Bike & Product Reviews

11am, Tuesday morning. Amazingly, its not raining. I say this because the last couple of days have been utter shite, storm like rain bringing down trees etc.

It's handy its not raining, as I've popped along to Experience Motorcycles in Kingsland to test ride their 2010 R1200GS demo, as arranged on Saturday, when I had a little Q&A session with them. Of course, no test ride is complete without taking along someone completely insane, to make you appear normal, so I brought along the ...

The clip on handlebars arrived finally. I still need to drill the holes for the controls. I have been surprised that the clip ons aren't going to hit the fairing, much to might delight. I got them from faddybike. While being at the more expensive end of the Thai parts suppliers, the quality so far has been very high.

Oh well back to garage...

Inspired by CG125 Bucket Project thread in the buckets forum I have decided to strip the chassis back (apart from the steering head) and clean it up. With the engine is out it is the prime opportunity to do some serious cleaning and making the bike look as good as I can. It will give me a chance to get rid of all that annoying surface rust and paint up the other parts/modifications that I made for the bike but never did anything about painting.

I'll post photos later.

Sunday morning broke fine and clear… the best day for riding (Just my opinion) on the long labour weekend break….

This was the 1st decent ride since the trip up north to the Twin Bridges and out to the Whangarei heads for lunch back on Fathers Day in September.... or the last quick blast around the Coromandel Loop....

Amongst all the other spring cleaning chores carried out on Saturday I had managed to clean the bike…. and check the fluids etc… so we were good to ...

Well finished the season by coming off; Finally got the bike to where I am comfortable to ride her, started the last lap... second corner with bike on my arse, rear slick not scrubbed in enough, wet track and sliding we did go - broken rearset and gear changer and dented tank.

I realised tonight I finished in 7th place in my grade. This is the same place I finished in my first year of bucket racing and following year I won the grade. Let's hope it's a good sign.

Mods ...

Well, today, I pootled off to Botany Honda to get Cindi serviced. She was booked in for her 6000km service (but I tend to over-run it a little ... this time, only by 300km or so).

Get the usual guff and customer dis-service from the lads in the shop, listened to some alarming South African driving/riding stories from the two saffies there. Wichard was not on talking terms with me since I got Cindi's rubber from another establishment (oh, look - my previous blog post! Fancy that!) ...

Well, after 6100km of happy riding, Cindi has decided that she needs a new set of shoes and daddy needs to do the shopping for her! The BT015 Battleax she originally had was a good tyre, but obviously being of a soft disposition, it was put to the test and found slightly wanting in terms of life. So ... time to try something else new!

So off to Drury Performance Tyres to see Mike about solving this little dilemma. The good man has a set of Pirelli Angels ST on the shelves ...

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Well it's been a while since I've managed to get some photos of half my collection (this happens to be the Honda collection!)

Will have to re do the shots and do it a bit better to do them some justice!

For those who don't know ...

CB250 aka lil'ol'hornet is Pete
CB900 aka Big Ol'Hornet is Max
CB1000R aka Predator is Cindi

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