Mississippi Bullfrog

I used to love F1 back in the day of Mansell, Senna and Prost. These days it’s all too artificial, which is no great surprise because it’s not motorsport anymore, it’s just money fodder manipulated solely by viewing figures.

I don’t think it does make any difference on a bike unless it’s specifically mapped for it, cars have knock sensors etc that can advance/retard the ignition for different octane fuels, it’s often high performance turbocharged stuff that has to use super. I don’t think even the latest bikes have the same ability although I might be wrong, I still use V power in the bike mostly because it’s cleaner/better for the engine, although this too is probably negligible, but then so is the price difference when filling a bike. Thanks - that was pretty much what I thought. I pretty much stick to Shell standard for the bikes and V Power for the car - as both our nearest petrol station are Shell

.... Would that be one of those FLAT 500s? The FT 500 or Ascot as them Yankees call it ? A curious bike . I've had two of them and let them slip through my fingers. Worth silly money now so quite expensive particularly if you just want one to use the headlight as a reading lamp. I'm trying to get the image of you balancing it on the bedside cabinet out of my head.

Check by..? Measuring the voltage at the battery terminals on Monday with my multimeter? Undo the positive terminal connector and put a multimeter between the end of the lead and the battery terminal. Set the reading to milliamps. Any current flowing should be negligible, anything over a few milliamps and there's a short somewhere. Unlikely to be the case. Most of the time it's the battery, but I've replaced a battery before and then discovered there was a reason all the magical sparky stuff was leaking out of it.

How many bike engine management systems can actually make use of Shell V Power? I use it in the car and the difference in drive and mpg is noticeable. But neither of the bike's seem to be any different between V Power or standard petrol.

Does sound like the battery then. Either that or there's a current flowing when it shouldn't be. Easy enough to check but most likely the battery if it's not holding charge.

The alarm on mine tends to take quite a bit out of the battery which isn't a problem when it's ridden every day but if I go away for a couple of weeks the battery indicator shows a bit low. I fitted a new battery in case it was the battery dying but the new one does exactly the same. I use a CTEK charger so it's not a problem but just check how much the alarm draws if you don't ride every day.

I did a funeral for a young lad a while back, parked the bike outside church and rode after the hearse to the cemetery. At the end of the service I'd hired a huge PA system so he went out to Born To Be Wild at galactic volume. It all seemed to go as well as you could hope for under the circumstances. Some months later I happened to be riding past the cemetery and heard Born To Be Wild blaring out. His mum was tending his grave and she'd parked on the road with the car stereo on full blast with the windows down. I guess that ending had meant something to her which she treasured. Sometimes it's the little things you do that mean a lot to people.

Sorry to hear that. Something similar happened to a mate and the other driver legged it. But he legged it down a rural lane which my mate knew didn't go anywhere. So he just called a few friends and waited at the only way back.

Doesn't an Optimate tell you when a battery is knackered ? Not always. I had one which like yours just died out of the blue. It was fine all morning then half way through the afternoon it was just totally dead. It had been on my CTEK with no sign of an issue. If the battery has dud cells so it can't attain the right voltage it throws a warning but batteries do weird things sometimes with no warning at all. Beans...hope you get home ok . Let us know how it goes.

Water in petrol ought be rare these days. The ethanol in modern petrol can mix with water whereas pure petrol can't so the water stays separate. An old trick was to add some meths to your tank. The meths can mix with the water, then the resulting emulsion can mix with the petrol so it all gets burnt during combustion. The downside is that older vehicles' fuel systems can suffer corrosion with modern petrol which includes ethanol.

A mate works for the refinery and he tells me that all the petrol is the same, just different additives. A road tanker has several internal tanks. The same petrol goes in them all whether it's destined for Shell, Esso, Asda, Tesco etc. The only difference is that the tanks contain additives specific to each brand. So your big brands do contain more detergents for example, but so long as you fill up at a big brand every so often you can safely use supermarket petrol most of the time. I usually do one in four fill ups at a big brand just to get the better detergents in there from time to time.

That is sad news. I remember meeting some of the team at the national funeral convention a couple of years ago. Nice guys. Great idea that has helped a lot of people.

Don't all Hondas have dodgy Rec Regs sooner or later ? None of mine have....so far! But I'm sure I read there was a generation of CBF1000 which were prone to charging problems.

I'd see how the battery goes after being charged. Be worth measuring the voltage first thing in the morning to see if it's holding steady. Also measure the voltage when you turn the ignition on, if the battery is weak you may see the voltage collapse as soon as any load is applied. Am I imagining it or do they sometimes suffer weak charging systems? I seem to remember reading some of them had problems. In which case check the output going into the battery as well.

Same here. I spent a small fortune replacing every low-energy bulb in our new house with LEDs (though one of them has already popped after just three weeks ). I have LED indicators but I've kept with standard bulbs for the headlights.

I've looked at loads of these kinds of lights to make a triangle effect at the front. Those look ideal - I have ordered a set.

Ah, and there was me thinking it was so if you fell off no-one would notice as quickly. I must confess I have had several occasions of upside-down forks.

I'm always struck by how reluctant these people are to leave the judging and the punishing to God. As if eternity in hell wasn't bad enough... "Your God disapproves of my lifestyle? Fine - let Him tell me, not you. Now f*ck off." Funnily enough there was some bloke who went round saying much the same thing, although perhaps in a slightly different manner. But they got rid of him 'cos they didn't like that kind of talk.

I usually find the consumption of pies results in less tendency to wheelie.

I remember reading a review of them when they were being produced and I'm pretty sure it said they were 'disappointing'. Only remember that because someone nicked my bike and I was looking for a replacement.

A friend of our daughter had a VW Golf with a huge split in the radiator. Being a student she had no money for repairs so a new rad was out of the question. With very little optimism I lobbed a bottle of radweld into it and was amazed at how it stopped the leak immediately. I'm not sure I'd chuck a whole bottle into a bike but the stuff certainly works. She ran the car for years with no issues. I think I'd drain the coolant to get rid of the rest of the Radweld as I've seen it slowly solidify if left in the system.

The utter moron in a BMW who just drove down our lane at massive speed. It's a 30 zone with no footpaths so my wife and I were in the road when he comes road a blind bend. He never slowed at all and went round the next blind bend on the wrong side of the road because he was unable to hold the curve at the speed he was doing. So speed limiters on cars? Bring it on.

Requiring cyclists to have licence plates seems a reasonable suggestion - and I say that as a cyclist myself. I get fed up with the anti-cyclist lobby who lump all cyclists together because the facts are that there are good cyclists and bad cyclists - so I'd be happy to display a licence plate on the grounds that doing so would help weed out the bad cyclists. On the other hand I think it is in everyone's favour for better cycles lanes. In Chester, where we recently moved from, the council proclaimed it was a cycle friendly city because they'd converted miles of pavement into cycle lanes. But they skimped on it so whenever you came to a busy junction they just ended the cycle lane, often with a kerb difference that was dangerous, and put cyclists back into the main traffic flow. That attitude is endemic across the country. When I rode Lands End to John O'Groats there were very few sections of cycle path that were actually usable. The flip side of the coin is to then also prosecute all those motorists who pass too close and who edge into the cycle section at traffic lights. The snag is to make it work it needs some serious money spending and local councils just aren't that flush at the moment.

I have relatives who farm round that area. Be warned, they are completely bonkers. Dukes of Hazard kind of bonkers.