Ergo-Cycle

http://cycle-ergo.com/

Looking at a better fit of bike (at 6"3' I'm a bit of a giant on the '07 Ninja 650r), I came across Cycle-Ergo, an online simulator that shows you the shape of any number of bikes and how your frame sits on it.  This is an interesting exercise even if you aren't looking for a new bike.

The FAQ explains that the basic rider model isn't perfect, but

does show you lean angles and other ergonomic considerations in riding.  The feet on the floor option should be taken lightly (the FAQ explains there are too many factors - rider weight, thigh size, seat shape,etc - that can change it), but it still gives you a rough idea.  

If you want to be a lean into it sport rider, then this will show you just how uncomfortable you'll be looking cool.  If you are looking for a long distance multi-purpose (as I am),then this will show me which bike offers me the most natural/classic riding position.

There are a lot of options in the menus to the right, so be sure to play with them.  After you put in the rider height and inseam you can modify various parameters of the stock bike (handlebar locations etc).  It also shows you variations in angle due to seat position.  At the riding school they encouraged me to sit as close to the tank as possible, so I tend to sit forward in the seat.  

I looked up my current Ninja (an '07 650r).  The bike feels too small for me, and it looks it in the diagram.  

I don't find the wrist position overly uncomfortable, even though I am at quite a forward lean angle.  What I do find uncomfortable are how high the pegs are and how bent my legs are on it.  At 75° it's one of the most extreme angles I found in the knees.

My feet are flat on the floor with bent knees.  The low seat means I can stand up at a light with inches of light beneath me.  It's a short bike I have to fold myself onto.  When at speed I'm catching a lot of wind in the face, even with the aftermarket windshield on it.  I have to lay on the tank to get out of the blast.

One of the bikes I'm considering is the Triumph Tiger 800xc.  The seat height on this bike is much (much) higher than the Ninja, and the steering seems to be closer and higher, offering a less stretched forward lean.


Unlike the backward bent legs on the Ninja, the Tiger offers me a more neutral almost 90° leg angle as well.  It looks like it might be a promising fit.

The Kawasaki KLR650 is also short listed as a possible contender.  It too has a tall, upright stance with a more neutral riding position.  At half the price of the (nicer) Triumph I'd also be much less worried about dropping it, which would certainly happen at some point if I'm exploring less paved roads.

As a bike I've actually sat on, I have to say this looks pretty close to accurate.



I ran the simulator with a number of other bikes just to see what various styles looked like.  The vague body shape reminds you that this is a rough simulation, but if you're considering buying a bike why not compare it to what you're on now or what you think would be your preferred style of riding.

I wish I'd have known about this tool when I was first looking for a bike, it would have given me some stats to consider.

The Ducati all-rounder adventure bike - the seat is supposed to be horrible

I've always thought Gixers were cool... painfully cool

Living out my Mad Max fantasies on an Interceptor... worse lean, better on the knees than the Ninja

I was considering this bike last year, but the blandness described  in reviews put me off

I've sat on one of these too - it felt small, it looks small in the picture, but classy!

Another rider at work has one of these, loves it, nice riding position!

The simulator lets you put a passenger on too - this is the Tiger with Max on the back

Here is what I'd look like if Ewan McGregor was my best friend...

Ninja Blues

This has been many weeks in the making.  I began de-blacking the '07 Kawasaki Ninja 650r (my first bike) in May.  Last weekend I took another big run at it.  This weekend I finally got it to the point where I can live with it.  I think I'll do the rest once the riding season is over in Canada, but in the meantime, I've got a Ninja that looks a lot better than it did.


I've blued the front end and the fairings down to the air intake.  I'll eventually do the entire bike, but those fairing are big and it takes a long time to strip the flat black off them (I'm using graffiti remover in small areas at a time).

At the moment the tank, front end and rear end are completely covered, but the fairings are only half blue.  I've faded the metallic blue into the existing flat black and it doesn't look half bad.

The more interesting bit is the frame.  I wanted a burnt orange, but every orange on the shelf was a pylon orange.  I was all set to mix a yellow and dark red to a burnt orange, but the mixing didn't go well, it ended up looking an angry pink.  It eventually settled into a darker orange, but I still wasn't happy with it, it looked muddy..


I had greater success getting the orange I wanted by doing a base coat of pylon orange spray with a cover of candy apple red metallic.  The result is the sparkling burnt orange I was looking for.  The plastic drop sheets and cardboard I was using to shield the rest of the bike looked like they'd come out of a volcano when I was done.  I'm not entirely thrilled with the finish, but now that I have some sense of how to mix the colours (orange based, mix in light layers of red while the orange is still wet), I'm ready to experiment more.

Orange base, light candy apple
red metallic over top
while still wet

I think I'll eventually make the entire frame that burnt metallic orange. It's also rust paint, so it'll seal up the frame nicely.


I got a different gloss this time, thinking they are all pretty much the same,
they aren't.

You want the one on the
right; AWESOME clear coat

The ultra-cover 2x (the blue and white can), gives you what looks like a factory clear coat finish.  The lacquer makes a foggy mess.  I'll only use the Ultra Cover in
future applications.
















The angry young man's flat black Ninja:

A truer, bluer Ninja:

One heck of a lot more visible, and it sparkles in the sun.

When I get the fairings finally done I'll giver her a real photo shoot.




















I'm now thinking about Kanji-ing up the front end... Ninja Kingfisher...

The Stable

My dream garage always had to be kind of huge to fit all the cars I wanted in it.  With the new bike
infatuation I get to dream of a more condensed (and plausible) dream garage.  It's still got room for the necessary evil (I live in Canada, some days a bike just won't do it), so I took the two car garage and doubled it to make a workshop in the back.

The car garage is separated by a dividing wall with a single garage door in it to allow larger vehicle access into the workshop.  There is a half size roll up door on the side for direct bike access.  The garage is wired in, but also has a turbine and solar collection.  In the winter this runs the high efficiency heater in the workshop.  In the summer is pushes a small, high efficiency air conditioner into the workshop.  The goal is to keep the workshop above freezing in the winter and below 25 degrees in the summer.

The battery packs and computer controls for the wind turbine and solar inputs are upstairs, as are the heating and cooling units, both of which feed into the workshop directly.  There is also room for storage upstairs.  Access is made through a pull down staircase in the back of the car garage.

The workshop has space for 5-6 bikes, though I think I'd keep 3 working bikes on hand, and one project bike.  I'd also keep a shed at the side for a couple of dirt bikes.

As for what I'd fill the workshop with, at the moment I'm all about the British bike.  A Triumph Street Triple, a Royal Enfield Classic with a sidecar and a Triumph Tiger 800XC would be what I'd have on had to regularly ride.  The other side of the shop has the half car/half bike Morgan3 Trike.

Royal Enfield Classic with sidecar

Triumph Tiger 800XC

The Tiger is a great all rounder that can get you anywhere.  A nimble adventure bike that also loves to carve up roads, this'd be my go to for long rides.

The Royal Enfield Classic with sidecar is a classic with modern technology.  It would let me share the open road with my son in a way he'd truly dig.

Triumph Street Triple

Morgan 3 Wheeler

The Triumph Street Triple is a naked bike built for the road.  It's fast, responsive and sounds wonderful.  This would be my dedicated road bike.

What I don't show in the plan is the project bike.  This would change quite frequently, depending on how much work the bike needs.  At the moment I think I'd like to bring an '80s Honda Interceptor back from the dead.

Honda VFR 750 Interceptor

The idea behind the dream garage is to have a workshop for bike maintenance and restoration.  I've really enjoyed restoring the 650r Ninja I've got now, and I'd like to keep doing that kind of work.  To that end I think I'd include a bike sized bench style spray booth, as well as a compressor in the workshop.  I enjoy both mechanical as well as body work, and it would be nice to have the space and tools to do both well.

Won't you make my black Ninja blue?

Project: restore the original blue paint job of a 2007 Kawasaki Ninja 650r.

Plan: remove the flat black-out paint job and restore the original metallic blue

Backstory:

This '07 650r Ninja is my first bike, I got it a couple of months ago.  I was considering buying a new bike, but wanted something I could get mechanically familiar with.  I got this Ninja with low miles (still only 8k on the clock when I got it).  There was evidence it had been dropped, but the bike was in excellent mechanical condition and with the low mileage, it seemed like a good candidate for a restoration that would let me familiarize myself with motorcycle maintenance (I've owned many interesting cars, so I know my way around an engine bay).  

Making a black Ninja blue again

So far so good, the bike is letting me figure out the mechanics and maintenance, and works flawlessly otherwise.  The biggest effort has been trying to figure out how to strip the blacked out paint job and restore the body to the stock colour.  Here is the process to date:

How to Strip Paint Off a Motorcycle:

My first attempt was heavy handed,
but lessons learned on the front
fender paid off elsewhere

Stone chips were showing the blue paint underneath around the front fender, headlight and leading edges of the fairings.  With it looking so shabby anyway (it's not like it's a nice black paint job), I began with the front fender, trying to find ways to remove the black.

I tried wet sanding the black but this didn't prove very effective.  The compound curves on the body work ('07 Ninjas are very sinuous) make sanding smoothly difficult.  The sanding block would either burn through into the

Goof Off Graffiti remover got
the worst of the black off,
then a wipe with a soft, lint
free painters cloth with some
thinner took away the haze

blue below or damage the clear coat; it was too blunt an instrument.  I eventually tried some graffiti remover  and it did the job while preserving the factory paint.  

Once I got the technique down, the
black came off leaving the blue in
good shape underneath

I initially tried wiping off the sprayed on remover with painter's rags, but they are too smooth to work well with paint this thick.  I eventually tried tea towels with a rougher texture and they worked well with the Goof Off.  

Eventually I found that spraying a thick coat of remover on a spot on the tea towel and then wiping in small circles would remove the black paint leaving the blue underneath untouched.  This is best shown around the seat at the back of the bike.  Even the clearcoat was left intact by working in small circles, removing the black paint in small areas at a time.  The paint there is not even waxed and looks great, this part of the bike was quickly restored with no damage to the underlying paint.

Graffiti remover (I can't speak for all of them but if they are all formulated similarly then you should get similar results) does a fine job of stripping a bad paint job off bike body work.  Work in small areas, spraying on to the rag and then applying to the paint.  The top layer of the black comes off on the first application, the blue shows through after the second.

Hidden bruises

This closeup shows just how
the black is coming off to
reveal the Ninja blue below

Of course, when someone blacks out a bike they might be doing it for aesthetic reasons, but I don't think I'll be assuming that any more.  It turns out the bike had been dropped pretty hard on its left side.  As I was removing the flat black it looked like I could see her hidden bruises for the first time.  The scuffs had all been sanded smooth for the black paint job, but as the extent of the injuries become clear I'll have a better idea of what happened.  It looks like the bike went down and slid without hitting anything.  It still has its original front end and various switch gear, so this was an asphalt slide that damaged the body work.

Looking at the bottom of the main fairing, I found that one side appears to be unpainted other than the flat black while the other is blue, so this is probably a replacement fairing.

The fairing on the right
has no blue under the black

I'm about half way through stripping the black off.  I'm to the big front fairings now, and they have a lot of real estate on them.  Working in small circles, this is going to take a while.

Once I've got it stripped down, I'll remove the panels, repaint them metallic blue and then paint the frame (burnt orange) while I'm in there.  The end result should be a colourful Ninja that proudly wears its stock metallic blue paint, albeit with some touch ups that make the bike even more visually interesting.

Notes:  

I picked up the Goof Off at Canadian Tire.  They had other brands there, I haven't tried them, but if I do I'll follow up with comments.

The factory paint job on an '07 Kawasaki Ninja 650r:  

Carrying Ninja

Getting a hard case with a back rest.  The goal:  

• To be able to carry the basics and keep them dry while out and about.
• To offer a backrest to make it easier for my passenger.

FZ-series Monorack is designed to add a Givi Monokey or Monolock topcase to your existing tailsection. Rugged black finish.

All hardware needed to mount the Givi rack is included. Installs quickly using simple hand tools. No welding or cutting of existing frame or body parts required. Tough black enamel finish with some gray fittings or hardware as applicable.

Select a Monolock(M5M) or Monokey(M5) top case mounting plate that will be used on the FZ445 when ordering for the related products. No Plate is included you need to add it to the cart.

The Givi FZ445 toprack may be used alone or with the Givi PLX445 side rack (for PLX sidecases ONLY).
$80  http://aviciouscycle.ca/MainPages/productpage.aspx?productid=1211

Designed for scooters and low-powered motorcycles.

Capacity of 30 liters, enough to hold a full face helmet.

It comes with a universal plate and mounting kit.

Maximum load capacity of 3 kg.

Note: Notice the body of the case does not change colour. It is just the lid section that will have the colour change.

$99 http://aviciouscycle.ca/MainPages/productpage.aspx?productid=4190

Turn your E300 Tour Case into a comfortable rest spot for your passenger with this Givi E103 Backrest.

Made of thick polyurethane, this backrest will hold up in the elements and provide comfort to all motorcycle and scooter passengers.

Sold each.

Long lasting material.

$45 http://aviciouscycle.ca/MainPages/Productpage.aspx?productid=4191

Items	Quantity	Price	Subtotal
Givi-E300 Monolock Case, 30 Liter		$CAD 98.99	$CAD 98.99
Givi-Backrest for E300 Monolock Case		$CAD 44.99	$CAD 44.99
Givi-Topcase Rack (Kawasaki Ninja 650R / ER6F, '06-'08)		$CAD 79.99	$CAD 79.99
Rebate Coupon:
Total : $CAD 223.97

http://aviciouscycle.ca/mainpages/Default.aspx