Category: Tim’s Motorcycle Diaries

Tim’s Motorcycle Diaries

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Domino Effect

I find myself fighting a constant battle with non-riders over just how dangerous motorcycling is. They can’t understand why I would risk life and limb (or my son’s life and limb) to do something so superfluous.  Unfortunately, the press is more than willing to inflame this perception.

While I was away this weekend a news story appeared that threw more gas on the fire…

 
“In an attempt to avoid collision with the fifth wheel, the motorcycles came in contact with each other, creating a domino effect and one rider, the deceased, came in contact with the fifth wheel,  Eight men and one woman were sent to hospital with multiple injuries. The driver of the truck was not hurt.” 

 

Bloodbaths, and then five people ♥’ed it?

Where do I even begin with this?  The people involved in this crash made a number of bad decisions that led to a disaster.

 A group mentality had them passing a vehicle en masse, something you never do.  Any sane motorcyclist knows that your pass is yours and yours alone, even (especially?) when you’re in a group.  You make the move when it’s safe and practical to do it, not because the people around you are.  This is yet another reason why I don’t like riding in groups, there is pressure to ride as a unit instead of an individual.  That kind of thinking is the antithesis of why I ride.

A few weeks ago I met up with an eclectic group of riders up by the Bruce Peninsula.  At its biggest we were about half a dozen bikes.  There were a couple of times during the ride when people crossed double yellow lines and dived around traffic.  They’ve all been riding a lot longer than I have, but I found some of the moves a bit reckless, and didn’t follow.  My ride is my ride, I make the decisions.

My best guess at what the point of impact looked like.
In the video below it looks like the bikes are in a pile
in the oncoming lane, so they attempted to pass to the
left of a left turning truck and trailer.  Done on
Draw Accident Sketch.

Looking at video from the accident, it looks as though the bikers were trying to pass the left turning camper in the oncoming (left hand) lane – they were trying to beat the turning vehicle, which sounds like a bad idea no matter how you phrase it.

This reads like a litany of things not to do while riding a motorcycle.  Apart from the group mentality, attempting to pass a left turning vehicle on the left suggests a real deficit in road reading, let alone basic physics.

This kind of riding is what stopped me from getting on a motorcycle just when I was going to get my license the first time twenty years ago.  In that case a kid, late for work, gunned it through a red light and went over the hood of a left turning car; instant fatality.  The cautionary tales that come from these situations always have more to do with poor road craft than they do with the perils of riding a motorbike.

Riding a motorcycle isn’t easy.  10% of my class failed to get their introductory license through a combination of poor coordination and inability to manage the many things you’re doing on a bike (you’re using both hands, both feet and your whole body to ride it), and that was in a parking lot.  On the road there are a whole raft of other considerations on top of operating the bike.  You need to develop advanced defensive riding skills because you’ll lose in any collision; it doesn’t matter who is at fault when you get in an accident on a bike.

My suspicion is that these bikers thought their numbers and loud pipes would humble any other road user into waiting to let them pass.  Using intimidation as a road management tool is a slippery slope.  I’m not trusting my life to other people’s perception of me – more often than not they don’t see me at all.

This video was shared with us by a man who stayed at campground on the roadway where this mass accident took place pic.twitter.com/ySWNYx2FYw
— Shane Fowler (@CBCShane) July 30, 2016

Shortly after this happened I came across this great article explaining to car drivers why motorcycles act the way they do.  I’m willing to bet the people involved in this accident had no familiarity with these habits.  Riding a motorcycle is a difficult thing, but doing it well is very satisfying.  Doing it poorly is just asking for trouble.  If you’re a non-rider and you want to trot this out as an example of why motorcycling is dangerous, it’s a poor example.

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Pretty Things

I was at the local dealer yesterday getting parts (just not all the right parts).

There were pretty things in the show room:

The new Yamaha FZ-10. Some don’t like the look, but anything inspired by anime mech is mega in my books!
It’s arresting in person.

The old school Yamaha yellow & black block looks spectacular on the R1…

Like this…  Kawasaki’s awe inspiring H2 supercharged missile.

Kawasaki’s Z125pro monkey bike, what a hoot that would be (I’d look like a circus bear on a trike on it)

Logo & strakes on a ZX-14.

There is something about a sexy Italian in a bikini (fairing) that fixates me.

Moto Guzzi V7

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The Ruminating Rider: Entropy

en·tro·py

ˈentrəpē/
1. lack of order or predictability; gradual decline into disorder.
“the old bike finally succumbed to entropy amidst the weeds.”
synonyms:
deterioration, degeneration, crumbling, decline, degradation, decomposition, breaking down, collapse;


Out of high school it looked like my life’s work was going to be mechanics.  I apprenticed as a millwright and quickly found a comfortable living doing work that I found satisfying.  When I put down the tools and went to university I spent a lot of time chasing down philosophy and literature that was looking at a perfected idea of the world.  The thought of spending my time thinking about machines that were in a continual state of decay (in fact, every time you use them they are literally falling apart), seemed silly.  That they also produced pollution (both in operation and manufacture) and were generally quite wasteful put them further from my mind.  I ended up leaving mechanics and my love of vehicles behind and going into I.T. after university for those reasons.

Shop Class as Soulcraft:
if you enjoyed Zen and the Art of
Motorcycle Maintenance, you’ll
love this read!

I’d been teaching English for a number of years when I had an opportunity to switch to computer engineering.  I ended up going back to school to get my teaching qualifications as a computer technology teacher.  At that training my instructor put me on to Shop Class as Soulcraft.  Suddenly, here was a deep, insightful argument against academics for the sake of academics and a profound argument for why you should not only exercise, but celebrate your manual technical skills.  Those skills are what can ground our intelligence and give it meaning in the world around us.

You sometimes hear the term, ‘it’s academic‘ – meaning it doesn’t matter in the real world.  If you’ve spent any time in institutions of higher learning, you’ve probably noticed how insular and self serving they are.  The value they assign to academics is generated entirely by the people involved, there are no subjective criteria.  When you tie intelligence to something in the real world, the real world will cruelly and repeatedly correct assumptions that would otherwise happily exist in academia.

Having real-world hardened technical expertise is a very different thing than a background in academia.  One is relentless and demanding, the other political and collaborative.  As long as you tow the line in academia, you generally do well.  You can tow the line all you want in engineering, but if you don’t submit to the demands of reality you won’t get anywhere, no matter how well you get on with your colleagues.

I find I’m able to integrate the intellectual muscle developed in university with my manual skills very effectively; they aren’t concordant, they’re complimentary, but the idea that what I’m working on is in a constant state of entropy still bothers me.  The very best you can hope for with a machine is to maximize the time it’s operational before it inevitably fails.  I missed the perfection and timelessness of ideas found in academia.

A meditative mindset in the wind.

Like Pirsig in Zen, I often find myself ruminating while I ride.  The complex machine interaction, balance and awareness needed to operate a motorcycle sets your mind in motion, but leaves your intuition free to chase down ideas.  I write better after I’ve been riding because my brain is full of meditative juices.

On our recent ride around Lake Huron, I was pondering this idea of entropy.  I’m in my late forties now and the concept of entropy no longer applies to just machines.  I’m watching everyone get older and struggle with the inevitable.  Entropy isn’t just a state in machines, it’s how reality works.  Everything is in the process of disintegrating, the trick is to dance gracefully in the decay.  Holding back the inevitable is what life is, and if I can perform that life affirming act by resurrecting an old bike, or replacing a failed component in an injured machine, it’s not a wasted effort.  Perhaps that is part of the joy I feel when I see an older vehicle on the road long after it should have gone to scrap; it’s a symbol of defiance against the inevitable.

***

Do not go gentle into that good night
Dylan Thomas, 1914 – 1953

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.


William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
       THE SECOND COMING

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

    Surely some revelation is at hand;
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

    The darkness drops again but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?


Samurai Jack & The Mountain

 

 

The journey’s the thing – if you’ve got 20 minutes and 
haven’t seen this before, it’s worth the time (and two bucks).
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Launching an Odyssey & Circumnavigating Huron

Jeff, the motorcycle Jedi, is crossing Canada with his lovely wife on a Honda Goldwing.  They leave shortly and we get to tag along on the first day!  We’ll accompany them to Massey, Ontario and over to The Sault the next morning.  They then continue up over Superior on their pan-Canadian odyssey while we cut south over the border into Northern Michigan and hug the shore of Lake Huron before popping back into Southern Ontario in Sarnia.


While Jeff and MA are heading west for days on end, we’ll be wandering through Hemmingway’s Michigan before arriving back home.  This’ll give me my second great lake circumnavigation (or maybe my first real great lake because Georgian Bay is a bay).

https://goo.gl/maps/UTLra6j7ZEL2

Daily Schedule:
day 1- The Mohawk Inn, Massey ON
day 2- The Breakers Resort, St Ignace, MI
day 3- Bay Valley Resort & Conf Ctr, Bay City
day 4- Home

Mileages:
Elora to Massey, ON:       496kms
Massey to St Ignace, MI:   296kms
St Ignace to Bay City, MI: 381kms
Bay City to Elora, ON:     395kms

http://explorersedge.ca/

Riding the twisty roads of Northern Ontario
The quiet shores of Huron in Northern Michigan…

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To A Thousand Islands & Back

We’re looking at a few days in The Thousand Islands at the end of Lake Ontario before my wife goes to a conference and my son and I head home.  Fortunately, between here and there lie some of the best riding roads in Ontario.  I finally get a chance to Ride the Highlands!

The ride out is going to be an avoid the GTA at all costs exercise (like most things are).  Other than getting pinched in Newmarket, it should be a straight shot across the top of population.  Port Perry is nice and once I’m past Peterborough, Highway 7 is a winding ride into Canadian Shield.

Where I drop off Highway 7 at Mountain Grove and cut down to the godforsaken 401 looks like a roller coaster of a road.  A quick blast (no such thing any more) down the 401 should finish the trip at Gananoque where I’ll meet up with the family and we’ll hang out for a couple of days.




The Ride Back is an even greater attempt to avoid the GTA, but this time with a find the twisty roads vibe.  Using ridethehighlands.ca I linked together a series of suggested roads to get my son and I back to South Western Ontario in the lest efficient but most pleasurable manner possible.

We meander north west from the east end of Lake Ontario before finally cutting south around the end of Georgian Bay.

If we leave Tuesday morning, we’ll overnight somewhere around Haliburton before finishing up the ride on Wednesday.



All told it should be about 1300kms of riding some of Ontario’s best roads.

LINKS
http://explorersedge.ca/ride-edge-check-2016-top-touring-roads-explorers-edge/
http://ridethehighlands.ca

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30 Hours

Elora to Creemore to Owen Sound to Lion’s Head to Oliphant and back home again in about 30 hours.  We started out as three and expanded up to seven at one point before finishing with the original three again.  It’s amazing how much you can get done in a day…

Photos and video done on a Ricoh Theta 360° camera and my Samsung S5 smartphone.

Through the wind fields – Spherical Image – RICOH THETA


Elora Ontario on the bridge on 2 wheels #theta360 – Spherical Image – RICOH THETA




On the dock of Big Bay https://goo.gl/maps/eoWBzaD5FFN2 #theta360 – Spherical Image – RICOH THETA

Stills from the 360° camera…

Some other shots from the smartphone…





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And Then There Was One

When I started riding I began to voraciously consume motorcycling magazines.  It took me a while to figure out which ones were good, but for a while there I just went all in.  Being Canadian I thought it prudent to get a sense of Canada’s motorcycling media, so I made a point of looking past the wall of American magazines to find a Canadian voice.

 The two I settled on were Cycle Canada and Motorcycle Mojo.  CC seemed to be edited by a writer with lots of motorcycle experience (rather than an expert motorcyclist with little writing experience).  Reading other magazines sometimes felt like reading a kid’s essay that they’d been made to write.  No one seemed to revel in writing like Neil Graham did.  He was consistently acerbic, challenging and opinionated, but he clearly enjoyed writing.  I really looked forward to reading him each month.

I found Mojo a short while later.  Its modern layout (many other Canadian magazines looked like they’d been designed on a photocopier), and crowd sourced travel pieces got me hooked.  Mojo feels like it’s put together by a community rather than a small group of motorcycle industry insiders who don’t know how to write very well.

A few months ago CC arrived at my door.  As I got into it I discovered that the two writers who do the majority of the heavy lifting in producing the magazine were leaving.  Many readers seemed relieved to see the back of the complicated and difficult Graham, but I missed that voice.  A magazine that was once a drop-everything-and-read-it proposition (and Canadian!) was now filled with news pieces that looked like they were written by an ESL writer in single, giant paragraphs; a computer could construct better grammar.  The new writer they brought in was an old writer they’d let go.  His MO seems to be to say something controversial at the beginning of each article even if what he’s saying is inconsistent from page to page.  The article on the new Harley Davidson is making fun of sport bike riders, the article on a sports bike makes fun of cruiser riders, and his recent piece on the new Honda Africa Twin allowed him to take pot-shots at adventure bike riders.  I get no sense of who he actually is or what he likes.  This approach seems disingenuous and makes me hesitate to trust him.

 The newsletter modelled magazines that feel like they are driven by industry interests rather than independent editorial opinion have already been dropped.  Mojo & CC were my only Canadian subscriptions to renew, but now it’s down to a single Canadian mag.  The hole left in the Canadian motorcycling publication landscape by Graham leaving Cycle Canada has made a sure thing a has-been.

 In the meantime I’m looking world-wide for my motorcycle periodicals.  The three I’ve settled on are Motorcycle Mojo (Canada), Cycle World (US) and BIKE (UK).  The last two are driven by professional writers who know motorcycles and not only write well, but seem to enjoy doing it.  I’ve never read a complaint about having to fill up space with writing or meet deadlines in either, although this seems to be a common subject for editorial discussion in many Canadian magazines.

 I’m not reading any more magazines, Canadian or not, that make me feel like I’m reading an essay a kid was forced to write for school.  If the writing is that difficult, don’t work for a magazine.  Writing is a skill unto itself, and it should be something you enjoy (it’s what will make you work to improve it instead of just trudging up to deadlines while complaining about them in print).  Just because you’re an expert in the subject area doesn’t mean you’re an expert at communicating it in writing.  Life’s too short to read things written badly by people who aren’t that good at it and couldn’t care less about their writer’s craft.

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Flying: The Antithesis of Riding a Motorcycle

No Moncton Airport, you can’t cheer me up with a rainbow.

I’m in the middle of a five hour wait at Moncton Airport for a flight back to Toronto and then a shuttle up to Centre Wellington.  All told it’ll be a 2pm to midnight commute, all on public transit.  Ten hours of tedium, uncomfortable seats and no leg room… and constantly being reminded that you’re much bigger than most people.

To fend of the insanity of canned air, lousy, overpriced food and being herded like cattle at an abattoir, I’m dreaming of the best possible way to get home.

Riding from Moncton would offer a geographical opportunity as the Appalachian Mountains are in the way.  The best route I can manage on Google maps takes me through Maine, Vermont and New York to Niagara Falls, before a quick blast up the QEW home.

Anything out in the wind on two wheels would be better than this synthetic hell I find myself in.  At the moment I’d opt for a Honda VFR800 Interceptor and a good set of leathers, and nothing else.  My only goal:  to wind my way across some mountains to home.

If I left at 2pm from Moncton I’d have gotten to Augusta, Maine by about 8pm in the evening.  A good sleep on a real bed and I’d chew up the remaining eleven hundred kilometres home the next day, wind blown, engaged and full of feeling instead of slowly dying inside in a darkening airport terminal waiting to be herded onto a plane.

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Tiger Chains & Parts

Top gear at 4000rpm has me going
about 100km/hr, so it looks like I have
stock sprockets on the Tiger.
A one tooth more relaxed front sprocket
knocks a couple of hundred RPM off
the bike at 100km/hr and takes the
edginess off low speed throttle.

Chain & Agony: The Return


Now that I’m off a shaft driven bike, I’m back into the black magic that is chain geometry!  A trip to Gearing Commander has me working out the details of an ’03 Triumph Tiger 955i’s chain and sprockets.  The stock set is a 18T (eighteen tooth) front sprocket and a 46T (forty-six tooth) rear sprocket.  The chain is a 530-50 114.

A number of riders suggested a 19T (nineteen tooth) front sprocket to calm the bike down a bit.  The chain and sprockets are happy right now, but when it finally comes to a change, I think I’ll go the 19T way.  Motorbike sprockets run backwards from bicycle ones – the smaller sprocket is attached to the engine, so the more teeth, the bigger the gearing.

LINKS & CHAIN INFORMATION

The 530 114 chain on the Tiger has a pitch of 5/8 of an inch (the 5 is 5 x ⅛” – a 4 series chain would be 4 x ⅛” or half an inch of pitch).  Five-eighths pitch chains have a  roller diameter of 0.400″.    The 30 part of the 530 refers to roller width, which in this case is 3 x  ⅛” or 3/8th of an inch.  A 520 chain would have a roller width of 2 x ⅛”, or a quarter of an inch.  If you want to understand chain sizes, get a handle on that rule of 8 (all the numbers refer to eighths of an inch).
The 114 refers to the number of links in the chain (its length).

How to change a chain on a Tiger (video)
Triumph Tiger 955i parts list

<- 520 and 530 chains & sprockets widths compared

Tiger Changes of Oil

A fifty dollar US ($300CDN) magnetic
oil drain plug.

Triumph magnetic oil drain plugs.
M14x1.5×16
(that’s a metric 14mm width, 1.5mm distance between the threads, 16 mm long drain plug).

Entertaining Triumph oil drain plug banter (and the idea to put hard drive magnets on your oil filter, which is what I’m doing instead of ordering an expensive custom drain plug from The States).

The Tiger has been using a bit of oil (which is evidently within spec) but I don’t know what the previous owner’s mechanic put in it – putting in not Mobil 1 Synthetic (which Triumph states is the preferred oil) would be a great way to make money on an oil change.  If I swap in the good stuff, then I know what’s in it.

I’m also putting on a K&N oil filter with a higher spec than the stock one and putting a couple of hard drive magnets on the bottom of it to catch any metal shavings dancing around in there.

I did the oil change yesterday. I’ve done thousands of oil changes (it put me through university).  If that oil was changed last fall I’m a monkey’s uncle.  The Triumph filter on it had rust on it, the drain plug didn’t look like it had been taken off any time recently.  Either the previous owner didn’t do it, or his mechanic lied to him.  The oil was black and punky too, looking like it had been in there a long time.

With that all done I’ll now look to see how much oil I’m missing every thousand kilometres (it’s 3-400ml at the moment – but goodness knows what was in it or for how long).  The moral here is change the oil when you buy a used bike – you can’t trust what happened before it was yours and oil is vital to keeping an engine running well.  I’m looking forward to seeing what new, correct oil does for the bike moving forward.


Other than keeping it shiny and lubricating cables and controls, there isn’t much more needs doing.

It’s supposed to be a beautiful long weekend.  I’m hoping to get out for some time on my very orange Tiger in my very orange Tiger shirt.

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Overnight & Doable

Alright, some of the recent day dreaming has been pretty extreme.  With all the Ride the Highlands material I’ve been seeing recently, how about this…

The Longer Map
Bancroft Motor Inn
Saturday:  Elora to Bancroft:  357kms
Sunday:  Bancroft back to Elora via Algonquin:  561kms

Alternate shorter map
Saturday:  Elora to Barry’s Bay:  412kms  
Sunday:  Barry’s Bay to Elora:  453kms
Balmoral Hotel

The longer route:


100kms shorter:

It’s also handily central in the province – the easterners could meet up with the westerners at a central location, somewhere like the Opeongo Mountain Resort (3 bedroom cottages for $150 a night!).  Ride up Friday afternoon, settle in, leave everything in the cottage and enjoy a day of riding light on Saturday, Saturday night around the camp fire and then riding home on Sunday.  That’d be one heck of a weekend.  If it worked out well we could do it again at the end of September in the fall colours.