You know when somebody messes with your bike and you really wish they hadn't?

Was in Pakistan last week and I stopped in a friendly little place called Kingri on the way to Iran. After eating, drinking tea and chatting with the locals on the street, I later went past my bike in the courtyard where my room was and noticed my fuel filler cap was missing from my IMS tank. Now that's annoying enough but after I sounded off at the people there (directing my anger at the owners son...), no one was admitting anything and said it must have been like that when I arrived (!) so I took a look around the courtyard with my torch and somehow thankfully spotted it in a corner lying amongst some junk.

Anyway, after that I put the bike in my room and had a look into the tank to see if anything had been put in there too. I could see something at the bottom that was a familiar shape but it was only the next morning in the daylight that I could see what it was- they'd broken off one of my indicator lenses and put it in the tank...grrrr!

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Mike


www.singapore-scotland.blogspot.com
www.argentina-alaska.blogspot.com
My little Vid: India/Pakistan

BMW R1150GS
Suzuki DR650 SE: Ride it like ya stole it. Oh, somebody just did...

commiserations. I remember back in the 70's when a member of the club I was in had spent months and and many hours rebuilding his 750 Honda and on one of its first outings the engine was wrecked because another jealous club member had topped up the oil tank with sand. Probably the first time I realized how malicious some people could be with some else's pride and joy.

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If you think you are too small to make a difference you have never spent the night with a mosquito.

In my early biking days I was riding a BMW R75/5 (which I still own). In Germany we called them "rubber cow" owing to their soft suspension and unstable chassis. At an outing with our club we camped in some paddock. I was by them probably the last BMW rider left, everybody else preferring cheaper Jap bikes that outperformed any BMW in any which way.

The next morning I discovered bundles of grass piled onto the cylinders. Somebody pointed out that cows need to eat grass, but if it didn't want to eat I should drain the oil, then it would certainly eat (implying that running the engine without oil would result in a "Kolbenfresser", the piston eating into the cylinder). This was all in good humour, of course.

Some time later our bike shop organised a rally for customers which also involved members of the same club. We had all booked into a camp ground near a small village in the Eifel hills. The camp also sported a pub, frequented by the locals. One of them was a young guy who made a nuisance out of himself riding his CB400F rather fast around and in and out of the camp ground, where children were running around. I finally decidd to teach him a lesson. After he disappeared back into the pub I casually wandered over to his bike with another club member to admire his bike. The I swapped the plug leads of cylinders 3 and 4. I never saw myself what happened later, as he stayed in the pub past my bed time. But my friends with glee reported that he had great difficulty starting his bike, coughing and spluttering, and that's how he puttered out of the camp. He never bothered us again.

Guilty as charged.

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Cheers,
Peter.

Europe to NZ 2006-10

I had someone locked my trotel lock down just so when I relesed it I stayed at speed lots of fun that.

I had a little scooter some one at work pushed over and broke the lights on it. That one realy pissed me off told every one if a see someone do that agen i was going to shoot them and brought in a gun to help reinforce that idea.

Had a tech once drain my oil then run my bike on a "test run" tryed to tell me it was full and no way can he make a mistake like that. Not mean or any thing may not have done much damage but I still traded it in and still will not buy any thing from them.

I took my bike in to a shop to get the electrics fixed and some of the plastics screws weren't put back in after retrieval so I found some and put them back in myself then a month later my electrics started turning off and on randomly so i got her naked and realised the battery was hanging on by one corner screw in a tab and the tab was really bent (almost broken off) probably from the speed I hit speed bumps (it's a motard). Needless to say I wasn't happy... now the battery always drains itself I think it was damaged, there are some cracks in the top of it.

I parked my F650 on the edge of a square in Milan with a load of scooters. Walking back towards it I noticed a guy in a suit looking at the bike very closely and thought enough of it walk a bit quicker. By the time I actually got back to the bike he'd run for it but left me a little present; a brand new Snap On scewdriver in the ignition

So, while Milanese bike thieves are obviously well dressed and don't buy their gear at ALDI, this one was a complete and utter muppet, the disk lock was untouched :confused1:

The ignition continued to work no matter if you used any key roughly the right size or a screwdriver, so no worries trip wise, I'm just glad I spent the extra fifty quid on the best disc lock I could get rather than rely on what BMW fitted.

In London I once found someone's sandwich box and three rounds of Ham and Cheese in the ex-Army rucksacks I used as panniers. Red MZ's with MOD panniers weren't that common and they'd done up the buckles, so I guess some sort of joke I wasn't a party to. I didn't risk the butties but the box served well for years as a storage container for assorted electrical bits.

Andy

As many travellers, I tend to put stickers of the national flags of the countries I visited on my aluminium boxes.

When I visited Syria, one morning I left my hotel to discover that someone had neatly added a very nice large Syrian flag to my collection

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http://www.ontheroad.de
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiVqgukzm40

Greek fishing village in '72, some german "hippies" stole cigarettes from my german friend and were given a talking to. Next morning my front tire and rim were sawn over with a hacksaw, and the hippies had vanished. Obviously a coincidence.
Last year in the norwegian coastal town Sandefjord some drunk youths kicked my K100 over, plastic fairing, mirror, indicator, pannier on the casualty list. The whole street was littered with flower pots and anything loose.
Inbetween these incidents its been more or less trouble free motoring, two attempted thefts ....OK,OK, I know it's unbelievable that some one would become a thief for a Beemer, but thats the truth.

Peter, Oslo

"Too much of a good thing.......is just wonderful" Mae West

As part of my pre-wedding send off celebrations years back - when I was riding to work every day - the guys in the office put shaving foam all over my leathers. I went mental, as it marks the leather badly... its fair to say that it was very clear I didn't get the joke.

Unknown to me, they had done the same thing to the perfect black paint job on my bike. They managed to clean it off before I went home, and I was none the wiser at the time. Until the day before the wedding, filling up with fuel with my best man on the back of the bike - the weather was perfect. Full sun on the tank and you could see shaving foam lines all over it. I never said a word...... We had a 30 minute trip round some entertaining roads and he got off shaking.... 'You don't normally ride like that with a pillion, do you.... ?'. I told him it was a special treat

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Honda CBR 1100 XX, Yamaha XTZ 660, Harris Special

Back in about 2004 my girlfriend and I decided to go to France on my bike. It was her first full on bike journey.

The bike was a tatty but serviceable CBR1000F in stadard trim except for Fireblade calipers on ally brackets to improve the braking and a re-conditioned Ohlins rear. The brakes had been on the bike for about 3 months/5000 miles already.

We rode around the Massif Central for a few days, then started to ride home.

This involved lots of motorway, but the CBR ate these up. We stopped for a stretch and fill-up every 100-150 miles of so.
About 70 miles from the previous fill-up, I got a wierd feeling: could not put my finger on it. Pulled over: looked the bike over: everyting seemed fine. Got on, continued.

Later, I thought I had hit some debris on the road as something hit my boot. Checked rear view mirror: could see nothing except the car behind flashing me: I tried to explain I had not thrown anything by raising my hand. Left it at that.

A while later I saw traffic slowing.

I applied the front brake: absolutely nothing!! Lever to the bar without any resistance. I down shifted and used the back brake to slow down: thankfully we were just 1km from the next motorway services and we pulled in.
We are only alive because the braking was just to scrub off speed for traffic some 300 metres ahead and not for an emergency.

I got off the bike and had a look: the front wheel was coevered in fluid and on closer inspection I saw the cause:

The 1992-95 fireblade caliper, like most 4-pot calipers is made of two halves bolted together with 4 bolts per caliper. These bolts are long. They are also M8, IIRR, and have a star-shaped head rather than normal hex-heads for regular bolts.

In the case of my bike: of the eight bolts used for my pair of caliper, 5 had fallen out altogether, 2 were already a few mm from the caliper and the remaining one I could move with my finger. The caliper mounting bolts were perfectly OK.

Basically, it seems someone had undone these bolts, and then just nipped them up enough so that they would only loosen with vibration as there was no loss of braking when I first pulled over to check my bike over some miles before.
These bolts are torqued quite high (28-32 ft/lb IIR) and a dealer I asked said it was highly improbably for a single bolt to loosen, impossible in his opinion for all 4 bolts to come undone and certainly not for all 4 on both the calipers in the same 70 miles stretch of motorway.

I reported it to the Gendarmes on my return but I do not think anything came of it. Retrospectively, I cannot say what made me pull over the first time (but I say trust your instincts: if something doesn't smell right, don't just ignore it), but the debris that hit my foot must have been one of the bolts falling out of the caliper and perhaps the car behind was trying to warn us, taking my hand signal as "I know..."

In a nutshell: someone who did not know me from anyone else decided it would be a laugh to try and get a young couple killed on their motorbike. English plates? Who knows, but if that was the motive the irony is that I am a French citizen.....

There are some really vindictive people out there and there are some who are quite simply sick b@startds....

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Adventure: it's an experience, not a style!
(so ride what you like, but ride it somewhere new!)

That Warthog story is scary.... on a lot of roads that would have killed you for sure. I had a similar 'feeling' on a french autoroute too - although I think I can only blame Italian engineers. I was on a Ducati 907ie years back - empty, gently curving autoroutes which were ideal for top speed testing. I was doing the max 145mph or so round some of those easy sweeping curves they have and it felt just gently sort of....wobbly. I assumed that was normal cos I wasn't used to riding it at that speed.

So, next time I fill up with fuel at a service station I'm sitting on the kerb with a coffee just gazing at the bike. Vacant stare ... mental blank. And then all of a sudden I'm awake - the frame joins with two bolts under the side of the tank, except they have BOTH fallen out ! You could actually move the frame with your hands. I was shitting myself. Luckily the other side still had two, so I took one out and swapped it over. I've got no idea how long they had been missing, but I rode a lot slower after that

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Honda CBR 1100 XX, Yamaha XTZ 660, Harris Special

On a 907 ie .....

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...on the road to nowhere...

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