The 170dB alarm clock.

Imagine making yourself a nice place to live. It's roomy, with a springy floor and you fill it with soft bedding to make it into the most comfy nest to get your head down after a long hard day working.
One day you are woken by what feels like an earth quake as your room is jolted about. In the darkness you hear a distant jangle and click followed by a brief scream that emanates from below, stopping as fast as it starts.
All goes quiet for a moment before your world is turned upside down. A brief rhythmic cranking noise is followed by a tremendous roar. Air rushes past you and apparently into the floor like breath.The roar builds and falls sucking bits of bedding into the creases of the floor.
You jolt into action and run  for the entrance, feeling the wind tear at you as you flee.
What was once a cold, neglected, man made maze is now rapidly heating into a furnace as you hop and jump your way to the floor only to see what was once your house, bellow off into the distance apparently possessed by the demon sat upon it.
A strange thought but something you might want to keep in the back of your mind.

A couple of weeks into happy motorcycle ownership and I had found some free time to have a proper look around the bike.
By now I had realized that the bike hadn't been touched for a while. The clutch casing was flaky, chain dry, wheel valves were losing pressure and there were what looked like berries under the seat. Strange.
The bike was also sans road tax, further cementing in my mind that the dealership hadn't really bothered much with this bike.
As there was no service book I decided to do an oil and filters change for now and catch up on valve gaps and other servicing fun once I had got myself a Haynes manual.
I decided to do the air filter first as it was most likely to be a pain so I popped off the seat and two 8mm bolts at the front of the tank so I could hinge it up.
I used an extension bar to prop the tank open and was promptly confronted with a rather pissed off looking spider. Fair play for hanging in there but it was time to move this resident on along with its network of webs. "Damn what a mess" I thought. As I cleaned, the foam soundproofing flaked off of the base of the tank: clearly embrittled over the years although curiously it looked like it had been chewed in some places. Hungry spiders?
Next I dug out an extra long magnetic cross point screwdriver. The airbox lid is held on with a number of self tapping screws around the edge, each one poised to dive into the bowls of the engine below with every turn. What screws aren't held into the lid come out with the magnet so reducing the risk of that annoying tinkle of a falling fastener followed by an age with a piece of wire and a torch trying to find the damn thing.
Finally I disconnected the flapper valve hose, unclipped the wiring loom and lifted off the lid. I didn't really expect what I was confronted with.

How in the hell this bike even started, let alone ran smoothly, without any bother or soot is a mystery to me. This bike was someones pad!
Apparently this is fairly common as mice seam to prefer the high quality comfort of a Honda VFR airbox after a quick Search of the internet but was still a shock to me.
I got my hoover out and removed as much loose stuff as I could before carefully removing the filter so as not to drop any bits I had missed into the lower airbox or worse still the throttle bodies. This area was thankfully clean but I still wiped it out with a rag and some carb cleaner anyway.

The replacement airfilter I chose was the Pipercross performance foam filter.
Not only is the price pretty good considering it will never need replacing but it is supposed to offer better airflow. This won't make a huge amount of difference now but as I later improve breathing by changing the exhaust it will all add up to more ponies.
Another factor in choosing the Pipercross modle is the surface area usage of this filter over the OEM and K&N options, as demonstrated by the images on the right. The filter material is present edge to edge on the Pipercross filter, whereas the OEM filter has allot of blanked off areas as well as a more restrictive material backed by a dense metal gauze. More air flowing into the engine is no bad thing so for £39 why wouldn't you put one of these in.
Oh and because the old filter had a mouse house on it.


With the filter swapped out I slung the bike back together so I could run her up and see how much better she was running without half a sofa blocking the bikes intake.
The answer; disappointingly little. The bike had done a fantastic job of compensating for its disability. Mpg was up a little and the induction noise had just got a bit more exciting to.
In fact sod it the oil change can wait till tomorrow, I'm going for a ride.