Foggy Ride In

T'was a foggy morning out in the wilds of Southern Ontario, Canada.  I took some photos with the big camera before leaving, then grabbed the Theta360 for some foggy road photos...

Holy night riding Batman!

It'd been a long, hot night in lodge.  Putting on a tuxedo isn't exactly comfortable at the best of times, stewing in one for three hours was worse.  I'd finally sprung free from cleanup and was looking forward to a cool, dark ride home.

Even now it was still well above 20°C, but the warm night air over mesh pants and jacket was dramatically cooler than a room full of guys in suits.  The Tiger fired up at first touch, eager to make some wind.

Riding at night doesn't happen very often, and when it does it tends to be the end of a long day where the goal is to get home, but the magic of night riding quickly reaches out and grabs me.  The smells are different and strong.  Reflective eyes follow me from every hedgerow and the stars are wheeling overhead.  Ground fog flashes past in low lying areas and my headlights tilt dramatically as I round corners on dark country lanes.

Suddenly, without warning something hits me in the visor - more precisely, I knock it out of the air with my face.  Whatever it was hits me hard enough to get off the throttle and coast while I assess the damage.  Insects attain Jurassic Park sizes in Canada in the summer, but this wasn't that.  Whatever it was bounced off the visor and hit my right shoulder, where it scratched desperately at my mesh jacket before the wind blast threw it over my shoulder into the dark.

Tiredness and heat exhaustion had been washed away with a surge of adrenaline.  I had big eyes behind that scarred visor.  Was it a cicada?  A June bug?  Those things grow baseball sized up here.  That desperate scratching feeling over my shoulder was still freaking me out.

I got my head together and pushed on into the night.  With no moon the Milky Way arched overhead.  Closing in on the one horse town of Oustic I tried a night time 360° photo which came out blurry but cleaned up nicely in Photoshop (on the right).

I rolled into my driveway well past 11pm.  As I pushed the Tiger into the garage and took my jacket off I discovered that it was splattered with blood.  My best bet is that I knocked a bat out of the air with my face.  He was probably doing his thing picking those Jurassic Park sized bugs out of the sky when my head came flying through space and took him out.  If I'd have seen him coming I would have ducked, but black bats at night are hard to pick out.

Better a bat than the rodent of unusual size I saw on the road half an hour later.  I don't know what that was either, but it gave me a long look with reflective yellow eyes before it ambled off into the undergrowth.

Riding at night is magical, but not without its dangers.

Lobo Loco WTF Bonus

Click on this and like it in Facebook!

While you're at it like my rally buddy Jeff's as well!

Help me out and click on those images and like it in Facebook!


It'll get us a bonus in the Loboloco WTF Rally we're running in this Sunday.  


I''ve got my rally flag - lucky number 7!

Thanks!

#shamelessselfpromotion

Chasing Storms

The other day riding home from a periodontal appointment in a foul mood I rode into a wave of ozone and turbulent clouds.  Spots of rain began to hit the visor while waves of rain approached over the horizon.  I pulled over to take some shower pictures and ponder the state of the world; it's been a tough month in motorcycle culture.

Robert Pirsig died in April after a long and difficult life.  Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a deep and nuanced read written by a man of tremendous intelligence who battled with mental illness.  If you can hang on to it and the philosophy it pitches at you, you'll find a an ending worth waiting for.  Pirsig's little book is one of the best examples of deep thinking intertwined with motorcycling I've found.  He leaves behind an important legacy.

Nicky Hayden, by contrast, was living the dream.  A man who found his passion early and then excelled at it, Nicky raced motorcycles in pretty much every level of road racing there is, and he did it with an infectious grin plastered across his face.

He was in the paddock of MotoGP a few years ago when I started watching, but by then he was on a satellite bike and struggling near the back of the field.  It wasn't until I saw The Doctor, The Tornado and the Kentucky Kid that I realized the trajectory of Nicky Hayden's career and came to respect both his talent and his tenacity.

Nicky was training on a bicycle on a road in Italy after his last round of World Superbike racing on my birthday when he was hit by a car.  After some days in a coma he passed away.  It's the kind of news you don't expect to hear.  Nicky wanted to work on reintroducing a new generation of American road racers to the sport when he retired (there are currently no Americans contesting MotoGP when it used to be dominated by them), but instead he's gone.  Because of a driver in Italy not seeing a cyclist none of that will happen now.

I stood there feeling the temperature dip, the wind kick up and the darkness fall while ruminating on these two very different deaths - an old man and a young man, an academic and an athlete, both linked over decades only by their love of two wheels.

I jumped on the bike and got home just as everything went pear shaped outside.  Rain lashed the windows and the day went dark.  

Of course, as is the way of things, when the storm passed the sun came back and reminded me how beautiful the world can be.

June 3rd Ride

After the success of taking Ricoh Theta 360 images on the roll a few weeks ago, I brought it along for a ride over to Erin and the Forks of the Credit on a sunny Saturday.

June 3 motorcycle ride - Spherical Image - RICOH THETA

Once again the Theta proved itself the ideal 360 camera for riding a bike with its hardware controlled buttons, all seeing eye and ease of use.

June 3rd Forks of the Credit, Ontario, CAN - Spherical Image - RICOH THETA

The embedded full 360° images above you can save on https://theta360.com show you the full range of the camera, but you can also use the desktop editing software to capture the views you like:

If you're looking for an on bike camera, you'll be happy with the Ricoh Theta - it's cheaper than much of the competition and is the easiest to use and most fully 360° camera you'll find.

Custom Motorcycle Digital Art

What I've got here is a photo of my Triumph Tiger 955i taken as near to fully side on as I could manage it.  I then photoshoped into a outline (trace contour and some negative inversion along with some line cleanup did it).  I saved that image as a vector and shared it with my trusty technology design teacher at work.  She cleaned up the lines a bit (mainly simplifying them) so they could be cut into perspex using a computer controlled router.

I then got an Arduino micro-controller and cut a length of Adafruit neo-pixel leds to fit the length of the perspex.  I soldered some wires onto the neo-pixel led strip and wired them up to the Arduino.  I then installed the libraries to run the neo-pixel strip and ran the basic test pattern code on the Arduino.

This is the result:

https://youtu.be/NAQBZQhmcgI

With a bit of coding you could colour code the display to something specific or make different patterns.  The strip along the bottom is 9 leds long, so you could get pretty fancy with patterns if that floated your boat.  I've also seen Arduinos run like graphic equalizers, responding to music with different colours and patterns, so that's another option.

Metres long LED strips can be gotten cheap.  An Arduino can be had for less than $10 if you're cagey about it.  Three wires and a bit of perspex and you're ready to go.  I'd guess in raw parts it cost all of about ten bucks to put together, and that includes an Arduino that could do a lot of other things.  If you've got a customized bike, a clean photo and a bit of prep and you'd have a disco light version of your specific machine.

***

I 3d modelled the Tiger a while ago using a Structure Sensor.  It snaps on to an ipad and is very straightforward to use.  Once you've 'painted' in your 3d model using the lasers on the sensor you can clean it up in something like the 3d modelling software that is included in Windows 10.  Here is what an upload of that looks like on Sketchfab:

Tigertester by timking17 on Sketchfab

I used Meshmixer to clean up any missed pieces in the original scan and then dropped it into a Dremel 3d printer.  This printer is fairly cheap and low resolution, but the model came out ok.  What I'd really like to do is try and print it in something like the FormLabs Form2.  Their terminator style resin based laser prints are way higher resolution, so you don't get the blockiness that you see in the additive 3d print process.

You can see how blocky the print is on the clean / top side of the print (the Dremel printer makes up the plastic model like a wedding cake getting layered).  The bottom side with all the extra support pieces that I had to cut off after is much rougher.  Another benefit of the Formlabs printer would be no annoying structural supports to cut off.

Like the disco light above, what's nice about this is that it's a direct copy of my specific bike.  If you've got a custom ride, scanning it with the Structure Sensor and then printing it out on something nice like the Formlabs printer would mean a smooth, accurate scale model of your particular machine.

What would be even cooler would be getting my hands on a large format 3d printer, then I'd be making accurate 3d models of fairing pieces and going to town on them in 3d design software.  I still want to remake a sports bike with  textured dragon scale fairings!

Motorcyclist's Bridge to Nowhere

I'm enjoying the new format of Motorcyclist magazine.  It's one of the few US bike magazines I make a point of getting.  They write smart and with a Californian perspective that is very positive and engaging.  Their new graphics format is like nothing else out there.  They also take risks with their stories.  In many other magazines you feel like you're reading the same reviews and comparisons over and over again.  Motorcyclist is like Bike UK and what Cycle Canada used to be in that you know you're reading something unique.  I think that has a lot to do with them focusing on getting the best writers rather than the most industry connected people they can find.

In the last issue they had a bit on towing a dirt bike into the desert using another motorcycle.  It was a bit silly, kind of like a bridge to no where, but I could appreciate it from a more bikes is good perspective.  Having said that, I have to question the logic of trying to go car-less this way.  Towing a trailer means you've lost all the benefits of splitting lanes (try to imagine you're somewhere sensible like California) and, you know, riding a motorcycle.  They said at the end of the article that chucking the dirt bikes in the back of a truck instead of trailering them and towing them with two touring bikes would have been easier, but I think there is an even better way to make that all motorcycle ride into the desert.

Things you don't see anywhere else. It's a story of excess, exhaustion and a lot of motorcycles.

The KTM 690 Enduro weighs only a couple of dozen kilos more than the 250 dirt bikes used in the story.  You get great wind on it while on the highway, unlike the hot and sweaty touring bikes used, and best of all the KTM costs about $27,000 Canadian less than a CRF-250X and a Goldwing.  I bet it would take you across the sand and up the mountain they went to in the article as well.

It'll take your camping gear and you don't need to slavishly fulfill two motorcycle style requirements, so you can leave your ever so fashionable heavy leather touring gear behind.

That's a long, hot slog through the desert - two ways.

If the point of the exercise is to get out there and back on two wheels, something like the KTM would have done the business, though it might have been a bit less dramatic doing it.  The highways would have been full of wind blast and the nimbleness of two wheels rather than two towing two more.  The off road riding would have been mighty close to what the 250 dirt bikes could do, and you'd be doing it all cheaper and more enjoyably.

Having said all that, what a great thing it is to see an article so uniquely silly and full of excess.  I'm glad the editor let it happen.

The Swiss Army Knife KTM 690 Enduro.
http://rtwwithnoah.blogspot.ca/p/blog-page.html
http://www.ktm.com/enduro/690-enduro-r-1/
http://www.advpulse.com/adv-videos/getting-from-london-to-sydney-on-a-ktm-690-enduro/
... and the new ones are in! http://www.kijiji.ca/v-dirt-bikes-motocross/ottawa/2017-ktm-690-enduro-r/1267233821?enableSearchNavigationFlag=true  If I had fifteen grand free I'd pop up to Ottawa and ride one back.