"Last Ride of the Season"

The day started out clear and cold at 28°F but by the time we left from College Coffeehouse at 1 pm, it had warmed up to the mid-40s. This ride was dubbed as the "last ride of the season" though many plan on riding next Sundays last ride as well. Six bikes left one was two up and one person turned around at about 43 mile Chena Hot Springs Road do to another commitment. This picture shows the wonderful yellow color of the leaves looking down the gravel runway that separates the resort buildings from the RV campground. The place was pretty full with a lot of foreign tourists walking around.

We stopped at the Granite Tors trailhead on the way out since is is a good place to regroup and more wonderful views. I thought it was interesting that 3 of the bikes were early 80s R100RTs just like mine though the others were in mint condition. The white one is immaculate with really well done mods such as powder coated wheels. Right in front of my bike is one of the new water cooled R1200GS models. Very little traffic on the road so it was a wonderful ride out an back. We had lunch at the resort but no food pics. Sorry.

I found that I was able to easily cruise in fifth gear most of the way out so I don't think long trips is out of the question for my rig. Steering still takes quite a bit of muscle since I have not done any steering modifications to reduce trail and I think this qualifies as strength training. When comparing my bike to the other airhead RTs, we noticed that my front suspension is sagging quite a bit. Sag is measured by jacking up the front end of the bike and measuring the length of the telescoping forks. I measured from the bottom of the triple tree clamp to the bottom of the fork lowers. Then the bike is lowered and with me sitting on the seat, the measurement is repeated. The sag was 3½ inches. It is supposed to be 1" to 2" with the airhead gurus preferring 2".

On the way back, I stopped at the Bob's (second from the right in the photo) home since he had extra spacer material (¾" schedule 40 ABS pipe) and offered to show me how it's done. He had done the procedure on his airhead RT earlier. We used 1½" lengths of tubing on top of the spring. It was quite the task to push the new spacer into the fork tube compressing the fork spring and trying to get the threads started on the fork caps to hold everything together. But we got it done and now the front end of the bike is about 1½" higher than before. More suspension travel on compression would be good as I remember it bottoming out on my trip last year. I did learn that the fork springs are aftermarket made by Progressive and the upper fork cross brace is aftermarket machined aluminum. And the springs are the correct length according to the specs. What was missing were factory spacers to compensate for the weight of the fairing on the RT and RS models. The previous owner probably couldn't get the spacer put in when he installed the aftermarket springs as it took three of us to get them in. Now I probably need to realign the sidecar since it is no longer level front to back.

The only other issue that showed up was an odd engine speed related vibration. It felt like unbalanced carbs or an ignition problem. One of those things to work on when it's too cold to ride. Several of the others mentioned that the rig seems pretty visible with the addition of the fog lights. The light pattern looks odd which may help them to take a second look (assuming they see me at all).

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