Seasoned London commuter, doing my best to stay rubber side down and never stop moving forward.
Autumn is here. The leaves on the trees are changing colour and are being shed. The weather is all over the place, wet, windy, bright sun. Watch out for wet leaves on the road, they’ll be super slippery. Avoid hard braking and cornering on them, or risk loosing grip on the front wheel. Don’t ride in the gutter where the collect, with the low Autumn sun dazzling you, glare on the wet road, you may not notice them until too late.
Recently I splashed out on a new Motad Venom complete exhaust system for my Fazer. Comprising of stainless steel downpipes, a nice oval end can and all the trinkets for fitting. Motad has their factory located in the heart of the black country up in Walsall, which is nice to know as supporting local trade is always preferable. Motad sells their products directly through their eBay shop or their website, and in either case, you can get a better price than going through a reseller. I ordered their full exhaust system; downpipes, gaskets, link pipe, the end can and necessary clamps/brackets. Motad offered me a good price in exchange for a write-up on this blog. The whole lot arrived quickly in a lot smaller box than I was expecting, but dismantled the system is not as large as you first perceive. Upon opening, I had a box full of shiny goodies. All packed well, everything needed for installation included and a short set of instructions for fitting.
Update 2017: Sadly Motad has shut shop and ceased trading. It’s a real shame to see such a good British brand no longer in business.
This is the first time I’ve tackled the fitting of downpipes, but after consulting my Haynes manual, and some guides on the Fazer Owners Club forums and various other websites, it didn’t seem too difficult. Here are the steps I followed.
Gerbing’s have taken their XR12 heated gloves for motorcycles and revamped and improved them for 2013/2014. Now with a number of key differences and tweaks that greatly improve them compared to the prior XR12 iteration. After recently sending my old Gerbing heated gloves back for repair (again), I received this new iteration as my replacement. Thankfully, a very swift turnaround on warranty from Gerbing, so I only suffered cold hands for a couple of days.
Treated myself to a set of nice new stainless steel downpipes and can from Motad. My current stock pipes have turned into a complete rust bucket and full of holes at the bottom by the 4-into-1. Not bad considering they’re over 10 years old now.
Will fit downpipes one upcoming weekend when weather permits. But might stick can on sooner, can’t wait to see how it sounds.
Haynes manuals have now arrived. Gave up trying to find a cheap second-hand copy, there’s naff all saving by the time you’ve factored in postage compared to Amazon free delivery.
To be honest, I can’t believe I lasted this long without a Haynes manual. I also have a Motad downpipes and exhaust system on order, so should be handy when it comes to fitting that.
Summer is well and truly over and now there’s a good chance you fall into one of two camps. You either:
If you fall into this latter group, then you will be all too familiar with cold hands and numb fingers. Never underestimate the impact of wind chill, it maybe 5°C outside, but at 60 mph wind chill brings that down to -11°C! (wind chill chart) Once your fingers are numb, it becomes painful, distracting and drastically affects your riding for the worse. Even the best winter gloves won’t protect you for long against that cold and so here I present a few cold weather motorcycle gear options to tackle cold hands.
Busy morning sorting out the airbox on Mary’s ZZR400. It had a bad seal where the underside marries up to the top of the throttle bodies, a gaping space along the rear edge. This has been causing running issues at high speed, where the ram air setup needs to be pressurised to ensure the floats let the right mix of fuel and air into the engine. Without the necessary pressure the fuel mix has been far too rich.
I picked up a new airbox on the off chance the current one was slightly warped. I also got a new duct seal, as the old seal was very squashed and not doing its job. Swapping the box over was mostly straight forward, with only removing/replacing the tank and getting the ram air ducts at the front lined up into the box being particularly tricky. All went well until a fuel line split – doh! Just at end near the clamp onto the reserve valve, so I was able to shorten it and make good. Phew!
The one year anniversary competition is now over and four winners have been pulled out of the hat at random. You lucky four have been emailed, so if you entered, do check your mailboxes and get back in touch with your postal addresses. I should have your prizes sent out next week, ready to prepare for the next bout of crap weather.
The lucky winners are:
1st prize: Iain MacIver
2nd prize: Simon Oakley
Runners up: Robby Price and Douglas Plester
Thank you all who entered and helped share my blog around a bit. I hope you enjoyed checking out my blog and do hope you’ll keep coming back to read more of my adventures.
Managed to grab an hour at the weekend to replace the Givi rack on the Fazer. The arms on the old one were thoroughly bent from the last crash, which snapped the top box off.
Tried as I could they wouldn’t bend back. To be honest I also doubted how strong they would be after if I did get them back into shape.
The new went on a treat, dead easy. Interestingly this one came with black painted bolt, rather than plain aluminium. Can’t decide which I prefer, might go for a combo to blend in with black arms and aluminium pillion peg brackets.
Lidl recently ran one of their Motorcycle accessory weeks, which featured some rock bottom priced rain covers. Since the lining on my old R&G cover was disintegrating and leaving a cloud of white fluff over the bike each morning, I thought I’d give them a go.
We also needed a cover for Mary’s ZZR400, so at just £9 each, we managed to buy two for less than the price of the R&G cover or a basic Oxford cover. But were they cheap and cheerful or do you really get what you pay for? Read on…
