biking

Escaping London

Building work in SE1 has meant moving out and taking Belinda back to a mystery location in Cambridge where she will rub shoulders with piles of furniture and artwork for the next 6 months or so. It feels so familiar to take the train up there from Liverpool Street, make my way to my old garage, and climb into armoured leathers and head off, usually in an easterly direction. It is really more pleasant to spend an hour in a train before riding than inching forward for the same amount of time through the traffic of south London before sniffing any sign of good roads to ride on. Today’s trip, taken on bank holiday Saturday with a cool sun shining, was back to Dunwich, a favourite destination partly because of the lovely ride from Cambridge especially on the A1120 but also the spacious destination where you can park for free, walk on the stoney beach and feel the sun on the face and take tea and cake at the great Dunwich Tea Rooms. The place is never crowded. Once I had relaxed and the stressful week had melted away from my body, I remembered the pleasure of riding a motorbike: the tilting of the body, the feeling of oneness with the bike, the acceleration, the cool air, the comfortable posture.

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Review of PDM60 – my installation

If you don’t already know what it is, the PDM60 is the name of a nicely designed automotive device that allows you to connect up to six electronic devices to your motorcycle (or car or boat) battery and manage the way they come on and off without attaching a huge number of connectors to that battery. It also does away with fuses – for those things hitched up to it. If tobacco companies made 2/3 size cigarettes then the PDM60 would be the size of one of these midget packs. You make three connections to install it – one to the positive battery terminal, a second to the negative terminal – with a sneaky extra cable to a bar of extra earth connections – and the third to an ignition trigger, a connection that only goes live when the ignition is turned on. The idea is that thereafter you can add gadgets to your heart’s delight just by connecting up to the PDM60 using the supply of pozilocks and terminal connectors (for the earth end).

I bought this from Nippy Norman over a year ago and only last weekend built up the determination to attempt to fit it. One thing that deterred me was the lack of any sliver of spare space in the liquid cooled R1200gs. But somehow, by owning it for a year or so, what space there is – under the seats – expanded enough to slide the device and its (in this shot untidy) wiring into place.

Plenty of people have posted their own experiences and reviews of this device – usually glowing. Please look at this for an example of a helpful and modest motorcyclist from Belgium who walks through fitting this. While I think it is a masterpiece of design, I was a little disappointed to discover some limitations.

I fitted a second auxiliary BMW ‘cigarette-type’ socket into a tiny piece of space under the rider seat and connected this to the PDM60. No problem. I will use it to plug in my fantastic Cycle Pump compressor if ever I need to. This will become live a few seconds after the bike has started up, then stay on until the mysterious canbus that runs the BMW’s electrics shuts down about a minute after you take the key out. So far so good. A popular device among motorcycle owners is likely to be a tracking device of some kind. These tend to have a permanent connection to the battery plus a trigger that disarms the device when the ignition is turned on and arms it again when you park it. Rowe Electronics who make the PDM60 gave me some advice, when I asked about how to connect such a device. Unfortunately using the PDM60 does not work for a device that needs a constant top up charge from the battery as this is shut off when the ignition is off. So this had to be wired – at least the positive lead – straight to the battery. Suprise number two was to do with the programming that you can do with this device – and Rowe have recently released a Mac version of this bit of software. You plug in a rather unconventional lead into the PDm and via a dashboard you can change the amps delivered by each circuit or turn off circuits you don’t use. The manual warns ‘don’t do this when the device is attached to a power source’. And they don’t just mean turn the ignition off, they mean disconnect it entirely. I tried without – not understanding – and it was not possible to connect to the unit. I see this as another weakness or limitation. It seems not unlikely that an owner would add devices over time and perhaps want to set up the PDM for them. To do that it seems you have to go to the trouble of disconnecting it from the battery every time you want to make a change. This seems like a bore. Surely it must be possible to design a device that does not need to do this. If I add other electronics then I can see the PDM60 was a worthwhile buy, but if I don’t I am not certain that this nice bit of kit is really worth it for people in my situation.

Return trip to Cambridge

At last: riding in the countryside in the warm sunshine on a day off work. March 15th was 6000 mile service day. I’d delayed it from the unseasonal November date. It seems much more appropriate to start the riding year with new oil and the other tweaks that a service provides. But the day was a day of two parts.
Up at 6 and on the bike by ten to seven, the GPS took me over Blackfriars bridge, up through Highbury and Archway and Barnet on the A1000, the old Great North Road, nearly all the way to Lind Motorrad in Welwyn Garden City. There seems no escape from London traffic and much of it was at a crawl until after Barnet. Its 28 miles from home to the dealer and the average speed was just under 16mph. Added to that the mist fell with poor visibility making full concentration necessary.

Since I was last there, SBW Motorrad has been taken over by the owner of Lind BMW in Norwich but the staff are the same and the showroom is more or less the same (where did that comfortable sofa go?) Waiting for the couple of hours that a service takes sees a motley crew of customers pass through, picking up bits, delivering bikes, looking at the shiny new ones, chewing the motorcycling cud. Some are reassuringly old, or well-spoken. Nowadays your bike gets washed for free after a service which is always welcome. Getting back on at 10am, the day was transformed and the sun was shining. The temperature had risen from 6 degrees earlier to 17. Partly for reasons of nostalgia I decided to ride up to Cambridge and enjoy the day off and the beginning of Spring. It was such a relief to be riding properly again. The A10 from Hertford to Cambridge would probably not make it into any collection of biking roads but it is always enjoyable with its empty dual carriage ways followed by some swooping A road that is rarely crowded – at least when I ride it. And straight after a service always feels like a good time to see if the bike goes any faster.

After a low-brow lunch in Costa, I made a return by means of the M11, occasionally busy but with nice open stretches, 60 miles back home but with inevitable delays on Mile End Road where a bus had broken down, then over London Bridge and home. There must be an easier route for those last few miles.

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MCN Motorcycle Show at Excel Centre London

Two years running I have been to this show, after a gap of 2 or 3 years. Its a minor highlight in a tedious winter month. Even quite early on the Friday it was heaving with people. The demographic is clear: the great majority of attenders are middle aged men. I’d say there is 5 – 10% women. And a few families with small kids who climb all over the bikes. There are always a small number of the injured, either with their wrists in a brace or with crutches or in wheelchairs. Every year I wonder what the stories are behind these more serious injuries.

The bikes, of course are beautiful and shiny and great fun to swing a leg over.

But mostly they are there to admire. Some, like the BMW R1200GS Adventure (huge already) up on a plinth higher than all the other Beamers.

Or there is the chrome Norton in a glass case.

There is always masses of stuff you can buy. I never know whether there are really any bargains to be had but the market creates lots of excitement.

My journey there is always fun too. From Bankside I took the Thames Clipper up to the O2 then caught the Emirates air line

over the Thames with its stunning view and commentary about the history of invention and the Lea Valley.

Westerham – the countryside at last

Passing a roadside sign that tells us that we have just entered Kent coincides with a vista of rolling hills opening out on each side of the road. At last. Going south or south south east out of Southwark is tedious. Lowpoints are the Lewisham one way and the Catford gyratory systems, but by Bromley things are looking more pleasant – and definitely by trusty Biggin Hill Airport with its WWII history you have to say we are in the country. Westerham is a pretty village or small town, just beyond the M25 though with nowhere obvious to park up as I rode through. Neither did I stop at Chartwell family home of Winston Churchill, closed when I visited. But the roads are lovely to ride through, though not empty.

I was on the road for 3 and 1/4 hours, covering only 60 miles at an average speed of 18mph and a maximum of 38mph.

Testing Adventure Screen and Sheep on Wheels Merino Base Layers

During the week I picked up, or rather was hand delivered, a tall R1200GS Adventure windscreen from Ebay. Unused and at nearly half the price I would have paid had I stuck with plan A and asked BMW to fit one at the next service. I was partly thinking of that long and possibly cold and rainy journey across northern Europe that I plan to take in September but also wanting to ‘adventurise’ bit by bit my ordinary 1200GS. My old 2007 white air/oil cooled Adventure had an idiosyncratic style that makes todays new GSs look a little mass-produced. The new model Adventure looks great – in my view – but is a Behemoth, huge, taller that the standard GS and heavier to boot. I had no intention of buying one when I traded in Belinda. Getting my wheels powder coated black would be a nice touch and a move in that direction but expensive I imagine.

Here’s a useful comparison:

Today after fitting the screen (thanks to one of the many instructional videos on YouTube I did it the easy way – very easy – and not the hard way which The Missenden Flyer shows) I dithered about which set of urban roads I should head down but chose to look at Gravesend. I wonder how it got that rather gloomy name. It is one of those Victorian towns on the Thames estuary that, I think, has a naval history. At least in my imagination it does.

Interestingly GPS took me north over Southwark bridge then close to the Tower of London and down through the Blackwall Tunnel getting on to the south side of the river again. Of course I took the wrong turn on the entrance and had to make a huge detour up the A13 (or was it the A12?). The A2 slithering East South East from London is unremarkable but at least moves quickly and doesn’t feel like driving through a city.

Gravesend is rather a dump. It has a small pier and a historic ‘quarter’ that reminded me strangely of how Bury St. Edmunds used to look about 20 years ago. By the river you look over to the docks at Tilbury on the north side of the Thames where the Empire Windrush brought future NHS workers from the West Indies in 1948 and where H’s parents left for Australia in 1961. I didn’t stay long.

So how was the taller screen? It is a bit like comparing two different marmalades. It was similar but I want to swap them back and try again. Then do it again. Once at 70 I had the feeling that I was having a more peaceful ride. So I have no regrets about this small not very rigorous experiment.

The merino base layers are good. The temperature hovered around 10 degrees so was not freezing but the air was very damp and rain started to hit the roof about ten minutes after I got home. Walking around Gravesend I was cold but once with everything zipped up and on the bike I was completely comfortable – just that slight chill at the top of my legs which must get the wind from underneath the windscreen. So another good purchase and cheaper than identical items made by other companies.

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The gap in the picture below is the Blackwall Tunnel. The short red vertical line is my wrong turning.

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