sort of technical

Old School motorcycle garage in South London

Everything I do ends up with lashings of anxiety. My bike was/is due its first MOT just after Christmas so at my KTM dealer getting a service done a couple of weeks back I asked whether my high beam Baja Squadron Pro would pass its test. I knew that it was sold as not street legal and I also know that it is blindingly bright. I was told that it would be ok but the dipped headlight would bring ‘an instant fail’. And why? Because its beam sloped up to the right rather than the left which is how LHD countries require headlights to point. (See below – subtle, eh?)

So, on the mail to Aurora Rally equipment, based in definitely RHD Greece. They pointed me helpfully to a Hella light on Amazon with a LH slope, ordered then delivered a few days later. I thought I would replace both headlamps and brought the bike back home from its usual location in Cambridge. Its not really that difficult to remove the front of the tower, just a little time consuming. For me though, the new light looked like it could never fit because the connection seemed totally different, so every step proceeded with a sense that everything would go pearshaped on this job at any moment.

Needless to say everything worked out well. The dipped beam is a small LED (over €100) which easily replaced the halogen bulb that came with the new light, though the Aurora tower does not seem to have enough upwards adjustment for the dipped beam.

So, rather than head back up to Ipswich I took the bike to a local MOT and mechanics, ChasBikes on Kennington Road. I was uncertain that the bike would get through.

It was easy to book, and there was no waiting time when I arrived and the test was done in half an hour, possibly less. The place is great and a welcome antidote for those corporate dealers where you get a coffee from a machine while your bike is whisked off and the mechanic’s space is out of bounds to customers. This is an Old school motorcycle garage at its best. I sat about 10 feet away from the mechanic testing my bike and could explain its oddities – like the headlight only comes on after the bike has moved a couple of yards. Chas and his mechanic both have an enjoyable dry humour (‘when electric starts came out I thought this won’t catch on’). I’ll be back for sure – next year at least. Chas mentioned that he had lived in East Africa, but I didn’t enquire further. The bike passed and I learned a few things about how the bureaucratic MOT system works. Interestingly this is what I found when looking them up to do a Google review:

‘CHASBIKES was started in 1984 by Charles Holt M.A.(OXON), a former East African wildlife biologist. Originally located on an industrial estate in Greenwich, the company hired out Honda CX500’s to dispatch riders, before beginning to specialise in repairing them for the public. The company then moved on to work on other popular dispatch riding models….’ https://www.yell.com/biz/chasbikes-ltd-london-6519580/

And here he is:

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.

Inactivity bites

Since sometime in late November I have struggled to keep my bike running, travelling up to Cambridge on the train from Liverpool Street every couple of weeks to take the bike out, have some fun, charge the battery up a bit in the process and maybe end the ride with some rudimentary cleaning courtesy of my battery-powered pressure (low pressure) washer. What was great fun in July and August – getting out into the East Anglia country without having to spend an hour or more in London traffic – turns into a chore in wet and cold December to February. Also, as we all know, batteries don’t hold their charge so well in cold weather. My tracker can tell me the volts of my battery from 60 miles away. Sometimes I am surprised. 12.2 volts can start up the bike. Sometimes it doesn’t and my amazing Antigravity pocket-sized charger has saved the day and been impressive in starting the engine. But when my device was warning me that the battery had only 11.3 volts I wasn’t too optimistic. Nevertheless as ever, I struggled into the biking gear, heaved out the bike to start up and attached the clever Antigravity but… nothing. So now my dirty R1200gs sits in my garage without a heart and my battery is here in the kitchen, charged up and being checked every day to see whether it still has legs – which it seems to. Not quite time to replace it. (Its a shame Odyssey don’t make a battery the right size for the 2014 GS otherwise I would have forked out on one already.)

My garage is getting closer to being ready for a motorcycle relocation.battery

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.

pdm60

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.

EDZ Layering review

Capitalism seems to take things we always had, give them a new name, and sell them back to us at a high price. We always had cables connecting our hi-fi amplifier to our speakers. We found these stray strands of copper in the back of drawers or in the bottoms of empty boxes. Now they are ‘interconnects’ and they cost at least ten times as much. Or rather we get a ‘choice’: the ‘best quality’, the ‘good quality’ and the ‘perfectly adequate’  with appropriate prices, bearing no resemblance to the cost of making them but invented to give an illusion of giving us control of every detail of our sound system. We, as intended, go for the middle way. We don’t want to be cheap skates after all.

And now the embarrassingly old-mannish long underwear has been discovered, given an expensive twist, and sold back to us as ‘base layers’. It could be made of ‘technical fabric’, newspeak for unnamable man-made stuff or merino wool which is found, as it ever was, on the backs of merino sheep. My mum would definitely have encouraged me to dress in it and bought it for me at Christmas.  Only now I won’t need to roll my eyes because, at last, it has become cool.

So, today my eagerly awaited parcel from EDZ Layering arrived. The postman managed to squeeze it through the letter box. I’ve bought long johns (sorry – leggings, nice olive green – on special) and a long sleeved top (safe black – blue was on special but looked ghastly) made of Merino wool all for less than £100.  I had my possible motorcycle trip to Helsinki and back via the Baltics in September in mind. I don’t mind the distance but I am nervous about riding so late in the Summer, early in the Autumn. Every account I read of similar rides seem to feature the woes of riding in the rain and cold. I like to be prepared. Despite my distrust of capitalism and its triumphs of marketing over reality (my choice to buy a hardcore Suunto watch for example) I am being converted to the new religion of base layers, that can achieve the impossible of keeping you both cool and warm and ‘wick’ away your perspiration. (When did people first start talking about wicking sweat away?) My polyester EDZ outfit that I bought when I got my most recent set of leathers from Hideout Leather certainly have managed to perform that miracle, and feel extremely comfortable in the process. Let’s see how the next winter ride goes in the company of these toasty sheep. Feeling prepared has a big impact on morale and good morale is the key to enjoyable motorcycle – and other – expeditions. I’ll buy into base layers for now.

EDZ items