Looking forward to this weekend! Ride to the snow.

[Bucko]

I'm going for an Xmas in July ride this weekend on the GK. It will be my first long trip on it after buying it a couple of weeks ago, so it will be interesting to see how it performs.
The heated handgrips I installed will be a big plus I'm sure.
I'll be taking the 7 hour trip to my friends place on the Friday and staying the night there, before heading to the Snowy Mountains on the Saturday morning.
Then the long ride home on Sunday.

Should be a good ride. Hopefully I don't need to try out the crash bars...[-o< I'll be wearing full leathers under my winter jacket and wet weather pants, just in case.

I'll be sure to take pics and post them up here when I get back.

[brenno]

Looking Forward To The Pics Bucko

Brenno

[bradleymaynar]

Have fun and be careful! I'm not looking forward to winter's eventual return here. It's always so cold!

Brad tt

[Bucko]

I'll start my ride report the day before I went to Tathra.
Thursday night I went out for a couple of drinks, which turned into a few drinks, which turned into a LOT of drinks which turned into taking a woman home for red wine and movies.
Rather than too many details, I'll just say that I had 3 hours of broken sleep, tops, before getting up, having a shower and packing the bike. I then had to wake up sleeping beauty and tell her she had to go as I was going riding. There is no polite way to do that, so I just woke her and said "I've called you a cab, I need to hit the road, see ya!" I did walk her out at least...
Anyway, I jumped on the GS and started my 7 hour ride feeling like crap and tired as.
I know I stopped for food somewhere, but other than fuel and a couple of ciggies, I went basically straight down there. I went Orange-Blayney-Crookwell-Goulbourn-Braidwood-Batemans Bay then the coast to Tathra.
When I arrived at Rob's street, Tathra did it's best to make me crash the Suzi. I turned into his street in the dark, hit loose gravel and did a nice big front end slide. I kept it upright though and didn't even put my foot down. I rode straight into Rob's driveway, into his garage, hopped off and pulled a couple of Jim Beam cans out of the pannier and handed one to Rob.
After unloading the other crap off the bike Rob and I knocked off a 6 pack of Jimmy's each and went to bed.
I was awaoken at 6.30 the next morning and handed freshly brewed coffee (thanks Judy). After a couple of morning smokes for breakfast we geared up and hit the road about 9.30. This is when I found out my clutch had decided to slip after being fine the whole way down. We stopped for fuel and I loosened off the cable, just in case the cold and not enough free play was the problem. No such luck. My tacho also stopped working as we went to leave the servo. I stopped and checked the problem and found it had come out of the engine. A quick refit and we were away.
Now anyone who has ridden with Buckets knows you need to ride fast. Try keeping up with him on a lard arse GS with a clutch that slips anytime you try opening the throttle...
We headed further South and stopped for breakky in Bombala. Bacon, egg, cheese and onion rolls all round with coffee to drink. With that sorted we headed to the border and found some nice dirt roads, which turned to clay based mud. The GS was sliding all over the place. Fun in a not so fun way if you get my drift.
Once the dirt was cleared we came across a sign:

It was about then I wished I was riding something that handled better than the QE2...
While we were at it, I took a pic of the bikes:



After about 50-60km of striaghts and losing the front a couple of times where vicroads had done roadworks, but put up no signs, we stopped for a quick break in a rest area. I need a smoke...
Buckets did a move on his bike that he'll never be able to do again. He hit the mud and spun around 180 degrees in a space 1.5 times the length of the ZZR1100 and he didn't drop it!
Damn these no crashing Kwaka's!
Here's a pic of the mark he left in the mud. I have marked the slide with red:

Another bike pic too:

We set off again towards Orbust to fuel up, then went looking for the back way to Buchan.
This is the bit that mostly stuffed my fairing.
The back road from Orbust to Buchan has a long straight near the beginning that is bumpy as hell. The bumps actually partially snapped my fairing where the top joins the bottom halves. It was bouncing all over the place. I shoed Buckets how much movement it had and we both laughed. It got worse the next day though...
In the mean time I had another front end slide on loose gravel and the rear brake ran out of fluid and the pedal did nothing. Not good on a big bike with crap brakes to begin with.
Anyway at Buchan we went to the Pub and had a nice meal and a few drinks. We were both stuffed after the days ride and eneded up going to bed by 8pm.
On a side note, the TV station was crazy. It had ads for QLD telling me I can't smoke anywhere, ads for Mt Isa, ads for NT...
We were watching Funniest HOme Video's (isn't that Ch9?) and there was promo's in the ad break for Thank God Your Here and The Wedge (isn't that Ch10?). Weird...
Next morning we woke up to find a very thick layer of frost and a -7 temprature. The ashtray on the table out side my room was so well stuck to the table I could pick up the table by the ashtray!

[Bucko]

This was the view I had from my room in the morning:

Here are the frosty bikes. No chance of seeing through the screen on my bike...
Sorry for the blurryness.


Buckets then drew on my screen:

It is hard to read, but it says "Where the Buchan Hell R you?"
Yes the Buchan jokes were going all night and into the next day...
We decided to head to a Shell Roadhouse about 60km away so I could get oil, brake fluid and gaffa tape for the fairing.
So we left Buchan and I battled with a slipping clutch again (it was much worse when the bike was cold).
As we rode along I hit a couple of good bumps and broke the rest of the fairing mounts. It was now only attached just in front of my knees on either side. The whole thing pivoted upwards and the top of the screen almost met my helmet!
I then had to ride the next 30 odd kays with only one hand, as the other one had to hold the fairing down...

[Bucko]

We got to the road house and I bought supplies and pulled out the tools:

First thing to be removed was the screen. I unbolted it so the wind wouldn't try and push the fairing back.
I then taped up the fairing using a roll and a half of gaffa tape while Rob did the oil and brake fluid.
Here is the repairs and me doing it:


After it was all taped up I snapped off the corner of the screen with my rego label on it and binned the rest.

After running repairs were made we set off for Cann River to have some brekky. As we left the servo I noticed my tacho wasn't working again.
I decided to to worry about it until we got to Cann River. Well by doing that I lost the inner cable. Oh well, at least I have a parts bike.
We had more Bacon, egg, cheese and onion rolls and fueled up for the ride back to NSW. I still had a lot of hours to go to get to Orange.

The fairing held together alright for all but the last 100 kays, but I'll get to that.

We said our goodbyes at Bombala and then went our separate ways.
I had a fairly good run stopping at Cooma for fuel, then Goulbourn for fuel and Macca's.
Things went bad again after that.
On the road to Crookwell I got pulled over for 122 in a 100 zone. $231 and 3 points. On the plus side I got pulled over by the first Patrol car. If I had made it past him I know I would have opened it up to really illegal speeds and then lost my licence to the next one that went past 5 minutes after I was pulled.

When I got the the dirt section the corrogations caused all the tape to snap and the fairing started flapping around again. I fixed it about 20km later once I was done with the dirt.
By this time it was getting dark and I only had a tinted visor, so I had to leave it up for the last hour or so home.
About 40km from home a few good bumps snapped the tape again, but I couldn't be bothered stopping, so I just let the fairing flap around and light up trees.

We left Buchan about 8am and I finally got home about 7pm. It was a Buchan long day.
All up I did about 1600km over the three days and had fun even with the dramas.

[Bucko]

Well since the dramas I've stripped off the fairings, fitted new clutch plates and a set of heavy duty springs and replaced the master cylinder with a TDM one and fitted braided lines to the front.
It made a big improvement to the brakes, but I still end up with the lever against the bar with brake fade after a lot of hard applications.
Not fun when you are trying to keep up with a ZZR through the twisties of the Snowy Mountains...
I really need to find some better brakes if I want to push the big girls limits.