Mississippi Bullfrog

Is the air filter soaked with petrol?

First question is when was it last fully serviced? Basic service items being past their best could cause problems. If the previous owner changed the carb jets ask why. If the oil is contaminated with fuel then change it.

I've seen faulty crank sensors do that. It's the heat that does it. Usually leave them 10 - 15 minutes and they fire up again. It won't repeat until the engine gets hotter such as at idle.

I've done tubeless tyres. Some are easier than others. Get them warm first and a decent bead breaker helps. Plus if you have three arms it's easier. I've never done tubed tyres yet but I will need to soon as the tyres on the Bobber are getting a bit low. I've done pedal bike tyres and tubes of course. Is it pretty much the same?

Sounds like a dud crank position sensor to me. They are basically just an electronic magnet. Eventually you get a crack in the winding which opens up when it gets hot. As soon as it cools down again you're good to go. A mate had the same on his Guzzi. He'd had in a workshop for months and they couldn't find the problem. They even replaced the ecu at enormous cost. He then found out that his Guzzi uses an ecu out of some old Peugeot, you just swap the chip over. But having spent hundreds on it he then found it was a 30 quid crank sensor that was the problem.

Some camshaft journal bolts are 8Nm - which is scary.

For delicate stuff I have a Halfords pro torque wrench that goes down to very low numbers. It's handy for stuff I don't want risk overtightening, like camshaft journals which can be literally just nipped up and nothing more. Handy bit of kit to have.

Saturday looks great so far as the weather is concerned. So I'm stuck doing another safeguarding course because every organisation I volunteer for won't accept the safeguarding training I've already done with every other organisation. Same with DBS checks. They're meant to be transferable but every organisation says they want to do their own. The new regs coming out of the Manchester Arena bombing where the security was woeful mean that anyone involved in public venues needs to do counter terrorism training. At least because that's still in its early days means that there is very few accredited courses so once you've got that certificate it's transferable.

I don't know if your forks are different but when I've replaced bushes and seals the lower bolt has to come out. The trick is to slacken it before releasing the spring tension. Or maybe those are different if you've had them apart without removing that bolt?

There's a lot of bogus NGK plugs on ebay. Was the plug replaced when you serviced it? As above....if there's a mix or timing issue that has destroyed the plug then you need to sort it ASAP. I'd get the compression checked as the missing bits from the plug must have gone somewhere. Hopefully expelled through an open valve but I've seen plugs like that do significant internal damage.

My weekend gardening

My world is very simple. Gentlemen pee against a tree. Ladies pee behind a hedge. Anyone wants to do anything in between just needs to watch out for the stinging nettles.

Sat here wondering why my tea isn't cooking. I've turned the top oven onto 200 degrees. And put my tea in the bottom oven. Feck!

If you're going to go faster then I suggest a few mods on yourself to prevent a power wobble. The best solution I've found is plenty of pies in you diet as heavier rider reduces the tendency for high speed wobble. At least that's my excuse.

Take a look at a Suzuki VanVan. Very easy to ride and maintain. Big fat sand tyres which make them ideal on poor surfaces.

I thought I'd try a new navigation app - so downloaded Motobit. They have a special offer on the full version which is usually £25 but is £16 for this year for new subscribers. I set a 60 mile circular route which proved to be a good mix of back lanes and faster A roads. It uses an American voice which is a bit annoying as the pronunciations are all wrong. I was looking to Rosette Lane when it meant Rossett Lane. At one stage there were two junctions very close together and I had both the American voice and an English voice both speaking at once. That was a bit odd. But overall I'm quite impressed with it. It analyses the ride data and I can't see anyway to tailor that to the bike. The Bobber tends to go round bends rather easily because the weight is so low and the app tracked the cornering data as constantly in the hooligan range. Maybe it will learn?

Some of the guys I ride with are older than me. One of them went for a Honda CB300R and got on very well with it. Another has been through a series of bigger bikes and then got rid of them within a few months because he finds the weight of them is a problem. I keep suggesting he goes for one of the new Triumph 400s. I have a 1200 and a 500. You can still have a lot of fun on a smaller capacity machine.

A few years back I wanted a replacement workhorse bike so looked at a new CB500. I then sought out dealers with used versions for sale that were a couple of years old. The signs of rust on such new bikes put me off buying a new one so I went for a 2006 CBF instead. The build quality back then was way better and it's been a cracking bike. I hope the dealer sorts it out for you. That's not good on such a new bike. At least the ones I was checking were 2-3 years old.

A bit of a follow up. My Beeline is now four years old. The charging unit got a bit tricky to get a good connection a couple of weeks ago. It still worked but I had to give it a firm press. I contacted Beeline who immediately sent out a replacement free of charge. They have a brilliant attitude to looking after customers.

I suspect dealers like most people who have to deal with that many headed monster known as the general public are inundated with time wasters who send out multiple emails expressing interest in something they're never going to follow through. Having wasted many hours my policy with all email expressions of interest is to invite them to come to see me in person. Only about 1 in 10 ever actually show up.

A lot of those youtube videos are either riders who are idiots and then get angry because they did something stupid and failed to spot a problem - or increasingly I suspect riders who are out for content so deliberately engineer a confrontation. If you ride with anticipation most potential issues become non-events.

I tried Riser last night. It's something to do with Cardo. The free version sounds usable but when you sign up you automatically get the pro version for a period so I can't yet say how the free version works. It found me a good route but no speed monitoring or speed camera warnings. Whereas Google maps did flash up a speed van. I was in Wales of course!

As above....mistakes happen. If you do it frequently you might shorten the life expectancy of your transmission. But they will withstand some mistakes without harm.

Oh joy, it's a lovely sunny day and I'm stuck in a conference about AI. I think I shall send a holograph of myself instead.

Hope you have a great day