Longest Day Up

3am and the alarm goes off, a drum and bass cover of a Manu Chao song and wildly inappropriate for this time of the morning. I'm not sure how much I've slept but it's time to get on with it. Shower, coffee and food, then outside to get ready. It's drizzling and everyone is grinning but also there's the odd worried look when faces are turned away, it's quite a monumental task we're about to do and very few of us have attempted it before. Rain will make or break us today, and after the weeks of wall to wall sunshine the last few days of water from the sky has been as welcome as a fart in a spacesuit... Strap the tiny amount of luggage onto the bike, check the fuel can is secure then throw a leg over the ringing wet seat that'll be my perch for an unknown number of hours. It fires up at first stab of the starter with just a pinch of choke for which I say a very rapid if unorthodox prayer. Dead on 4 o'clock I file out of the car-park in the not quite dar...

Just before 3pm I set off from my house for Lands End. We don't actually do the complete end to end as Lands End don't open their gates until 9am and there's no accommodation there for forty riders and the necessary support crew. So we assemble at Lands End for 4pm and have a ceremonial start off. When I left my village it was raining hard enough, and had been for a couple of hours, to flood the patio so despite the heat I wrapped myself in all my waterproof gear. Three miles to Redruth and the roads are dry and the sun shining. Yay for Cornwall... An hour and 34 miles later and I wasn't the last to arrive at the meeting point at Lands End where we first get to meet the others and look at the very broad spread of bikes that'll be aiming to ride to the very North East of Great Britain tomorrow. There were a few absolute heaps, and a fair few bikes that you'd also suspect could be sold today for much more than the nominal £600. There's also some poor chap who...

So I made it, 993 miles in a shade over 24 hours.   I wrote this on my forum as an initial thought, I'll either edit it later and write more or just write a whole new post but I'll leave this up for a bit: I think I got to JoG about 0430h in the end, but I shepherded one chap back from about Glen Coe onwards. He'd tipped off his bike at Dunoon snapping his clutch perch and getting a mirror stalk in his eye. I didn't want to leave him, especially as his tank range was pretty small on an old Honda CB360. He suddenly disappeared a number of times from my mirrors so I had to go back and see if he was ok and could get the bike started. 993 miles was my final total. I was soooo cold though, the chap at P5 who owns Haggis Adventures very kindly lent me thermal liners for my jacket and trousers which helped so much, and his wife had made little doggy bags including scones and a miniature bottle of Glenmorangie for arrival at JoG. I gave her a hug as I left and thought we were b...

After some more last minute bike repairs/modifications, getting together luggage, some spare fuel capacity and quite a bit of admin including pace notes. I'm ready. For a given level of ready. Obviously... This morning has been a bit of a panic*, I ended up stripping out the wiring that I'd done yesterday for the axillary lights. I'd firstly wired them in using a relay, then when that failed to work properly I wired them in directly, but with the switch on the negative wire back to the battery, and of course both lights grounded themselves to the chassis and were permanently on. Third times a charm and they're now wired in correctly but also it's only on the handlebar mounted switch, not off ignition so there's a possibility I could flatten the battery. I have no idea how the reg/rec and generator will deal with them either so I may just have manufactured a whole world of electrical pain for myself but here we are... Months ago I bought a plastic welding kit wit...

The goo that was in the thermostat is evidently all through the cooling system and although it's had a good flush out, it is probably blocking many of the galleries in the radiator. Touching the middle of the radiator when the bike is running and it feels cool, you can leave your hand on it whilst the two tanks either side are boiling. Removing the radiator and filling up one tank slowly then you notice that all but the bottom two galleries are completely blocked. Water isn't getting exposed to cool air as it crosses the radiator, so it just re-enters the engine as hot as it came out. Best way of getting scale out of something is with Harpic. You can use bicarbonate of soda, or white vinegar and gently boiling or something but I was running out of time, we are away camping over the weekend and I needed it done now. For three hours I had Harpic inside that radiator, shaking it and refilling it and trying to get it to cross the galleries. It's made a mess of the stainless sin...

Thursday evening, five days to the start of the LDU. After posting on the LDU WhatsApp group one of the other of this years challengers Dave, who co-owns the Redruth MoT Centre (the premier MoT garage in the Redruth/Pool/Cambourne area) suggested I visit the next day so we can pull apart the cooling system and see what's going on. I very gratefully accept and happily ride up there then next morning. We take the bike apart, remove the radiator and thermostat. The radiator does allow water to pass through at a decent-ish flow rate, but you can see there is scale inside and many of the fins are caked in mud and other road debris. The thermostat however is covered in this weird goo that seems to be made partly from silicone sealant, partly from sand and partly from bits of scale. Boiling it in a mug of water doesn't make it open either so it's obviously borked which will cause the overheating.   Getting to the thermostat was a challenge and required prising the twenty year...

So it's Friday, four days before I run out of time and I'm stood there looking at the bike in the afternoon sun dumping it's coolant out onto the road again. The fan is running madly but the temperature gauge is obstinately refusing to drop back down whilst more and more water splatter my shoes. Annoyingly I'd just spent four hours working on the bike to make sure this didn't happen. This is A Problem.  Rewind back a day and I trundle up to Plymouth and back, a round trip of just over 120 miles to say hello to some friends, make sure the bike is running well and nothing falls off. The first thing I notice is that even before I've got to Liskard a half hour up the road that the seat is really uncomfortable. As in a wooden plank with steel rivets in would be preferable to this. The second, and slightly more concerning right now, is that the temperature gauge is permanently just below the redline. It's been that way for the past ten minutes and every so often d...

If I had three wishes I'd wish for five, Then I could breath under water and I'd still be alive.* Or alternatively, I'd get this lot: A radiator cap with only a slight bit of manky oil residue on. Means the head gasket is fine (probably) and residual bit of oil is swimming around the coolant system rather than a leak anywhere. The bike is fit and healthy(ish). Which means it's time for this: And not long after I handed over the keys this arrived: I gave Adam, the MoT tester a hug because I was quite emotional. Not sure he was expecting it mind. Whilst waiting for the MoT I met someone else waiting for their test to be complete on a tasty looking Z1000, the naked with the twin shotgun pipes. He is a similar age to me and had had leukaemia in his early 30's. I genuinely enjoyed listening to his outlook on life and speaking to him about attitudes to work and life. We're here for a good time, not a long time, But we should make the best of it when we can and be kind...

Since the last post I've managed to ride the bike on a few chores around the lanes and then up to Redruth, over to Helston and back home again. Not far but there's 55 miles on the trip meter since I filled up the tank. The bike's running well, it easily pulls up to 70mph on the A30 and ticks along merrily at that speed. No idea if it's able to go faster Officer... Nothing has fallen off so far although than the number plate had started to think about a bid for freedom. It stops and steers with if not aplomb and taught manners then at least it's not so bad that I've ploughed it into a hedge yet. Always a reassuring sign. The brakes are still terrible, the suspension wallows like one of Chacewater Farms prize sows and it's still loud even with the baffles in. But so far, so good. So the only outstanding issue is the head gasket. Sooner or later I'm going to have to take off the radiator cap and see if there's loads of congealed oil entering the cooling...

So the last couple of days have been a bit of a roller-coaster emotionally. I went back into the garage late on the evening that I found the head gasket might have blown, ostensibly to tidy up and move the bikes around in the garage but in the end I just had a few beers, listened to the KLF's White Room on repeat and glared looked at the bike resentfully. The idea of getting this far with the bike and then to find it could be terminally borked (or at least beyond repair for me in the time left) was pretty frustrating. Earlier that evening, to say thank you to Martin and the rest of the people at Cornwall Kawasaki , Jayne baked them a chocolate cake which I dropped off the next day.   Fun Fact: There's not enough green M&M's in a large packet to do two letters on a large chocolate, so we had to use some viagra blue too. Either way, the cake went down a treat, Martin was very happy and shared it between the others in the shop. Talking to the owner Mark about th...

The Spanish have a proverb that literally translates to If you wish to make God laugh, tell him your plans ... which has turned out to be quite apt today. This morning I returned to Cornwall Kawasaki in Lanner to pick up my freshly cleaned and rebuilt carbs. Martin has done a fantastic job upon them rebuilding using a mix of the original parts after a lot of cleaning, a few from the Chinese rebuild kit, namely the diaphragms and a fair few bits out of his personal stash. For all this I was charged nothing more than the cost of the cleaning fluid, for which I'm incredibly grateful for, especially knowing that Martin took the carbs home with him and worked upon them in his own time over the weekend. I'll keep the spares for now, but I think they're fit for little more than the bin unfortunately. I reassembled the now clean airbox and oiled the filter. It was lose in the the airbox when I got the bike so although not new it's had little air sucked through it so point nib...

Or at least I've had one from Martin at Cornwall Kawasaki . My carbs have been split, the last few bits I couldn't do myself removed and they've been for a soak in the ultrasonic cleaner. He's then rebuilt them using the cheap Chinese kit I got from fleabay and I'm assuming a few bits from his personal stash. Apparently they're fuel tight and fully operational as far as he can tell without sticking them on a bike. I know I've been told that the cheap diaphragms won't last for everlong, but I just need them to get me to the far northern reaches of Haggistan and back in less than a month. I really am hoping I'm not going to regret buying the pretender bits, but OEM parts for these carbs or any old bits of bikes are usually beyond ridiculous prices. Anyway, I've got to do the school run and offload four one tonne bags of grass clippings at the tip tomorrow before I can pick up the carbs. After that I've got about five hours to go from a bike tha...