Two wheels good.

Talk about your cars etc here. Keep it sort of sensible and on topic please.
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brandersnatch
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Re: Two wheels good.

Post by brandersnatch »

That’s odd. Obviously tyre pressures etc are all good. Maybe it’s worth trying a different brand of tyres next time.
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Re: Two wheels good.

Post by Hooli »

That was my plan anyway, after the delamination incident last year I've gone off Michelins. But I wanted to wait till I could change the pair together, which I now can.
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Re: Two wheels good.

Post by DodgeRover »

Has it had fork bushes at all?
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Re: Two wheels good.

Post by Hooli »

DodgeRover wrote: Tue May 07, 2019 5:03 pm Has it had fork bushes at all?
Yup, forks rechromed & all new bushes etc approx 28k ago. It was doing this before that & it made no difference to tyre wear. It did get rid of the vague & untrustworthy feel to the front end though.
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Re: Two wheels good.

Post by brandersnatch »

I found with Michelins they were great till around 4000 miles then they started to go off. They would still grip well but they felt unruly, picking up on road undulations etc. The FJR is very tyre sensitive. Great on Road Pilot 3 and 5 but not so good on 4s. Running Dunlops now. Not so good on ultimate grip riding 10/10ths but I don’t tend to ride like that nowadays (old git), they don’t go off as quickly and last really well. I was replacing the Michelins every 6000, the Dunlops last 8-10000. I do about 1000 miles a week so I’m on first name terms in the tyre shop 😂
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Re: Two wheels good.

Post by Hooli »

I think it's pirelli that my mate who lives in the Alps recommended. I'll check as he gets excellent life on bikes ridden hard over there.
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Re: Two wheels good.

Post by Hooli »

Aye it was, he says an Angel GT on the rear & Angel ST on the front. They are on offer at mytyres too, £200 the pair roughly so I think I'll try them next.
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Re: Two wheels good.

Post by brandersnatch »

Hope they work well for you. Motorbike tyres are such a subjective thing. All the top brands are pretty good nowadays, it all depends on how they feel to you.
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Re: Two wheels good.

Post by Warren t claim »

So I'm not clogging up the main board with migrated topics and posts I thought it might be a good idea to reproduce my Confessions Of A Motorcycle Instructor onto our Two Wheels Good thread so here goes...


Sometimes the truth can be stranger than fiction so here goes. Let's assume the following story is a work of fiction written in first person perspective.





Part one. (No pun intended)





Back in 2003 a mate wanted to do his full bike ticket and asked me to run him to the training school he'd chosen as he'd be wearing full bike gear and couldn't drive in it. I agreed as I was a biker up until 1997 and was interested in seeing how learning to ride had changed since my day of a test consisting of a trip around the block on a GP100 as it was in my day. I got chatting to the instructor and we hit it off so when it came to the road element of my friend's CBT he threw me the keys to one of the ER500 Direct Access bikes and invited me to come along for a laugh and obviously I agreed as it'd been 5 years since I'd had a bike. When we got back to the compound the senior instructor was for some reason impressed with my riding and laid back attitude and made me the offer of being down trained as a CBT instructor giving newbies lessons in both the classroom and on the road on our scooters and CG125s. For some reason I jumped at the chance as it gave me the opportunity to ride bikes and get paid for it.





Now time for a little description of what the bike school set up was like. Every other school had instructors that acted and behaved like wannabe police motorcyclists, even down to their choice of ex plod BMW and Pan European bikes they used for lessons. We were somewhat different in being a school who were more interested in the fun aspect of biking and didn't take ourselves too seriously. When the call came out for marshals to assist on the annual Wirral Egg Run we declined due to not wanting to have anything to do with authority. The other main training school in the area had an after Egg Run family friendly get together at their premises involving bouncy castles and a BBQ while our effort was different, the senior instructor had a pub as well so we had an after run party involving a bawdy rock band playing while our girlfriends served drinks dressed in fishnets taking it in turns to dance in a cage.... Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself so let's get back to the story. As I had yet to attend my instructor assessment course in Cardington I was only allowed to teach CBTs and our younger learners who weren't allowed to do Direct Access due to their tender age. Some were genuine bikers in the making but I also had to deal with scores of 16 year olds who knew it all and wanted you to finish so they could ride home on their scooter and suffer two wheels until next year when they could buy the Corsa of their dreams. A good 90% of these already had the machine control element pretty much licked before they got to us, the other 10%, mainly girls, were somewhat challenging to say the least. The number of times I asked the question can you ride a push bike only to be answered in the negative is more than I dare remember. One such girl who I shall call Chantelle-Marie for the purposes of this post was a particular pupil who illustrates this point perfectly. She came to us as she had a job offer and the DWP did/does have a scooter commuter scheme where if you had a firm job offer but public transport wasn't an option they'd bung you a new scooter, helmet and CBT to get you off the dole queue. She was utterly fucking hopeless. Both myself and the senior instructor tried to get her to stay upright on our Honda Vision without any great success. When we eventually got her to go in a straight line she'd promptly fall off to one side when she was told to stop. Undeterred I ended up running around the training compound in front of her getting her to aim for my arse! Sadly she was distracted by one of our fence posts and as your eyes are connected to your head, which is connected to your body which is in turn connected to your arms she made a full throttle beeline for said post uprooting it and writing off our scooter at the same time.








Part Two to follow next time I'm at home drinking.
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Re: Two wheels good.

Post by Warren t claim »

I suppose as I'm having a rare Friday night off with a glass or three of something cheeky I'll continue with my (mainly) true instructors tales.





A little about the fleet we ran. To begin with we had, starting from the bottom up, a Honda Vision Met-In 50cc scooter, two Lifan CG125 clones, three consecutively registered Kawasaki ER-5s, an older blue ER-5 and finally a Kawasaki GT550 that was given to me as a company bike. The Vision was about as fucked as you'd imagine it to be as it spent it's life being crashed on our compound every day. The two Lifans were a disaster, they were both W plated and even back in 2002 they both had totally fucked chrome and starter motors that refused to work. An unusual quirk of them was that they both had no less than three sets of footpegs for some reason. Our ER-5s were divided into two groups, two were dedicated DAS learner bikes and of the other two one was a mint condition example used only for tests and the older blue one was used as an instructor bike.





Next part to follow in a few mins...
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