bonox

Er.... is this a trick question? yes it is - noone needs to check the oil on a honda

bullshit mine works very well, even on shitty roads like this.

It will save you just about 3 amps. Not enough to offset heated clothing or grips but any little bit helps. 55W stock - (35W lamp + 7W ballast) = 13W At charging voltage of ~13.5V, you are looking at saving 1amp per lamp replaced - 3/10's of sod all by itself. The only reason for replacing the stock lighting is more usable lumens for same(ish) electrical input - unless you are running more than 4 lamps, it's just a waste of money. A pair would cancel a pair of heated grips running at low/medium but that's it!

at the risk of sounding like a twat, if you RTFM, you'll find it is section 3-5 2-6mm (1/16 - 1/4") measure at the throttle grip flange.

not quite correct mate - depends on how much your mates want to help you push or how long the hill is. The alternator turns with the engine - turn the engine using the back wheel for long enough and you'll prime the pump AND turn it over with enough left to fire the plugs. The pump will run on bugger all volts and only runs for a second or two on my machine. Would take longer with a perfectly dead battery (if such a thing existed in practise) because of the electrical drain on it, but it could be done if you needed it.

my 09/01 has the original battery - gets run weekends only, and does about 700miles over one or two days every weekend of the year. Never had a problem and still going strong! Never seen a tender either. Mind you, coldest winter temp here is about 5 degrees and it doesn't sit in the sun lots when not riding.

the answer is easy! suzuki cheesecake strikes again!

testrider mine are the same as WC's. In the pic, they are just a pair of 3mm angle section aluminium strip. They don't cause the mirrors to vibrate more than usual and they are only mounted 3mm further out than stock. My update was to cut the mounts down to look pretty and annodise them. My idea is different to WC's in that i'm not using spot lights, and the angle mounting of my oval lights means that when you bank into a turn, the long axis of the ellipse becomes parallel to the road giving lots of light through a turn. I rarely use my as straight line driving lights - they are cornering lights that fill in the cutoff in the main lamp when you bank.

For rare use of the heated clothing, you shouldn't have problems. Mine, admittedly, is EFI, but the doing the sums seems to indicate that both types have roughly the same number of spare watts. I run HID mains (ie about 26 watts less total than the stockers) and my voltmeter tells me that the bird is happy burning all the lights and still generating 13.5 volts down to 3000revs. I can run the 40W heated grips, cruise control 15W and everything else (10W) flatout as well, but have to be pulling at least 4000rpm to keep the stator happy. Recommend installing a voltmeter and riding off that - if you can't get the heated gear and all lights on together, drop a gear or two and get the revs up, or turn off a light or two and slow down a little. (Best thing i ever did - well, after the HID of course!) Mine has a relay based switchboard - slightly difference to WC's, but means i can run light duty hookup around the flexing bits (ie up to the bars) without worrying about cracking leads or resistance on the bars. (see the boxes above the clutch reservoir below. Voltmeter under the main left side instruments.

sold a 96 plated model with 180,000km on it (whats that, about 112,000miles) that never needed a new one. I didn't drag with it and didn't commute, but still not bad i reckon.

too complicated a question. If you don't clean the wheel bearing areas with high pressure water, don't hit too many potholes and avoid wheelies, then yo ucould hapilly get more than 200,000miles out of them, just like a car. Or, you could ride it like you stole it and get anywhere between 20,000 and 500,000miles. Or, you could ride it like a granny and they'll give up at 5,000miles. Comes down to how you treat them and whether or not you get one from the long life side of the bell curve. As a rough stab though, i'd be surprised if you got less than a hundred thou out of them.

i thought i'd go one step further - i've never really been that comfortable with right hand turns, so i moved the right fork up more than the left one and now my right turns are better than rossi!

i agree on the being caught out with no material left on one caliper, but you could quite happily run a new set of greens in one side and a set of sintered metal in the other side and still have a perfectly functional set of front brakes. The wearing two different shoes is not a good analogy because i'd need four feet, and if each shoe is comfortable, there is no difference between sides. Bikes are massively overbraked anyway, which is why you can pull up a 500 pound missile at 180mph using two fingers of one hand or put them on a track with no changes at all. (unlike practically every car out there). For street use, you'll never get a high enough heat load into them to warp a disc unless you are abusing them all the way down a huge hill in neutral! The pressure supplying the rear caliper is generated from the braking effort applied to the front, and if getting less action on the rear is desired, you could easily do it by putting a set of lower coeff. pads in the left caliper. (or more coeff. if you wanted more rear bias). Greater emphasis could be had by putting lower coeff. pads in the rear as well, which would get you a little LBS, but better than none at all and much cheaper than a delink kit. (at the cost of accelerated wear of the right rotor compared to the left - but you could swap these periodically) The master cylinder does not lie directly in line with the caliper line of action, so you would expect it to wear slightly off axis, especially if the bushes start to wear. My point is that there is no technical or operational reason that dictates identical pad materials in left and right front calipers, particularly if you replace the whole front set at a time, and you can use knowledge of their behaviour to tune the linked brakes if you wish. I agree that keeping a worn out set with a 'little to go' is false economy though. shovel, it is not a twisting force about the steering axis - it is a bending load in the fork, and if the fork couldn't handle the load, you would have them bending under the load required to pull the bike up, whether or not you had two calipers or one, or even no brakes at all and just a drag bar pushing on the axle.

just for the dummy in me, why is that joe? pads grip a rotor - the floating nature of these 3pot calipers means you get an even pressure on each pad of the pair. If you replace each caliper as a set, it shouldn't matter what the other caliper is running - front wheel has two rotors; if one set of pads has less friction coeff., then you are just running most braking on one rotor with the rest being taken up by the other rotor - all torque reactions can be taken by each respective carrier and there are plenty of bikes around with a single front rotor, and all rears have one only anyway - what's the problem with having independant sets in each front caliper?

Isn't france restricted to 100hp, similar for bikes imported to germany (but not domestic market?) - or maybe that was just the cats? Either way, why not look up the country vehicle regulations where you are and see what you can find - cyprus = greece? Can't imagine they'd have anything special!