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Two things! First........you know when you've read through a thread and you want to go back to the top? Previously you'd have to use the scroll bar on the right to do it........and if the individual posts were very long with lots of pics then it took forever. Well I've now set up a "Back to Top" function which has been added to the bottom right of the page.......all you do is click the up arrow and the page will go back to the top on it's own. Secondly, Invision, in their wisdom of advancing and improving the forum software, did away with the "Preview" button which you could use to check just how shit your contribution was before you posted it. I've now coded it back in and you'll see it just below the text box when you go to post something. When the box opens you'll even see a representation of how utterly crap your post will be on desktop, tablet, and mobile. To close the preview and return to the editor just click on the black cross on the top right hand corner. Or you you can hit Submit Reply to actually post it. Please note that your posted content will still be mindless garbage......but at least you can now preview your mindless garbage before inflicting it on others! You don't get this shit on ButtRider you know! Tell 'em @Tym

This Saturday marks SIX MONTHS since we opened the doors here! Back then, people were locked down and getting more and more frustrated......and going on FaceButt just wound you up even more. So I pulled the trigger on this forum as an escape.......even if I was the only one escaping to it. People signed up, but I honestly didn't think we'd last beyond the end of lockdown. Yet some of us are still here! The nucleus of this place now comprises original DSUK members, plus a few who joined up when we became MB. Which is what I originally wanted. Additionally we've had some new members sign up...... who've made great ride report contributions, and whose outlook is similar to ours. So recommend us to friends if you think they may be interested. Just don't invite any of the individuals that previously got banned on DSUK or MB though. Particularly that guy with the Beemer who had all those sex slaves! Or the Holocaust denier! Or Fuckmine/Flouncing Floater......though somebody who invents his own accidents would be good entertainment up to the point he got banned again! So thanks for your support......I've enjoyed having this place here! AFAIC it's been good seeing old friends again, plus my ride reports can finally be presented in the right way. And spidered by Google too......not lost in a sea of shit on FaceButt never to be found again. What about you? Has this place made a difference for you?

Through Max bikes I met Fred, Ogri, Dawn, Bruce , Ren, Dave and probably a few others I can't remember. I nearly met Pete several times but he always seem make some excuse about it raining or something like that ?

I love this place...ok love might be a bit strong, ?? but I like the fact that it is a smaller group. I really enjoy the.....you know...the....man, I just sound silly, but the down to earthness of it all....like the title of this thread for example, where else can you go and be called a twat in your day..... I like sharing with this group and the silliness that can come about. The newest member was my invite, so I'm working it for ya @XTreme ?

As I have said before, I take no chances, I get off and push the bike round any sharp looking corners. You can't be too careful.

Dude! I'm here too, you know I can see what you're writing! Sheesh, I'm not sure who this other guy is but I hate him already. Wait, what was the question? Oh, Yeah, sure, it gives me something to do while I phone conference in to the latest 8D meeting. To those of you unfamiliar with an "8D" it is a procedure that is done after a fuck up at work to prevent it happening again. 8 steps including identify who to blame, how to fix it, and whay it will never ever happen again. Step 8 is congratulating the team (who did the 8D). In the ever increasing pressure on doing things faster, some companies now require a 5D, which is an 8D with fewer steps. And that is what I'm SUPPOSED to be doing right now, but in fact the meeting is droning on in my earbuds/work laptop while I type away here on my personal MacBook. Oh hey! I just contributed to the meeting! Had to tell the program manager he was wrong and we shold do it a different way. I'm hoping to get laid off BTW - the severance pay would just about cover to when I plan on retiring anyway. Win/win!

That's a good point Eric! I remember when a previous forum exploded with members around 2006 and it changed the vibe completely. Most of them came from ButtRider.......and in a few cases they'd been banned from there. So a few more members would be good.......but the right type if you get my drift!

I only have one friend that rides much and he's already on here. So I'm tapped out as far as bring more members to the fold. I suck. But I like the Forum in that we don't have a bunch of wankers on here and it's fairly small.

I deleted my facebook account years ago when it revealed how racist and angry people really are when Europe got to deal with the refugee situation. I am happy to not go back there. This has provided somewhere for me to post a few reports very dear to me, and to properly go through those pictures for the first time ever, but also as a great replacement for a less intrusive facebook of sorts, served in a format and pace which are more agreeable to my internet ignorant way of being.

Dont forget i have to look like im headed for adventure! Just still clean, havnt hit the dirty parts yet type look.

It might be a novelty for you, but for some of us it's an hourly occurrence.

Well you can use the fucking arrow from now on and like it! @Tym get the fucking guns out........Fred thinks he's above using the arrow!

Michelle......I just wanted to make an observation! You're a woman who doesn't want to get married, who doesn't want to go shopping, and you spend all your money on motorcycles! That is not normal! Therefore.....this is without a doubt the place for you!

That thing is going to cause accidents cos twats will get one and then try and match Marc Marquez's 70 degree lean angle!

Not sure anybody does Clive......cos they wouldn't be able to get away with it here. Everybody's connected you see.......so any bullshitting would be found out. For example.... @Tym doesn't pretend to be unstable.....he is. I first had my suspicions back somewhere around 2002 when he built a big snowman in his garden, shot it to pieces with his guns, then threw red liquid over what was left to signify bloodshed. I believe the legendary Julian Solos delivered his "unstable" diagnosis on Tym at that point!

That makes it wider he wants it to be longer and there's something wrong with his side stand as well lol

Today was the first proper run on the Beemer other than when I brought it back from the dealer! So how did it do? Well I've covered a few of it's aspects before........so no point going over those again. All I can say is that this G650GS is probably the best fit for me, and the roads I ride on, than any machine I've had since I've been in Spain. It really is that good! The only minor negatives (and they are minor) is that the sidestand is too short......so the bike leans over quite a bit when parked. The other thing is when the fan comes on it blows out hot air over my right leg. Very minor stuff as you can see. It was great on the motorway trip coming back from collecting it, and it was even better on these rural, bumpy country roads. Just so easy to ride. It ticks all the boxes for me.......but in terms of reliability it has to prove itself! Only time will tell if I can get the same level of trust in the Beemer that I would have in a Jap bike! So watch this space!

What do you wear and why, i need new boots. i just used a whole tube of shoe goo on my bought in late 2002 on sale! Sidi on road. Added more duct tape too.....still no pulse. I still have these horse riding shoes as spare if the boots gluejob doesnt hold up. Hope they used extra horses. The most important feature is looking good when clean. Thanks for your help!

Yeah, lithium iron batteries are sexy. Everybody who thought the box was empty when they first picked one up, raise their hand... I'm right there with you. tldr version; Old regulator bad. Voltage high. Really high. Victims included fancy new battery, the ECU, and a few other things I've forgotten. Fix is modern MOSFET regulator. Moral of the story - bikes without MOSFET regulators should not be running lithium batteries. Lithium batteries are fragile. The long verison: Of course when the time came to replace the battery in my 1991 Ducati I thought oh yeah, gotta have it. Smaller, lighter, much more better. I ponied up the cash and ordered a fancy new battery complete with built in circuitry to protect the battery from over charging and over discharging. Either case will kill a lithium battery. I got the battery, fit it to the bike, and away I went. About 230 miles later, the bike suddenly died. Then started running again. Ok, it's a Ducati, give it a minute. About ten seconds later the bike died for good this time. I pulled over to the side of the road and as I was removing the seat I noticed a small whisp of smoke. Uh oh... Soon enough smoke was POURING out from under the fairing. Fun fact soon discovered. You can not remove an 851's fairing with the tools supplied in the factory toolkit. For reasons unbeknownst to me, Ducati felt the need to add two very small allen screws holding the fairing together in the front. Time to stand back and hope nothing starts on fire. Luckily this was all happening in front of a fellow motorhead's house. He told me he was looking out the window and when the smoke show started he thought "Wow, that's not the radiator". He came outside, found out what I needed, and got the tools to pull the fairing off. It would have been too late by then if it had been a fire but I still felt better getting them pulled off. At this point I had ID'd the issue as the battery. It was easy to see because the battery was arcing and smoking and melting down. FWIW: The smoke from a lithium battery that is melting down is absolutely horrid. It can't be good for you. Along with worrying that the bike would go up in flames, I was pondering the fact that these batteries are used in aircraft. Holy crap. If this was happening inside an aircraft you'd be seriously screwed. Mental note - if I ever build an airplane, do NOT put the battery in the same cabin as the people. The smoke REEKS, as in I had to leave parts of the bike outside until I could clean them because of how bad it was even after the incident. I have a short video of the show but I apparently can't link it here because it's not hosted on a secure site. I also can't figure out how to embed photos within the post but I'm guessing I can't do that for the same reason. I'll attach them at the end. So what happened? I contacted the battery company and sent the battery back to them. They found that the bike was pumping too much voltage into the battery. I went and checked the voltage and when it hit 16 I stopped testing. Anything over 14.5 volts (I think? it's listed in the battery literature) is too much. I asked about the battery protection and they told me that it was only good to something like 60 volts and my bike must have exceeded that. I also found out that they have upped the protection since then. I'm no electrical engineer so I may have some of the details wrong, but from what I read when a lithium iron battery gets too much voltage fed into it the internals begin plating themselves. Eventually this plating causes an internal short. Once that happens, it's game on until all the smoke is gone. Nothing you can do but stand back and watch the show. The fix was to install a modern mosfet voltage regulator. Google it - there are sources available. I also installed a volt meter on the bike that shows different color LEDs depending on the voltage, they make them specifically for monitoring lithium batteries. I replaced the battery with the same kind that melted down and after a couple years of limited use have had no issues. After the fact I also discovered the ECU had been damaged, along with a couple other electrical parts. The ECU problem revealed itself with a rattle. When I pulled the cover I found some electrical component bouncing around inside, having unsoldered itself from the board. Further investigation showed the liberated part had something to do with overvoltage protection. So to sum it up, lithium batteries require modern charging systems with mosfet regulators. When they meltdown from too much voltage, it's a huge mess. Letting them discharge too much kills them too but with less of a mess.

It was a national holiday today so I thought I'd get an hour out on the Beemer! I've already tested it on Motorways, A and B roads, farm tracks and light offroad paths. All good so far.....so I thought I'd give it a test on the canal paths! These have multiple variations of surfaces varying from billiard table smooth to trenches.......and just about everything in between. Along with bizarre cambers and falling debris strewn across your path. And there's the added bonus that if you get it wrong you'll end up dropping 6 feet into the canal. This particularly one is relatively easy......the final one up into the reservoir itself is a bit rough! It's virtually all concrete but it's completely broken up into various zig zag patterns and trenches which can trap your tyres and take you off course! That's for another day.....I just wanted a gentle jaunt this afternoon! After all, I am a Pensioner FFS!

I could do but it squares the profile of the tyre, if I keep the bike for long I may get the rear wheel rebuilt with a narrower rim like I did on the orange KTM 950.

Nice, I like the back to top feature....that sounds a bit weird.... ?

Whoo hoo preview!

I doubt there is much hope for me to be honest.

beautiful country!!

Tryactin like you're not a fucking moron when writing web pieces, look at journalism and tryactin like that.

Lovely bike, Pete, it suits the land.

Get a sidestand extension under the sidestand foot, Pete, job done.

Sorry about that - forgot you were on here.