Category: Tim’s Motorcycle Diaries

With the weather beginning to turn we’re in for a Canadian treat:  Fall Colours.  I think I’m going to aim for a couple of days out Haliburton way in October for a last big ride and a chance to soak up the colours.


Last time up that way I did Highway 60 through Algonquin Park.  This time I’m going to stitch together another route that is as different as possible.

Algonquin does a colour report that I’ll keep an eye on and see if we can time a couple of days up that way when the colours are peaking.  Discover Muskoka does one too.  Last year we went up to the Kawarthas for Thanksgiving (early October in Canada): 

…and it was right before the colours changed.  Only the somac was in full colour.  I’ll see if I can time it a bit better this time around at sync it up with a big last ride before the snows come.


Autumn on the Canadian Shield is a beautiful thing.

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There are a number of posts on this blog about working out the kinks in my 2003 Triumph Tiger 955i,

and this is another one.  I’ve been playing with the Tuneboy engine management software that came with the bike, which works well, is put together well and is easy to use.  In working with the Tuneboy kit I discovered TUNEECU, a more open-source option for programming your own engine maps.

If you’ve never wrapped your head around engine maps, they’re not very complicated.  Tuneboy does a good job of explaining how it works in their primer that comes with their software.

Back in the day you had a carburetor that used screws and jets to set the amount of fuel that got metered into the engine.   If you changed altitude you had to start swapping hard parts (usually the jets that sprayed fuel) to keep the bike running right, and sooner than later you had to manually trim the whole thing to keep it running right.  Electronic fuel injection took that all away.  A computer under the passenger seat on the Tiger takes inputs from sensors in the air-box (barometric pressure), in each of the three injectors , the fuel pump, radiator (engine temperature) and a crankcase sensor to constantly adjust things to use the most effective amount of fuel to make the bike go.  Put another way, carburetors are a mechanical, low resolution solution to feeding fuel into an engine.  Electronic fuel injection is a responsive, high resolution fix to the problem of delivering the right amount of fuel to a motor.

Tuneboy map editor – you can change settings and tell the ECU (electronic control unit) what to do under certain circumstances.

A fuel map is a spreadsheet of numbers.  Sensors feed the computer what RPM the engine is turning at and how much throttle is being asked for and based on the number in the fuel map, the computer delivers a set amount of fuel.  The ‘fuel map’ is literally a map that directs the computer to deliver a set amount of fuel.  If you’re at high RPM and have just shut off the throttle, a smart EFI system will cut fuel delivery entirely, saving both fuel and emissions, something a carb couldn’t manage.  If you suddenly give the bike a handful of throttle at low RPM, the map will direct the fuel injectors to deliver an optimal amount of fuel as it picks up speed, whereas a carb will always just send a mechanically set amount of fuel based only on how much wrist you’re giving it.

In Tuneboy’s system, you can change fueling and ignition maps, and modify things like idle speeds. The issue has been that the only maps I can find for Tuneboy are the stock ones from Triumph, which were set up to favour fuel economy and emissions over smoothness and drive-ability.  Meanwhile, TUNEECU (if you can navigate their 90’s style web design and atrocious apostrophe use) offers you modified tunes that can smooth out your lumpy OEM map.

Of special interest to me were custom edits that made the list and have been on there for 9 years.  I don’t know who Deano from South Africa/SA_Rider is, but they know their stuff.  The map on there does wonders for your Tiger’s smoothness and pickup.  It might use a bit more fuel if you’re heavy handed, but the difference in motor operation is impressive and worth it.

Even though the old vacuum pipes held vacuum, I swapped them out for some similarly sized clear fuel line I had (you can see them going from above each injector to the idle stepper motor.  The TUNEboy software also comes with a diagnostics tool (with very cool 90s graphics!) that lets you test the radiator fan, idle stepper motor (which moves up and down modulating the vacuum in that black thing to the left/bottom in the picture) and the RPM gauge. LINKS You can find TUNEboy here:  https://www.tuneboy.com.au/ It comes with a cable that’ll connect to your Triumph and is easy to get going, and comes with all the stock tunes.  It also lets you tune on a dyno, if you’re minted.  It ain’t cheap, but the minted guy who bought my bike new was, so he sprung for it and I’m still enjoying his largess over a decade later. TuneECU can be found here:  https://www.tuneecu.net/TuneECU_En/links.html  Try to get past the out of control apostrophe use – they’re better at software than they are at the speaking English goodly. The older version is free, but finicky with Windows’ old serial port drivers.  You can buy the app on the Android store for fifteen bucks, which seems perfectly reasonable.  You can then connect via bluetooth from a phone or Google tablet, though I understand you miss some connectivity that way. It gets tricky these days finding the On Board Diagnostics (OBD) serial cable you need to connect the bike to the PC.  You can buy ’em from the UK, where people like fixing things.  CJ Designs in Wisconsin will sort you out with one too:  https://cjdesignsllc.com/?s=TuneECU The modded engine maps for Triumphs on TuneECU can be found here: https://www.tuneecu.net/Custom_Tune_list.html The TuneECU page goes into detail about how you might use the TUNEboy cable, but it requires so much messing around with knocking default Windows drivers out of the way and forcing others on that I wouldn’t bother (I didn’t).

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The carburetor rebuild grinds on.  It took the better part of a week to get the airbox boots in, and when I opened the bag they came in I’d been charged for four but only got three.  I tried contacting Two Wheel Motorsports to ask if the fourth boot was sitting around there, but they didn’t get back to me.  

The Concours uses two types of boots to connect the carbs to the airbox and one of the old ones still had pretty good flexibility in it, so I used the three new ones and the best of the old ones.

I tried for the better part of two hours to get the carbs mated to the airbox properly with the stiff, old airbox boots without success.  With my home-made hooked screwdriver (to slip the boots onto the intakes) it took about ten minutes of adjusting to get a good seal on all four carbs.  If you’re doing an old carb rebuild, buy some new airbox boots, it’ll save you a  lot of frustration and swearing.

The old airbox boots look rough, but the real issue is that the rubber has hardened over time and no amount of heat will soften them up.  The new boots were supple and easily went on the carb air intakes with minimal fuss and bother.

I pay for four and get three.  Fortunately one of the old ones was still pretty supple so I could reuse it.

Ten minutes and the carbs are back in place.  Get new airbox boots if you’re rebuilding an old carb!

Thanksgiving weekend in Canada was to be my last big ride of the season.  It’s been a tough year and the chance to get away from the pressure cooker of teaching in a pandemic was something I was clinging to a bit too tight.  The daring plan was to finish another exhausting week of teaching in a too small masks in classrooms that are ignoring all the pandemic rules everyone else is following, get a much needed night of sleep and then make my way up to ride the Haliburton Highlands in all their autumn glory before spending a weekend far away from the noise of pandemicky 2020 in the woods near Bobcaygeon.  The ride back would have been 274 kms of backroads less travelled.

I discovered Friday afternoon that we’d been waved off from the in-law’s cottage because we’re too much of a pandemic risk.  The irony that I can’t get away from the thing that strangles me each week because I’m getting strangled by it each week isn’t lost on me.  Instead I took the sunny and 22°C forecast and headed up to Hornings Mills and River Road for some Niagara Escarpment twisties, except I never got there because forty minutes up the road just north of 89 in Shelburne the rain started to fall.

When we got home I backed the Honda out of the garage and went for a ride in the cool, clear, autumn air.

Any weekend where you can take each of your two bikes out for a ride isn’t a bad weekend.  Soon enough we’ll be buried under a blanket of snow while the second wave of the coronavirus spreads in the closed places we share, like my classroom.  

I don’t live in the right generation to own a cottage (and the generation that does isn’t sharing during a pandemic), so I need to work out a way where I can check those boxes without depending on the vagaries of other people.  My wife won’t sleep on the ground any more so camping won’t cut it, but maybe a camper might.

If I had the shop space and time I’d go grab this disco 1974 ‘RekVee’ from where it’s parked up near Perry Sound for five hundred bucks, throw it on a flatbed and bring it back, strip it down and convert it to an electric/hybrid.  The electric RV isn’t viable yet with our medieval chemical battery technology but a hybrid diesel/electric option would work.

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A cold, rainy Saturday had me break down the carburetor on the Yamaha XS1100.  A Triumph Spitfire and Mercury LN7 owned as a teen made me pretty handy with carburetors.  In addition to multiple rebuilds I also got handy at jury rigging manual chokes thanks to the utterly crap Ford Escort carb set up.

The beautiful Mikuni unit on the Yamaha looks like a piece of industrial art in comparison to the pedestrian Triumph and Ford carbs, unfortunately it’s seized.  After breaking down the top end I soaked it and freed up the seized throttle body.

The next to-do with the Yamaha is to clean up the gas tank and then reassemble the fuel system.  The engine isn’t seized and spins easily, so I think I’ll have an easy time firing it up for the first time in years (knock on wood).

Here are some pics of Mikuni’s Yamaha masterpiece:

The throttle cable wasn’t playing nice even after taking apart the handle bar – so into the carb I go…

The Yamaha XS1100 engine block with the carbs off – it got the Warhol treatment….

Like everything else so far, the internals look to be in good shape on the old (35 year old!) Yamaha

Cleaning up the fasteners using the caps from each carb to keep things organized.

XS1100 is in for surgery

Not many riding days left as the weather turns up here in Canada

I just started “Why We Drive” by Matthew Crawford.  I was in the middle of transitioning from being an English teacher to a technology teacher back in 2012 when my university prof suggested Shop Class as Soul Craft, Crawford’s first book.  It gave me the philosophical grounding I needed to value my manual expertise and to fight the prevailing academic prejudices of the education system I work in.

A few years later I’d embraced my new role teaching technology and found myself constantly arguing for parity with academic programs like the English one I’d just left.  Crawford came out with his second book called “The World Beyond Your Head“, which made a strong argument for human expertise in a world where blind allegiance to system think made management a fragile grasp at control for people who have no other skills of value.

I’m only through the opening chapters of “Why We Drive“, but I’m enjoying the angle Crawford it taking in using driving (and riding, he doesn’t distinguish) as a means of questioning the assumptions we’re all increasingly living under.  In the opening chapters he suggests that operating a vehicle is one of the few domains left that demand human expertise as the rest of society falls into a WALL-E like world of of systemic technology driven infantilism.

From Uber’s malicious dismantling of existing industries to suit the long term game of its investors to the NHTSA’s outright misleading information on Tesla’s Autopilot feature (they claimed that it radically reduced accidents when this was simply untrue), and the industry driven big government money drive to chase old cars off the street by misleading the public with even more false statistics, Crawford tears apart many of the assumptions around environmental NIMBYISM and the relentless capitalism that underlies it.

I’ve questioned the environmentalism of hybrid and electric cars before.  It’s a classic case of NIMBYism where the wealthy hide their pollution further up the chain and then claim superiority over all the people who can’t afford to give up a tail pipe.  One of the difficulties in being a teacher of technology is that I understand it, warts and all.  Our battery technology is still medieval in both construction and effectiveness.  They don’t hold a lot of power and don’t last very long, but any analysis of electric vehicle efficiency likes to sidestep that fact.  Nissan Leaf owners can’t though.

Crawford also brings up the idea of recycling already manufactured vehicles rather than giving in to the relentless futurism of consumer society where owning anything old is paramount to a crime.  He compares a massive new SUV (all modern vehicles are massive compared to older ones as they get weighed down with safety-at-all-costs tech and grown to maximum size) to his old VW.  They get about the same mileage, but driving the Karmen Ghia is a very different experience to driving a modern safety tank.

It’s a challenging read, but also an opportunity to wake up from the progress pills everyone has been popping and understand that being human isn’t about efficiency and management, it’s about agency.

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