A nowhere ride

Yesterday I was busy mowing and gardening and several bikes rode past whilst I was busy cutting down branches out the front. It's double points long weekend here which means the cops virtually take your license for doing 1 kmh over the limit. So I resisted the temptation, then a few more bikes went by. Did I mention it was a fantastic day for riding. Then the missus and kids got in the car and went to church. Was I gonna stand here all day doing boring chores all by myself or was I going for a ride?

Bugger this it's to good of a day to waste doing chores and no riding. So I quickly cleaned up and got the bike out. I wasn't going to go on a long ride as the minister of finance and warfare would be back in an hour and a half.

So I just went for a short ride locally. I happened to find myself out the front of Yamaha Australia HQ which is only 10 minutes from where I live. This is where my bike came from(factory in Japan excluded).

Blogger Meet up

I've been away on holidays with the family and during this time I've been trying to post up a couple of blogs but have had to wait until I got back to the civilised world for a couple of reasons. For starters free wifi in this country is abysmal and blogging from a tablet really sucks ass. My phone's internet connection wasn't up to the task of blogging. When I was using the fablet for some stupid reason all the photos got deleted from the post before I could publish, it doesn't seem terribly blogger friendly when pictures are involved and the cursor seems to jump to random spots. Frustrating to say the least. Give me a PC any day.

Anyway I managed with my feeble internet and computer skills to get a comment and email through to Jules from the fabulous Tarsnakes Motorcycle touring blog and a phone call later a meeting had been arranged.

Jules and his Fabulous wife Mrs T rocked up at the bakery in Apollo Bay smack bang on time as scheduled. I'll finally get to see the ZX-14 in the flesh and what a beast it is. Jules had just fitted a GPS to it. That would be a great accessory on the R1. I forgot to ask how it goes with gloves on, does it operate the same or is it a bit cumbersome?

Tarsnake's Beast, the Mighty ZX-14

I was a little nervous at first as we've never met before and only exchanged emails and comments on each others blogs. Jules and I hit it off right from the word go and I could have talked bikes for the whole day(to the disappointment of the girls). Jules is very knowledgeable about bikes in general and had some excellent local knowledge that came in handy for our trip down to Port Campbell and back. Mate the home made hamburger at the shoppe in Lavers Hill has to be the best I've ever had. Thanks for the tip.

The below photo was blatantly stolen from Tarsnakes blog.

Jules & Mrs T it was a pleasure to chat with you over a coffee. An hour and a half flew by. Two of the nicest people you could hope to meet. Maybe one day we will have a chance to get out on the bikes together. If your ever up this way, give us a yell and its our shout for the coffees and we could show you around.

Mr & Mrs T

Bee's, Beers and Magpies

'WTF is that' I thought to myself as I watched bushpig on his triumph riding in front of me as he rode into darkish cloud that was floating across the road. It suddenly dawned on me it was a swarm of bee's. I had about 2 seconds before I would be engulfed by the bee swarm. The only thing I could think of doing was ducking down under the small screen on the R1. Did I happen to mention that R1's have a very small screen, as I went through I could see bee's bouncing around in all directions. As quickly as I rode into the bee swarm I was out again. I checked around and there were bee bits everywhere but no stingers in me. I checked over bushpig and he was all good as well. All this only 5 minutes into the ride.

Fridays ride was just a quick one up into the blue mountains via the bells line of road. We decided on having some lunch at the Mt Victoria pub. There wasn't a lot of traffic as it was a week day which suited us perfectly.  Temps up near Mt Bell were a little on the chilly side but that didn't worry me at all.

A great place to give the newly rebuilt rear shock a test. It was immediately clear to me that the rear shock was working how it was supposed to, feeling firm and soaking up bumps and staying firm under acceleration out of corners and not pogoing around.

In fact it felt so good that I could now see that the front suspension couldn't cope with the back being fixed. I might have to upgrade the front too.

As we entered Bell and rounded the corner where the road meets the Mt Vic turn off I heard a squawking noise of a bird then followed by a clunk on the back of my helmet. I was getting dive bombed by a bloody magpie. The little bastard. For the non Aussie readers the Australian magpie is an aggressive little black and white coloured bird that during the spring time will dive bomb anyone unmercifully if one happens to wander too close to its nest.






We stopped in Lithgow for a fuel top up and came back via the great western highway up Mt Victoria. It's sad to see that they have now fitted average speed cameras on the Mt Vic section of road. We were soon stopped at the pub for a quick lunch of wedges and a beer(only one of course).

Bushpig multitasking

We had soon headed back across to the bells line again but this time I was riding the trumpy and bushpig was on the R1. I followed in comfort, with the trumpy's upright seating postion and reach up to the bars not down, it sure has some grunt out of the corners and it soaks up the bumps well too. The R1 out in front looked tiny in comparison. As we approached the intersection at bell I saw the shadow of a bird and then another clunk on the back of my helmet again. That friggin magpie was back again. We stopped in for a couple of photos near Mt Charles and then continued on.

Bells Line at Mt Charles

Mt Banks

Sydney Skyline in back ground

It's only a short ride back to Sydney from here of about 1 hour. A short but good ride just before my annual leave kicks in with a trip of the great ocean road coming up, pity it won't be on the bike though.

The clean up

This is the shit!!

Brasso is the best shit ever invented for cleaning metal surfaces. I have used this for years on my bike. After exposing the dirt fest that was the internals of the rear of my bike in yesterdays blog, a 10 minute session with the pressure cleaner and some brasso and good old elbow grease brought the rear section back to new stone chipped not so new.

Even with the pressure cleaner after 10 minutes nothing looked different. After rubbing in the brasso within a minute all was clean and shiny again. Thank you Brasso and you can send the cheque in the mail.


Now its time to get some riding in.

A Shocking Development

News has filtered through that Bobskoot had recently passed away. It's left the motoblogging community reeling as just about everybody in the blogging community knew Bob. May you now rest in peace Bob and ride long and hard where ever you now are.


It's been raining the last few weekends so I haven't been able to get out for a ride lately. I decided that it was finally time to unleash the moths from the dusty cobweb riddled thing I call a wallet and splurge on getting my rear shock rebuilt. I've only been talking about it for about 5 years now. Maybe with an up and at em attitude like that I could become a member of the West Coast Procrastinators.

I pulled the rear shock out which took about 5 minutes and on the advise of Stu who you saw in the last post I did, I took it down to Teknik Motorsport suspension specialists at Penrith for the rebuild. I met Nick the owner, who was knowledgeable and pretty fair with the pricing.  I also got them to put in a new spring as the original fitment spring is only weighted for a 69kg rider. I had always had the spring pre load turned up to 1 from hardest and it was still too soft. It's never been any good really. The shock bump rubber at the base of the spring has crumbled into dust and is also in need of replacement.

One well past its used by date R1 rear shock

Here's the shock back with the new spring and bump rubber installed. My massive girth required a spring that could launch a shuttle into space once compressed. They re-valved the shock as well as Nick said if they didn't the rebound would send me over the moon. I didn't want to take him up on that offer so I duly had them do the re-valving. I can't afford the trip into space let alone the moon.

One rebuilt R1 shock complete with new spring and bump rubber

Compression Damping screw with
pre-load below that

Here it is fitted back into the bike, it wasn't to difficult at all really. I reset all of the pre-load, rebound damping and compression damping back to factory settings.

Then I adjusted them harder by 1 notch each. I'll give that a shot for a starting point and adjust from there. It has to be much better than when it was new.

The pic on the right shows the Compression damping screww at top with the blue ring and under neath the preload is set to 5. 4 is factory standard setting. Now just to set up the sag again with the new shock.

Below is the rebound damping screw also circled in blue.

Rebound damping screw

During the works I also pulled out the rear hugger just for some better access. What I discovered was a little disturbing. On the left hand side of the swing arm where the plastic bolted to the aluminium bracing arm the plastic had rubbed it's way into the metal. There is a pretty deep groove there at about 1mm deep. See picture below. Pulling all this stuff apart has just shown me that there is a lot more cleaning to be done. I guess there nearly 15 years of dirt, mud, clay and crap under there. 

Is Plastic mightier than aluminium? You be the judge.

Anyone got a hose?

I hadn't finished there either, as I had some bling arrive in the post yesterday that needed installing. I had broken one of the plastic windscreen bolts when I did the fluid change last month. They are really cheap plastic screws so I ordered some new ones from the interwebs. Shiney new blue anodised aluminium bolts.





And to go with that some new bar end weights to replace the stone chipped rusty original bar weights. And not just any bar weights R1 bar weights. She's all blinged up now.

The pointy end of the field

Here's a good friend of ours here at the Road to Nowhere who occasionally shows up on these pages getting down to business and showing us how its done at Wakefield park last weekend at the post classic racing. Thanks for the pics Rick.




Hope every things all right mate and it wasn't too costly for you.

Driver Incompetence

The need for speed

With our never ending police presence on our highways these days it makes sense to take to the track if you feel the need for speed without losing your license, and as a consequence your lively hood. This is one of the reasons in the last 10 years or so my riding has become fairly sedate. I've had about enough I can stand and it's time for some action.

So it's time that I got some of these......

And head to one of these.......

For some of this.......

And this........

Without worrying about seeing these....

And losing this.....

The date has been settled and the track has been booked. Time for some speed.....