Working on my bike before two big rides in September

The weekend before the Distinguished Gentlemen’s Ride is the Royal Enfield Club of Australia’s 2016 AGM at Temora in country NSW and they are both “long” trips I thought I’d make it more comfortable for us on both rides.

The DGR is a long day in the saddle as the event sees us going all over sydney – well really just from Sydney Uni across the bridge and back – but it seems like a long trip due to the large number of bikes . It’s worth noting that 725 riders have registered and raised $103924 already. This is just the Sydney ride mind you – In 2015, over 37,000 participants in 410 cities in 79 countries raised over $2.3M (US) for prostate cancer research.The goal for this year is $5m USD.

I will take to the bike’s shiny bits with some metal polish before both events to make it look its best and I might also do some facial manscaping myself to try to look even more dapper.

Here’s a link to My Distinguished Gentlemen’s Ride site where I have updated my blog and added some images

Please check it out and if you can help out and sponsor me it’s all for a good cause – Raising money for men’s physical and mental health

The Temora trip is also an all day ride that is 430 km each way on our route through the Blue Mountains, Bathurst, Cowra and Young to Temora and back.

Trying not to sound like Goldilocks but my original exhaust was “a bit too big and soft” and the one I bought some time back was “a bit too small and loud” this one is just right and will ensure I arrive without industrial deafness.

I also installed a windshield which may or may not protect me from the wind but it just might stop my leather jacket from getting squashed bugs splattered all over it.

My Saddle bags were bursting at the seams from trying to shove too much into them so they had to be repaired.

two-piece rivets are usually crap and either rust out or just come apart and easy fix is two stainless steel washers and an aluminium pop-rivet

Due to a rivet tearing the leather where it was too thin on the edge (cheap and nasty) the stitching had come undone which I had to replace.

In order to do so i had to visit Lincraft and buy all this sewing paraphenalia

It looks impossible to replace the rivet so I will need to rivet in a piece of leather strap on the inside now that it’s all stitched up but finding suitable leather is a problem since that when you buy a leather belt it’s not really leather – some type of papier-mache composite material made out of leather scraps, apple cores and old chinese newspapers I suspect. – that was a waste of $7 and the belt wont even fit me.