06 FJR 1300 – Page 7

September 4, 2007

FJR EOM Routes (Eastern Owners Meet)

I didn’t produce these routes, the fine folks putting on this shin-dig get all the credit.

The thread with info about these routes is [here]

I’ve posted them here for convenience sake…

I have stuffed all of the .GPX routes into one Mapsource .GDB file here: ALL EOM-07 Routes in one GDB File.
(I have pushed these routes, through this file to my Zumo, then from the menu, chose ‘User Data’, Routes, select them, import, and it works nicely. I cannot comment on how well this will work or not work for any other device.)

For those folks who are GPS impaired, I’ve bundled up the Adobe PDF text directions for all routes and put them here:
All EOM_Text_Directions in one handy .zip file.

This should include all the latest changes that have been blessed by Heidi. If not, then they’ll be updated again.

August 20, 2007August 20, 2007

To St. Louis and Back

This weekend Kyle, my dad and myself, headed out to St. Louis. Why? That’s the starting location for this years Iron Butt Rally.

I wanted to run out there, see some bikes and meet some of the folks brave enough to attempt this rally.

We left Cincinnati at 8am Saturday and took a leisure ride out to St. Louis staying off the interstate and mostly on Route 50. We hit a few other squiggly roads when we could find them.

Our complete route was this:

The day started out really well, it was nice and cool, apropos 60 degrees, which can be chilly but we were ready for that. Somewhere about halfway through Indiana we hit a warm front and temps climbed rapidly. At 11am we were still under 80 degrees, buy noon we were well into the 90’s with a bucket load of humidity.

When we arrived in St. Louis, my bike said 103 degrees, dads said 107. It was hot. Route 50 west of Indiana pretty much blew, it’s flat and straight forever with very little to excitement. Was neat to see some of the country though.

In St. Louis we gawked at all the hardware and bikes equipped for the purpose… Riding 11 days non-stop to places yet unkown. The Aux fuel tanks, hydration systems, GPS gear, with backup gear, and aux lighting was all very impressive.

We stopped in and looked around for the folks that I wanted to meet. Unfortunately it was the end of a long hot day. They were getting cleaned up for the nights festivities and weren’t around. The hotel was booked solid (as we expected) so we needed to get rooms elsewhere. We headed up the road a bit and checked in to the luxurious St. Louis Hampton Inn. We showered and headed out to dinner.

After dinner there was a pretty significant storm was moving in so we didn’t head back to the other hotel. We talked about our route home, and cashed in our chips.

Sunday we left around 9am, and stopped at the arch.

From St Louis Aug …

More photos are available in the gallery. We had a similar mixed ride home, about half highway, and half off the beaten path.

All told around 850 miles for the weekend, and it was hot and humid :/

June 8, 2007June 8, 2007

Grip Puppies, mmmm delicious…

Well, 12000 miles later I decided I wanted a little less vibration in my throttle hand and mostly in my thumb.

I keep the Throttle Bodies pretty well synced to keep the vibes as low as I can get them. (A PC-III might further reduce it). All and all it’s not that bad, but after my 1300 mile day my thumb vibrated for a while.

Grip Puppies are a spongy over-grip that gives you about a 1/4 inch of cushion on your grips. They are cheap too, from California Sport Touring Click.

Installation is pretty simple, provided you use a couple tips/tricks. Especially compressed air.

Before:

After:

Use a little lubricant on the inside of the grips (Windex works great). That and a little compressed air and the slide right on.

On the throttle side I had to cut about a 1/4 inch off. Full length pushed the rubber grip into the controls on the left and made the throttle bind a bit. If I pulled it off the controls it bound on the throttlemeister.

So…

I just trimmed it a bit. The cut off part is on the throttlemeister to show how much I removed. This worked out well.

May 29, 2007May 30, 2007

The MD2020 Recap

Whew, it’s over… I’m exhausted.

Heading to York, Friday the 25th at o’dark thirty.

500 miles to York, PA, 1300 miles in the rally, 500 miles home. We could have and should have done more but unfortunate circumstances kept us from executing our planned route. It was very doable and would have scored us in the top 15, which for being noobs at this, would have been very, very good.
Out of 50 riders we finished 30th, which for our first Rally isn’t too shabby, especially after you consider our down fall.

Continue reading “The MD2020 Recap”

May 21, 2007May 21, 2007

Garmin Zumo is the shizzle.

Wow,

As indicated, I’m participating in a rally this weekend. Because my right hand man at work will also be unavailable (out of town) this causes a small dilemma. We need to be reachable, because it seems that Murphy always shows up when we go somewhere together.

Previously I had the Scala-Rider Bluetooth headset that I used so that I could be reachable. I don’t like to ride and talk on the cell phone, there’s already enough going on that I just don’t like it, but it is hands free so that’s a plus.

Last fall I migrated/upgraded my onboard entertainment to a StarCom1 intercom with iPod music input, as well as Radar (when needed) and the GPS audio. This system just rocks. For the rally my GPS was getting a bit dated. The Garmin Quest 1 is fine, except that it’s internal storage for maps isn’t all that large. I couldn’t load enough maps to potentially cover the rally area. I lucked into a Quest2 which holds all the maps for the US, but man is it slow.

That brings me to the Zumo. This brilliant GPS is designed for bikers. It’s designed for gloved touch screen use, can interface with XM, and has bluetooth.

After reading a few reviews on the FJR board, and doing a little digging it became apparent that this was the way to go. This baby puts me back into a situation to be reachable on the bike as well as upgrades my GPS considerably.

The unit is mounted on a Tech Mount Stem Mount, audio and mic cables are plugged in to the StarCom1. Audio isn’t ‘perfect’ but similar to most of the bluetooth head sets I’ve used with the Treo 700p which has a crappy bluetooth implementation anyway.

With this I have crazy fast and accurate GPS, 2gb of mp3s for it to play (as well as my iPod pumped into the StarCom1), and now bluetooth connectivity for my phone. I mounted everything tonight (had to wait on cables for the StarCom1) and it works great!.

Photos:

One other thing, the Zumo motorcycle mount is brilliant. It’s water tight, and has this crazy magnetic cover to cover the contacts with the Zumo is out of the mount.

To keep your Zumo, there’s a ‘security’ screw that you screw in. The basically keeps the mount from releasing your Zumo from the bike. It’s just a funky screw with a funky screw driver. You’re supposed to mount this on your key ring, but the brilliant minds at Garmin didn’t realize that they put the hole on the wrong end. Basically the screw driver stayed attached to your keys which made it darn near impossible to use. (It’s a really tiny screw).

I fixed that by drilling an identical hole in the cap and attaching that to the key chain. We’re good now.