As Different As Different Can Be

The wall-o-carbs that blast
the Concours to warp speeds.

I'm looking to expand my riding experience so a second bike had to be as different from the Concours ZG1000 that I have as possible.  The Connie is a 999cc, sport touring heavy weight with shaft drive, full fairings and an inline four cylinder with a row of carburetors that create astonishing power.  It's a blast to ride on the road.

The KLX I rode home today is a rev-happy 250cc single cylinder bike that weighs an astonishing 370lbs less than the Concours.  Everything the Concours does well the KLX doesn't and vice-versa, which was kinda the point.

Having never ridden a fairingless bike before I was surprised at the wind blast from the very naked KLX.  It could get to 100km/hr with some judicious gearing and a willing throttle hand.  If I squeezed the Concours that hard I'd be travelling well over 100mph while vaulting over the horizon.

A very different riding experience, and I haven't even taken
it off road yet!

What else is different about the KLX?  Knobby tires offer some weird feed back.  The KLX comes with some fairly serious off-road tires which make a kind of slapping sensation on pavement.  They almost feel like whiskers, picking up seams and other details in the pavement with surprising detail.  It makes me wonder how nuanced the feel is on dirt. Once I got used to the change in feel it wasn't a problem to make full use of the 250ccs.  The KLX pulls away from traffic lights in town with aplomb.

The tallness of the KLX makes cornering nothing like the Concours.  Where the Concours (and the Ninja before it), tuck in and conquer corners in a buttoned down way the KLX feels like you're on a ladder.  Tall rims and seat, long suspension and a clear view ahead conspire to give you an unobstructed view of the road.  Again, once I developed some confidence in the bike's strange geometry managing corners, I had no trouble rolling on throttle through turns and getting things more settled on the floaty suspension.

A two Kawi garage

The skinniness of the KLX is also a shock after straddling the wide and heavy Concours.  You feel like there is nothing around you and virtually nothing under you.

Looking down, the wasp waisted KLX is barely there.  Strangely, it has a less cramped riding position in spite of it being a skinny, 370lb (!) lighter bike.  With more relaxed knees and taller bars it feels like a good fit; it's funny how such a small bike can feel so big.

I'm hoping to have the paperwork in order by the weekend then it'll be time to see how the KLX handles what it was build for.  Taking it out on some trails is imminent!

The Ready Launch™

A momentum driven motorcycle turntable.

We pulled in to the garage yesterday and I wished for this: The Ready Launch™.  Backing the Concours out of a single car garage and around parked vehicles can be onerous, and as we rode right in and the door closed behind us it reminded me of the Bat Cave.  When Batman does it he drives the Batmobile in and it rotates for a quick getaway; I want that.

When you pull in to your garage and brake on The Ready Launch™, it transfers the forward braking momentum of the bike into a mechanical system that produces a slow, rotating motion spinning through 180° before locking again.

With some calibration and gearing it should be no trouble to capture all the momentum of a stopping motorcycle and pour it into the rotating platform.  It would be a zero energy system, reliant on the bike pulling on to it and stopping to produce the energy needed to spin, and it doesn't need to spin quickly or far.  After a few test stops a rider would know how hard to pull the brakes to produce the energy needed for the 180° turn.

http://functionspace.com/topic/3704/Converting-Rotational-motion-to-Linear-motion-and-vice-versa

The braking mass of the bike is applied to the piston, which then turns the gears to make the platform rotate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_moments_of_inertia
http://interactagram.com/physics/dynamics/MechanicalAdvantage/gear/
The rack being pulled is where the bike parks, spinning up a flywheel that rather than lifting a weight transfers to a rotational plane under the platform.  With proper gearing the heavy platform slowly rotates using the short but heavy stopping momentum of the bike.

A Good Kijiji Week

Last week a pair of Alpinestar boots popped up on Kijiji that happened to be just my size.  The Alpinestars I have are totally next level, so the chance to own a second pair for the price of tax on a new pair was impossible to ignore.

A ride over to Kitchener on an idyllic Sunday morning and I'm the proud owner of my second pair of Alpinestars, this time for twenty five bucks.  Only used for a season, and in fantastic shape, they're waterproof and much better for wet/cold weather than the summer boots I currently have.

***  Kijiji Part 2

I love riding with a purpose.  Today I went to Guelph and then Orangeville to check out two dual sport bikes.  I'm looking for something as different as possible from the Concours, so a light-weight off-road focused enduro machine fits the bill.

The first bike is a 2007 Kawasaki KLX-250.  250ccs is on the small side, but this is a very light bike.  At 298lbs, it's 374(!)lbs lighter than the Concours.  It barely makes any noise, felt spritely and has a radically different riding position.  No windscreens, very open and a tall riding stance.  It's been immaculately cared for by the original owner and comes with all the right farkles.  You couldn't ask for a nicer machine and it's much newer than I thought I could afford.  If I'm worried about the power, there are always options to buff up the bike.

It's a bonus when you hit it off with the owner and end up having a good chat.  He is an experienced trails rider who offered up all sorts of good advice about where and how to do it.  As he said, this is the ideal bike to learn on.  I may eventually want a more powerful bike, but as a starter this one is as good as it gets.

After a ride over to the Forks of the Credit, and a quality coffee at Higher Ground, I rode the Forks for the first time on the Concours (which always feels lighter than it is in a Millennium Falcon kind of way), and then headed up to Orangeville.


The XT350 looked like the ideal bike.  Air cooled, super light weight, with a medium displacement, but this one was a poor example.  It looked like it had led a life that alternated between abuse and neglect.  Not only was it filthy, but it looked like it was going to rust through in some expensive places.  It didn't start and after a dozen or so kicks, when it finally did fire up it sounded like a tractor.  It couldn't have been more different to the only marginally more expensive, lower kilometer, six year newer, much loved, whisper quiet KLX.  I'll trade a few cc's for a bike that won't strand me deep in the woods any day.

I emailed the owner of the KLX standing on the street as the XT owner tried to get it started again and told him I'm all in.  It's nice when the right thing falls into your lap just when you need it, and in my case that always seems to be a Kawasaki.  The KLX will be my third Kawi (though my first green one).  I can't wait to get to know it.

Bikers

The other week I posted a discussion on the Concours Owners Group asking how to pass a large group of bikers on the road.  That discussion sparked an angry rebuttal condemning me for mocking the happy pirate look that a large portion of the (especially) North American motorcycle community identifies with.  Personally, I'd say people can dress however they want and ride whatever they want, but I get the sense that the pirate types don't feel that way.

On COG I was trying to be funny, but with an edge.  On the Georgian Bay circumnavigation I ran into some corporately attired Harley riders who wanted to point out how much unlike them I looked.  It felt like hazing with the intent of getting me to look like a proper biker.  Nothing will get my back up faster than someone telling me I have conform to their standard.  The irony wasn't lost on me that these rebels without a clue whose look is predicated on nonconformity were uncomfortable with a motorcyclist not in proper uniform.

One of the reasons I make a point of reading British biking magazines is because they are free of (and willing to make fun of) this dominant North American biking culture.  They don't worship Harley Davidson as the one and only motor company, and they try to look at the breadth of motorbiking rather than forcing a single version of it down everyone's throats.  Had I the boat load of money that they cost I would happily buy an HD V-Rod (not considered a 'real' Harley by purists because it's liquid cooled).  It's a fine machine and I'd get one for that reason, but I don't think I'd ever buy a motorcycle because of the manufacturer alone, I'm not that politically driven.

When I first started riding I was shiny and new about it and told one of my colleagues who rode that I was just starting out.  He asked me what I got and when I told him a Ninja he put his nose in the air and said, "hmm, isn't that like riding tupperware?"  Just recently I told him I was thinking about getting a dual sport.  He said, "why would you want that?  It'd be like riding a toolbox!"  In the biker ethos there is only one kind of bike with a single aesthetic.  If you don't conform, expect criticism.

In talking to other motorcyclists the non-mainstream/biker crowd sometimes find biker types to be holier-than-thou, not returning a wave or giving you the gears at a stop for not conforming to the dress code.

Motorcyclists tend to be iconoclasts, they have to be or they'd be doing what everyone else does riding around in the biggest cage they could afford.  Yet the act of riding isn't enough for some, there are also social expectations that these rebellious non-conformists expect all riders to conform to.

At the end of the day I'm a fan of two wheeling.  I'd call myself a motorcyclist.  I get as excited about looking at historical Harleys as I do at racing tupperware or riding toolboxes.  I only wish more bikers would be less critical of anything other than their singular view of the sport.

I refuse to conform to their nonconformity.

Passing Etiquette

I came upon a group of riders after exiting the ferry and getting most of the way across Manitoulin; first off the ferry gives you wide open roads!

I'd been moving along at a nice clip alone but had to slow down to follow them.  Had they been a car or truck I'd have used my power to weight ratio to good advantage and made a quick, safe pass.  This clump of bikers were much longer than your typical truck, so passing them would be tricky.  In addition to the physics there was suddenly a lot of motorcycle psychology to consider.  Would these riders take offence at being passed?  I'm not safely ensconced in a box if they got aggressive.

In wondering about this I sparked a rather heated debate on COG.  The sensible (and rather Zen) solution seems to be to find a nice place to have a stop, a stretch and a drink, then get back on the road when they're well down it.  Strangely enough, the only thing that seems to be able to clip the wings of a motorcycle are a bunch of motorcycles in front of it.

I had a moment when I first started riding where I suddenly realized I'm on a machine that has Lamborghini like power to weight ratio.  Since then I've made a point of exploring what this means.  When you ride you're missing the steel cage, but what you lack in mass you make up for in agility and power, and learning to harness that power is vital to your well being.   Following that logic I prefer to have things coming at me and don't like being passed or boxed in, but for twenty frustrating minutes that's exactly where I was as a line of campers and SUVs formed up behind me.

The general feeling on COG was to either pull over or take your chances passing a bunch of leather clad bikers not knowing if these are wannabes or one percenters.  The later are much more likely to do something about it if they perceive disrespect.  In any case, it's not like you're in a big box so antagonizing them seems like a potentially dangerous course of action from both a physics and a psychology point of view.

I was out on a ride with a group the other week for the first time, but these guys didn't hang about and were making a point of using side roads rather than main through fairs so we weren't holding anyone up, and there were only half a dozen of us.  We were also riding a wide variety of machines designed to exploit the natural agility of the motorbike from GSX-Rs to forty year old Kawasakis in genres from adventure to standard to sport and sport touring.  I'd also say we were pretty approachable based on the number of people who approached us.  Eclectic would be a good way to describe us, we certainly weren't wearing anything approaching a uniform.

On COG someone suggested that when they ride in a group they intentionally get out of the way if they feel they are holding up traffic because everyone has the right to enjoy the road how they want to, but not everyone feels that way:

A clip from Henry Cole's World's Greatest Motorcycle Rides:

Riding the American Deserts

I'd say physics and some rather negative stereotypes (along with a lot of bikers adopting those stereotypes) held up that traffic.  I don't think respect had anything to do with it.

So there you have it:  the best advice when you come upon a large group of floorboard grinders is to pull over and take a break, it's not worth the hassle of trying to make a pass, even though you're on the machine best able to do it.

Google motorcycle films and this is what you get, the odd intelligent attempt amidst the bikespoitation flicks.  And
we wonder why the general public still has doubts about motorcycling...