Two Rides, Two Bikes, Back To Back
I love having three bikes, partly because they’re so different and each has its own strength.
For a little more than two weeks Judy and I were on a ride to British Columbia on my 1999 Kawasaki Concours. We got home on a Thursday and on Friday I took off with the OFMC for another week, this time on my 2006 Suzuki V-Strom 650. After basically living on the Connie for two weeks, was it an adjustment to be on the V-Strom, alone? You better believe it.
First off, Judy and I have helmet-to-helmet communicators, and I was totally accustomed to just talking with someone (her) as I rode along. Heading off on the OFMC trip, several of the guys had left earlier but I headed out with Brett. I can’t tell you how often I started to just talk to him, only to be reminded that, oh yeah, he can’t hear me. It’s silly how many times I did that.
As for being on a different bike, that played out in a variety of ways. For one thing, wow, what a change to go from a 670-pound bike with a 110-pound passenger to a 420-pound bike and no passenger. Can you say “light” and “agile”? I thought you could. This was like night and day. Smaller, lighter bikes are just fun to ride. I love my Connie as a highway, let’s-do-some-traveling sort of bike, but the Wee Strom is made for other pleasures, although it does fine on the highway.
Now, the seat is less comfortable than the Connie. I know most people think the first thing you should do is get an aftermarket seat, but I’ve never found that necessary or even desirable. I like the seat, and it is definitely better than the one on the V-Strom.
A different consideration is that the V has chain drive, while the Connie has a shaft. Not a big deal, but I did pay attention to the chain on this trip, even stopping to buy some W-D 40 because I forget to bring chain lube along.
The other significant thing about the V is that it has a digital read-out, not dials the way all older bikes do. One option on this digital read-out is the odometer and two trip meters that you have to punch a button to select. Also, a fuel gauge with five bars: full is five and when you get to only one it starts flashing to warn you that you are low.
These controls may be simple but it took me a while to figure out how they worked. As long as I’ve had the V-Strom I have had it just set to the odometer. That means that if you want to know what kind of gas mileage you’re getting you have to remember what the mileage was when you last filled up. I usually didn’t.
So on this trip I started using the trip meter for the first time. I wanted to understand how many miles each of those five bars represented. I quickly found that the first one did not go away until I had ridden at least 100 miles. The second one would generally disappear about 40 miles later. But I was riding with the guys, and none of their bikes can go as far on a tank of gas as my V-Strom so we were always stopping for gas before I got far into the third bar. I’ll have to figure out what the others represent sometime when I’ve riding alone.
But even the little I do know now has come in useful. As long as I’ve had the bike I’ve noticed that when I start it up after it’s been sitting for a while I smell gas. Once I saw gas dripping and I took it in for work that seems to have addressed the issue for the most part. But after I got home, with about 50 miles on the tank, I let the bike sit for a few weeks. Next time I got on it I was already down to the third bar. Whoa! Clearly I have a leak. Something is wrong. I’m hoping it will just require replacement of some rubber fuel lines. That’s going to be up to Joel to figure out.
Biker Quote for Today
If you need me I’ll be riding.
Tags: comparing motorcycles
