DRZ Clock!

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Daisy-su (mk 2) had been rested up in my mother’s garden for the past 2 months, and while she sat there, I took the battery out, brought it indoors and left it on a solar tender/trickle charger (after all, it was winter). However, a problem occurred after re-installing the battery and not knowing how to set the clock.

Now, those of you who know the two bikes will know that Daisy (mk 1) has a Acewell speedo and the setting/resetting of the clocks is achieved simply by holding both buttons down for 3 seconds and voilà.

Setting the time on the stock clock on a DRZ is a bit more tricky; and for the life of me, I genuinely forgot how to do it. So let me quickly tell you how to set the time on the stock DRZ clock:

  1. With the Clock displayed on the screen: hold the Mode – Time button for 2 seconds.
  2. (On the screen you should see a bold line under the word Clock) Press the Set – Time button to change between seconds, minutes and hours.
  3. Using the + and - buttons adjust the time, pressing the Set – Time button to change between seconds, minutes, hours.
  4. Press the Mode – Time button once complete to return to normal functionality (the bold line under the word Clock should disappear).

There is much to be said about keeping your battery on a tender in winter if you’re not likely to be using the bike. I personally ride rain, snow or shine, however, since my recent move, I left one of my bikes at my mum’s while I got settled down. Putting the battery on a tender saved me worrying about charging the battery when I came back to riding it, and potentially saved me having to buy a new battery. A little effort goes a long way.  :)

Something to think about…. (punctures)

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Picture of a motorcycle laying on its side with rear wheel removed

Oh noes! Red patches mark the spot (or at least a few of them).

Now, unlike most: I am a very fortunate person! However, in the past 6 months I’ve had two punctures in the same tyre, out of 2 bikes, those odds are something to think about.

Common sense would steer you in the direction that, perhaps after the first screw that punctures your tyre, you’d think about carrying a can of tyre repair agent, or have a puncture repair kit handy…. or own a spare inner tube.

Well, I didn’t. I am simply that kind of a guy.

It took leaving my friends house at 2am on cold January Saturday night and finding a puncture to realize that riding 9 miles on a flat rear isn’t a good thing, and that petrol station air pumps don’t fit SM wheels (even when you can find one open at said hour).

As you’ll imagine, Sundays are not a day you’d associate with finding hard to find things/services open/available. You’ll be right.

Suffice to say, as much as I’m not all about carrying the world of supplies in the event of anything happening. I would suggest a can of tyre fixing gunk would be more useful than anything leaving it for a Sunday morning to discover that the earliest you can get a new inner tube is Tuesday. :)

Seat Mod (#1) revisited (01)

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So I’ve had the seat mod’ed for a few rides now, I can safely say while it is more comfortable, and certainly lower than it was before (giving me even more leg room when wanting to walk the bike around). I can also say it’s not as good as I had hoped. Which, in light of the fact that this is not a terminal problem, I will re-pack the seat with more foam.

Currently, the seat squidges right down to the base foam, and while giving you some support around the butt region, I would say it’s still rather narrow, and added to that not as soft against the plastic frame as I would have liked. I hope not to have to do this but I may have to add “wings” to the side of the seat to give it more width, however, I will try adding some lateral memory foam, and an extra layer of 1cm thick packaging foam. I will photograph and repost how that pans out.

As with all things, you don’t always succeed first attempt. However, the wealth of a job well done is to persevere through ones failures and hone down the successes of previous attempts. :)

Valve Clearances

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Well, aside from making a new seat, my other project has been to check the valve clearances, and consequently changing the shims.  I will confess, my take on mechanics tends to keep me well clear of going inside the motor… change of brake pads, bulbs, you know… things that if done wrong you can quickly undo and nobody will know/notice. So, my dealings with valve clearances have been as far as adjusting the tappets on a Bandit (GSF600), an even then I over-looked tightening one up and finding I had a horrid ticking sound and firing only on 3 cylinders. Suffice to say, having to take the cams off, unhooking the chain, removing the CCT (Cam Chain Tensioner) damn near horrified me. Luckily for me, I currently have a garage with electricity, so I can tinker through the night should the need be there.

Now, for those of you who are a dab hand at doing everything correctly, tightening bolts to the right torque and organizing and polishing your spanners, I suggest you don’t read on.

If unlike above, and you’re like me who is a bit clumsy but curious and willing to give it a go, I will point out it is a wee-bit scary. Taking the top of your bike engine off is nothing, compared with unhooking the cam-chain from the cam sprockets and taking the whole thing apart. I’m not trying to technically instruct you how to do that, you should be reading a manual for that.

I will remark however, that when calculating the shim sizes. The error on my shims were all over the place. Exhaust Left was too small, Exhaust Right was too big, Inlet Left was gigantic and Inlet Right was spot on. So let it not be too surprising that when calculating the desired shim size I accidentally ordered up the Inlet Left shim with the error augmented, which on installation and checking I was kicking myself at how on earth the error was double what it was before.  I will allow this to be my learning error.

So in conclusion, my first DRZ (Daisy) that has done approximately 15,000 miles since last inspection was -0.05 out of tolerance on exhaust left, spot on on the bottom of the tolerance on the exhaust right. It was then +0.05 out of tolerance on the inlet left and spot in the middle of the tolerance on the inlet right. Which after a 4 week road trip round Spain and France, commuted to work for about 4 months and then ridden from Surrey, England to Cape Town, South Africa; I would say it did pretty well.

(Side note: the replacement shim is in the post and should be here tomorrow)

Seat Mod (#1)

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1

So I wont beat around the bush, the stock seat on the DR-Z is crap, firstly it’s hard, and if that wasn’t enough, it’s ergonomically unsound, it’s only about wide enough for a single buttock.

From my previous bike which I had much luck with, I managed to get a very very cheap deal on a used Corbin seat. It’s great for width, however after riding 12,000 miles through Africa, I can tell you, regardless of how you wish to hide it with a sheep-skin, it’s still as hard as sitting on a rock.

On a shoe-string budget and a bit of lateral thinking, I realized the potential of what I could possibly try and if it all goes wrong I could return to what I had before. So I present to you a seat mod that costs approximately £10 (GBP).

For this you shall need:

  • A dense memory foam pillow that nobody will miss.
  • Some 1cm thick packaging foam (I have no idea where you get it from)
  • A staple gun + staples
  • Staple removal tools (screwdriver + pliers)

Firstly, I suggest you take off the exiting seat cover… it helps! ;) You should be left with as from above. A) Seat frame. B) Original seat foam. C) Your memory foam pillow. D) Original seat cover.

Obviously, after that you’d want to see how much of the pillow you’d need to cut in order to get the seat covered. In my case I could not get the full length of the seat out of the pillow.

Marking out then follows. I would advise if like my pillow which is tapered, that you maximize the middle area of the pillow, the tapering can make sculpting the foam a nuisance.  As you can see, I did not do this, and suffered the consequences.

Once I had done this and sampled it, I found that I could feel the seat frame through the foam, hence why I decided to use the 1cm thick foam as a liner under the memory foam.

I will spare you all the long and convoluted stories I have about patching up the front-end of the seat with scraps from the remaining pillow, suffice to say, it’s all together now and a staple gun over the stretched seat cover hides a multitude of sins.
I’ll admit, it’s not much to look at, but it’s certainly more comfortable than what was already there, and in fact, I dare say a little more comfortable against the Corbin, which I compared with. However, I will say this is sitting still in the garage without actually riding on the seat mod.  I’ll keep you posted on any further changes I make to this mod.

A New DRZ

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Hi there, thanks for tuning in, this is a tribute to my two wonderful machines, I hope to document the modifications, trials and tribulations of owning a DR-Z that I have encountered, and will likely to encounter during their lives as touring machines. Picture of two DRZ bikes side by side.

My bikes are named Daisy and Daisy-Su. Daisy the original  (pictured right) crossed Africa on the East African Highway, modified with an Aqualine 28L tank, Corbin seat, Dirt-bagz luggage system, ThumperTalk engine protection.  Daisy-Su (pictured left), is so far an un-modified, stock DR-Z with less than 2,000 miles on the clock.  Watch this space to see the changes.