Vocal Voices

I have new brake pads for the front. Fitted them, fine.

I've been having front vibration and wheel shakes for a while and I was determined to finally get to the bottom of it. Started dismantling the top yolk to tighten the steering head bearings. Slacken off left side, move to right side..... 2 bolts. No nuts.

Hmmm, that'll explain why the bike felt like the front wheel was following the road more than where I was pointing it then.... Urgent trip to the Brico to get some nylon locking nuts. I really hate this Kawasaki build stuff where nothing has either lock nuts or shakeproof washers on it...

Ah well. Better to find it before it throws me down the road. But a bit of a concern really. I'll be changing all of them (there are 8 bolts and nuts), over the next week or two. Feeling a tad unconfident in their security... I'm sure Kawasaki must use thread lock but that's not in most people's tool kit (used to be in mine but I tend not to have a need now)....

Feeling a bit safer now.

Get a car!

One of the old ones you can fix with an adjustable, screwdriver, hammer, knife and fork and a crisp packet... you know it makes sense.

Old Puntos, R5s and 2CVs from the Med region must be available for peanuts.

I bought the bike when I was flying out of Southampton and working from home for a week, meaning 9 days for the car in parking. Plus one other weekend and my monthly parking bill was hitting £180. Then, of course, I also had the issue of getting there on a Friday in a reasonable time. Parking costs went down to £0, bikes are free. The bike cost £795.

Here in Brussels a car is useless to me. My car (2007 807, is sitting in the garage at home on SORN. It would cost me a minimum of €120 per month just to park it and there is no way of parking on street as I won't be there every day of every week to check if they are blocking the parking and digging the street up (always somewhere every month here), so it's private parking which is a 1 year minimum contract.

Then there is the weekend travel here. Add train to Lille and onwards to Poitiers, €80 every time I travel. Take the train direct from Brussels to Poitiers, add €200. Take the bike? €23 in fuel, better timings, free parking in Lille for the weekend and no chance of being stuck in Lille on Sunday night (avoided that twice already).

Travel to the UK on a weekend is currently around £20-£22 via Tunnel (cheapest), with a car it would be at least £60. The bike does nearly 50mpg which is 10mpg more than the car. OK diesel is cheaper here but not 10mpg worth.

The bike is now 25 years old. It's basic maintenance which I can do and have the tools for. Carbs (cost me a lot of trouble recently), not fuel injection, solid state simple electronic ignition, all the other serviceable parts are easy. The main issue is somewhere to work on it and the time to work on it. The brake pads, for instance, cost £14 for the front to buy and 25 minutes to fit on the street. Not something you could say about a car.

It may have issues and be a pain from time to time, but it's worth it. I was just aggrieved at the way the bolts undid themselves. Lesson learned. Replace nuts on use...

Suff wrote:..... 2 bolts. No nuts.

Crikey me Suff, have you contacted Kawasaki about this? If it's a regular thing that could happen then surely it should be an urgent health and safety recall? That could end in disaster otherwise

Glad you spotted it

Presumably you have had a dynamic balance of the wheel as well?

Meriad, I guess if you always went to a Kawasaki shop and paid half the price of the bike (every time), to get it serviced and maintained, then they would always put on threadlock.

It's probably my fault as I don't do this enough any more. No nuts should be without shake proof security and my brain was on half power and I was struggling to get the job done in one evening. Which does not include a visit to the (closed), shops for the correct nuts. Even more telling was the nylon locking nuts on the bottom of the yolk which had already been replaced....

My bad I think. But still a learning experience.

Ped, I've just had the second dynamic wheel balance done. The first one was done whilst the wheel bearings were totally shot so I wanted it done again after I changed the wheel bearings. The reason I was looking so hard was that I knew the wheel was well balanced and on good bearings but it was still causing problems. Also that sinking feeling when the wheel was tracking around the ruts and depressions in the (pitifully poor), Brussels roads and my hand on the handlebars was not quite in sync with the wheel movements on the road. It had been getting worse and, ill or not, I was determined to find out why....

My brother had a BSA 250 side valve hand change motor bike. We put new pads in the clutch, de-coked it several times and re-wired it and fitted a new head lamp.. Now with the car, all I can do is put fuel in, top up the windscreen washer bottle and check the oil.
But I did manage to re-wire the house several years ago, and have fitted an outside tap, and a new valve in the cistern in the toilet. But i am no good with wood.
Glad your bike is fixed. I would love to ride one again as I still have my lo licence.

Cruiser, that means quite a lot to me, the old B series engines in the Army were overhead inlet side exhaust. Side valves were a pleasant job to work on, kind of like a 2 stroke, you didn't have to mess with pushrods, timing chains or adjusting the tappets just because you hauled the head off.

That old BSA would have been rigid rear end... Modern suspension is quite an upgrade and even my bike at 25 years old is quite aged in terms of road handling and also the tyre technology is so far ahead it's like comparing WWII rigid tyres with pneumatics. Modern bikes are amazing. Sadly so is the price... They have become toys for people with too much money.

Even the bike technology 25 years ago was very advanced. The Overhead cam uses "bucket shims". Now I've been trained to set bucket shims as the old Jag 4.2 engine had them but my experience was that you needed a workshop, bucket of different size shims, micrometer...... etc. However the upside on a bike is the need to adjust them about once every red super moon or when you strip the engine. Which I am extremely averse to.

However you do know that the highest rate of biker deaths on the road comes in the category of rider who rode a bike in their youth, got a full license and then came back to it in their 50's onwards because cost was no longer an issue and they had a nostalgia for it. I've ridden on and off since I was 15 so I'm not quite in that category, but you do need to keep it up and modern bikes, even in the 250 class are simply monsters for power and handling if you are not used to it.

At least the handling is so good that other kinds of accidents don't happen so much. Last time I came back from the train it was late (past midnight), I was tired and not in a mood to take it easy. I had just passed a truck, on a gentle bend and was easing my way back towards the centre line of the motorway when I had another "dead animal" incident. Just as I passed the white line the bike sort of "flowed" over a significant bump in the road. Older bikes would not have handled this so well. Also the speed helped, I was distinctly north of 100mph. If I'd been going, say, 50mph, I would have been in a lot of danger of losing it.

The only work I do on Mrs S' car, besides Oil, water (both), brake fluid and fuel, is brakes. Disc brakes are disk brakes. so long as you get the pads with the sensors and connect them, it's not so bad. Bleeding brakes on modern cars is for a garage with a pressure bleeder.