chain went on with the right tools.

If you’ve only got a bicycle chain
breaker, file or grind down the rivets
first before you push them out.

If you’ve broken bicycle chains before you know the basics. Motorcycle chains are much heavier duty so the process requires stronger tools capable of dealing with stronger rivets. If you have a bicycle chain breaker you just have to take your time and file down the rivet you’re going to push through first. It took me a couple of minutes of filing to do this. Lazy people on the internet say buy a Dremel. If you’re lazy, that’s what you should do.

VIDEOS

A video on how to break a motorcycle chain (skip to 35sec when the mechanic comes in) in order to re-size it using a motorbike specific tool

A good primer on how to install a master link (and how the pressed, rivet type master links work)

How to measure a motorcycle chain

Hillbilly mechanics: how to do a master link without special tools.

LINKS

Gearing Commander – a handy webpage that lets you compare different sprocket and chain combinations
http://www.gearingcommander.com/

DID company chain guide:
http://www.didchain.com/chainSpecs.html

Motorcycle Chain primer on about.com
http://motorcycles.about.com/od/motorcyclemaintenanc1/ss/Chain_Maint.htm

Wikipedia‘s history and technically detailed chain description
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roller_chain

Layout of a roller chain: 1. Outer plate, 2. Inner plate, 3. Pin, 4. Bushing, 5. Roller

An exhaustive history of chains!

How Motorcycles Work‘s awesome chain diagram:

2015 IndyGP Videos & Photos

I’m sorting through the photos and videos from the Indianapolis MotoGP trip… here’s what I’ve got so far:

Prior to take-off

At the Michigan International Speedway

Lunch stop in North Manchester

The back straight at Indy – what a ride!

Bike parking on the back straight

Indy golf course in the infield

Friday practice session for the 2015 Indy GP

Yamaha R1 guts

Dancing through the esses

Danny Kent doing the business (qualified first!)

The Doctor at work

The Maestro Marc Marquez doing what he does

There were many more bikes when we returned!

They compete for motorcycle insurance here?
We must not be in Ontario!

Motorcycles on Meridian

Thousands upon thousands of bikes – if it’s been built it’s here!

Michigan International Speedway

You can sign in and have a look around inside!

Indy Again

Google Story of the trip

Google auto-made video of the track day

Mostly Ironheads

The Connie is off getting safetied, and the Ninja has found a new home. I’m bikeless!

One of the things you learn about motorcycle culture is that it tends to exist underground, out of sight. For example, this week I discovered that there is a bike shop in the small town that I’ve lived in for five years. I had no idea that down the back of the industrial mall behind the country market is a specialist motorbike shop. This reminded me of our trip to Old Vintage Cranks a couple of summers ago.

I’d contacted the owner, Lloyd, over the phone during the week about getting the Concours safetied. He doesn’t usually work with ‘metric bikes’, but he was willing to look after me. Mostly Ironheads is a full service shop that, in addition to offering everything you need to maintain your bike, also offers you some genuine historical motorcycling perspective. While chatting with Lloyd he showed me a 1934 Harley Flathead engine that he was in the process of rebuilding. In the front of the shop you’ll also find a collection of customized Harleys from various decades. I’m going to bring the 3d-scanner when I return for the Connie next week and get some models of this classic American iron.

It’s convenient to wander around department store styled dealerships and bike shops, but it isn’t all that interesting beyond what you’re shopping for. Places like Mostly Ironheads run at a different speed. The proprietors are always happy to spend some time chatting with you and the chances of seeing something genuine and learning something about motorbiking are much higher.

If you’re travelling through Elora, Ontario on two wheels (and many people do to have lunch by the river in the summer), be sure to pop down behind Dar’s Country Market to Mostly Ironheads and have a look at a hidden piece of Ontario motorcycle culture.

Mostly Ironheads Website

Mostly Ironheads on Facebook

3d models of some historical Harleys

Proliferation of Fifties

Our school is the only local high school in the area. If students want Catholic or special education, they get on a school bus for over an hour a day of commuting down to Guelph. I’m a big fan of choice so, while I think it mad, I don’t have much to say about a student who wants to spend over 194 hours a year (that’s over 8 full days of riding 24 hours a day) on a bus to Guelph and back for specialized education, as long as it’s a choice they’ve made.

Ontario’s high school streams seem pretty straightforward,
they are anything but in practice.

Our public board think it wise to ship our essential level students down to Guelph for special education. This isn’t a choice, it’s a system driven process. The Guelph school for this doesn’t fill up with locals so the surrounding community schools are expected to ship their most at-need students out of their home communities every day. This is an ongoing pressure in our community.

At our recent heads’ meeting there seemed to be support for the idea of our school being a comprehensive, community school that serves everyone, but we struggle to run essential sections because parents resist putting their children into it, the board doesn’t section us to run smaller essential classes and many teachers in our school would rather be teaching academic students. It’s an uphill struggle to create a comprehensive local school that supports everyone in our community.

Because we aren’t sectioned for essential classes (those smaller sections are given to the specialist school in Guelph), we end up populating applied level classes with essential students. It is so difficult to align parent perception, board support and student ability that we place all non-academic students into the same room. This is where the proliferation of fifties comes in.

A teacher in our school recently said, and in retrospect I agree, that we place essential students into applied classes and lower course expectations to accommodate them. This not only does the essential students no favours, it also dilutes applied curriculum goals.

The people running the education system tend to be successful professional educationalists; very experienced with the system having spent little time outside it. These educators see kindred spirits in academically streamed students who are successful in school and make effective use of the system. These teachers want to teach students like themselves. Asking them to work with students who find school a challenging environment or aren’t on the same academic trajectory they experienced is difficult for them.

The predisposition of teachers makes academic curriculum somewhat sacred, but applied classes aren’t. Applied students should be on apprenticeship and college skilled labour tracks that demand hands on (applied?) skills. While less theoretical in approach, applied classes are supposed to be rigorously skills focused. When you put students who lack basic literacy and numeracy into a grade 10 applied class you make grade appropriate learning nearly impossible.

How do teachers manage this? If you fail a student, you get called into promotion meetings at the end of the semester where the grade you’ve given becomes the starting point for an inflationary process that floats fails up to passes. The best way to avoid this is to simply award a 50%. What is a fifty when it’s really a 42? At its best, a fifty means a student has not reached minimal expectations for a class. Would you want the mechanic working on your brakes to have gotten there with fifties?

The teacher I was talking to suggested that the number of fifties being handed out has mushroomed in the past few years. Those statistics aren’t made available to us because they would make a travesty of curriculum expectations, but I suspect he is right. A fifty means the government gets to say graduation rates are up. A fifty means the ride ends at graduation because no secondary program would accept a student with a D average. A fifty means you’re not sitting in promotion meetings watching your semester of careful assessment being swept away to support policy.

The range of student skill in my classes is astonishing. My current grade 9 classes range from students who could comfortable complete grade 11 computer engineering curriculum next to students who appear unable to read, yet I’m supposed to address that range of skills in a 50-100% range in a single course.

Perhaps we will find a way to reintegrate Ontario’s carefully designed secondary school streaming system, but considering the various pressures on it in our area, it’s going to be an uphill struggle.

NOTE

Re: school busing children…

Time isn’t the only resource being spent. School buses get 6-8mpg, Guelph is about 15 miles away. A (very conservative) 30 mile round trip (it’s much higher if you want to consider all the pickups and drop-offs) is a (very conservative) 15 litres per day of diesel (probably double that for your typical start/stop run), per bus, and we have a number of buses making that trip 194 days per year.

Someone better than I can calculate the overall environmental impact (how many other vehicles are also held up burning fuel while these buses grind down to and back from Guelph every day?). Making an economic (let alone moral) argument for shipping our essential students out of their home communities seems impossible.

Cookie Cutter ‘Formal’ Exams

We were recently told that our board is moving to a formal exam for every course model. We’re told that this needs to happen because if we don’t use formal exam days for formal exams, we’ll lose the days. Perhaps we should lose the days. Formal exams are an echo from the past. Desperately trying to ‘keep’ them by forcing them on everyone isn’t the best approach to learning, it never was. Clinging to status quo thinking seldom produces outstanding results in anything.

This conundrum once again has me feeling the friction between academic and technology classrooms. To the majority of subjects in our school, an exam for every class simply means setting up more desks and running off more photocopies.

One of our auto-shop teachers tried running a ‘formal’ exam this semester. He had tinkered with a car and then had students diagnose it. Since he doesn’t have a 24 bay garage, he has to have students approach the car one at a time in order to diagnose it. Because he is expected to have all students in the room at the same time (exams are blocked into two hour scheduled time periods, one per day), he had students come up one at a time to diagnose and resolve the problems while the rest wrote written tests that did not reflect how students had learned in his class during the semester.

Cookie cutter exam schedules for cookie cutter learners.

The formal exam structure didn’t work at all in the shop. The first kid up shouted out, “do you want me to change out this fuse?” and suddenly everyone in the room knew an answer. It then kept happening. When you’ve been teaching students to collaborate on diagnostics all semester, why would you suddenly have a summative that demands they don’t? Even if that’s what a ‘formal’ exam is?

All that effort to create a genuine assessment within a standardized exam structure was wasted, but that doesn’t stop us from being expected to bring meaningful assessment to all our technology students in this cookie cutter final exam format. How meaningful can this two hour window be when our courses are tactile, stochastic and experiential? In a class where there is a linear progression from question to answer, and were the skills are assessed on paper this works a treat, but not in tech.

Coop avoids the exam problem by creating individual summatives (each student has an interview). Of course this means that each teacher is handling 25+ hours of assessment for each class they teach. I’m surprised that they can stuff all that meaningful assessment into a single exam week. While this resolves the problem of trying to fit individualized exams into cookie cutter academic schedules, it doesn’t address the complexity of creating an entire class set of experiential problems of equal complexity (you couldn’t have the same problem because the first student out would happily tell the rest what they are about to face). Creating individualized, immersive simulation for each student might be the ultimate in summatives, but a factory styled school system isn’t remotely designed to produce that kind of individualized learning opportunity.

Is this what an exam for every course looks like? Kinda like
the floor of a very serious factory, or a university…

Would I like to create a ‘formal’ exam that offers my computer students real-world, immersive, experiential computer technology problem solving? You bet, but expecting me to do that in a two hour window for dozens of students at a time suggests that the actual goal here isn’t meaningful and genuine so much as generic and formulaic, like most ‘formal’ exams.

‘Formal’ exam is code for a university-styled, written, academic assessment. It typically involves lots of photocopying and students sitting in rows writing answers to the same questions. The teacher then spends a lot of time trying to assign value to this dimensionless form of assessment. Like many other aspects of high school, formal exams are high school teachers imitating the university professors they wished they could be.

For hundreds of thousands of dollars with corporate sponsorship
and post-secondary support, Skills Ontario championships
create meaningful, experiential tech-assessment.

If you’re looking for an example of an immersive, complex, skills based assessment, we have a fantastic home-grown example. Skills Canada does a great job of creating experiential assessment of technology knowledge and tactile abilities, but with million dollar budgets and support from all levels of government, private business and post secondary education, they exist in a different world from my classroom. They’re also catering to the top 1% of 1% of technology students. I have to cater to the other 99.9% with nothing like that kind of budget.

I’ve been mulling over how I’m supposed to create meaningful assessment for my technology students in that two hour time slot and I’m stumped. No budget is forthcoming to purchase equipment and tools so that I can have every student doing the same thing at the same time – I don’t even have enough screwdrivers for all students to be building computers at the same time, let alone the computer parts needed to build them. Those would be computer parts that some students would not ground themselves properly when installing. Funding wouldn’t just need to be there for tools, it would also have to be there to replace breakage due to incompetence.

Technology teachers already struggle trying to explain technology costs to academics with only a vague understanding and little experience in apprenticeship and the trades. When students are heavy handed or absent minded it costs us money to replace what they break, yet we struggle to get funded on par with academic courses that do most of their work on paper.

Now we face the prospect of being forced to reduce our tactile, experiential, immersive learning into cookie cutter summatives that jive with the pre-existing academic scheduling. Just when you think we might be evolving beyond the 20th Century factory model of education it rears its ugly head and demands reductionist assessment for all. Wouldn’t it be nice if we were looking to diversify summatives instead of cramming them all into the same schedule that existed fifty years ago?

Triumph Tiger History

First gen Tiger from the late ’30s

I’ve been finding out the history of Triumph Tigers from various places on the interwebs. The first Tigers were born just before World War 2 and were quickly put on hold when the war started. With rigid rear frames and girder front suspensions, these were 1930s bikes in every sense.

Tigers followed the steady evolution in motorbike technology throughout the Twentieth Century, and also followed some rather silly styling trends, like shrouding the mechanicals in 1950s aero inspired nonsense.

’69 Tiger made in the UK the same
year I was! Nice high pipes!

Things get interesting again in the 1960s, with late ’60s Tigers, along with the British motorcycle industry in general reaching a zenith before being crushed by their own weight and a lithe, hungry wave of Japanese imports.

Pam Anderson riding
a Tiger!

Through the long, dark tea time of the soul in the ’70s and ’80s (and while my parents and thousands of others fled the country) Triumph went down in flames along with much of British manufacturing. In ’83 John Bloor, a building contractor who was looking into the purchase of the derelict Triumph factory to build more homes ended up buying the brand. After sitting on it for a while he rebooted it and built a new factory.

It’s one of the best examples of British manufacturing rising out of the ashes of old money and old ideas and embracing a more effective approach to manufacturing. Without the conservative establishments of aristocratic ownership and unionized labour Bloor was able to reignite British engineering and give it chance to shine again. You might think that it isn’t properly British if it isn’t mired in limited social mobility and the kind of Kafka-esque bureaucracy that makes building something well next to impossible, but that was only a moment in Twentieth Century British history and doesn’t speak to the engineering prowess of our little island.

After Triumph rebooted in the early ’90s, the Tiger reappeared in ’93 during the second wave of model introductions. An early example of what came to be known as adventure bikes, the Tiger was a tall, long suspension, multi-purpose machine running a three cylinder engine.

Having tapped into this trend while it was still only popular in continental Europe, Triumph’s Tiger line has been a key part of their brand for the past twenty plus years. If asked what bike I’d want to take around the world tomorrow, the Tiger Explorer is at the top of the list.

Tigers have been around, in one form or another, since before World War Two. I’m looking forward to getting to know the one I found this month.

TigerLinks:
http://www.motorcyclenews.com/news/2013/march/mar1113-triumph-tifer-timeline/
http://www.classic-british-motorcycles.com/1969-triumph-tr6.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triumph_TR6_Trophy
http://www.triumphworld.co.uk/pages/triumph-enthusiasts/all-things-triumph/tiger-history.htm
http://www.rat-pack.com/TriumphHistory.php
http://www.gregwilliams.ca/?p=1693
http://www.ianchadwick.com/motorcycles/triumph/time03.html

Poetry

We’re moving into poetry in the senior academic English class I’m teaching. Poetry is one of those things that can seem a bit pretentious, especially to high school students. We looked at contemporary lyric poems to begin with. After some Practical Magic and other free verse I thought it might be time to take a swing at it ourselves. I’m curious to see what students bring to class today. Hopefully writing about something that interests them will remove that pretension and let them get some ideas on paper in the relatively unencumbered contemporary lyric format.

In My Pocket

あ and ん

alpha and omega

binary beginnings and silent ends.

ones and zeroes?

no,
math is an abstraction
but
certainty is in the machine.

waves relentlessly pound our shores,

pass through us

quantify us

connect us

ensnare us

constant attention demanded

this raging sea of yes and no,

profound and banal

personal collective

private crowd.

information constellations

in magnetic grips

lighter than a glance,

more certain than a second thought.

frozen moments of certainty

tumble to an event horizon

making sense of the senseless

at a ferocious rate.

I have a text!

Track Day Planning

I’m pretty keen to go do a track day, and I have a buddy who is the same. The Grand Bend Motorplex does motorcycle open lapping on its track. I found GBM through motorcycletrackdays.ca. The upcoming SOAR racing event at Grand Bend offers open motorcycle lapping prior to their weekend events. That might be a good time for two nØØbs to go as there will be experienced track day people on hand to help us fumble through the technical inspection.

I figured it would be a show up on what you rode here on and go on the track, as you would with a car, but bikes seem a bit more involved. Here is the list of motorcycle specific technical requirements:

Is your kickstand secured? Your spring return isn’t enough on a racetrack. Use a plastic strap tie or duct tape to secure your kickstand in the up and locked position before you come to tech.
Tape over your speedometer. It’s the rule.
Make sure your throttle returns quickly and positively. We want to see it snap back when you release the grip.
Change your antifreeze for straight water. If your bike puts antifreeze on the surface, it shuts the entire track down and may result in suspension. Antifreeze is 100 times worse than water on asphalt (It’s like wet ice). Swap it out for water before you proceed to tech.
Tape over or remove lights, signal and mirrors. They all shatter and they all puncture tires.
Brakes: Make sure they’re properly functioning, front and back, with no leaks, because we’ll check.
Chain: Check your drivechain adjustment. Too tight or too loose means breakage. Refer to manufacturer’s specification. Also, check your master link. A rivet style link is preferred, but a standard ‘slip on’ while suffice if you put a dab of silicone on the key to secure it.
Now that you’ve ensured your brake lines don’t leak, check the rest of the bike. Your engine and suspension components must also be leak free.
Overall track worthiness: These are the small things that can lead to disaster. Loose lines can snag. If it can flop around, it can be snagged and lead to a crash.
Body: All body parts must be secured or removed.
Mechanical: Check your fasteners and ensure they’re secured at recommended torque.
Tires: Properly inflated, with structural integrity intact (sidewall, tread, steel-belts, bulges).

Most of that is common sense/maintenance, but there are a couple of bits that will require some thought. Tying up the kickstand is all well and good, but that means you’re bringing a rear stand to keep the bike upright. Swapping out the antifreeze also means you need to bring some distilled water. Some tools, disposable gloves and fluids would probably be a good idea too. Suddenly the back of the bike I want to ride to the track day is looking like a hardware store. You wouldn’t want to ride an hour and a half to a track to find out you don’t have what you need to go around it. Short of asking for a pit crew to accompany you in a four wheeler, riding solo to a track day seems difficult if not impossible.

Of course, this leads you down the road to a trailer, which then begs the question, why use your road bike for track days when you can pick up an older sport bike for not much, not have to pay for road insurance on it and spec it out specifically for track days. Stripped of lights and needless accessories like rear foot pegs and indicators, you’d be ready to ride as soon as you roll it off the trailer, and the machine would be tailored for the track.

I’ve been to several racing schools, but the one time I really got into it was while living in Akita, Japan. Kyowa Race track was a small carting track deep in the mountains south east of the city. Kazutoyo, a student of mine, was an avid racer (he came to Canada for a summer to participate in a Mosport racing mechanics program). We’d go up there half a dozen times in the summer and spend the day hauling the carts around that bendy circuit as quickly as we could.

The vehicle of choice for the carts and the paraphernalia that went with them was a cargo van. We’d be able to fit three people, the tools, the disassembled cart and spare tires and other odds and ends all in the van and head to the track. Riding around at break neck speeds was awesome, but I have fond memories of all the fettling that when on in the pits too; it’s all part of the race experience.

Ford Canada’s handy Transit Van Builder got me all set with a customized utility van that could carry two bikes and gear with ease… things I’d do if I were rich!

Now that I’m thinking about doing a track day on two wheels I’m tempted to imitate those Japanese carting guys and get what I need to make a track day possible. I’ve been wishing for a trailer several times this summer to haul lumber. Having one on hand and a vehicle to haul it would be handy for more than just track days.

Or just win the lottery and get the full on racing support van.

If Mechanical Sympathy were to go full on into racing, I’d grab that 1000cc VFR from Angus (in my Transit race van) and prep it for racing. Stripping off all the lights and extras and minimizing it down to a race bike. I’d be a dangerous man if I had more money.

In the meantime I’m still trying to look for ways to ride my Ninja to the track and do some laps without dragging along someone in a cage to support the activity.

Links:

Motorcycle track day primer: a good explanation of track days.
Beginner’s Guide to Track Days in Ontario: a great checklist on how to approach track days – renting a bike is what I’m now looking into…

Around The Bay: Part 2, an Informed ride

Putting on the miles and building muscle memory.

A couple of recent articles informed my circumnavigation of Georgian Bay.

Bike magazine’s resident lawyer had a great piece on the dangers of the over educated novice rider. He made the poignant observation that people who haven’t had a lot of seat time but have over-thought riding to the nth degree often have much nastier crashes than less trained but more experienced riders. Sometimes the best thing to do is instinctively grab as much brake as you can instead of overthinking an impending disaster. Perhaps riding is more of an art than a science, informed by experience, not training.

As a teacher I found this critical assessment of instruction over experience to be both interesting and probably accurate. There is a lot of anxiety over motorcycle riding from the general public I was determined to get some saddle time and learn the hard way rather than in theory. The over-focus on training and gear tries to mitigate this fear, and it helps to a degree, but if fear is what drives you, I’d suggest that motorcycling isn’t what you should be doing.

The second piece was Neil Graham’s editorial in this month’s Cycle Canada. Neil is getting back to form after an agonizing winter back injury. After everyone else had moved on Neil stayed out on track until it became kind of boring and he relaxed into the ride. In his case it was track riding on the edge, but it still spoke to the teaching of muscle memory, something that became evident in the previous Bike piece as well.

On my way out of Southern Ontario I was intentionally trying to untense muscles, especially the ones I subconsciously tense when I’m riding. Yoga probably helps with this, but I was able to sense and untense muscles in my legs and backside while riding. Being loose and heavy on the bike allowed me to ride further without fatigue. It also allowed me to respond to issues quickly and lightly. Being able to free your mind from the demands of your body and put yourself into a state of relaxation also opens up a state of heightened awareness.

Riding into my driveway on Sunday afternoon I was exhausted but elated and felt like I was coming out of some deep meditation. My mind was full of the 900 kms I’d seen, smelled and felt, and the soreness became something that I’d worked through; the second wind was a real endorphin rush. After the three hundred plus kilometre stretch down the backside of Georgian Bay I suddenly found myself operating beyond the soreness of the long ride. Coming off the very demanding highway ride to quiet back roads probably helped too.

If you’re able to find a state of intense focus while performing a strenuous mental and physical activity like riding a motorcycle, you tend to be able to find that state much more easily when you’re not on the bike and things are easier. Being able to focus and perform while under duress makes entering that state of intense awareness in other circumstances that much easier.

I guess I found that moment beyond the thinking and training where I relaxed into the saddle and became the ride. If long distance riding can do that, I suspect I’m eventually going to want to do the deed and get my iron butt.