Motorcycle Maintenance (and good rides)

This is a long weekend for us here as Monday is a national holiday- ????Umi-no-Hi?, which can be directly translated as 'Ocean Day', but is basically 'Let's go to the Beach' long weekend.

Typically by this time, Brian and I would have spent several weekends at the beach, but this year's rainy season has been aggressive and persistent. Add to that the fact that we recently received our new motorcycles, and the formula adds up to weekends spent riding our motorbikes wherever we decide to go.

Yesterday we racked up 72 kilometres, going through Gotemba, up to Hakone, around and through Hakone, and down through Mishima. Lots of fun, and good practise with: steep, switchback curves; wet, slick country roads; thick (THICK - as in nearly zero visability) fog; sharp, steep turns; heavy traffic (at times); and insane drivers. Good practise all around.

Today we'd decided to ride not too far, but still far enough, to Shira-ito-no-taki - a famous waterfall in Fujinomiya. We got started at about 9 a.m., and we were dressed and excited for the ride.

Still in the parking lot, but raring to go, I then tried to fire up my engine, but it didn't catch. Brian shouted to me to release the choke.

I did not release the choke, because, the minute I tried to start the engine and give it a little throttle, I felt the throttle 'let go'. I don't know how else to explain it, just that, suddenly, there was no throttle to give. First it felt fine, then there was nothing. So I shouted back to Brian, over the roar of his VRX, "I'm not even gonna release the choke because something is VERY wrong here."

It turned out that my throttle cable had broken. Brian could tell this from the feel, and we went back home and did a quick bit of research. We learned that we should remove the switch housing to see the cable 'root' beneath. We did this (the function and view of the cables is actually very similar to a mountain bike); we had both been expecting the problem to be at the source - where the little 'ball' holds the cable to the throttle. That seems the most breakable part, so we were surprised when it was intact. Then Brian pulled on the cable, and it came up...completely severed in the middle!

The problem was rust and corrosion. The bike that I bought is very old, and had likely been left in the rain a lot, and so the cable had rusted and rotted through in the middle, probably from sitting in a puddle of water in the cable housing.

Anyway, we called a couple of shops, and a Kawasaki dealer in Numazu had the cable we needed (but they didn't have the other,'close', cable, which we had also wanted to replace as a 'just in case' measure. I will buy this online, and we'll replace it at a later date).

After driving about an hour through traffic each way, we got back home and Brian broke out his tool box to replace the cable (I was there and did 'help'!). It didn't take too long, and soon the bike was working better than before!

So most of today was spent finding and fixing my broken cable. At about 3 p.m., though, we finally got out for a shortish ride, up along the ridge of Mt. Fuji.