Fr. Matthew Cashmore

How hard can it be? A 16 year old with a diploma from the local collage can do it, that polish chap I met at Chiswick Honda can do it, so can I. In fact, I booked myself onto a Motorcycle Mechanics course at Merton Collage in South London (just to be safe) – I’m half way through it and according to my notes we’ve covered everything I need for the service – apart from everything else, and as my tutor likes to point out – the course has given me the confidence to work on my bike, if not the actual skills.

Three days ago I started the service, it’s taken two of those to clear the crap in the garage to a point where I can get around the bike (It’s pissing down outside) and a day to take all the bloody plastic, screen, tank, seat and all the other stuff that seems so unimportant now my aim is to cause grieves enginely harm to my bike. All that done I’ve replaced the spark plugs – dear god how difficult is that! Or rather more to the point, did Honda think about getting to the spark plugs when they designed the engine? I don’t think they did, but three and a half hours later I’ve got the old ones out, the new ones (gaps checked) in and tightened and the leads plugged in. Shame I didn’t think to look at the manual for the ordering of the leads – it’s amazing how much noise a bike can make when you get cylinder 3 and 4 confused.

Next came the oil change – nice and easy only took me an hour or so, in fact I was pleasantly surprised, apart from nearly destroying the old filter because I thought I could use a cheap Halfords filter remover (chain) rather than the proper part (must get that ordered). The other thing I found interesting is how the hell you tell if you have enough oil in there? I followed the instructions in the shop manual but my pristine, brand new Castrol oil is so beautifully clear that I can’t tell how far up the dip stick it is – I’ve stuck to the shop manual and put in exactly 3.8 litres of oil – let’s hope this works.

Frankly that’s as far as I’ve got – I’ve done valve clearances at collage on a single cylinder bike – easy enough – but mine scares me so it’s going to the garage for that – as it is for the carburettor synchronisation – I think I’ll be booking onto the advanced course at collage next year. Everything else is just inspection (chain etc which I can do with my eyes shut – in fact that’s what I get accused of every time the garage has to fix my mistakes) so let’s just cross fingers I don’t blow the CBF up like I did my very first bike – a 1997 (brand new) CZ 125.

It’s finally here, my new house, and with it (most importantly) is my new garage! I was adamant from day one that this garage was going to be a shrine to my bike. A clean, healthy environment with a red painted floor, white walls a ‘clean’ workbench, a ‘dirty’ bench and a kettle – not to mention a PC of some sort. But the inevitable has happened and I’ve succumbed to the ‘we don’t have enough space’ argument from my wife – so now the back of my garage is cluttered with gardening things, a table and chairs, two bikes we never use, some gardening implements which frankly (although my wife assures me they’re not) look like something I’ve seen in medieval war films.

So now my pristine garage does have a red floor (already scratched), it does have white walls, and it does have all my shelves patiently waiting for me to stock them with bike parts, sprays and oils. What it doesn’t have is a work bench or room to work on the bike in the dry and warm – it also doesn’t have enough light, but I can’t get around to that until the crap is cleared into a shed and I can get at the consumer box.

What we do to keep our wives as well as our bikes.

Yes I know it’s Christmas, and I know it’s the New Year, and yes I know the most important thing at a time like this is family, friends and home. But for some unknown reason I’ve really missed being connected to the net over the holiday period. I’ve moved you see, and this has lead to all sorts of fun and games (new house you see); mainly that I have no phone line…. who knew that having a phone line was so important!

I thought it would just be a case of moving in and giving BT a call, and hey presto a couple of days later phone, then another couple of days on dial up until the broadband gets moved over…. oh no! I have to wait three weeks for a BT engineer – and only then can I request the broadband is activated on my line, so I’m without internet and more importantly without a wi-fi enabled machine in my garage. Bugger.

So this is an apology for the dump of posts – there’s several hitting the blog at the same point because even though I’ve not got net access at home I’m still writing.

I’m very very much against road pricing, the latest (old) idea to come out of one of the governments think tanks;

Each vehicle has a box that receives position signals from satellites (the ‘downlink’) (GPS or the European Gallileo system) and records vehicle movements in some sort of local memory. At some specified interval the box sends a burst of this data (possibly by cellular telephone or by dedicated new network) (the ‘uplink’) to the official road pricing computers that then generate a monthly bill for vehicle usage. The box must be programmed to identify the individual vehicle.

So, as well as knowing everything else about us the government will also know where we are, exactly. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, I don’t buy into a lot of the crap that gets pushed around about the police, the government and everyone else in authority. But I am getting sick to the back teeth of being watched. Everywhere. The only place that still appears to be private is the thoughts in my head when I slap on my helmet and ride away; the only thing is that those thoughts keep getting interrupted by the other irritating little voice of… is my insurance up to date as there’s an ANPR camera ahead, when’s my tax due, am I over the speed limit…. dear me the only time I want to worry about these things is when a reminder pops through my door and I spend the 10 mins it takes to sort it out, not the constant concern that I’m doing something wrong!

Why is the new assumption in this country, you’ve done something wrong and if we watch you long enough we’ll know what it is; rather than, get on with it and when you cross the line we’ll come and get you.

Very good write up about Road Pricing here.

I’ve just finished reading the quite amazing book from Charley Boorman – Race to Dakar – First of all I want to make it clear that I really enjoyed Long Way Round, even though I’d watched ‘the real boys’ doing it several years earlier on no budget, with no support crew and certainly no big sponsors, in Mondo Enduro.

I was lucky enough to meet Charley at the NEC Motorcycle Show earlier this year, and he was obviously very warn out and sick to the back teeth of signing books and DVD – let’s be honest after you’ve taken part in the harded rally in the world, standing on the BMW stand signing things and having your photo taken must come a very poor second – I really felt for him standing there, and I’m sure he’d much prefered to be at home with his family, or out on the bike!

The book was a revelation; a stunning portrail of life over two weeks in 2006 as three men and the support crew fought against the sand, the special sections, the organisers and their own mental capacity to just carry on and make the beach at Dakar. When I finished watching The Long Way Round, (the book wasn’t that good) it left me wanting to do my own mamouth trip and was the inspiration for Journey To Russia, but the Dakar book (which is stunningly well written) has left me wanting to go and buy a BMW Dakar bike and find out what all thie enduro nonsense is all about.

Not one to post about scooters very often but this caught my eye

http://www.mp3.piaggio.com/index_eng.html

Essentially it’s a scooter, but, it has three wheels! No news at the moment about how it rides or what it costs but tomorrow is it’s launch day and one of our members over at londonbikers.com is test riding it – so hopefully some more news then.

I’ve resisted posted this for some time because it was a real accident and my old boss felt dreadful about it – he was exceptionally sorry and made sure everything was paid for and repaired.

But it’s still quite funny.

I run a website for bikers in London called londonbikers.com – it’s a pretty cool site that has an amazing forum and collection of users losley defined by a standard internet forum.

It’s been pretty noisy lately, with the very vocal majority, pointing out what they see as problems in the way the site is run – mainly they feel that the site is over moderated. I’ve seen this many times before and Robin Hammon hits the nail on the head in his post here.

Robin points to resent research that suggests users much prefer a moderated forum to a non moderated forum – what he believes is happening is that the user preferes a hosted forum – and that a host and moderator have very different role within an online community.

So I’m going to try to move londonbikers.com down that road – we’ve already identified several members who would like to be hosts, and we’ve losley defined what they’ll do, we’ve also thinned out the moderator ranks, and hopfully this will lead to a much happier forum.

I’m leaving things quite lose at the moment because I think it’s going to take a month or so for both the mods and the hosts to explore what their role, in combination with the site owners, should be.

Then there’s always the commercial angle, and whilst we will never charge members for access to the site (why would we?) we do have to come up with a way to cover costs – we can’t keep writing blank cheques to run the site, and we need to make enough money to employ someone full time to really make the site fly.

We’re a very young company and we’re facing the problems many sites have faced in the past, so I’m trying to learn from other people mistakes and base our way forward on research and tested ideas rather than gut feeling… but why does it feel like I’m pushing a stone up hill.

How do you deal with members who, no matter how open you become, no matter how great the site is, will still only post negative comments and scare away those members who just want a cool club to be a member of – trolls if you like… answers on a post card please!

I was going to write something nice about Ian’s new bike – a Honda Silverwing

I was going to point out that it doesn’t look half bad, that it is rather comfortable, that it does sound quite good, I was even going to go as far as saying I wouldn’t be too embaressed to ride around on one.

Then he posted this and now the gloves have come off.