A member of the UKGers forum had laid on an invitation ride for big trailies and novices over some of Salisbury plain and anxious to try out some new territory and also to see how my Metal Mules performed on the rough stuff, I was keen to sign up. I became rather less keen as [...]

I bought some SW Motech engine bars for the GS from Nippy Normans. They were a good price compared with other makes and they arrived swiftly. Both left hand and right hand bars went on the bike easily enough although the lower bolts must have been made from putty as the hex key started to [...]

Got down to Metal Mule today and had these beauties fitted. It”””’’s two 38l side panniers and a 45l topbox. To get the balanced set-up the standard exhaust was replaced with a slimmer Scorpion exhaust. It is no noisier than standard but sounds quite different - better I think.

I have been awaiting the arrival of BMW crash bars for the GS since I ordered the bike. The last news I had on these was that there were “production problems” with no further news on a projected delivery date.
What these production problems might be in something as apparently simple as a set of [...]

It just happens to be blocked by a rather large tree root..
Turning six bikes round in a lane narrower than the bike is long necessitates some rather hard work..

It was a brilliant day, organised by Mike Wilson at South London BMW. Six brave souls, including Mike - bravest of all for looking after us! - [...]

For some greenlaning tomorrow that is. Recalling my last outing, a few precautions have been taken, such as to have had a bashplate fitted and I have removed one mirror from the bike - the other will come off before we hit the dirty stuff. One problem is deciding where to put stuff like an [...]

I had a great ride yesterday with guys on the UKGSer forum. We started and finished at Newlands, taking in three counties in a 120 mile loop thorugh some very pretty country side and along a fine mix of roads including some gravelly muddy stuff that almost threatened to become off-road, shady country lanes and [...]

Back from a marvellous tour of Umbria, Tuscany and the Marche courtesy of Beach’’s Motorcycle Adventures.
I was riding a brand new BMW 1200GS equipped with a Garmin 276C GPS (great system - miles better than my Garmin 2820 I reckon, at least for my uses) that was filled every couple of days with lots of [...]

I had a fantastic day on Saturday, taking the GS properly off-road for the first time. The weather was rather mixed, starting out nice but with some rain and hail later. It didn”t stop five of us having a ball in the mud though. The new tyres were perfect for the job even if the [...]

I took the GS this morning to get the off-road tyres fitted. They are Continental TKC 80s, a road-legal tyre with a good blocky pattern that should be much better in the mud than the road tyres. I”ll get a chance to try that out tomorrow! On the way home. I was treading somewhat carefully [...]