Single biggest improvement in the motorcycling experience?

[Alex A]

Traction control.

Not because I like it. I don't particularly. But because it's afforded manufacturers the latitude and confidence to develop and sell road motorcycles that would otherwise be considered reprehensible.

Sports bike sales may have been on the wane for some time, but we're living in a golden age. 200bhp+ in whatever flavour of engine configuration you like, road tyres and brakes with serious track performance, and a highly configurable electronic safety net (if you want it) to mitigate poor/unpredictable road conditions and the inevitable human error.

All of that trickling down to the super-naked class too.

Just add hundreds of miles of remote country B-roads.
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Current: Ducati Panigale R / Ducati Streetfighter S / Suzuki GSX-R1000 L5

[Teflon-Mike]

The legend of 16" wheels is rather perverse... it starts though with the Peny-Farthing bicycle... bear with me!.. it's a short story, in so far as two of the most influential folk in motorcycling were of vertivally challenged persuasion... and besides, its mildly amusing!

Joseph Starley, in middle Victorian times, was by trade a sewing-machine repair man. In his spare time, he had taken to this craze for racing penny-farthing push-bikes... one does have to wonder at his sanity... especially as he was of little leg.... Now... with a fixed pedal crank, how fast you can get a penny fathing to go depends on how big the wheel is. Bigger the wheel, further it travels per revolution, faster you go.... B-U-T you have to straddle the wheel.... this put our Joseph's family assets in rather dire risk... and meant he was always loosing to folk with longer legs who could use bigger wheels and not put thier gonads at such dire risk!

He pondered this problem.... as you would.... whilst repairing his sewing-machines, and whilst (aledgedly) tightening the chain drive between the treddle and the needle upy-downy bit, that was jumping, had a eurika moment.... and the Starley-Safety-Cycle was born.

His 'idea' was that if you used a chain drive, you could put the pedals anywhere you wanted, they didn't have to be on the axle of the wheel; so you could use almost any size wheel you likes, and more, use cogs to get a gearing rather than rim size.

Result was, the now ubiquetiouse 'diamond' triangulated push bike frame, with a bottom bracket with the pedals in it, in the middle; which remained pretty much unchallenged as the 'best' way to make a push-bike for a century, from 1885 when he patented it and set up the 'Rover' company to build the things in Coventry..... which quickly became a center of both push-bike manufacture and racing.

Other Short-arse, of note, is of course Edward Turner; creator of the Triumph Speed twin, aka the original 'Bonaville'.. who insisted he should be able to flat-foot every bike to come out of the Trumpet works, hence they all had low saddles... but that's a later, and slightly tangential topic.. Back to Starley's ball-sack!!!!!

The usual wheel size of an adult push-bike, is 26", and it takes a 1" section tyre. Add that, top and bottom ,to the rim, and you get a wheel with a 28" rolling diameter... THIS co-incidentally is 'about' the average gentlemans inside leg measurement.... back to them family jewels! You still have to, er... cock... a leg over one!

Oh-Kay.... serendipity of the motorcycle to begin with; IF you were starting with a clean sheet of paper to design a form or motorised transport, you would NOT start with the idea of making something A-Stable that has a tendancy to fall over if left to its own devices!

Joseph Starley's penny-farthing, was to start, something of an anomoly, that came from the 'Hobby-Horse'.... you used to give a kid a broom, and tell them to 'imagine' it was a horse when they played cowboys and indians or knights of the round table.... then shouted at them when the stick clattered down the stairs between thier legs! This resulted in some, Dad, probably, having the notion to screw a wheel to the broom handle so it didn't clatter so much, or splinter and prick missus hands when she came to sweep the kitchen...

Next development from this was to put another wheel under the front, to make a 'Hobby-Horse'... and, in drunken revelry, as you get, after kids have gone to bed.. the groan-ups started having 'horse-races' round the garden on these things... 'cos groan-ups just cant keep thier mitts of the kids toys, can they?

Right.. this lead to the rigid, iron wheeled 'Hobby-Horse' you sort of scooted along, to which some-one had the notion of adding pedals, that gave rise to the penny-farthing, to allow taller gearing.... John-Bulls pneumatic tyre was a boon here, making the ride a lot smoother than an iron-rimmed cart wheel, AND letting the thing 'tilt' to turn.... before we get to Joseph Starley and his short-legged testicular troubles!

Oh-Kay... enter the Germans, and a certain Nikolaus Otto, who built a practicable 'internal combustion engine' running on 'city-gas' as a small domestic 'steam-engine' to power small plant machinary. He had an aprentice; Gottlieb Daimler, who had in his youth done 'The industrial tour' of England, and co-incidentally, worked for Joseph Witworth, mad eccentric inventor of the .303 riffle bullet amongst other things... but nebulousely btt!

Daimler had a rival, Karl Benz, who was like Starley an avid push-bike nut, and like Damiler, pioneer of the infernal combustion engine... Daimler, renamed his company 'Mercedes', BTW after the daughter of his French importer, to avoid licencing laws, rather like Prince changing his name to Symbol. However, two of them pioneered internal combustion engines, and Daimler was deturmined to make things move, unlike his boss who had just bolted his engines to the floor!

Mercedes, tree-pointed badge, is then actually to commemorate Daimler's challenge to build self-propelled, internal combustion engine vehicles to travel on land, water and sky.... his first attemps to power a farm-cart, were spectacularly unsucessful, and he realised that his engine just didn't make enough power to shift that much weight, so he turned to something lighter.... poor kids.... they lost enouther Hobby-Horse... and he build Einspur, the very first internal combustion engine 'motorbike'... sort of had stabilisers... but it was a BIKE... and it moved... with iron shod rims, and a big fire beneath the riders balls, probably NOT all that comfortably... but that was the first motorbike!

Then he set about strapping one of his engines to a row boat, and then to a Montgolfier-Brother's hot air ballon, to earn all three points of his stars... whilst his assistant Maybach, worked on the details... like practicable carburettors and ignition!

Meanwhile... Karl Benz, similteniousely inovated a form of internal combustion engine, and like Daimler found it rather under-powered to push a horse cart along. Like Daimler, he looked at his push-bikes for inspiration, and decided that actually TWO WHEELS was not a wonderful idea, and built a tricicle! And it worked! But lightweight cycle construction was the 'key' to get things moving.

Count De-Dion... did I mention him? French chap, and a little, but not entirely crazy; after Napoleon, his disenfranchised father had turned the family farm's coach house over to coach manufacture, then with the craze for steam and electric cariages motorised them. De-Dion, saw the German creations racing on the streets of Paris at heady speeds up to 7mph! And was inspired, and bought a Benz Auro-Carriage... which promptly broke down!

Scratching his head in the shed, De-Dion, kept saying, in heavily accented french accent one presumes; "Zis be Crazy!".. and his greatest contribution to automotive evolution was to take the Benz 'gas' engine, and simplify the thing.... HUGELY! Result was the De-Dion/Minerva 'Coffee-Tin' engine. The conventional four-stroke engine we recognise today, with a simple crank, and conrod, piston and cylinder, all pretty much as we are familiar with. The Minerva connection coming because the engine was so successful he couldn't keep up with demand, hence Belgian Minerva took up the manufacturing rights, as did many many others, whilst De-Dion went on to persue his pasion of building racing horseless carriages....

HOWEVER... simple single-cyclinder De-Dion 'Coffee-tin' engines, were the key; De-Dion actually sold 'single-engine-licences' to DIY make a single example, on 'Blue-Prints' he would sell mail order! This was probably another 'key' to the evolution of not just the motorcycle, BUT the whole auto-industry.. but still.

Popularisation of potential auto-movive-ness, inspired by 'more' easily makeable De-Dion/Minerva engines, gave a hord of enthusiasts the same problems faced by both Daimler and Benz, as far as the low power output, and the obviouse solution was to strap one of these gas engines to a commercially available 'Starley Safety Cycle' or one of the many copies littering cities at the time... and the modern MOTORCYCLE came to be.

BACK TO WHEELS!!!!

Strapping engines to push-bikes, is probably NOT the best idea in the world, and as said, if you were starting with a clean sheet to design a self propelled form of personal transport NOT where you would logically start! But.... that is where so many pioneers did, and they 'worked' in a way.

But, as the internal combustion engine pushed potential top speeds up to oooh! 30mph or so... so the limitations of the push-bike started to become aparent, and the ride quality was amongst them.

SUSPENSION: The pneumatic tyre, providing complience between the road and the rider, was the first real suspension, but it's not a lot... especially on a 1" tyre!

Obviouse answer is thicker tyres... B-U-T and this is the pertinant bit, you STILL got to cock your cock, sorry LEG over one.....

And that sets the maximum 'rolling' diameter of a wheel, at about 28", and the only way to use a thicker tyre, is to make the rim smaller. If you have a 26" wheel with 1" tyre for 28" rolling dia, to use a 2" thick tyre, you have to pull the 24" wheel; to use a 4" tyre? you have to pull the rim rize down to 20"... make sense?

Oh-Kay... now add 'suspension'. You nows need some space for the wheel to move up and down on a spring, as well as for the tyre, and you STILL have to fit it twixt a riders legs... so 28" is still 'around' your nominal seat-height.

This, empirically, is what drove the evolution of smaller wheels, down to the 1960's defacto-standard of an 18" rear and a 21" front, front using a larger rim, because it begerally used a thinner tyre.

Enter the 1980's.. when motorcycle design goes crazy...

The rise of the 16" wheel, was to be able to fit wider tyres. Cross-Ply tyres.

The difference between cross-ply and radial tyres is essentially that in a cross-ply, the rubber is moulded over woven fabric, that has waft and weft threads crossing each other at right angles....

ANOTHER little tangential, is talking of tyres being down to the canvas... canvas was commonly used as the base for old tyres, and co-incidentally the 'innovation' of Serge-De-Niem'.. yes, Strauss's famed 'Denim' jeans, is that it had a two way weave, two layers of warp threads crossing the supporting weft at around 30 or 60 degrees, to make a thicker, stronger material, used originally for canvas 'tents' sold to miners in the Californian Gold-Rush... and used to patch thier trousers when they went through the knee.. leading to the modern 'Blue-Jeans'.. but Back To Topic... what was that btw?!?

In the Radial tyre... the base canvas isn't a 'woven' fabric; instead, just one set of threads, from bead to bead, are arranged 'radially' and held in place by the rubber set around them.... makes for a tyre that is a lot WEAKER... curiousely.... which is why it took do long to develop for motorcycles, where the tyres are subject to loading in a lot more and more complicated directions than on cars, because motorbikes 'tilt'... but there in lies the difference.

Struggling with this problem, in the '80's, and leading to a lot of the tyre lore, manufacturers tried to deliberately weaken the frabric sub-structrure of the tyre, in order to 'let' it provide complience without setting up oposing forces inside the tyre to make it hurt itself... whilst making a true radial tyre with very weak carcas construction, resulted in unpracticably weak tyres that didn't really work too well, wobbling around all over... a good compromise was needed, and it was actually more carfefully engineered man-made fibres that could provide the required strength without the weight or bracing of a weave that made radial motorcycle tyres practicable... but onwards!

Ride of the 16" rim, WAS then originally an attempt to use 4" or 6" wide tyres, when construction techniques significantly meant that the tyre had to be as 'tall' as it was wide;

12" of side-wall on a 16" tyre equals? that magic 28" yet again!

The suggestion that a smaller wheel has less moment of inertia, and less gyroscopic resistance, hence is easier to make change direction, IS actually a bit of a red-herring.....

My old VF1000 has a 16" front wheel from the era of 16" front wheels. Add a 110 section tyre, tad over 4"... and we are back to 24" near that majic 28" inside leg dimension. Probably more pertinanly, when they launched the Honda Fire-Blade in 1993, and controvercially gave that a, by then, 'old fashioned' 16" front wheel, and ISTR a specially developed Bridgestone tyre to fit it, the rolling diameter of that combination was exactly the same as on my decade older VF..... MORE it was exactly the same rolling diameter as a 'Low-Profile' radial tyre, on a 17" 'rim' diameter, on a more contemprary sports bike....

Which is ALL to point out, its a load of BORROCKS.. starting with Joseph Starleys!

The wheel diameter is just one dimension; the more critical 'thing' is the overall rolling diameter of the wheel and tyre...

And ACTUALLY, that HAS changed remarkeably little over the years, since 26" push-bike wheels with 1" rubber on them....

Technical acrgument was hugely inflated to promote/justify smaller 16" rims in the 80's techno race... some with a little truth, some with not a lot, all grossely exagerated.. More used to promote/justify shift back to 17" rims in the 2000's... also with variouse degrees of truth, pertinance and exageration... buit we STILL keep coming back, ultimately to this 'inside leg' sort of overall dimension....

It's interesting to note that one of the arguments used to support Honda's curiousely unfashionable use of 16" front on the Fire-Blade, was the question or suggestion that rubber is lighter than alloy... more alloy, meant less rubber, meant less sprung mass.. which is nebulouse.. probably holds some truth, especially when Radial tyres were heavier, but, more significant factor is probably brake rotors....

Interesting to note, is the Honda 'Inboard Disc' of the 80's.. a rather curiouse contraption that stuck one or two 'inside out' brake discs into a drim on the wheel, to achieve the worst of both worlds... however... another inovation of the day, that they did use on the Elf, and I believe was used on a production bike in the Beull, was the insiude out 'rim-disc'... principle was to use a HUGE brake disc, that was bolted around the perify directly to the rim the tyre sat on, to give the largest possible brake diameter, allowing the rotor to be slimmed down, and saving the weight of a seperate rotor carrier to transmit forces to the hub.. again, more techno babble as to the pro's and cons of the idea, and one that HASN'T seen the wide-spread adoption of a more conventional hub-disc arrangement, but also porovides hint at the number of competing factors in the equation; weight of the tyre on the outside of the wheel, even the material of the wheel itself, whether alloy or steel, cast or spoked, or even Carbon-Fibre or something else alltogether, may or may not be so significant when you attatch one or two large, and usually heavy cast iron brake rotors to trhe thing too.

Which brings us back to the whole vs sum of the parts... and not looking at a single feature of the design, but the artifact as an entirity, and the bottom dollar question... WHAT WORKS... and maybe what works best!

In which, like motorcycling in general, there is an almost chaos of competing forces at play, and trying to distill them down to a single feature facet or dimension, is almost impossible, and always brings about the aparent contradictions....

I mean, IF smaller wheels were better, we'd all be riding scootaz with little 10" wheels, wouldn't we?

Standardisation of the 17" rim, is as much as anything down to market forces as it is science, and tyre makers tooling up to make product for a pretty small market segment, NOT really technical merit, which is at best nebulouse....

BUT, if we can learn anything from any of it, its that first leson of Joseph Starley.... KEEP YOUR EYE ON THE BALLS, FOLKS!!!!
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My Webby'Tef's-tQ, loads of stuff about my bikes, my Land-Rovers, and the stuff I do with them!
Current Bikes:'Honda VF1000F' ;'CB750F2N' ;'CB125TD ( 6 3 of em!)'; 'Montesa Cota 248'. Learner FAQ's:= 'U want to Ride a Motorbike! Where Do U start?'

[Rogerborg]

tl;dr version -

[choogh]

Frame design, I recall back in the 70 's my CB 750 K6 needed three lanes of the M6 to go straight.. Now.. as we all know, stability and true running is " built in".
So, my vote is frame design.
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Current Squadron:
R1200rt. Virago 535
Loro Sono tra noi.

[choogh]

Frame design, I recall back in the 70 's my CB 750 K6 needed three lanes of the M6 to go straight.. Now.. as we all know, stability and true running is " built in".
So, my vote is frame design.
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Current Squadron:
R1200rt. Virago 535
Loro Sono tra noi.

[stinkwheel]

But remember, he asked about the last 15 years.

Nobody has been making bikes with frame hinges or 16" wheels in the last 15 years. That's since 2003.

So we're talking R1, VTR1000SP, Speed triple, ZX12R etc.
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“Rule one: Always stick around for one more drink. That's when things happen. That's when you find out everything you want to know.”
I did the 2010 Round Britain Rally on my 350 Bullet. 89 landmarks, 3 months, 9,500 miles.

[chickenstrip]

[redeem ouzzer]

Lol at teffers going on about wheel diameters when his point of reference is a load of weird old clunkers on the road and some trials riding.
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Be a REAL MAN!

[AshWebster]

sometimes i think Tef is just a microsoft chat Bot...... input: words ... output: sperg
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Honda cg125 J reg peice of shit ---> CB650F ---> 2016 CBR600RR
Ford KA ---> 93' MR2 ---> 94'MR2 ---> 98' Subaru WRX STI Ver 3 (track car)

[chickenstrip]

[trevor saxe-coburg-gotha]

[Freddyfruitba...]

[Old Git Racing]

Tyres, weight distribution, riding gear.

OGR
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2022 Tiger Sport 660 2019 Street Twin 2003 K3 gixxer 1000 1998 Srad 600 track hack

[stevo as b4]

If we wanted to be wankers about it and drill it down to sports bike development in the last 15years, then aside from tyres and better more sophisticated Mappable EFI then I'd counter that bikes havnt really got better since 2003 for the road rider that is.

This year's WSB replica IMO does not make for the ideal daily rider or relaxed weekend fun riding like the 2003 bikes did.

[Old Git Racing]

[Alex A]

[Polarbear]

[Rogerborg]

[Teflon-Mike]

1986 CBR600.. it all endeth there!!!

I recall the launch 'hype' of the original jelly-mold CBR6, and a lot of it was honda spiel with a lot of very interesting and sound engineering reason for it all, to hide fact it was actually a rather hasty reverse-engineered GPZ600R, given a value engineering exercise along the way.... oh and trying to avoid the topic of chocolate cam-shafts!!! ANYWAY... the official Honda spiel, that curiously, made it into MCN review and in more detail, into US Cycle-World 'strip-down' evaluation, WAS interesting, and DOES point at how M/C development and evolution has gone in the last thirty odd years.

GSXR.... Launched circa '84, on the hype it was a road-going replica of thier endurance racer, it book-ended the 'Race-Replica' era, with factory fitted 'race-style' full fairings. The Honda CBR's jelly-mold all-enclosed body-work, was to eyes of the era rather like the Sega-Super-Hang-On plastic-purches you got in video-arcades; BUT, Ducatti had pioneered the idea with the Paso, and sold it as 'Italian style'.. and Honda copied it, and gave the reasoning...

IF you are going to wrap a motorcycle in fairings, why NOT go the whole way, and cover the entire bike, Super-Hang-On style, rather than leave raggy 'bits' of fibre glass hanging hither and dither around the thing? Now, the body-work, 'hides' features of the mechanics, like the engine, and as water-cooling was begged by ever tightening emision controls, this meant that the body-work could be used to 'hide' rather boring slabs of cast metal, instead of fins. More; with the paint and stickers now the 'visual feature', you didn't have to make the metal 'pretty'; Honda actually claimed a weight saving on the engine castings for NOT having to emboss the castings of the clutch cover and stuff to give them visual interest, in metal, and doing it instead with a sticker on the outside..... THIS is value-engineering.. making a product with the same practical performance and market appeal, but at cheaper cost... and THAT is what has peculiarly 'pushed' MC development in the last quarter century or more, NOT so much the actual performance envelope, that was such a significant 'sales feature' when both the Meriden Bonnaville, and the CBR600 could have sat side by side, brand new in the show-room!

That, really, the 'total-product' design of the CBR600, probably is a watershed in motorcycle evolution, and the point that motorcycles became 'products', designed as much by accountants as engineers, like video recorders or fridges, rather than 'contraptions' invented by men in overalls in thier garden sheds with hammers and welding rods, and a probably 'bad' idea, but a lot of enthusiasm!

As said, its very hard to identify much if any 'technical' improvement in the actual motorcycle in the last thirty years; as aluded the Meriden Bonny, in the mid 80's could have sold, brand new, side by side in the same show-room, as a cxompletely 'new' CBR600. The Bonny, air-cooled, with push-rods, bits bolted wherever they fitted, owed its design heritage to the 1937, FIFTY year old by the time the Jelly-Mold CBR came along, Triumph Speed Twin. The Jelly-Mold CBR6, a completely clean-sheet (bar the GPZ reverse engineering excersise!) design, to make something, that met all modern expectations, but for less manufacturing cost, and with more show-room sales value... A-N-D going on to be the top selling over 400cc motorcycle, actually did a damn good job of that... BUT it HAS steered development away from the race track, and into the accountants office..... and what we are offered today, ONLY has 'performance' if that will sell.... and not necesserily the products.. sorry BIKES... its given too... since the heady days of the 'homologation special', and bikes like Honda's RC30, made in small numbers purely to win races, competing against Ducatti 888 derivatives, built to try sell err.. 888s and derivatives! Have championed the technology, the 'cooking model' over the counter offerings often haven't had, or have had tamed to make them cheaper and road-world-freindly, bought on the 'sucess' or legend of the flagship offerings.

In short, the money men have taken over from the oily oiks in boiler suits with a spanner! Consumers get 'more' over the counter, for thier money, but it ISN'T necesserily hugely better... a-n-d, has to be said, there has been far more fop payed to the other suits who make the rules, by way of C&U regulations and emmission controls, than the clamouring customer shouting "Faster-Faster!" in the show-room!

Depressing view of modern motorcycles, IS that so much of the 'soul' has been engineered out of them, in order to make a consumer freindly product, and make it cheap enough to make the finance company rub thier hands with glee...

Honda VFR... Honda itself has so much to answer for, starting with the '67 CB-750 'four'; which they admit was designed as a 'product'; cramming in features, like four cylinder engine, like thier race bikes, disc brake, like thier race bike; electric start!! Things that were 'sales features' you only got on works-special race bikes, and or 'easements' like the e-start that made it easy to use.

The VFR, was probably one of THE most boring motorcycles I have ever ridden. I had almost identical reaction to it as to my Honda Civic... "What do you thing of it then?" answered with.. "Err.. not a LOT actually... doesn't give me much to think abouut!" the thing just 'worked', did everything hoped of it, pretty much as expected, with no drama or surprises of idiocyncracies! It was just an utterly 'bland' experience, devoid of anything that stood out to suggest 'charecter', either annoying or nice. it just was... and thankfully I have never had to balence carburettors or tension the chain on a single0sided-swing-arm version, which MAY have offered some of that 'charecter'... mostly to a franchise mechanic, rather than the owner... but still.

Another bench-mark; it shows how much 'procuct engineersing' has taken over, and its NOT about making anything 'better', but about making it 'as good' as what already exists... making that a tad cheaper, and flogging a few more units....

The possible night and day contrast between the Meriden Bonny and the Jelly-Mold CBR on the showroom floor in 1987, just ISN'T to be found today even between a brand new headline catcher and an outgoing cooking model... part of that is probably flook that the incumbent Brit-Bike industry had so stagnated development in the 60's and 70's.. but still....

That in-itself DOES make me wonder for the future.... motorcycles sold in the '60's, significantly to a boyant 'youth' market, cheaper than a car, and looking for thrills; which cheaper cars sort of killed, whilst the Brit incumbants retreated into the fatter markets of big-bike sales and hung thier hopes on the seeminly ever expanding cash-cow US market, as domestic sales slumped.

It's interesting that the Japanese, who inherited so much of the motorcycle market when the Brits collapsed, having made thier fortunes on the sales of 'cheap' small displacement 'utility transport', like the Honda C90, done exactly what the Brits did in the '60's and retreated into the fatter proffit margin 'Big-Bike' market, and similarly, pinned so much on US sales...... and have, like the Brits, so significantly 'abandoned' the small displacement utility segment; farming production of the mass-market C90 and the CG and others, to most obviousely China.... one does wonder whether the Japanese incumbents of today are making the same 'mistakes' as the Brit incumbents of half a century ago... a-n-d what the future of the motorcycle, in its entirity, may be, as the bean-counters so significantly direct development, and the legal-beagles get thier oar in on the act, and what we get, now is NOT bikes like the Laverda-Jota, on open conti-pipes, an anti-social confection on wheels... instead we get things like the PC700, with ABS and air-bags.... do they have air-bags? I'm sure I saw it in the options!!! fops to the tree-huggers, and the accountants.. and about as exiting to see in the show-room as a new washing machine!!!!

Is this where it is leading? Chinese made electric Honda silver-wing super-scooters for all? IF anything!!!

(and ominously, as e-bay ports an add to an electric trials bike at me, as I hit the 'preview' button!!)
____________________
My Webby'Tef's-tQ, loads of stuff about my bikes, my Land-Rovers, and the stuff I do with them!
Current Bikes:'Honda VF1000F' ;'CB750F2N' ;'CB125TD ( 6 3 of em!)'; 'Montesa Cota 248'. Learner FAQ's:= 'U want to Ride a Motorbike! Where Do U start?'

[grr666]

^^^
Twice in one thread??? Holy moly.

Meanwhile in a large top secret warehouse Tefs collection of worn completely smooth keyboards hits the one million mark
https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/rms/computerweekly/photogalleries/237852/1627_20_computer-keyboards-and-mice-deva~an-impact-of-toxic-technology-waste.jpg
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Currently enjoying products from Ford, Mazda and Yamaha
Ste wrote: Avatars are fine, it's signatures that need turning off.

[Rogerborg]

Oh, leave him alone, he's in his happy place.

I mean, really, do not approach while he's bashing away furiously.
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Biking is 1/20th as dangerous as horse riding.
GONE: HN125-8, LF-250B, GPz 305, GPZ 500S, Burgman 400 // RIDING: F650GS (800 twin), Royal Enfield Bullet Electra 500 AVL, Ninja 250R because racebike

[techathy]

I've only been riding a motorbike for 4 years s not really experienced older technology tyres. Thing I find that makes winter riding enjoyable and much more comfortable than cycling is heated gear (gloves, bar grips & socks).
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Bikes: '17 Zero FX ZF6.5, '16 BMW R1200 RS, '12 Triumph Daytona 675

[Fin]

I haven't got 15 years of biking experience but I've had bikes almost 15 years apart in age and the main improvement I notice between them is the lights.


Have waterproofs got better?

[Nobby the Bastard]

[stevo as b4]