Tim King's homepage with images and writing about technology, education, visual art and motorcycles!
I’m teaching a class on 3d modelling in Blender next semester, so what better way to practice than on my partially taken apart for maintenance ZG1000?
The model was made with the Occipital Structure Sensor 3d Scanner. I’m trying different editing programs. I used the 3d Builder integrated into Windows 10 to edit out the extra bits captured by the scanner. It’s quite easy to use and has some pretty good editing tools. If you’re trying 3d modelling for the first time it’s not a bad place to start (and it’s included in Windows 10!).
The Concours is a naked thing at the moment. I’m under the fuel tank for the first time since I bought it. I’m going after the spark plugs, but neither of my imperial spark plug removers would fit. Kawasaki uses an 18mm metric socket. Fortunately, Canadian Tire had that very thing in stock.
With the plugs changed it’ll be time to start putting it back together. I’m cleaning electrical terminals and torquing bolts to spec as I go.
The wheels are off, stripped and cleaned and ready for reconditioning at Fireball Coatings. I’m hoping to get them over there this week.
What twenty year old Concours rims look like after you’ve had a go at them with SOS pads for an hour.
They’re off to Fireball for a two stage gold/candy coat finish. They look better than they have in years already, I can’t imagine what they’ll look like when I get ’em back!
The stripped bike is letting me get to pretty much everything. I found the two cut-off gas tank ventilation pipes, which will get properly re-attached again.
Last but not least will be calliper rebuilds and braided metal lines for the rear brake and clutch (which have been waiting until some down time to install – I was loath to do it while I could be out riding).
It will all go back together on new tires and renewed rims ready for the season to begin as soon as the rain washes all the salt and other winter crap off the road.
If I lived somewhere more temperate I’d need two bikes so that I could rotate one out of operation for this kind of work. Canada obliges by making it miserable outside for four months of the year.
 |
| Arizona roads are magical. |
I’m getting suspicious as I ride out of Scottsdale into the desert and see signs saying I’m entering Phoenix. My son and I are riding in December, not something we usually achieve in Canada. Our rental is a Kawasaki Concours14 from AZride.com. We pull over into a gas station to pick up some water we needed anyway then turn around and start heading the right way. I’m dataless and gpsless and we’re heading deep into the mountains a couple of days after Christmas.
Soon enough we’re out of the urban sprawl of Phoenix and feeling the cool desert breeze as we head north on Highway 87 through scattered saguaro cactus. I have that realization I often get when I haven’t been in the saddle in a while: wow, do I love riding a motorbike! The vulnerability, the sensory overload and the speed conspire to make a rush of adrenaline that opens you up to this overwhelming experience even more. I’ve tried many things, some of them not particularly good for me, but nothing, and I mean nothing, feels better than disappearing down the road on two wheels.
Once clear of traffic lights I immediately get lost in the winding corners and elevation changes of the Bush Highway. The bike is leaning left and right, feeling weightless under me and eager to spring forward at the twist of the throttle. My twenty year old Concours at home under a blanket in the garage does a good job with a thousand ccs, this newer fourteen-hundred cc machine is a revelation, even two up.
 |
| The Ride: 350+kms through the Superstition Mountains |
 |
| A couple of weeks after our ride our route was buried in a foot of snow. |
We leave the traffic lights of the city behind and immediately find ourselves amongst ranches and desert aficionados hauling everything from ATVs and Dakar looking off-roaders to boats and bicycles. It’s the end of December but it’s still 16°C on the digital dash and people are making use of their time off after Christmas.
The Bush Highway turns back toward the sprawl, so after crossing Usurer’s Pass we drop down to Highway 60 in Apache Junction having bypassed miles of Mesan strip malls. Highway 60 is empty and arrow straight. What would you do on a 160 horsepower bike you’ve never ridden before? I do it. In what feels like moments we’re leaving the desert floor behind us and climbing into the Superstition Mountains. I feel like I’m sitting on a Saturn V in a full stage one burn.
 |
| The ride into the Superstition Mountains is elevating. |
We’re both wearing fleeces and leathers and it was comfortable on the warm desert floor, however the mountains ahead are looking mighty foreboding. We started our ride in Scottsdale at just over a thousand feet above sea level, but the road to Globe is going to take us up to almost five thousand feet and we can feel the temperature plunging as we climb.
I’ve wanted to ride this road to Globe since driving it in a miserly Nissan rental car years before. It’s twenty five miles of being on the side of your tires. You’re only upright as you’re switching sides. The temperature drops and snow begins to appear in shady patches on the side of the road. We surge ever upward in a cocoon of still air. The Concours’ fairing is keeping the worst of it at bay while that mighty engine makes short work of any moving chicanes in front of us. Would I like to ride this road on a sport bike? Sure, but the big Kawi makes it easy to enjoy two up with luggage.
As is the way with winding roads I get to the end of them in a trance, and always earlier than I think I should. By this point we’re both cold regardless of what we’re wearing and fairings. The outside temperature in Globe is 4°C. We jump off the bike at the Copper Bistro and stamp some feeling back into our legs. Walking into the restaurant we’re met with the incredulous stares of the locals.
“Kinda cold to be out on a bike, ain’t it?”
“We’re Canadian.”
“Ahh…”
The old timer at the bar gives us a look like he understands why we’re out but still pities us for doing it. We can’t help being what we are.
 |
| Do not mess with the Globe popo. |
We warm up to a damn fine burgers and fries. Max likes the splotches of copper made into art on the wall. Globe is home to one of the biggest copper mines in America and the locals have that toughness that you see in people who don’t sit at a desk for a living. The Globe Police department comes in for lunch, men with no necks who look like they stay in shape by managing the miners on Friday nights. You wouldn’t want to mess with these guys.
Warmed up, we’re back on the bike and filling up before ducking out of Globe on the 188 into the Tonto Basin, a two thousand foot drop down from where we had lunch. In warmer weather the 188 is busy with boat haulers heading to the lake behind the Roosevelt dam, but today the road is ours.
 |
| Roosevelt Dam, a nice stop and the beginning of the rather bananas Apache Trail – an astonishing road but not the sort of thing you’d want to two up on a Concours. |
We wind down into the Basin and see the big saguaro cactus return. The temperature is back into double digits and we’re at our ease following the twisties on an empty road. We meet the odd bundled up motorcyclist coming the other way and get the universal wave, but otherwise it’s wonderfully quiet.
We pull into Roosevelt Dam for a stretch and a drink of water before following 188 to its end at Highway 87. Our animal sighting luck kicks in at this point. As we’re kitting up to leave the dam a bald eagle flies over it and down the Salt River looking a scene out of a movie.
By this point it’s mid-afternoon and we’re both wind blown, dehydrated and a bit achy from the swings in temperature, and I’ve got the trickiest part of the ride coming up. I’ve driven the 87 in a car and know what’s coming. We pull up to make sure our ATGATT is airtight and for me to get my head on straight for a high speed decent on a fast two lane highway down the side of a mountain range.
 |
| Have a stretch and get your head on straight for the ride back to Phoenix. The locals don’t take this road slowly. |
The first time I drove the 87 toward Phoenix from Payson I was astonished to see large trucks towing full sized boats blow past me at better than eighty miles an hour. This road moves and none of it is straight. Some of the corners feel like they last forever and they all generally lead straight into another corner. For a guy from Southern Ontario, home of boring, straight roads, this isn’t business as usual.
The Concours surges down the highway and I drop into the flow of traffic. Leaning into corners for up to thirty seconds at a time has me concentrating on perfect arcs and not being happy with the results. How often do you get to describe high speed arcs for an hour at a time? I’m feeling rusty, frustrated and want to find a way to smooth out my mid-corner corrections. Fortunately I’d been reading Total Control by Lee Parks on Kindle and found his advice about one handed steering to be the solution to my broken corners.
 |
| Total Control by Lee Parks – it’s exhaustive in its description of motorcycle physics. I wouldn’t call it light reading, but that one bit on steering input made me a better rider instantly. |
Lee’s advice is to only push on the inside handlebar when in a corner. This causes the bike to counter steer deeper into the corner with very little effort and much finer control from the rider. I wouldn’t normally get much of a chance to play with this on Southern Ontario roads but Arizona was made for this sort of thing! That one piece of advice got me down the 87 with significantly fewer sore muscles. By the time I was getting to the bottom of the Superstition Mountains I’d had many long corners to test and refine my technique and my arcs were more precise and less meandering as a result.
 |
| The Concours is back in the lot next to this ridiculous thing. I’d take two wheels over anything else any day. |
We roll back into Scottsdale afternoon traffic like two cowboys who have just time travelled back from the Old West. The suddenly onslaught of traffic is a bit overwhelming. After a last fill up (the gas station attendant has a starry eyed look at the bike) we return the Concours to AZrides and get checked out in a matter of seconds.
The rush hour drive home in the rental SUV is tedious and slow, but that blast in the mountains cleared out the cobwebs. The ZG1400 made an interesting comparison with my ZG1000. I found the newer bike a comfortable and agile machine, but the whining of electronics didn’t thrill me, and the tightness of the foot controls were awkward. Because this is someone else’s bike they made choices (like ridiculously high risers) that I wouldn’t have. None of these things spoiled the ride, and the biblical power of the ZG1400 motor is something that needs to be felt to be believed. This taste of ZG1400 makes me wonder how I’d fettle my own. Thoughts of a ZG1400 swirl in my mind as I roll along with the commuters into the setting sun.
Check out this piece as published in Motorcycle Mojo.
ZG1400s for sale (they aren’t $800 like my old ZG1000 was)…
2008 with 100k on it: $8600 (really?)
2008 with 63k on it: $7850
2008 with 13k on it: $8900
2009 with 72k on it: $7000
2013 with 8k on it: $13,000
2015 with <1k on it: $13,500
new 2016: $18,000
Photos from the helmet cam. It was supposed to be video but I didn’t set it up right. I guess I’ll have to go back and do it again. I’m most sorry you can’t hear the sound of a ZG1400 engine singing in the tunnel…
 |
| The Bush Highway |
 |
| The tunnel out of Superior – the Concours’ engine was a spine tingling howl! |
 |
| The road to Globe |
 |
| The never straight 87 back to Scottsdale – 3300 feet down to the desert floor, none of it straight… at 80mph. |
 |
| Dropping down into the Tonto Basin |
 |
| 188 into the Roosevelt Dam |
 |
| The Apache Trail a couple of days later in the rental car… |
 |
| Back of the Roosevelt Dam before tackling the Apache Trail. |
 |
| Roosevelt Dam |
 |
| Sunset on the Apache Trail |
 |
| Maybe on a dual sport or adventure bike? Not on a Concours. Apache Trail is a couple of hours of hair raising corners with no crash barriers, washboard gravel and thousand foot drops. A brilliant road, if you’re brave enough! |
Ride Maps
The actual trip:
The original plan:
A bit less: the Superstition loop with a jaunt up to the interesting bit of Hwy 60 – though mileage wise this is pretty close to the full monty below. it doesn’t include AZride’s Bushy bypass…
Getting to the twisty bits (hitting the interesting bit of 60 before coming back):
The full monty: what I would have aimed for solo
 |
| A not-so-super Saturday morning. After driving through thick fog for almost two hours we’re told to line up to get in the parking lot, then line up to get in the door, then line up again to get into the show – it was over an hour wait to get to the single guy with a ticket scanner. |
 |
| The website the show put out (when it loaded at all) was insecure. Management & organization is an issue. |
What would be nice would be having access to show specials at my local. I’d happily spend the hundred odd dollars I spend getting to and into this show and apply it to purchases at Two Wheel. If that’s a possibility I’ll save a Saturday next January and avoid the lines, crowds and other nonsense. I’m going to contact Two Wheel and see if show specials might be available for customers on that weekend at their shop. Their new digs are twice as nice as the International Centre and it doesn’t take you an hour of lining up to get in the door.
The other reason to attend a show is to touch base with your favourite motorcycle media. I did have a nice chat with Glenn from Motorcycle Mojo but couldn’t find Graeme at Inside Motorcycles, though I can see my favourite motorbike magazines at the Toronto Motorcycle Show in February which feels like a much more professionally organized, industry driven event. I can also take my wife to that one without her rolling her eyes at all the strippers on display.
I’ll stick to complaining about the poor organization both online and at the venue, but the show itself is what it is. I’m an odd-duck in motorcycling. I prefer to ride alone. I go riding to find solitude and in that solitude delve more deeply into the craft of motorcycling. Riding to feel a part of a crowd, ‘show my colours’ or just show off isn’t my bag. I don’t ride to be seen or make a statement, I ride because I love riding. |
| Coulda skipped that… |
 |
| Woulda happily have skipped that (this is the passageway you get funnelled into after getting out of the big passageway)… |
 |
| Coulda done this at Two Wheel… |
 |
| Coulda done that at Two Wheel… |
 |
| almost 1600 miles diagonally across North America. |
I roughed out hotel stops based on ideal distances, but it would probably be significantly cheaper to pick a hotel chain and stay with them throughout. My hotel of choice would be Hampton Inn, so a revision based on where I can stop at those might be in order.
After Indy got cancelled this is the only other race on my continent and so my only chance to ride to a race event. It’d be nice to see the circus in action again this year and Austin, while much further away, offers a chance at Ironbutt glory!
It’d be nice to go down there with some good camera kit and see what I can capture. I did pretty well with my little Olympus last summer, but another go with more effect gear would net even better results.
Many of the images I took had to be photoshopped a bit to hide the poor resolution and light intake of my camera (creating a simplified painted look in Photoshop hides these weaknesses).
I’m also getting frustrated with the lack of lens availability with the Olympus I’ve got. I’m thinking of going back to a superzoom on my next camera. The Nikon P610 has enormous reach (4x what the Olympus telephoto can manage with similar light loss). What would be even better would be a full 1″ sensor superzoom like the Pentax FZ1000, then I’d have a multipurpose camera with excellent low light ability – though they are three times the price of the smaller sensor superzooms.
I had a fixed lens superzoom a few years back and loved the flexibility, though it was one of the first electronic view finder cameras and lagged annoyingly. It’s light intake wasn’t great either. The new ones will benefit from much faster electronics and dramatically larger sensors letting more light in.
The Olympus PEN is an entry level mini-SLR. I’ve enjoyed the size and convenience but the lenses are expensive and hard to find, and the kit lens has broken. The body itself also broke under warranty when I first got it. A second failure in three years has me thinking about moving on. I’m looking for the simplicity and flexibility of a fixed lens superzoom again. This would be especially handy when travelling on a bike where all the SLR clobber takes up too much space.
As a photographer I’ve always enjoyed being able to do more with less. I’ve often seen people with suitcases of gear worth ten times mine take worse pictures. As long as it can keep up with my eye and offer the control I need, a quality fixed lens superzoom will let me do that in spades.
Rough Planning Maps:
I’ve been watching Tough Rides: China by Colin & Ryan Pile. It’s the long way around China and a great introduction to a little known country, but it sometimes comes off as another thinly veiled BMW ad for adventure motorcycling.
The ride itself is indeed tough with the boys working their way through deserts, traffic and mudslides all the way to the base of Everest, but their bike troubles left me thinking about BIKE’s ride from the UK to Japan on a Suzuki V-Strom. In that case the (relatively budget) Suzuki V-Strom managed to cross Europe and Asia (including the Pamir Highway and Mongolia) in fine fettle. Bike’s 13,768 mile (22,160km) ride highlights just how tough Suzuki’s less famous adventure bike is.
In comparison to Bike’s bullet proof V-Strom, the new BMWs making the 18,000km circuit of China quickly develop character. I just finished the episode where one of the bikes (after not starting in a previous episode), now needs a whole new clutch. This got me thinking about another statistic.
The Consumer Reports reliability Rankings are pretty damning. From a purely statistical point of view you’d be crazy not to buy a Japanese bike, adventure or otherwise. If you want something American, get a Victory! Want something European? For goodness sakes, get a Triumph! Ducati is more dependable than BMW yet the propeller heads from Bavaria still seem to be the darlings of the TV adventure motorcycling set.
I get the sense that this is a triumph of marketing over engineering, which is a real shame. If every other motorcycle manufacturer took the same risks supporting epic rides we wouldn’t all be subject to this style before substance adventure-bike TV.
A while back I was reading a Cycle World article comparing the big BMW adventure bike to KTM’s Super Adventure. The article ended with a litany of breakdowns on both machines. It turns out taking 550+ pound, tech-heavy giant trailies off-road doesn’t end well unless you’re a magazine reporter riding a demo bike. I guess they’re great bikes as long as you’re not pouring money into repairs yourself.
I got into Nick Sander’s Incredible Ride a while back. Nick road the length of the Americas three times, two of them in just 46 days, on a Yamaha Super Ténéré.
That’s 50,000 miles (~85,000kms) through the bad gas of Central America, jungle, deserts, mountains all from north of the Arctic Circle almost to the Antarctic Circle. The BigTen worked flawlessly and when they stripped the engine down after the fact the technicians were frankly astonished by how little wear there was. Needless to say, it didn’t need the clutch replaced during that massive trip.
Honda is bragging on their new Africa Twin, a ‘true’ adventure bike. At 500lbs it’s a bit lighter than the super-stylish yet very breakable BMWs & KTMs listed above, and if anyone could build a bike that wouldn’t break it would be Honda. Yet even in this case I’m left wondering just how resilient any off-road capable bike north of five hundred pounds is going to be.
You’d think it would be impossible to build a big bike capable of managing this abuse – it’s a question of physics (mass vs. the violence of off-road riding), but Sanders’ Yamaha suggests it is possible, though you won’t see it on adventure bike TV. Maybe bikes that work all the time make for bad TV.
 |
| There is a reason why you guys are having to figure out how to install clutch plates in the middle of a trip…. |
An antidote to all of this is Austin Vince‘s various Mondos. He seems to spend about the same amount of time repairing his ailing, ancient dual sport bikes but he isn’t wearing designer riding gear and he didn’t pay anything like the $15,000 that the two Canadian boys did for their new F800GS Adventures. Vince probably spends less than that on a whole trip, including the cost of his bike.
Ultimately, much of the adventure bike genre is more concerned with style. Like SUV drivers, most ADV riders seldom if ever venture off pavement so perhaps this post is suggesting something that doesn’t really matter.
 |
| COST x FAILURE RATE presents a pretty obvious conclusion. |
But if you can buy a better built Japanese adventure bike for less (they all cost substantially less than the nearly $22k a BMW 1200GS Adventure costs), then why on earth wouldn’t you?
If you’re buying that GS to feel like Ewan & Charley then I suppose it’s all good if you enjoy the feeling you get from it, but if you’re actually interested in going off the beaten path and don’t have a sponsorship deal and a support crew, considering reliability before marketing seems like a no-brainer.
From shockingly rude Canadians to wonderfully supportive Guatemalans, this book makes you question all the prejudices we have about foreign lands (as well as the one I happen to live in). Lois is amazingly fearless and committed to her journey. You can’t help but admire her for her bravery. |
| “On April 30th 2003 I left my job at the BBC and my cosy houseboat in London to motorcycle the length of the Americas on my Yamaha XT225 Serow. My route took me 20,000 miles from Anchorage, Alaska to Ushuaia at the tip of Argentina, the most southerly place in the world that can be reached by road. The book of this journey, Lois on the Loose is available in the UK, USA and has also been translated into German, Dutch and Italian.” |
If you think you might be in love, head over to the online configurator and spend some time building your perfect Ace.
In the meantime, I’ve been playing with graphics of this lovely machine:
 |
| The original from my configurator… carbon wheels? Why yes, yes I will! |
