Cycle-Ergo, the motorcycle ergonomics simulator, is a great online resource for getting a sense of what you’ll look like and how you’ll fit on a bike. Unlike cars, your options with bikes aren’t as easy as sliding your seat back or adjusting the steering wheel. To make ergonomic changes on a motorbike you need to change hardware and make physical changes to make it fit.
The other day I was out on my trusty 2003 Triumph Tiger 955i. I came off a Kawasaki Concours 10 to the Tiger and while the Connie was comfortable, it made my knees ache on long rides. The first time I sat on the Tiger it felt like a bike built by people the same shape and size as me because it is. I can go for hours without putting a foot down without a cramp on the Triumph. This got me thinking about the differences between the big Kawasaki that sits next to the Tiger in the garage these days.
Cycle-Ergo gives me a quick way to check out the differences. Forward lean is much more pronounced on the Concours 14 (12° vs an almost vertical 4° on the Tiger). Knee angle is the same and my knees aren’t bothering me on the Connie but hip angle is 6° tighter on the Kawasaki which explains the cramps I was feeling after today.
I sold a Honda Fireblade to bring the 1400GTR in and that bike had an extreme ‘sports’ riding position which was basically like doing a push-up on the bike (you lay on it) – it ain’t easy on the wrists. There are advantages to this aggressive riding position. When you want to get down to business in corners a forward lean gives you a more intimate relationship with the front end, which is why sports focused bikes tend to sit a rider the way they do. If I lived somewhere where roads were dancing with the landscape instead of cutting straight lines across it I’d have happily kept the Fireblade but in tedious Southwestern Ontario it didn’t make much sense.
Today I did a 200km loop on the Kawasaki and the constant lean does make it tiresome on the arrow straight roads around here (I have to ride 40 minutes to find 10 minutes of curves). In the twisties the Concours is much more composed that the tall, skinnier (and ADV) tired and leany Tiger. The Concours is a 50+ kg heavier bike but you can see in the animation that it holds its weight much lower than the Tiger. In the bends today the Connie was fine but the Ontario-tedium I have to deal with most of the time has me thinking about ways to ease that lean.
There are solutions to this in the form of ‘bar risers’ which are blocks of machined metal that you slip in under the handlebars to bring them taller and closer to you so you’re not stooped. For me the lean also means I’m putting a lot of weight on my, um, man-parts, which end up pressed up against the tank in the lean.
I had a look around at bar-risers. There are number of people who put them together including some cheaper Chinese options but I ended up going with Murph’s Kits C14 bar risers. Murph is well known in the Concours Owners Group and has been producing Concours specific parts for decades. His risers aren’t quite as tall as some of the others and look to solve the problem without over-solving it by giving too-tall handlebars that spoil the lines and the purpose of the bike.
The biggest ergo-thing I did on the Tiger was getting a Corbin seat for it which makes it a long distance weapon. I’ll eventually do the same thing for the Connie but I think I can make do with the stock seat this year and then do the Corbin over the winter. That doesn’t stop me from mucking around with the Corbin seat simulator though:
By next spring I’ll have a C14 that fits, but it isn’t as easy as sliding the seat back in a car. In the meantime we’ve got the Lobo Loco Comical Rally coming up at the end of the month. That requires a minimum of 400kms travelled in 12 hours and will need more than that if we’re going to be competitive. I’m hoping my bar risers will be installed and I’ll bring the good ole Airhawk out of semi-retirement to keep me limber over a long day in the saddle.
Over the Easter long weekend I’ve rebuilt four carbs and put them back together again. Unfortunately they won’t go back on nicely thanks to two decade old rubber boots, so they’re on order. It’s nice to have a forced day off. If you’re ever rebuilding carbs on a ZG1000, and the airbox on it is more than ten years old, it’s a good idea to get some airbox ducts (that connect the airbox to the carbs). Supple, soft rubber is important when connecting these up. I tried for a frustrating couple of hours to get them to join properly. This is especially difficult when the inner boots are rock hard, even when warmed up. Steve suggests new carb boots to cut down on swearing, he ain’t kidding:
Sixty bucks and should be here by Wednesday.
I contacted my local dealer and they can have boots here by Wednesday. They’re charging less than they are going for on ebay or online retailers. Score one for my local. Sixty bucks means less swearing and an easy install. Wayne, the Yoda-like parts guy at Two Wheel, says you’re lucky to get two decades out of a set as they harden over time and eventually split. With the weather going sideways again, there won’t be much of a chance to ride any time soon. Hopefully this means I can get this odyssey finished and the bike back on the road by the time the weather clears again.
The airbox ducts/boots that need replacing – the old ones are not only beaten up, but they’ve gone hard. Even putting heat on them doesn’t soften them up. Note the flat spots up by the airbox that show you which way to turn the boots.
Heating up the airbox boots – but they’re too old!
A big empty where the airbox and carbs usually go
This ordeal has me rethinking things. My wife suggested I unload everything except the old XS1100 and buy a regular motorbike that is more dependable. When I started riding I got a dependable bike that just needed some cosmetic work. It was so dependable it was tedious. Since then I’ve gone back in time and enjoyed the world of carburetion and two decade old rubber, perhaps a bit more than I wanted to. I genuinely enjoy mechanics, but never when there is a time demand on it. I’ve already missed three riding opportunities because of the stuttering Concours, and this irks me. The idea of wiping the slate clean and moving forward appeals. I started riding late and moving through a number of bikes seems like a way to catch up on my lack of experience. Maybe it is time to put sentiment down and move on. I didn’t start riding to watch the few lovely days we have in a too-short riding season pass me by.
The little Yamaha and the KLX are gone now, netting me about $3000. As it happens, a 2003 Triumph Tiger is available just over an hour away for about that much. Come the end of the week I might be able to say, “a tiger? In my garage? Must have escaped from a zoo!”
It doesn’t matter where you live, this one is a start anywhere, finish anywhere timed rally on Friday, July 23, Saturday, July 24th or Sunday, July 25th. You need to cover at minimum of 400kms to be considered a finisher but otherwise it’s an open event.
Our Mini Rallies give riders the chance to get involved in Scavenger Hunt events without having to travel to the start lines. You can start these ANYWHERE; we’ve had riders from all over the world do them each time! You can also choose when to start your 12 hour ride clock, so you can adjust the event around your own work schedule and the local weather.
This event will have you looking for the Super Hero themed locations…
along with other Villainous twists & turns that Lobo Loco Rallies likes to throw your way!
If you’re looking for a reason to put some miles on your bike and see places you wouldn’t usually go during a strange summer where the rules of travel aren’t very clear, do this! You’ve still got a week to sign up.
I came across Overland Journal in Indigo that other day and the combination of reasonable price ($12CAD) and very high quality (it compared favourably with magazine-book combos asking $25+) had me picking it up. It isn’t motorcycle specific but does include off road and adventure bikes along with pretty much any vehicle you might go off the beaten path with.
I usually do that kind of off-roading with completely inappropriate vehicles. In the early noughties my wife and I beat a rented Toyota Camry to within an inch of its life on the the logging roads in the interior of Vancouver Island. Another time we were in a rented Citroen mini-van in Iceland watching arctic foxes run across the empty landscape. In both cases we got deep into the wilderness in rental 2wd vehicles, but then we got a Jeep Wrangler as a rental car last year and it started giving me ideas.
I put myself through university working as a service manager for Quaker State’s Q-Lube and whenever a Jeep came in you needed an umbrella when you walked under it for all the fluids leaking down on you. That negative experience put me off the brand for years but last year we got a Wrangler as an insurance rental after and accident and it changed my perception.
It was a 2019 Jeep Wrangler four dour with about 20k kilometres on the clock and it was tight! Everything worked and felt quality and it did something that no car has done for me in the past decade; it felt like an event driving it.
Since bikes set in I’ve fallen out of love with cars (trucks, whatever), but the Jeep made driving feel special again. Performance cars seem kind of pointless when I have two bikes in the garage that are faster than anything but apex million-dollar plus super-cars, but the Jeep came at it from another angle. The big tires made it a challenge to manage on pavement and the big V6 in this one was a stark contrast to the sub-two-litre mileage focused appliances I’ve been driving but maybe that’s what made it feel special.
There was a point where we could have taken the other car (a Mazda2) down to Toronto but took the Jeep instead and it made the whole experience less like a long, difficult winter drive and more like an event. Being higher up off the road meant I wasn’t looking through other people’s road spray all the time and if I wasn’t heavy on the gas the thing was getting mid-high-twenties mpg.
Another time we were out in it and my brother-in-law (a former Jeep owner) and our sons went out for a ride and I shifted it into 4wd and drove right over the snow mound in the Canadian Tire parking lot, much to everyone in the car’s amazement. This was a ten-foot plus high mound of snow and the Jeep went right over it – with road tires on! Deeply impressed with the vehicle’s capabilities and character is where I was when we handed it back after our car got returned.
I also used it to take a thousand plus pound of ewaste to recycling from work and the heavy duty suspension and utility of the thing made this an easy job when the little hatchback would have been blowing shocks and wallowing under the weight. Having a vehicle that takes on larger utility tasks makes sense when you do a lot of it.
I’m getting to the age now where things seem strangely expensive. My first car cost me $400 and took me a hundred thousand kilometres. A Honda Civic hatchback I had in the early noughties took me over a quarter of a million kilometres for less than seven grand. The only new car I’ve ever purchased (that Mazda2 that has been flawless for over 120k over ten years of ownership) cost me $17k new, all in. My wife’s Buick Encore cost an eye-watering forty-grand back in 2016 new and I’m not interested in double car payments so won’t be looking until we finally pay that one off (which seems like it’s taking forever with our strange new world of 7-9 year finance schemes). When that debt finally gets cleared I’ll be looking at a Jeep Wrangler.
From an ‘overlander’ point of view, a dependable long distance vehicle capable of going off the beaten path means my wife and I can do what we’ve always done, but more so. In the pre-covid times we drove from Ontario to the West Coast in 2018:
In 2019 we took the same tiny Buick Encore to the East Coast of Canada, but the vehicle we drove limited our ability to go off the beaten path (or even off pavement). What a Jeep would do is enable us to do the things we defer to (in rental cars) in something designed for that kind of nonsense.
This has me encouraging my lovely wife to join us at SMART Adventures this year to learn some off road driving in a side-by-side while we dirt bike. Which brings the overlanding vehicle back to bikes again. You can go deep in a Jeep but you can get places on a dirt bike that you can’t in any other way. The Jeep would be a fantastic platform for all manner of biking shenanigans.
Whether it’s taking a dirt bike to a trail or a trials bike to an event, the Jeep would be capable of doing it efficiently. With some canny rear mounted racks it wouldn’t even require a trailer.
The cost-no-object green option would be to pick up a KTM Freeride and an Jeep Wrangler 4xe and then work out how to charge the bike from the hybrid Jeep’s electrical system.
Overland Journal has a lot of advertisers who specialize in making vehicles long distance ready, including many that specialize in prepping Jeeps for the long haul. A Wrangler 4xe with a roof mounted camping option, KTM on the back and the ability to go self-contained into the wilderness for days at a time would make for a thrilling combination.
The Jeep Wrangler 4xe is the most powerful Wrangler yet, has astonishing mileage and would also offer some interesting electrical generation options when off the beaten track.
The bike and the fanciest Wrangler would cost less than a base model BMW mid-sized SUV, so it isn’t even crazy expensive (well it is, but that’s just because I’m old – everything’s expensive!).
KTM and Jeep should join up on this. Two legendary off-road manufacturers combining to create a futuristic zero emissions expedition!
I came across Overland Journal in Indigo that other day and the combination of reasonable price ($12CAD) and very high quality (it compared favourably with magazine-book combos asking $25+) had me picking it up. It isn’t motorcycle specific but does include off road and adventure bikes along with pretty much any vehicle you might go off the beaten path with.
I usually do that kind of off-roading with completely inappropriate vehicles. In the early noughties my wife and I beat a rented Toyota Camry to within an inch of its life on the the logging roads in the interior of Vancouver Island. Another time we were in a rented Citroen mini-van in Iceland watching arctic foxes run across the empty landscape. In both cases we got deep into the wilderness in rental 2wd vehicles, but then we got a Jeep Wrangler as a rental car last year and it started giving me ideas.
I put myself through university working as a service manager for Quaker State’s Q-Lube and whenever a Jeep came in you needed an umbrella when you walked under it for all the fluids leaking down on you. That negative experience put me off the brand for years but last year we got a Wrangler as an insurance rental after and accident and it changed my perception.
It was a 2019 Jeep Wrangler four dour with about 20k kilometres on the clock and it was tight! Everything worked and felt quality and it did something that no car has done for me in the past decade; it felt like an event driving it.
Since bikes set in I’ve fallen out of love with cars (trucks, whatever), but the Jeep made driving feel special again. Performance cars seem kind of pointless when I have two bikes in the garage that are faster than anything but apex million-dollar plus super-cars, but the Jeep came at it from another angle. The big tires made it a challenge to manage on pavement and the big V6 in this one was a stark contrast to the sub-two-litre mileage focused appliances I’ve been driving but maybe that’s what made it feel special.
There was a point where we could have taken the other car (a Mazda2) down to Toronto but took the Jeep instead and it made the whole experience less like a long, difficult winter drive and more like an event. Being higher up off the road meant I wasn’t looking through other people’s road spray all the time and if I wasn’t heavy on the gas the thing was getting mid-high-twenties mpg.
Another time we were out in it and my brother-in-law (a former Jeep owner) and our sons went out for a ride and I shifted it into 4wd and drove right over the snow mound in the Canadian Tire parking lot, much to everyone in the car’s amazement. This was a ten-foot plus high mound of snow and the Jeep went right over it – with road tires on! Deeply impressed with the vehicle’s capabilities and character is where I was when we handed it back after our car got returned.
I also used it to take a thousand plus pound of ewaste to recycling from work and the heavy duty suspension and utility of the thing made this an easy job when the little hatchback would have been blowing shocks and wallowing under the weight. Having a vehicle that takes on larger utility tasks makes sense when you do a lot of it.
I’m getting to the age now where things seem strangely expensive. My first car cost me $400 and took me a hundred thousand kilometres. A Honda Civic hatchback I had in the early noughties took me over a quarter of a million kilometres for less than seven grand. The only new car I’ve ever purchased (that Mazda2 that has been flawless for over 120k over ten years of ownership) cost me $17k new, all in. My wife’s Buick Encore cost an eye-watering forty-grand back in 2016 new and I’m not interested in double car payments so won’t be looking until we finally pay that one off (which seems like it’s taking forever with our strange new world of 7-9 year finance schemes). When that debt finally gets cleared I’ll be looking at a Jeep Wrangler.
From an ‘overlander’ point of view, a dependable long distance vehicle capable of going off the beaten path means my wife and I can do what we’ve always done, but more so. In the pre-covid times we drove from Ontario to the West Coast in 2018:
In 2019 we took the same tiny Buick Encore to the East Coast of Canada, but the vehicle we drove limited our ability to go off the beaten path (or even off pavement). What a Jeep would do is enable us to do the things we defer to (in rental cars) in something designed for that kind of nonsense.
This has me encouraging my lovely wife to join us at SMART Adventures this year to learn some off road driving in a side-by-side while we dirt bike. Which brings the overlanding vehicle back to bikes again. You can go deep in a Jeep but you can get places on a dirt bike that you can’t in any other way. The Jeep would be a fantastic platform for all manner of biking shenanigans.
Whether it’s taking a dirt bike to a trail or a trials bike to an event, the Jeep would be capable of doing it efficiently. With some canny rear mounted racks it wouldn’t even require a trailer.
The cost-no-object green option would be to pick up a KTM Freeride and an Jeep Wrangler 4xe and then work out how to charge the bike from the hybrid Jeep’s electrical system.
Overland Journal has a lot of advertisers who specialize in making vehicles long distance ready, including many that specialize in prepping Jeeps for the long haul. A Wrangler 4xe with a roof mounted camping option, KTM on the back and the ability to go self-contained into the wilderness for days at a time would make for a thrilling combination.
The Jeep Wrangler 4xe is the most powerful Wrangler yet, has astonishing mileage and would also offer some interesting electrical generation options when off the beaten track.
The bike and the fanciest Wrangler would cost less than a base model BMW mid-sized SUV, so it isn’t even crazy expensive (well it is, but that’s just because I’m old – everything’s expensive!).
Ontario has hundreds of miles of ocean coast line but being Ontario there is no way to ride there. Quebec hasn’t been so lackadaisical in connecting its northern communities by road. If I cut out of Ontario just east of New Liskeard I could then make use of Quebec’s better northern infrastructure and actually ride to the coast of James Bay almost to the point where it opens out into Hudson’s Bay:
…though apparently only (new) BMW riders make the trek. Bet my old Tiger could do it.
It’s remote but the vast majority of the 1600+ kms north are on paved roads. North of Hotel Matagami (just over half way up) services get thin. It looks like there are road side truck-stop type accommodations on the James Bay Road but most of what’s on offer is camp grounds and sparsely spaced gas stations. Sounds like a perfect adventure bike thing to do!
Lots of good advice for riding motorbikes in the remote north around James Bay can be found on the James Bay Road website. The challenge here isn’t twisty roads and nights in the bar, it’s the extreme isolation of the far north. You need to be able to keep your machine moving or it will end expensively, or worse. Getting a tow out would cost thousands. Worst case would be getting stuck without any means of getting out, then it could quickly get dangerous.
For people who have only ever travelled between other people this’ll be hard to wrap their heads around. On a ride like this you’d find yourself hundreds of kilometres away from the nearest people and even further away from infrastructure that could help you. Self-sufficiency would be central to a successful run up to James Bay.
History isn’t just an informational subject, it’s also very much about critical media literacy. Trying to get a clear view of history through what’s left to us is nearly impossible because human beings will immediately want to spin it for their own benefit. These prejudices come from the people at the time, the people who decided what survives and the people in charge now. This propagandist approach has a great deal of power when applied to the study of national history because it produces dangerous byproducts, like patriotism based on national myths that systemically exclude whole swaths of our society.
This is the cover of Flashback Canada, the history book they handed me to teach a grade 8 class during my teaching practicum in Peel in 2003. I wasn’t a Canadian citizen when this piece of propaganda was handed to me and I was told, as an agent of the system, to indoctrinate the class (most of whom were also new Canadians) with this violently untrue rendition of Canadian Federation.
I can’t find the full illustration from inside the book (it’s a two page spread!) but I recall it had indigenous groups in traditional garb, unaccompanied women and many BIPOC characters fictionally back-written into the narrative of a multi-cultural Canadian history that never happened. Teaching this “we’ve always been multi-cultural” myth of Canada made me very uncomfortable so instead of teaching the text I found some other historical images of Confederation done close to the time and then the students and I looked at the differences between the textbook’s rendition and other historical documents. As you might have guessed, Canadian Confederation in 1867 was a lot of white dudes (because they were the only people considered as people under the law – no one else could vote or politically mattered):
How did this play with a lively, very multi-cultural class of grade 8s in 2003? Code-switching wasn’t a common term back then but many of the BIPOC students talked about how stuff like this makes them doubt their own experiences with racism in Canada. This made my older, white Canadian supervising teacher uncomfortable. These days I’m sure she would be on board with the current ‘woke’ white settler types who want to make make a lot of noise in this moment that will quickly fade to leave us with our lousy status quo again. Dwelling in the discomfort by prompting discussion and then making systemic change as a result is a way to move beyond our reflexive need to retain a status quo built on lies.
I’ve talked about historical prejudice before on Dusty World but the events currently happening in Canada are bubbling it all to the surface again, though I don’t understand why anyone is so surprised by them. These children disappeared in plain sight and reports of the nastiness of religious residential schools aren’t new. Choosing to be surprised by them now feels like political spin. Part of that latest push is to cancel Canada Day but this politically divisive move only shames anyone who disagrees while amplifying the voices of those who want to leverage this disaster for their own political ends.
I’ve heard (smart, historically aware) people advocate for cancelling Canada Day because aboriginal families are mourning the recent discovery of thousands of children’s graves from the Canadian religious residential school genocide, but the only people reeling from this ‘discovery’ are politicized left-wing Canadians who have now decided to (loudly) acknowledge this hiding-in-plain-sight colonial history. I doubt native families are ‘stunned’ by these ‘findings’ as they’ve been living them for generations. This ‘white surprise’ must seem disingenuous.
I’m left wondering if children’s history text books are still as multi-culturally white-washed as that one I was handed in 2003. My approach to that lesson caused friction with my (white, established-settler Canadian) teacher-mentor. Teaching rote curriculum out of prejudiced texts works much like taking down statues and cancelling holidays: it’s an effective way to revise historical fact to suit the current political narrative which is itself a nasty piece of work.
In the next two centuries the selfish decisions made by current generations around rampant overpopulation, wasteful consumption of resources and pollution of our limited ecosystem will make any previous genocides look tame, yet we’re quick to burn anything historical that doesn’t meet our myopic ethics. That well-travelled, carbon spewing first-worlders who hop into their 4×4 SUVs wearing sweatshop made clothing are so loudly self righteous is another example of temporal prejudice, but then you don’t see a lot of humility or self-awareness in history.
It’s easy to criticize previous generations without making any attempt to contextualize their decisions in the time that they were made. This temporal prejudice is every bit as corrosive as racial or gender prejudice. Mass consumers waving social justice flags while making decisions that will kill billions in the future are just as blind to their own contextual short-comings. Wouldn’t it be something if everyone tried to overcome the pomp and circumstance of history with humility, honesty and fairness?
Cancelling holidays that are guaranteed for you but not for others at the rough end of the socio-economic spectrum reeks of privilege, while taking down statues and renaming things is more about rewriting history to make it less uncomfortable than it is about making any genuine systemic change. What we should be doing is legally deconstructing confederation and taking the colonial prejudices out of Canada’s political structure. First past the post British electoral systems prop up old prejudices and should be dismantled but won’t because party ‘representatives’ that could make the changes won’t because the status quo is what handed them power.
The nastiness of Canadian colonial history isn’t easy to stomach but throwing a cancellation blanket over it isn’t going to solve anything; we need to dwell in this discomfort if it’s ever to prompt real systemic change. Politically driven divisive ideas like cancelling national holidays and renaming everything to make it less offensive is more likely to support the status quo than change it. We’ll never overcome historically prejudiced propaganda by spinning more of it. Real change has to happen at the legal level or we’ll just keep spinning lies to maintain this poisonous politically charged status quo.
First nations Canadians didn’t get the vote until 1960! Canada’s concept of representative democracy has always been flawed and yet it’s treated as sacred – which is how you ensure that status quo continues. These days the old white guys in charge casually dismiss the Charter of Rights whenever it suits them.
“…in September 1917, the Wartime Elections Act was passed in Canada. It granted the vote to women in the military and women who had male relatives fighting in World War I, but it also stripped away voting rights from many Canadians who immigrated from ‘enemy’ countries.”
“The story of the right to vote in Canada is the story of a centuries‐long struggle to extend democratic rights to all citizens. It’s a chaotic tale that includes rebellions and riots, as well as protests, and visits to the Supreme Court of Canada.”
“Indigenous peoples were not invited to or represented at the Charlottetown and Quebec Conferences. This despite the fact they had established what they believed to be bilateral (nation-to-nation) relationships and commitments with the Crown through historic treaties. (See also: Treaties with Indigenous Peoples in Canada; Royal Proclamation of 1763.) The Fathers of Confederation, however, held dismissive, paternalistic views of Indigenous peoples. As a result, Canada’s first peoples were excluded from formal discussions about unifying the country.”
You won’t find anyone on the Canadian Encyclopedia page who isn’t an old white dude because they are the ones that confederated Canada, specifically while denying anyone who wasn’t from their background any participation. Re-writing history to ignore what actually happened isn’t a great way of learning from those mistakes.
There is an element of British television that revels in the industrial history that many generations of us lot lived through, and I’m hooked on it. My favourite is Henry Cole & Sam Lovegrove’s Shed & Buried which follows the two as they dig up hidden treasures found in some of the more eccentric sheds in the U.K., including a lot of older motorbikes:
They find all sorts of old machines in people’s sheds which often leads to impromtu history lessons on brands I’ve never heard of or hidden bits of industrial history I hadn’t heard of before. From seed fiddles to motor memorabilia to the esoteric history of British motorbike production, it’s never dull and usually enlightening.
They don’t just rummage around in other people’s sheds. The show also casts a light on the ‘car boot sale‘ and the used sales trade in the UK. This culture of reverance for past technology is completely foreign in Canada.
It’s tough to find anything motorbikey in Ontario to begin with let alone anything old and interesting, yet Henry & Sam seem to be able to find any number of interesting old bikes for around £1000 ($1700CAD). In a country like Canada that prefers to hide its history under a modern marketing blanket, throwing stuff away is a cultural imperative. This (very colonial) approach means there simply isn’t an ecosystem of old machinery to explore. This is exacerbated by Canada’s history as a resource extractor rather than an industrially focused manufacturer; we don’t make much here so there is no home-grown pride in any vehicle.
These cultural differences in background prompt media and awareness that is distinctly different in both countries. The British produce a plethora of programs that explore industrial history and mechanics. Shows like this would never fly in consumerist focused Canada.
Here’s a case in point: Shed & Buried started out with a ’69 Triumph Daytona project, sorta like the one below described as ‘an excellent buy’ in Ottawa right now for $4650 Canadian . Henry paid £600 ($1000CAD) for his old Daytona in similar condition.
If they exist at all, older bikes in Canada are prohibitively expensive.
What got me thinking about this was someone else on FB Marketplace offering disorganized boxes of old Triumph parts for $3600 without even a clear idea of what’s in there. Henry and Sam picked up a 1950s BSA for £400 they found in pieces in a caravan. Canada’s disinterest in and lack of history around industrial manufacturing make it a very difficult place to find old project bikes – unless you want to go into massive debt for an incomplete box of shit.
If, like me, you find living in this vacuous, consumerist wasteland frustrating, there are a lot of British TV programs that will remind you that finding old things and getting your hands dirty restoring them is a viable thing to do. Here’s a list of what to watch if you’re looking for some proof that you’re not crazy:
When I think back to the late ’80s (the last time I had to involve myself in driver testing), I recall reasonable wait times, full time employees invested in what they were doing and a general sense of competence. I left with my driver’s license feeling like my time wasn’t wasted and the people there knew what they were doing.
The lost souls trapped in the beige, fluorescent lit hell that
is Ontario’s Drivetest Centre. I got in trouble for taking
this picture, I hope you like it.
Since going back for my motorcycle license in 2013 I’ve had to attend Drivetest Centres several times and each one has been worse than the last. The stone eyed ‘funployees’ of Drivetest struggle to handle massive wait times and angry citizens whose time doesn’t seem to matter at all. While waiting for more than ninety minutes yesterday in an overcrowded holding area I looked up Drivetest and discovered a poster child for why Ontario is failing like it is. Up until 2003 Driver training was handled by MoT employees. These would have been unionized, government workers who make enough money to pay a mortgage and tended to stick around, meaning they have a vested interest in what they’re doing. In 2003 Mike Harris (aka: ass-clown of the century) decided to privatize driver training in Ontario (because the mess they made giving away the 407 wasn’t enough). In a matter of months hundreds of full time employees were laid off in the name of efficiency. At the time the six week waiting list to get a license was considered proof of government incompetence and the private sector would come to our rescue! The current backlog is over sixteen weeks. Feeling that private efficiency yet? At the Drivecentre yesterday I heard one of the employees say that they have a lot of people away on vacation so they are short handed at the busiest time of the year. Another came back after taking only 10 minutes for lunch. While reveling in this Kafkaesque corporate efficiency I thought I’d look up who we pay millions to now for driver testing. Privatization seems to feed into globalization. Just as he sold off the 407 for a fraction of what it’s worth to a Spanish company, so Harris sold off driver training to another overseas firm, in this case Serco, a billion dollar a year multi-national out of the UK. Their spiel on the Drivetest website is exactly the sort of MBA drivel that makes me sick in my mouth:
Positive change and continuous improvement! All’s good in corporate speak fun-land! Based globally? That sounds tricky.
Ah, the countless possibilities. Fortunately, thanks to Serco’s crap-tastic personnel management I had a lot of time to consider countless possibilities. The Ontario Government is supposed to oversee the efficiency of this subcontract, but like most privatization they simply turn away from what IS the role of government and takes no responsibility for what has been and continues to be an out and out disaster. You’d think it would be fairly easy to make licensing a zero-sum game. You charge for licenses whatever it takes to cover the cost of licensing and you keep that money in Ontario instead of shipping off millions of dollars overseas. You then offer bonuses based on accident rates of new drivers and the wait times in Drivetest Centres. The lower the rates and better the wait times, the better the bonus. Or… you could just give it all away to an off-shore concern that couldn’t give a damn about Ontario citizens, their safety, or their time, but sure knows a lot about business. Meanwhile, we’re all sitting here wondering why Ontario is in the biggest financial mess in its history. Efficiency doesn’t mean off-loading responsibility and doing things cheaply unless you’re in the private sector, then that can be your reason for being. Efficiency and cheapness are not the same thing, though the private sector and conservatives often confuse the two. Get your finger out Ontario. Stop off-loading important government services to incompetent multi-nationals and keep our money in-province! Fix this!
I finally got around to adjusting the Concours’ suspension. It was pretty unsettled on uneven pavement so I went with the list shared online and aimed everything at ‘right on the money’ which works out to front spring preload of 14mm and rebound dampening of 3 clicks out from all the way in. The rear got set to 20 clicks in on spring preload and 1 and 1/4 turns out on rebound dampening.
It’s a significant improvement over what the bike was set at before. On uneven pavement it feels much less likely to bounce and wander. On smooth pavement it now tracks much better and isn’t such a struggle to hold a line with, though it still feels heavy. That might be my own fault coming off a Honda Fireblade to the Kawasaki though.
The existing tires on the bike are Michelin Pilot Road 4s which people in the know swear transforms the bike’s handling. I had a look around and the rear tire’s 2715 stamp means it was built in the 27th month of 2015. My best guess on the front is that it was 1918 or 2019 in the 18th month. If that was the case then Declan, the guy I purchased the bike from, put these tires on it in or around 2019 so they’re not only lightly used but also recent!
They passed the safety easily and aren’t flat spottted or low on tread so a couple of very low mileage years is likely, which means I’m not in any rush to replace them. That didn’t stop me from having a look at what new tires for it would cost anyway just so I’m ready (end of 2022 riding season?) to replace them.
Going to a 190/55/R17 rear tire (stock is 190/50 ZR17) raises the back end a bit with a marginally thicker sidewall and stops the bike from feeling so vague. Bike Magazine describes the handling of the GTR1400 as ‘not good’ and I think this dropin vagueness is what they’re referring to.
Another nice surprise on this used bike purchase is that the former owner put new tires on only a couple of years ago and then barely used them, but now I’ve got some ideas about where to go next.
Road 5s are a newer, top-of-the-line tire that are $70 more expensive than Road Pilots but don’t come in 55 rears.
