Leave it to Darth Nater to find things out in the world that have no other reason to exist but to amuse us. First there was the Hemi-powered snowblower. Some might say a practical item, given how much snow we had last winter. But this takes the cake: Honda-powered blenders. Now, it has been the subject of many rides that someday we are going to open an adventure motorcycle shop like the world has never seen. And in this shop will have to be an espresso bar, and now, a smoothie bar with gas powered blenders.
Archive for the 'Gear' Category
I finally got around to having a new Dunlop D908 Rally Raid rear tire installed on my KTM 640 Adventure. I took my rear wheel off and had the folks at Summit Honda in Park City do the honors of installing it, well worth the service charge to have someone else do this. Even with a tire stand, these things are torture to change by hand. The new D908 RR was replacing a worn-out Dunlop 908 enduro that served me well during the Trans-America Trail trip, but was toast after 2,000 miles. The center knobbies were flattened and squared-off, probably from all the pavement on my return trip. The D908 RR is big, fat, and nasty, and I was itching to get it in the dirt. After a day of mixed pavement, loose gravel, some sand, a few minor stream crossings, and lots of dry and rocky mountain riding, I can say that I am optimistic I have found the perfect rear tire for this bike. I hope it will last a lot longer than the previous Dunlop, and it should, as it really was designed for the bigger 950/990 KTM adventure bikes. Now the challenge will be to find the perfect front tire. Rumor has it the matching front has a super aggressive tread pattern that is not too road friendly. The D606 currently on my front is due to be replaced soon, so I’ll give it a shot and see how well it matches. For KTM 640 Adventure riders out there: don’t waste your time with anything else.
The Dunlop D908 Rally Raid on a KTM 640 Adventure.
Massive center knobs hook up really well in loose stuff.
There’s still some patches of snow in July in the Uinta Mountains.
After returning from the Trans-America Trail trip, I had very little desire to touch the KTM let alone ride it. It was a reliable steed that saw me through some good times and some trouble, so it was nothing personal. Part of it was that last day from Burns, Oregon to Park City, Utah all on the pavement. Seemed like my wrists and hands were still buzzing after a week. Also, the bike needed some maintenance. My Dunlop D606 front tire and D908 rear were totally hammered, both from the aggressive and sometimes rocky off-road riding, as well as the road riding. My rear sprocket is worn to the point of replacing, and I decided to have the dealer do the 2nd big service, because it involved a bunch of things over my head, like checking and adjusting the valves. The head KTM mechanic at the Edge Motorsports, Victor, seems like a really good dude, passionate and knowledgeable, and most importantly, certified by KTM. They did forget to rebuild my clutch master cylinder, which is one of the main reasons I brought it in, but that wasn’t Victor’s fault. The service guy who wrote my ticket must have spaced it. That’s about it for the boring maintenance report. While I was picking up my bike, I just had to check out the new KTM 690 Super Enduro and ponder how it would have performed out there on the Trans-America route. No windscreen might have been tough to handle, but with enough room on the tail for some soft bags, this thing looks like it would have devoured the dirt.
3/4 view of the new 2008 KTM 690 Super Enduro. Big, bad, dirtbike. I like.
Spent much of the day today getting gear sorted. Made two small repairs to the KTM 640 Adventure:
1. Adjusted steering bearing. First I had to lift the bike up on a crate to get the front wheel elevated. Then had to loosen five bolts on the upper double clamp of the fork, then adjust a tightening nut (very much like the process on a mountain bike!), then check for play, then finally tighten everything back up to spec.
2. Replace bent clutch lever. This was a little dicey, as the KTM dealer didn’t have an OEM prelacement lever in stock when I was there, but had one “they thought would work.” So precise, these guys at motorcycle shops. It fit just fine, and it seems to eliminate the leak of mineral oil from the seal on my clutch master cylinder.
Now for the bad news. Rode the bike into Park City to run some errands and make sure everything was running tops. Came out from the post office and when I saddled up and pressed the starter, nothing. Definitely electrical. Called Bartman, he said try to get it rolling down Swede Alley and pop start it by letting the clutch out while in gear. Nothing. I scurried off into a parking lot and tried to kick start it. Nothing. Called Bartman again to bail me out with his trailer. While waiting a few minutes, I tried the ignition button again just for the hell of it and it started right up. When I got it home, I turned it off in the driveway, then tried to start with the button and got denied again. A few hours later, I cycled it on and off and it started every time.
You can imagine this is putting a serious damper on my enthusiasm to depart on a 10-day slog westward, through some remote road and trail on the way to Oregon. Bartman says definitely don’t go unless you know what the problem is. Darth Nater says what’s the worst that can happen? He always says that.
Lord Darth called a planning session for the upcoming Trans-America Trail trip at downtown SLC pizzeria, Settebello. Obi-Ben had just taken delivery of a pre-owned Kawasaki KLR, in cherry condition, I must say. Upgrades for the trip include new Continental TKC knobbies and a Wolfman Luggage tankbag. Much pizza was eaten, and not much planning was done, but duties were assigned: Darth is chief navigation specialist, Obi-Ben is chief medic and infantry, Moto is responsible for procuring grub and spirits, and Hans is in charge of keeping it all together for the first few days. It was decided that rollout will be early morning on Saturday, May 17th, after breakfast at the Blue Plate Diner in Sugarhouse.
Obi-Ben’s newly acquired Kawasaki KLR, with new rubber and tankbag.
Hans, Obi-Ben, and Darth Nater showing off his egg on a stick. Photo by Moto.
Today, I experienced a contrast so stark and revealing by comparing experiences with two local Salt Lake City motorcycle shops. One good, one not so good.
I have been shopping online for the perfect pair of adventure dualsport riding pants. After striking out on my search for Rukka Allroad pants, which I determined after extensive research to be possibly exactly the pants I was looking for, I turned my attention to another brand and model, the Rev’It Dakar pants. Rukka is a legendary Finnish brand known for quality workmanship, 5-year warranty, and of course, a certain Euro cool factor. In my mind, they also stand out for being virtually unattainable. As Darth Nater can attest, Rukka gear does it all. The only problem is, there is only one place to get them in the U.S., from a distributor in Arizona. Said distributor had nothing in stock when I called to inquire, and their online store is so archaic, it didn’t inspire confidence to say the least. Bartman recommended giving Rev’It a look. I was pleased to find out that Salt Lake Motorsports was a stocking dealer of Rev’It gear, as well as being the local Ducati dealer here in the Beehive State.
I settled on the Rev’It Dakar model and was able to visit their store and try on the pants, which resulted in a purchase. I wanted to try them on with my Sidi Crossfire SRS boots to make sure the fit was right. The young woman who helped said no problem, take them home and try them on with your boots, and if you have second thoughts or any doubts about size or fit, just bring them back. She put them on a hanger and zipped them up in a Salt Lake Motorsports garment bag, as if I had just bought an Armani suit. Now that is what I call friendly service.
The not so good experience was with one of the local KTM dealers, Edge Motorsports. I called to inquire about getting my bike in for an oil change and minor service in advance of the Trans-America Trail trip, with the May 17th departure date looming. The surly voice of the young lady on the phone at their service department assured me they were three weeks out on being able to work on my bike, and I was basically SOL. I have a hard time imagining there is no way they could squeeze it in, but it was the attitude of the person on the phone that turned me off the most. Take it or leave it. So I am going to change the oil myself and probably wing it on rebuilding my leaking hydraulic clutch master cylinder. Too bad Salt Lake Motorsports isn’t a KTM dealer.
The stock grips that came on my KTM Adventure 640 were paper thin rubber and offered no cushion or vibration dampening. After a full day of riding, when you feel like you have been straddling a two-wheeled 400-pound bees nest, your hands could use a little love. I bought some new grips from Sommer KTM in Deutschland last summer, and finally got around to putting them on this past weekend. What I learned is this: the easy things on motorcycles are not always as easy as one might think. Slow down. Take your time. There’s no rush. The hard things are not that hard to figure out, if you don’t have any other alternative but to relax, get inside the problem and figure it out.
When you install new grips on a mountain bike, both grips are the same size on the outside (OD, for “outside diameter”) and they are the same size on the inside (ID, for “inside diameter”). Motorcycle grips are not. Since the throttle handle is a floating sleeve over the bars on the right side of the handlebar, it has a larger OD, thus requiring a grip with a larger ID than the right side. But when you take the new grips out of the package for the first time, they look the same from the outside. When you are looking at two things your hands are going to spend a lot of time grabbing onto, you are focused on the outside (the shape, the taper in the center that will help keep your hands relaxed, the softness of the rubber that will help deaden the buzzing bees). You don’t look inside.
A friend told me to use grip glue, which I purchased from the Honda dealer in Park City, Summit Honda. There are two ways to keep your grips from sliding if they get wet: grip glue, or wiring. Grip glue provides some lube when you are first sliding these on, then it sets up like concrete and makes it impossible to ever change your grips again. Wiring involves tightly wrapping a few strands of thin gauge wire on the ends and in the middle of the grip, and twisting the ends so tight that the wire helps fasten the grips to the aluminum bars. I went with the glue. You see where this is going.
After putting the right grip on the left and realizing it would take a lot of glue to keep that grip from twisting and staying put, and after realizing there was no way in hell the left grip was going to stretch over the throttle sleeve, I quickly undid the mess I made by swapping the grips to their proper places. In the process, I made an even bigger one. With the smaller ID grip now correctly positioned on the left side, I muscled the right grip over the throttle sleeve using generous gobs of glue. A few twists of the throttle and everything seemed fine. A few twists later when the glue had set up, and the throttle would not return to neutral position like it’s supposed to. Stuck wide open, not a good thing on a motorcycle. I had to disassemble the throttle handle clamp, exposing the two throttle cables, slide the floating throttle sleeve back off the bar, and carve away the dried cement, followed by sanding with fine grit sandpaper. The good news is after putting it all back together, the throttle twisted and snapped back like butter. So the moral of the story is something like this: look inside, not outside, if you are truly to see how two things can be more or less the same, only different. And wear rubber gloves when working with glue.
As anyone who has ridden a late model KTM 640 Adventure or 950/990 Adventure in serious muddy conditions knows, it can be devastating when your front wheel stops turning because mud gets clogged between the wheel and fender. I had this happen once at slow speeds on a muddy doubletrack in the Uintas. It didn’t throw me, as I was able to hop off and land on my feet as the bike was going down, but trying to lift the bike and roll it out of the mud bog was like trying to push a 300 orange pig away from the feed trough. That pig wanted to stay put.
So after much research, I threw down $275.00 plus shipping for the Touratech LC8 and LC4 high fender conversion kit. I ordered it online and received it via ground shipping 2 days later. These bikes use many of the same front suspension parts, so the kit is shared between the two models. They also offer it in orange, silver and black fenders. I stuck with the orange. Bartman has a homegrown version on his 950 Adventure, but he had to do some serious mods to make it all come together. His solution to the dual rotor issue on the front was to remove the right side caliper and rotor. When asked about how that works, he said “fine on the dirt, not so good on the road.”
Let’s just say, it was an all day job. The directions were spartan, and translated from German. Non-linear would be one way to describe it; there were several steps I did that had to be undone after moving on to the next steps revealed that I had done something wrong. Also, ending up with extra parts is usually not a good thing. Bartman came over and checked it out and thought everything looked good, and wished that he had bought this kit when he did his fender conversion. The only thing I would suggest to Touratech is to make a kit for shorter travel bikes with a shorter second brake line. I had to re-route my brake lines several times before I got a combination that worked. The supplied second brake line would have been perfect if it was 4 to 5 inches shorter. Check out the pics:
This is a before photo of the old low fender. Also, check out the Dunlop D606 front tire. You can see there is not much clearance there.
View from above of the new high fender kit. Hmmmmmm. Lots of clearance.
View of the fender from down under. Note the stealth black leg protectors and the re-routed secondary brake line to the right caliper.
Close-up view of the double banjo bolt at the master cylinder. This was a beeatch to install, but Bartman says it’s cool. So, it’s cool.
In Chicago at a work conference, discussing e-commerce with other travel and tourism marketing professionals. Listening and observing, and wondering if some of these folks feel like they are trying to catch and hold on to a greased pig, that’s the analogy I think of when I hear folks ask questions relating to how they might “monetize social media” and the like. And the greased pig squirts off into the corner, and then someone else tries to catch and hold it. I learned today that in the Social Media Ladder of Technographics, I somehow qualify and fit the profile of Creator (because I started this blog). I learned the online travel industry, generating $112 billion dollars in sales a year is the largest segment of e-commerce, porn notwithstanding. Talk about monetizing something. The truth is, most of the time, I was thinking about the upcoming Moto May-hem trip: Utah to Port Orford on the Oregon Coast, following a mostly off-road route called the Trans-America trail. I had a call with my master Yoda, Bart to discuss new tires for the KTM 640 Adventure. I have been reading reviews online for dualsport Pirelli tires, Metzelers, and Dunlops. My bike is currently equipped with Metzeler Enduro 3 Sahara tires, front and back. The reviews were inconclusive, so it was good to get some direction from Bart. Based on his advice, I am going to give the Dunlop D606 tires a try. Stay tuned for a full report after I get them mounted.
File this under “mods” to my KTM. Last fall, I installed two aftermarket accessories to the KTM 640 Adventure. First, the Hepco Becker crash bars from Sommer KTM, all the way from Germany. Their site is listed on the blogroll. Very easy folks to deal with and they stock everything for KTM bikes. As many people know, when you dump a 640 Adventure in the dirt, the first thing to touch down is the corner of the fuel tank, right down near the fuel cock. Heh heh. I said cock. These crash bars were pretty easy to install. Next was the pannier frame, also by Hepco Becker, so I could attach the KTM plastic locking panniers. All said and done, the beast is even more of a beast as I have added quite a bit of weight. I haven’t done any serious tours yet with the panniers fully loaded. Plenty of capacity in the boxes for touring and camping gear, a necessity for longer rides.
