Sumthin' perhaps more to mawl over:





https://youtu.be/Kh-UvcIVkt0

… make an [url=https://www.motorcycle.com/post/news/erik-buells-return-to-music-with-album-dust-settles-44600371]album.

I'm thinking of selling my Honda CB1100. Since I got the Yamaha, I'm not riding the Honda much, and as summer gets here I'm starting to crave a sailboat again. I've spoken with a neighbor who has a small sailboat, a 16 footer, and I've sailed on it with him a couple of times. I hit him up with "How would you like to partner on a boat with me?" We'll get one something in the range of 18-22 ft. something with a bit of interior room and a bigger cockpit, easier to handle. We could store it in a "mast up" yard right on the lake so we wouldn't 'have to put the mast up and take it down every time we wanted to sail. He's very interested, and we're going to start looking at boats. There are a lot lakes in TX, so the supply is good. We'd be able to take it down to the gulf, too.

Has anyone tried taking the end cap off the stock muffler and drilling holes in the end of the muffler to get a deeper sound? I have on other bikes, not sure what I would be drilling into or how thick it is. Thanks.

I'm sure I'm like a lot of people who ride regularly and with many years and miles under the belt, while always taking safety precautions, stop giving a lot of front-of-mind thought to the dangers of riding until something jars me back to the reality of it.

Had that happen on Saturday night, and have been mulling it over in my mind. Spent the evening with friends after work, so I came off of my freeway off-ramp late in the evening and faced a sea of flashing red as I came onto the boulevard that leads to my neighborhood. Riding past, the unfortunate site on the other side of the road was a bike on its side with a crowd of emergency workers tending to someone strapped to a board on the street. A row of sport bikes was parked along the curb with a crowd of leather-clad riders standing nearby. The context was clearly a group of riders, probably coming out of the nearby canyon, headed toward the freeway when one of them collided with... something.

In the dark with the glare of the red lights, and my desire to keep my eyes on the road on my last mile home, I didn't get a long enough look to see if another car was involved, I just gave the rider a mental "Good luck, man" as I turned onto my street.

Accidents happen all the time, but when it happens on the street you ride and walk every day, it makes you think more, doesn't it? Next morning on Sunday, I took my usual neighborhood walk to get the blood moving and hit the new coffee shop. As I approached the scene from the night before, my insurance investigator mind clicked in to see if there were easy clues to figure out what had happened. One thing that was probably lucky was that it happened right outside a hospital, so response was likely immediate. If there was a collision with a car, that car would be coming out of the hospital parking lot. No skidmarks, no fluid in the roadway. Some broken plastic bits in a small pile near the curb. A black mark on the roadway that might have been from a sliding foot peg.

A brake fluid reservoir on the sidewalk about thirty feet down seems to indicate some speed was involved. Mrs. was out of town on a girl trip so might have been a good thing I was alone, she might have said "why is a broken motorcycle part on the sidewalk?"

This morning, riding past the same spot as I do every day, there was a car waiting to turn left out of the hospital. Tough, unprotected (and I think illegal) left turn. A driver might get impatient sitting there waiting, and if it's illegal, likely that the driver would want to make that left as quickly as possible. Was that the case Saturday night? No way to know, but something I'll think about from now on.

So, thanks to m in sc, here’s a picture of that Distinguished Gentleman on a Honda Grom with a round headlight and a 250 cc 2-stroke motor. Neat.

But is it still a Grom?

When does a Grom* cease to be a Grom? When it gets a new tank? When it gets a new frame? When it gets a new engine? A combination of those things?

Discuss.



* or any motorcycle …

Well, not really. So, my brother-in-law and I went to COTA this year and had a great time. Great weather and really interesting racing. The bagger class was fun and the racing overall was top notch.

However, Honda had a terrible weekend. Kind of goes with their season as a whole. Only one of for Hondas finished and that bike, ridden by Marini, was dead last. Yamaha did only slightly better.

Marquez pushed into the lead on his Grisini satellite Ducati only to crash out on turn 11 about halfway through. He remounted and managed to pass Marini on the lone Honda. He’s doing well and will likely be a contender if he can finish more races, but not this time.

We were in the Turn 15 area which I really recommend. You can see the riders come down the back straight and work through turns 12 - 15 and then head into turn 16. We also walked a good bit of the track. Watching on the hillside by turns 4-9 is also good.

Hope Honda can get it together. Using a Texas horse theme, those bikes may as well have been taken out back and shot after the race.

Took the bike out last week and got caught in rain showers which resulted in it needing a good wash and blow dry yesterday. When I was wiping the front left indicator the orange lens part fell off in my hand. No force was involved, and it has never been bumped or bashed. The plastic retaining tab on the bottom, that is screwed to the housing, has simply snapped off. I'll have to glue it temporarily until I can order a new one. Has anyone else has this happen?

In a thread a while back, I mentioned a local gear shop that I found while ducking in out of a rain storm on a long walk. https://discountmotogear.com/

Along with a great selection of new gear and very nice people, they have a back room with racks of final clearance stuff, which as you can imagine, would be right up my alley.

Poking through some of the jackets in the back room, I ran across a few interesting items, which gave me some insight into the moto riding gear market.

I posted a thread about the Tourmaster Navigator jacket, which is a great clearance bargain on most online gear sites. I love mine, and it's become my go-to jacket for comfort and utility. It comes in a neat tweedy-looking grey which I got, but I didn't dig the other available colors, black or Smurf blue.

One of the clearance jackets on the rack is clearly the same model, but in an olive color. Grabbing it, fit the same, but the labeling inside was slightly different, and the tags didn't say "Tourmaster". The brand was not a retail name, and there were notes on the tag with what looked like a grade for the jacket.

Asking the shop owner about it, he gave a puzzled look for a moment, then said "Ah... this jacket never existed." He explained that it was probably a sample that Tourmaster had made before the model was launched, and that they typically make the same jacket in different colors and material textures and show them to the major dealers for evaluation. The dealers give their input on what colors they think will sell the most easily. So this olive example would have been a rejected color, but otherwise identical. Tourmaster off-loads excess inventory to these guys, so this one was in the mix.

I love the color, so I grabbed it. There was also a bright red version of another Tourmaster model called "Tarmac", that I can only find offered in black, so that's another non-existent reject that I snapped up. Now I have a red jacket to match my CB1100.

Kinda interesting.

Stock Part Numbers...

Front brake pads

06455-MGC-016 (New Part Number)
06455-MGC-006 (Old Part Number)

Rear brake pads

43105-MW0-425 (New Part Number)
Or 43105-MW0-405 (Old Part Number)

EBC part numbers...

Front
EBC Brakes Double-H Sintered Metal Brake Pads - FA296HH

Rear
EBC Brakes FA174V Semi Sintered Disc Brake Pad

There's also a PDF about pad compatibility published by EBC...

Ebc Catalog showing compatibility part numbers for different manufacturers.

https://www.ebc-brakes.de/downloads/EBC_...torrad.pdf