Wordpress – Mechanical Sympathy

Stealing One in November

It’s the best I can cobble together if I want to lean into some corners… miles of straight lines between them though.

Don’t often get rides in after Hallowe’en, so gotta grab ’em while I can. The Tiger remains flawless after the idle hack. It was a high of 10 degrees but I bundled up.

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Got an invite to speak at RICET 2025 in Montevideo, Uruguay on emerging technology in cybersecurity. I’m excited to head south of the equator for the first time, but it’s a Monday out, Friday back flight marathon. I’m thrilled to be going, but a Tim with more control over time would fly down and then take the long way up home.

Timing this to sync with the seasons would be the trick, but it would also slow me down. Ushuaia isn’t easy to get to at any time and if you’re going to do it you want to make it on the longest days of the year (southern hemisphere). If I wrapped up Montevideo October 24th and took the weekend to sort myself out and unpack the Tiger (ship it down in advance?), I’d be over to Buenos Aires for the end of October and ready to tackle Patagonia and the long ride south through November up to the mid-winter holidays.

New years at the southernmost point and I’d start the long ride up, working my way over to the Pacific coast. The ride north could be accomplished (with stops and without rushing through it) over 3 months, getting me into Buenaventura in Colombia at the end of March.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/wGXW5JrPTEF1ihWCA

There are lots of floating options for crossing the Darien Gap to Panama from Buenaventura, so that’d swallow another week of loading, boating and unloading. They call it RORO shipping (roll on, roll off).

Then it’s on to the North American portion of the odyssey. I’m loving Cali’s ‘last bastion of the Constitution’ that they’ve got going on, so it’d be through Baja and up the PCH on a ride I’ve always wanted to do, getting me to Vancouver in May.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/3ogTHUvhpXatQzmTA

Timing crossing the Rockies would be the next trick because the weather isn’t a sure thing at that time of year, but a well timed May to June crossing Canada and ending back home would replace the 20+ hours of flying with an epic seven month odyssey up the Americas.

After RICET 2025 (I did last year’s RICET 2024 in the DR so I already know people), I imagine I’d have an opportunity to follow up with cybersecurity types across the hemisphere on the ride back home to Canada. My research buddy from Mexico City is also on the route. Rather than fly over it, I’d use the trip to Uruguay to get deeper into the places and cultures that would otherwise be present at the conference.

TMD was originally named after Chez Guevara’s The Motorcycle Diaries, where he rides across South America to understand what was happening through colonialism and early globalism in many countries. It’d be cool trace some of those roads, this time with cyber intentions in order to get a better understanding of challenges in the region.

I would, of course, take the old Tiger. It’s ticking along very well at the moment and I’d be
curious to see if the old Girlie can make the trip. It’d get the Hagon shock I’ve been thinking about and I’d go through it end to end for tires, inner tubes, bearings and the like to get it ready for over 26,000kms of riding.

I’d take the stock panniers and a roll back across the back and aim for lightness with a focus on staying with locals whenever I could.

I’d be dangerous if I had the money and time (money is time)…

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Tiger Miles and C14 Tight Trousers

The Tiger is healed. I wasn’t sure of going off piste with the engineering when I first did it, but trying to keep to Triumph’s design demands when they themselves won’t support them with parts pushed me over the edge, and I’m glad it did. The how-to is here.

It now starts on the button, idles steadily at 1200RPM (I set it with a spacer nut on the throttle idle bolt on the intake manifold), and has become my go-to ride again. Take out the it-never-worked-right idle control plunger and you’ve got a functional Triumph 955i motorbike.

The end result? I’m putting miles on the bike again this summer and hope to have it within 5k of the 100k goal before the snows fall. Next year I’ll go over the top.

Many miles in many weathers on and off road. The Tiger’s solid… which prompted me to put the Concours 14 up for sale. I got a couple of nibbles but wasn’t feeling it so I took it down again. Why sell the Connie? It costs twice what the Tiger does in insurance each year and is half as comfortable (I’ve never been able to make it fit me right). My better half and I went out to Stratford for a play and it was rock solid.

When you have the hardware, you can show up in Stratford for a play dressed like a biker and turn into a well dressed theatre goer in moments!

… and yet we both got off it after a couple of hours of riding limping. It’s a younger person’s machine and I think it’s time to let it go. Considering I stepped from a Fireblade to the C14, the next step is likely to be a (frickin?) Gold Wing, but that’s me aging gracefully. The combo in the garage is more likely to be the Tiger and some godforsaken recovery project I’m neck deep into figure out rather than the Tiger and a cruiser.

While in Stratford we stopped by Perth County Moto‘s Bike Night. The new location has piles of parking and the new store is enormous! Well worth a trip out, and we’ve proven that you can rock up to a play and transform into theatre goers when you’ve got a top box and two panniers.

A brilliant trip to Stratford has left the C14 is hanging by a thread. Being a competent sports tourer with hyper-ballistic skills isn’t enough anymore.

PCM’s new (to us) digs impressed.

When I look in the garage, this is the one that still gets my attention. Sell the C14 and find the guy selling the 955i Tiger in Windsor last year for parts and see if he still has it?

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Tiger Mileage and an Atmospheric Ride

Most recent mileage data: 378kms using 19.5 litres of gas, which is 5.16 litres/100kms or 45.6mpg. The Tiger typically returned just over 50mpg before, so I’m seeing a minor hit in mileage. Triumph claimed it’d get 43mpg, so I’m close to that. Perhaps previously I wasn’t wringing it out like I am now that it’s healed.

Took it out for a ride on a June Saturday when it was supposed to get very hot. Instead it got very pop up rain stormy and I ended up cold. Love riding in the rain though, it consumes all of my attention…

No issues in the rain and I can live with a small mileage cut, though I’m still not convinced this fix has one. Perplexity agrees with me. 160kms in the rain and the bike purred like a kitten.

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Cross Canada Dreams

After decades working in the next town over commuting to the same job year in year and year out I found an opportunity to travel with work. My current gig has me doing cybersecurity training and emerging tech outreach across Canada. In the past couple of months I’ve been coast to coast to coast in Canada, but because it’s still fairly new to me I’m not making best use of it just yet.

A good example is a trip I have to Vancouver next week. If I were crafty I’d have the Tiger shipped out to Vancouver the week before, pick it up for the week of work across Vancouver Island and then begin the ride home starting on Sunday morning. At sub 500km days I could do an eight day trek home:

Vancouver to home in 8 days.

A quick poke around suggests it would cost just over a grand to get the bike out there. Considering I’m paying about that for the rental car for the week, I suspect I could get that cost covered.

The tricky bit would be finding the time to ride back, eight days costs more than just dollars.

What’s nice about the one way nature of this is that you get to see everything once and soak it up. If I could stretch it to ten days I’d slow things down in the Rockies, perhaps spending a day doing a loop out of Jasper.

Later this summer I’m in Charlottetown and Antigonish, Nova Scotia. That’d make for an even better cross country ride… truly coast to coast. Doing this sort of thing would get the Tiger north of 100,000kms this summer!

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Tiger Test Ride(s)

The Tiger rode like it has never had any fueling problems after I hacked the idle control system last time. Idle control is a common problem on 955i Triumphs and I’ve spent years trying to get mine back into spec even as finding parts for them gets more difficult. Turns out the solution is to remove it.

Ride #2: 40 minutes locally

Second ride this week and the bike idles rock steady and is as smooth as it has ever been, and the backfiring that had been getting worse is completely gone. Today it started on the button, ran from cold with no issues and took me on a 40 minute ride without a hiccup.

We live in an overcrowded little town now thanks to Southern Ontario swelling in size post COVID, so I took the Tiger through a lot of stop-start traffic to see if I could get it to hiccup, but it wouldn’t! Makes me want to move more than ever though.

No problems on the back roads.

Pickup up from stops, no problem. Cornering roll on throttle? Smooth as butter. Idle never wavers and I’d forgotten how much fun to chuck around the Tiger is…

So if you’re having never ending headaches with your Triumph 955i idle control system, yank the damned thing! Modulating the idle through varying the vacuum between the intake manifold and the airbox (the servo moves up and down revealing the vacuum passages for the three throttle bodies) serves some purpose (perhaps emissions?), but at this point in the bike’s life at over 90k and 22 years in, removing the lot and connecting the intake vacuum lines together offers a viable fix for what may be one of the last of these bikes on the road in Canada. I’d be willing to play Top Trumps with any other 955is on mileage too.

Ride #3: Going Long

The next run was a 275 km run up to Georgian Bay to look at a blue horizon. These days it’s also a reason to get out of our increasingly overcrowded and traffic jammy town.

The first 45 minutes are straight lining through farm desert, but the geography starts to get some character once you get into the Niagara Escarpment in the Gray Highlands. I didn’t throw the 360 camera on until we got to the less tedious bits.

At just under half a tank the Tiger took me 140 kms and two stops to a fuel stop between Blue Mountain and the big water. It was still showing most of the red on the fuel gauge and took less than 17 litres (it’s a 24 litre tank), suggesting that this mod isn’t hurting mileage.

After the fill up it was some twisty bits over to Creemore for a bite and then the long haul back through farm desert (with its big, juicy flies) and then lines of traffic to get back to my driveway. Through it all the Tiger was mighty.

Flesherton to Thornbury through Beaver Valley (41kms)

Thornbury Harbour to Creemore Brewery (77 kms)

Thornbury Harbour!

Just past the scenic caves on Blue Mountain.

Creemore for a late lunch.

Steady 100km/hr sections, twisties, as big an altitude change as you can find in Southern Ontario and we never missed a beat. Left at 10am, got home just past 4pm, multiple stops, always started on the button whether cold, or or somewhere in between.Temp was mid-teens leaving and mid-twenties returning.

It’s been a while since you’ve heard this on here, but I’m a happy Tiger owner.

1) Bin 2, 3 and 4
2) Remove the top of the servo (1) and leave it plugged in but detached from the airbox.
3) Block off the hole in the bottom of the airbox left by the removed idle control stuff..
4) Plumb the three vacuum lines out of the throttle bodies into each other through a T-junction.

Bob’s your uncle! No promises, but it did the trick for me.

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Triumph 955i Stalling Issues…. Fixed!?!

Facebook slapped me in the face with this this morning:

…so I went on a mission.

I pulled the tank (for the millionth time?) and set up the 955i Triumph Tiger so I could try many different things to test if the idle was working. Previously I’d followed the manual, but no longer!

I did the usual checks for vacuum leaks and I continue to suspect the overly complicated and no longer supported idle control system. After trying everything I’d tried before, I decided to go OFF BOOK.

If I can’t fix this @*&%ing thing perhaps I can hack it! With the bike in test mode (plugged in and ready to run with all sensors attached), now is the moment to try some alternatives, so I pulled the entire idle control system and tried variations without it.

I plugged the servo back in because I figured leaving it unplugged might piss off the computer. I also removed the end of the servo so it wouldn’t interfere with the airbox and then blocked off the airbox with Gorilla Tape.

I’d also done my due diligence by balancing the throttle bodies and making sure everything else was plugged in as normal. I also reflashed the computer through Tuneboy with the South African map I found a few years ago.

So what happens when you remove the entire (problematic) idle control system in a Triumph 955i engine and simply connect the vacuum tubes out of the throttle body to each other?

Well, it seems to have fixed everything. The bike idles right where the computer sets it, the backfiring problem is gone and the motor fuels smoothly (though this is probably in large part due to that fantastic South African fuel map). Best of all, no more stalling.

That’s the work around. I got some silicon tubing from Amazon along with some T connectors (maybe $30 all in?). The last round of Triumph replacement parts cost me north of $200 and when I had to start buying used parts (because Triumph has stopped supporting their own bikes) and getting them shipped over to Canada it cost even more… but this hack is thirty bucks in parts and I also have a pile of unused silicon tubing and T connectors left over. I attached the silicon hoses to the T connector and then into each of the throttle bodies, so it’s a closed loop with no chance of leaks.

In the pic you can see the idle control servo (black object above the intakes on the left side). That’s what it looks like with the plunger removed. It still moves up and down but has nothing to do with moderating vacuum between the airbox and the throttle bodies which is what has caused me years of headaches.

I’m so jumpy about the motor falling through idle and stalling (it’s a perilous place to be when you’re on the road on a bike that keeps cutting out), but this hack hasn’t just solved the idle problem, it has also resolved all of the other issues. The bike idles steady right where I set it in Tuneboy, but more surprising is that the backfiring that had crept in is completely gone. The bike feels tight, full powered and like it did years ago. My only thought now is that it might hurt the gas mileage, but I’ll keep an eye on that as I get some miles under me this summer.

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Kawasaki Concours C14 1400GTR Valve Check Finished! (finally)

It took the better part of four months over the winter thanks to lots of work travel stretching things out, but the C14 is back together again and runs like a top. The engine doesn’t feel as tight, which makes sense as all the valve shims needed were to resolve the overly tight valves.

The Bay of Fundy near Saint John (latest work trip)

It still does the clatter when you first start it (it’s to do with the cam chain tensioner needing oil
pressure to fully engage – it’s part of the engine design). The bike has always done that but now that I’ve laid hands on the thing itself it’s helpful in understanding how it all works. Knowing how complicated just the top of that motor is gives me a new sense of satisfaction hearing it run well.

I’m back from yet another work trip but managed to take the big Kwak for a spin last weekend and it pulls like it always has (which is to say like a nuclear missile). Today I’m going to finally do the oil change it was owed last fall and we should be on track for regular use this summer.

The question now becomes do I sell it on during the riding season or keep it having done this soul crushing maintenance job. Based on what I saw in there I’m betting I was the first to do it (at 45k kms). Considering the complexity of this job, I can understand why.

Part of that decision will come down to whether or not I’ve solved the Tiger’s fueling issues. If I have, I might sell the big (and expsnsive to insure) Kawasaki and do the summer on a dependable Tiger, though the C14 is a much more comfortable two up appliance if anyone wants to come for a ride with me.