Saturday 24 October 2015. Cross country through parts of the Lockyer Valley and Scenic Rim

Caught up with F800GS mounted Mark at his place at about 8:00 PM and the plan was, well, we didn't really have too much of a plan. We head out over Mount Glorious via the "Goat Track Road", video of which is below. From there, to the bottom of Mount Glorious, up to Somerset, left at the T intersection and down to the Esk-Crows Nest Road, which is just great. A quick bite at Crows Nest and then gravel roads at the back of Crows Nest, 17 mile road and down to the Scenic Rim. Here we dropped in at Ropeley Lutheran Church. This is an area settled by Mark's ancestors; his paternal great grandparents are interred there and there is a memorial to the three brothers who first migrated to the area. Quite a moment to be there with Mark.

Of to Laidley for some fuel and then down to the end of the road at Townson. The road was gated but I am not sure it really is private property and will have a look into this. Mark has been searching for years for a track over the range here. A reasonable quest I believe. A long day of about 10 hours riding. I guess you could deduct about two hours for stops at most. Anyhow, I hope you enjoy the short video of the Goat Track Road:


Sunday 11 October 2015. V-Star needs some loving

Theold V-Star 650 has been languishing for a while. That's despite paying rego and insurance, I simply had to put it aside after a failure to finish the bulk of my studies for the year. The second term finished on Friday and this afternoon I started work on the VStar, also known as the Rainmaker.

The main problem is that the igniter unit has failed. At least that is what Yamaha call the thing. Everybody else calls it a CDI - Capacitor Discharge Unit. These units are expensive, $1,000.00 from Yamaha but fortunately there are aftermarket ones available form about $400.00. After some urging from Karen, I know have one of these that allow you to manually set the upper rev limit and timing curve. However when I installed it, still no spark. A retest of the pickup coil shows very high resistance and so that needs to be checked.

This job gives me the chance to deal with quite a number of things and really square this bike and some of my equipment away. This afternoon I modified the motorcycle lift to make it work much easier on the VStar, photos to come. With the modified lift in place I removed the left-hand side crankcase cover to have a look at the pickup coil. Glad I did as the gasket was cactus and obviously a cause for the small oil leak that the bike has had for a while. The screws holding in the pickup coil and stator coil are jammed in and some work is required to remove these and replace them with allen key bolts, making the bike much better to work on in the future. I will take the time to clean the crankcase cover nicely and the surrounding area on the bike, it will be a job well worth doing. Loctite Red on the stator and pickup coil bolts and Loctite Blue on the crankcase cover bolts.

Photos to come, I'll keep you'all posted.

HU Queensland 2015, 24, 25 & 26 September 2015

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