Irish Road Racing

What a cracking photo. Irish road racing - coming to a front garden near you next summer.

 
(Stephen Davidson @sdbikephoto)

Drive

(Via: deviantart)

Joining A Club

When I first moved to Edinburgh for work about 25 years ago I didn't know anyone locally, and certainly no one who rode a bike. Not long afterwards, though, I noticed an advert in a bike magazine from a local motorcycle club looking for new members. In the days before the internet this was a fairly common practise. I thought that I'd go along and see what they had to offer.

It was a chilly November evening when I rode out to the pub after which the club were named. On arrival, there wasn't another bike to be seen in the car park, and I wondered if I had the wrong evening. This thought was uppermost in my mind when, on entering the bar all I could see were a couple of old guys nursing their pints.

Obviously seeing my confusion, the barmaid informed me that 'everyone else' was in the back room. Everyone else turned out to be about twenty folk, mostly quite young and dressed in bike jackets, drinking pints and talking about their recent summer trip to the Isle of Man.

On the whole they were harmless enough, but they did go on rather too long about the joys of sports bikes, about speed limits exceeded, and of crashes had and survived. In hindsight, they may have been trying to impress me. It didn't work. One individual even tried to sell me his bike forgetting, obviously, that he had already made mention of the fact that it was a heap of shit half an hour earlier.

I stayed long enough to be polite before making my excuses. They were rather amused that I had actually arrived by bike and streamed out behind me to have a look at it. As I was riding a soviet-built flat twin they felt perfectly comfortable in telling me it was rubbish and that I should buy a proper bike.

Just to annoy them I got on and reversed the bike up the street for a bit just to see the looks on their faces. They didn't disappoint, and I left them with their mouths hanging open as I rode the short distance home.

On reflection, it had been obvious from almost the first moment that I entered the pub's back room that these weren't going to be my new best buddies. I had too little in common with most of them, and what I was looking for in a club differed greatly from what they were offering.

I have subsequently found a home with a number of one-make clubs with whom I was a better fit.

Unexpected Road Hazards

(Via: bikepost)

Waiting

(Via: motobilia)

Bloody Saturday

Looking north towards the Firth of Forth

East Lothian, where I now live, is replete with sites of historical interest. Many are just a short distance away, and I often use the excuse of visiting them to take the bike out for a spin.

After adjusting the clutch recently, I made the short two mile trip to the memorial for the Battle of Pinkie Cleugh to make sure that everything was working as it should.

The battle site is now farmland, and the main A1 arterial road runs through what was, in 1547, the site of the last pitched battle between the armies of Scotland and England.

On this occasion, the away team won the day.

Clutching

The Aprilia's clutch has been dragging a bit since I bought it, and putting it into neutral had become rather problematic recently. I'd been putting up with it, but the other day the bike started rolling forward with the lever fully engaged, and then it began cutting out every time I tried to put it into gear. The clutch was clearly not engaging and disengaging properly. Something had to be done.

As it's a hydraulic clutch there is no external adjustment possible as you have with a cable operated clutch. I've never had a bike with a hydraulic clutch before so I was a bit unsure of how to approach the problem. One of the joys of owning and running older bikes is that they have less technology to go wrong even if, admittedly, they tend to go wrong more often. So, I was going to have to do some research.

First up, I consulted the owner's manual, a copy of which is conveniently to be found online. No great help, unfortunately, as the solution offered for pretty much every problem you might encounter is to take it into your Aprilia dealer and let a qualified mechanic sort it for you (for a price).

So, back onto the internet for information about working on hydraulic clutches. There's loads of stuff, as you might imagine. However, most of the advice seemed to focus on 'reverse-bleeding' the system using a large syringe to force the fluid up into the reservoir from the bottom rather than filling from the top and bleeding normally as you would with a disc brake.

As I didn't have a large syringe, and as everything else pointed to it being reasonably similar to working on the brakes, I decided to give it a go. What's the worst that could happen?

Removing the cover from the reservoir on the handlebar I noticed that what little fluid was evident was a nice pale colour suggesting it was reasonably new. Topping it up and bleeding the system as I would my brakes resulted in a large number of really big air bubbles being expelled. This is never a good sign and they were probably the cause of the problems.

With all new fluid and the line bled properly the clutch lever lost its spongy feeling, and once I'd started the bike up the clutch appeared to be operating properly again. What it looks like is that the previous owner had changed the fluid before selling me the bike and the system hadn't been bled properly.

For those of you used to doing this you'll be wondering why all the fuss? I'm just glad that it turned out to be so straight-forward and, as an added bonus, I now feel confident about doing it again, even if it probably won't need doing for some time yet.