2025 Glacial Lakes MC Grand Tour

  click on image to enlarge My last GT ride was in early July, the start of our Winter, and  I had hoped for another ride in mid to late August, when the  weather is still cool but there is only a few days of light rain.   What you would describe as reasonable riding weather. Unfortunately, this year we seem to have entered a "wet Winter cycle" with warm sea-water temperatures in the Indian Ocean to the west of Oz, combined with warm sea-water temperatures in the Pacific Ocean to the east of Oz.  The result was cold air temperatures combined with abnormally high rainfall. Over the three months of June / July / August, we had significantly more than our total annual rainfall, with only 20% of days being rain free.   That's works out to be only 1 or 2 days of sunshine a week, for 3 consecutive months.  And yes, I know that this is mild compared to the winter in Minnesota, but it is unusual / unexpected for us. This ongoing rain has resulted in...

  Part 3 Friday, 8th August.   The replacement hose was received this morning, and the metal 90* bend that had been a problem was now smaller, and a fter lunch, I performed a "dry" test fit and confirmed that the new hose no longer fouled the fork leg.   That was the good news, because the bad news was that I found that the replacement brake line was the incorrect length.   It was 10 cm shorter than the original kit brake line and the OEM brake line. click on image to enlarge Bugger. So, it was back on the phone to the Distributor.  Now, my first inclination was to "scream & shout" but that rarely achieves much, so I calmly thanked Mark* for the quick shipping, before explaining the new problem. Needless to say, Mark* was surprised and confused.  Truth be known, I am not sure he believed what I was telling him.   So much so that he opened two similar kits they had in stock and found that both those kits had brake lines of the wr...

Part 2 After what seemed like weeks but was probably only days, my friendly Workshop Manager gave me a call to inform me that my new shims had arrived. Now, as everyone will know, each shim has a 2-digit number etched on one side. This number indicates the thickness of the shim. click on the image to enlarge For example, a shim marked as 85 means the shim has a "nominal" thickness of 2.85 mm. Likewise, a shim marked 05 has a "nominal" thickness of 3.05 mm, and so on. I say "nominal" because the actual thickness of a 05 shim can be anywhere between 3.035 and 3.065 thick, and by knowing this, it is possible to "cherry-pick" shims for your engine if you have access to enough shims to choose from. So armed with my trusty micrometer and a list of what shims I really wanted, I headed down to the Workshop, and after sweet-talking the Manager for a while, I was eventually given permission to root around his collection of shims. This chart shows the resul...

Winter Maintenance July is the middle of our Winter, and just 3 words sum up the current situation perfectly. Cold, Wet or Windy or a combination of one or more of those factors.   Cold as in 0*C ~ 15*C, Wet as in 20 days of rain per month or more, and Windy as wind gusts exceeding 100 kph.  Not the best riding weather by any stretch of the imagination. Lately, it's been cold & wet & windy, so it is the perfect time to perform that much-needed routine maintenance.  Now, it is fair to say that there are 2 schools of thought regarding routine maintenance. The first is " if it ain't broke, don't fix it ", while the second is " a stitch in time save nine ". Apparently, that saying has a maritime origin from the 1730s and relates to the idea that it is better to repair a small tear in a sail than wait until it is a large tear, particularly when you are in uncharted oceans. So with that in mind, I pulled out the Service Manual ( as in RTFM ) and pull...