I had a little break in the rain last week and took the bike for a couple short rides. The first was to the grocery store. How cool to be able to load up a box of tide, a gallon of milk, a gallon of OJ, a dozen eggs, and a couple bags of produce! The first real ride I took was early in the morning on July 4th down to Rabbit Hash and back. It was around 7-8am, so nothing was open and I didn’t really stop, but I put about 50 miles on the bike and it performed very well. On Monday, I rode the bike to work, over to Eastgate, and home and again, things were great. All told, I’ve put about 150 miles on the bike so far. If it weren’t for all the rain, it’d be much higher.
I have found a couple remaining issues:
- The lockset has issues: The key doesn’t want to turn in the ignition because it’s worn, a couple of the locks on the boxes don’t work, and I don’t know where the lock is for the gas cover. To solve that, I spent about $50 to get a complete used lockset off eBay.
- The front of the bike is really too soft. I’m going to try to change the fork oil to see if that helps.
- There was a small oil leak from the back of the stator. Turns out that the nut holding the cover on wasn’t even finger-tight, so I solved that by applying a couple pounds of torque.
- There was another small leak, this time of antifreeze, coming from the water pump cover. I re-torqued the bolts and that seems to have stopped as well.
- I’m missing one of the louvers from the right side of the lower fairing. I got the other 5 vinyl wrapped and installed, but I cannot for the life of me find the last louver. I only had one of those panels between the two bikes, so I don’t have any extras and I have no idea what I would have done with the one that I’m missing. I’m keeping an eye on eBay for one.
- I still need to vinyl wrap and install the fairing trim.
- Still need to get a radio installed, but the gauge cluster trim doesn’t seem to be installing flush like it should and as a result the speaker covers aren’t installing securely.
- The ignition cover bracket is missing (if I ever had it…) and so I can’t install the bit of plastic in the middle of the handlebars.
- The left side valve/head cover has a minor oil leak. If I use the center stand it doesn’t seem to be too bad. I’ll get the gasket and the next time I change the oil, I’ll swap the gasket. No rush on this one.
- The mirrors are a bit loose. They rattle around a bit on the road and the wind and vibration push them down on the interstate rendering them useless.
- Still plenty of orange paint on the bike that needs to come off.
- The left lower fairing inside piece is missing.
- The emblems on the headlight trim, fairing, and side covers are all missing. I have most of them so I either need to recondition them or get new ones.
In terms of improving the ride and not really repairing anything that’s “wrong” with it:
- Windshield is a little short for me. I think a taller windscreen with a vent in it would be a nice touch.
- When cold weather comes, having some sort of wind deflector to add some protection for my hands and upper body would be nice.
- The engine heat gets trapped behind the fairing, warming my lower body quite a bit. A little too much on a hot day. I think some sort of wind deflector on the lower part of the bike would be a nice touch to push air in for warm weather riding.
- Need a radio. Hate that giant hole in the dash!
- Need to get the seat recovered.