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Wonderful! Well done! My little Ginger is my shadow

Great story Pedro! Sage is quite literally my "Best Friend"......especially since Jana passed last August. She's been through so much with me. I'd be an absolute TrainWreck without her.....

Its not cheap keeping horses! The best i can do is feed this thing!

A wee rode report from a trip earlier in the year. We're hoping to do this again next January if anyone is interested. As always, it's on my blog. https://yodagoat.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-possible-birth-of-winter-motorcycle.html?m=1 All feedback welcome. Mike

There's a little ride I love going on near home, it's about 60 to 70km roundtrip, I can stop midway for coffee at a hilltop place or at a nice small restaurant with nice typical food. My house is in ribatejo, in a place that is too warm during summertime, and this provides welcome relief because on top of this hill you get cold winds from the seaside. It's also a place where I used to take small sunday morning trips with Maria, be it on the bike or the track car in the winter. I started going shortly after I started to deal with being all alone with nothing to do on weekends and it's now become my own ritual, I'm not going to be dramatic as to say it saved my life, but it surely made a lot of days bearable. It started to be a way of coping, and is now a ritual that I really enjoy. If you want to see where it is click here: Serra de Montejunto Parking for my favorite restaurant up there: It's a nice place to go, if you like old windmills in working condition: Some light off-roading, if that's your thing: Most of the time, I usually take the tarmac, though: My little shelter, resting cafe up there, sometimes you see some different machines there, like an Africa Twin all the way from Japan Or this tricked out, loud as hell, Yamaha DT50 with an 80cc kit: But most of the time I just chill by myself: When I feel like eating alone, there's this little place with a view: All in time to get back home for a glass of wine while watching the sunset from my front door: There you go, the little corner of Portugal I call home.

possibly the last of my september trips as work has evolved and we now are busier in september than in July August. It was my fist proper trip on the tiger which I bought in october 2017. The 3rd week september is traditionally our "boys only" weekend away with the "club" ( inverted commas cos we're not officially a club anymore) and in 2018 the planned destination was the high Jura. 8 bikes in all and all except me had just the weekend off. I didn't need to be back at work till the thursday and had cleared it with Madame MooN that I would be an extra day at least. day one went something like this: Auxerre Besancon via A6 and A39 in order to get just east of Besancon for Lunch and then straight into the good bits. Up the Doubs valley to Baume les dames, Pont de roide, Maiche,Villiers les lac, Morteau ( sausages!), Pontarlier ( aperitif!), les gorges de la Langouette, Morez et premanon. As usual, when riding with the group I don't get time to stop and take pics. but we did about 500km in the day with about 250 on the more interesting roads between besancon and Premanon. next morning i rode with the group as far as Cure where they turned back westwards and I carried on turning right down the eastern flanc of the Jura towards lac leman ( or lake Geneva as the uneducated call it) I dropped down the hairpins through St Cergue to the lakeshore and along the edge of the lake through geneva and out the other side heading North east alon the french shore and back into Switzerland at St Gingolph where I popped down to the lake edge and took this photo. To take the pic I was sat at the same table in the café Madame MooN and I ate at on our very first weekend bike trip nearly 25 years ago... It was too early to eat so I set off again, heading for Martigny and the col st bernard. I stopped at a petrol station and grabbed a sandwich and a drink ( when in switzerland, drink milk and eat yoghurt, its devine!) There were quite a few bikes about and I had fun annoying some power rangers and then trying to keep up with some swiss plated ducatis. My excuse is that they probably knew the road, being locals... I stopped to picnic by the lake at the top which was heaving with bikes from all over. Me being the asocial entity that I am, I didn't stay long I rapidly withdrew, stopping a little further round the lake for the pic above. I then set off down the south side of the mountain heading for Aosta. I had a lot of fun on the way down but was very much put to shame by a complete nutter on a pushbike who would overtake on the straights ( 70odd km/h) and then get in my way on the hairpins. This is how I discovered that I can lean the Tiger considerably further over into the corners than I would have dared with the tralp ( Oh, and that the bakes are a little more efficient...) having skirted Aosta, I headed west and North back up the valley towards the Mont Blanc, on the Italien side turning southwest before Courmeyeur and heading back up to the french border and the col du petit St Bernard. looking north to Mont Blanc I spent the night in a small gite in Bonneval, just north of Moutiers. I was totally knackered and had made very few stop, thus discovering pretty much just how many hours i can spend in the saddle on this bike and since the back op. I think it was nearly 9 hours if i remember right, including the few stops. the next day was just an easy run home via Annecy and Bellegarde where I picked up the A40 westbound and thus onto the A6 northbound at Macon and Home for tea and buns by 5pm. i did manage to get a speeding ticket as a souvenir somewhere around Annecy and I also learnt that when an automatic camera flashes you in a Tunnel you KNOW you just got flashed...?

I had a KTM990 Dakar for a year as a stop gap as I was waiting for the KTM790R to come out and the dealer I got it from had agreed to take back the 990 in part exchange. When the 790 was announced they called me up and asked me how much I was expecting to pay, they then told me the price (£11,995) and I told them where to go. I loved the 990 but found it heavy at times and 37mpg was a bit fruity as well so I turned my attention to the T700. All the reports from the magazines and web sites were raving about it but Yamaha were playing silly buggers in regards to how you bought one. There were none in the dealers show rooms, you had to go online and order it, BUT it was on offer for the first batch at £8,399. I took the plunge knowing damm well that I could easily sell it if it turned out that I didn't like it. I waited 3 months for it to arrive , ran it in before the first service and now I can't bloody ride the it because of this bloody virus ?

I had a testride on the T7 a while back. Was a great bike but my right leg kept rubbing against the clutch cover and I found it quite irritating after just a two hour ride. The stealer said that I wasn't the first one to mention it. I was all set to buy one, but it put me off when I imagined being on it for days. Throttle was rather jerky at low revs making it a bit tedious in traffic. I could have lived with that though. A shame about that cover.

That as well. ?

Another ride report from my blog. My dad and I rode to Russia via Lofoten and Nordkapp. It's some place if you like scenery. Ooya! https://yodagoat.blogspot.com/2017/12/scotland-to-russia-and-back-again.html?m=1 Cheers Mike

Getting Kawasaki's bean counters to ok disc brakes was a brutal fight down at Corporate let me tell you....lol

Think I remember you telling us about the Suzuki now. At least you ended up with something you have an excuse for.? Still have your old exhaust which I cut down, not on the bike anymore, think my age is liking a quieter life and now the standards are back on. Thinking the same way on my Dominator aswell, to bloody loud.

Yes and no. I vowed to sell the TDM when it reached 60k. By then I'd had the bike for 13 years and though the engine was good for another 60+k the plastics were falling apart and the bike was looking tatty. Truly a great bike the 9er and I miss it, but I wanted something with less plastic that I could service myself and the Himalayan fitted the bill. That said, I would now be the owner of a DL650 if the sellers word had been good. I had the train ticket bought and was in the process of getting insurance quotes when he phoned to say he sold it to someone who turned up at his door with the readies. This is the post-modern world and a man's word is worth nothing. Found a great deal on Ebay, bought the bike from a bloke in Glossop and rode it back up the M6. First thoughts were, 'bloody hell, this is no motorway tool'. And it's not, but on the country lanes it's a cracking bike. It handles great, has plenty of low down punch for the tricky stuff. It feels best at 50-60 mph and will return 80 mpg at those speeds. I was never much of a fast rider anyway in recent years, so it suits me fine. It's not as light as I would've liked, being almost as hefty as my 9er, but the weight means it feels nice and planted. I used to love riding the Kawasaki Super Sherpa and it reminds me more of that bike than of my old XT600E, which I didn't get on with at all.

Au contraire mon ami, I see your Bisley and raise you a Mrs Paws Mrs Paws is a stray who appeared at our back door about 10 years ago. My wife would bollock me for letting her in and wasn't keen at all, nowadays you'd have to prise that cat from her dead body before she'd let go ? This is our son Paolo trying to coax her to eat back in 2010 and hear she is today, she doesn't seem to get any older, unlike me ?

I don't suppose you remember, but on July 2012 I posted a report in which, riding the XR in the woods, I found an abandoned puppy and took him home. He was barely one month old, very sick and had a serious case of scabies, left to die in a heatwave. This is him after a couple of weeks at home: And this is him now, spoiled and 8 years old, having survived serious liver surgery last year: He's the man! ?

2004 BMW F650GS Dakar with a few modifications...

Hello everyone!! Thanks for having me! My friend Pedro Rocha pointed me in your direction because he knows how much I love the UK and the UK bike scene and how much I miss it. From 2001 to 2009 I lived in the UK, it was where I got my first bike, and all the others afterwards actually!! Currently I live in Portugal and try to go out as much as possible, although haven't done a lot recently because I started my own small animal vet practice and have concentrated on that. I am also going to run a moto tours business, which is something I really love to do. Being a total numpty when it comes to off road ridding and half a numpty on the road , I am hoping to learn a lot of things here!! Again, thanks for having me!!

Dunno mate, the time was right, physically for my back I needed something less... erm... vibratory... than the old tralp and I still had a couple of years befor N01 daughte started university so... I'm starting to see reports of the first generation of 800xc's racking up 100,000+ km with no majour problems so I don't see why not. I tend to keep things till they're no longer fit for purpose so we'll see I guess.

He will be off his nut on pot today.

Interesting Alan, a few owners have mentioned jerky fuelling and it was worrying me slightly before I collected mine. Fortnately mine is smoother than a smooth thing and so is my mates. Judging by owners reactions on other sites I reckon you're pretty unlucky if you end up with one that has bad fuelling.

What we need (especially with what's going on at the moment) is a conspiracy theorist, bring back Zzzzzzzzzzzack ?

That' s some serious street cred in the GS community at ADV rider!

No problem at all Pete. I hate motorways on a bike and the back roads and trails in France are a great way to cross the country if you're not in a hurry. It will sit at 65-70mph on dual-carrigeways with no fuss and all the while you're getting 80mpg ? I would quite happily ride it down to the Pyrenees and probably will in the future.

Some of these names look familiar ? Good to see em again!

This is my Honda CRF250 Rally. I usually by secondhand but this was the first brand new bike I'd bought for 35 years. I've had it for 18 months now and I'm really pleased with it, it took a bit of getting used to as you have to wring it's neck to go anywhere fast and works in a completely different way to the DR350's I'd been riding for 15 years or so. It's taken me to France twice already , done some of the TET and some other trail riding over there and down to my mates house near Brive-le-Gaillarde. I've modified it a bit to suit my trail riding, the main thing you need to do with these bikes is replace the rear shock as the Honda unit is awful. I put a YSS jobby on mine and it works great.

Tried that, no joy ? Edit: went for a walk down the park, come back and working again now ? ? ?

Hey old riding partner..... good to see you're still alive & kicking....

Already shared it with mates etc so hopefully some will be along to create mayhem. ?

Ha ha absolutely ??

I gave them the best 3 posts of my life ya know.

There sure is some great riding where you live Pete

You definitely took the best option Fred by heading back home. Next year I'm just going to stay in the Conwy YHA and not move, it's an ace spot ? That's an ace lane, not very long but with a fantastic view, I did it with Paul Mules about 10 years ago

You know... probably the same damn thing ? Things are good actually... family and I are healthy so cannot complain. Cheers!

Wassup!

I’m still without Moto... having sold the TransAlp bikes and Africa Twin RD03. Still miserable with my old Series Land Rover rigs!?

Cheers! It’s been awhile. ?

After all these muddy pictures, I went and dug up a few pictures from the old days, didn't find what I was looking for but found these from when I first started riding my XR, back in 2007 I loved riding sand back then, when I bought the bike it had a few cables badly routed and the steering was stuck. Since I fixed it, I started falling down in the stuff ?

Good to see my fellow adaptive Rider......? ? your T7 buddy-- ?

one of life's simple pleasures was taking a motorcycle turd and polishing it to my liking, and it's been a while since I had the bug in a big way. Mostly because we moved and bought a house that has been an ongoing project since we moved in and is still demanding some work, but here in the lesser 48 the project bike market is much larger than in Alaska and it's finally game on! Picked up this ummmm, BSA as it is recorded on the title, with several tubs of various bike parts, mostly from a Honda CM400 it appears. The motor is the same as the CM400 I rescued many years ago and that we still have, it's now pretty the spare bike. I've always had a desire to build a chopper, and here is the start!

Hi, A friend sent me a link to this site. I've been riding on and off since 1973. For most of that time it was sports bikes. I've done some racing too, mostly drag racing. In 2017 I moved from the US to Spain. When I left the US most of my time and money was going into my light aircraft but with a retiree's budget flying isn't likely to be a thing for me here, though I do want to see about flying a sailplane. So after a while the urge for another motorcycle set in. Spanish law does not provide a mechanism for me to exchange my US driver's license so I had to go through the whole process again, starting from scratch. Once I had my automobile license I started looking at getting a bike license. Turns out that I am limited to 47 horsepower for the first two years, though I can restrict a bike with up to twice that amount. There's enough dirt roads here that I thought it would be good to get a bike that I can ride on them. My wife never wanted to ride on my sports bikes so I decided to try to buy something that is comfortable two up on the highways. Also, one thing that I'd become sick of doing is cleaning and lubing chains every 600 miles. So after doing some research I decided to get an old BMW R1150 GS. It's affordable, has a good reputation and can be restricted. So that's what I did. Oh, yeah. Getting an A2 motorcycle license here was expensive and it was a pain. Everything is in Spanish, which is a language that I don't speak well. But I had the money, I had the time and I had the determination. So I've got the A2 license and in less than a year I can exchange it for an A license. The GS is kind of a strange beast compared to what I'm used to. However after putting some kilometers on it and tweaking it to my satisfaction (basic mechanical work, premium shocks, premium seats, GPS) it's not a bad bike for just riding. It handles better than it has a right to on the road. My biggest complaint is that it sits high and it's a little tough to touch the ground at stops. But I've found that the bike grows on one after a while. But of course she's been sitting in the garage with a battery maintainer attached for about a month and a half now. Funny thing is that we've had crap weather for about the same amount of time. I wonder if the fact that there's a lot less road traffic has had some sort of effect on the weather. Anyhow, here's a pic of my Beemer. I generally leave the panniers off when I'm just out riding.

I've been meaning to strip the rear end off this bike since i bought it in 2010 but only now getting around to it. No play at all in the linkage but not long after i bought the bike i noticed the rear end creaking when getting on and off the bike then it stopped and i forgot about it. As i suspected one of the bearings is seized along with the bolt and another badly corroded bearing. As usual its the most difficult bolt to get at that has seized. Had to strip the swing arm off to get at it and the centre stand has to come off to take the bolt out if it hadn't seized which is a bit of a problem as that's whats holding the bike up but since i'm cutting the bolt it can stay on for now First job is to drill the head off the bolt luckily i had some long cobalt drill bits i bought for a different job a few years ago and long they need to be I started with a small bit and worked my way up to 10mm as that is what diameter the bolt is Didn't take long and the head is off, i had to put a maul grip on the thread the other end to stop the bolt from turning once the head came off so i could drill a bit deeper on the bolt shaft Next was to cut the thread off this would have been a real problem if it wasn't for this little air powered reciprocating saw fitted with a cut down cobalt hacksaw blade, i bought it years ago to cut the swing arm spindle off a scrap XR400 i bought for spares. It took a while but it went through OK Once all cut i used a tyre lever to pry the linkage out And shes out I was quite surprised how good the condition of the rest of the bolts were for a 26 year old bike So the bike was left like this while waiting for parts to arrive

Decided to lake the back end off the bike to tidy it up looking quite rusty under there. When taking the indicators off i had to undo a load of insulation tape around the wires. When investigating why the tape was on there i found for some bizarre reason a previous owner had cut the wires off the indicators and soldered them onto the the opposite one using orange cable to extend them and couldn't even get that right, they had the live going to earth the reason the fuse didn't blow is because the brackets the indicators bolt onto are rubber mounted and are isolated from the frame anyhow i swapped them back the way they were supposed to be minus all the slack that was there I also made this exhaust deflector plate, i got the scott oiler touring kit and noticed when taking things apart it was being melted by the hot exhaust gasses you can see the bow in the number plate where it was catching the exhaust gasses and deflecting them behind the number plate getting everything hot there. This wouldn't happen with the standard exhaust but the venom exhaust is a lot shorter than the standard one This is the back end painted up its not in the best condition hopefully this will preserve it until i strip the whole bike and get it all done properly That was my bank holiday and last weeks evenings taken care of next week is the front end, oil and filter change and i'm going to flush the cooling system no time to get bored here ?

The rest of the suspension parts were waiting for me when i got home from work last Wednesday thought i'd get it all together that night but forgot i need a new chain slider for the swing arm ordered a genuine one from rugged roads so waiting for that before i put the swing arm on The new bolt i got to replace the one i cut off is a bit awkward to put in as you need to take off the centre stand and to get that off you need to take off the exhaust but i managed to do it by removing the one sleeve on the side the bolt goes in from. Which was a pain to put back in with the springs attached but really didn't want to take the exhaust off or the centre stand springs While waiting for the parts to arrive i made this bracket to stiffen up the back end as it bounces about with the weight of the scottoiler touring reservoir on there. The threaded holes were already in the frame not sure what they were for but were perfect to mount this

The bearing and seal insertion tool i made worked great Bearings pushed in equally each side And now for the seal Everything has now been painted waiting for it to dry and once the collars and bolt arrive from Honda i can reassemble everything

So to kill some more time i made a tool to press the new bearings and seal back in when they arrive,made from a large bolt. I screwed the nut half way up the bolt and welded in place then cut the head off the bolt, I should have taken the photo before i started All finished the right side is to push the bearing in, the step in the larger diameter is to make sure the bearing is pushed in the correct depth to allow the space for the seal to fit, the left side is to push the seal in flush after the bearing, well that's the theory anyway lol