[Motorcycling] the country side.

Jokerman

Once upon a time, riders of all shapes and sizes came to a thread, much like this one, and talked about their motorcycle and riding a motorcycle.

Lets start that up again.

Lind

Nice a bike thread!

Sadly I sold my motorcycle (a Yamaha MT09) a few years back and bought a jet ski instead. I do miss having two wheels but since I also have a ATV (Polaris Sportman 570) I can’t complain to much.

Hope to see some nice bike pictures here and if you’ll allow it I’ll post some from the ATV!

Doc

My main ride is a 2007 Suzuki V-Strom that I've owned since 2009 or so. I've kept it through a move from the Pacific Northwest US to Canada, back to the PNW, to New York, and back to the PNW. It's a fun ride that does pretty much everything I want a bike to do.


It was my only bike until I saw this for sale on the side of the road in 2019:


It's a hilariously-branded "Genuine," which is actually a knock-off Vespa made in India. I can use most Vespa parts and they work fine. My wife, nephews, and dog love riding in it. Especially the nephews, though we're keeping that to around-the-block trips until they're a bit older.

Also, three wheeler classes are super super fun and I recommend them to anyone with a few years of riding motorcycles under their belt. You'll learn to "fly" the sidecar, which is riding along with the sidecar in the air. Seems like a circus gag, but it happens when you take a right turn a bit too quick.

LikeaBosh

I can't wait to get out and ride more. I got our bikes all ready to go, new oil, etc and after the first ride found a huge leak from my rear shock. Had to get a new one made from Cogent Dynamics, and am finally getting it put on next week. I've had to stick to short rides on my wife's bike, but soon we can both ride and get the dog back on the bike. He loves it, and gets jealous every time I ride without him.

Lind

That’s amazing. I’ve always wanted to try driving something with a sidecar. I’m guessing it’s quite scary to corner with at the start.

Doc

Yeah, you can't lean them, so the steering is exactly the opposite of a normal motorcycle. Really, go take a class! They're often subsidized by Can-Am, the company that makes those two-wheel-in-front bikes.

An aside: a lot of people were taking the class and only rode those, which are automatic, have suspension that keeps all three wheels on the ground, and just generally drive like a small car. I don't get it.

Lind

Bumping with a picture of me on my last day as a bike owner.

SummaryJudgment

What a great thread

I'm headed down to Tail of the Dragon tomorrow morning, so I'm trying (failing) to work right now while doing last minute packing!

Wish me luck and I'll have an effortpost when I get back 👍

LikeaBosh

SummaryJudgment wrote: »

What a great thread

I'm headed down to Tail of the Dragon tomorrow morning, so I'm trying (failing) to work right now while doing last minute packing!

Wish me luck and I'll have an effortpost when I get back 👍

Awesome, make sure to get a shot of the Tree of Shame haha.

Doc

SummaryJudgment wrote: »

What a great thread

I'm headed down to Tail of the Dragon tomorrow morning, so I'm trying (failing) to work right now while doing last minute packing!

Wish me luck and I'll have an effortpost when I get back 👍

may your ride be dry and free of minivans

SummaryJudgment

Doc wrote: »

SummaryJudgment wrote: »

What a great thread

I'm headed down to Tail of the Dragon tomorrow morning, so I'm trying (failing) to work right now while doing last minute packing!

Wish me luck and I'll have an effortpost when I get back 👍

may your ride be dry and free of minivans

it's absolutely pissing rain in Ohio around 8am tomorrow, extra clothes in a drybag. I've rounded the bend from a worried to a manic excitement.

SummaryJudgment

2018 CB500F

its wearing some soft saddlebags, a tiny Givi screen and framesliders, and a seat pad right now

I tried in vain to add a USB charger last night but my option sockets are already stuffed with heated grips + aux lights and routing cable wasn't happening

japan

I have been frustrated in my attempts to get my full bike licence

I did my compulsory basic training in 2019, intending to do my theory test and full test in summer 2020

Now my CBT certificate is about to expire and I still can't get the theory test booked

JRosey

Here's my 2008 Yamaha FZ6 with all the fiddly plastic bits snipped off. Been thinking of replacing it with a husky vitpilen 701 so I can experience the thrill of ABS brakes but can't seem to part with something that has brought me so much joy.

Jokerman

SummaryJudgment wrote: »

2018 CB500F

its wearing some soft saddlebags, a tiny Givi screen and framesliders, and a seat pad right now

I tried in vain to add a USB charger last night but my option sockets are already stuffed with heated grips + aux lights and routing cable wasn't happening

I had the baby brother earlier this year (The CB300F) and boy was that a reliable motorcycle. Never have I ever owned something so delightfuly trustworthy.

Then I sold it and bought a Triumph and now I'm fixing something eveyr other day.

exis

Yay bike thread.

I have a Street Triple 675 RX. The roads here are not the greatest but there are some decent twisty hills to play on which this is perfect for.


Only complaint is at 6'2" I wouldn't mind something I could stretch out on a bit more. Was considering replacing this with a V-Strom and doing some longer weekend trips, but with a baby on the way my riding time is going to be shrinking rather than growing, and a wee naked bike is ideal for popping out for an hour or two here and there. Plus it looks cool 8-)

Jokerman

The Stripple gives me so much bike envy everytime I see one.

Mortal Sky

I made a good post in the (currently Kawasaki Versys themed) chat thread but it's got swamped under 20 new pages in the last 24 hours so I'm quoting it here for posterity

Mortal Sky wrote: »

Ok so a history lesson on how you arrive at the oddball that is the Kawasaki Versys:

So there's this race that used to be held through Europe and the Sahara called the Paris-Dakar Rally, and when it started in the late '70s there was no real standard for what a "dirt bike" was yet - most "dirt bikes" then are what retro bike folks now call "scramblers", essentially road bikes with lifted pipes and extended suspension like the Yamaha XT500



By the early '80s, a German motorcycle company that had recently become more famous for its cars would come to define the desert rally world with its contribution to the open-class race: the BMW Gelande/Strasse, or G/S. This was, unlike most dirt bikes, a twin-cylinder heavyweight focused on sustaining high power over long distances. No one had done this before with such success, but for a couple decades this would become the standard for high-end rally racing (until the races were restricted to smaller single cylinder bikes again in the 2000s)



Now, the Japanese companies invested in would soon fire back with their own big rally racers like the Yamaha Super Ténéré, Honda Africa Twin, and Suzuki DR800 (the latter of which possesses the largest single cylinder bike motor ever mass-produced that I am aware of)




All of them except humble Kawasaki, which would make the KLR series. While the other three of the "Big Four" Japanese companies were chasing rally legend in the '80s, the 1984 KLR600 (and from 1987 to the present day, KLR650) is essentially a dirt bike tractor, slow and low but able to climb just about anything with little complaint, and has remained so for nearly 40 years. Kawasaki simply focused on sport bikes and true dirt/motocross bikes



While Kawasaki was looking away from the world of rally, though, something funny started to happen - it turns out that the big rally racers could, given less exaggerated fuel tanks and a bit of a de-tune for reliability, make excellent touring bikes. The same suspension and frame geometry that made them excellent desert racers made them surprisingly docile touring bikes, and so through the mid-late '80s in Europe and Japan they caught on as popular street bikes. These motorcycles, eventually taking on the monicker of "Adventure Bikes" or "ADVs" are essentially the crossover SUVs of motorcycling and remain popular to this day. Kawasaki finally took notice of this and introduced their own road-going do-it-all in 1991, the KLE500, which took the motor from a Ninja 500 and put it in a rally-style frame. At ~375lbs wet, this bike is actually much lighter than the big rally . This bike was never intended as a true rally raider and Kawasaki still never officially took part in rally but one Italian privateer would actually take one to Dakar in the mid-90s and do OK with it



That KLE moniker would stick around for a while - if you look at the legal paperwork for my Versys 650LT, it is legally a KLE650! However, the true dirt-worthy successor to the KLE500 wouldn't come until the mid-2010s with the Versys-X300. In the meantime we need to take a diversion to one of Kawasaki's big specialties, sport bikes, to talk about the bike that would prove blend further blur the line between Kawasaki's Ninja line and the KLE line: the 2005 ER-6N, a bike that wasn't ever sold in the US to my knowledge but was a "Naked" version of the ER-6F, a bike the US got as the Ninja 650. "Naked" bikes are essentially sport bikes with the fairings largely removed and more upright ergonomics - I would actually argue they're better for most on-road purposes than their faired counterparts, which are really at home on the track



Note the headlight and frame here - the Versys 650 still uses a variant of that frame to this day. Kawasaki is very much an "if it ain't broke" company, albeit less extreme with that than Suzuki, who are extremely conservative with bike remodels. Anyways, in 2007 Kawasaki would take the ER-6N and put long-travel suspension and a tall windshield on it to make a bit of an oddball - an "adventure"-posed bike with sportbike-sized wheels. They weren't the first to do so, Ducati's Multistrada and Yamaha's TDM beat them to the punch by years, but Kawasaki had made it substantially lighter and/or more affordable than either bike



And so you end up with the first-gen Versys, a bike that's not perfect but affordable, light, and generally greater than the sum of its parts. And hey, if you want a first or second gen Versys, they usually resell for incredibly cheap and they're stone-axe reliable. The third and fourth gen bikes are substantially heavier, but also have better wind protection - a new fourth-gen Versys 650LT is a great buy. I have never ridden the more recent Versys 1000 but I don't know if I want to, it's substantially heavier and less fuel efficient and I generally don't trust big 4-cylinder sportbike motors to not try and kill me.

If you want to do a little bit of everything on-road or slightly unpaved roads, a Versys will get you there at safe and sane speeds but with enough power to still excite ya. Meanwhile, Kawasaki still makes the humble KLR650 and the Versys-X 300 if you want to do off-road stuff

tl;dr - two-cylinder sport-y bike motor, dirt bike suspension geometry, good for a little bit of everything

SummaryJudgment

Mortal Sky wrote: »

Ok so a history lesson on how you arrive at the oddball that is the Kawasaki Versys:

So there's this race that used to be held through Europe and the Sahara called the Paris-Dakar Rally, and when it started in the late '70s there was no real standard for what a "dirt bike" was yet - most "dirt bikes" then are what retro bike folks now call "scramblers", essentially road bikes with lifted pipes and extended suspension like the Yamaha XT500



...

tl;dr - two-cylinder sport-y bike motor, dirt bike suspension geometry, good for a little bit of everything

Hey, that XT500 looks familiar...



This was the front of my AirBnB halfway down Ohio's Triple Nickel last year

My '18 CB500F went last year to a young guy for what I paid for it ($5800ish in Mar 2020, 400 miles on the clock and an Akropovich pipe for unknown reasons)

Now I've got this Yamaha XSR700 and it's fast enough. Mt-07 wearing a classic fairing, light, and seat.

I really love it, actually, it's quick but not crazy, the bottom-end torque is a blast in the city or twisties. The stock Pirelli Phantom Sportscomp don't turn in quite as quickly as I'd like (read: on rails), and I've about used them up and so I'm thinking either Michelin Road5s or some chunky dual-sport touring rubber. I've seen hardcases I love but I can't beat a 35L Kreiga pack for convenience and cost. The Marlin windscreen helps -- a little -- but since I like touring I'd like to pick up an Indian Challenger in a couple of years once the new crop of models winds up on Marketplace; I've got tinnitus (I always wore plugs!) and I just need a big chunky front fairing and windscreen in case I'm having a bad ears day.

Or maybe an inline-4 bike, since I keep hearing that and nothing else sounds like it...

Mortal Sky

I love the vintage Yamaha liveries, and those XSRs are pretty classy bikes - plus the 700 is just a good size, less fire-breathing than the 900 triple

I think the Kawasaki retro bikes like the Z900RS and W800 are the best-looking vintage aesthetic bikes out of Japan right now if you're looking at them up close on a showroom floor, but the more "neo-retro" rides from Yamaha and Honda still look real good and especially in motion

Red Raevyn

Nice bikes! Lots of stuff in that write up that I was surprised to not know Mortal Sky, thanks for pasting it here. I still hate KLRs though, don't think that'll ever change.

I hear ya on the "there's nothing like an inline 4". After almost 20 years of always having one I sold my street bike about a year and a half ago, and FortNine's video on the ZX4RR has me really wishing I had $10k around.

japan

I made the Versys themed chat because I passed my full bike licence tests this week and I've been watching the classified ads for something bigger than my wee Suzuki

I have a chunk of money set aside for just that but my partner's car broke down this week, possibly terminally, so I can't pull the trigger on a purchase until we have some idea what that's going to potentially cost

So I'm just frustratedly skimming gumtree

Mortal Sky

I like the KLR for exactly what it is, but I do wish Kawasaki still sold a classic dirt bike-y model without all the added bulk of the fairings -- at least there's always the DR650 for that and honestly the DR650 is probably a better bike on actual dirt

The one thing about the KLR that's a little bit suspect is that in spite of their unkillable reputation, they're infamous for (not always, but often enough it's noteworthy) tearing themselves apart to the point of needing a full engine rebuild by around 50-75,000 miles -- it's not the infamous doohickey, which has actually been fixed from the factory for about 10 year now, it's just that the engine starts getting oil blowing through the piston skirts and cylinder sleeve to a kinda nasty degree

Edit: digging around KLR forums seems to indicate it's worst on the '08-09 model years, and can be mitigated with a couple of tweaks and preventative maintenance, plus the big-bore 685 kit that you use to rebuild the motor has incredible quality piston rings and will near-permanently fix the oil burn

Red Raevyn

Yeah I just don't like the jack of all trades master of none, and it never impressed me. Heavy, burns oil, blech suspension, etc. Really feels more like "isn't good at anything" to me than anything else. I do see why people like em, but they're not for me.

I spent so long being super cheap that it took me a while to appreciate that sometimes it's way better to just spend the money once and have the right machine, than to keep trying to polish an imposter. For instance I've been super happy with getting a KTM dirtbike instead of trying to make my WR250R dual-sport do increasingly more dirt things it wasn't designed for. Or even taking something like a YZ250 and trying to replace parts and make it as good as the KTM 300... it just isn't worth it, and usually doesn't even work for that matter.

Doesn't Kawi have some scrambler, wanna say W650 or something? Ah yeah W800. That'd do gravel as well as anything else with the "KICK ME" front mounted oil filter. Maybe a little more classic than dirt bike.


I saw a really weird Ninja today (bike a ZX10 or ZX14), in that it had a big underseat exhaust but then also a second smaller exhaust on the right side. I've seen underseat, twin, and single pipes (and underseat twin!) but never one under and one side. Kinda curious how whoever did it ended up with that.

japan

Red Raevyn wrote: »

I saw a really weird Ninja today (bike a ZX10 or ZX14), in that it had a big underseat exhaust but then also a second smaller exhaust on the right side. I've seen underseat, twin, and single pipes (and underseat twin!) but never one under and one side. Kinda curious how whoever did it ended up with that.

Turbo with a screamer pipe maybe?

Jokerman

Hey anyone who wrenches on a bike, can I use a differently sized fuel line on my bike? It's apparently 7mm, would a 5/16 fuel line work or should i custom order a line somewhere?

Red Raevyn

It'll probably work. From where to where? What kind of fittings? If you're talking stuff like tank to carburetor or fuel pump, anything (made for fuel and pressure) that goes on the fitting and doesn't leak should be fine.

Honk

If it’s carburetor and not an injection engine you’ll probably notice if it runs poorly and might be able to tweak the mixture. Just make sure the hose doesn’t pop off or anything.

My dad’s bike routinely stopped running at all on one out of four cylinders due to a mixture error. In the end no damage was done to the engine. So I hardly think it would cause any long term problems in case it doesn’t run optimally.

Mortal Sky

slightly too big is probably better than too small, but if you're not running a drag bike I imagine the fuel supply should be plenty

Jokerman

Red Raevyn wrote: »

It'll probably work. From where to where? What kind of fittings? If you're talking stuff like tank to carburetor or fuel pump, anything (made for fuel and pressure) that goes on the fitting and doesn't leak should be fine.

That's a bingo. I was going to use a hose clamp on it, as it had a clamp on it anyways. But I've been keeping myself from putting the throttle back together for months because I haven't gotten a new fuel line for it.

japan

So I figured out why there seem to be very few cheap (<£3k ish) bikes on the local second hand market, and it seems to be that there is a guy in Dundee with a barn absolutely stacked full of bikes at about that price or lower who doesn't list his stock online

Went for a poke around, and assuming all goes well next week with the car it seems that within my budget I can have my pick of any number of: Bandit, SV650, CBR600f (F3s, mostly, but there were a couple of F4is), CB600, ER-6, BMW F650, or if I wanted to go older: ZZR600 or Thundercat (YZF600R)

I think there was also a VFR800 in there that I didn't look too closely at because it wasn't on my list at the time but I've since started seriously thinking about it as an option

So I kind of have choice paralysis. I don't think I can go really wrong with any of them save for the fact that some of them, and especially the CBRs, ZZRs, and the thundercats are quite old (90s vintage).

I think I'm going to go back next week with the cash for a deposit in my hand and see what I'm tempted by

Red Raevyn

Wow that sounds like so much fun! I would love to look around a place like that. You think they're all in reasonably good shape, or will need a "been parked too long" kinda treatment? There was a store (more like warehouse) north of Seattle with heaps of older parts and parts bikes... can't remember if they actually had full runners. Even it was always a good way to waste an hour.

Model-wise they'll all be fine bikes but there really is a lot of difference: You've got inline 4s, L-twins, and parallel twins. Sporty, upright, or sorta dual-sport! I'd figure out which kind of engine you like to ride first (personally I dislike the exhaust sound of parallel twins), then from there go for the bike that makes your heart pound. glhf!

Eat it You Nasty Pig.

There’s a place kinda like that here, though they’re closer to a proper dealer than a guy with a barn.

I’d be nervous about buying anything older though cause who knows how long it’s just been sitting on a warehouse floor

japan

They are in a variety of conditions but they're pretty clear about what is "ride this away" and what is a project. The deal is that they buy them in but don't really do anything with them until someone puts a deposit down, then it gets a service and if it needs work it gets it. They're up front about what they'll do and they apparently warranty for three months

They seem to have a pretty good reputation as far as I can tell.

Also there is a tiktok featuring the most Dundonian man I have ever met
https://www.tiktok.com/@barnstormers_dundee/video/7266841434832014625

japan

So this was delivered yesterday

Really pleased with it. I learned on an SV650 and this is a lot more docile at low speed, which is nice. The engine braking on the SV was really abrupt so you ended up slipping the clutch in second to negotiate roundabouts.

Also it was pretty cheap and it's a little bit scruffy, which I'm actually ok with because I can ride it around for a while without getting paranoid about damaging it

The one part I'm kind of equivocal about is the exhaust is really obnoxious

I need to check whether or not there's actually a baffle in it

Doc

After 15 years with it, I sold my VStrom. I only rode it about 12 times in 3 years, mostly to keep the gas fresh.

If I change my mind, I can always go get another bike!