I hate riding my motorcycle when it rains… Here’s a tip for all of you who don’t wanna be bothered with checking tedious and boring weather forecasts. “Is it going to rain?” is a really simple website that lets you know if it’s going to rain in your neck of the woods today.
My family gave me an excellent little multitool that’ll be great to bring on longer rides where I’ll have to camp. It has all the standard features like a knife, corkscrew, can opener and bottle opener, but it also has a spoon and a fork which is great cause I’ll never have to bring cutlery ever again. It’s also stainless which is good. I’m not sure where they bought it but I’m sure you can find something similar online if you’re interested – soooo hit Google! :)
You don’t actually get a pen with the multitool… it’s just to show you the size of the tool.
It’s finally spring! The sun is up, it’s a few degrees Celsius above 0 and people are getting their motorcycles on the road. It’s that great feeling that only motorcycle owners get. My Vulcan 900 has been sleeping in my garage all winter for the first time. Last year I had it wait for me in a warm and cozy room at the local mechanic/motorcycle shop where they took care of it and changed the oil and filtre, checked the tire pressure, hosed it down with some soap and water and so forth before I got it back. But not this winter, oh no! I was gonna save some money and do this myself… stupid stupid stupid…
12V 10Ah YTX12-BS Battery
If you’re gonna be dumb, you better be tough right? Rite! So I should have read up on how to prepare my bike for winter instead of just parking it and leave it for 5 months. It turns out that everyday you leave your bike without riding it your battery lose 1% of its’ charge, so leaving it for 3 months and it’s practically dead. Leaving it for 5 months and the battery is, uh well, dead… even deader than dead, in fact it’s exactly 4,23Volts of wasted-acid-dead. What I should have done is buy a maintenance charger and had it connected to the battery all winter or at least charge the battery for a few hours once every month. Oh well, I learn everyday! And since I don’t have anyone teach me all this stuff (damn it would have been fun to do a Bachelor of Kawasakis at uni!) I’ll have to learn through trial and error and doing a hell of a lot of googling.
The first remedy I tried was using a friends motorcycle (a sweet looking 125cc Honda!) and hook his battery to mine and jump start it that way. It pumped some juice into the beast, but not enough to get the engine running, not even after we tried push-starting the heavy bastard bike.
Stein Arne and his 125cc Honda
Anyways, after calling a mechanic I got around to buying a battery charger, a CTEK XS 800 designed for 12V batteries like mine. The dealer told me that it probably wouldn’t be able to charge my battery but it would be perfect for next winter so that I didn’t have to end up in the same mess again so I got one and brought it back to the garage and tested it anyway. Just as he had told me, 15 hours later the battery still wouldn’t put out the juice to to even light up the small light indicators or anything.
IT Apprentice Alexander checking my motorcycle battery with the multimetre at work :)
Now what? I’m not known for giving up easy, so I took the battery to the shop that I bought the battery charger from and he is now charging it over night with his über-super-mega-charger and we’ll see if that helps, if not I simply have to go and buy a new battery. I’ll keep you updated! :)
Important! If you’re going to fiddle around with your battery, read the section on battery removal, charging and reinserting the battery in your motorcycle manual! Also, read the manual of your battery charger and never jump start your tiny little motorcycle battery using some ones oversized car battery! Apparently, if you hook up your battery in the wrong way sparkles will fly and the acid inside your battery might end up in your face… that’s right, it could actually explode, so take care and read up on handling batteries. Check out Dan’s MC for more information on motorcycle batteries.
Solar Powered Digital Tire Pressure Gauge
I ordered a solar powered digital tire pressure gauge a couple of weeks ago from Hong Kong… It doesn’t need batteries and has a built-in tool to measure tire-depth and a fancy red flashlight(!). Since I work with computers all day I simply love gadgets, so combining this with tools for my motorcycle is especially fun. It set me back a measly $8,14 (free shipping from the other side of the world…). It has a nice little LED display and measures tire pressure in PSI, Kpa, Bar and Kg/cm2.
Having the right tire pressure can save you for quite a bit of petrol and can also extend the life of your tires.
The manual for the VN900 Classic recommends 28PSI on the front wheel and 32PSI on the rear wheel but motorcycle legends on the Kawasaki Motorcycle Forum recommends 38PSI/40PSI or even 40PSI/40PSI. I can’t really recommend any of these until I’ve tried myself. Since my bike is still in the garage waiting for warmer weather and have been so since October, my values are way too low at 23/25 front/rear so I’m gonna have to jack those up to at least what the manual says before I hit the road.
By the way, I don’t really trust cheap plastic gadgets imported from China so I’ll check my tire pressure gauge against a professional one the next time I get a service on my bike just to see how accurate mine is. I’ll keep you updated on this.
If you want one for yourself, go here: http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.2623
Top Supporters:
1. BikerMagne
2. Your name here?
3. www.yourwebsite.com?
