The Pacific island of Nauru - with the runway showing at the bottom of the picture.

I came across an interesting Blog Article by a retired airline pilot who used to fly into a small pacific island, where the locals would race the departing aircraft using a road which was close and parallel to the runway.

One of the bikes was a GoldWing GL1500.

The Article is well written and interesting, especially to learn which was in the lead, bike or plane, as they got up to 80 mph.

I won’t spoil the story by telling you the answer but you can read the Article for yourself by Clicking Here.

By the way if you are ever offered a used GL1500 which has been imported from Nauru it would probably be wise to give it a miss.

When the going gets tough ....

Our Indian Summer is over and the leaves are falling big time, even though the air temperatures became mild again temporarily last weeekend.  If you haven’t already done it this is a good time to decide whether to lay the Wing up for the winter or prepare properly for riding in winter conditions.

The risk of snow and ice is still low, unless you live or ride on very high ground, and there are still riding events and activities on the calendar to be enjoyed as well as the occasional day when the weather presnets a glorious riding opportunity.  Last Saturday here in Lancashire was such a day and I’m now kicking myself that I didn’t grab the opportunity.  The Manchester Salvation Army Toy Run is also coming up (November 19th) and there are other worthwhile (and worthy) events still to come too.

If you decide to lay the bike up for the winter, as I might have to do in order to face another hip operation, then it’s important to give it a little care and attention as you do so.   Dave Partridge, proprietor of AwingAway and Tecnical Editor for the Federation Website  wrote a very helpful article on Laying up your GoldWing last year which you might want to read again.

And if you are going to lay the bike up don’t forget that you can surrender your tax disc and get a refund from DVLA; I discovered after an interesting series of encounters with our local DVLA Office that timing your arrival at about ten minutes before they close, so 4.50pm, even on their bsuier days, ensures a short or no queue at all or anyway some pretty snappy service because they all want to go home.  If you haven’t read it, my article about the DVLA has its entertaining moments.

But let’s not get too defeatist that the biking season is over just yet.  Let’s think about continuing to ride as winter approaches – and therefore about the implications for our riding skills and style, the extra things we need to look out for and deal with as hazards on autumn roads.

Wrapping up but still smiling

Preparing for Winter Riding

Perhaps the most obvious autumn hazard we face is more and more continuous rain.  Those of us who don’t have to ride in rain, for example to get to work more or less whatever the weather,  will often decide not to set out if its raining but there’s always a risk, and a higher risk in autumn and winter, that we’ll get caught out in rain to we should at least be better prepared in case it does.

Our first thoughts are probably about keeping dry ourselves, so about making sure the wet riding gear is on the bike.  But rain affects tyre grip and will often also reduces visibility, as of course does fog.  The combination of rain or fog and a drop in air temperature can dirty and/or mist up your windscreen and visor too, so ensuring that you can still see where you are going if it starts raining or gets foggy while you’re out is useful preparation as well.

Windscreen and visor care

In summer I ride with the windscreen set high up so i look through it, to reduce air flow noise inside my helmet, but in winter I always drop the screen to its lowest position so I can see over it properly, including at the surface of the road immediately ahead.  You can flip your visor up quickly if necessary to get a better view but you can’t adjust your GoldWing’s windscreen while your riding, so you have to plan ahead.

Keeping your windscreen clean and polished helps to ensure optimal visibility too of course and a purpose-made product like Plexus makes that job a lot easier and more effective and will, for a while at least cause the rain drops to flow off the screen more quickly and easily.  But GoldWing windscreens are specially coated with something, a thin layer of surface plastic of some sort, so you have to take care not to use anything which will damage it.  A product called RainX was all the rave one year and it repelled the rain of the windscreen superbly but the windscreen’s plastic coating started peeling off and wrote the windscreen off.   This was years ago and they may have modified the formula to remove this risk of damage but it would be wise to check.  Maybe it’s best to stick to products you know to be safe on GoldWing windscreens.

Visors need more attention for winter riding too and choosing an effective de-misting application for the inside of your visor is important, especially if you wear a full face helmet.  The idea of de-misting applications is to reduce the surface tension  of the water which condenses on the visor and so make it transparent rather than misty.  Washing up liquid works reasonably well but there are a host of special chemical and applicator products sold in bike shops and it’s a question of choosing what works for you.  I have a full face helmet and I used to switch to it in winter for greater protection but nowadays I stick to my open face helmet instead – which allows me to lift it up a little bit when misting appears, to generate upwards airflow which does the de-misting job effectively enough.  Ian Cardwell, who rides all year, has found that Autoglym Visor Cleaner works well on both windscreen and visor.

GoldWing can be very conspicuous if you don't compromise it

Check that your lights are bright enough to be conspicuous

This might seem an odd thing to suggest to a GoldWing owner, whose bikes are often brightly illuminated with extra lighting, but it’s worth a cautionary note.  Not all GoldWing are conspicuously lit, even new ones.

It just as important to be seen well as to be able to see clearly yourself when visibility on the roads is at risk and so checking that your bikes lights are working at full brightness is important.  If your bike has standard, i.e as manufactured, lighting then its a question of checking that the bulbs are still working and if any are looking a bit dim or intermittent, checking and cleaning the contacts.  If that doesn’t get them all shining brightly then you should dig a bit deeper, or get someone  else to dig deeper for you, to check for wiring problems, including poor earth connections.

Lots of GoldWings have lights which have been substituted or modified, such as LED units replacing ordinary (i.e. incandescent tungsten) bulbs.  It’s important to check that these substitute light sources are bright enough to provide following road users with adequate warning because some of them certainly aren’t.  Riding around in reduced visibility with dim tail and brake lights is taking quite a risk.

The same applies to indicator lights and for example the chrome-fronted light bulbs which some wingers use for GL1800 front indicators  when they replace the standard yellow mirror lenses with clear or smokey lenses are as dim as the proverbial Toc H lamp.  The light output from these chrome-fronted bulbs, even through a clear lens is much, much less that from a standard clear bulb through an amber lens because only the back of the bulb does anything and only reflected light is emitted.  If you compound this problem by using smoked lenses the indicators will be even dimmer.  Oncoming drivers are going to miss your turn signals with potentially disastrous results.  When someone pointed out to me that my front indicators were barely visible and I worked out why I kept the clear lenses but switched to yellow bulbs instead.  Better to have a yellow bulb visible through your clear lens than to be invisible to other traffic.

If in doubt change now

Tyre pressures and state of wear

Another bike check which gets even more important in winter is your tyre pressures.  Tyre performance depends greatly on inflating to the correct pressure and in winter you might need every bit of performance your tyres can give you.  Wingers seem to be prone to failing to check them regularly.  A contact who services lots of GoldWings has told me that he often finds that the tyre pressures are well below specification and sometime only half the pressure there should be.  When he points this out to the owners they will say something like “but you checked them at the last service”, as if that was OK.  That last service was probably months and months ago.  Tyre pressures need checking at least once per week and ideally every time you take the bike out.  Failing to check your tyre pressures regularly is being suicidally lazy, it’s a simple as that.

Tyre wear is another performance issue and it’s a bad idea to leave replacing your tyres until next Spring if they are ready for changing and you plan to ride during the off season.  You are going to have to pay for them anyway so why not bite the bullet before winter and have the benefit of the extra safety margin which new tyres will give you in the wet?

Motorcycles are allowed to be worn down to a smaller tread depth than car tyres and they start off with less tread depth too.  But that doesn’t mean it is sensible to run on well worn tyres, especially during winter, and tyre performance doesn’t just depend on tread depth anyway.  Flatting of your tyres, especially the rear one, will start to compromise your tyres’ performance long before you reach the tread depth markers and you might find this out the hard way during winter riding by suddenly losing rear tyre grip in the wet, especially on roundabouts.  A skid while you are riding a GoldWing is quite a buttock-clenching experience and although you don’t automatically come off if your rear tyre loses grip while you are turning, it will certainly raise your eyebrows if its never happened to you before.  If in doubt, change your tyres for new ones as winter approaches.

Beautiful but dangerous to bikers

Spotting Winter Riding Hazards

Safe riding is always about reading the road ahead as soon and as well as possible and this can be particularly important in winter, when you need to read the road surface especially carefully and there are extra hazards, like wet fallen leaves on the road and the risk of black ice, the conditions for which have to be anticipated, because you simply cannot rely on being able to see it.

The average motorist, and the average rider, look only a short distance ahead to read the road, maybe only one hundred yards and even less than that in towns.  Advanced riders look much further ahead and they are scanning all the time for every scrap of information they can pick up which could help them know what’s coming.  Even if you haven’t done advanced riding training (yet?) getting into the habit of making yourself look as far as possible ahead, to pick up the earliest clues about hazards you are about to encounter can pay real dividends.

For example knowing that the air temperature has dropped low enough (3ºC and below) to present a risk of black ice forming in particularly sheltered or exposed bits of raod surface so that you start to look out for them can be literally life-saving.  You probably know for example that black ice can have formed in shady dips but are you aware that it can also form on bridges you might be riding over, because there is cold air underneath the road surface at this point rather than the warmer solid earth either side of the bridge?  The only warning you’ll ever get about black ice on the road ahead is if you spot the risk factors for its formation.

I’ve already mentioned fallen leaves, which are very slippery when they get damp, as an additional surface hazard during autumn and winter but there are others.  Road maintenance has been neglected in UK this past year because of the economic downturn so patches of road surface which have worn smooth or started to crack and crumble become an increasing hazard in colder and wetter conditions.   Diesel spills on roundabouts are even more difficult to spot in the wet and mud, metal grids, tar banding, sets and cobbles are all much slippier when they are wet.  Likewise they are places where any frost which might be forming will be must slippier.  Know your enemy and look out for it, that’s the thing.

Slower than this would be sensible!

Very heavy rain brings extra risk too, both by obliterating your view of the road surface when there is a lot of water standing or streaming on the road but also by presenting an increased risk of losing grip because of aquaplaning.  Riding through flood water can get very exiting on a bike, especially if the road surface beneath th water cannot be checked for potholes and such so you must always do it with great caution if at all.  GoldWings are not designed for fording in the way that some other bikes – and remember that if you are fording a flowing stream and the road surface isn’t rough tarmac or concrete there will be the added risk of a slimy surface.  It’s potentially entertaining to watch the Winger ahead of you come to grief and drop his bike while fording but ideally you will be far enough back to be able to stop your bike on dry land before going to his aid rather than joining him having an impromptu bath with your bike as well.  If in doubt don’t ford at all on a GoldWing, it’s as simple as that.

There is nothing you can do about aquaplaning except keep the handlebars straight and gradually close the throttle in the hope that tyre grip will be recovered as you slow down.

Spray from large vehicles on the motorway adds to the problem of surface water and one of the scariest situations I’ve found myself in on a bike was being alongside a lorry on the motorway when the rain and spray suddenly got worse and combined to make it like riding blind through a flooded car wash.  Overtaking lorries when there is heavy rain and spray around is always something to be approached with great caution and probably best not done at all.  The combination of heavy rain and heavy traffic which is still moving quickly is very threatening to a motorcyclist and well worth coming off the motorway to get clear off, even if it does delay your journey.

You don’t have to stay on the motorway when you are making a journey and if conditions start to get dangerous the sooner you let discretion be the better part of valour the better.  I don’t like staying on motorways in thick fog in the car and I certainly wouldn’t do it on the bike.

Not so full on in winter conditions is wise

Adopting a gentler riding style

As well as spotting as many hazards as soon as possible you need to give yourself extra time and opportunity to see them late and to reduce the risk of what will happen if you don’t, by riding more slowly, picking your line with an eye to more margin for error and braking and accelerating more gently.  You need a bigger margin of tyre grip for unforseen action so you need to to put extra effort into matching gear and throttle to your road speed so that you can accelerate and decelerate more gently and avoid the need for abrupt changes in speed or line.  Use a higher gear to help avoid wheel spin, that sort of thing.

Skids on a motorcycle are no fun at all so they are much better avoided than dealt with.  If a full skid develops, ie both wheels lose grip, you are unlikely to be able to recover control of the bike at all unless the skid was caused by very localised loss of surface grip so that the skid is only a momentary one and corrects itself as you move on to better road surface.  But that’s pretty unlikely to happen and if you suffer a full skid you are almost inevitably going to go down out of control.

A rear wheel skid might be controllable.  Remove the cause of the skid (eg reduce or stop braking or accelerating)  get the bike as upright as possible and steer into the skid.  As the skid stops resume braking or accelerating as necessary to recover your line but more gently than you were doing, so as to avoid precipitating another skid.  If you were going too fast into a corner or a roundabout you might not have room to recover so err of the cautious side with your approach speed when there is any risk of a skid.

A front wheel skid is more difficult to control and you need to react very quickly to stand any chance.  If the skid was precipitated by too much throttle or a sudden handlebar movement or braking you might be able to reverse its effect by removing the cause but don’t count on it.  Front wheel skids really need to be avoided.

If you find yourself sliding towards a kerb in a skid it’s just possible that hitting the kerb might help rather than hinder the situation, so having the presence of mind to make use of the impact with the kerb to help get the bike upright and under control might save the day.  It’s a longshot but it happened to me once and I was able to get the bike under control again.

Summary

Even if you’re not planning to do much riding this coming winter, give your bike a bit of attention before you lay it up.

Be aware of the additional hazards of winter riding and look ahead to try to spot them.

Adopt a gentler riding style to give yourself a margin for coping with the unexpected.

And if you’d like to read about more adventurous winter riding and how to do it, I came across this interesting article on another motorcyclist’s Blog.

Safe to overtake?

Lots of GoldWings are equipped with CB radio so that bike-to-bike communications is available to some if not all during a group ride.  Chatting on the radio can add both enjoyment and humour to a ride, as I was reminded recently when we were out in a small group, all on CB, and while passing a primary school Ian announced that it was his old school – and that he had been kept back by his teacher at the age of five for not being able to draw a frog.

For some reason this really tickled me and it was fortunate that there was nothing complicated to do in the way of riding at the time because I couldn’t stop laughing for ages.  This early but major life-event had clearly scarred him deeply.  I couldn’t stop laughing again when he confessed sadly that he still couldn’t draw a frog.

I can still remember laughing out loud the first time I heard Dennis chirp out of nowhere with “So I said to this horse, why the long face?”.  It was very funny. Of course Dennis did have a tendency to say the same thing quite frequently and it wasn’t quite so funny every time but on lots of tours I did with Elite Wings the CB radio was both useful and entertaining.

CB communication is also useful in a number of ways for group riding and it can make dropping off or other ways of keeping everyone on route and together almost completely unnecessary.  Of course CB only works reliably “line of sight” and out to a maximum of about mile so it’s not the complete solution.

However, on my ride with Ian and two other friends this wasn’t a problem because we were only four bikes, so a small group, and we were on open moorland roads so the CB was working reliably and at considerable range.  The first part of the day had been spent taking part in a charity bike ride but after lunch, involving a visit to the Hawes Chippy, we rode back to civilisation (i.e Lancashire) together as  a small group of four.

I was leading but as is my wont and was no surprise to the rest of the group, once we were pointing in the right direction I rode ahead at a faster pace to enjoy those lovely sweeping bends between Hawes and Ribblehead Viaduct.  The other three bikes, two couples and a less experienced rider, rode at a gentler pace, staying together as a group.

I could hear them chatting on the CB from time to time and they were helping each other to overtake slower traffic by telling the guy behind when the road was clear for an overtake.  I spoke to them myself from time to time, for example to mention gravel on the road or fast on-coming traffic.  As I mentioned these were open moorland roads with only the occasional side road or gateway where anyone could possibly be joining or leaving the carriageway and the view of the road ahead was generally clear for some distance.

Car emerges from side road and.....

One of the accepted wisdoms of IAM advanced riding is that you never, ever, signal or instruct another driver or rider to do anything and this includes, and applies particularly to never telling another rider when you think it’s clear for him to overtake.  When I was group riding with Elite Wings, when most riders would have CB and the majority were also advanced riders this was a fairly strict rule; don’t try to help other riders overtake.  Any newcomer who did this (thinking of course he was being helpful) was tactfully discouraged.

There are lots of accepted wisdoms in the IAM/police approach to riding and some of them make more sense than others and the odd one I’ve never been able to see the sense of at all.  But this one I can see the sense of and I generally adhere to.  The thinking behind it is that however careful you have been in your own observations, you are not sitting on the other rider’s bike, you don’t have his viewpoint (for example of hazards in his immediate path or to his rear) so you should try to make decisions for him.

Could you be sure for example, that even on moorland roads that something hasn’t developed since you overtook, like a small tractor or quad bike starting to emerge from behind a wall into a gateway, or a previously unseen sheep climbing out of the ditch on to the verge?

The only way to be sure that you won’t be encouraging another rider to attempt an unsafe overtake is to keep your mouth shut, even if you are still fairly close, even if you are only just the other side of the car being overtaken.  This is perhaps particularly important if you are being followed by an inexperienced rider who might be tempted to “do as he’s told” by his more experienced companions.  Less experienced riders and those new to CB can sometimes be keen to explore the options which bike-to-bike communications present, which can lead them to try to be helpful in this way.

None of this means that I’m criticising my companions on this recent ride for trying to help each other on this particular ride.  I was out of sight of what they were doing and there were certainly long stretches on this route where there were no side roads or gateways or sheep or walkers or dogs etc at all.  OIt’s entirely possible that they were picking out only completely safe situations in which to suggest that an overtake was “on”.  I was merely reminded by hearing their calls on the radio of this IAM “rule” and since I was on the hunt for what to write about for my next article, decided to use it.

Clearly there will occasionally be situations where it would be helpful and risk free to indicate an option helpfully to another road user, so I wouldn’t want to suggest being inflexible about this sort of thing.  But as a general rule, and especially as far as overtaking is concerned, it’s best to leave other riders and drivers to make their own assessments and decisions.

There are other situations when helpfulness is potentially too risky, such as when you stop in traffic and a car or bike wants to turn right from a side  turning to your left using a gap you’ve left in front of you.  It’s tempting to wave them out if there is no on-coming traffic but can you be sure that there isn’t another motorcycle approaching from behind you, overtaking the stationary traffic?

Collisions of overtaking motorcycles with vehicles turning into their path through a gap in standing traffic are not at all uncommon.  If you’re the overtaking rider you need to beware of any gaps in standing traffic queues for this reason and pass them with suitable caution.  It isn’t illegal to overtake standing traffic on a bike but you’ll get at least part of the blame for the accident if you are doing the overtaking.  Someone might well try to blame you if you have waved the vehicle out through the gap towards the collision too.

Even waving or nodding to someone to go ahead at a pedestrian crossing when you are stopped or stopping can be risky; are you sure you have seen far enough backwards along the road to ensure that another vehicle can’t appear out of nowhere, miss the stop signal (or ignore it) and run into them?

So, I’m not suggesting being inflexible about this but helping other road users to make decisions is always something to do with great care and even greater reluctance, especially when it comes to helping other riders to overtake.

If you’d like to read more about the art of overtaking you might like to visit Tips for Overtaking on a Motorcycle  or to treat yourself to a copy of the IAM Book: How to be a better Rider.

in the wake of my second proper session on a race track, when I did 50 plus laps, most of which involved scraping the foot pegs on most of the bends for most of the time, the old brain started ticking and it occurred to me that what I had been doing that day was potentially useful on the roads as well as a fun experience on the track.

So, I’m now a bit better informed but can it really be useful on the road to have had the experience of scraping your foot pegs in this way?  Are there any circumstances in which you would want to touch ground with your foot pegs on a GoldWing on the road, other than for showing off?

During my early days on a Wing, riding a GL1200 and before I developed any sort of appetite for “making progress”, as the IAM calls it, I had no thought at all of leaning over far enough to scraping anything on the ground and thought, as I suppose most Wingers do, that riders who do that sort of thing must be barmy.

I suspect that some of my fellow IAM riders on that day think I was barmy for chucking my GL1800 around on the track like that, especially the guy on a replica Repsol Fireblade, wearing the matching riding gear, whom I tried to overtake on one of our warm up laps because he was getting under my feet.  He didn’t let me, the spoilsport, he just accelerated away.  I had no illusions that I could out perform a Fireblade on a racing circuit riding a GoldWing unless he had been willing to let me come past but I would have claimed the bragging rights anyway at the next IAM Group Meeting.

So scraping foot pegs on a GoldWing is for showing off and nothing else – right?  Well no, actually I don’t think it is.  Being confident that you can scrape your GoldWing’s footpegs can be very useful, as I’ll try to explain.

Foot guards after a day at Three Sisters Circuit

It’s about gaining confidence that in the context of ordinary road riding, your GoldWing has far more ability to cope with leaning over in a corner and tightening a turn than you might think is possible.   Circumstances can arise in which being able to use this ability could save your bacon.  Having the confidence to be able to lean over further in order to tighten your turn and get yourself out of trouble is a potentially life-saving skill to have up your sleeve.

A bad bend near Oban

The most vivid recollection I have of failing to do this was during a group ride somewhere near Oban some years ago when I was following several other bikes, all of us with pillion passengers and most of us IAM members.  It was a tour and although we were not hanging about, nor were we competing or rushing.

Whether I was making the classic mistake of following the bike ahead rather than reading the road and upcoming bend I don’t know but I made a real mess of one particular bend.  It was a left hander around some high ground and it tightened up unexpectedly and very dramatically.  The rider ahead of me got round it on his own side of the road – but only just and with a bit of extra effort to tighten his turn.  When we were comparing notes later he admitted that it had caught him by surprise too and he’d had to work hard to get round it.

But I had run wide as the bend tightened and ended up on the wrong side of the road, in the path of an on-coming car.  I can still see it in my mind’s eye; it was a Jaguar, whose driver gave me a really dirty look as he swerved and braked to avoid me.  Quite right too, I had put him and his passenger at risk.

Fortunately for me the car was far enough away and moving at a sufficiently sedate pace (and the driver sufficiently alert) to allow me enough space to get back on to my own side of the road before I hit him.  It was a near thing, a matter of a few feet at most.  I was probably doing about 40-50mph and the car would have been doing about 40mph, so the head-on collision speed would have been over 80mph.  Neither I nor my wife would have survived.

It turned out that the bend had caught us all by surprise by the speed with which it tightened up and it was the topic of conversation in the bar that evening, when we got to our overnight hotel.   The view around it was closed off by the high ground to the left (we were virtually rounding a cliff, within an area of woodland) and there was nothing to give advance warning that the bend was about to tighten up other than that the limit lines (as they are called in Roadcraft, the Police Rider’s Handbook) very suddenly and very rapidly closing down.  There were no chevron signs on the opposite verge, as we come to expect on hazardous bends in UK, which are normally very well signposted and marked – something we we clearly should not take for granted.

More chevrons = tighter bend

Chevrons and Limit Lines and White lines

Observing the Limit Lines as you approach and go round a bend is a technique you are taught as part of advanced motorcycling.  In essence you monitor the very limit of what you can see of the road around the bend (i.e. the verge on the far side as it’s coming into view) to detect the rate at which it is coming into view.  If additional verge is coming into view at a decreasing rate, the bend is tightening (spoken of as closing down) and you need to brake.  At some point the rate at which the verge is appearing will steady, which means you can maintain speed and finally it will start to increase, which means the bend is opening up and you can start to accelerate.

If you do these observations scrupulously you will always be able to tell very quickly when a bend is tightening up (so you should be slowing down) and you should be able to avoid any nasty surprises.  Bends aren’t always smooth arcs of a circle, sometimes they can tighten up again after appearing to start opening up.  So you need to observe the limit lines continuously as you approach and round a bend, in case this happens.

The rider behind me that day near Oban happened to be a retired police motorcycling instructor, indeed he had been the Chief Instructor at the Metropolitan Police Driving School at Hendon.  He (very tactfully as well as helpfully) took the opportunity to explain to me afterwards how he used the white lines on the road whenever there was one to make equivalent observations, because on country roads the verge is often a fairly ragged affair and low light levels and poor contrast can often make reading the rate of appearance of the verge of the road difficult to monitor.

White lines along the centre of the road are mostly hatched rather than solid, which is very useful.  You can monitor the rate at which the hatched sections of white line are coming into view around the bend much more easily than by watching the far verge.  They provide a very good indicator of what’s happening to the bend: a decreasing rate of white line coming into view means the bend is closing (so you need to brake) and an increasing rate means the bend is opening, so you can accelerate.

I’ve been using this technique whenever there is a white line ever since and it works very well.  As I was teaching myself to use it I would say to myself (aloud) as I approached and rounded a bend “closing, closing, closing, steady, steady, steady, steady, opening, opening, open”.  It works; try it.

Of course on some bends the white lines will be continuous, which unless they have conspicuous cats eyes in them, which you might still be able to monitor to detect the rate, make them pretty useless – so you have to be prepared to revert to using the far verge if necessary.

So, how had I messed up that tightening bend near Oban?  Why was it that I ended up on the wrong side of the road when the other riders didn’t?

Failure to monitor the limit lines well enough to spot that the bend was closing down rapidly was obviously part of it and maybe I was also falling for the trap of following the line of the bike in front of me rather than reading the road ahead for myself.  But with the benefit of both hindsight and quite a bit more riding experience, I think that failure to spot the earliest indications of the tightening band was only part of the problem for me that day and the really important thing I got wrong was the way I handled the bike once I did realise the bend was tightening up spectacularly.  Remember that all of us were taken by surprise by that bend, so suddenly and unexpectedly did it tighten up but I was the only one to run wide into on-coming traffic.

More Lean Angle?

I ran wide when the others didn’t because I braked to try to reduce speed in order to get round while they probably resisted the temptation of further braking in the bend (which almost inevitably widens your line) and leaned over further to turn in tighter instead.  I lacked the experience and confidence to do this, so I ended up on the wrong side of the road in the path of an on-coming car and they didn’t.

Developing the confidence that your GoldWing will let you do this, lean over further and tighten your turn to get round the bend, is what this article is all about.  Leaning over further until you scrape your footpeg if necessary, and even further than that if you need to, by lifting your foot off the foot peg to let it hinge upwards, is what your GoldWing is perfectly capable of allowing you to do.

A GoldWing’s tyres will still have good contact with the road when leaning over all the way to and beyond the point when the footpeg touches.  The footpeg hinges upwards; it doesn’t dig in.   Only when you lean the bike so far over in a bend that the crash bars touch down will you start to take weight off the wheels and therefore be at risk of losing tyre grip and therefore sliding wider.  Until that happens your turn will tighten as you lean further over and this will help you get round the bend safely.  Before you resort to braking to cope with an unexpectedly tightening bend, which is at best going to reduce your collision speed a bit, you should always have got the bike leaning over far enough to be scraping the foot peg.

When you’ve overdone it into a bend …..

The retired police motorcycle sergeant, Keith Shuck, who took me for my IAM test and I were chatting over a bowl of soup at the rendezvous afterwards because I was the last candidate of his morning session.  He’d passed me (probably somewhat reluctantly, I hadn’t ridden well) and so I plucked up courage to ask him to tell me first hand about the tale I’d heard about him scraping the belly pan of his brand new Pan European ST1300 a week or two earlier when he’d been riding a bit too hard while he was out with some other guys we both new. “It was the police training which got me out of trouble when I was too fast into that bend.  Never, ever, brake if you’re too fast into a bend.  It’s too late for braking.  Keep some power on and lean over further.”

The problem for most Wingers about advice of this sort is that it sounds crazy.  The very idea of getting anywhere near scraping your footpeg on the road is beyond anything he has ever contemplated never mind experienced, so how can he possibly summon up the coolness and courage to do it when he suddenly finds himself going far too fast for comfort into a tightening bend.  Inevitably, with no option to do otherwise, he will clench his buttocks (or worse) and grab the brakes, which is what happened to me near Oban that day.

Which brings me to the value, indeed what has become for the pleasures of feeling able to scrape a foot peg on a bend if you want to – or at least of not being surprised by it and not feeling instantly panicky when it does happen?  It’s not a macho “look at my footpegs, I’ve scraped them” thing.  It’s much more “Ah, that’s what happens and that’s what it feels like – now I understand, now I can cope with it if I need to”.

And this presents the problem of how, as a road rider, do you acquire this confidence without riding like a lunatic around bends until it happens, then getting scared out of your wits when it does?

Too late for braking

Accidental footpeg contact

It may be that you will encounter and may have already encountered, as I had done once I’d bought a GL1800 and started riding it to make progress, IAM style, your first experience of foot peg scraping by accident.  I was rounding a bend where the road surface undulated a bit and the road simply came up to meet my downhill footpeg, causing a graunching sound and a similar feeling unexpected rough contact under my foot.  It could might have been a much quieter and gentler contact you experienced, which took you a while to figure out.  You probably thought to yourself “whoops, I don’t want to do that again” or words to that effect.

Despite what might have seemed at the time to be quite a loud noise and a distinct jarring under your foot, when you looked at the underside of your footpeg afterwards, there will have been little or nothing to show for it.  GoldWing footpegs have a projecting stud on the underside of the footpeg to take the contact and the foot peg hinges upwards and backwards, so it can’t dig in.  Your GoldWing hasn’t batted an eyelid, let5 alone suffered any damage; it’s taken the incident in its stride, as it’s supposed to be able to do.  Only if you have a lot of your own weight on your foot peg as it grounds will any really grinding contact be made.

Learning to love foot peg contact

If you can get access to a racing circuit, as I was fortunate to have, there is no better place to learn how to lean over further around bends in safe circumstances.  Racing circuits have bends which are ideal for the purpose; they will have smooth, well maintained tarmac with no kerbs or other obstacles so that if you get things seriously wrong and run off or turn in too far, the worst thing that is likely to happen is an undignified exit on to grass or gravel or into a pile of tyres or some other relatively soft landing.  Assuming that you’re not having to cope with complications like circuit traffic, so knock the Nurburgring of the list, a racing circuit is ideal.

Those laps I did around the Three Sisters Circuit a few weeks ago were a wonderful learning opportunity.  The circuit was short, so I was lapping in less than two minutes and taking the same bends again and again, which gives you a great opportunity to gradually take the bends faster and/or lean further over without feeling that you are going out on a limb.

Which is why I suggested on this Blog shortly after that access to a racing circuit like that one would provide an excellent rider education opportunity for Wingers (and other riders too of course) and tried to get HondaUK interested in helping set something like that up when I spoke to Steve Martindale.  Unfortunately that suggestion fell on stony ground but I haven’t given up on the idea yet.

Roundabouts have their uses

In the absence of an opportunity to learn in safe circumstances like that Wingers will have to do the best they can by gaining experience of gradually leaning further over into bends on the road.

Roundabouts are places where Wingers will often encounter their first accidental footpeg contact so in theory at least they could be exploited for teaching yourself how to scrape your foot pegs.  A couple of roundabouts separated by half a mile or more of road might be suitable providing you can pick a time when the road has little or no traffic on it.  You will only be able to practice getting your right foot peg down of course but that’s better than nothing.

Having found your roundabouts and ensured that there isn’t much other traffic (nor any diesel on the roundabouts!) you should simply use the pair of roundabouts and the connecting road as an ad hoc circuit.

Scraping the belly pan is overdoing it

Take it slowly and smoothly and only gradually increase your lean angle and speed around the roundabouts but only doing what you are completely comfortable doing.  If it starts to feel in any way scary or that you are not completely in control abandon the exercise and take a break.  The absolutely ideal location for this exercise will involve a snack shack in a lay by half way between the roundabouts.  There’s no need to hurry this learning process.

As you gradually increase your speed and lean angle to ride around the roundabout, you will eventually, inevitably, feel the inside footpeg touch down.  If the road surface is smooth this shouldn’t be a jarring event, simply a scraping noise and/or a feeling that your right foot is being pushed gently upwards from below.

Your GoldWing will now be leaning over further than you’ve been used to but it will still be circling the roundabout smoothly and you should still feel completely in control.   As you get the hang of continuing to ride in a circle while your foot peg is still gently scraping on the road surface, your foot lifted up slightly to ensure the foot peg doesn’t make unnecessarily firm contact, you will experience your eureka moment.  It’s quite a satisfying feeling to take your bike around a roundabout under complete control in this way.

Note that it’s not necessary to lean over far enough to be scraping your foot peg all the way around the roundabout; it’s enough that you are rounding the roundabout smoothly and scraping the foot peg at some point.  Doing that will have given you the confidence that you need – that your GoldWing can be leaned over further than you might normally choose to do and that you can still control the bike perfectly while it does so.

Summary

It is this confidence that the bike doesn’t automatically crash or become difficult to control as you lean over far enough for the foot peg to touch that you are looking for.  This is what you need to convince yourself of in order to have useful cornering capacity in reserve for when you need it one day, when you find yourself going too fast in a bend.

You may want to reinforce this confidence occasionally by aiming to scrape your foot peg on a roundabout or a bend from time to time but that’s optional.  Then it’s a matter of making yourself read the limit lines every time you approach and round a bend, saying to yourself as you do so “don’t brake, lean over further, don’t brake, lean over further…” until that becomes what you would automatically do if you find yourself too fast into a bend which is tighter than you thought.

Parts supplied

CLICK ON ANY IMAGE FOR AN ENLARGEMENT

Having read many good reviews about fork braces for the GL1500, it seemed like a good idea to fit one to my trusty Wing.  As my birthday was also approaching, this was a golden opportunity not to be missed when family asked “What do you want for your birthday?”

The question was, though, which one?

The front runner in the brace stakes seemed to be the Superbrace which has been around for a little while, but appeared to have the disadvantage of not allowing the chrome cover above the mudguard (fender?) to fully sit home after fitting, but leaving an ⅛” gap between the two.

Searching a well known auction site, (oh, go on then, Ebay), revealed an alternative in the shape of the Blackwing Brace.  Having read the description of the brace and its advantages over its competitors, I was beginning to warm to the idea.

Further digging showed there to be a video on You Tube which demonstrated the fitting of the brace with the absolute minimum of dismantling and in less than approx 15 minutes.

So, the choice was made and my brace was duly ordered (thanks, Lynette and son, Alex!) and I settled back to eagerly await its arrival. This, I’m pleased to say, happened today, but I should point out just a word of caution.   Although I felt that the shipping costs were not unreasonable, what I hadn’t accounted for is that the Customs people would charge some £4.02 in VAT, plus the good old Royal Mail wanted their cut of £8 for ‘International Handling”, adding another £12.02 to the final costs.

Levering off the cover screw caps

First impressions were of a very nicely machined and substantial aluminium plate, contoured to fit the internal surfaces of the fork legs precisely. This was accompanied by four stainless steel countersunk screws and two threaded studs.

So, armed with a torque wrench, socket wrench, a small flat screwdriver and 4mm, 5mm and 6mm alan key drives, I set out to see if it really was that easy……..

Cover retaining screws

First step was to remove the small caps covering the retaining screws on the fork cover, These were easily levered off with the flat screwdriver.

Cover off

Then, the cover retaining screws were removed,  together with the fork tube cover itself.

Now it’s time to remove ONE of the mudguard retaining bolts from the left hand fork leg.

Left mudguard retaing bolt out first

Note that you must not remove both bolts at this stage, otherwise you could end up having to remove the entire mudguard unnecessarily later on!

Then the diagonally opposite one

Then, the diagonally opposite mudguard retaining bolt is removed from the other fork leg.

This is where the two threaded studs now come in, screwing one into each of the holes now vacated by the bolts I removed.

Retaining stud in the bolt's place, finger tight

Now I could remove the two other mudguard retaining bolts.

As I did, the casting beneath the mudguard dropped down a bit, but having the studs screwed in meant that it stayed attached and aligned underneath, so I could lift it back up using the studs in order to fit the replacement bolts (which are actually countersunk machine screws)  without having to remove the entire mudguard.

First stud in place

The fork brace was then fitted over the studs and the studs then pulled up to restore the lower casting to its correct position.

Brace fitted over the two studs

This allowed the first two new countersunk retaining machine screws to be fitted through the fork brace, screwing into the lower casting.

Having hand-tightened these two machine screws, the two studs could now be removed and the final pair of new machine screws fastrened in their place.

First machine screw goes in

The four machine screws holding the fork brace in position could now be tightened to the correct torque setting.

Torquing up

Just left the cover to be replaced and its retaining screws and covers refitted. Note that the cover fits back flush to the mudguard, just as intended.

Now all that remained was to take the bike out for the new fork brace’s first test ride…………

Cover goes back on

If anyone had told me that something as simple as a piece of aluminium could make such a difference, I’d never have believed them.

Job done, fork brace installed, hidden nicely

The feel of the bike, and especially the security of the front end was so amazingly improved, allowing me to dive into bends which I’d previously treated with more than a little caution, scrape the footpegs and then fire out the other side (all within the speed limits, of course, Officer!).

At ultra-low speeds, such as when crawling in traffic, the increase in stability was also truly remarkable.

For such a small amount of time and effort in fitting, this has to be one of the best investments that a GL1500 owner can make in their bike.

Editor’s Note: Ian Duxbury works as a Training Officer and is a lives in Longridge, near Preston,  Lancashire.  He is also Chairman of GoldWings North West.

Honda Staff at their Slough HQ

Staff at Honda’s UK head office came out in force today to take part in a range of two-wheel activities, in support of the annual National Ride To Work Day.

More than fifty riders, many carrying a colleague as a pillion, rode their various Honda machines into the Company’s Head Office near Slough, where everyone gathered for a group photograph and ‘bikers’ breakfast’, joined by hundreds of non-rider colleagues from both the car and power equipment areas within the business as well.

Honda motorcycle models spanning over 30 years, from the Honda 400 Four Supersport from the late 1970s, to a GoldWing took part – highlighting Honda’s diverse range of scooters and motorcycles as well as their impressive longevity in engineering as well as appeal.  (This is based on a Honda Press Release – you’d never guess would you!)

Other staff took the opportunity to experience life on two wheels for the first time either by taking a pillion ride of having a go themselves – taking advantage of an hour off work and a free bike and practice area in the car park.

Novice riders having a go in the car park

This year’s National Ride To Work Day also marks the launch of ‘The Case For Motorcycling’ – a campaign which until recently has been part of the Motorcycle Industry’s discussions with the Government but is now being expanded into the public arena to generate support for the economic, social, environmental, commercial and practical benefits of motorcycling in UK.

Honda (UK) Managing Director, Dave Hodgetts, who is new to motorcycling himself, rode to work today on a PCX125 scooter – good for him too.

For further information about Ride To Work Day and what ‘The Case For Motorcycling’ is all about, click here or follow on Twitter @RideToWorkDayUK or Facebook ‘Ride to Work Day UK’.

As you might have gathered from this video clip, I really enjoyed my second proper go on a racing circuit using my GoldWing yesterday.  Indeed I enjoyed it so much that I thought that other Wingers might well find an opportunity like this one useful – so would they?

Three Sisters Race Circuit

Last year about this time I was invited via my IAM Group to take my bike to a track day laid on for the benefit of visually handicapped people, when they would have the opportunity to ride in sports cars and as pillion passengers on motorcycles provided by enthusiasts as well as to drive dual control cars provided by local driving schools.  I wrote my first experience of this up for the Blog in a previous article which you can find by clicking here.

This time I wasn’t quite so much of a newcomer, we got less rain and we were a bit better organised marshalling-wise, so I was kept busier and enjoyed it even more.  I also discovered that the compact digital camera I have used for years and can mount on my handlebars records video, hence the clip heading this Article.  It shows two laps of the circuit, starting from the pits and coming back into them.

Freddie Mercury and Queen was playing on the stereo but if you listen carefully you will hear the footpegs scrapping on the bends; this was during the warm up session we had at the start of the day with the track to ourselves and without passengers.  As you will see, I was enjoying myself.

Because I had already ridden the circuit and managed to stay on the bike last year despite some very slippery conditions in the rain I wasn’t quite so anxious and as I rode the circuit I was gradually getting smoother and better at taking the corners – and I suppose I was getting faster too.

Consistency = confident control

The important thing was that as I got smoother and better I felt more and more completely in control.  Eventually I was taking all the corners with the footpegs scraping steadily on the tarmac (out of choice) which was very satisfying.  I was even managing to do this with passengers of varying weights too – it was clearly from early on in the day that my biker colleagues expected the fat bloke on the big bike to take the fat passengers!

I always wondered how Ron Haslam could possibly take a modified racing bike around a circuit with a passenger on board at almost racing speeds – well I certainly wasn’t doing that but I was lapping fairly briskly and – most importantly – consistently.  And it felt very safe too – it was all extremely satisfying.

Terrific selection of cars

The passengers were given the option to tell me to slow down if they were at all uncomfortable with the speed or anything else  (by tapping my helmet) but none of them did so.  Maybe they were too busy concentrating on gripping the passenger handles but they didn’t give that impression afterwards.  One of them chose to grip my spare tyre rather than the handles and I could feel him tense up a bit as we dropped into the bends but even he was full of praise and thanks afterwards.

So I don’t think I frightened anyone at any stage, including myself – although maybe I did surprise the E Type driver when I overtook him.  And one of my fellow bikers, riding a CB1000F, did take  care to make sure I went out ahead of him after I had overtaken him during a previous session.

Please can we go very fast?

Most of the passengers urged us to ride as fast as possible but of course we made our own judgements about how fast it was safe to go.  Once I had developed the confidence that I could deliver fairly smooth and consistent laps I did aim to sustain a brisk pace but the overriding consideration was always safety.  I certainly wasn’t risking chucking either myself or any of the visually handicapped passengers on to the tarmac unnecessarily.

But I wasn’t hanging about either and as well as giving the passengers what they wanted, the 50 plus laps I did gave me  a real buzz and a sense of achievement.  I felt really quite tired when I got home but it was all very satisfying and worthwhile.  My GoldWing was very popular choice among the passengers even though most of them couldn’t see it and they all seemed to be genuinely grateful afterwards – most of them asking how fast we had gone excitedly, presumably for bragging purposes.  None showed or expressed distress of any kind.

The real thing, and just me on it!

Alice, the octogenarian speed freak

I had one eighty year old lady as a passenger who really, really enjoyed the ride, as she demonstrated by embracing me enthusiastically afterwards and then trying to kiss me.

Having a visual handicap could have been a factor in her deciding to do this but it also presented even more difficulty than usual when two people wearing crash helmets try to kiss, so I don’t think we did quite manage to exchange any saliva – indeed I think what she actually kissed was the sponge windshield cover of my microphone.

Alice, as she was called, was full of thanks afterwards and she had clearly enjoyed the excitement of it all, demanding to know precisely how fast we had gone, which I duly exaggerated.  In an effort to empathise I also suggested to her that when we got to our age (I am younger than her but no matter, I was being gallant) riding a bike at speed was better than sex.  “Oh do you think so?” she said, with a twinkle in her partially sighted eyes.  She was an exceptional octogenarian, full of vitality.  Apparently she been water skiing the week before and the bloke who drove the boat had told her she was definitely the oldest gal he’d ever pulled.

Another, slightly younger, lady passenger made the mistake of confiding to another rider in our group when she was about to have her second ride with him that she’d found me very sexy earlier on when she’d ridden with me.  He thought this was so hilarious he promptly said so very loudly, so all could hear.  I comforted myself with the thought that although he doesn’t have a visual impairment and she does, no called him sexy!

Does it help you to ride better on the road?

The experience you gain doing this sort of riding doesn’t translate directly over to riding on the roads because of course on the roads you don’t get the opportunity to keep riding the same bends time and again to work out how to ride them optimally.  And on the roads you have to assess each bend afresh as you approach it and allow for all the other prevailing hazards, which vary.

But on a track you can safely experiment with going a bit faster or taking a different line or leaning further over, to find out whether it makes your progress around the bend better or worse.  And because there were only a few bikes and cars on the track at any one time, unlike the Nurburgring, which is a bit of a bun fight during the public sessions, we also had the elbow room and freedom from hassle which you need in order to enjoy doing it.

You’ve ridden the same bend only just over a minute ago, so you can easily remember the line and speed you took last time, which also helps.  Small and relatively tight circuits like this one might be too small for superbike riders to stretch themselves but they are ideal for non-racing bikers to use for skill training purposes.

It’s not sensible to keep going ever faster and faster of course, or you presumably would end up discovering either bike’s or more likely your limitations the hard way.  But you can certainly go fast enough and lean over far enough to develop your cornering skills.  And I didn’t find it scary at all, just interesting and enjoyable to try to achieve consistency and smoothness.  If you lose smoothness, you’ll find you also lose speed.

Team photo at the rendezvous

There is certainly value to your road riding skills in discovering (on the safety of a track) what you and your Wing will cope with when cornering fairly quickly if you want to do so – and for example just how much lean angle a GoldWing will allow you to exploit.  It’s far more than you might think.

So you discover safely on the race track what you can use if necessary to get round a bend on the road if you suddenly find out that you have underestimated how tight it is.  You will have the confidence to lean forwards and into the bend to tighten your turn rather than resorting to panicky braking, which will inevitably cause you to run wide.

And doing all this without traffic and street furniture to worry about is very liberating.  You can concentrate on taking the bends well and gradually improving your cornering without having to worry about all the other hazards of road riding, not least on-coming traffic.

There’s no racing involved, even though it takes place on a race track.  We riders we were of a mind, as we chatted over the lunch break, that anyone who actually races motorcycles, especially on the Isle of Man, must be barking mad.  So there was no pressure within the group to ride as fast or faster than the other bikes.  Each rider chose his own pace and kept out of the way if anyone did look like wanting to go faster.

We soon learned for example that if the Austin Healey 3000 came up behind you it was best to get out of his way wherever you were on the circuit, while the E Type would accelerate briskly on the straight but was otherwise slower than the bikes.   It was the driver’s appetite and his willingness to push his car which was the difference of course, and there was perhaps something of the same sort of variation among the bikes.

Yet this was all comfortably accommodated on the circuit, especially once the Marshal worked out his system of batch releases, which meant we didn’t really come into conflict with each other at all.

So as I rode home, tired but very happy, I began to wonder whether other Wingers would like the same sort of opportunity and if so how it might be arranged.  I suppose that most Wingers will, as I did myself, start off thinking that racing circuits are simply not a sensible place to take a GoldWing at all but I was wrong.

A track like this one, constructed primarily for go kart racing and less than a mile long, so even on the straight you will only reach about 60mph, provides a superb sequence of wide tarmac bends for purposes of improving your riding skills.  There is plenty of room to take things slowly and/or wide until you get the hang of things, when you will naturally start to want to take the optimum line around the bend – which I suppose is also the racing line.

Clockwise circuit but there are left-handers too

As long as there’s no actual racing going on, a racing circuit is much safer to ride than ordinary roads.  When  I rode the Nurburgring a few years ago there was lots of high performance overtaking traffic to worry about (which was pretty terrifying, to say the least) but yesterday we had none of that.

Initially the bikes were tending to get under the feet of the sports cars, which would therefore want to overtake but that all evaporated once the Marshal worked out his system of sending us out in sequenced batches, in our case immediately behind the sports cars.

So although we were sharing the circuit, including with blind people driving dual control cars, there was no conflict at all – we simply took turns and this also helped to make the process of changing over passengers more efficient.  The stream of cars or bikes ahead of you on the circuit gave a useful impression of circuit traffic without presenting any actual conflicts.  It worked a treat and mostly we came back in the same sequence we went out – although when I happened to be leading bike on one occasion I did manage to overtake the under-performing E Type through the bends, I just couldn’t resist it.

We had quite  few light showers and one period of very heavy rain which made life extra difficult for part of the time but we carried on riding and there were no accidents at all.  Compared with the cars the bikes had to really slow down in the rain because in parts the circuit became very slippery indeed – and that was useful experience too.  You soon learned to enter the bends slowly and to avoid the bits of tarmac which looked slippery than others.

Would you like to have a go?

So all you need in order to provide a really worthwhile and fun day out for yourself and your Winger friends is exclusive access to somewhere like the Three Sisters Racing Circuit.  Using a batch release system like we did provide enough elbow room for safety and potentially enough track time for quite a large number of riders – at least fifty I would guess, maybe more.

Therein (i.e. getting exclusive access to a race circuit) lies the problem.  But if you don’t ask you don’t get, so I’m looking into it.  I’ve made some initial enquiries and I’m in the process of developing one of my cunning plans.

By the way I’ve looked into the insurance angle.  Your ordinary bike insurance covers the third party risks – i.e if you or your bike cause damage to anyone or any other vehicle and vice versa; this is something which insurers have to cover by law anywhere in UK, on or off road, it simply doesn’t matter.  However if you drop your bike and damage it yourself then your insurer would probably repudiate a claim for repair of your own bike, i.e. by riding off road you would almost certainly sacrifice the comprehensive part of your cover.

But I don’t think that’s a big risk to take, even with your precious GoldWing.  Firstly you are not racing, you are merely riding safely around a circular road at your own normal riding speeds for the conditions, so there are no racing-type risks at all.  You wouldn’t even be mixing with full-on sports bike riders; this would be a track session primarily and predominantly for GoldWings with maybe the odd other tourer if a friend wanted to come with you.

Secondly, even if you did get something very seriously wrong and drop your bike or run or slide off the tarmac track, you would merely end up on nice soft grass or at the very worst against a suitably cushioned barrier.  There are no walls or trees or street lamps or even kerbs to worry about.  And you would impact at a relatively modest speed, the small size or the circuit limits the maximum speed anyone can achieve and the run-offs and barriers are designed and placed to minimise the risk of injury.   Serious injury to you or your bike, or even of damage to your pride, are pretty unlikely.

Would you and your Winger friends or club (or Region) be interested if the opportunity of a specially devised GoldWing Track Day became available?

Please let me have your Comments.

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A Track Day with a difference

A Wing on The Ring

The Trough of Bowland on a Spring day

It was a perfect biking day in the North West recently, clear sky and sunshine and warm enough to sit out and enjoy tea and a toasted tea cake at Slaidburn when I got there with another couple of bikers who had the same idea.  One of them was even older than me and hadn’t brought his bike that particular day, but he took the opportunity to join us for a chat, as I had done by joining the other biker at his table when I arrived.

I chatted to another elderly Honda VFR rider at the Devil’s Bridge, Kirkby Lonsdale, also in the sunshine, on another ride a day or two later.  He had ridden over from Ripon and was feeling a bit tired because he’d taken an indirect route and he was a bit worried he’d taken on too much and would be very, very tired when he got back home.

He was perhaps entitled to feel tired after that ride at 79 years of age, on a Sports Tourer like the a VFR.  My idea of the bike I will ride when it’s time to give up the Wing is more like a Honda Deauville.   I used to say I’d like to be shot by a jealous husband at the age of 85 but if I can still be enjoying a longish day out on the bike at 79 or so that will do nicely instead;  quietly sliding off my perch on the wall at Devil’s Bridge into the next world after a nice ride and a nice cup of tea and with the lingering taste of a bacon butty in my mouth wouldn’t be a bad way to depart at all.  Not that my companion did this on me that day, thankfully; by the time I came back from my stroll across the Bridge to the toilets he had gone on his way on two wheels.

A deceptively tight right hander in Ribblesdale

It wasn’t busy at Slaidburn, if fact we three were the only customers at one point.  The Cafe Owner was unusually chatty.  He was clearly pleased with the weather and the implied prospect of a new season’s earnings.  He thought there might be lots more bikers along later in the afternoon; it was a good day for them to be taking a sickie he said, which apparently some of them happily declare that they are doing as they order their refreshments.  There might be a few less bikers doing that this year due to the economic situation and some of those who are free to ride their bike might have to count to pennies carefully to afford the petrol.  I’ve always felt privileged to be out riding a GoldWing but especially so these days.

Fortunately my bike seemed to be handling very sweetly too that day, so I persuaded myself that in retrospect I could tell that there was something not quite right about its handling when the front tyre was on the wrong way round.  It didn’t feel seriously wrong but it didn’t feel right either; difficult to be more specific than that.

I suppose the lesson is that if you ever feel that there might be something wrong with the bike and it’s probably not just you having an off day with your riding,  then you really should stop and check – or at least check the obvious, basic things like the tyres, including that the tyre is on the right way around as well as the tyre pressure if you’ve not done that before.

When I listen to other bikers who talk as if they can “read” the handling of their bike I do so with varying mixtures of envy and disbelief, depending on whether I think they are bullshitting, which of course some bikers are occasionally prone to do.  Indeed we’ve probably all met some bikers who seem to do that most of the time.

But if I’m honest despite having done advanced riding training etc, the closest I’ve ever got to diagnosing what might be going wrong with the bike while riding it was when I noticed a front wheel wobble on my first GL1800 at about 30 mph when it was fairly new.  I thought it was probably something to do with the front end but that’s as close as I could get.  On that occasion it turned out to be the front tyre, which was a Bridgestone with twin circumferential groves which Bridgestone did away with fairly rapidly because they did sometimes cause a wobble.

However according to my Motorcycling Guru, Ian Cardwell,  the commonest cause of front wheel wobble on a GL1800 is an under-inflated rear tyre, which didn’t occur to me as even a possibility, so I wasn’t really hitting the diagnostic spot that time either.

Another Winger arrives at Hartside Tops

On one occasion (many, many years ago I hasten to add) I rode for several miles with a nearly deflated rear tyre on my GL1200 without noticing anything was wrong with the bike.  It was a bystander who noticed that the tyre was a funny shape.  You have to look to see whether a GoldWing rear tyre is OK and fat people like me don’t like getting down on the floor to do it properly.

In my naive ignorance of those years gone by I learned to trust Ian, who always sounded like he knew what he was talking about in a very convincing way.  Over the years I’ve followed his lead in all sorts of motorcycling things.

Mind you, Ian made his pile out of selling things to people so I should have realised that expressing opinions confidently could simply be part of a confidence-building sales patter – and he does have some very obviously strange ideas like thinking that Rotherham is a nice to live.  He still likes drinking Creme de Menthe too, so I  should have realised that he’s not infallible, even about matters motorcycling.

For example he was very enthusiastic about the Arai RAM 3 helmet when it came out and I ended up bringing one back from Daytona one year on his recommendation, much to the irritation of Management because we had to buy an extra luggage bag to fly it home in.  It was certainly cooler to wear in summer because it scooped in lots of extra air but it was very noisy too – indeed it was a bit like having a ram jet engine fitted to the top of your head.

And you should have seen Management’s face when she found out I would be checking in a pair of Dunlop Elite 3s to fly home on another trip we did with Ian, also on his recommendation.  They weren’t available in UK at the time.  Great on dry roads but the back tyre would let go so suddenly on a bend or a roundabout in the wet which was more alarming than exciting.

A sunny weekday at Devil's Bridge - lots of sickies being pulled?

But as I’ve had to reassure Ian from time to time, he’s not completely useless and what he says about the bike’s handling do mostly make sense, so he’s still my Motorcycling Guru.  Quite how his background in selling kitchens and bathrooms has equipped him for this role I’m not sure but somehow he is pretty good at it.

He’s pretty good at keeping a straight face too and Management has never ever been able to tell when he’s pulling her leg.  Mind you I don’t think I’d be allowed to bring any more helmets or tyres home from America, no matter how persuasive Ian was.  She no longer believes anything he says at all.

So I was following another one of Ian’s recommendations to upgrade my bike’s suspension using Progressive front springs.  I’ve also installed (or rather Ian installed) a replacement Progressive rear suspension unit.  The image of Ian astride my partly dismantled bike tugging rhythmically at the fuel tank to persuade it to come out of the frame is a memory which will keep me entertained for years to come.  Quite why Rotherham isn’t populated by lots of little fuel tanks after that performance I’ll never know.

Whether the Progressive Suspension has made a big difference to the handling of my bike I’m not sure – because I have come to realise I’m not a sensitive or good enough ‘test rider’ to be able to tell.  It certainly seems to help the bike cope with carrying a fat bloke like me around and the centre stand doesn’t seem to clang in contact with the road under G forces as it  used to occasionally during enthusiastic cornering where there is also an undulating road and I’m grateful for that.  Despite what I’ve written elsewhere on this Blog about possible shortcomings in Honda’s design of the GL1800, I’m still inclined to think they got it pretty much right first time and that it is really quite difficult to improve on it as a rider’s bike for normal road use by modifying it yourself.

I’d love to do some training by a proper test rider to learn the beginnings of how to “read” a bike and the faults in its handling because I suspect that even introductory-level training of that sort, even a little taster, would be a valuable addition to advanced riding training.  I wonder if it’s something that HondaUK could be persuaded to use their resources to offer as rider education?  Short courses using a few of their bikes which were set up with illustrative handling problems.   I suppose their personal injury insurers would have a dizzy fit if they were asked if it’s OK to do it.   ‘Elf and Safety and the prevalence of predatory personal injury lawyers in our society getting in the way again.

A stunning Ariel Square Four outshines the BMW K1600GTL

But back to my ride out on that sunny day last week.  By the time I got to Slaidburn I’d probably done 150 miles or so but the sun was still up and one of the great joys of riding a GL1800, or indeed any GoldWing, is that you can often ride all day without losing your appetite for more.  So instead of riding directly homewards I decided to head for the Trough of Bowland.

This is, on a fairly modest scale, a bit like mountain pass.  The road from Dunsop Bridge towards Lancaster follows a river up a narrow and scenic valley in order to exploits a gap in the hills to get over them.  There is even a mobile snack bar there regularly too, although on this occasion it wasn’t but it didn’t matter; I’d refreshed myself at Slaidburn.

On the North West side of the Trough the road crosses some moorland where many years ago someone had very considerately built a castellated viewing tower which provides, on a clear day like this, stunning panoramic views  of Morecambe Bay and the Lake District Mountains, some of which are proper mountains.  You can also gaze down on Heysham Nuclear Power Station and be grateful, as I was that day, that tsunamis are unknown in the Irish Sea.

While I only saw a handful of bikes while I was at Slaidburn, there were fifty or more at the Devil’s Bridge a few days later, even though it was also on a weekday.  And there was a steady stream of bikes coming and going.  For now at least, it seems there are bikers who can take advantage of a weekday ride on a sunny day.  Lets hope we have plenty of them this year.

One of the bikes to arrive while I was chatting to the elderly VFR owner was a BMW K1600GT, so I had my first look at this newly released bike in the flesh.  The rider had it on a test ride and was absolutely gushing with praise for it; he was clearly intending to trade in his BMW GL1200GS for one of these new wonder bikes as soon as he got back to the Dealer.  It’s an attractive and capable bike; that’s for sure and its grand touring stablemate, the BMW K1600GTL may well steal some potential GoldWing customers from Honda.

By the time I got home I had used up a full tank of fuel and done over 200 miles.  It had been a magnificent day’s riding and a terrific start to my biking season.  Unfortunately I had run over some unseen piece of metal on the road while I was following a car and looking to overtake it.  The only chance to avoid it would have been if I had spotted it the road ahead of the car and either I missed seeing it or it dropped off the car.  I felt the bumps as both wheels went over it and it sounded like a tin can being crushed.  More likely it was a piece of an exhaust system I suppose; I didn’t have time to see.

Realistically I suppose there was no chance to avoid it and when I got back I found that it had made a couple of fairly deep circumferential cuts in the front tyre – big and deep enough to look like an additions to the tread pattern.

It’s looking very much like I’ll have to replace my current pair of tyres early anyway, even if running the front one the wrong way around didn’t do any apparent harm.  I might not be up to telling when I’m riding that’s something is wrong but I can take a clear hint like this.

So somewhat belatedly I rang Graham Matcham, the Motorcycle Sales Manager for Avon Tyres in UK, whom I had met a couple of years ago and found very helpful as well as knowledgeable.   I’m sending him a picture so that he can comment further and I’ll write the outcome up as a separate article in due course.

Spring is here!

Winter is all very well in small doses and I suppose we’d miss it if it never happened but exceptionally cold weather and dark afternoons do get wearing after a while and the sight of daffodils and other spring flowers has really cheered me up.

Not that I’m any sort of gardener, indeed I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to avoid learning the difference between the plants and the weeds, but after a couple of weeks away from home in Lancashire, coming back to see colour appearing (or at least colours other than green appearing) is really heartening.

Getting the bike back on the road might have had something to with it too of course and with a weather forecast set fair for today and the weekend, life feels pretty good at the moment.  Bit of a struggle to fasten my biking gear but nothing a few less pies won’t fix.  I’m retired, so no daily grindstone to trouble my nose – and endless list of jobs at home to be done of course but I’ve dealt with the urgent ones, so I’m off the leash.  For a day or two anyway.

At this time of year the Lake District is a delightful biking area; the tourist season never quite stops up there but there’s certainly a lot less traffic before Easter than afterwards, so I’ll be heading that way for sure.

Probably I take my favourite local ride-out to start with: East along the A59 to Sawley then an unclassified (but very rideable) road through Wigglesworth towards Settle and the Naked Man Cafe, a favoured watering hole,  before heading north through Horton in Ribblesdale to the majestic Ribblehead Viaduct then left towards Ingleton and back homewards via High Bentham and Slaidburn.  About 90 miles of decent roads and lovely scenery.  Eat your hearts out you Southern Softies, we’ve got some really cracking riding country right on our doorsteps here Up North.

Re-learning my motorcycling skills is part of the early season routine for me and has always needed to be.  I like to go off on my own, at my own pace, and to cover a spectrum of town and country riding.  When I was taught advanced riding developing the capacity to be self-critical about my riding was a big milestone and thankfully I haven’t lost that.  Making myself re-learn the habit of staying alert all the time comes from that; if I find myself day dreaming or anything like it when I’m riding I get really annoyed with myself.

The problem is that as you get older you are less alert and it does take you longer to spot things as well as too react to them.  No point in kidding yourself, especially yourself, that you are still razor sharp when you’re nothing like it.  Maybe I over-compensate with a bit too much self-mockery about getting old and I do sometimes exaggerate, but it certainly feels safer and more enjoyable working back up to a reasonable standard of riding rather than kidding myself I’m still (or ever was) God’s Gift and can jump straight back in at the deep end  by riding hard and fast.

But I do like to ride hard and fast too, or at least I have done some of the time in previous seasons, and I expect I will want to do that this season too, once I feel I’m up to it.  The bike too of course must be up to it and with a front tyre that’s been running in reverse for far too long until it was spotted at my recent MOT, I’ll certainly be riding gently until that gets replaced, which unfortunately can’t be this weekend.

Motorcycling involves taking risks but they should be considered risks, not silly ones.  I’ve done silly on occasions, as most of us will have done, but not these days, not for me.  They talk of growing old gracefully and I suppose that’s my aim in motorcycling these days: precision and smooth progress, which equates, more or less, to gracefulness.  A fat old man isn’t naturally equipped to be graceful but with the help of a GL1800 and a big landscape my bike and I can make a decent fist of trying to look stylish as well as graceful. It probably helps that neither of us fart as much as many other motorcycles or their riders.

I’ve been competitive and I have ridden very hard and, I suppose, really quite quickly.  A couple of hours keeping up with another advanced rider on a BMW R1200GS who was trying to lose me in the French Alps springs to mind as the zenith of my fast riding achievement, but never again; I’m not up to that sort of thing these days.

So this afternoon I shall be enjoying the start of my 2011 biking season and although I will be concentrating on my riding I will be counting my blessings and I’ll try to spare a thought for those less fortunate people who either don’t have a GoldWing to ride at all or have to leave it alone this afternoon while they are at work.  Especially the Southern Softies, who seen to be in for a spot of rain today, poor things.

You will probably have been fooled into missing the double “the” words in the sentence on the left because your don’t expect to encounter double occurrences of “the” when you are reading.  Of course placing the extra word at the line breaks also helps to mislead you.

The significance of Expectancy when you are riding your GoldWing is however not so much that you will be fooled into missing things, although you might, but that other road users will put you at risk because they fail to see you.

It’s well know of course that an important cause of fatalities among motorcyclists is car drivers pulling out of side roads in front of them because they haven’t really looked for a fast approaching motorcycle, they were looking only for the cars, buses or lorries which might hurt them in a collision.  They fail to see push bikes for the same reason and it’s also why the Sinclair C5 was doomed to commercial failure.

I had a near miss recently at a mini-roundabout because a driver didn’t expect to see anyone in his path and assumed his way through the roundabout was clear, even though he didn’t have a clear view.

I was using the roundabout to reverse direction having given up trying to turn right our of a side road into busy two-way traffic; the only way I could hope to get moving was to grab a gap in the traffic to turn left turn instead of right and then find somewhere to turn round.  I didn’t know the locality well but I had an idea there was a roundabout only a few  hundred yards down the road, which indeed there was.

But it was a mini-roundabout and there were a pair of them close together at a staggered crossroads, the first one having two other entry roads, one coming in from my left at 9 o’clock and the other at coming more or less straight at me from the other roundabout at 1 o’clock, so there was nothing from my immediate right.

It was an unusually spacious junction for a mini-roundabout and there was plenty of room to go right around it in order to reverse direction.  However it was an unusual place to try to reverse direction and it was the rush hour, so lots of traffic; I was on my toes and being careful.  I slowed down more than I might otherwise have done and I made sure to signal in good time.  There was no way I was diving head on into this manoeuvre.

A car gave way to me at the threshold to my left and another one stopped at the other entry point.  On the face of it my opportunity to reverse direction had presented itself and I was clear to proceed.  I entered the roundabout, taking a wider line that would otherwise have been necessary, to make my 180 degree turn.

Fortunately I was moving slowly and it was just as well because another entered the roundabout at speed from behind the car in front of me, undertaking him at the threshold heading for his first exit, the same road I would be leaving by.  He didn’t see me until he was on the roundabout by which time he was half way across it and the only thing which had prevented a collision was my emergency stop.  He drove on after only the briefest slacking of his pace, a mere momentary lifting of his foot off the throttle.

I suspect he was a regular at this roundabout and that he was making his way home as quickly as possible.  So he didn’t really look, except perhaps across the rear of the car he was undertaking towards the entry road from his right, and he was as shocked as I was when we suddenly came into near collision.  He was driving too fast for the situation of course but he also failed to look for other vehicles already on the roundabout because he wasn’t expecting there to be any.  Assuming he saw the car on his right he would have seen that it was stationary and he perhaps assumed that this implied a gap on the roundabout through which he could make his dirty dash.  Expectancy had led him to make a serious misjudgement.

So the extra caution I had exercised paid off.  I was moving slowly because of the danger that someone would appear from nowhere.  I don’t think I was being particularly clever in being extra cautious in this situation and I certainly didn’t think in terms of expectancy popping up.  It was merely that because I was doing something unusual, in aiming to reverse direction at a mini-roundabout,  so it just felt like I should take extra care.

So there are at several lessons to be learned for motorcyclists from this scenario:

• If you plan an unusual manoeuvre which might take other road users by surprise, take extra care.
• When it’s rush hour expect extra distraction or carelessness as well as extra hurry from other road users.
• If car drivers have the smallest of reasons not to expect to see a motorcyclist, assume that most of them won’t even try to look.