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Showing posts with the label buying

On balance

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One of the first tasks I normally perform on a new (to me) bike is to balance the carburettors. This is one of those jobs that never seems to get done as you need specialist tools but can make quite a difference in the day to day running of the bike.  "But wait Gavin, that's an injected motorcycle" I hear you cry. Well this is true but you can still balance the throttle bodies and mine are all over the place.  When I first purchased this bike, the tick over was up at 3.5k rpm when warm. I bottomed out the idle screw and had to also wind back the whole throttle body plate in order to get it near to the 1.5rpm correct idle. Now this might have had something to do with the bike massively over compensating for having a mouse house in the airbox  but with that small obstruction removed I knew the throttle body balance would be out after my fiddling. The first thing obstructing me from doing this right in the first place was that I had lent my carb gauges to a...

Being sensible with money

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What do you do when you buy a house? Move in, maybe buy some furniture and get yourself settled? Well in November 2013 I was doing just that, but I had two rooms that lacked any furniture at all. I'd walk into these rooms that felt cold and empty and ponder how best I should make them feel like home. I knew other rooms needed finishing to. The spare bedroom had no bed, the living room just had a sofa in it and the study was filled with boxes of books. So some budgeting and prioritizing was in order. After some sole and internet searching the plan became clear. One of the garages was going to have to wait a bit longer than the other. After three years of caging I was buying another motorcycle,  but what to buy? As aforementioned I had been off of bikes for 3 years so I wasn't going to get anything to silly, but on the same hand my last two bikes were Fireblades so I was kind of used to a little power to play with. I was going to need something that was fun and goo...