Sibirsky Extreme 2012 - The Toughest Ride of Them All

Luggage racks were from Rally Raid, and were again excellent. They're formed with lots of slots and square holes in the steel plates so you can pop straps through to secure your soft luggage where's its best for that make of gear. I've seen them with Wolfman luggage, Walters Magadan bags and the Dirtbags and they seem to accomodate any gear equally well.
For luggage I used Dirtbagz as I've had them for years on DRZ400 and the old 625 and they hold enough for everything if you pack well, but haven't got enough space that you pack a load of extra crap. If you have extra space you'll find something to put in there as sure as there's shite in a donkey.

Trust me, you'll be sick of the sight of it in a few weeks.

At the point in the trip Walter and Terry have just reached the bike was on its way by van from Amsterdam (I hopped over with the bike on the ferry from the UK the week before) to Poland, where it would be picked up and trucked to Astana in time to meet us when we flew in. Allegedly.

As a fellow 690 owner, I'm really interested to see how this plays out.


(or should I say I'm really hoping it doesn't become the weak link in a great ride)......

Meanwhile .... while 3 other bikes (including Rod Currie's KTM mentioned above) were winging their way to Astana, Kazakhstan with Sambor's bike transporter ....

Terry and I were due a rest break ... and I needed to fix my cracked front subframe. The ride to YuzhnoUralsk had opened up the crack a bit and we stripped back the front of the bike (big job since I had run all my electrics and instrument wires up through the centre of the subframe. Headlights, ballasts everything was in the front subframe. All the wires had to be labelled.

I took a bunch of pics and got on the chat to Erik at Hot Rod, The fairing subframe was a prototype by Erik .... subject to final testing on this years ride. The conditions recently especially thru the Urals, were really rough. We decided I should patch this one up and he will redesign with more strength. I asked Erik if there were any other prototypes out there. He mentioned a couple of Norwegians had some too. I guessed they should be OK unless they do stuff this stressful with them.



Terry used the days off to look at ways to improve his bike. One problem that had been dogging him was the fan being on much more than might be ideal. Closer inspection revealed the radiator grille on the X-Country covered up half the radiator. Terry took to it with a drill:



I liked his work ... gave him mine to do ...

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OOH, whats that curly thing under the ktm.?

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OOH, whats that curly thing under the ktm.?[/QUOTE]

Its the tail of your bike ;-)

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Its the tail of your bike ;-)[/QUOTE]

All will be revealed ..........

Are we guessing here?? I'm gonna go with tow rope, bummer.

Last day in Russia for a while. We were heading across the border into Kazakhstan - It was a short day ... about 200 km. As was typical of border crossing days, it was a predominantly asphalt day. This was one limitation of Russian border crossings. As far as I was aware, all of the "international" border crossings had asphalted roads leading to them. And if it was an international crossing, it meant the read leading to it was a Federal Road. The entire Russian border is surrounded by an internal buffer zone, called a border zone, into which you can only go with special permits. For foreigners like us, those permits must be applied for 2 months in advance, and had to be picked up in person from the relevant regional office. It made travelling off road close to the border pretty much impossible, unless you wanted to risk appearing to contravene Russian national security ... which is a risk beyond that we were prepared to take. So when crossing a Russian border, we had to approach it on a Federal asphalt road.

I had been annoyed by my brake pedal ... it wasnt adjusted right for the standing position. I adjusted it as part of our morning checks and we headed off towards the border. After a mere 15 km (9 miles), Terry rode up beside me flapping his arms about and directing me to the side of the road while yelling FIRE FIRE.

I pulled over and as I began dismounting Terry was already throwing sand over my flaming back brake caliper. We grabbed a water bottle and extinguished the flames ... The alloy back caliper was half melted. It was deformed. It was absolutely not repairable. Something must have gone terribly wrong with my back brake adjustment. I now had no back brake. A close inspection of the rear steel brake disc showed that while it was totally heat discoloured (and still is to this day), it was neither badly scored nor warped at all.

Thinking quickly, I sent a message to Prutser, one of the 3 riders who would join us in Astana in less than a week. I asked him to get me a back caliper and bring it in his luggage. Within hours I had a message back that he had found one at a Dutch bike dismantlers for 70 EUR ... bargain price. Awesome, it could be fixed in Astana if it could get to him in time. The dismantlers didnt want to send it until they received payment, and Prutser was flying out in just a couple of days. It would be touch and go.

Terry and I were still 3 and a half days ride from Astana ... it would be a learning experience to try to ride off road without touching my back pedal.

The Russian - Kazakh border came and went in a one hour visit, and we were back on the steppe ... this time, the Kazakh steppe.

We finished up in the first town we came to in Kazakhstan, Karabulak. We tried to get some Kazakh sim cards for the phones, and a late lunch. But we found a decent cheap hotel and decided to call it a day.

We struck out when it came to the SIM cards. Kazakhs dont sell micro ones ... which Terry and I both needed for our phones. But we had a nice dinner. Our hotel had a cafe attached to it but across there road was the towns main restaurant. A bit over the top it was for a rural Kazakh town. The beer was cold. We needed a lot of it as the Restaurants in house DJ / self Karaoke man was truly appalling.

So did that somehow cause the fire? :eek1

I think you can cut your own micro sim card with a knife. In some countries they've done this quickly for me with a hole-punch-style tool

How to make your own MicroSIM in 3 Minutes

That's what I was thinking but I don't want to diss the 690 if it hasn't done anything wrong (yet) I ride one too, so I'm willing it on. Maybe the 690 pulled the beemers

Backwards?

you are totally right.
Pretty much every store selling phones around here (Almaty!) has the special tool to punch the sim card, they do it for free too... Might not be the case in more remote areas of Kazakhstan thoug...

Didn't you know? 690's come with those new fangled reverse rear sprockets now, but it must be used in conjunction with an expensive orange chain or it won't work.

KTM are so confident of their bikes they even have this related product: KTM part no. 3B87190

If you only adjusted the pedal stop downward and didn't re-adjust the master-cylinder actuator rod (probably longer), then you created a full-time braking situation (which would lead to the result you have). As much custom work as you have done, I would be surprised if you missed this though...

The moment I read about your problem I also thought of this. There must always be a bit of free play on the actuator rod, if not the mastercylinder piston cannot move fully back to the rest position where it opens a small hole in the mastercylinder bore to allow the returning brake fluid back into the reservior. So every time you used the brake it built up more pressure in the system.

is that subframe aluminum,it is shunned in aviation engineering to drill a lightening hole in al sheet on a production basis as the chance of vibration cracks are highly probable without the necessary radius, polishing and crack inspection applied.
100 years back the saying was that the sea was relentess, the sky even more so( no place to park) and now the adventure ride without pity(my addition).

First stop in todays agenda was the mining town of Rudny. We pulled in to get some fuel and look around again for SIM cards.

The guy in the fuel station welcomed us into the little shop attached to the station and asked if we need any motor oils? I told him no, its OK ... our bikes are very specialised and we need special synthetic oils specifically for bikes.
He replied ... yes I know, look ... and showed me a load of LiquiMoly (good German brand) specific motorcycle oils in a variety of weights including the rare and elusive 10W-60 ... their top of the line oil. I was amazed ... even here in Rudny, you can get proper top quality synthetic bike oil at a sensible price.

I had done my oil recently in Volgograd and Terry had some coming into Astana with our new arrivals, so we passed, but it brought a smile to my face to know that good bike oil can (sometimes) be found out here.

As for SIMs, I cut my losses and got a standard SIM to put into an old phone. It meant my internet access would be poor in KZ (my old phone that took the big SIM was a slow one and mobile coverage here was a long way behind Russia ... so far I was getting mainly 2G). In Ukraine and Russia, we had 3G coverage almost everywhere ... even out in the middle of nowhere. We were taking pics in the middle of the steppe with nothing around and uploading to facebook in 2-3 seconds. It wasnt going to be like that for us in Kazakhstan.

We crossed the river at Rudny, looked back at the town ... before heading into the empty steppe:

There's not a huge difference in the steppe here and the steppe between Volgograd and Orenburg ...







After a morning on the double track, we came to a village located on a highway ... this would be our lunch stop.



A cafe frequented by truckers on the side of the highway was always likely to be a good bet: