Freebird

Yes, exactly like that. That was in April of 1999 the day that I took delivery of the RSV.

Retirement? Well let's see. Based upon how my 401k has done over the past 3 or 4 years and looking at my outstanding debt, I'm thinking that I will be able to retire at around age 145 I was shooting for 120 but don't see that happening now.

Being on the road so much probably actually makes it easier to do what I have to do here. If I was home every night, Eileen would start getting upset at me for being on the computer all the time. Being on the road, I really don't have anything else to do at night. I'm too old and ugly to go out and pick up women and besides, Eileen doesn't let me date.

Here it is, March 2, 2012. We just completed 2 months of the year and this morning I got an email from Choice Hotels congratulating me on achieving Diamond Elite Status for this year. I've been a Diamond Elite member for a lot of years but you have to re-qualify every year. That is the top level of their membership program and I think you achieve it at 40 nights. I am not bragging about it....I'm really just TIRED of being gone so much. It doesn't even include my last 8 or 10 nights on the road and yes, I'm writing this from another hotel room. I know that I am fortunate to have a job at a time when so many are out of work and I am indeed thankful for that.

I did a Google search on it and it appears that it is just a concept bike and not actually even designed by Ferrari. Either way, it sure doesn't look very comfortable.

LOL...I wonder what happened to Spud. I actually didn't mind him but he was always getting mad about something. He finally go mad and left. Then he rejoined and sent me a message that he was sorry and hoped he was still welcome. I told him that of course he was still welcome. Then he posted once or twice and was gone again. He was last here in February 2010 and I never heard from him again. He just never seemed happy about much of anything though.

So just to be clear, what are you running? Water Wetter or Engine Ice?

I've never quite understood this desire to make the engine run cooler. Now what I'm going to say can be taken as a question as much as a statement of fact because I'm just sort of thinking out loud and need to do some more research on this subject. My thought though are that these engines are designed to run within a certain temperature range. They have thermostats that are designed to get them up to a certain operating temperature before opening and regulating the temperature. If the manufacturers wanted them to run cooler, there are a number of ways that it could be accomplished. I read an article somewhere long ago that discussed this and I wish I still had it. Basically what it said was that modern combustion engines are designed to run at fairly high temperatures and run most efficient at those temperatures. The running temperatures can affect fuel efficiency, emissions, etc. If all this is true, WHY do we want to add something to make them run cooler and possibly less efficient?

You are correct. Years ago when I worked for a power plant, a lot of our high voltage motors use 120V DC control. We had emergency battery backup for those control circuits. 60 LARGE 2 volt batteries wired in series to provide 120V DC backup power.

I was going to post something along these same lines. I wasn't sure but had read somewhere a long time ago that they HAVE to offer the "no purchase necessary" clause to conform to government regulations. Same thing in the USA. They obviously don't REALLY want to be giving things away but they HAVE to make such offers to comply. I agree it is stupid but that's the way it is.

Some of you are getting your burgers spit on.

I would think that you will be able to find a good used one pretty easily. If not though, you might be able to fill it with JB Weld and then drill and tap it.

He was quite a character. He also had a very interesting history. He was on disability and the story he told me was that he had sustained a back injury when he was working as a body guard for the owner of the Dallas Cowboys, Jerry Jones. The story was that they came out of club in Austin or Houston and got jumped. He got hit from behind or something like that. He was always pushing the limits here. He may hold the record for having the most posts deleted. The last time I communicated with him was when I sent him an email one night asking him to PLEASE show a bit of restraint. His response was that I was just scared of him because he was getting too popular and I was afraid that he was going to take over the club. You can say what you want about him but you CAN'T say that he didn't have a very high opinion of himself.

I really don't know when they came out. I'm talking about the style of the '93 being discussed here though. I felt like my knees were in my chest. I just did a little research and it looks like 1986 may have been the first year of the new style.

I have always thought that the Viragos are beautiful bikes. I've owned older 750 and 920 models years ago. I bought a 535 for my wife a few years ago but she didn't care the way it handled. When the new style like that '93 came out, I really thought I wanted one of them but after sitting on one, I realized that it would never work for me. It was the 1100 that I tried and I found that they are really small for an 1100. No way would it work for a tall rider.

You are probably making the right decision. You can always replace the bike at some point in the future. Sounds like your priorities are in order.

Of course it's safe....anyway....all my pets have to eat SOMETHING.

OK, there are several ways of doing it. They all work and there are advantages and disadvantages to all. That being said, this is the reason that I prefer the pictures be uploaded here instead of linked from a remote site. There have been a number of times over the years when people have posted some very good technical articles. Great write-ups and complete with pictures. Then a few months or years down the road, the original author of the articles either moved on to another bike and left here or simply came to the point where they needed more space or whatever in their photobucket or wherever they had uploaded the pictures. Either forgetting or no longer caring that they had linked them to a post here, they deleted the pictures at the remote site. What we are left with then is something that used to be a very helpful tech article and is now just some words that don't make a lot of sense when they are referencing pictures that are now just red x's. I have have spent a good bit of time over the years going through and either deleting or rebuilding articles that were rendered completely useless due to the fact that the remotely hosted pictures were no longer available. Therefore, at least for technical posts that many here might find useful for years to come, I prefer that the pictures but uploaded to VentureRider.org and not linked to remote sites.

Yes, you don't have to host them anywhere. Just click on "manage attachments" as stated above and you upload them directly from your computer to here. Just make sure that they aren't too large. They should be resized to no larger than 640 x 480 and a maximum of 200,000 bytes.

Yes it is. The splitter just allows you to keep the aux plug beside the tape deck active and plug your GPS into the other one. If you don't care about keeping the one by the tape active, you can just unplug it and plug your Garmin directly into it.

Sometimes you will run across a great deal on Craigslist. I've bought a number of things off it. The red flag though is not usually just the price but the terms. If they say that they are in the service , out of the country, etc. and want to use some escrow service it is almost ALWAYS a scam. As has been said, Ebay does NOT have an escrow service. Don't be sucked in by this mess. If you can't look at it and make the exchange face to face then it is more than likely a scam.

Yes, I've worked on it and trying to make it more consistent. I can't get the unanswered threads and etc. to work on the home page though.

Actually, you can use it from anywhere in the forum. There had been some confusion in the past where people were trying to find it on the actual home page of the site. Though there are two menu bars there also, the Google search does not exist on the home page. As for why you got the different number, I really don't know but I'm thinking that by the time you get through 50,000.....you really won't care.

Sent to me by an old friend from the MTA. I think that man of us knew this though. "Riding a motorcycle every day might actually keep your brain functioning at peak condition, or so says a study conducted by the University of Tokyo. The study demonstrated that riders between the age of 40 and 50 were shown to improve their levels of cognitive functioning, compared to a control group, after riding their motorcycles daily to their workplace for a mere two months. Scientists believe that the extra concentration needed to successfully operate a motorcycle can contribute to higher general levels of brain function, and it’s that increase in activity that’s surely a contributing factor to the appeal of the motorcycles as transportation. It’s the way a ride on a bike turns the simplest journey into a challenge to the senses that sets the motorcyclist apart from the everyday commuter. While the typical car-owning motorist is just transporting him or her self from point A to point B, the motorcyclist is actually transported into an entirely different state of consciousness . Riding a motorcycle is all about entrance into an exclusive club where the journey actually is the destination. Dr Ryuta Kawashima, author of Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training: How Old Is Your Brain, reported the outcome of his study of “The relationship between motorcycle riding and the human mind.” Kawashima’s experiments involved current riders who currently rode motorcycles on a regular basis (the average age of the riders was 45) and ex-riders who once rode regularly but had not taken a ride for 10 years or more. Kawashima asked the participants to ride on courses in different conditions while he recorded their brain activities. The eight courses included a series of curves, poor road conditions, steep hills, hair-pin turns and a variety of other challenges. What did he find? After an analysis of the data, Kawashima found that the current riders and ex-riders used their brain in radically different ways. When the current riders rode motorcycles, specific segments of their brains (the right hemisphere of the prefrontal lobe) was activated and riders demonstrated a higher level of concentration. His next experiment was a test of how making a habit of riding a motorcycle affects the brain. Trial subjects were otherwise healthy people who had not ridden for 10 years or more. Over the course of a couple of months, those riders used a motorcycle for their daily commute and in other everyday situations while Dr Kawashima and his team studied how their brains and mental health changed. The upshot was that the use of motorcycles in everyday life improved cognitive faculties, particularly those that relate to memory and spatial reasoning capacity. An added benefit? Participants revealed on questionnaires they filled out at the end of the study that their stress levels had been reduced and their mental state changed for the better. So why motorcycles? Shouldn’t driving a car should have the same effect as riding a motorcycle? “There were many studies done on driving cars in the past,” Kawashima said. “A car is a comfortable machine which does not activate our brains. It only happens when going across a railway crossing or when a person jumps in front of us. By using motorcycles more in our life, we can have positive effects on our brains and minds”. Yamaha participated in a second joint research project on the subject of the relationship between motorcycle riding and brain stimulation with Kawashima Laboratory at the Department of Functional Brain Imaging, Institute of Development, Aging and Cancer at Tohoku University. The project began in September 2009 and ran until December 2010, and the focus of the research was on measurement and analysis of the cause and effect relationship involved in the operation of various types of vehicles and brain stimulation. The study measured changes in such stimulation over time by means of data gathered from a long-term mass survey. The reason for Yamaha Motor’s participation in this project is pretty obvious and not a little self-serving, but further research into the relationship between motorcycle riding and brain stimulation as it relates to the “Smart Aging Society” will certainly provide some interesting results. The second research project was divided into two time periods throughout 2009 and 2010 compared differences in the conditions of brain stimulation as they related to the type of vehicle and driving conditions. A second set of tests measuring the changes in brain stimulation over time involved a larger subject group. Yamaha Motors provided vehicles for the research and made its test tracks and courses available for the study. What the study revealed is that what you’re thinking about while you’re riding – and your experience on the bike - changes the physical structure of your brain. Author Sharon Begley concurs with Kawashima’s findings. In her tome, Train Your Mind – Change Your Brain, Begley found much the same outcomes. “The brain devotes more cortical real estate to functions that its owner uses more frequently and shrinks the space devoted to activities rarely performed,” Begley wrote. “That’s why the brains of violinists devote more space to the region that controls the digits of the fingering hand.” Source: http://www.motorcycleinsurance.com/this-is-your-brain-on-a-motorcycle/

Yes, and it will be moved to there after it has been here for a few days.