Pedro

Back to it, mint and basil pesto, fresh and lovely: Portuguese mum's cooking to the extreme, fried mackerels and tomato rice. Leftover roast in a sandwich, and mozzarella salad. Serra da Estrela, local specialty cheese sandwich, buttery and strong. It's the ideal snack on a cold day on the bike. @Marcel and @Buckster's favourite: Grilled aubergine sandwich, with pesto, mozzarella, and spinach. Way better than it should be. Eggs and farinheira, with healthy things to compensate. Farinheira is a very interesting kind of sausage, I don't like it unless in eggs like this. Leftover rags from making something else, now with pasta. Good stuff. Homecooked pizza, with non conventional dark flour mix. Not delicate and crispy like normal pizza, but way more flavor. Middle eastern style carrot salad with an amazing orange juice based dressing, canned mackerels and a typical Rissol. Which is fried with shrimp filling. Steak: "hotdogs" my way, with cheese and tomato, plus peach dessert as this was in summertime. Tras os Montes food. Must have posted this in a ride report. Again, pizza with Sofia. Grouper rice, portuguese style. It's lovely, very hard to get right regarding the rice's cooking point and the right amount of sauce density. I love it, and am getting better at it. Sofia's lamb meatballs with the carrot salad. Delicious dinner this was.

Forgot about this thread. @boboneleg, did you ever try those peas?

If they're charging you 50 or 70€ an hour and invoicing you from BMW's scheduled maintenance times, maybe, but that's not the reality of things in a good specialized mechanic. Granted, if having a very cheap bike to fix is a priority, don't get a BMW boxer of any generation, I think they're inexpensive to run according to plan but breakdowns are sometimes costly.

No, on mine there's a cover in front of the engine, behind the front wheel, and behind that is where the clutch is. Similar to how you take the side cover from a normal bike to access it only bigger. Now all you need is to compress the front suspension a little bit with a strap and you access the clutch. The old way was better though, I like that the gearbox and clutch don't contaminate the engine oil like they do now and on almost all bikes. On an old one fit a ceramic clutch and it'll last a really long time.

Weather is depressing outside. Tomorrow I might take the GS to my mechanic for a service, spark plugs and valve check. Also going to be taking the clutch apart to measure a certain shaft for play, the clutch has been acting weird in a way that makes it feel like it never completely disengages so makes it harder to find neutral, and makes it clunky (more than the usual clunky) from first to second gear, this is usually a symptom of a worn clutch on these bikes but that isn't the case. If it comes out with a clean bill of health I'll maybe go for a proper ride in a few days. Apart from that, nothing planned.

Nothing like a nice long bike ride by yourself to help cope with emotions.

Easily done by taking a few pictures when out on the bike, that most people take anyway, and then post them around with three words.

Too much nitpicking and criticising and judging from people that post absolutely nothing at all about bikes or riding bikes or whatever. If it’s not to someone’s tastes then move on, but negativity and sucking the life and joy out of the place isn’t cool. By not making the slight effort to even post outside of the usual diatribe that’s what one does, makes it less alive.

Watching Star Trek with my best buddy. He’s fallen asleep, can’t cope with Kirk’s dramas!

Don’t mock him. He’s an athlete.

Got to give them time, they eventually will. They have something on their side, which is old school build quality. China currently hasn't caught up with a lot of environmental restrictions that affect builders in Europe and Japan, so they can make things in a way that other manufacturers already can't. For example, a few coatings used on delicate Ducati, KTM and BMW valve trains are now being made in China because they can still make them to a higher quality. Yes, eventually it´ll be US and China making good quality bikes!

I like that the 450cc chinese trail/travel bike has tubeless spoked wheels, they must have been listening on my phone!

That 1200 makes a GS Adventure look slim!

@busabeast I´ll be the one to say it since you can´t read between the lines. They won't hand one of their bikes over for you to thrash off-roading trying to prove you're the new off-roading prodigy.

You would be wrong, in this case. KTM dealerships used to only sell race bikes, because that's what they made, then with the adventure range dealerships got separated into two categories, the more "advanced" ones being able to sell and be authorized service shops for the more complicated engines and even more importantly, to cope with warranty claims which was not an issue with racebikes as there is no warranty on motocross or enduro bikes. The "very small" dealership I'm talking about is one of Portugal's most competent's shops regarding mechanics, they used to run Yamaha's Superbikes and Supersport efforts here, race bikes to the highest level. Ohlins uses them as their service provider for all Öhlins supported race bikes in Portugal. They used to sell a small number of KTM adventure bikes so some clients that used them for maintenance and wanted to buy a new bike. They easily got the licensing to sell those bikes and all was going ok until the chinese bikes appeared, after a couple of years of that they decline orders to sell or service those bikes, they have annoying faults from new and KTM doesn't solve it in serviceable times. Above all else, apparently KTM dealerships have authority on what bikes they order and display for sale, so they do what they please, and in this case decide to keep away from a troublesome line of bikes except if a valued client absolutely wants them to go through the chore of it.

They are doing their work and using the Dakar as development, they do ok too.

I personally know a dealer that quit selling KTM road (i mean multi cylinder) bikes and only does their offroad ones. So many issues which KTM wasn’t ready to help fix under warranty made it a nightmare to them so they just quit.

Not true though. The new paralel twin engines are shit quality and in longevity compared to the old v-twins.

185mm suspension travel at the front? Where's the good part of that bike compared what it used to be?

The italian guy in the design team took the afternoon off right when they finished that bike's rear end. From the rider's part of the seat backwards they did that in 15 minutes.

Honda sells good value bikes, that's why. Considering the price of building raw materials today, they're selling more metal for the money.

I would say the new one never looks clean, even the ones in the show room. Thus, the new ones will never look like they're unclean either. Agreed, the rear subframe being white suits it. The others don't look nice at all compared to that, but knowing BMW they'll release the Adventure in one year and that will look even better, and then two months later they'll release a new color scheme that will make all previous ones look like shit.

No, they were all very close together. Check google for Tenere 700 Word Raid Peterhansel

Similar to the previous 1250. Starts at 20 or 21k and then on bikes found at dealerships there's always a minimum of 5 or 6k of extras added on, many of those I would prefer to not have. That's what I don't like about this bike on concept, it comes stock with things I would prefer not to have to deal with.

Very pretty view, I love the twin tanks even though they might be tiresome in real life use. With this paint scheme this is the prettiest trail bike today in my opinion.