Demo Daze

Kawasaki Canada's Demo-Day, if there is one in
your neighborhood, I highly recommend heading
out for a day of diverse riding experience.

There aren't many opportunities to ride motorcycles when you first start out.  If you're a new rider buying even a second hand bike generally happens without a test ride.  Based on very loose ideas of what fits and the advice of others, you wind up on a machine with little or no idea of how it might work with you.  I purchased my Ninja 650 without test riding it and I often wonder if I would have had I a chance to ride other bikes.

This past Saturday I spent most of the day at Two Wheel Motorsport in Guelph riding a variety of bikes from Kawasaki Canada.  Kawasaki's demo-days lets you sign up to ride your choice of pretty much their full range of bikes, and it only costs you a donation to the Canadian Cancer Society.




The demo-day setup is a well oiled machine with a Kawasaki trailer set up along with tents to cover the bikes.  After a briefing on what to do if separated and the expected 'don't ride like a fool' safety talk, you're ready to go.  The ride is 20-30 minutes and took us through country roads, small towns and offered some twisty bits as well as opportunities to open up the bikes.  One of the safety tips before we began was to not grab a handful of brakes if you're coming off an older bike.  The more athletic machines have such good brakes that you might launch yourself if you grab them too hard.


After the ride you get a debrief and chat with the Kawasaki people there who are very responsive to rider feedback, often taking notes on what people are saying.  Apart from the opportunity to ride all of these new machines, it's also nice to see a company so interested in getting ground-level rider feedback.

The people at the demo-rides ranged from early twenties to seniors and on some of the rides there were as many female riders as male.  Some people went out on the same kind of bike that they rode in on, others were obviously looking to try something specific, and then there were the few ding-dongs like me who just wanted to try as many different bikes as they could.

I ended up riding everything from a Z1000 naked sport bike to the all rounder Versys and even a little Ninja 300.  I'll go into details on subsequent posts, but I'll end this one saying, if there is a demo-day going on in your area, head out for a couple of three hours of riding that will expand your appreciation of just how different motorbikes can be.  If they're all run as well as Kawasaki's was, I'll be heading out to others at earliest opportunity!

A sea of green... a chance to ride everything from a KLR650 to a ZX-14r or a Vulcan!

Fighting The Urge for Sensible Compromise

I picked up my sprockets & chains today from Two Wheel Motorsport.  I then had a chat with Craig, who works there and was the head instructor on my motorcycle course at Conestoga College last year.  He mentioned the used bikes upstairs (TWM goes on and on, be sure to wander around if you go there).  I was interested in a Kawasaki Concours they had on sale because it's a sensible touring bike.  Craig mentioned 'upstairs' when I was asking about used bikes.  I didn't know they had an upstairs.  After getting my parts I went up and found a couple of dozen bikes and no one around.  Since I was looking for a sensible touring bike I immediately found this and took this:

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.

Sprockets, Chains & Walls of Rain

I thought I could make it down to Guelph to order my sprockets and chain and back before the rain hit.  The weather radar said there wouldn't be rain for over an hour.  I left at 2:30 and grabbed some gas in Fergus before heading down Highway 6.  It sprinkled lightly as I went, but it was just enough to take the edge of some truly oppressive humidity.

I got the sprocket and chains sorted out at Two Wheel Motorsport.  The chain drives on motorcycles are one of the first places people play with their geometry.  If you go to look up sprockets and chains for a 2007 Ninja 650r you're buried alive in neon chains and sprockets designed to look like shuriken.  By messing with the length of chain and number of teeth in the sprocket you can essentially gear up your bike, giving it faster acceleration (though it would also be revving over 5000rpm at highway speeds).  

For my first go-around with motorcycle sprockets and chains I went with quality and longevity.  The steel sprockets I got were Afam sprockets designed and built in Europe, they are very high spec pieces.  I stayed away from anything that's neon.  If you're curious, a 2007 Kawasaki Ninja 650r takes a 15 tooth front sprocket and a 46 tooth rear sprocket (that isn't always obvious as people rush to over gear their bikes so they go 0-60 faster).  I also got an X link chain, which offers a number of advantages over an O link chain, though they are more expensive.  The high quality sprockets (front and back) and a high tensile strength chain cost me about $300 taxes in.  They should be in by the end of the week.

Something wicked this way comes!

After wandering around looking at new bikes in the showroom for a few minutes I jumped back on the Ninja and headed back north.  As I turned on to Elora Road the sky got menacing, then it turned positively apocalyptic.

I've ridden through rain a fair bit, especially last summer when I was commuting on the bike.  This one looked turbulent though.  I stopped to zip everything up and take that picture and then I drove into a wall of water.

One of the nice parts of being on a bike is how connected you are to the world.  As I rode toward the darkness I knew this was going to be more than a sprinkle.  The clouds were scalloped and black/green and the temperature dropped ten degrees as I rode under them.  Then the smell of ozone filled my helmet.  I could see across the valley ahead that cars had their headlights on and the wipers were going furiously, behind them the standing wall of rain advanced steadily.

Hosed but home.

As the first big drops hit me I hunkered down on the tank behind the windscreen.  The wind picked up and I had to lean into it to hold my line, and then I rode into the water wall.  I like riding in the rain.  The bike is surprisingly well planted and if you want your visor to clear just turn your head and watch the rain roll sideways across it.  Of course, I like it better when I'm in rain gear, which I wasn't this time.  In about 10 seconds at 80kms/hr in torrential rain I was soaked to the bone, but I was only 10 minutes from home so I could get wet.  Cars were pulling over, the end was nigh.  Trees were bent sideways and it was night-time dark.  I made it the 10 minutes up the highway and turned on to back streets.  I was in my driveway a minute later.

After getting the bike inside and towelling it off I peeled off soaked clothes.  It was the first time I wasn't hot and sweaty all day.  I love riding in the rain.

A Silent, Fast & Sustainable Future

The other day I swung in for one of my infrequent fuel stops on the Ninja.  As I was finishing up putting $18 of super into the tank, good for another 300kms, the guy across from me was bleating about how much it was costing ($180 of the cheap stuff) to fill up his massive pickup truck with chrome wheels and low profile tires (I won't go into how wrong that is, suffice it to say that this truck wasn't purchased to *do* things, it was purchased as a look-at-me-penis-extension - one that costs over two hundred bucks a week in gas).

His fill up would put about ten tanks in the Ninja, at 300kms a tank his single fill up would get me over 3000kms (!), and he has the nerve to stand there crying about how his inferiority complex has resulted in poor choices?  If gas doubled in price tomorrow I'd still be able to afford to ride.  I wonder what Bucky-look-at-my-truck would do.

***

I was reading Cycle Canada last night and came across a letter from a reader who (after extolling the virtues of cruisers for a long time) went on to sneer at the idea of quiet electric bikes, basically saying that they'd have to pry his Harley out of his cold, dead hands.  Many of those dinosaurs will soon be extinct and maybe then we can move on to forms of motorcycling that are sustainable for generations.  I've often wondered what it would have been like to ride my Grand-dad's bike.  Wouldn't it be cool to get to a point where our descendants can?  It would give me great pleasure knowing that we developed a form of motorbiking that is so efficient and undamaging that my great, great grandchild could enjoy it without worrying if it will irreparably damage the world.

Don't get me wrong, I love the sound of a nicely tuned engine as much as anyone (you can keep your farty exhausts), but if the internal combustion engine is the pinnacle of human achievement, we're in real trouble, especially if we're going to stuff the world full of billions of people who all want a giant pickup.

***

Way back in the 1990s I watched one of those Star Trek: The Next Generations that was dangerously insightful.  In the episode, Force of Nature, it is discovered that warping all over the place actually damages space.  It snuck up on you, but the allegory was clear - even if you love something (burning fossil fuels and making CO²), you can't be blind to the damage it does.  What was previously a blind-love relationship with motor vehicles became more complicated for me after that.

Think gas is expensive now? You
ain't seen nothing yet.
Welcome to the end of cheap oil.

Just recently I watched Cosmos and the episode they did on climate change was jarring.  Neil deGrasse Tyson demands something more than blind devotion to fossil fuels no matter how easy they've made life.  Ever the optimist, he states that in the next century we'll build the last internal combustion engine as we move on to less environmentally damaging technologies (he's an optimist, I don't know if we're that adaptive).  

If you ask most people to imagine a world without internal combustion, they can't.  I asked kids in class a couple of years ago what they'd like to do when they retired in 2045.  One said she wanted to buy a Camaro.  I asked her what she intended to do with it, use it as a planter to grow flowers?  She couldn't conceive of a world without cheap, plentiful oil, most of us can't, but that world is coming.

"Though they run on fossil fuel, these
are digital machines" - Ewan McGregor
describing the lastest MotoGP bikes

Nothing thrills me more than seeing real change.  Formula One this year is using hybrid gas/electrical power plants and reduced the fuel from 176 to 100 kilograms per race.  The cars are faster than ever but the engines are changing how to drive quickly.  Instead of having to wait for a gas engine to rev up to peak output, the electric assist is providing instant, full torque.  Drivers are having to change how they negotiate corners because the power is instantly available.  The cars are also much quieter, you can actually hear the rubber squealing as they peel out of the pits (you couldn't before over the howl of v8 engines).

I also caught some of the 24 Hours of LeMans.  The prototypes in that race used only electric power to enter and leave the pits.  They were eerily silent and people could carry out normal conversation as they went about their work, it was pretty awesome.  They are also faster than anything previously while using less fuel.  That's the kind of future I can get excited about.

The McLaren P1 is an astonishing piece of engineering.  Over 30mpg and capable of well over 200mph.  It's not just fast for a hybrid, it's one of the fastest cars ever built.  The future won't be slow, though it may be much quieter.

There are still people who keep steam engines alive because they love the history and the mechanics of the things.  They aren't very efficient, and it wouldn't be sensible to have everyone using steam, but it's nice to see mechanical history honoured.  There are people who will keep gasoline engines alive.  They aren't very efficient or sustainable, and it wouldn't be sensible for everyone to have one,  but it'll be nice to see that history remembered too.  For the rest of us (doofus with his pickup truck included), I'm looking forward to a quieter, faster, cleaner future.  In the meantime I'll enjoy my 0-60 in under 4 seconds Ninja that gets more than 60mpg.  There is nothing like the minimalism of the motorbike to make the most out of every drop of fuel.

Possibilities

A friend's daughter came by last night because she was interested in The Ninja.  I'm rabidly interested in riding as many different bikes as I can, so when they asked if I wanted to follow along on the Honda Firestorm she'd ridden over I quickly grabbed my gear.  With aftermarket everything on it, the Honda backfired loudly and took off like a scalded rabbit.  The steering geometry on it is very vertical and the grips small, making the bike turn in very quickly even though it feels heavier than the Ninja.  It was definitely a young man's bike, riding it for more than an hour would be agony, but I totally get it, it was a blast!

The test ride ended up not fitting the rider (she found the Ninja tall and the riding position too upright), but the possibility of Bike2.0 got me thinking...

They have a nicely-looked-after '06 Concours at Two Wheel Motorsport.  It's an athletic mile eater that easily 2-ups and is in its element as a long distance tourer.  This particular one is low kilometres (~50k) and well maintained, it would run for ever with no problems.

I'm pretty weight fixated after riding the Ninja and doing a lot of thinking about bike dynamics, and the Concours isn't light even if it is light on its feet for a big guy.  I was wandering Kijiji yesterday after suddenly facing the prospect of maybe being bike-less and came across another interesting choice.  I've been doing a lot of reading on the new VFR800f Interceptor.  This is another athletic mile eater that is at home in the twisties, and at over 150lbs lighter than the portly Concours it plays to my sense of what athletic means in a bike.  I've always been a Honda fan, I had a picture of one on my wall when I was a kid, it'd be cool to own one.

The VFR on Kijiji is an '02, almost half the miles of the Concours for sale and 'meticulously maintained'.  Not to be an English snob or anything, but the add is nicely written too:

Mint condition, meticulously cared for, very low mileage (28000 km) VFR 800 VTEC with ABS. The VFR 800 has the distinctive single sided swingarm, ABS and the legendary Honda Interceptor V4 engine that is famous for producing one of the most intoxicating exhaust notes of any motorcycle powerplant... it's music. This bike is just as comfortable eating up corners in the twisties as it is taking you on multi day trips in comfort. It comes with 2 seats, the stock one and a Sargent seat, 2 windshields, stock and a tinted Zero Gravity windshield, solo seat cover, PDF Honda VFR800 Service Manual and a set of frame sliders still in the box. Also installed are the 2006 VFR clear tail light and smoke front turn signal light lenses. $5700 or best offer.


There is something about a rider who knows spelling and grammar that gives an air of competence.  When this guy says it has been meticulously maintained I believe him because he knows the word meticulous (and how to spell it).

I've got such an itch for this bike that I'm tempted to give him a call and ride down to Hamilton to give it a go.  I only wish I had the money aside to snap it up if I liked it as much as I think I might.  The process of selling the Ninja means that the VFR might be long gone by the time I'm ready to pull the trigger.

That was quick.  I'm glad he sold it, but sad too...