So I checked the oil and tyre pressures and hit the road at 7.30 this morning, headed for Hartside. The roads are varied, long fast corners, tight nadgery hairpins, bumpy poorly surfaced bits and random wandering sheep just to keep you on your toes. Not much traffic at that time of the morning either.
The engine is brilliant, pulls strongly from everywhere and sounds awesome, even with db killers in the Arrow silencers. The rear tyre is quite badly squared off and I could feel it rolling off the edge as you turn but it never gave me any buttock clenching moments. Suspension is ok most of the time but on particularly bumpy sections it got a bit out of shape. I checked when I got home and the rear shock compression and rebound damping were turned all the way up. I've set it back to stock so that should improve things.
I spent some time this afternoon bonding. I don't feel as if a bike is properly mine until I've done some work on it, so the rear wheel had to come off so I could take a closer look at the flaking paint on the swingarm. Those of us who have had to remove the wheel on a single sided swing arm will know how difficult it is to stop the wheel turning while you loosen the nut - a ratchet strap through the wheel, attatched to the ABBA stand does the trick
This really shouldn't happen on a 13000 mile bike
I cleaned of all the loose paint, rubbed it down with wet and dry and applied some smooth Hammerite. It really needs the swing arm removing and completely refinishing but that's a job for the winter. At least this will stop any further corrosion - that and only riding it when it'd dry and sunny.
( I like the 1100 Monster too though)
seems very odd.
