[zeppelinfromled]

I agree with Munch, I would never ride with that group. It’s more of a wild mob than a group.

As I look at it again, they do seem to use a pretty good staggered formation withing a lane. That’s about the only thing they have going for them.

[zeppelinfromled]

I decided to go with the mesh jacket, and I picked it up today. I had to pick it up in my car since I can’t carry 2 jackets at one time on my bike, so I haven’t tried it yet. I’ll report back once I do.

[zeppelinfromled]

Over the winter, someone clipped my door and left a pretty nasty scrape it in, but no defects to the door. I brought it into a body shop (it’s actually a dealership) and they buffed it out. They said it was going to be $40, but they didn’t charge me (the guy said something like “just remember us if you have any work in the future”). Might be worth looking into getting a professional to buff it out if you can’t do it yourself.

[zeppelinfromled]

How set are you on the cruiser style? I would at least look at and sit on some sport bike/sport touring bikes. As a first pass, check out the Kawasaki lineup (Ninja 250, Ninja 500, and Ninja 650) as well as the Suzuki SV650. These bikes have a more upright posture (if that’s part of what draws you to cruisers), but you can still tuck down if you want. The seat tends to be higher off the ground, which wouldn’t be a problem with your height, although the four bikes that I mentioned have lower seats than a lot of true sport bikes. I ride a Ninja 650, and it fits all of your requirements as far as I’m concerned. You’ll need to work up to trips over 100 miles, but I suspect that you’ll need to do that on whatever bike you get.

So those are the sport bikes I would look at. I’m not very knowledgeable about cruisers, so I can’t comment too much. But I know that the Vulcan and the Shadow are popular bikes. If I had gotten a cruiser, it probably would have been the Shadow 750 (I didn’t do that much research, so I can’t be sure).

[zeppelinfromled]

Hm, it sounds like I should go with the mesh. Since I already have a jacket, and it’s just a little too warm, I would hate to drop several hundred dollars to find out that my new one is exactly the same. I wish I could test ride the jackets. Just go out on my bike for 10 minutes a piece on a warm day. I’m pretty sure that I could very easily decide after that. That’s a good tip about avoiding black. It should apply to the mesh jacket as well, but it’s probably less important there.

[zeppelinfromled]

Haha, doggles. I love it.

Owlie, your cat seems to like things related to your helmet (your avatar has your cat investigating the helmet itself).

Sometime I’ll videotape my cats with a laser pointer. They work as a team to hunt it, trapping it in the hall between them. I’ve tried to get them to hit each other head on, but it never happens.

[zeppelinfromled]

By far the animal that I see (or notice one way or another) around here are skunks. I can smell them much more readily on my bike. I saw one walking down the sidewalk one night while I was riding past, and I booked it out of there.

I guess we also have a lot of house cats that go outside, but I’ve only once seen them while I was on the road, and I was in my car.

[zeppelinfromled]

I’m thinking about getting on the track once I have some more experience. My biggest reason not to do it is that I assume I would need different tires. At least my understanding is that road tires are too hard for the track and track tires are too soft for the road. So do you have to resign yourself to either own two bikes or only do one type of riding (track or road)?

[zeppelinfromled]

Be warned that some (maybe most) dealerships won’t let you test ride unless you’ve had your license for some specified amount of time. To test ride at the place I got my bike, that amount of time was 3 years.

[zeppelinfromled]

I started with a 650R instead of a 250 because I was relatively confident in my riding ability. I have no problems with it on the highway or anything. I might upgrade to a more powerful bike at some point, but this bike has plenty of power for me.

[zeppelinfromled]

There was a big piece of plywood with some screws in it on the road a couple weeks ago. It was in the other lane (opposing direction), but I turned around to move it out of the road. No one was next to it with flat tires, but I figured it was easy enough for me to throw it off the road.

[zeppelinfromled]

In that situation, if I had the bag in my hand, I would put it in a pocket. I keep one pocket unzipped while I ride (with nothing in it) so that I can put something in it easily with a glove on if I need to. I don’t do it with the intent of catching a bag, but it could be used for that.

But if for some reason I couldn’t get to a pocket easily, I would have no problem letting it go.

[zeppelinfromled]

I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t like the smell anymore. And before that, the smell would make me want a cigarette, so that wasn’t good either.

[zeppelinfromled]

As a former smoker, this doesn’t bother me that much. I don’t usually follow close enough to get hit by a butt that they flick out of the window (unless they flick it straight up). The litter bothers me a bit. It’s not like their car isn’t going to smell like smoke, so they should just use their ash tray. But when I see areas on the side of the road covered in litter, it’s not the cigarette butts that I notice, it’s the empty food containers, etc. As long as they’re not flicking them in areas where fires are likely to start or in pristine wilderness, it doesn’t bother me that much.

What bothers me, and isn’t really anyone’s fault, is having to breathe in the smoke that someone blows out of the window. When I’m following behind a smoker in relatively heavy traffic, I’ll usually do something to get in front of them, or I increase my following distance a lot and a few cars will usually get between me and the car in question. I don’t blame the smoker. When I was a smoker, I smoked in my car too. And it’s not like they should put their cigarette out when a motorcycle gets behind them. It’s just something that I try to avoid when possible.

[zeppelinfromled]

They’ll teach you this stuff in the MSF course.

I’m assuming that when you ask “how do people stop at red lights” you mean because starting again is the hard part. The stopping part is easy.

As for the daily check, some of it’s important. They’ll go through a basic checklist at MSF for what you should do before riding. I’m pretty lazy about it though. I check the important things like the tires and sometimes the oil, but a lot of it I can determine if it’s good or not on my way out of the place where I park.

[Author]

Posts