Just back from my last evening class at Borders College on the Know Your Motorcycle course. Hats off to Shane Black for knowing his stuff, and tweaking the course content to allow us to get on with the spannering.

It was great fun, and the only downer for me was having to travel all that way to Galashiels. I can’t believe that I have to travel 40 miles either South or West to get a basic mechanical maintenance course. I guess the city bikers must be too posh to get their fingernails dirty. And its not as if they have to, I wear nitrile gloves and stay clean thankyou very much.

We did everything from removing wheels to electrics, changing the oil, changing the brake fluid, removing the forks (the suspension at the front) and we had one bike running tonight, one almost running (it had a spark) and another not working. As we didn’t even know which of the three bikes worked before the course, that was reckoned to be good going.

Shane has a day job working at a Chrysler dealer as a diagnostic technician on Jeeps, and has worked on quads, bikes, cars etc etc. Turned up on his Fazer tonight, one of the other guys was on his GSXR.

Having got the reputation as the guy with the BMW, one of the others (who is an associate with Borders Bike IAM) gave me a link to a video of a BMW R1150GS going round the Isle of Man during TT time – they do strange things with roads during that time.