Tuesday 30 September 2014

Bike Bucket List

Tim's bike-hole, once a storage place for unused furniture,
now an insulated work space with two Kawis in it.
Season 1 ended with me getting my license, my first bike and getting over 5000kms of riding in, including a full month of long commutes.  The original bike bucket list included getting the license and first bike.

As season two began I was looking to expand.  Bike bucket list 2.0:
  • build a garage worthy of the name (almost done!)
  • have a bike holiday on some less-Ontario-ish roads (done!)
  • ride more different bikes, done and done! (and that second one even got my wife scooter curious)
  • work on my bike-craft (done & ongoing!)
  • buy a fixer-upper (done!)
  • do an overnight bike trip (didn't manage it... but the season isn't over yet!)

Here's the bucket-list 3.0.  Some of these might take a bit longer to complete:
Some of these are well beyond what I can pull off at the moment, but you never know when circumstances might change.  Besides, if you're gonna dream, might as well dream big!  If I'm going to do that, retiring into my own little shop would be awesome!  Custom mechanical, digital parts fabrication and finishing!


Friday 26 September 2014

Yogacycling

I came across YogaMotorSport on Google+ and began looking into yoga from a riding perspective.  It turns out many professional riders practice yoga.  I've never really done yoga before so I wasn't sure what I was getting into beyond some stereotypes.


via Michael Tan
Our little town has a nice yoga studio right down by the Grand River, a 15 minute walk away.  Awareness Yoga happens in a large basement studio with old stone walls and the sound of the Elora Gorge thundering away outside.  I'm a firm believer in ley lines, and there is definitely a lot of energy coming out of the ground in the middle of Elora.  It's a nice spot to do yoga.

I went in thinking it was some deep breathing and stretching.  It is that but it's also a lot of core strength building and I found myself sweating buckets simply following the workout.  I've had three classes so far and find the combination of stretching and strength training intense, but combined with the mindset you're encouraged to follow, it's also remarkably relaxing.  I don't come out of it all worked up like I do after a hockey game.  I come out of it calm and loose (though it tends to be sore the next day).

Yoga looks to flexibility, core strength and mental focus, all things that should be in frequent use while riding, I can see why professional riders do it.  I was lucky that my local studio does stiff guy yoga, it's a men's only class and I've got to say, it's a really nice change from your typical guy-sports workout, and something uniquely suited to motorbike riders.


Meditative rides through India
Motorcycle Yoga by Lisa Haneberg


Motorcycling & yoga... it's a thing!

Yoga & Motorcycling

motorcycle yoga mats

yoga and the motorcycle journey

Sunday 21 September 2014

Getting to know a very different motorbike

I took the Concours out for a brief ride in the sun this afternoon to get a feel for her.  She's a very different machine than the Ninja.  The carbs are a bit touchy when warming up, but then work in a very satisfying and immediate mechanical way once the bike is at temperature.  It's a much bigger bike too (over two hundred pounds heavier), but surprisingly lithe for its size.

Where the Ninja picks up nicely in lower RPM, the Concours pulls immediately with a much flatter torque curve; the word 'meaty' comes to mind.  The Concours was also surprisingly lively at higher RPMs, pulling hard to the redline.  Not like the Ninja does (which is more like a bull in a China shop), but it still gets you down the road right quick.  The lightness of the internal bits in the Ninja's 649cc parallel twin make it spool up like a turbine.  You can feel the complexity and weight of the Connie's in-line four cylinder as it builds RPM.  Where the Ninja screams like a banshee (and sounds lovely doing it), the Concours has a deeper, more sonorous song, though (and surprising to me because I really love the Ninja howl) equally enticing.  I can see why previous Concours owners have said they've had no trouble keeping up with sports bikes, this is an agile, athletic machine that belies its size.

In corners, especially at speed, the weight of the Connie seems to disappear and I can hit apexes in a similarly precise manner to the much lighter NInja.  With so much torque on hand, you don't need to keep the engine revving hard to get immediate pull out of it.  The Connie will go quickly without appearing to, with the Ninja you've got to keep it on boil to get that astonishing acceleration (as opposed to merely shocking acceleration at lower revs).


Controls wise the Concours is a much more comfortable machine.  The seat is wider and softer, the bike feels more substantial and not so wasp wasted between my knees.  The fairings keep the wind at bay, especially around  your feet.  In the rain your feet are soaked through on the Ninja where they are hanging out in the elements.  Riding in cool weather means thick socks.  I kept bumping my toes against the Connie's lower fairing until I got used to using less toe on the gear change.  Knee bend is still pretty bent, though not nearly as much as the Ninja and with the wider seat didn't seem so intense.

The Connie's gearing is much higher than the Ninja's.   At 120km/hr on the highway you're up around 6000rpm on the Ninja.  I'd guess the Connie would be doing under half that at the same speed.  A more relaxed bike that still has hidden reserves and is light of foot, I'm looking forward to getting to know Connie better.

As I was riding home we fell into a groove, like a horse extending its legs into a comfortable gallop and I realized just how far this bike could take me.  She's been sitting too long and wants to put road behind her.  Instead of wondering when to stop on the Ninja, I'll be wondering how much further I can go on the Concours.

Cycle-Ergo shows me the numbers...

Wednesday 17 September 2014

Complete Connie

Thanks to the kindness of CoG, some much needed bits and pieces from Murphs Kits, parts from my local Kawi dealer Two Wheel Motorsport and an awesome Givi box and windshield from A Vicious Cycle, the Connie is finally back on her feet!

The parts I needed consisted of your basic filters and fluids, some clutch lever bits, a number of rusty connectors, a speedo gear housing (the cable got replaced too), and replacement levers for the rusted out old ones.  At a CoG suggestion I looked at Murph's and found a full set of stainless replacement fasteners.  The bike was missing a number of them and the rest were in various states of disrepair.  I now have a pile of spares and new ones on the bike.  They look great and the whole deluxe set was less than seventy bucks.  Murph also had stainless replacement clutch and brake levers for only twenty bucks each, so I picked those up too.

The nicest surprise was the Concours Owners Group (best membership fee I've ever paid for!).  When asking about aftermarket options for the master cylinder covers I broke getting rusted bolts out, one of the moderators offered to mail me up a spare set from Florida in exchange for an adult beverage at some future time.  If you own a Connie, COG is a must do.  I get the sense that even if you don't have a Concours, COG is still something special.

With everything back together she hummed around our cul-de-sac in fine form.  No leaks, controls feel sharp, I think she's ready for a run at a safety.  If she passes I'm going to semi-retire the Ninja and put it up for sale and spend the rest of the season seeing what the Connie can do.  Once the snow closes in I'll break it down again and do the body work so next spring it looks as good as it runs.

Unscripted Moments

Steve Hoffarth has a good editorial piece in the August/September 2014 edition of Inside Motorcycles that got me thinking about scripted experience.  Steve was lamenting his inability to go racing this year.  He compared going on rides at a theme park and found them lacking.  A scripted experience like being a passive rider on a roller coaster has nothing on the complex, non-linear and entirely participatory experience of racing.

I was sitting in the garage last night working on the Concours when my wife stuck her head in the door and asked how I was doing.  "I'm in my happy place," I replied.

What made it happy was that I was fixing a problem that had no instruction manual.  Success wasn't guaranteed and I had to approach it from several different angles before I could finally come up with a solution.  Real satisfaction followed a resolution to a situation that could easily have ended in failure.  It was an entirely unscripted situation, the kind I long for after your typically scripted day in the life of a 21st Century human.

So much of our lives are scripted nowadays, from phones telling us when to be where to GPS units telling us how to get there.  Brakes script themselves for us because we can't be bothered to learn how to use them effectively, traction control leaps in at a moment's notice to script your acceleration, vehicles will park themselves, warn you when something is behind you because you couldn't be bothered to turn your head, and even avoid obstacles you couldn't be bothered to pay attention to.  I used to enjoy driving, now, at its best, it feels more like sitting on a roller coaster.

All this scripting is a result of software.  It may sound funny coming from a computer technology teacher, but that software kills it for me.  If I wanted to watch machines race I wouldn't put people in the cars at all, it's safer that way.  It's been a long time since a driver could take a car by the scruff of its neck and drag it around a circuit.  We do all this in the name of safety, but ultimately I think it's lowest common denominator thinking; software engineers design life for the least capable people, they can sell more of it that way.

There are places in mechanics where it just makes sense to incorporate computer control, especially when it amplifies an operator's nuanced control of a vehicle rather than overwriting it.  Thank goodness for fuel injection.  It allows us to create responsive, linear fuelling and use less of a diminishing resource, it's all good, as are disc brakes and other technological advances that improve rider feel.  I'm certainly not anti-technology, I make my living teaching it, but I am anti-technology when it takes over human inputs instead of improving them.  That kind of thinking breeds sheeple.


Traction control (many settings!), antilock brakes (many
settings!), hill start control and more electronics than a
moon shot - perhaps bikes aren't the last bastion after all.
Unscripted moments are increasingly hard to come by.  Perhaps that freedom we feel on a motorcycle is one of the last bastions of unscripted moments when a software engineer isn't deciding how you'll spend your time, or worse, spending it for you.

Except they increasingly are.  After I started riding last year I was astonished that this is legal.  In a granny state-world where safety is all that matters, where SUVs are considered better because they're bigger and collision avoidance systems are desirable because you shouldn't have to pay attention while operating a vehicle, motorcycles too are succumbing to our vapid, software scripted lives.