Clutch Question

Are you trying to say that BMW and Moto Guzzi have succeeded in
directing cooling air to the clutch, or that both marques use a larger
diameter single disk clutch?

I threw away my R-69 manual, feeling that I was unlikely to ever
acquire an old airhead...

BMW's and Guzzis have granny gears in their transmissions, and the
riders probably spend all their riding lives on nicely paved roads, so
there is little need to ever slip the clutch like the designer of the
multi-plate clutch intended.

Clutch slipping makes up for a taller first gear which is more useful
on the race course.

The highest performance literbikes can now reach 100 mph in first gear,
while my low-geared water buffalo would barely reach 35 mph.

 

I was a "committed rider" for years.

"Committed" in the sense that my income and job prospects had committed
me to riding to work on a motorcycle, riding for recreation on a
motorcycle, and using a motorcycle as a pickup truck any time I wanted
to move, say, a 50 gallon aquarium across town.

Yes, you could call me "independant", too. I never asked anybody what
*their* plans for the day were, I just went ahead and did whatever I
wanted to do, whenever I wanted to do it, and, if that meant I was
doing it alone, that was just fine with me, I was comfortable
with my solitary self.

The average citizen would say that I should be *committed* to a mental
institution for riding in weather where the rainwater flowing off
freeway overpasses loked like waterfalls.

The average cop looked at the way I was dressed and figured that he
might be able to talk a judge into committing me to a correctional
institution for *some* offense against the social order, all he had to
do was check my papers and he would surely find *something"...

I was more committed to riding than the other committed riders that I
knew. I was manically putting 2000 miles a month on my water buffalo,
and trying to tell them that they were missing out on some of the
grandest experiences possible by sleeping past the crack of dawn, or
going to bed just before dawn and sleeping all day to live like a
vampire and come out after dark...

Other riders have boasted that they have been licensed for 20 years and
have never owned a four-wheeler. I can understand where they are coming
from, having been there, done that, and left it all behind for a
multi-vehicle lifestyle better than the average.

I recently sold off all the souvenirs of my world travels, acquired
whilst jetting around the world on package tours. One guy who purchased
some of the junk marvelled, saying,
"You've really been blessed".

Yeah, well all of that materialistic stuff tends to adhere to a person
over time, and I once again eschewed it in favor of monistic
simplicity. Who *needs* five color TV's, three computers, four
motorcycles, three cars and a hundred porn videos anyway?

I'm getting off the track of what the "committed rider" is like.

They are often the lone inhabitant of a single room in some apartment
building and are rarely seen in the company of a female of the species.
One old bachelor that I know rode from Conecticutt to San Francisco on
the back of a Triumph during the Viet Nam war.

His draft card burning brother continued to Vancouver where he lives
today. The old guy
only recently sold his final Honda, which he only rarely rode across
town.

Another rider proudly declared that he was a committed motorcycle rider
and that he'd never owned a car and never would. He shared a two
bedroom apartment with another
similar social retard who'd also never married and also blamed his
mother for his clinical desperation.

Both of those guys are dead, and maybe their alcoholic friend is still
riding to Alcholics Anonymous meetings every night and trying to seduce
other recovering alcoholics into the joys of single room occupancy and
committed motorcycling.

Their other buddy has become a drug rehab counsellor, figuring that his
extensive experience with certain substances was imminently qualifying
for the career.

I occasionally see one of the "old gang" from the motorcycle hangout.
He had to sell his
motorcycle and all of his possessions before going to prison for some
kind of marketing scam.

I remember how he criticized my "committed biker" lifestyle back in the
"good old days".

He told me that my motorcycle was all that I owned and that he
"couldn't live like that".

Now he talks about how he misses the "camaraderie" and he wants to get
another motorcycle and try to recreate those days.

Yeah. Right.

 

No, I'm merely saying that your original assertion that you can't cool a
car-type clutch on a bike was, and is, bollocks. And nobody mentioned
size.

Both BMW airhead boxers, and Guzzi vees, were (and still are) raced,
using their original clutches, with great success. Classic races
nowadays, of course.

A friend bought an early R65, and took it for a holiday to the south of
France - about a 2000 mile round trip from where he lives. The gear
return spring broke (not unknown on the early R65 until they modded it)
in France, leaving him permanenetly stuck in fourth gear. And he was
two-up. He made it all the weay back in the one gear, sliping the clutch
all the way to about 30mph. Made it. The clutch was toasted, of course,
but I'm afraid it illustrates that you're talking crap.

See above.

It *might* help your cause if, occasionally, you admit you're wrong.

 

Indeed.

 

Depends on what you're trying to do when you park the motorcycle. Maybe
he doesn't want somebody to scratch his perfect machine or knock it
over by parking to close.

I pulled in to park one day, and was sharing the stall with a Harley
rider, and he yells at me, "Do you have enough room there?"

So every time I see the guy pull up to park, I yell at him, "You got
enough room there, old man?"

Another guy I know will yell at pedestrians if they cut through the
space he's parked in, on their way across the street. When they yell
back, he says, "What don't you use the gawddamned crosswalk, like
you're supposed to?"

Our group of regulars at the hangout on top of the hill saw that we
were in competition with cars for our preferred parking spaces. We
would park two to a diagonal stall, and sometimes two riders would
depart from two different stalls, leaving enough room for a car to
slide in between, straddling the dividing line.

So we tried parking diagonally in the diagonal stalls, but that upset
riders who didn't know us, they couldn't figure out what we were up to.

Besides, Harley riders just have to park backwards, facing out so they
can make a dramatic exit.

Finally, we decided to divide four diagonal stalls with extra center
lines, and we came out with eight stalls, which was just fine for our
tight knit group. We brought the paint out and laid down some masking
tape, and "voila!* (1) we had motorcycle parking stalls, and we got the
maintenance supervisor (this was on city property, mind you) to cut a
stencil forbidding violation of a municipal code that he made up on the
spot.

So there we are, sitting fat dumb and happy, and along comes a fat guy
on a Suzuki Intruder. He begins telling us that the motorcycle parking
spaces existed because some semi-hemi-demi-quasi wannabe outlaw biker
went to the city and demanded motorcycle parking spaces in all the city
parking lots.

"Bullshit!" sez I. "We painted these friggin' spaces ourselves, and we
didn't ask G*d or the Superintendant of Parks and Recreation, we just
did it."

Fat Boy gave up after the second time I called "Bullshit!" on him.

Then, as the number of committed motorcyclists began to dwindle, cagers
started parking in our motorcycle spots, taking up two spaces. Once one
cager was in, the other cagers thought it was open season on motorcycle
parking spaces, so we started parking across the motorcycle stalls so
we would have space to park and mill around.

Naturally, along comes a Harley rider who has to park backwards, and he
wants to know
why the heck I'm taking up two motorcycle stalls, and I have to tell
him that the motorcycle stalls are OUR stalls, that we painted the
lines.

And he proceeds to tell me that he's been coming to that hangout for 20
years and he has as much right as anybody to park backwards. I tell him
that I've been parking there for *thirty* years and that if he'd ever
been there before, I would *know* him.

(1) Notice that I spelled "voila!" correctly.

 

B-12 schreef:

The worst thing I ever carried home on the bike was a ladder. I had
to sit on it. That was a real pain in the ass.

I'm blessed with a wife who loves to sit for hours on the pillion seat,
with a backpack. She falls asleep on long trips. I can tell, because
her helmet then touches my back. But she doesn' fall off.

Exactly what I sometimes wonder about. I must be nuts. My favorite
weather is snow. Everybody takes a car to work, I do not even have
a car license.
I must be nuts, which is what many people think of me.

Not to brag: Daily to work and back + bringing my wife to her work
and late at night pick her up again, made me do 40.000 km per
year. All those years, I missed one day. Icy road (people went skating
and some went skiing to work). I picked my beamer boxer, stood
beside it and kicked the starter. The bike slid away sideways, and it
was so slippery that I could not pick it up. So I decided let it lay
there on it's side and to stay home.

My wife bought a car when her working hours shifted and I could no
longer bring her to work. I must admit, a car sometimes is a handy
tool.

I've visited the birthplace of my wife in Indonesia. In the middle
of nowhere. They have no roads, no electricity, no running water.
We'd think of them as being poor. But over there, nobody has a TV,
or freezer, or any other goodie. And because nobady owns something,
they are not really poor. Drawback is that when you break a leg,
you are doomed. No hospital around. And if they bring you those
50 miles by perahu to a hospital, you need money, which they do not
have too (no factory to earn money).
I there discovered that I was in a rat race at home.

Rob.

 

When I started riding in the '50s, my town (Louisville,KY) still had streetcar
tracks. You haven't lived till you've gotten your tires (or worse, ONE tire)
stuck in an icy streetcar track .

 

How about one of those potholes next to the track that's about 2 ft long
and seems to go to the core of the earth, while the rear wheel is
skidding across the track trying to spin you like a ballet dancer?

Ian Singer
No, hasn't happened to me, just fantasizing

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<Mental image>

<Boggle>

 

How do you say, "I went native," in Dutch?

There used to be a comic strip in the Sunday newspaper, called "The
Katzenjammer Kids". It was about the Dutch planters in Java. But most
Americans didn't understand the milieu and the humor of colonial
imperialism during the Indonesian struggle for independence...

A friend of mine had a mild stroke when he was about 53. The doctor
asked him what kind of work he did and he told him about his low stress
job working in the same place for 27 years. The doctor then asked him
how long he'd lived at the same address and he also answered that he'd
lived there for 27 years.

The doctor said, "My God, man. You're in the deepest rut I've ever
heard of."

My friend retired to a life of travel and leisure and lasted another 27
years. He had his final heart attack in the mountains of Mexico where
there was no hospital or emergency services for 100 miles. But his
friends said he died with a smile on his face...

Most Americans wouldn't know when it was time to quit working and
relax. They move from house to house (or apartment to apartment) about
every three years and change jobs as often.

They stress out and have a massive heart attack by age 65, and never
get to enjoy retirement.

 

I think he's trying to tell you that they both use single disk
dry clutches without overheating problems.

The diameter of the single disk is a little larger than some
multi-plate clutches. The total surface area is likely somewhat
less.

My BMW GS goes offroad pretty regularly with no clutch problems.
Less dirt capable than a KTM perhaps but way better than any other
liter bike I can think of. Very occasionally, I've produced clutch
smoke trying to get it up a hill full of big rocks. Still get plenty of
life out of the clutch. I'm on my 3rd disk at 135,000 miles and
could have probably stretched it further.

 

B-12 schreef:

I had to look this up in my dictionary, because I did
not know the meaning. Translated: "Ik ging inburgeren".
A 'burger' is a citizen. "inburgeren' is a noun. It is
a brand new word, and currently *the* topic of
political parties, that shout that Turkish and
Moroccan people living here must 'inburgeren',
meaning they should become like us.
Will the time ever come that I see a woman
on the beach taking off her burqua and lay
down topless?
And do I *really* want that to happen?

I would not call that period *humor*. It was pure colonialism
exploiting the Indonesians. The awkward thing was that
we (me too) did not realize that.

For work I've been in the US a couple of times, and usually stayed
with a good friend I have in Ohio. I was totally flubbergasted
when -on a saturday- he phoned the company to see
how another colleague was dealing with some problem.
The sheer fact that he thought of the company on a weekend day,
plus the fact that some 'idiot' was working in his free time (unpaid)
left me stunned.

The company was Lucent. They sacked almost everybody
when times got worse (including me) an gave the CEO
(Rich McGinn) a load of money when they laid him off.
Lucent did not even say 'thank you' when they sacked me.


Hey, we are way off the cluch question.
Rob.

 

My feeble recollection of the strip says it looked way more
like Africa than it did Indonesia. Agreed completely that
it was insulting. I sort of remembered a native king and a
search seems to confirm this.

http://www.toonopedia.com/cap_kids.htm

 

oldgeezer kirjoitti:

Dry clutch was must for road racing use , when they still had to
push-start
their engines. They could get engines started much faster by the faster
, off/on
grip by the dry clutch

Jukka