V649HP-Kawasaki's new gravel runner

hello! today ride ...snow mobile and bike on same time ....






350 km just for the fun

ah, the great white north. looks like the surface of that gravel road is frozen.

you're supposed to be building a bike, not playing on a sled.

big expedition next week, thought i better dust off the WR after a guy said there's too many water crossings to count on the route. i was doubtful until i got out the topo maps and tried to count the streams crossing the roads...finally gave up. single track, water, and who knows what else. maybe moonshiners and dope farmers.



prepped the bike, added a 12V outlet for the GPS, and fabbed a tail rack for my rare pewter metallic WR.

Nice WR Dave! When I grow up I want to be just like you, lol!

Sheila has updated and brought her thread over into the new forum. She is going to be working on the suspension soon and could use some clever ideas.

Enjoy you trip and as always looking forward to the report!

you meaning flopping the bike in the mud, ya don't want that. i only wrecked the WR250 once on this trip, nobody died.

go to see you got your thread in the right place, anyone who wants to see a clean Ninja build at standard ride height just has to look at yours.

why i hate tubes (continued)...

on the way back in from the BRT expedition, i had a rear flat near Appomattox, must have scared the hell out of the car behind me, the little WR was suddenly all over the road.

only about 100 pirate boys went by, no one stopping, but it should be no surprise who did pull over in his pickup truck...Paul, a KLR rider. it's as clear a statement as could ever be made about the mentality of the two wheel riding community.

between the three of us, we made short work of installing a new tube, and i got to try out my homemade trail jack for the first time, only been carrying it around for 15,000 miles. hey, it works, would work on the V649 too.



i only flopped the WR once, and my riding buddy had the bike back right side up faster than i got up, no photo. bike bent, rider unbent.

great trip, those "roads" are the real deal...and an adventure, for sure.

jd - In the Yahoo Tiger group, making a spoked rim tubeless was just discussed. I copied some responses as I have no experience:

"I looked closely at what others have used, performed a lot of additional adherence tests with various sealants, and ended up using this stuff...with no problems after almost two years now. PRC Desoto, PR-1440 Class A, http://www.e-aircraftsupply.com/products/Sealant/67695/PR1422A12
is an aircraft integral fuel tank sealant. When you read the description for this sealant, it reads as if it was specifically designed to seal aluminum motorcycle rims. A bit pricey, but so is my hide. I used one 6oz kit for each wheel. Decent working time..thin enough to get down into the nipples and thick enough to not drip."

"I tried a few things and went tubeless in 1999. Initial systems were silicone and glass tape based but I settled on a single pack polyurethane pick-up bed liner sold as "Durabak" here in SAfrica. It is exported to the States and sold under a different name which I cannot recall. Front and rear are tubeless. Since using the polyurethane I have not touched it again in 12 years, tyres have been changed numerous times and my son now commutes on it. (One of the first T7 Tigers sold and certainly the first tubeless Tiger)"

"I first went for the Silicone Seal & tape method, but found at the next tire change it was all but self destructed. After a thorough wire bushing & acetone cleaning, I used Marine Goop in 3 light coats & no tape or liner. Been good now over 10 years with a slight loss of about 2psi per month. I'm too lazy to check which spoke has the slow leak, so this just means that I check my pressures twice monthly, as we should do anyway."

Hope this is helpful.

Jim

Here is Woody's procedure for sealing spoked rims: http://www.advrider.com/forums/showthread.php?p=14539902&highlight=seal#post14539902

Another one with pictures: https://cyb.smugmug.com/gallery/7250813_ZxQA5#!i=465979239&k=UFqYE

One thing though, Woody won't seal 21" wheels. They tend to fail. I think it was because of more flex in the larger rim, and the only tubeless rated knobby in 21" is the TKC and he wasn't impressed with its quality.

If going tubeless on a dirt bike, I think I would do the Tubliss system: http://tubliss.com/

thanks for the info on sealing the spoke wheels, i'm not sure what i'll do yet, if anything...besides riding the V649.

i've been thinking about whether the rat Versys could have done the same roads carrying the same loads, i think so, but it would have been tougher on any heavier bike. no surprise there.

after riding the WR250 for 1200 miles over a few days last week, yesterday i put the V649 back on the road for a run to our east coast "mountains" in West Virginia. to be fair, there's some good riding in the area, and to do the out and back trip you need the bigger bike. off and on rain, and i stopped for a photo in the same place we took photos while camping a month ago. i swear it doesn't look must different. after a mild winter, spring started, then stopped... at least for this elevation. the area had heavy snow last week. 700 miles on the day, entertaining besides the wet weather, plenty of bizarre stuff as usual.

Seems that stuff follows you around

Any big rides planned for the summer?

I say no big rides until he finishes the last report. As we last left our intrepid traveler . . .

it does, i'm 100% sure of that. i thought there for awhile saturday that i must have had a sign pinned to my riding jacket that said "if you're completely freakin' nuts, c'mon over...let's talk". that was all happening off the bike, and the weirdness over 700 miles of riding, holy crap, that's a chapter.

i think i'll head to canuckistan late this season.

what's with the "africa" in your sig, going on safari?

you guys are brutal.

here's the story on the story. i put the brakes on the report when my group of "consultants" drank up all my bourbon one evening and started chanting "ebook, ebook..."

i even have a photography consultant now, face it, i've gone completely Hollywood. he's made a commitment to teach me the "point and shoot", and enhance any of my marginal photos. i have thousands of marginal photos, he doesn't know what he's getting into.

it seems the online folks are so hungry for content that just about anything can be published. i thought, hmmm, my stuff fits right into the anything category. i finally sent a rambling email to an editor and outlined the whole plan. haven't heard back yet, but heck, it's only been two months, maybe he's kinda busy.

the first two reports were unfinished by accident, but i still have all my journals and photographs, so we'll see. those final days on the road homeward bound were full of even more adventure...and of course, the bizarre.

with the journal and photos, i can pick the storyline right off the bat...

"That pert young thing behind the counter gave up the road report like she had just been there ten minutes ago, even though those roads were forty miles away. Everyone in the place had a work uniform on, not her, she was all western garb, head to toe. Big silver belt buckle, and a some rolls of fat showing above the belt, she coulda been a barrel racer or some such at the rodeo, and that fat wasn't the soft kind, more like India rubber. If she ever fell off that horse, well, she'd naturally just bounce right on out of the place."

about an hour later, i was nearly killed out in the middle of nowhere, southeastern Alberta back roads, runnin' like hell for the Montana border in rain, sleet, and snow.

i know an inmate who has some riding experience there if you want the contact info.

From the reading I have done it looks like 08+ KLR forks will fit into the stock 650R triple clamps since both have 41mm forks. Does anyone know if the KLR wheel, caliper etc. also fit without modification? I have been unable to find information about anyone doing the swap.

tonymorr's old bike from back in 2008.

Update......current pic:


those are 41mm KLR forks in the OEM ER6 (650R, EX650) clamps. his setup is 19/17, but the 19 with tire is not much different in diameter than the 21 with tire. the KLR and ER6 clamps have different centers, so you're looking at wheel spacers and a caliper spacer to make the 21" KLR spoke wheel fit. very easy work.

haven't seen any recent builds using the KLR forks, although bodie1 reports he has a bike in the pipeline using this setup.

i like the 19" wheel on these bikes for a variety of reasons, but that's just one opinion, others vary.

Thanks! I thought it had been done before. The KLR and ER6 clamps having different centers was the key information that I could not find. Sounds as close to a truly bolt on front end as I have found so far.

there are some subtleties involved before you could state one is easier than another. cost, wheel selection, axle size, caliper options, available rotor diameters, fork performance in OEM configuation...and so on.

the good news is that there are examples of many fork/wheel/brake combinations to look at, and all of the work is fairly easy.

if you build a bike, come back with a photo, i'd like to see what you decided to do.