{"id":437,"date":"2015-07-09T10:16:23","date_gmt":"2015-07-09T14:16:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/putrescence.org\/wordpress\/?p=437"},"modified":"2015-07-09T10:16:23","modified_gmt":"2015-07-09T14:16:23","slug":"first-big-ride","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.putrescence.org\/?p=437","title":{"rendered":"First Big Ride"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I had a little break in the rain last week and took the bike for a couple short rides. \u00a0The first was to the grocery store. \u00a0How 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! \u00a0The first real ride I took was early in the morning on July 4th down to Rabbit Hash and back. \u00a0It was around 7-8am, so nothing was open and I didn&#8217;t really stop, but I put about 50 miles on the bike and it performed very well. \u00a0On Monday, I rode the bike to work, over to Eastgate, and home and again, things were great. \u00a0All told, I&#8217;ve put about 150 miles on the bike so far. \u00a0If it weren&#8217;t for all the rain, it&#8217;d be much higher.<\/p>\n<p>I have found a couple remaining issues:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The lockset has issues: \u00a0The key doesn&#8217;t want to turn in the ignition because it&#8217;s worn, a couple of the locks on the boxes don&#8217;t work, and I don&#8217;t know where the lock is for the gas cover. \u00a0To solve that, I spent about $50 to get a complete used lockset off eBay.<\/li>\n<li>The front of the bike is really too soft. \u00a0I&#8217;m going to try to change the fork oil to see if that helps.<\/li>\n<li>There was a small oil leak from the back of the stator. \u00a0Turns out that the nut holding the cover on wasn&#8217;t even finger-tight, so I solved that by applying a couple pounds of torque.<\/li>\n<li>There was another small leak, this time of antifreeze, coming from the water pump cover. \u00a0I re-torqued the bolts and that seems to have stopped as well.<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;m missing one of the louvers from the right side of the lower fairing. \u00a0I got the other 5 vinyl wrapped and installed, but I cannot for the life of me find the last louver. \u00a0I only had one of those panels between the two bikes, so I don&#8217;t have any extras and I have no idea what I would have done with the one that I&#8217;m missing. \u00a0I&#8217;m keeping an eye on eBay for one.<\/li>\n<li>I still need to vinyl wrap and install the fairing trim.<\/li>\n<li>Still need to get a radio installed, but the gauge cluster trim doesn&#8217;t seem to be installing flush like it should and as a result the speaker covers aren&#8217;t installing securely.<\/li>\n<li>The ignition cover bracket is missing (if I ever had it&#8230;) and so I can&#8217;t install the bit of plastic in the middle of the handlebars.<\/li>\n<li>The left side valve\/head cover has a minor oil leak. \u00a0If I use the center stand it doesn&#8217;t seem to be too bad. \u00a0I&#8217;ll get the gasket and the next time I change the oil, I&#8217;ll swap the gasket. \u00a0No rush on this one.<\/li>\n<li>The mirrors are a bit loose. \u00a0They rattle around a bit on the road and the wind and vibration push them down on the interstate rendering them useless.<\/li>\n<li>Still plenty of orange paint on the bike that needs to come off.<\/li>\n<li>The left lower fairing inside piece is missing.<\/li>\n<li>The emblems on the headlight trim, fairing, and side covers are all missing. \u00a0I have most of them so I either need to recondition them or get new ones.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In terms of improving the ride and not really repairing anything that&#8217;s &#8220;wrong&#8221; with it:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Windshield is a little short for me. \u00a0I think a taller windscreen with a vent in it would be a nice touch.<\/li>\n<li>When cold weather comes, having some sort of wind deflector to add some protection for my hands and upper body would be nice.<\/li>\n<li>The engine heat gets trapped behind the fairing, warming my lower body quite a bit. \u00a0A little too much on a hot day. \u00a0I 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.<\/li>\n<li>Need a radio. \u00a0Hate that giant hole in the dash!<\/li>\n<li>Need to get the seat recovered.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I had a little break in the rain last week and took the bike for a couple short rides. \u00a0The first was to the grocery store. \u00a0How cool to be able to load up a box of tide, a gallon&#8230;<br \/><a class=\"read-more-button\" href=\"https:\/\/wordpress.putrescence.org\/?p=437\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-437","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-84wing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.putrescence.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/437","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.putrescence.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.putrescence.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.putrescence.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.putrescence.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=437"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.putrescence.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/437\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":438,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.putrescence.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/437\/revisions\/438"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.putrescence.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.putrescence.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.putrescence.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}