A Nice Way to Turn 50...

Thanks to the Ontario Government ignoring the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and illegally forcing a contract on us, I had my 50th birthday off.  I had an entire year of saved up sick days stripped away, but hey, I got a day off for it.  So much for Charter rights.

I figured the Forks of the Credit would be silly over the long weekend, so I thought I'd head over there on the Friday afternoon.  Still lots of people about, but I got to have a couple of clean runs up and down the twisty bits where I wasn't on the bumper of a duffer in a cage.  I'm not leaving rubber doing this, and I'm usually within 10km/hr of the limit, but cars through this twisty, technical road are a bit of a disaster.  It was nice to get a couple of runs without worrying about the processing capacity of the driver in front of me.

Photos are taken with a Ricoh Theta V on a custom built mount attached to the wing mirror.  Screen captured in the Ricoh software and modified in Adobe Lightroom:

The switchbacks at The Forks...

The little guy on the side of the road said, 'woah!!!" so loud I could here him on the bike.  :)

Always look where you want to go - sometimes that's over your shoulder!

In the moment on one of the frew curves between me at the Niagara Escarpment.  If I lived in California I would be a regular canyon carver on the weekends.

Beautiful weather, minimal traffic and a frisky Tiger.  It was a good 50th birthday ride.

The Corbin Experience

The big five-oh is coming up so I got myself a present.  I've always wanted a custom saddle and after seeing buddy Jeff's new Sargent seat, I started looking into what's available for the Tiger.  Sargent doesn't do anything for Tigers as old as mine, but Corbin does.  Their site lets you customize your seat with material and stitching.  The Tiger isn't a shy and retiring sort of motorbike, so I wasn't very conservative in my seat design.

Corbin lets you play with variations on their online customizing tool.  I started off with basic black but quickly moved on from there.  You can go full disco oligarch if you want, but I looked at the Tiger and worked out a design that pulls the colours already on the bike together on the seat.  I took the most shocking part of the Tiger, the Lucifer Orange paint, and did the stitching in orange.  Most of the mechanical bits are black, so I stayed with a black set but went with a gripper material rather than leather.  The side panels I matched in navy blue with the blue on the swing arm.  The goal was to design a seat that looks like it belongs on the bike, and I think it does that while not being dull.

It's a pretty thing.

The customization options offered by Corbin are exceptional.  Less so was communication.  I sent in the request online and got an email asking me to confirm the order.  When I questioned the $120US delivery fee added on, I got no reply.  The initial email also promised a follow up when the seat was going into production, but that didn't happen either.  What did happen was one day I got a bill for $94CAD on my front door when I got home from work.  After driving over to the post office I got told there was a bill for taxes on the shipment, so that puts getting my Corbin to me at two hundred and fifty-five bucks (I could fly back from San Francisco where Corbin's factory is for about the same price)... and I had to go pick it up.

The seat itself is very nice on top.  The underside looks a bit rough with loose bits and rough holes , but I guess no one will ever see it but me.  It's heavy duty leather so it'll take a while to break in and will look better and better as it does.

Comfort wise, it feels very different from the curved stock saddle.  The Corbin is much wider, making the ground further away.  I can flat foot the Tiger on the stock saddle even when it's in its highest position.  The Corbin doesn't adjust for height, but its width makes it feel much taller.  The width was such a concern that I tried standing on the pegs to see if the seat interfered with my legs.  I can feel the seat (not so with the curved and narrower stock seat), but it's not pushing my knees away, so I can still stand on the pegs if necessary.

The seat's back is so steep that it feels like a small backrest, which does wonders for support and comfort.  My son is too big now to pillion with me (we exceed the bike's carrying capacity), but if my wife ever comes for a ride, I think she'll have a better view from a higher back seat.

The seat feels firm, but Corbin mention that as it breaks in it will conform to your butt specifically and soften.  The width of it handles weight so well that I really don't notice the hardness, and it's supposed to fade away over time anyway.  They suggest a 2000 mile break in period, which seems like a long one, but it is what it is.

It isn't cheap, but the lifetime warranty takes care of any quality worries, and it seems a well put together thing, once I got it to attach to the bike.

Installation wasn't as easy as I'd have hoped.  The Corbin is a single seat unit replacing a separate rider and passenger stock seat set.  The stock rider seat has a couple of hoops on the frame that locate the front and a pin locking mechanism in the rear.  The passenger seat has hooks on the front another pin locking mechanism at the back.  The all-in-one Corbin seat doesn't use the middle pin at all and wouldn't locate and lock in the rear pin.  Putting it on and off the big over and over trying to figure out why it wouldn't lock ended up scratching the triangular side panels under the seat a bit, which was annoying.

I ended up removing the fuse box and taking out the middle locking pin as I was afraid it was preventing the seat from sitting down on the frame properly, but it ended up being the front metal bars that hook on the frame loops.  They weren't bent down enough to allow the seat to sit flat.  After a bit of bending, I was finally able to get the seat to click into place.

I'm sitting higher on this new, firm Corbin seat, but it's supposed to soften over time, so I think the height will ease a bit too.  The 'gripper' fabric feels quality and tough and isn't particularly grippy.  I'm able to move around on it quite easily and I'm hoping it breathes a bit better than leather would.  Hot seat in the summer is one of the things I'm hoping this solves.

I'd be happier with Corbin communicating (at all) and I'd have been a lot happier with the stratospheric shipping charge if it took care of border costs too.  Paying the equivalent of airfare from San Francisco seems a bit excessive, especially when I get to deliver it to myself anyway.  If you're ever on holiday in northern California, pre-order your seat and then pick it up from the factory near San Jose and save yourself a pile of cash.

Overall?  I'm happy with the seat.  The upside is a quality seat that you can make uniquely yours for what I consider a reasonable amount of money for a bespoke item like this.  When people are dropping twice this on slip on exhausts and helmets, the Corbin starts to look like good farkling value.  It certainly makes a statement and as one of the key connection pieces between rider and motorbike, it's a customization option that does a lot to make a bike feel special.

I just got back from a 232km romp across the Niagara Escarpment.  Never once did I have to stop due to numb bum.  That's never happened before.

Winding River Road on an Easter Monday Morning

Riding River Road on Easter Monday morning.  The day promised to warm up, but it was cool in the valley.  With little traffic and miles of winding road, the Tiger was frisky and I was ready to explore some corners.

With the ThetaV 4k video camera wrapped around the rear view mirror, I proceeded down the hill on Prince of Wales Road to River Road before heading east.  The Theta seems to kick off when it hits two gigs of video.  4k video is heavy and you reach two gigs after only five minutes, so here is five minutes of riding down into the valley before it chokes on itself. 

I couldn't stop at the Terra Nova Public House (closed for the holiday), but on the way back I went back to my happier medium of still photography and set the ThetaV at its one photo every four seconds rate to catch some corners, which I then chased down on my way back through the valley to Horning's Mills.  Later in the year it'll be quite busy, but on this early spring holiday, there were only a smattering of other vehicles and the corners were open and empty...

Riding through the desolation of winter before spring green is back.

Neutral throttle in, winding it on through the apex and out the other side. The Tiger is a settled, athletic thing for such a big bike.

Some Photoshopping to give it a painted look.  That scalloped sky followed me all the way home.

I ride an hour out of my way just to find that magical sign.

Terra Nova might have been closed, but Brewed Awakenings in Grand Valley was open with hot coffee and a date square ready to go.

Gold Winging It

My buddy Jeff is heading off to the West Coast and a golden retirement shortly, so he's cleaning up and vacating Ontario (good time to be doing it).  One of his motorcycle herd is a GL1800 Goldwing.  He offered Max and I a ride last weekend to see if it worked for us since Max is now a full sized adult and your typical motorcycle is overloaded with two big guys on it.  A few years ago I rode Jeff's daughter's Honda Firestorm, by far the sportiest bike I've ever ridden.  This time around we were way up the other end of the spectrum with the 'Wing.

That seat looks mighty appealing to a kid who has been forced to ride motorcycle saddles since he was eight.  Not only is it recliner comfortable, it's also heated!  The rest of the bike is equally enormous and astonishingly appointed.  With fourteen year old, adult sized Max on the back, we had no points of physical contact, which is strange because we're usually back to chest on the Tiger, which is a big bike in its own right.

We rode out of Jeff's place on a dirt farm road in South Western Ontario, in April, so it was really wet and soft... on an eight hundred pound gorilla, uh, bike, with 430ish pounds of us on it.  The 'Wing handles our size without a problem, but the whole thing rolling down the road is massive, so massive in fact that you just ride through puddles and mud and ignore variations in the road that I'd be skirting around on a typical bike.  The Tiger is a sure footed thing, but it felt a bit skittish on the muddy driveway, not so the 'Wing.

Once out on the road the first thing that hits you is no wind, at all.  I ended up flipping open my helmet even though it was a cool day because of the zero wind blast.  No wind noise, no buffeting, it didn't really feel like riding a bike.  All the elemental cues that I get from riding were gone.  I'm looking out through a screen instead of over one and the fairings cover you head to toe.

The dash looks back at you with a staggering array of buttons. My car doesn't have half that many. The tachometer looks like the one out of my old Civic, and red lines lower. It took me ten minutes of riding to work out where the heated grips and seats were. The grips themselves are meaty, way thicker than any I've used before; my hands didn't quite wrap around them.

On pavement you twist the throttle and get whooshed down the road without drama.  The 'Wing is motorbike quick and smooth, but I wouldn't call it inspiring.  Jeff set a quick pace on his Yamaha Super Ténéré and I had no trouble keeping the twelve hundred pounds of us in sight of him.  I was tentative in the first couple of corners, but once I realized how nimble the 'Wing felt, I just dropped it into corners and trusted the tires to handle us.  I often feel weightless when I'm riding, but as well as the Goldwing handles its size, I was always conscious of it.  In fairness, it also had over four hundred pounds of human on it as well.

The brakes haul it down from speed quickly and it picks up with piles of torque and very little need to change gears, which were smooth and direct when I did use them.  By the end of the ride I was up and down in the gears without a second thought, so that's a thumbs up from my foot.  The first time I realized I didn't need to cancel the turn signals after a corner was a nice surprise, but habit had me turning them off anyway.  The GPS in the middle of the dash is nice too, but wasn't very bright.

We did a short, half an hour ride around the area, looking for some of the few twists and turns available to us in the agri-desert that is rural Southern Ontario.  Jeff is moving out to Vancouver Island where the riding season is virtually year 'round and the roads are never dull, but the 'Wing isn't making the trip.  The Super Ten and his customized BMW Cafe Racer are going in the container though.

After parking it back up I can say I get the Goldwing.  I understand why it's as popular as it is and what function is serves.  As a device to transport my son and I in comfort it does that, but I find myself back where I was in 2014 pondering the CanAm Spyder.  There comes a point where a motorcycle is trying so hard to be something else that it isn't really a motorcycle any more.  The Goldwing, with its faceful of buttons and speakers and radios and weatherproofed rider cocoon,  removes me from what I think riding is all about.

I'm a number of years into riding now and I've been on all sorts of bikes in all sorts of strange places.  That experience has refined my aesthetic sense of motorcycling.  For me it's all about getting to that feeling of flying.  It's a visceral experience with wind, noise and a sense of lightness.  When you bend into a corner that feeling is amplified.  You can probably see where this is going.  The 'Wing will lean into a corner, but it feels stately and remote when it does it.  Everything feels far away, and ends up begging the question: why suffer the indignities of motorcycling when the bike is trying so hard to be something else?

I can get a lightly used one of these for the same price as a Goldwing.
Given a choice, I'd go for the mini-Mazda Ferrari in a second.

It might sound perverse, but the other side of motorcycling for me is embracing the physical difficulty of the activity.  I don't consider motorcycling a hobby, I consider it a sport and want to attack it with the same physicality.  This philosophy doesn't only contrast with the Goldwing.  Any bike that does all it can to not delivery that immediacy of riding experience misses the mark for me.  Whether it be a Harley tourer or a BMW K1600, any big, heavy cruiser with windshields and fairings and every gizmo imaginable makes me wonder why in terms of motorcycling.  If you want to bring that much stuff with you, go in a car.  In many cases the car is cheaper and more efficient, and contrary to biker prejudice they aren't all cages.

I love to ride, but I'm still smitten with bikes that feel like bikes and focus me on the aesthetics of riding.  When a lightly used Mazda MX-5 RF costs the same as a new Goldwing and looks like a piece of rolling art rather than a compromise, that's where my eye wanders.  Motorcyclists call car drivers cagers trapped in their boxes, but a massive bike that does all it can to not feel like a motorcycle is more of a fetishy gilded cage than any number of cars designed to be entertaining drives.

So, the Goldwing is not for me.  When I get to the point that I can't handle the elemental feeling of riding (a moment I hope I never see), I'll be looking for a Lotus, not a mega-bike.  My son is only a couple of years away from starting the never-ending and sickeningly expensive licensing and insurance process in Ontario.  I'm hoping that he has developed a taste for riding and will one day join me on a ride on his own machine, then we can both revel in the visceral feel of flying down the road together.

Jeff will have no trouble selling his Goldwing on.  He has meticulously maintained it and there is a strong market for 'Wings since there are so many older bikers who are looking for that kind of ride.  I, for one, will miss him when he's gone.  As a motorcycling mentor, he has been a great friend and teacher.  I hope I can get out to see him on the West Coast and ride those magical roads in the future.  In the meantime, I'm feeling more and more like Ontario is getting too tight for me, yet here I stay.

Spring Riding On-Bike Photography

A Sunday in the teens (Celsius) meant that riding was inevitable.  The Tiger had been sitting in the garage as it hailed and snowed outside this past week, but once again we get a break in the neverending Canadian winter, so off I go.

In the fall I got a Ricoh Theta V, so this was the first go at on-bike photography with it.  Using the mount I made last year, I attached the new camera (same form factor and similar size to the SC I'd used before) and off I went for the first ride over to The Forks of the Credit and Higher Ground.

The ThetaV has better processing power for video than the older model, but the camera is similar spec, so still photos, where I like to work, weren't likely to change.  Once nice thing about the V is that it processes way faster, so can do a photo every 4 seconds instead of the old camera's one every eight.  Having twice the chance of catching a good corner was no bad thing and resulted in a number of good shots as I rode up and down The Forks, usually behind confused people driving beige minivans as slowly as they possibly could.  I waited for a gap on the return ride and got a bit luckier with space, though it was pretty busy on the first sunny Sunday of the year.

Winter run-off everywhere meant a cautious line, but the Tiger on Michelins is always sure footed whether it's on snow runoff or piles of sand left over from winter.

I guess someone missed the switchback - bet it was a fast and furious type...

Stuck behind that tool in a big maroon mini-van again, so I'm waiting for a gap.  Nothing more frustrating than riding for an hour to find some curves only to be stuck behind a yobbo in a mini-van.

Quality of photo is similar between the ThetaSC and the ThetaV, but the V takes way more photos quickly, so you're more likely to capture a good moment.

Parked up at Higher Ground in Belfountain. Don't order a specialty coffee if it's busy - the regular brew is good and you get it right away.

As capable as the V is, it suddenly flashed out on me when I went to ride home and wouldn't start.  This was a bit of a surprise as all previous Thetas have been astonishingly tough.  The Theta V seems to have magically fixed itself today, but now I'm wondering if it's up to the job.

In the meantime they've come out with the Theta Z1, a higher resolution 360 camera with a faster lens and even faster processing performance, including in-camera stitching of images together.  It looks very nice, but if my first upgrade won't take photos when I need it to after it's first real weekend of use, I'm second guessing a bigger, more expensive step further.

In another meanwhile, GoPro has the Fusion 360 camera, which is tough and offers similar high resolution imaging.  It's a bit of a brick, so the Theta still seems like a more aerodynamic and logical choice for on-bike photography, but not if it doesn't work.  More to come.  Hopefully this in-and-out Theta V was a one time thing.