Motorcycle and Scooter appreciation

Balkans are incredible. If you want any advice just message me.

How are you finding the Tiger? Thinking of changing up from my CB500 to a Tiger 800, probably on an 11 or 12 plate

Annoyingly where I live I can get 3rd party coverage only - seems SW9 for theft is too high for them to offer coverage as I don't have a garage event though kept off road

If anyone would be interested in a CB500 in silver on an '07 plate I could be tempted to sell in order to help fund the above. I've been using it for a bi-weekly trip to Ipswich from London for the last few months and not skipped a beat

I'm hanging my helmet up from daily commuting, keeping the Tranny, but not to be used as much.
How often should I take it out for a blast to keep it keen?
My garage is not powered so no option for optimate

I have that exact same issue. unfortunately my battery went flat, in both bikes. Im now going to sell at least one of them and hopefully just jump start the other enough to get it over to my dads (whose garage does have power) and get it recharged.

Can you hook up a solar-powered battery tender?

How easy is the battery to remove? Could you keep it plugged in in the house?

Doing it with my triumph is pretty easy, whereas my derbi basically required taking the tank off.

I may be interested.

Hi Saprky. I'll drop you a pm.

yeah, both mine are a nightmare. needs the full fairing off one whole side which means about 20 or so painful fairing bolts. On each bike.

Tried one of those jump starters on both bikes this weekend, one looked liked it was giving juice to the instrument panel but didnt start at all, the other, my main bike, no dice, completely dead.

Next weekend will be fairing off and battery out to attempt a proper recharge. especially annoying as I was hoping to sell them both and just get one casual bike for round town funtimes rather than 2 big beast tourers.

So some more modern bikes not have jump start points like cars do? Mine is very easy to get to, you can sort of reach with just the seat up, but ideally side panel, which is just held on with two m5 Allen bolts.

Yours is f650? I had one of those, much easier.

Mines an r1100rt. All the side fairing has to come off

Does anyone have the motorbike equivalent of a chain tool that I could borrow? It's for a friend but I'll cover any breakages

I bought a £10 one on eBay and it's done the job twice.
If you're wanting the chain off just use a hacksaw.

Minor update on my motorbike crash:

I'm back on the road with £1,500 of repairs to get it road legal. Still over £4k worth of damage to repair including (but not limited to) dented tank, crushed radiator, gouged rim (oooer) and, most expensively, chipped frame.

Police have summonsed the kid for Careless Cycling & contravening a Red ATS.

This is great but until the court case is resolved, i can do nothing. That could take up to 6 months...

What does ats mean?

I did search google and found nothing.

I think it's Advanced Traffic Signal (ie one that's in front of the stop line)

Ok thanks.

Glad to hear you're back in the saddle.

Bloody hell.

And that's why people should be legally obliged to have 3rd party insurance, in some form.

The thing is, is that he's likely to have adequate liability insurance as part of any home insurance he has but without admitting liability, i still have to go to court.

It's all a bit shit.

Ah yes home insurance is enough. That's how I claimed against a pedestrian. With cctv it was clear cut.

Part 17 of the great pannier frame saga.....

So gave up on all bodge solution s trying to make my two existing givi racks fit my hepco becker standard alloy panniers. Plumbed up over £200 for the frames. Then realised you need to spend another £45 for the magic mounting plates that latch the actual box to the frame. More money

All arrived this week so set to fitting them. Expecting a £260 piece of German designed and made kit to fit a lot more neatly than thr £80 and 105 givi racks made in China.

No.

The rumours were true.

Hepco and becker don't make good frames (the boxes yes, and other things maybe!?)

They weren't even painted well out of the box. Fitting up to the bike they aren't even remotely straight, each has three mounting points, two can be bent into shape without too much effort, but the legs that mount to pillion brackets are 1" and 2.75" out of whack, will need a big vice, heat and then probably re painted to get them fitted properly.

Also they have four small nuts tack welded on that a crossbar mounts to. All four of these are buggered. In thr kit comes m6 and m10 bolts. The welded nuts don't take the m6 and m5 course abd fine do not fit either, looking inside nuts they are rusty and appear stripped all the way through.

I'm going away on Sunday for a rare multi day ride so have two options
1) heat, bend, cut new threads and "make" tye thing fit, but then have a set of boxes.
2) shove it back to tye distributor and let them deal with it

Anyone else had h+b racks?

Send back and use dry bags/bungess where panniers would sit and/or gym bag/hold-all in place of pillion if no pillion involved.

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Very pretty. Does it sound good?

It's not mine regrettably, fella I work with. Hoping to hear it soon. It's his 3rd z650 project and he's built it with love from the ground up.

Id possibly prefer a black saddle but think the white kinda works.