Tomorrow I'll be easing on down the road

Sunset at Ben Avery's rifle range

I spent the morning getting ready to leave tomorrow. I've got the packing up thing so its fairly quick and easy and in fact the most time-consuming thing is loading up the motorcycle. Putting it on the rack is now as easy as pie, tying it down is easy but takes a little bit of time, putting a chain on it and locking it to the rack is fairly simple, but the most time-consuming thing is putting the cover over it and tying it down so it doesn't blow off, and fixing it so it doesn't cover up the trailer tag or the taillights.

I got to ride the little Beta around the campground a few times so I'm getting more used to it now but it's still an alien feeling motorcycle and I think there's two reasons for that. One is the lightness of the motorcycle I don't think I've ever owned a motorcycle that weighed less than this Beta does. It feels more like riding a bicycle than a motorcycle.

 There's a term dirt bikers use called flickable, which means you can quickly throw the motorcycle from side to side and it still feels stable, and because its lightweight the little beta is certainly flickable.  The other thing is the angle of the front forks which is called the rake. If you look at a bicycle the front forks are almost straight up and down with just a little bit of forward rake. On a motorcycle the forks are at  more of an angle, and the more rake or angle they have the more stable they are at high speed and the more input it takes at the handlebars to make it turn. The little beta doesn't have much of a rake because it's designed to turn quickly and easily so it responds to the gentlest touch on the handlebars and I'm not used to a bike doing that, but that's part of its trials bike heritage.

When I get around to it I'm also going to change the gearing on the Beta.  The seat and extra gas tank combination that I just put on came with a different sprocket set for the motorcycle which raises the gear ratio a bit. Trials bikes are geared very low so they have a lot of low-end torque because they're not required to go fast they just have to have lots of power, which is great for a trials competition but not so great riding down a dirt trail, putting the new sprockets on will fix that.

I put a little two-minute video at the bottom of the page to show everyone what these little trials bikes can do in the hands of an expert. To me it's amazing and even unbelievable what these little motorcycles without seats are capable of doing.

      theboondork

Hot air balloon sunset