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The one with number plates right?
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Aug 24, 2015 22:07
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clutchpuck posted:Had to look this up. Looks like an uglified (if even possible) Buell SuperTT! Firstly, pot/kettle/etc. Second, the tracer is selling like hotcakes here and is wildly popular with middle-aged men.
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Aug 24, 2015 23:09
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Trip report. Used DRZ400E cams make the bike want to pick the front up in first if you even think about the clutch. Also, I can hit 100(indicated) on flat ground, bolt upright, with a backpack on. Before I'd be lucky to see 90. 85 with a good headwind. That said, I think the stock exhaust cam -might- have been off timing by one tooth for god knows how long. So that might have had something to do with it. e: After further googling/asking in bieks/discussing what a cam is with n8, the timing was probably fine. It was hot, I was in a hurry, and I might have had my MCCT loosened by the time I saw that anyways. If the timing was off I probably would have been hearing the sweet sounds of a piston meeting a valve or two. Marxalot fucked around with this message at 23:55 on Aug 24, 2015 |
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Aug 24, 2015 23:35
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HotCanadianChick posted:It's a euro variant of the FZ-09, which means it's one of the top selling bikes in Europe. That is the most flowery review I've ever read, it sounds like the reviewer is no-poo poo in love with that bike. maybe Buells would have sold better if they had had a French master of words like that write their reviews. "Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? MT-09 art more lovely and more temperate."
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Aug 24, 2015 23:49
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Changed my oil. Never done it before, and it was really easy, so that's cool. However, the oil filter wrench thinger I used... the oil filter is stuck in it. I think, when I put it on the filter, it was slightly crooked. Now it won't come out. Any suggestions? I have one of those wrenches that's a "cap" shape, kind of hexagonal and fits over the entire end of the filter.
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Aug 25, 2015 00:06
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Just whack it with something for a while, it'll eventually come off.
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Aug 25, 2015 00:23
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Slavvy posted:Firstly, pot/kettle/etc. Pot what? I know what the MT-09 is, the similar-if-not-identical FZ-09 is a big seller stateside. I was however unfamiliar with the spectacularly ugly Street Tracker variant and I will take the position that it is about as ugly as the STT, whose visual proportions - while the bike as a whole is pretty cool - are pretty terrible. Even next to an Uglysses.  ...  The MX-style numplates 
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Aug 25, 2015 00:40
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Rev. Dr. Moses P. Lester posted:Nice work. I hate those smushed headlights too. Looks like a real bike now. Coydog posted:Yeah, ripoff, you really did that bike justice. Has a real space age classic standard look to it now. Thanks! Coydog posted:The slightly bigger light actually helps proportioning with the rest of the bike. I am not sure what you mean about wanting to change the color of the light bezel. Unless it somehow looks awful in person, keep it. In photos, I can see exactly what you mean about it matching to the rest of the brushed metal parts in veiw. I would probably not thought of doing that myself, and definitely wouldn't have wanted that kind of work. The end result looks stock, and 100% better than actual stock. I was a bit afraid the color was a little too obvious and kinda made the front of the bike look weird with the gold forks, carbon-fiber mudguard and such, but after staring at it in a garage for a while today it really started to grow on me. I think I just need to bump the headlight down a little, maybe a half-inch or so, and it'll be perfect. Then I'll probably figure out that the turn signals don't work and I'll have to rip it all apart again. Lynza posted:Changed my oil. Congratulations on saving a shitload of money! Go buy something nice for yourself with that saved cash.
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Aug 25, 2015 00:41
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clutchpuck posted:Pot what? I'm mistaken, I was going off what was in Hcc's link, which was the semi-faired pseudo-adventure variant. That does look amazingly tragic.
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Aug 25, 2015 01:22
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Slavvy posted:I'm mistaken, I was going off what was in Hcc's link, which was the semi-faired pseudo-adventure variant. That does look amazingly tragic. Eh, it's a parts bin pseudo-sumo, intended to go against the similarly tragically styled Ducati Scrambler and Triumph Scramblers, neither of the bikes it's positioned against are as good mechanically, either.
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Aug 25, 2015 01:31
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I do like parts bin pseudo sumos
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Aug 25, 2015 02:24
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Is it not a throw back to the flat track style bikes? Either way, the Buell looks fat and dumb while the MT-09 looks slightly less fat and not quite as dumb. Personally, I think this style needs to come into fashion 
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Aug 25, 2015 11:34
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I see light under #1's tire.
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Aug 25, 2015 14:48
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HotCanadianChick posted:Eh, it's a parts bin pseudo-sumo, intended to go against the similarly tragically styled Ducati Scrambler and Triumph Scramblers, neither of the bikes it's positioned against are as good mechanically, either. Wouldn't it be going up against the Hypermotard? That and the 990smr are/were actually good looking bikes.
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Aug 25, 2015 16:51
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High Protein posted:Wouldn't it be going up against the Hypermotard? That and the 990smr are/were actually good looking bikes. The actual product page for it uses phrases such as 'scrambler-inspired' and 'credibility', so I'm assuming it's targeting the same retards as Ducati. http://www.yamaha-motor.eu/uk/products/motorcycles/mt/mt-09-sport-tracker.aspx
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Aug 25, 2015 16:56
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High Protein posted:Wouldn't it be going up against the Hypermotard? That and the 990smr are/were actually good looking bikes. That'd be the Tracer, not the Tracker (great branding there Yamaha). The Tracer is sort-of-dual-sport-shaped, the Tracker is sort-of-60s-MX-bike-shaped. I don't think they're actually aiming to directly compete with those bikes any more than the base MT-09 is aiming to compete with the Striple or the Monster (or that their cruisers are aiming to compete with Harley-Davidson), they're aiming to differentiate from and compete with the other Japanese manufacturers. There's obviously inspiration (or plagiarism depending on your outlook) from those bikes but they're aiming at a completely different and much broader market sector of "Wants a Japanese bike that doesn't look too Japanese" rather than the "Wants something not-Japanese" sector that European and American manufacturers have comfortably settled into since the 80s. I'll leave the exact definition of "Japanese" there up to the reader.
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Aug 25, 2015 19:11
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I have a bike mag with a lengthy article about Yamaha's resurgence, with interviews with various staff. One guy (responsible for the MT bikes) said that, prior to this, they were building direct equivalents to competitor bikes and assuming people will buy them because they have a Yamaha badge.. Now they're attempting to build bikes people actually want.
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Aug 25, 2015 19:39
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goddamnedtwisto posted:That'd be the Tracer, not the Tracker (great branding there Yamaha). The Tracer is sort-of-dual-sport-shaped, the Tracker is sort-of-60s-MX-bike-shaped. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWWwM2wwMww Slavvy posted:I have a bike mag with a lengthy article about Yamaha's resurgence, with interviews with various staff. One guy (responsible for the MT bikes) said that, prior to this, they were building direct equivalents to competitor bikes and assuming people will buy them because they have a Yamaha badge.. Now they're attempting to build bikes people actually want. Seems like it's working out pretty well for them.
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Aug 25, 2015 19:50
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Slavvy posted:I have a bike mag with a lengthy article about Yamaha's resurgence, with interviews with various staff. One guy (responsible for the MT bikes) said that, prior to this, they were building direct equivalents to competitor bikes and assuming people will buy them because they have a Yamaha badge.. Now they're attempting to build bikes people actually want. I'd say that's been a problem that's afflicted all manufacturers from time to time (and certainly isn't unique to bikes). The late naughties were a pretty grim time for bike design - not in the horrible way that the early 80s were, but in a kind of dull flatness similar to the mid-90s, where you could cover up the badge and basically have no way of telling one bike from another. Obviously a lot of that was economics (as it was for other bike slumps) but there wasn't even the craziness at the fringes that you had in those earlier times indicating a possible new direction. I guess some of that was due to timing - there was no big leap forward just prior to the doldrums the way there was with the UJM completely shaking up the entire market like it did in the seventies or the utter craziness that was the speed wars of the early 90s. Not to say there wasn't progress, of course there was - all manufacturers have seriously upped their game on things like reliability and finish since the turn of the century, just as one example - but there was nothing to get really excited about. I'd say the other factor other than the financial - at least in the UK market, I can't speak for anywhere else - was the pretty spectacular failure of the sports bike market. The UK used to be the biggest buyer of sports bikes in the world (not per-capita either - literally just plain biggest) but around 2005 that market fell off a cliff. The reasons are many and varied (and mostly guess work) but in 2000 the biggest-selling >125cc bike in the UK was almost a dead heat between the R1 and R6 and another six of the top ten were also sports bikes, but by 2005 not a single bike in the top 10 was even vaguely sporty. This seems to have totally wrong-footed the manufacturers and then The Great Global Financial Kerflooie came and wiped out the rest of the market, and I think we're only now seeing them starting to come out of that risk-averse shell. I have a sneaking suspicion that Triumph had at least something to do with this because the Striple and the Bonny-derived bikes were pretty much the first to define this new landscape (naked bike that wasn't just a poor relation to the donor bike (and yes Aprilia got there way before them but nobody ever acknowledges them) and retro-themed "lifestyle" bikes). Also Ewan loving McGregor should probably be getting royalties from BMW because the GS bikes were a blip on the sales charts before Long Way Round and now they're outselling 125s, which rounds out the third prong in the current bike resurgence - Overly-Large-Vaguely-Offroad-Looking-Bikes-For-Commuters-With-Penis-Issues, which is what the "dual sport" bike should properly be named.
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Aug 25, 2015 20:28
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Two wheeled range rovers.
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Aug 25, 2015 23:03
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I think conflating adventure touring bikes with dual sport bikes is pretty unfair to both styles
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Aug 25, 2015 23:20
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Heck I'm leaving my nerdventure bike at home and taking a dual sport to Alaska next year. While there is some overlap in application, there is a lot that one will do way better than the other.
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Aug 25, 2015 23:24
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EX250 Type R posted:I think conflating adventure touring bikes with dual sport bikes is pretty unfair to both styles What's a dual sport bike? KLR, DR650 etc?
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Aug 26, 2015 01:28
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Slavvy posted:What's a dual sport bike? KLR, DR650 etc? Not an goddamnedtwisto posted:Overly-Large-Vaguely-Offroad-Looking-Bikes-For-Commuters-With-Penis-Issues
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Aug 26, 2015 01:41
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A factory street plated dirt bike.
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Aug 26, 2015 01:57
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goddamnedtwisto posted:Overly-Large-Vaguely-Offroad-Looking-Bikes-For-Commuters-With-Penis-Issues What if you look like a gorilla on a bicycle on everything but those? Me irl 
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Aug 26, 2015 02:17
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It blows my mind that I can think of something I need (in this case, an adapter to go from a newer CB400T II Honda Hawk speedometer to my 1979 CB650's speedometer hole), spend 10 minutes with calipers, spend 20 minutes in SolidWorks, and come out with a real thing that exists. What the gently caress is going on with the world?
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Aug 26, 2015 04:25
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EX250 Type R posted:I think conflating adventure touring bikes with dual sport bikes is pretty unfair to both styles Their application for the vast majority of riders is absolutely identical.
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Aug 26, 2015 07:08
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Geirskogul posted:It blows my mind that I can think of something I need (in this case, an adapter to go from a newer CB400T II Honda Hawk speedometer to my 1979 CB650's speedometer hole), spend 10 minutes with calipers, spend 20 minutes in SolidWorks, and come out with a real thing that exists. What the gently caress is going on with the world? The future is soon.
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Aug 26, 2015 07:39
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Collateral Damage posted:I love thingiverse. Just wait until metal 3d printing becomes as affordable as plastic is today, and good enough that you can make load bearing parts. You can already pick up 3-axis mills for not much more than a thermoplastic printer, and 6-axis mills are plummeting in price too (although obviously with the cheaper ones you have to deal with changing heads and stuff yourself). Alternatively you can use a wax printer to make moulds for metal parts, but then you've got to deal with melting, pouring, tempering and all that jazz. Actual metal 3d printing (sintering) still requires conditions (vacuum/inert gas) to produce decent strength that probably puts it out of the home market for the forseeable future. Having said all that, I don't think I'd use some random plan downloaded off the internet (or my own drat fool guesswork) for something load-bearing/safety-critical, and it's probably this that has helped plastic printers take off so much quicker than home CNC machining.
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Aug 26, 2015 10:01
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You can print with PLA and do lost-casting with that, no wax needed. Of course, you need to keep in mind the burn-out passages because PLA takes slightly bit more to furnace out with, but it has been done and is being done a lot.
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Aug 26, 2015 10:40
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goddamnedtwisto posted:You can already pick up 3-axis mills for not much more than a thermoplastic printer, and 6-axis mills are plummeting in price too (although obviously with the cheaper ones you have to deal with changing heads and stuff yourself). Alternatively you can use a wax printer to make moulds for metal parts, but then you've got to deal with melting, pouring, tempering and all that jazz. Actual metal 3d printing (sintering) still requires conditions (vacuum/inert gas) to produce decent strength that probably puts it out of the home market for the forseeable future. I think a CNC is still a bit more than a plastic printer, not much, but enough to where the majority of hobyists (cheapos mostly) are not making the jump. Example, all in my printer was around $300. For a decent CNC, you'd be looking at maybe a couple hundred more just based on the size of the extrusions needed to do it properly.
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Aug 27, 2015 00:18
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Got the hornet's nest out of the battery box, threw the hornet-poop-covered old and dead battery away, put new battery in, rode it. RODE IT. For the first time this year. Shoulder surgery last December, and I finally got released to ride. Feels good.
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Aug 27, 2015 04:42
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Stripped the rear fairings and electrics off the ZRX and hunted for surface rust with a wire wheel and some POR 15. Nothing out of the ordinary on an old bike. Ground off the helmet holder/whatever thingy, finally had a chance to use my old Makita die grinder I found at a jobsite last year. Put on a competition werks tail tidy, looks cool. Spraying the carbs with penetrator before I take them apart, partly out of preparation, mostly out of fear and procrastination. Pods purchased, researching mains and pilots.
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Aug 27, 2015 05:40
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GLHF with pulling airbox boots back from the carbs.
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Aug 27, 2015 07:46
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The 3 that didn't accidentally come off on the airbox at least
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Aug 27, 2015 07:48
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Actually it was p. easy. Slid a license plate frame between the boots and the carb and it slid right out. The throttle linkages were a PITA, drat these sausage fingers.
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Aug 27, 2015 16:06
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Rode south on 101 this morning after I got off the grave shift. Traffic backed up and I began lane-splitting behind a guy on a Harley. We were splitting along the carpool (leftmost lane) when a silver sedan made a quick merge, no blinker, from the carpool to the right . Dude on the Harley collided with the passenger mirror as he just barely scraped passed the car. It exploded into a beautiful shower of glass and plastic that caught the rising sun perfectly as it rained down around me.  I pulled over with Harley dude and he was fine. The car never showed up.
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Aug 27, 2015 16:23
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Finally cleaned up my gauge/headlight area. Forgot to take a proper before pic, but this is how it was earlier:  crappy pic because it took so long the sun started to go down:   Replaced the triple with a custom one for gsxr swapped SVs, mounted the gauge onto the triple instead of the garbage headlight mount, put the naked SV gauge cover on there, plastidipped the headlight ring (and lost the nut off the headlight adjuster, so now it's walleyed af...), chopped the super long wires on the blinkers, ziptied some of the rat's nest together. Also plastidipped the rad guards, haven't put them on yet. I'm extremely pleased with the results. The headlight/gauge is finally attached properly -- the old assembly would loosen even with loctite, the gauge couldn't be angled so I could see it fully because the mount 'arms' would hit the MC bleeder bolt, looked like poo poo, etc.
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Aug 30, 2015 01:42
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Why the gently caress would Kawasaki make the front axle nuts such a pain in the loving rear end to get loose? Manual says tighten to 90~lbs and here I am sitting on it with a giant Milwaukee impact...17mm allen socket got so hot it burned my fingers when I touched it. Really not stoked about cheater bars and that nonsense. Silly old bike.
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Aug 30, 2015 04:40
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