Motorcycles

Well, I suppose that there is not much more to say than I enjoy riding motorcycles. Maybe I should detail a couple of trips. But before then, I'll need to take a camera on a trip. I suppose that one could have the text only version, but that leaves me a little unexcited.

Well, a decision was made to put the bikes in reverse chronological order. This is slightly confused now, as the first one talks about the previous one...

1986 Kawasaki Vulcan

8kHz: .au (mu-Law)
11kHz: .wav (16bit PCM, 194K)
22kHz: .wav (16bit PCM, 388K)

The Vulcan was a bit more dear. But it was a lot newer and had only 7K miles. No additional paint or fixing was required. I have been tossing around repainting it a little, but I am going to wait until the current paint begins to fade. Then I will debate over the ``road warrior'' matte black, or possibly some sort of design.

This bike is a lot better than the old CX500, a little lower, a bit more powerful, but surprisingly it tops out before the CX500 did. It does accelerate quicker. Perhaps it tops out lower because I haven't cleaned the carbs, though. That is something that I do need to do, soon. In fact, I need to overhaul the entire bike, since I've more than doubled the mileage in the last year and a bit. That is hard on a ten year old, but it certainly needed the exercise.

As far as comments about the bike, I read recently somewhere a critique of the Kaw Vulcan 750. They said that the suspension is way too soft, and I am quite inclined to agree. The bike tends to bounce down the road a bit, and that detracts from the handling characteristics.

I haven't had to make any repairs, except for the typical changing oil, oil filters, air filters -- routine job, nothing special. The engine does make a knocking sound that I am a little annoyed by, but there are no adverse symptoms to accompany it. But enough of that sort of description, the joy of riding is in the action of riding. This bike is fun to ride, and although I have gone through a number of its problems, I still prefer it to the CX500 by an incredible margin. It would be hard to find the appropriate words, however, and a bit unnecessary.

This bike is about to make the Indiana to San Francisco Trek. I am hoping that I won't have any mechanical problems, or the like, but I am guessing that it will be alright. More from the other side of the Trek. This paragraph will eventually be changed to reflect the journey. But at the moment it simply exists as a filler to flow around the text for the visual appearance of things.

1978 Honda CX500

Well, I paid $300 for mine in Indiana. But it was in relatively bad shape.. It had about 32K miles on it, and had a odd knocking sound. I had to repaint it, and it was missing most of its indicators, (the rear two were hanging off and the front two didn't work since they were wired in series...) But I did put over 6000 miles on it over three years without any real problems. (Except replacing the fan, a foot peg, clutch cable, and a throttle cable.) It was a stalwart companion, and I still have a scar to prove it. The bike even did pretty well after three accidents...

I eventually sold it to a friend for almost nothing in the middle of the winter, since I thought that I was going to move to England in January. The move did not occur until the following September, so the next summer I purchased the Kaw featured above.