Sons and Daughters, Brothers and Sisters...

Boys

Sons are just the best, they like to play with cool toys, they are full of laughter and they surprise you every day with just how much they grow into a damn cool guy. Alex is doing this, he is great fun to hang out with and it is amazing that it was not that long ago that he was a boy. Well now he is a man and as such he drinks, farts and fiddles with motorbikes. We could not be more proud. So when my Brother Pauly came to visit, we had to go out to play in Pauly's truck.

You can just see Alex sat about a third up the way the cliff face

So we headed out into the hills of Somerset and tried our hand at a bit of local offroading, which we loved. Pauly is an expert driver and approaches any challenge with his usual gentle humour and then climbs his truck up the sort of rocky slopes we loved to ride our bikes down so many years ago. While out and about we checked out some of the old places we visited as kids, including the caves we explored while on a school trip in 1990!

The entrance to Sidcut Swallat cave, Mendip.

Going underground!

Nothing like a bit of solo climbing forty feet up a cliff with no rope!

More solo climbing at height

So after a whole day of adventuring we wandered home and Alex declared that he was in love with Pauly's truck and we both had a new hobby. Let's OFF ROAD! A massive huge thank you to my dearest brother Pauly and my lovely step son Alex, who made a day out a pure pleasure.

Girls

Girls are just great, they are pretty, they smell nice and they like cuddles. Can you tell that I always wanted to be a mummy? So when Alex announced that his lovely girlfriend Beth was moving in with us, I was overjoyed. You see, Beth is lovely, she has filled our home with laughter and seeing Alex this happy is just wonderful. You have never seen such a beautiful couple who compliment each other so well. 

The thinker goes Gothic!

Well, once Beth was moved in and had settled into the comfortable life of enduring Jayne's almost continuous farting and Carol's horrendous snoring, she let us know that she would like to travel north to visit her Mum and introduce her to Alex. Well, any excuse for a ride out...

So we decided to take the motorbikes and ride the ninety three miles to Beths Mum's house. Only Carol's bike had packed up, with leaking fork seals, blowing exhausts and a failing cooling system. Noreen needed a lot of work to make sure that she could make the journey. 

No forks or cooling system

So over two weekends Carol tore Noreen to bits and put her back together again. 

Going back together

It took some time, a lot of work and a few cups of tea. Once sorted, it was a quick test and then we discovered that the cooling fan had melted. Thankfully a dear friend of Curious Adventures, Wayne of the bashed up ZXR sports bikes stepped in and offered us a new fan. With Carol off the road, another friend of Curious Adventures, Rich stepped in and rode over to Wayne's to pick up the fan. Both of these men are utter gentlemen and with out them, we would have been stumped. So huge thanks to them both. 

So with the bikes sorted, we hit the road and headed North...

Beth and Mummy

Jayne meets long time hero, Vlad the Impaler...

Then as we left Tintern on the way home, Carol discovered that during all of her work, she had not adjusted her head light correctly. Oops, but it was a simple fix... until her bike over heated once again and spewed coolant all over the road. So we stopped for a short break and took in the fabulous view that we could see in the dark, in the woods on the edge of Newport.

Finally, with Noreen fixed once again, we hit the road, quite literally in the case of Beth when Sylvie dropped down an unmarked bump in the road and hurt her ribs. Cue another pain relief stop in Oarst services. Damn that place is shit. 

Three numb arses and one case of sore ribs later...

Finally at just after midnight, we rolled up the hill and home. I dropped Sylvie back in the garage and as we were locking up the bikes Alex came back and told us that we were locked out. The front door was locked from the inside. Fortunately it turned out that he was just so tired, he forgot that the door has two locks! Bed that night was welcoming for us all and after two hundred miles of riding Jayne's shoulders were completely ruined, her hands no longer worked and just keeping her eyes open as she took off her leathers was a challenge! 

This was Beth and Alex's first Curious Adventure together, just as it was Pauly and Alex's first Curious Adventure too. A month of firsts and a month spent with some of the most beautiful people I could ever ask to be with. After many years of wanting, I have the family I always wanted and I could not be happier.

A huge thank you list this month and in no particular order

Alex - for being so much fun and the perfect son

Beth - For being so lovely and the perfect daughter

Pauly - For being the brother every sister wishes for

Rich - For going beyond the call of duty and being a true friend

Wayne - for being a fountain of knowledge and so kind

Finally, I want to thank my beautiful Carol, the woman who has given me so much over the years, so much love and happiness, the family I always wanted and the partner who makes Curious Adventures so much fun. Thank you my family, I love you all.

What a day

You may well have noticed that of late, Curious Adventures have been more curious and less adventurous and there is a reason for this, Jayne (yes OK, me) has a knackered shoulder! A knackered shoulder that makes riding her bike rather hard and painful work, after all think about how your bike steers. With counter steering, as a rider you push the side away from you where you want to go, hence the name of counter steering. Well, for those of you not familiar with the technique, please do not try steering the opposite way you want to go, it will result in you crashing painfully into what ever is not where you want to go! Counter steering is done by placing a gentle pressure upon the bar, not actually turning the bars, it works by effectively changing the push on the front wheel and banking the bike over. Now I am sure that there people reading this who have a far better understanding of the physics of this technique than I do and I would love to read how it really works, but for now that will do. Why did I mention it? Well because I just can’t do it at the moment.

So with a knackered shoulder I have been forced to endure all manner of helpful medical staff from our beloved NHS prodding, poking, pulling or pushing my bits and pieces. Most recently I have endured needles shoved deep into my muscle tissue, intense massage of my neck and exercises involving rubber bands. None of this has worked. The exercises have made it worse, the massage made it worse and as for the needles, do you really need to ask? Oh alright, yes they made it worse. All of which brings me to MRI scans. Magnetic Resonance Imagery is a fantastic science where using a combination of fantastic physics, breath taking biology and a man with a bad hair cut, the medics can have a look about inside your body with out having to slice into it like a crusty loaf!

The down side though is that an MRI scanner costs an absolute fortune and each scan costs a smaller but still significant fortune. So they are not handed out to just anyone and today I had an appointment to see if I justified having a scan. Well, that is supposed to be what today was about.

So Carol and I set off this afternoon at close to half past twelve, giving us an hour to make a journey that should only take twenty minutes. Our first stop was for fuel because my bike was showing a worrying fuel light having driven a pitiful 87 miles since my last fuel stop. With the pump droning away I filled both my and Carol’s bikes and then went and paid up the ridiculous sum wanted for a thimble full of go-go juice. Back outside, when we switched on Noreen  and tried to start the engine, it resolutely sat there refusing to burn the thimble full of petrol we had just dripped into it. We tried again and nothing happened. So we kept on trying, Carol wiggled wires and pushed and pulled switches and buttons, but still nothing. Time was counting down, forty minutes to the appointment.

We looked at each other, Noreen was going no where, Carol shook her head angrily and had a gentle word in the bikes ear. Now let’s be honest here, when Carol has a gentle word in your ear, it is wise that you listen. The bike did just that and with another push of the button, it roared into life, with just a couple of sets of traffic lights and couple of roundabouts to get through before hitting the motorway. That was until we discovered that the A370 was running at speeds only seen by your average snail! We finally got to the motorway, twenty minutes until my appointment. We raced off down the slip way and joined the busy traffic and began to make progress towards Clevedon, half way there, Noreen started to do odd things. 

Her rear light started to flash, but not in a way that is easy to explain. The rear light of the ZRX has two bulbs and they started to flash alternately, one side and then the other. The light then flicked off and relights. It flashes some more and then flashes off again. As we approached the Clevedon exit it became apparent that Noreen also had another problem, her rear tyre had decided to let all of it’s air out. We rolled to the top of the slip way, turned on to the road into the town and headed down to the roundabout, where we discovered that the tyre had totally deflated. Unfortunately, the car behind us was not completely understanding of our predicament and hooted angrily. With no real choice, we rode carefully around the roundabout, Noreen also decided that at that moment it was a perfect time to run on only three cylinders! Ten minutes until my appointment.

Fortunately there is a Shell garage just around the corner from where we pulled over, which is why we made our way there, only to discover that it had closed and was being renovated! The workmen there guided us away to another garage, but we just did not have time. So we limped Noreen, running on three cylinders and a flat tyre to the hospital. Five minutes until my appointment! We arrived, parked up and ran like buggery to get there on time and made it to reception at twenty nine minutes and thirty seconds past the hour.

The medical stuff was dealt with I walked out of the room, tears in my eyes, an intense burning pain in my shoulder and a worried Carol on my arm. Back in the car park, Noreen was sat on a flat tyre. We rolled it down the hill and out of the car park and phoned the RAC. Following a  quick chat with the call centre and we settled down for an afternoon of waiting on the pavement. Carol bought a local newspaper that took us less than ten minutes to read and we sat there, bored. Finally after an hour and twenty minutes we had a phone call from a manger at the RAC call centre who apologised for the long wait that we had enjoyed, but promised faithfully that a truck would be with us as soon as possible.

Another forty minutes passed, Carol and I considered learning to juggle to pass the time, but we were saved from this torture by Martyn, the truck driver, who phoned to ask where we were. It was great news, our Knight in orange overalls was coming, but coming from Gloucester, he had a journey time of another forty minutes. Carol and I sat there, bored, we even considered taking up knitting! Finally though, he arrived and we were able to load Noreen onto the back of the fabulous RAC truck. Martyn himself was a jolly chap and chatted all of the way home, Carol rode Sylvie back home and got the garage ready to receive a poorly Noreen. Jayne got to ride in another fabulous truck and finally at nearly seven in the evening, exhausted, Carol and I walked through our front door and sat down. It had been another curious adventure. 

Show me the way to go home, I'm tired and I want to go to bed!

I want my bike back!

No bike looks good on the back of a truck.

The urge to ride her home like that was so hard to ignore.

To oil or not to oil... Now there is a question...

Now for those of you who enjoy riding motorcycles, there is the extra pleasure of home servicing, getting your hands dirty and doing the jobs that your bike needs to stay healthy and happy. But with home servicing there is a down side, what do you do with the used engine oil? With a motorcycle like mine, the engine oil also acts as the gear box oil, it soaks the clutch plates and lines the bores. So as you can imagine, what comes out of the sump plug at the bottom of the engine is not the nice golden silky fluid that is poured in through the filler cap.

Now getting rid of used engine oil is fairly simple, as is joked about in the fabulous film (and book come to that, but I have not read it, so can't be fully sure) Fight Club, used engine makes a great lawn fertilizer! The truth though is that used engine oil is poisonous. The muck that comes out of an engine after a season of hard use is carcinogenic, it contains fragments of metal if you are unlucky and lumps of crank if you are really unlucky. It also contains the microscopic particles worn from your clutch plates and carbon particles from your cylinders, so yeah, it is pretty mucky stuff. On a serious note, really really do not pour this stuff into the environment, it is horribly dangerous to wildlife, it destroys habitats and dumping this muck out there will get you a massive, massive fine if you are caught!

So Carol and I set about an experiment, you see I had read on the internet that it was possible to use used engine oils to lubricate your chain, via the chain oiling mechanism, however with your oil full of nasty impurities who wants to spray that over the drive system of their pride and joy? So I made a filter, on the end of a funnel and we passed half a litre of dirty oil through the filter and then checked it to see what was left behind. The top filter contained the sort of detritus you find in old oil cans, but the bottom filter contained nothing but a soggy bit of oil that had not made it through. 

So the next step was to filter a little more and this is exactly what we did, so we ended up with close to five litres of filter old engine oil in a nice clean bucket! However, fitting in with our recycling ethos, the bucket was recycled too. The top was fitted into place and into this I added a little soap dispenser pump and promptly pumped a small sample out into a specimen bottle. Now you may be wondering why I did this, but lets carry on with what I did first before I explain it.

Taking the specimen bottle, I gave it a damn good shake and made sure that any nasties were held in suspension with in the fluid and then taped a very strong neodymium magnet to the side. I then sat it on its side and left it for a week. By doing this, I could then examine that part of the specimen bottle for ferrous particles by gently tipping it and leaving any bits stuck in the magnetic fields. 

Now you can ask if you have to why I did this? The answer my dears is to look for steel fragments, anything small enough to pass through the filters that could potentially damage my chain. After a week, the magnet was surprising in its complete lack of ferrous particles stuck to it. So that leaves us with a bucket of oil and a fairly clear idea that it is well filtered. 

My next step was to contact our old friends at Tutoro Chain Oilers, and ask their opinion and other than a few suggestions as to what may be useful additives, they say why not give it a try. So that leads me to this point and a question for you folks out there in Curious Adventure land. 

Do you think that used engine oil makes a good chain lube for use in your automatic chain oiler? Have you done it and does it prevent rust and keep your chain healthy or does it just spray a poisonous nasty mess onto you bike? So come on folks, don't be shy. Tell us what you think?

Cheers

Tutoro Auto Chain Oiler as fitted to Sylvie

Tutoro Auto Chain Oiler as fitted to Noreen

Get your filthy hands off my Biking

24^th of June 2012, MAG action day.

Disney never made a film about these two!

If you are reading this, but are not a biker then you may be wondering why Bikers are making so much fuss at the moment about proposed legislation coming direct from Unelected Bureaucrats working in the offices of power with in the EU. More directly, you may be wondering why a load of bikers held up the traffic today in the middle of the day while wearing very large yellow t-shirts shouting about the EU?

Well, there is a very good reason, or to be brutally honest a whole pile of reason, but here is a brief synopsis taken from MAG themselves on why they are very concerned about this new legislation.

o                 It aims to restrict the possibility of carrying out modifications to motorcycle power-trains (from the airbox down to and including the radius of the rear tyre) - your campaigning efforts so far have helped to roll-back some aspects of this threat but we are still faced with proposals to make it far more difficult to work on future bikes and to add cost and complexity to bike ownership.

o                 It aims to prevent engine re-mapping

o                 It admits that there is no evidence to say there is a problem caused by modifications, or what size that 'problem' may be.

o                 It aims to make 'Advanced Braking Systems' compulsory on every machine from 125cc up, adding hugely to the purchase price of cheap commuters.

o                 It aims to limit the availability of aftermarket parts that may alter performance

o                 Much of the technical substance of exactly what is included may not be written until after the regulation has become law, instead the Commission will use 'Delegated Acts' to make changes and it is unclear how effectively these will be scrutinised.

o                 The European Ombudsman has found the Commission has a case to answer that the legislation has been drafted in breach of European Treaties (which requires evidence to justify a new law)

o                 Other procedures seem to be at odds with democratic accountability

Taken directly from the MAG Website,

 http://www.mag-uk.org/en/campaignsdetail/a6989

Strong stuff, but what does any of it mean? Basically if you buy a bike and then intend to modify it in anyway. Tough, you wont be able to. No funky tyres, no race exhausts and no way you are going to be allowed to take out that wimpy cam shaft and put a nice race one in that de-tuned GSXR engine you bunged in your heavily chopped Streetfighter frame. Add to that they want you to fit ABS to every bike on the market, even if it is a super cheap training bike. Let’s be honest, ABS is an option and not every one likes it. Personally, I had ABS on the Honda I rode a while back and to be frank the brakes on that lacked feel because they were just horrible. The brakes on my SV are simple “twin piston in a floating calliper” units and they are both strong and effective. In use they have loads of feel and can stop very well. ABS would be an option, but would it be nice? Also how much would it cost? 

So in protests against this draconian “thou shalt do as thou is told” laws, we all got together and had a bit of a shout on the motorway. Those present in the Van were Biker Rock Radio Boss, Steve and his Biker Rock crew of DJ Ghost and Prof Plums. On the bikes were a rather broken Jayne (still suffering with a poorly shoulder) riding a shiny and clean Sylvie and Carol with Alex on Noreen.

On our arrival at Taunton Dean services, our immediate priority was to get the music blasting and get some good biker tunes rousing the crowd of gathering bikers. I am pretty sure that no one expected a PA to turn up or for great music to be present and the guys from MAG quickly came over and said hello. A quick exchange of T-shirts and we were ready to roll.

The Biker Rock Radio Roadshow in action.

The Rozzers come for Jayne and Alex.

At exactly one PM, the convoy started and three hundred bikes rolled out onto the north bound and hit forty miles per hour. It was a magnificent sight and once again I was able to ride with Carol on a huge mass protest ride. On the south bound side of the motorway, another large group of bikers were heading the other direction and nationwide, bikers everywhere had gathered into groups to do exactly the same thing. This truly was an epic protest.

Best parts of the day had to be the smiles and waves of support we got from car drivers, crowds who gathered on bridges and kids watching. But then there is something impressive about three hundred bikes thundering by.

Other sights worthy of note were the birds of prey we saw hunting in the verges between carriage ways or on the sides. I counted several buzzards and had one fly right past me, as we cruised along, clutching it's lunch of a vole in it’s beak.

The ride was a lot of fun, but it had a serious point. That point was this, to those unelected people making decisions for “my benefit”, when you know nothing about me, get your filthy hands off my hobby!

 

A party at Gordano Services after the protest ride.

It is not just two wheels being threatened.

Prof Plums showing off his Woofers