Two wheels good.

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

Post by Hooli »

I don't actually follow the racing, so it's only something I've seen on FB etc.
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Re: Two wheels good.

Post by DodgeRover »

I got this out and had a ride round the garden, bit of a grump though as rats have chewed a hole in the impossible to find a replacement air box!
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bub2006
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Re: Two wheels good.

Post by bub2006 »

Reliant is off the road. Alternator died. It's been hit an miss for nearly a year now. Along with a new boot needing to be built due to rotten wood and some sidelights and indicators getting replaced when I can afford them I've decided to take it off the road until it's all fixed
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Re: Two wheels good.

Post by Arthur Foxhake »

Hooli wrote: Sat May 25, 2019 5:24 pm I don't actually follow the racing, so it's only something I've seen on FB etc.

They claim that the leg acts a bit like an air brake and pushes you back into the seat to settle the rear end.
Tried it on the PXR50 and it didn't work for me...
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Re: Two wheels good.

Post by DodgeRover »

Hells Angels are in town for the Euro Run down to Brighton, apparently so is every police officer from about 3 counties.

It's odd seeing so many patches about, reminds me of working in the less than posh parts of NZ.
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Re: Two wheels good.

Post by DodgeRover »

Had to come home early from work to supervise the kids and new puppy while my wife is away.
Managed to get a few things done including turning the rear tyre on my "modern" trials bike and getting it to reseat on the bead.
The idiot who thought running tubeless tyres at 5 psi was a good idea has a lot to answer for!

It's not been used for just under 3 years for various reasons but started 3rd kick (while wearing trainers) on the fuel in the tank, the clutch is sticking (was completely
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stuck but freed up after multiple laps of the lawn) and the kill button isn't working but hopefully I will get another moment to sort both of those.
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Re: Two wheels good.

Post by Warren t claim »

OK peeps I'm going to import this thread from the beige as I've got a few more tales to tell. In case you never saw it over there it's my Confessions Of A Motorcycle Instructor thread.

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 2002 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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Re: Two wheels good.

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Part Three.





Now let's talk about some tricks of the trade. A load of bollocks is talked by many instructors about if you're good enough to pass a test you're good enough to pass anywhere. This is total shit. Any test taken away from your local test centre should be treated as an "away match" with a greater chance of failure. Several times I've taken pupils to Chester, St Helens, Widnes and the like just because a punter has managed to get a short notice test only for them to come home with their tail between their legs and a quivering bottom lip just because they had no idea about the sneaky stop signs and slightly unusual junctions, so my top tip is stay local! Another thing to bear in mind is that we would always strongly advise you to book the 3.27pm test and turn up 20 minutes early, our local examiner liked to get home sharpish and he'd be more interested in an early dart than your rear observations! Now our local examiner was, and still is, a decent bloke. He hated working for the DSA and out of all the local training schools he had the best rapport with us as we were the only outfit that didn't claim that he used us to train his own kids which was a common lie told by other instructors. In fact for the record, his son was at the time 18 and had a Max Power Corsa with no interest in bikes and his 21-year-old daughter was a hairdresser who'd cut her own head off before wearing a helmet. This lead to a few perks for us like when the examiner was given money to replace his helmet he'd buy one and sell it to us cheaply but the biggest perk was the Saturday morning scam. Part of his job was to visit training schools and observe us giving CBTs and we had an arrangement, we'd sign off that he'd been to visit us and he'd not bother to turn up and still get the overtime.





Stay tuned for more two-wheeled antics in a few mins.


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Re: Two wheels good.

Post by Warren t claim »

On with the story.





During my stint as an instructor, this incident happened...





https://www.liverpoo...n-roads-3525545





What this meant for us is that the DSA immediately stopped examiners using their DSA provided Pan European bikes for tests which meant that most, but not all (and I'll come to that later) bike tests were conducted with the examiner following in a car. Now because we had a decent relationship with our examiners we were often invited to 'ride along' with the examiner while he was testing our candidate. Now this was a perk only offered to us over other training establishments because we would never spend the 40 mins talking shop or DSA procedures but we'd listen to him moan about his job, talk about a plumbing course he was thinking of attending, make various sexist comments about our lady pupils arse, you get the picture? All in all we managed to swing it for a few of our punters while in the passenger seat.





I think we'll discuss the examiners in the next thrilling instalment.
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