So what did my first tour teach me? at Chris`s BIKE Blog

So what did my first tour teach me?

Published by June 11th, 2007 in Biking Gear, Bits and Pieces, Goldwing, Maintenance, Touring, Wordpress

Get a half cover for the bike, it must surely beat all that mopping up in the morning when it rains the night before.
The stock seat suits me just fine and the heated seat and grips are very nice to have when it’’s cold.
The large information panel on my bike is great for reading without spectacles - I guess Honda know their age demographic pretty well!
I waste a lot of space taking camera gear on the bike that I don”t use. Basically a whole pannier for an SLR and lenses is daft when all I take is a couple of snaps. In future I shall use a simple point and shoot camera.
Storage on the bike is OK but no better and a little worse in fact, than my Pan with its OEM panniers and a Givi top box.
The Wing corners very well and I didn”t ground the pegs once although I fully expected to. Part of the reason is that I wasn”t prepared to corner at high speeds on the roads with stone walls and blind turns - not to speak of oncoming traffic.
The gearbox is plainly designed in the expectation that one will use the engine torque to overcome its limitations - rather like the Pan’’s in that regard. I do wish both bikes had a decent 6 speed box. The gearbox on my ancient ZZR is simply miles better than either the Pan’’s or the Wing’’s - it’’s like silk and and I am never in the wrong gear. The gearbox on the Wing is the same kind of agricultural job that the Pan has and first and second sound like straight cut gears.
Throttle control is very nice and responsive and there is no backlash right through the drivetrain.
I really need to test out the brakes in a big car park, they don”t seem too powerful but I haven”t really slammed them on (except once - see next post!) and I am probably not using the rear brake as much as I need to on this big heavy bike. The rear disk is obviously built with heavy use in mind - being both vented and of larger diameter than the front disks.
Rough surfaces cause unpleasantly harsh feedback in the front wheel/suspension. I need to see if there is some way of adjusting the compliance at the front end - maybe I need that Traxxion gear?
The satnav works very well for point to point navigation (and perhaps for more complicated routes too although I haven”t tried that). I would like to be able to enter destinations as a postcode and also to load overlays of things like speed cameras. Perhaps the next iteration of software will permit this? The speakers are fine for listening to the route instructions. They are not bad for music either although a headset would doubtless be better.
As usual, I took too much clothing. I need to make a proper list that I can use to pack for trips in future. It will include the new Hood jeans I bought recently but which I did not take on this trip - this was especially dumb considering what I had written here. I regretted that oversight because I could have left the Roadcrafter trousers in the B&B at Llanberis where I stayed for two nights and would then have been more comfortable with the jeans during the many stops I made to wander about and take photos.