Matthew Supert

It has been a pretty frustrating motorcycle season so far this year. The weather has not really cooperated with my schedule. The days that I have been free unfortunately have seemed to have pretty bad weather. Not really an excuse, I know, but I really need to find some time to get some rides in. 

It has taken me forever to get this stuff uploaded. This week has been a nightmare, but last weekend I had a wonderful time doing my first Slimy Crud in Wisconsin. It was a blast......Well it was once we got past our first hiccup. The day started out with us all meeting at the Belvidere Oasis off of I-90. Not more than five minutes into our ride one of our riders crashed on an off ramp. What turned out to be an annoying inconvenience turned into something much worse when a state trooper showed up and immediately was a jack-ass right out the gate. 

The crash also unfortunately resulted in our group getting split up at first, since about half of us didn't see the crash and kept on riding. This led to one of our other riders (Hans) and I getting split up from the group and partially getting lost. We saw some people double back to try and meet up, but it was a divided highway. Hans and I ended up continuing to ride for a while, but we were not sure what the turn off was. This ended up in a rather funny incident with us trying to find out where people were and us following a random guy who was headed towards Galena. 

In the end though we found our group, literally as we were about to turn around and the ride ended up being one of the better ones I have been on for a while. Great roads up in Wisconsin, some good people and a fun bite to eat at the end. 

Went for a nice ride today and decided to just sort of head south on 55 and then turn off to head west somewhere. I sort of randomly found myself ambling just south of the Des Plaines river. There is a nice bit of scenic riding through here and i was pleasantly surprised.

After a few hours of riding i came upon route 23 and thought to myself that looked awfully familiar. After taking a pit stop and then checking my phone, I found that I was right near Starved Rock. Who would have thought.

Apparently there are two nuclear power stations in this area and i even happened upon a wind farm on my way back that I had to check out. Riding through the wind farm was actually really cool, despite the roads just being straight. You can see in my map that I zigzagged through that for about 20 minutes.

The Dresden Cooling Lake also had a really interesting covered bridge going over it that at first had me thinking that I stumbled onto some sort of private access road or something.

So I sold my Kawasaki ZR-7 this evening to an eastern european fellow who looked to be in his late teens or early twenties. I have a little bit of sadness at the sale, but to be honest I am not nearly as torn about it as I thought I was going to be. For months now, over the winter I had been debating whether to keep my first motorcycle; the motorcycle that sort of saved my sanity during one of the toughest emotional periods of my entire life. 

My wife in her infinite wisdom sort of convinced me that it probably made sense to sell it. I was always choosing to ride my new BMW over the Kawi whenever I went out and really the girl deserves better justice than to sit in my garage. The first ten years of her life were spent mostly in some guy's garage. She needed better.

So I threw the bike up on Craigslist and had a few takers. All said and done I think the bike probably made its way to a good home. The guy who bought it seemed extremely excited about the bike. I could just hear the excitement in his voice and while his friends who came along didn't seem quite so excited I could sort of tell that this guy found the type of bike that fit his personality. I did also get a vibe however that he may not have actually had a motorcycle license since we ended up chatting about the MSF courses. 

Regardless though I think the bike has found a good home. Someone who will put some miles on her. I have an empty spot in my garage now that is is very much motorcycle sized.........

I just have to shake my head sometimes. So I have owned the r1200r now since September of last year and I love the bike. This is my first "modern" motorcycle with fuel injection and a computer, etc. A couple of months ago I posted a thread in the user forum asking why there weren't very many aftermarket parts for the r1200r compared to the older Japanese bikes that I have seen.In retrospect that seems like such a funny thread now.

Over this winter I have attempted two minor modifications and both have been foiled with frustration, both of which have been easily done on my previously owned bikes. Many of you probably saw my Banshee Horn post from a week ago. That one I probably can do and the failure was more on my issues with the aesthetic of the bike with the horn more than anything else.

Today I attempted to install the Signal Dynamics' Back Off XP. It is a tail light modulator.  The journey on this one of course started off fine enough, but even at the outset when I exposed the wiring I found myself confused right out of the gate. I was presented with some of the weirdest wiring colors I have ever seen . A black/grey/yellow wire, a grey/red/white wire and a brown wire. The brown is negative btw.

After installing the Back Off kept getting a lamp fault on the bike when I started it up. I could not for the life of me figure out what was going on. Were my splices and butt connectors bad? I finally went online and figured out it was the canbus. So much for another project. Now I am just slightly pissed because I had to cut back quite a bit of the insulation wrap on the wires to expose them. They are now of course also butt crimped back together rather than being nice and clean. The more I own this bike the more I sort of look at it like an Apple computer (which I own and use). They are gorgeous, beautifully engineered pieces of equipment. Even the wiring was gorgeously laid out (on both!!!!) There are easy to install after market accessories that are equally as beautiful and pricy. But, if you really want to mess with stuff though it seems like that is sort of a "no-no". Don't crack that box open too much. The gear is too smart for its own good. All said and done, I suppose I just need to stop fiddling with the bike and just ride the damn thing.

I have come to realize as a motorcycle owner that part of this experience is lusting after more and more motorcycles. It really is too bad that there isn't more opportunities to rent motorcycles for a day or two. I also of course feel I need a larger garage for all of these lusts. A two car garage just doesn't cut it unfortunately. 

All right, so here is my new list of wanted motorcycles. 

1. Ryca CS-1 (aka Suzuki Savage Conversion)
2. Ural (Orange!!!)
3. Harley Davidson XR1200 (best looking HD no one bought)
4. Royal Enfield Classic 350
5. 197X Honda GL 1000 Goldwing (Strip it down to cruiser)
6. Honda VFR400 (Love the ugly headlights)
7. Triumph Street Triple (2012 Purple)
8. Yamaha TW200 (Dat ass.....I mean tires)
9. Honda NC 700x (Ultimate Commuter)
10. KTM Duke 690

So one of the first things that I have noticed since getting my R 1200R is that almost all of the bolts on the motorcycle are Torx screws. That means all of my metric tools that I own will not work and I unfortunatley need to pick up some torx tools. As with most motorcycles, the bike did come with a basic tool kit, but to be honest it is something to be desired. It just does not inspire confidence for something that I would want to rely on when broken on the side of the road. So over the past couple of weeks I have been doing some research to try to find some tool rolls or kits that I can add to my bike. Unfortunately the pickings do not seem to be all that good and one of the only pre-made kits i have found is from Cruz Tools. Now, the kit looks fine, but it is not exactly what i am looking for. 

So I have decided to build my own tool roll. A quick search online for what other people are using lead me to some nice R 1200GS links. These are of course not my bike, but the bikes are close enough that everything should work. Here are the links. 

http://www.r1200gs.info/misc/toolkit.html

http://micapeak.com/checklists/R12tools.html

I am going to use these for the basis to build my kit over the next couple of months. Now, I personally am going to be buying Craftsman tools. I know that Craftsman sort of gets some flak these days, but in my opinion they are still the best hand tools around. I just have no frame of reference online for a lot of the other "no-name" brands and I always read about problems when pieces break or don't fit right and strip a screw from cheap branded stuff. I'll pay a bit more for the Craftsman stuff, but it will last forever and I know it will work properly when I need it. The last thing I want to happen is to strip a screw head in the middle of nowhere when I really need my tools to work. The extra $20 now could save me a ton of headache later. 

So far I have picked up just an adjustable 3/8" rachet with an adjustable head and a torx head set T-15 through T-50. I believe I need a T-55 or T-60 as well, but this should probably get me through 80% of the bolts on my bike right now. 

Additional items that I need to pick up will be some allen wrenchs, and appropriately sized wrenches for stuff like the oil filter, etc. Now I have been reading online that some people have picked up some open/closed end wrenchs. I am curious if these are really needed or if I can get by with just getting some equivalent metric sockets. It could save me some space.

Anyways, I will see how this builds out.

So yesterday I was supposed to do another group ride up to C9Y in Iowa. Unfortunately that ride was canceled due to scheduling conflicts. I opted instead to do a long ride myself to checkout the Illinois River Road Scenic Byway. 

I knew from the outset that this was going to be a long ride, and it was. It was probably 500 miles. So instead of getting a nice start on Saturday morning, I ended up sleeping in until about 11:00 am. I didn'tget out the door until noon. I was determined to get his ride in so out I went. Overall I have to say the ride was just "so-so". There were nice bursts of some scenic areas, but I was surprised at how much of the road didn't follow the river and was just on farmland back roads. I was pleasantly surprised by how nice Peoria was by the river though. I want a nice little residential road up above the town on a ridge that offered a good photo. Now, I don't take a lot of photos on my rides, and I really should probably take more. You can see from the photo above however, that my photo obviously did not turn out. When I took the photo my phone said "processing" and I had thought it taken the picture. Clearly it looks like it took the photo after I lowered my camera down. Not a bad shot of the asphalt though, if I do say so myself. 

So as I was traveling down I made it to the southern most point in about four hours. Remember I left at noon, so that means that I wasn't going to get back until 8:00 that night. Yesterday's high temperature was about 53 degrees as well. So after getting lost a little bit I was trying to make a high tail back north to get on the highway before dark hit. Of course, to add to my woe, I got pulled over for speeding and received a ticket. 

Ultimately I did not get home until about 8:15 last night. I was freezing and tired and apparently I do not know how to take a photo. I did learn however that the seat on my new BMW is comfortable enough to go all day in. I road basically eight hours straight and did not have a sore butt. 

View Ride Log: 09-30-12 in a larger map

Nothing spectacular for a ride this afternoon. Just a quick two hour jaunt near the Shipping and Sanitary Canal west of Chicago. While scoping this one out I notice a road that ran parallel to the canal and though that it might have offered a good view. Unfortunately it ended up being mostly industrial areas which at one point road right through the middle of an oil refinery. I even managed to skirt around the outside of a forest preserve.