Motoblag

We finally got our snow last week.  The sidecar rig is the only motorcycle outside.

Thankfully the temperatures climbed back up shortly after this accumulation, and I got a change to work on the bike and take it to work since.  Still looking at either making a set of chains or getting a cheap set of knobbies and doing the DIY studs.

The Velorex tub was real beat up from the Alaska/Canada road trip.  After pricing out getting my own plastic welder, I instead poked around and found an auto parts store/body supply shop can do it for me.  After taking the tub off, the damage was worse than I thought.

Repaired:

I also bent the rear tub support back into shape. I think it was still off from the outfit’s initial, err, barrel roll. Now, the tub doesn’t move around nearly as much and doesn’t crash and bang over bumps. Right on!

In case of an accident or near-miss, you must take one big step: placing responsibility on yourself.

Don’t blame your bike. Don’t blame your tires. Don’t blame other motorists. Identify what you did right, what you did wrong and learn from it.

Identify the Mistakes

Start with what happened. We’ll use a story to illustrate our point:

Joe Rider is riding down a street with two lanes each way when the truck ahead of him in the left lane slows before reaching a crosswalk. Joe recognizes the brake lights but as far as he can see, his path of travel is clear, so he keeps his speed up. When Joe reaches the crosswalk, he just misses clipping a pedestrian appearing from the front of the truck. Arriving at his destination, he takes off his gear in a huff and tells all of his friends about the stupid pedestrian that almost walked into his bike, but he is still glad there was no damage done to anyone or anything involved.

What happened here? Joe Rider was aware enough to identify the crosswalk and truck slowing. However, he did not take into account the reduction of visibility the truck caused. The larger vehicle effectively shielded the pedestrian from Joe’s sight.

Mistake one: not realizing the truck was causing a reduction in visibility. Joe could have slowed or changed position in his lane to improve what he could see.

Mistake two: not slowing. The truck was slowing. The driver may have been turning without signaling, but that would be an incorrect assumption.

Mistake three: trying to put blame on the pedestrian. “They were walking too quickly.” “They should have been looking.” It’s the motorist’s responsibility to yield to pedestrians.

Mistake four: rationalization. “A miss is as good as a mile” is the wrong attitude to have. What if the next time this scenario happens, the pedestrian is a little bit faster? The rider and pedestrian could end up in the hospital. The rider needs to learn from their mistakes.

Take Responsibility

If Joe realizes it’s his fault if he collides with a pedestrian, he will start looking into why it was a close call. He will hopefully identify the mistakes listed above and determine why he made them, how they affected the scenario and how to fix them in the future.

Take Action

Once the mistakes have been identified, the rider can determine what they did wrong, what the did right and how to improve their safety in the situation. Joe needs to take a close look at what he deems is acceptable visibility of his environment and how to improve his riding to meet a stricter standard. For example, he could have slowed his motorcycle to reduce the effect of reduced visibility from the truck.

Learning from Mistakes Made by Others

As a rider, you need all the learning you can get. Any time you hear or read about an accident, find out as much information as possible, identify possible mistakes and figure out what you would do in the situation.  Learning from mistakes other folks make is a valuable method to avoiding tears and expensive damage to your bike or your body.

I have posted my 2011 Alaska by sea and by three trip report.  I punted and copied the writeup I posted to a couple forums.

Also updated: the upcoming trips page.

Coming off last week’s post, I want to discuss a tangent, one I’ve been pondering for a while.  As the title of this post says, perfect is the enemy of good.

To tie in to the adventure posing scourge, there’s a sizable amount of motorcyclists who think they need the absolute latest and greatest to do anything.  They’ll look at a gravel road and think they need some big ol’ knobby tires to even think about traveling on it.  Or when wanting to go long distances, they’ll upgrade their bike with a fuel tank to beggar some cars, get a huge windscreen and a GPS wired into the bike before they even take a day trip.

What they should be doing is heading out on the road, getting some experience and find out through that first-hand knowledge what they should change on their bike.  It’s easy to find what internet forums think one should do to the motorcycle, but the most important drive should be from seeing what needs to be fixed.  That small fuel tank?  Not a problem unless you’re tackling one of a handful of roads in North America.  GPS?  Getting lost, I mean finding an alternate path of travel, is a great way to find and connect with some locals.

This is not to disparage the use of GPS and other items to make traveling easier, but it’s not for everyone.  Sometimes motorcycling is about the simplicity of being out in the wind and using what you have.

You don’t need perfect to enjoy the ride, you just need good enough.

One of my biggest points of contention is not folks modifying their motorcycles, but thinking their motorcycles won’t do what they want, before they try it.  I was taken aback when someone stumbled on my first trip to Alaska on the 599 and their response was “wow, he did that on such a small bike!”  They were under the assumption you needed a big bike with a big engine to attempt the trip.  I hope they realized whatever they are riding is more than likely enough.  Seeing a big touring bike kept as a garage trophy instead of seeing the world, even a small slice of it, makes me shake my head in dismay.  That’s my opinion: some folks enjoy sitting in the garage, drinking a beer and polishing the bike, but that’s not what motorbikes were made to do.  Maybe the owner would feel better if they became a weekend warrior, or picked a riding goal and made it a priority to improve it.  For example, there’s plenty of aspects of cornering that every ride can work at polishing.  And I hope they eventually do make that a higher priority than researching the best polish on the internet.

I would like all my rambling about motorcycles to be encouraging to folks to try things out.  See if touring is up your alley, or endurance riding, dual sporting, scootering, racing whatever you have toggles your fun button, but try something new.  Just try!

The New York Times has a well written and balanced article on adventure bikes and the majority of their owners. To pull out one cogent piece:

The motorcycle industry, like the pornography and military industries, owes its existence to the proposition that nobody ever went broke overestimating Americans’ ability to value fantasy over reality. Superbikes are built for road racing, which most of their proud owners will never do. Stripped-down, chopped-out Harleys were created by rough, independent gearheads. So now millions of rugged individuals roar through cities in great herds, wearing the same clothes and riding the same bikes to the same places.

The author portrays the world-beating-ready motorcycles in a favorable light, but puts general Starbucks attending use in a less favorable illumination.  However, the genuine usefulness of the motorbikes are pointed out: comfy ergonomics, well-rounded handling and ability to haul things about.  There’s hints of motorcycling being a form of transportation rather than the hobby it is here in North America, and the European adventure style bikes appear to lead the way.  Full dressers, baggers, whatever you’d like to call bikes with large amounts of luggage strung on them, are flat-out more useful than their race replica or standard peers.  Breaking into the everyday useful part of American lives is easiest done by portraying products as the big dog ’round town.  Nobody points to a big adventure bike and thinks it’s not a bike.  Or not a real mode of transportation.  It shows the capacity for doing whatever is asked of it.

The connection between the North American fascination with SUVs and these adventure bikes is easy enough to spot.  Both are attractive to purchasers because of what they could do, or what marketers portray them as able to do.  But SUVs are firmly rooted in commuting, simple transport of bodies from point A to B.  Adventure bikes may start that way in the minds of some owners, but maybe something more will spring forth.  I cling to the romantic notion once someone gets started with motorcycling, they’ll see it as less a hobby and more of a lifestyle, however they define that.

Here’s hoping adventure bikes will pick up where SUVs left off and invigorate another yield of motorcyclists who are motorcyclists through and through.

For those lacking patience for my trip writeup, you can see a dump of photos on the honda599.com forums.  I’ll get the whole trip writeup done and posted on here before it snows.

I’ve returned from my trip in the north. All the major bits on the outfit and myself have held together, but there’s some long overdue maintenance on the horizon!

My wife and I are on our way north for a few weeks with the sidecar rig.  We won’t update on the road, but we’ll be sure to have a boatload of photos when we come back!

On the second weekend in July I made time to hit up Highway 12/Lolo Pass in Idaho.  I had not been there in a while and wanted to get some more miles on the 599.

It was an uneventful trip right up until construction right outside Kamiah.  After being informed it’s seven miles of the nastiest in progress chipseal you’ve ever seen, we decided to take the alternate route.  I ended up latching onto a couple BMW adventure bike riders.  We found an alternate route with the help of their GPS and it was rough.  Without hyperbole, it was the worst “road” I had ever been on with two wheels.  It made the Top of the World Highway, USA side, look downright pleasant.  Thankfully, the combination of bumps, potholes and fist-sized rocks gave way to regularly maintained gravel within a couple miles.

Back on Highway 12, I said my goodbyes to the BMW riders as they gassed up.  Also at the fueling station was the pickup truck that was right ahead of us in line in the construction zone.  Looks like we made good time!

At the top of Lolo Pass, I relished the fact there wasn’t any snow.  The last two or three times there has been snow on top, but it was warm that day.

Zipping through the city of Lolo to Missoula, suffering through its traffic lights and heat, I hopped back on I-90 westbound and laid on the gas.  There was the usual headwind I get when going west in that area.

At Wallace, ID I stopped for fuel and conversed with another rider, out from Missoula.  She asked me about my bike, saying how she wished Honda had a non-race-replica 600.  I pointed at my bike and said they brought it to North America for two years and nobody bought it, except me, but they did have one!  She and her husband finished gassing up and left as I popped my earplugs in and grabbed the interstate again.

Just outside of Coeur d’Alene I recognized the sidecar rig going eastbound and waved like a loon.  I’ll have to drop the guy a line and see if he noticed me or not.

After that, it was an uneventful ride back to Pullman.  Total mileage for the day was a hair over 500.  As I rolled into town, the 599 ticked over to 49,000 miles.  Almost to the big five-oh!