Motorcycle photography over the past couple of weeks.
Tuesday 31 May 2022
Thursday 15 December 2016
Daydreaming: Winter Road Trip to New Orleans & Key West
Dec 24th: (van) Elora to Knoxville in the van 1147kms
Dec 25th: Knoxville to Talledega 271 miles the interesting way
Dec 26th: Talledega to New Orleans 420 miles
Dec 27th: New Orleans!
Dec 28th: New Orleans!
Dec 29th: New Orleans to Panama City 304 miles
Dec 30th: Panama City to Tampa 339 miles
Dec 31st: Tampa to Miami 252 miles
Jan 1st: Miami!
Jan 2nd: Miami to Key West to Miami 155 miles there and back
Jan 3rd: Miami to Jacksonville via Daytona Beach 346 miles
Jan 5th: Jacksonville to Greenville 388 miles
Jan 6th: Greenville to Knoxville 212 miles via Deals Gap
Jan 6th: (van) Knoxville to Dayton 304 miles 1/2 day
Jan 7th: (van) Dayton to Elora 410 miles home mid-afternoon
Jan 8th: chill out day before going back to work
Van mileage: 2300kms / 1440 miles
Bile mileage: 4500kms / 2812 miles
I could probably arrange with our Knoxville hotel to park the van somewhere safe and then head south on two wheels. The Tiger could totally handle the job one or two up, but there would be more specialized tools I'd select if given a choice from the new 2017 bikes:
One Up 2017 Minimalist Bike Choice
Kawasaki's new Z900 looks like a lovely, light weight device to explore some corners with. It's an upright bike that would be easy to sit on for long periods of time. It's a minimal machine but that would be ideal for riding into the sub tropical climates down there.
It's a brand new machine but the Z650 it shares parts with already has some luggage bits that might work. Keeping with the minimalist vibe, I'd try and do the whole 3000 mile / two week odyssey using only those two expandable panniers. If I have to expand half way through I could always throw a tie down duffel bag on the back seat.
One Up 2017 not-remotely minimalist Bike Choice
The opposite of the tiny, lithe, naked Z900 is the absurd, over the top and abundantly present Moto Guzzi MGX-21 Flying Fortress. It comes with its own panniers so that's not a worry. It's also the kind of bike that would swallow many high mileage days in a row without batting an eyelash. And it's so pretty.
Two Up Touring Preference
A large, comfortable bike that Max and I could ride the southern triangle on would be the goal here. My default is always a Kawasaki Concours 14. We rented a last gen model last year in Arizona and it was a rocket ship that was also big and comfortable for both of us. The fact that it comes in candy imperial blue this year only encourages me to put it back at the top of the list again.
A more touring focused choice would be the Goldwing F6B which is a more stripped down version of the full on bells and whistles Goldwing. It's a big, comfortable bike that is surprisingly nimble for what it is and comes with built in panniers. It'd cover the miles with ease while keeping us both in excellent shape for when we arrived at each stop.
Sunday 3 October 2021
Environmental Marketing: the shell-game of hybrid electric vehicles
This proud-Prius driver got his back up when I suggested that my bike gets better mileage than his dual-engined hybrid (it does - his AWD Prius gets 52/48mpg on its city/highway cycles, my C14 is currently averaging 4.5 litres/100kms mostly two up, which works out to just over 52mpg). That Toyota, like my Kawasaki, is made in Japan by unionized workers who are paid a living wage to build world-class machines. Being Japanese, they also both lean heavily on locally manufactured parts. More and more vehicles are being built in developing countries, which can be a good thing but can also be an excuse to force labour on people who could never afford what they're building. Globalism doesn't like to show the off-shore slavery that makes it run.
Where I think our two vehicles diverge are in the inherent compromises in the design of that Toyota. Lugging around two seperate drivetrains is incredibly inefficient. It's impressive that the hybrid drive has evolved to the point where it can post the mileage numbers it does, but it's still having to lug around a gas tank and gasoline powered motor in addition to batteries and electric motors. Other than the much-vaunted fuel efficiency, the cost of maintenance must be miserable. By comparison, the efficient shaft-drive and motor on the Kwak are designed to do hundreds of thousands of high-efficiency (or fast if you prefer) miles without any of that overhead.
The most onerous (and hidden) part of that mechanical overhead are the lithium batteries in that hybrid. I teach computer engineering as my day job and I'm well up on our medieval battery power development. We are stuck with poor performing, environmentally bankrupt, chemical battery technology from somewhere in the late 19th Century. Instead of addressing the immanent climate emergency by producing smaller, more efficient vehicles, we're using electric and hybrid electric as an excuse to produce slightly more efficient behemoths.
Lithium batteries are a nightmare. From a safety standpoint they are a potentially explosive disaster and from a power to weight ratio they are next to useless, but they're the best we have. The nightmare gets worse though when you look at how we're managing lithium production in a world that desperately needs more of it. As you'd expect, transnational companies with no real oversight are abusing developing countries (as they have since colonial times) with aggressive economic tactics in order to strip local peoples of the natural resources beneath their feet. International mining concerns ferment government instability in order to ensure cheap access to in-demand resources. Money likes to condense where it already exists and the electric car battery market has all the hallmarks of blood diamonds in terms of the distribution of wealth involved.
There are a lot of advantages to electric vehicles and I hope to get into them sooner than later, but these early adopter vehicles are being driven by and for the privileged wealthy and are mined and manufactured by environmentally and socially bankrupt transnational companies chasing dollar signs (as it has always been).
If you're all about leveraging your privilege in order to wander around with your chest out bragging about how much you care about the planet, do a bit of research first. There is a darkside to rushing electric vehicle sales before we've worked out the tech that amplifies rather than resolves our resource shortages. The immanent climate disaster needs solutions, not a shell-game where old white guys get to tell everyone about how much they care by driving overweight, compromised designs based more on marketing than actually solving the coming crisis.
That same day we filled up before riding home. I put $28 of premium in to fill up the bike. The guy next to me pulled up in a new hybrid F150 pickup truck that looked bigger than a house. He proceeded to put nearly $200 of gas into it. I asked him how far that'd get him and he told me about how the hybrid electric was so efficient that he'd get about a thousand kilometers to the tank. I get just shy of 500 to a tank on the bike, so for what he put in I could cover 2000kms. I know this is apples to oranges as that pickup could do things the bike can't, like carry loads, except this one with its never used bed and chrome wheels wasn't carrying much of anything, and therein lies the real issue with this hybrid fad; instead of directing us to use less (which would actually help us deal with the climate emergency), hybrid technology is being used by car companies to justify an unsustainable habit of ever larger and improbable vehicles. If we could all do more with less we might just make it out of this mess.
The Corvette owners club rocked up at the gas station then. The new Vette goes 0-60 almost a fast as my decade old Connie while using twice the fuel. With only two seats it makes a more direct comparison with the bike in terms of functionality and usefulness. The plethora of old white guys who hopped out of their new Vettes all spent 12 to 15 times what I did to buy their toys, the difference is that my gasoline powered recreational decisions aren't burning a hole in the world.
If you really want to help out, get smaller and use less - riding a bike is a great place to start. Your other option is to keep playing into the enviro-marketing games until we're all watching the world burn to the ground around us. I won't go into how charging all these electric vehicles on our already overloaded and vulnerable electrical infrastructure is going to poke holes in other aspects of life. We need people to change their minds about what green is, and the first step isn't to throw new technology at our massive vehicle infatuations in order to make them seem green, it's to do more with less.
Some Research on Battery Powered Vehicles (in case you can't be bothered to do it yourself)
https://www.varsity.co.uk/science/20401
Starving arid regions of their drinking water to feed the world's insatiable appetite for lithium? If you know where the technology comes from, it gets difficult to stay on that high horse.
“The ethics of electric vehicles is far more complicated than the expensive car adverts and glowing newspaper headlines would have us believe.”
https://www.thoughtco.com/lithium-production-2340123
Lithium production is a messy business.
https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/201208/backpage.cfm
Lithium development has stalled and initial optimism is fading. You're not going to be replacing your worn out lithium batteries with something better in your EV any time soon - but you will be replacing them with yet more lithium.
https://www.ford.ca/trucks/f150/f150-lightning/2022//?gnav=header-trucks-vhp
Instead of immanent climate disaster modifying our driving habits and producing smaller vehicles that use less of everything, we're leveraging hybrid electric vehicles to keep churning out excess. When people plug in behemoths like this we'll end up having to turn on coal powered hydro plants just to keep the lights on.
With Ontario spending hundreds of millions to cancel carbon neutral electricity production, we all appear more than happy to simply hide our carbon output rather than actually reduce it.
Car companies are selling environmentalism hard, even when what they're selling isn't.
Monday 1 March 2021
2021 Motorcycle Wish List
The new hybrid Wrangler Jeep manages to get 50mpg while also being able to run entirely off battery for my entire commute to work. It's also tow capable and even stronger than the 21mpg of the base 4 cylinder model it's based on. It'll tow, it'll use barely any gas under normal circumstances and it's a genuinely useful utility vehicle that also lets you take the roof off and make driving an event.
An easy to load, multi-functional trailer that'll carry up to 2000lbs (3-4 bikes). The transformable nature of it means I could also hang it on the wall in the garage out of the way until it was needed.
They have bike-specific trailers too, but this one would handle bikes while also being a multi-purpose thing that lets me utilize my new utility vehicle in many ways.
This one has a cosmetic scratch but is low mileage (35k kms) and would be dependable for years to come. As a big, functional, dependable 'modern' bike, this one checks all the boxes. I'd like to keep the older Tiger, but this bike would take the all-ways on demand for riding off it.
It comes with all the luggage, just had new tires put on it and has had major services done recently, so it'd be a no-headaches addition to the paddock that would take all the pressure off the old things.
My son and I did SMART Adventures again last summer and I did the whole nine yards: I started on a trials bike, gave the new BMW 1250GS a try and then finished the day trail riding on a Yamaha 250cc dirt bike. It was a brilliant day and I've been keen to find a way to keep practicing these skills but buying an off road bike in Ontario isn't easy.This P.O.S. on Kijiji is a fine example. It's a 20 year old bike that the seller couldn't even be bothered to pick up off the floor for the photo. It's broken, not running and they still want over two grand for it! Dirt bikes get abused and then still seem to retain their value. I'm asking about the same amount for a safetied, perfectly running Fireblade super-bike from the same era and can't get a bite.
The other recent P.O.S. I looked at was this trials bike, which was ancient, technically uninteresting (being the year before they got good) and was being sold in better condition anywhere else except in Ontario for half the $1800 the owner wanted. It's not longer available. I can't beleive that he sold it, but maybe he did. People in Ontario are willing to pay a lot of money for money-pit projects.
The used market for off-road machines in Ontario is so psychotic that it almost makes sense to just buy a new one. A Suzuki DR200 brand new is less than five grand, so why on earth would you buy someone else's heaping pile of shit for the same amount of money? I can handle the weight so even the 50 kilo heavier DR650 is only a touch over six grand. I'm still kicking myself for not picking up that brand-new/old stock DR650 a couple of years ago.I always thought I'd be rebuilding an old dirt bike from re-machining the cylinders all the way up, a complete rebuild, but the obscene pricing of dirt bikes in Ontario makes that unlikely.
There are alternatives to Ontario's psychotic used bike market. It's possible to drop old, used, broken Yamaha money on a brand new electric Chinese trials bike. This is edgy new tech but that's where I work all day so I'm not scared of it.There are other Chinese off-roading alternatives like the Tanaci-Wong, which is intriguing. Their Facebook page has a Canadian distributor offering their 150cc trials bike for under $3500! That'd only buy you a non-working 15 year old POS on Kijiji.
Chinese engineering has come a long way in the last decade and harbouring old prejudices against it doesn't make a lot of sense.
In a perfect world I'd have that Tiger purring like a kitten, the Fireblade for dynamics focused rides, a C14 for two up riding and a trials bike for exercise and balance practice. Alas, these things would necessitate a bigger garage.
Saturday 28 June 2014
Fighting The Urge for Sensible Compromise
I'm really bad at trying to be sensible. I ended up buying my current Ninja because of the way it made me feel rather than the sensible KLR I was going to get. When it comes to buying an appliance like a car I'll be sensible, but a motorbike isn't about being sensible and I don't want to waste my riding time on bland compromise.
I met John the salesman and we finally found the Concours out back. It's not as big as some other touring bikes, but my knees are still pretty bent on it. Short of getting some sky-scraper adventure bike I'm going to be bent legged on a motorbike, especially if it's as road-centric as I want it to be.
I suspect the answer still lies in not trying to find a bike for all things, they don't exist. Instead, a couple of really focused bikes that do different things would do the trick. Instead of trying to find an athletic road bike that two-ups my son easily, get a machine that caters to time with him and another for solo forays.
The other day a guy road by on a Triumph with a Rocket Sidecar. I've still got a thing for sidecars. Uralling or Royal Enfielding up would cover the vintage bike itch as well as the weird sidecar itch in addition to creating a very friendly shared riding experience with my son. The other bike could be some kind of bat-shit crazy single seater that focuses entirely on me alone on the road (or track). Or a café racer...
I'm glad that Concours made a big wet noise in my imagination when I saw it with its C.H.i.P.s style windshield and acres of plastic. A sudden, irrational urge to own it didn't follow. What it did do is clear up an important point: don't compromise on what you want a bike to do for you, you'll only end up disappointed.
John the salesman told me the story of a kid who missed the bike he fell in love with by twenty minutes and ended up with tears in his eyes over it. If I'm going to move on to another bike, it's got to be a tear jerker. I didn't get into motorcycling for sensible, I got into it for an emotional connection to my machine. Fortunately, that bonkers bike choice isn't crazy expensive. An '06 bike with only 2400kms on it costs less than $7000 from Two-Wheel.
For another $7k I could pick up an almost new Versys and go about getting it kitted out with a cool sidecar from Old Vintage Cranks. It'd be one of a kind on its way to being a multipurpose outfit that I could customize indefinitely. For $14k I'd be into one of the most powerful two wheelers ever made and a truly unique go-anywhere 3-wheeler.
Monday 26 July 2021
Long Distance Rallying: Lobo Loco's Comical Rally
For us we were looking at a warm (28°C), sunny day in Southern Ontario. Our plan was to create a 'skeleton' map of where we wanted to go and then research locations on the route that would get us points. Because this rally was a human-focused one, it made sense to head into population to find locations, so I elected to make a route that would lead us to Niagara Falls eventually. This would mean riding in the dreaded "Golden Horseshoe" - the most populated area in Canada and usually a sure way for me to lose all hope in humanity.
The plan was to take the new Concours 14 on the trip but after a pre-rally ride on it we got home and looked at the Corbin seat on the Tiger and decided to take the older, less dependable and less long-distance touring ready bike simply for a saddle that doesn't feel like a sadist's dream. The Tiger also has nicer foot pegs for pillion and wasn't giving me any reason to doubt it so I spend the day before making sure everything was tight and ready to go.