equipment review

Dialing out the pain: mini review of Oxford Lidlock

One of enjoyments of regular – even though its annual, its still regular – motorcycle travel is the satisfaction of noticing the things that end up being annoying and sorting them out for the next trip. But sometimes noticing these annoyances and naming them is harder than you think. Its counter-intuitive but its true. For the first few years of camping in Europe I used the ACSI guidebook and always seemed to end up in campsites surrounded (literally) by Dutch families in large white motorhomes. Where were all the interesting travellers, I found myself wondering, feeling alienated in my little tent and crouched over my tiny stove? It took that long for the penny to drop that this was a result of using that particular guidebook. Then I discovered the Cool Camping guidebooks, though Cool Camping has been taken over by a US company HipCamp who are offering ever larger discounts to tempt me back. I also realised that I could search on the net for tent-only campsites or adult-only campsites. This realisation made a huge difference and I started finding myself in beautiful sites, with friendly and sometimes interesting neighbours, feeling relaxed and open rather than odd and conspicuous.

Another annoyance that I think I may be on the way to sorting is the following scenario, repeated many times. You park up in a small town to look for somewhere to eat, or you park outside a large supermarket intending to shop for dinner. It hot, possibly very hot. You can take off a heavy motorcycle jacket and sling it over you shoulder if you wish. But then you have your helmet, with its valuable, possibly very valuable, camera stuck on the side and bluetooth speaker system. Do you leave it on the ground next to the bike? Probably not. Do you get out your heavy chain and padlock and use that? Did you even, now that you are trying to travel light, add this item to your luggage? Enter the solution that was there all along, hidden in plain sight: the OxfordLidlock costing about £15.

You could thread the curly thing through the sleeve of a jacket if you dared

Its light and doesn’t require you to carry yet another key. But its tougher than it looks though. The curled up wire is designed to let you thread it through some clothing to also lock to the bike. Its a nice idea but the wire would be very easy to snip and, if you decided to use it to stash your jacket, you would need to empty the pockets of: your camera, wallet, documents, keys, sunglasses, cigarettes (if you smoke), Leatherman multi-tool…. so not much use for me.

I hope I use it for short stops. I can’t see why I woudln’t. It could be one of those small things that just makes a big difference.

How comfortable should we be camping? Mini review of Helinox Zero chair

Many travellers say they travel light, or ultralight. But they pack 10kgs of cameras. Others pack just a saucepan and leave plates and a mug at home. Everyone’s decisions are a bit crazy. So how comfortable should we be when camping and carrying everything on a motorcycle? A few years ago I realised that Touratech panniers make very comfortable seats at the camp – and useful tables to put your gas stove on, but then what do you sit on when you have decided to travel with soft bags? Crouching or kneeling or alternating between them gets excruciating after not too long. Camp chairs of course. And Helinox seems a favourite worth investigating. See here.

Since Thomas’ review, I think, a lighter more comfortable chair has appeared from Helinox, the Chair Zero. It weighs 525g and packs to a package about 300mm long. The Ground chair is far too low. The Zero is comfortable to lean back into but also easy to get out of without pushing up on the earth. Here it is in my back garden.

its easy to fold up and put together

Its coming to Portugal with me later in the summer. Last year I paired everything down because I didn’t have proper luggage. This year I seem to be adding things one by one…

LiteLock bike lock

Finally, after supporting this on Kickstarter in the middle of last year, this innovative lock for my motorcycle has been delivered. As the project got more and more delayed, communication from the company was not that brilliant with very irregular updates and assurances to those who had invested in the development of the lock. I ordered the longer version to make attaching my bike to some fixed object. It is surprisingly not light and too large to fit into the bag that came with it. I was expecting it would be useful to bring along when travelling but I think it will be too big and heavy to take on trips though fine for home security and for short trips. Here it is:

Nice colour though
It doesn’t curl up much smaller than this

Installing Aurora Rally Kit

Over the last weekend I finished (v nearly) installing the Rally kit for the KTM 790 purchased from Aurora Rally Equipment based in Athens. Ordered last November and delivered three weeks ago it was always going to be the most complicated piece of work on the bike. If you’ve looked at videos from Aurora, also one or two from YouTubers (sorry I can’t find the link now), you can see the most scary moment of installing this kit is when the old front headlight cowl is completely removed and a spring of mad wires and connectors greets you, all needing a new home. Not only do you have to remate them to their original partners but you have to cram them all into the new narrow space of the new tower. It turned out that all 14 of these cables each have their own unique connectors so impossible to reconnect wrongly. I had written sticky labels on each part to avoid later disaster but most of them fell off.

Here’s before and during:

before…
Nooooo
now where did these go?
its a squeeze
Nooooo again

I worked methodically, over a few weekends and watched Aurora’s installation video, stopping, rewinding and starting scores of times. I was determined not to panic or surrender to my familiar catastrophising thoughts so their soothing voice-over and background music definitely helped. Even their stamped out ‘Never give up’ slogan on one of the metal plates helped – though I presume the never giving up they had in mind was some tough enduro race, not actually installing the kit.

My only mistake was not bolting the tower properly onto the incredibly strong and perfectly engineered spider/head clamp. Somehow I had located the top bolt though the hole properly but at the bottom I missed it completely and the bolt sat just pinching the side of the mount – and somehow survived being tightened up to 25Nm. It was only when I got to the ‘tightening the tower’ stage that I realised that the handlebars no longer moved. The back of the tower was jammed against, and gauging out lumps of plastic from the steering lock barrel. And once I got it sorted the whole front dropped down about an inch and now bumped against the fender. This was the low point, followed shortly after by thinking I had stripped the heads of two of the bolts – but I was just using the wrong tool. After this things calmed down. And mysteriously the fender was no longer in the way.

Navigation tower finished including mount for my Garmin

About an hour later I plucked up the courage to put the key in and turn on the ignition. Everything worked. And the lights – I kept the super-bright Baja Squadron headlight – were blindingly bright.

full beam
dipped

Its only the side panels left to fit now and the stickers to get onto them without crease or bubble. My thought – apart from thinking it looks great – now is to wonder how much rain will get inside the tower from the front and top onto the masses of -in-theory-all-weather-sealed wiring. I think I might fashion some waterproof material to fit inside behind the back plate. I’m awaiting Aurora to send the CanBus adapter for the headlights – though all works well with the temporary fix that they sent.

Overall I am hugely impressed with the quality, organisation and communication of Aurora. In particularl the all important spider clamp – important because it is the one piece that holds the tower onto the bike – was an absolute perfect fit into a complicated space.

Once complete I will go for a ride and report on how it works once rolling – and I need to adjust the headlights properly…

Aurora Rally tower installation complete

On Sunday I went for a quick spin and to fill up. It was so nice to be back on the bike even for such a short ride. It sounded and rode so well – with a nice rough edge. All seemed to work well though I haven’t checked that the 12v socket works as it should plus there is the HDU warning as expected till the final canbus piece arrives from Athens.

KTM 790 Adv mods so far

Why do we spend so much time, money and thought on modifications for these machines? Maybe one reason is that we are aware that they are mass produced tangles of metal and plastic and we want them to feel more like our own unique thing. However, if beauty is in the beholder’s eye then our new bike might already arrive with that quality of gladdening the heart just by looking at it in the garage – until that feeling evaporates next to a newer more desirable model. After my first trip on the KTM I made a list – a long list – of things I wanted to change or add to the bike to improve the riding experience.

One or two items on this list were in the rational box but most were in a box with a more complicated label on it. At the risk of stating the obvious the label on the non-rational box includes something about enjoying identifying with a hardcore life without actually necessarily living it. ‘Aspirational’ would maybe be a simple way to think of it. Nearly everything on both lists is done now – along with some that were not on it at all.

The really practical things, honestly: cruise control and heated grips – the former an expensive dealership item, the second a do-it-at-home event.

Look no hands or cold hands

Then the possibly practical: One finger lighter action clutch: another home fitment. The stock was not awful but its the gentler biting point of this set up that makes the difference. A slightly longer lever is such a simple idea.

The main engineering challenge would have been the limited range of movement behind the fuel tanks.

Then in the appearance category is Barkbuster handguards. The existing ones were fine but these look better and add to visibility.

Look – they stand out

Some more items from the orangery: the high front fender I bought when I bought the bike (I’m not sure how practical it really will be), some lower wider footpegs from Rade Garage and some radiator protection at the front from R&G who did not reply to my query about fitting these guards. You have to bend the lower part to fit – though the instructions don’t mention this. Also down there but not too visible is a larger brake pedal from Touratech and a larger side stand foot also from the German company.

motorcycle with orange bits

Then there is the new exhaust from Italian company SC Project. I’d watched some Youtubers fit this and then remove the baffle to produce an amazing exhaust note. However, I’ve not yet been able to pull out that part and wonder if I’ve bought a new non-removable design. So apart from losing some weight, this did not quite deliver on expectations. I haven’t given up yet though…

2 and 1/2 Ks. Now how much did the original weigh?

I nearly forgot: the first things I did when I got the bike into my garage was to install my faithful PDM60 electrical unit that I’d used on two previous bikes and removed and then dismantle the front to make a kind of temporary mounting and connection for a new GPS Garmin unit. (Temporary until the Aurora rally kit)

KTM showing wiring under seat

There’s never enough room under the seat for this kind of addition

The other first thing was to fit a Perun luggage rack. This was a well made piece that fitted perfectly – and looks great. Fitting this enabled my first trip away on the bike.

Perun rack – nicely built. I took off the original grab handles to fit my soft luggage

Most recently I replaced the ugly and hard to adjust mirrors with Double Take mirrors from the US via Adventure Spec. These arrived quickly at a not too high price and were super easy to fit. Apart from wanting to join the club and their looks my main reason for fitting these was not the fear that I might break the originals on a fall on the trails but that they will be easier to adjust on the road.

Nice look but they seem eminently stealable.

Coming some time soon fromGreek company Aurora is their rally kit which will completely replace the slightly ugly front of this machine – once I have risen to the major challenge of installing it. Then I think I will call it a day, well apart from maybe a nicer seat…. and some…

Sony RX100Va first thoughts

For the last year I’ve been updating the contents of my bags and pockets for future trips near and far. This time its the travel camera that I take. When I downloaded the photos I took of my last trip up to Yorkshire I was a little shocked at the poor quality that my Lumix Panasonic DMC-TZ30 caught. Fewer seemed to be sharp and many suffered badly from glare (it turned out that there was a smear of something on the lens). That camera has been a great lightweight and pretty cheap companion on may trips though it has two limitations. One is the image quality – on close scrutiny everything seems to be made of putty – especially human skin. The second is how difficult it is to take photos with settings that you chose. Changing aperture, shutter speed and ISO is not straightforward and I’ve ended up just setting it to automatic and hoping for the best. Blurring the background is not something that that camera excels at for example.

I had two candidates to chose from: Fujifilm X100v or the Sony that I eventually bought. I think the Fujifilm is a more capable camera and would be more fun to use but in the end I chose the Sony for some sensible reasons: I already have a Sony helmet camera and a collection of batteries and a charger and I don’t want to have to carry around yet another set of batteries that I need to keep charged on the move – always one more thing to be on top of; the Sony is quite a lot smaller and will easily fit in a motorcycle jacket pocket; it has a wider angle lens (24mm equiv compared to 35mm on the Fuji). I also had to decide between an up to date model with a longer zoom or the one I bought (24-70mm equiv) with a f1.8 lens. I looked back at my photographs from my travels and nearly all were taken at the wide angle end. So it was decided.

So far I’ve changed some of the settings, with the advice from one of the camera’s Youtube champions and taken a few dozen photos mostly in the study but some on the streets outside.

Exported from Lightroom

What I like: the camera can save in RAW or RAW plus JPEG which the Panasonic couldn’t.

It has a little electronic viewfinder (fiddly to pull out):

The image quality is quite good but its best not to think of my Nikon D810 – which is an unfair comparison.

I like the wide aperture lens both for low light and for blurring a background. The Panasonic was f4.5 – 6.3 so you could never do that.

Adaptability of settings; aperture priority and auto ISO seems to work and its relatively easy to change the aperture – result.

What I’m disappointed with: wifi connection to iPhone – just doesn’t seem to work…. update. For some reason, this Youtuber’s instructions seemed to work. This is a big breakthrough – for sharing photos while travelling. The camera transfers JPGs not RAWs. Here’s the JPG quality from an image transferred to the phone and then to the computer:

JPEG size 1.7Mb ISO2000

The other thing I don’t like is the flip side of its main attraction and this is it is too small to handle comfortably. It just does not fit nicely into the hand – as DSLR’s do, despite their weight. There are grips available which I will try but I don’t want to permanently stick something onto its beautifully designed and engineered body. Perhaps there is a removable option.

Nevertheless, this camera will definitely improve the records of future travels and lead to some slightly more thoughtful photography on the road.

Here it is