Kevin (Spin Doctor on Visordown) over at Survival Skills has put up an excellent post on sorting out your lines on the road. I like this for a couple of reasons, the first being that every now and again I get a bit ragged in my cornering and feel really ackward, and also that he puts his finger on the building blocks to sort it out.

Motorcycles are relatively narrow compared to the amount of road width needed by cars, and there are more options for positioning. They also carry less grip, so the options for getting out of cornering problems can be less if you aren’t so sure of your machine and skills.

I recommend a read of that post if you are a motorcylist.

Had a day working from home this week so that I could drop off and collect my motorbike from the local MOT place, C&J Wilson in Uphall. At the time I took the opportunity to get the Autocom Active Plus kit fitted. Wilson’s are an Autocom dealer, and although I didn’t buy it from them, they said they were ok fitting it to the bike.

So the good news was that the bike passed its MOT, with a wee word of caution from the tester about a rattle from one of the brake discs. The discs are floating types i.e. they are not rigidly fixed to the wheel so that they can move while braking along the axis of the wheel rotation. With age the various parts wear a little so I’ll keep an eye on things. It will need to be looked at if bits start pinging off.

They also fitted the Autocom, and a very very neat job they did to. The unit itself is mounted in the tail piece of the bike, with the cables running to the front for my headset, and near the rear for the passenger headset connection (unlikely to be used). The auxiliary socket is on one side and I’ve also bought the wire to connect this to one of my recently purchased Motorola T5622s. This will give me the option of bike to bike comms for Observing and general coughing, sneezing, singing and other stuff I do when riding my motorbike.

I’ve also got a couple of other wires that plug my phone and mp3 player into the thing. I’m not planning on phone calls, but the option of music or even perhaps the TomTom GPS on my phone may be handy. Lots of gadget options to play with.

I used to be good at posting my Sunday ride reports, but I think I spent the time last Sunday finishing typing up my notes as Secretary of the Scottish IAM Forum. I now need to process it into more legible minute type quality that can be published.

I finally found a Sunday morning when I didn’t have an Observed Car run and the bike was in one piece and not having any problems. So I met the three other chaps at Dreghorn Services for a run to St Mary’s Loch in the borders.

From Dreghorn we went South to Peebles, East to Innerleithen, then South (I think) to join the A708 and head to the Glen Cafe. They do excellent Bacon Rolls there, and I managed to get them to do me two after the official breakfast time. The Borders group had also made a trip there – I think they had more out that we did from EDAM.

Then back over towards the Megget Reservoir through the sunshine and falling snow, then up Tweedsmuir way and back towards Leadburn and Penicuik.

I nice run, though I need more practice at maintaining progress for that amount of time. I get left behind a bit.

Headed over to see George in South Queensferry this afternoon to look at the petrol drip. It looked like it was coming down the outside of the three breather pipes that come down the right hand side of the R1100RS. Having looked under the seat, the breather pipes looked a bit cracked, but trimming and reconnecting them just had the drip coming out of the pipe.

The breathers connect to a plate on the bottom of the fuel tank, which itself connects to lines inside the tank to connect to the fuel filter and petrol filler cap drain hole – channels rain water away. Sounds like one of the breather pipes inside the tank is allowing the petrol of the tank to seep in and run down the pipe. That means a tank-off job to ferret about inside to check the pipes for leaks and make sure their connector seals are ok.

So I left the bike with George and should be able to pick it up soon.

Spoke to the man from Sherlock’s a couple of days ago to get bits in anticipation of fixing the petrol leak on the R1100RS tomorrow. Turns out the service kit was returned to them with a hand written note saying “Not Collected”.

I phoned three times a day for almost two weeks, and visited the sorting office in person three times. Argh.

Seems I spoke a little too soon when I said the bike was serviced for another year. I was up in Perth last weekend for one of the two a year meetings of the Scottish IAM Motorcycle Forum and spotted a petrol leak, which has continued since.

So off to South Queensferry tomorrow to see why my RS is leaking petrol down the right hand side.

Popped over to South Queensferry to pick up my bike from George. No problems encountered, so now I have the R1100RS serviced for the year and also fitted with new suspension and heated grips.

The new suspension is superb, and as the weather improves I expect to be able to try it out more. It already feels less harsh but also less bumpy. I saved up for them for a while and ordered a set of uprated units through Tim Rose of T.R. Engineering from a company in France called EMC Suspensions. The units come with blue springs as standard, but for a small charge can have practically any colour you want. Blue is fine for my bike, so I got the springs and dampers set to cope with my weight (xxl).

And heated grips are usually part and parcel of BMW bikes, but for some reason my bike just had the switch. After a few months of trying the switch at different settings and thinking how dumb I was not to notice the difference, I had the fairing off and there was the connector for the wiring cable-tied to the loom but not connected to the further wire to the grips. And right enough, the bar-end weights didn’t have the cutouts for the wires of the heated grips. Saving up again I forked out for the BMW retrofit kit from Motorworks and George fitted these for me too. Thankfully the bars themselves were the correct type with a hole through the centre of the casting to accept the wires, and I now have new grips and bar end weights etc. And they are excellent, I now have a proper BMW with touring kit and nice warm hands behind the GS handguards.

And I took the long way home from South Queensferry, via Linlithgow, twice…

I’m just back from South Queensferry, having dropped the R1100RS off at George who does servicing on my bike in his spare time. I get the RS serviced annually, with bits and bobs in between. This time it is getting a couple of treats – new suspension and heated grips! The new suspension should help it handle better and also cope with my huge weight better, and the heated grips make a big difference to comfort when riding in this country which makes you feel cold on a bike even in the summer.

The journey back was rather good, although I had to wait quite a bit on a train coming, I checked the internet timetable through my SPV M600 and discovered there was a 4 minute connection to Livingston. Travel time from Dalmeny (walking distance from George’s) was 34 minutes, including the stop over at Haymarket. The train to Livingston was direct from Haymarket – quite unusual on the Glasgow Central Line.

Spoke to Sherlocks on Friday, received the stuff today at work. Excellent service, speedy, and by Royal Mail.

Now I need to get my bike and parts over to South Queensferry for it to be put together!

(At last).