Category: motorcycle

I’ve got a work thing in Vancouver next month which got me thinking about incorporating a ride to the west coast and back. Turns out flying is much cheaper (even with car rental) than riding…

Cost of flying/ ($200 return) + renting a car for the week (inc. gas + taxes = $1100): ~$1300 total.

Total mileage riding out and back: ~8800kms. at 0.58 cents/kms = ~$5100 (not counting hotels enroute). Flying is way cheaper! I’d save on having to rent a car while out there, but the costs of moving myself there (as opposed to being luggage on a plane) are significant.

If I took the week off before the week I needed to be in Vancouver, could I ride out there in that time? It’s about 4400kms to get there. Saturday to the following Sunday is nine days on the road, which works out to under 500kms/day. Intense but certainly doable.

4400kms out at 500kms/day = 9 days (8 nights of hotel). Going cross-Canada on the way out: https://goo.gl/maps/zBYBMzkMqsxDrMx67 = 4436kms. 9 days on the road at 500kms per day = 4500kms.

After the week on the ground in Vancouver, I’d take 2 weeks off to come back through the States, hitting key points like Yellowstone National Park. The way back through the US, even with the detour down to Yellowstone, is 4462kms: https://goo.gl/maps/RHEUUiSrxCCj6V7g7

It would probably be wise to factor in a tire change at some point on this 10k odyssey. I imagine they’re cheaper and easier to find in the States, so I’d throw on some new shoes and get an oil change and service once south of the border.

Riding out would chew up 3 weeks of vacation but would offer a chance to cross most of the continent on two wheels. In a perfect world I could find work related stops on the way out across Canada and get that week covered (mileage and hotels), then use 2 weeks of holiday for the return through the US.

Motels in Canada on the way out look to be between $120-150 a night (x 8 nights = $1200 in not fancy housing). If I stayed out of cities (where hotel pricing seems to have lost its mind), I could come in under budget if I was aiming at $150/night (taxes in) on average. Hotel prices in the States look similar.

Budget (assuming I covered all costs)

Hotel stays going out (8 nights @ $150/night avg taxes in) = $1200

Hotel stays coming back (12 nights @ $150/night avg taxes in) = $1800

Gas/day = $60* (= 2 tankfulls and ~700kms range/day on the C14) x 20 days on the road = $1200

Tires & Service: Bellevue Kawasaki in Seattle on the way back $1000

Travel eating: breakfast**: $10, Lunch: $20, Dinner: $30 = $60/day avg. x  20 days = $1200

Estimated total cost for a 3 week cross continent 2-wheeled odyssey: $6400

*  Well over what I’d need/day mileage wise and will be cheaper in the US
** If I’m staying a breakfast included hotel then I can save there

That budget isn’t being overly stingy and I should be able to come in ahead on it. It might also be possible to shave days off if I get into a groove (say, on the Praries) and do a couple of big mileage highway days. If I got good at a last minute booking app like HotelTonight I could probably save a bit on the hotel stays too. Another alternative might be to stay at the same chain all the way across and save that way.

We did it by car preCOVID and it was an epic trip. Riding would make it even better!

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I’ve been on the road for work for the past couple of weeks (Newfoundland is spectacular!) The weather from there followed us back and we haven’t seen the sun for many days, until this weekend! It finally broke and I’ve gotten some riding in.

I was hoping to get the old Tiger to 100k this year in its 20th year on the road. On the way to that I managed to hit eighty-eight thousand, eight hundred and eighty-eight kilometres! Very satisfying, and the bike looked great doing it:

I pushed my luck the next day and took Connie out for a couple of hours to Hockley Valley and back…

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 I’m getting back out with regularity now that the worst of the winter is past. Both of the regular road bikes are fit and took to the road effortlessly. I had a bit of a breakthrough with the Concours14 last year and we’re understanding each other a bit more. It’s a big old bus but it’s remarkably agile for how big it is and we’ve come to a kind of mutual kinesthesis, but I still took the Tiger out first because it’s like putting on an old shoe….

… and we picked up right where we stopped. The goal is still to get to 100k this year in the bike’s 20th year on the road, and I think we’re good to get there.

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The never ending winter drones on up here, so I’m putting my back into getting the ’71 Triumph Bonneville project closer to a state of mobility.

I have a new 750cc head and pistons on hand, so I gave the piston rings a go. Installing them is pretty straightforward and the first set went in no problem, but as I was compressing the second set into the cylinder sleeve it didn’t feel right, so I backed everything out and the bottom ring came out in pieces. I can only think it was already compromised in the package.

I sent Britcycle an email and they looked through the warehouse to see if they had any extras laying around, but I was out of luck, so it’s a $100 failure (new rings, taxes, shipping). Ouch. This got me looking at costs for this vintage project. The last one I did was the Fireblade. Those are my favourite kinds of restorations. Parts are easy to find and relatively inexpensive, the bike is rideable fairly quickly and, after riding it for a season, I can turn it over for at least what I put into it (or with a small profit as was the case with the Fireblade).

New cylinder heads and cylinders… and broken ring.

I think I’m still right way up on the Bonneville simply because these older bikes seem to work under their own economy. I was looking up prices of what I’ve got on eBay this evening and the frickin owners manual that Bryan threw in at the last minute is $50US! A used top end is $500US (and Bryan gave me 2 of the things!). I imagine I could double my money just parting it all out, though dealing with people doing that would be a giant pain in the ass – at least it has been with the newer bike crowd, maybe the vintage types are less adversarial.

I had a couple of choices when I was considering going old school, and I think I picked the hardest possible one to bring back to life. The technical side of it doesn’t bother me, but with costs increasing all around I’m bothered more about the high prices and difficulty finding and shipping parts than I am with what I’ve got to do to bring it back. That old BSA would have probably been a better choice for my first vintage resto, but it (and alas, Bryan) are long gone.

I’ve got what I’ve got, and I’ve got a lot of it, and I’m crafty. I’ll see what I can do about replacing fasteners and the other bits and pieces I’m missing without it breaking the bank, those these strange old British pre-metric fasteners are a story unto themselves. The goal right now is to rebuild the bike to an operational state and then maybe ride it for a bit before putting it up for sale. I still need a seat and exhausts and I’ll need other odds and ends like control cables. If I can get it back to a state of play, I think I can cover costs and move it along, then I’m thinking I’ll go back to my favourite hunting grounds: forgotten bikes from the 80s, 90s and 00s that I can turn over for next to nothing while giving me a chance to ride something different for a little while.

When the ring crumbled on me I changed gears and rebuilt the Amal carbs. That went well, but I’m missing two of the bolts to put the second carb back together – they weren’t on it when I wiped the mud and rust away. It’s these little setbacks that stall things, and it’s not like I can grab a couple of replacements out of my big tray of bolts (most of which are metric).

How simple can you make a carburettor? These old Amals are pretty close to first principles. The combination of archaeology and simple mechanics is very appealing when everything else I ride carries a computer and my day job is all about them – it’s nice to be fully analog!

I’d broken down the carbs in the fall and left them packaged in a segmented toolbox. Putting them back together was problem free and the kits I got from Britcycle replaced all the gaskets and rubber grommets in them. The old rubber bits were really showing their age.

Guess which one is the 50 year old ring (I;m assuming they’re original)?

Just need some bolts (at $3.50US a pop)

If money and time were no object I’d dig deeper into this vintage resto thing – I dig the mechanical simplicity and I enjoy seeing how mechanical evolution happens over time. As a hobby in retirement, it has great appeal, but I’m some years away from that much free time on my hands.

I’ll see this one through and then refocus on the SPQR-WRO (small profit, quick return – with riding opportunities) side of it where the costs and time commitments aren’t quite so demanding.

 

 

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 I thought I’d give this a go when I discovered that one of the plastic dash bits (used) for the 2010 C14/GTR1400 Concours was upwards of $150US +shipping. One of the benefits of reading Practical Sportsbikes Magazine is that they’re always dropping technical hints and ideas. They mentioned plastic welding in one of their project bike articles, so I looked it up.

The repair kit cost less than $40CAD and includes a heating ‘iron’ with multiple ends and piles of plastic strips you can melt into a repair. Starting with a simple crack would have been easier, but I had to rebuild the broken end of a complicated plastic form, including a missing bolt hole.

Here’s the broken plastic dash panel:

I found a piece of plastic from a hex key tool with a matching sized hole, cut the end off the plastic bit  and grafted it on.

While that was cooling I melted some of the filler on the back and healed the crack up the middle.

I was liberal with the filler because I figured it would sand back. The only problem with this piece is that it’s patterned on the surface and I’m not sure how I’m going to replicate that. The fix might be to take both pieces of and just paint them to a matching finish.

So, what’s plastic welding like? Pretty straightforward, and like most things if you practice you’ll get better at it. The filler sticks provided in the kit melt easily under the iron and fill cracks and holes well. If you don’t like the first go you can reapply heat and get it to set differently. If you’re looking at absurd replacement costs for old plastic on a well used bike, a plastic welding kit is a good purchase.

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 It’s been a busy winter and I haven’t gotten as much done in the garage as I’d hoped, but breaks in the gloom are beginning to appear so I spent the weekend getting the Tiger sorted and giving plastic welding my first go.

2003 Triumph Tiger 955i Fuel Injector Maintenance

Injectors out! I put the end without the electrical connector into the ultrasonic cleaner and give it 10 minutes at 60°C. Once out I clean them up and back in they go. No hesitation or idling problems since.

That vacuum run stepper motor (upper left) is what manages the idle control system – it’s touchy! Make sure you’ve got good vacuum hoses (the black ribbed ones in the pic) and the gasket for the stepper motor is in good shape, or you’ll be stalling… a lot. I’m sorting a threaded holder for the fuel injectors here.

Tank off gave me a chance to sort out the airbox, which I now seal with gasket material. At almost 90k, maintenance takes on jobs like rethreading bolts and gasketing tired airboxes to keep everything tight.

Found a stowaway on the airbox under the gas tank. Probably good luck?

Tiger is back together again and ready to take a run at 100k in it’s 20th season.

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After 25 days on the road across the Iberian Peninsula, I have ideas about what I’m looking for in terms of travel photography tech. The Canon SLR with a bag of lenses is too much to lug around, and the recycled 7 year old Dell laptop doesn’t cut it when it comes to keeping up with modern file sizes. An agile photo tech set also works on two wheels, so here’s what I’d bring along if I were going light but looking for full technical flexiblity in terms of imaging while on the road:

Zenbook S 13 FLIP OLED

An absolutely bonkers sub 2.5lb laptop with 2k of colour corrected display with 100% colour gamut. It folds away to almost nothing, offers the power needed to make high resolution photo and video edits on the road and even converts to a tablet for digital sketching.

$1899

Sony Cybershot RX10Mk4

After lugging the SLR with many lenses around Iberia for weeks on end, I’m looking for a more compact but technically robust option. The Cybershot has a massive sensor, shoots in RAW and outperforms my SLR in pretty much every area. Being smaller and less fussy (just the one do-it-all lens), it does what the best camera always does: makes it easy to have it with you. I ended up leaving the SLR behind towards the end because it was more trouble than it was worth

$2199

Ricoh Theta Z1

Simply the highest photo quality 360 camera you can get. A massive 1 inch sensor means good low light, RAW shooting, a programmable Android based OS that lets you push the limits of this emerging format by creating my own plugins.

I prefer photography to video so the Z1 is the weapon of choice when it comes to 360 photography. The only thing it can’t do is rough and tumble, but I have a plan for that.

 $1349

GoPro Max 360

The rough and tumble option. If I’m riding, in the rain or under water, the Max will do the job and capture the moment. It also handles instant panaramas and many video options, including timelapse.

I prefer the ergonomics of the Theta, but the GoPro is the best at what it does, and for action shots it would be a powerful tool.

$669

Apple iPhone 14 Pro

I got an iPhone 13 last year and the camera on it is good – so good that I found myself leaving the DSLR behind because, for candid snaps, the iPhone is more than up to the job. As good as it is, I’m wishing I’d gone a bit further and gotten a 14 pro with extra lens and that bit more photographic range. I’m still struggling with adapting to iOS after owning an Android from the very beginning, but I’d stick it out for the software integration and quality on the iPhone (Apple’s stance on user privacy is appealing too).

$1549

This might all seem pretty expensive (photography isn’t a cheap hobby), but when a single pro 400mm lens costs you about ten grand, this entire $7665 set offers much more flexibility with a powerful all-in-one camera, two 360 specialist imaging tools and a state of the art lightweight laptop for post production, and all while taking up next to no room.

***.

I did alright with the old DSLR (these are wild Portuguese seas), but lugging all that about wasn’t very travel friendly – I think I’m ready to migrate back to a prosumer grade all-in-one superzoom camera. I just need to make sure it beats the SLR with lense and includes the specs I need to improve my imaging (large sensor, full manual controls, RAW file saving, epic lens).

I’m pretty crafty with on-bike pics from the old Ricoh Theta I’ve got, but with newer (and tougher) tech I could push the boundaries there too.

Good example of how capable the iPhone is at photos (and a nice way to get to the beach – on a 90s vintage Africa Twin!). This is cropped in tight from the original and is still high-rez.

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I’m a couple of weeks into a trip around the Iberian Peninsula with my family. I’d been hoping for a car we can’t get in Canada, but ended up with a Kia but it’s a Kia you evidently can’t get in Canada. This is a Kia Xceed:

We ended up with it because we were driving from Madrid, across Spain and into Portugal, and Lisbon has a low emissions zone where only electric and hybrid electric vehicles can go. Before we left Madrid airport the guy at the rental desk encouraged us to charge it up and use the battery to save gas – but they didn’t include the charging cord with the car, and so began a long series of frustrations with our first hybrid electric driving experience.

We figured we’d just charge at a station but stations don’t provide charging cables, they come with the car (unless they don’t). On top of that, it turns out that the charging cables aren’t standardized, and vary from region to region (I imagine because electricity itself isn’t standardized worldwide); the stupid plug stack I packed to keep our devices charged is testament to that.

Imagine if you had to bring your own gasoline hose with you everywhere you went. Imagine if different cars had different sizes and shapes of holes for you to put gas in, so your car only worked at certain gas stations. We’re a number of years into this ‘electric revolution’ in vehicles. I’ve never been able to afford being early-adopter green, but a lot of wealthy people enjoy the glow of showing everyone they care about the planet (I just keep old, efficient, high mileage vehicles in good repair and on the road, saving all those greenhouse emissions from having to manufacture something new every few years).

I thought the ‘EV Revolution’ would be further down the tracks with standardized ports and cars that actually came with the gear needed to make them work. Many manufacturers are making marketing noises about being entirely electric in the next decade, but after our experiences in Spain and Portugal, I can’t see how this is anything more than marketing. William Gibson’s observation about the future being here, but not evenly distributed rings especially true in the EV shell game.

Not that it mattered because we couldn’t use them anyway, but I recently read that many EV chargers are in disrepair. The reason why again emphasizes green marketing designed to ease climate anxiety rather than recognizing the hard work of changing how we move ourselves around. Many chargers are out of commission because the money to install them was provided, but the money to maintain them was not. Details like this make it difficult to believe the hype, though if it makes you feel high and mighty, I guess it has achieved its true aim.

The appearance of green is more important that the truth of it. We get given an HEV to get into Lisbon’s low emissions zone, but without the charging cable we’re a gasoline powered car carrying hundreds of kilos of battery and an entire secondary drivetrain, all of which reduces the gas efficiency of the vehicle, but we can drive into Lisbon because we have an HEV badge on the the thing; more smoke and mirrors.

We’ve driven over 2000kms in the KIA. It’s the first KIA I’ve driven that has seats that fit me (nice sports seats no less). Like most modern cars, the electronics integrations are nice, but I have concerns about the privacy and cybersecurity of it all. When we got into the car it had a list of all the people who had driven it previously which included their personal device information including their phone name, type, bluetooth details and even what they’d been listening to. I deleted it all and we’ll clean the KIA before we hand it back, but most people don’t.

On the Redcar ride to the airport for this trip the driver was telling us about how there has been a rash of vehicle thefts powered by electronic hacks rather than good old fashioned grand theft auto. If you own a new truck in my neighbourhood, you better be crafty about how and where you store your keys. The guy delivering fliers to your house may be sniffing around to clone your convenient electronic key. Still digging that electronic convenience? Turns out we are behind in vehicle cybersecurity in Canada (and worldwide). My day job is developing cybersecurity education, so I’m not remotely surprised by this. Everyone lives their lives on networked devices but almost everyone is oblivious to how this technology works and how it can be exploited (except for criminals).

One of our last stays has Tesla charging stations at the building, so we’re finally charging the HEV. I’m curious to see what having it charged does to mileage, but I still feel like hauling all that extra weight around is a step backwards. My Mazda back home isn’t HEV, but is lightweight and efficient (getting almost 10 miles per gallon better than the Kia), but it isn’t allowed in a low emissions zone. It’s also over a decade old and ready to do another decade of high efficiency service. That approach is greener, but it doesn’t sell new cars to rich anxious people.

I haven’t gotten into the nasty and exploitive world of lithium battery mining and production in this, but I should have. I’m a big fan of going green in a real way. I suspect that hydrogen fuel cells will offer a solution to burning fossil fuels that the messy world of hybrid and medieval battery technology EVs can’t, but we’re still some way away from creating anything like the infrastructure needed to leverage the most abundant substance in the universe to power our transportation needs.

I also haven’t gotten into the all the data collection around charging systems in Spain and Portugal. If you drive electric you’ll be pumping personal data (including when you’re not home) into online databases from multiple companies. Those online databases are what criminals access to steal personal information, often to sell to other criminals. It’s a worldwide problem and having signed up for multiple ‘apps’, my exposure to potential hacks has increased dramatically – even though none of them actually charged the damned car (which is also collecting my data).

Maybe the fully charged KIA will change my mind today, but I doubt it. The inherent inefficiencies around lugging along spare powertrains and batteries aren’t the solution they’re being made out to be. The hidden dangers to my privacy are the forgotten side of this convenience and green marketing. The real answers aren’t going to be solved by marketing snowjobs that ignore nasty truths about our still terrible chemical battery technologies and vehicle cybersecurity. Hopefully next time I rent a ‘green’ car, it’ll actually be green, and secure.

What moving off burning hydrocarbons might really look:

Cybersecurity in cars (should also include privacy and security around charging!):

Some other observations from driving in Spain and Portugal…

Now that’s efficiency! Over ten times the mileage of your typical HEV… and it looks fabulous!

 

Parking in Portugal is an art – this guy stuffed his Range Rover into a wall (cars can just squeeze by).

We off-roaded around a cork farm in torrential rain in this 40 year old Landie. With 6 people on board it was incredibly effective (like a mountain goat!), navigating flooded mud roads and hills.

Joanna, our guide, handled the Landie like a pro: https://www.corktrekking.com/  Highly recommended!

The roads in Portugal are spectacular – but I had two too many wheels (and drivetrains, and fuel systems) to truly enjoy them. Though this was still (by far) the best KIA I’ve driven so far.

Lisboa is a city of bikes…

One of the first cars I ever rode in was my Nana’s Isetta Bubble Car – they had one just like it in the MHAS in Salamanca.

They has Schumie’s Benetton F1 car in there too!

Best KIA so far…

The efficiency you get from toll roading all of your major highways in Portugal. The only place we’ve slowed down for traffic (hugely inefficient and anti-green, no matter what you drive!) was in Lisbon, and even there the rush hours were like a love tap compared to the daily abuse Torontonians face.

Now that’s my kind of sustainability! A nearly 30 year old Honda Africa Twin that gets almost 50mpg looking fabulous at the beach in Lagos. When it only rains a few days a year, the Algarve is the perfect place to ride year round… and the roads are spectacular!

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You can pick up a reprinted copy of One Man Caravan on Amazon for about sixty bucks, but I did a bit better. For ten bucks I discovered an original 1936 edition in a used book jumble when we went to Pelee Island over Canadian Thanksgiving. The spine is cracked and the pages are stained with almost a century of smoke, coffee and whiskey – intrigued yet?

When you take on a read like this it drags you out of your own context and into a world substantially different from the one we live in, Many people have trouble navigating this time culture shift (they like to bring their current values and fixations with them – it’s a kind of temporal colonialism), but not me, I like the dissonance.

One Man Caravan is the story of Robert Fulton, an American student living in Europe who shoots his mouth off at a dinner party, saying he’s planning to ride a motorbike around the world. (Un?) Fortunately for Robert, one of the people at the party owned the Douglas Motorcycle Factory and offered him a free bike to do it on. It reminded me of Charley Boorman shooting his mouth off about doing the Dakar… and then having to do it.

Another familiarity with moto-travel history is similarities to Ted Simon’s Jupiter’s Travels. Fullerton describes his decision to go with a motorbike: “I had considered the matter from various angles, only to arrive at the conclusion that there must be some better method of seeing that world than by the standard processes. On foot and carrying a knapsack? That would be too slow. By motor car? Too expensive. A bicycle? Too much work. A motorcycle?”  Simon says something similar in Jupiter’s Travels when he talks about what it takes to ride around the world.

The world Fullerton navigates feels like another planet to most modern readers. No digital anything, nothing like today’s transport infrastructure, and industry has yet to force everyone into similar lifestyles. We often forget how much industry defines our lives, but Fullerton comes face to face with that in 1932. The other oddity for the modern reader is just how different the immutable facts of life (like countries) change over time. The world was a very different place in 1932…

The emerging chancellor in Germany was taking it into the future (Fullerton talks about how well ordered and future facing Germany is – unnerving, right?) ! I had to look up Waziristan (modern day Pakistan).

Robert blitzes across continental Europe before pressing on into Greece and finding his way to the ‘edge of civilization’ in Turkey.

You’ll come across a very colonial view of the world because that’s how it operated in 1932, but if you can get past your temporal prejudices, this old book does a fantastic job of bringing that lost world to life. Robert finds himself in kinship with Bedouin camel train drivers who live their lives on the road (at least when he isn’t being thrown in jail – the preferred way to house an itinerant motorcyclist passing through in the 1930s). He has frequent altercations with local law enforcement and the various ‘agents of empire’ he comes across, though his American citizenship gives him a useful separation (and a healthy irreverence) for those government interests.

Like many around-the-world stories, the trip itself changes Robert as he travels. His early, furtive forays in Europe are accompanied by a rueful, self-mocking tone, but once he gets into the grind, especially as he’s navigating Middle Eastern deserts without roads or even a clear idea of where he’s going, you start to get a  sense of how much of a grafter this guy is – he certainly isn’t afraid of hard work.

Riding the streets of Shanghai in 1932…

Robert’s mechanical inclinations kept him in motion (he went on to invent the skyhook system you see in James Bond and Batman films!)

In Saigon, the ‘Little Paris of the East’

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Modified images from 360 photographs taken while riding this fall.  Modified in Photoshop and Lightroom.

How to do 360 photos on your bike: https://www.adventurebikerider.com/how-to-capture-360-photos-while-riding-a-motorbike/

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