Out and about. Motorcyling. Stuff.
Motorcycling, just getting out there.
Since I talk a lot about touge and twisties on here and in some of the articles I’ve had on other sites, I thought I should give a mention to a friend of mine who is the Touge master, and runs the blog ‘Touge Express‘.
Craig has done a lot of riding all over the world, and has sniffed out some of the best routes I’ve ever been on so check out his site which has a lot of tips and route reports, so there’s plenty to go at.
(He also does excellent water proofing videos.)
It’s difficult to believe it’s been a year since I got my 2016 Yamaha MT-09 Tracer, but it really has been. What a great year too!
Getting down to business, so far I’ve put over 6,400Km (~4,000 miles) on the Tracer, which for me is pretty respectable in 12 months, so here’s a very quick mini-review of the experience so far.
“It’s a great motorcycle.”
There we are, nice and to the point. Done.
OK, maybe I should add something to that.
To ride, it’s fantastic, there’s plenty of torque and power coming out of that CP3 triple engine, and it never gets old winding it up on the twisties.
Of the three throttle modes, I’ve mostly just been leaving it in standard for most of my riding, though I do slip it into the B mode for heavy rain in the mountains, where it’s effective for that – there’s a much smoother roll on experience.
The A mode is fun, and yes, on the highways it’s useful, but honestly it’s a bit too enthusiastic for the way I ride day to day – I don’t ride aggressively, at most I’m around ‘decisive’, sometimes I drift into ‘plodding’.
I spent a bit of time setting the suspension up, and generally I’ve been pleased with it, and adjustments are simple, though at one extreme on the rear the C wrench provided meant I had to move the chain guard to adjust the pre-load. Only had to do it that once though.
The stock tyres, Dunlop OEM D222 Sportmax, are OK. Coming from Pilot Road 2s, they don’t feel as good, but they’re certainly not bad. I am planning to swapping them out for Road 5s though.
I haven’t modded it much beyond adding some frame sliders so I can’t speak to the customising aspect, but the whole MT-09 range seems to get plenty of attention on the mod scene.
It’s all about the riding though, and the riding has been great, from the mountains to hours on the expressway, to trips around town, and nothing to fault really, the windscreen and front fairings provides a bit of wind deflection, which is good when I ride the coast roads, and the seat-height is pretty much the highest I’d feel comfortable on.
Have you dropped it?
Of course I have! Nothing exciting – did a U turn on an incline, foot was on some loose stones and slipped, leading to one of those slow, inevitable lowerings which deserves a round of applause. Nothing damaged though, save a minor bend in the brake pedal.
It has to be the Coast 2 Coast Twistybutt. Over 500Km of touge twisties from the the Pacific to Japan Sea coasts in a day, and the Tracer did it with comfort and ease – this thing loves twisties, and if there’s one thing Japan has piles of, it’s twisties!
After sorting the suspension for my slightly over-fed self, a minor tweak for my significant other, and it’s a fine two-up bike, where reports say the pillion seat is comfortable with a decent view, but not out in the wind. I tried throttle on B, but standard is still fine for two.
One odd thing for me might be the mirrors. They’re OK after you’ve messed around with them, if a bit narrow for me personally, but I found the stem nuts would vibrate loose now and then, once leading to the left side one spinning around whilst riding, forcing me to pull over and look for the correct spanner in the micro toolkit Yamaha provides – of course there wasn’t one which fit in there, so I bought one (17mm?) from a local DIY shop which has now saved me on a couple of days out. Also, the fuse on the aux outputs are for 2A, so beyond a phone, USB etc., you may want to be careful. Don’t ask me how I know.
Let’s face it, if they’re the only downsides, that’s not too bad at all.
Last month a large group of us got together for our annual toy run in Kanagawa. I did a brief write -up on RideApart.com if you want to have a quick look.
I’ve done a few ride reports for the toy run on here previously: 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, and indeed 2017 made it our 9th continuous event!
Thanks as ever to the kids at the childrens homes for having us, and all those who rode in, or donated gifts.
I’ve been looking around for some frame sliders for the Tracer, and indeed found quite a few which seemed to fit the bill with it being based on the fairly popular MT-09 and all.
As you could expect, the two two main types for my model were the ‘single bolt and puck’ type, and those which used two bolts per side with the slider puck somewhere in the middle on a bar or mount. Despite being a little more expensive, I decided to go for the latter two-bolts-per-side type as I think they’d disperse any inpact force a little better, and frankly I quite like the look of them. I also thought it’d be something different to install, as I’d only had the single bolt type on previous bikes.
Truthfully, I’ve been lucky over the years not to drop or slide my bikes too often, but the Tracer is quite tall for me, and I’ve felt it almost go when doing some slow, tight U-turns down mountain roads which had suddenly stopped being roads, so once more I thought I’d get some sliders on, just in case.
After a bit of thinking, reading, more thinking, and several cups of tea, I’d narrowed it down to either a set from German manufacturer SW Motech, or some from a Japanese company called Baby Face. The Motech ones look nice, they’re well made and angular like the Tracer. The Baby Face ones look more traditional, with the more tubular style puck but the two piece bar is a very nice piece of engineering. Partly because they looked chunky, and partly because a friend is a distributor who tends to only represent decent kit, I thought I’d give the Japanese manufacturer BabyFace a go. Price wise here in Japan they’re quite similar.
The sliders arrived in a well packed box with the contents shown above – all in a kind of vacuum bubble wrap, and with some very basic instructions. Very. Basic. Those instructions had an odd blowup diagram of the assembly, some generic warnings (‘don’t fit these when the engine is hot’), some general torque guidance for their bolts, and a request to consult your bike’s service manual for specific mounting bolt torques. There’ s also a parts and spec list, but none of the parts themselves have numbers on them, so be sure to measure and know which part is which.
I dry assembled them, and beautifully labelled them with premium masking tape, in an attractive shade of pink. You can see the two parts which form the bar are quite chunky, but they’re light, and even when only lightly tightened, they feel incredibly rigid.
Next up was fitting them to the bike.
Per instructions and experience, I’d need some threadlock, for which I defaulted to Loctite Blue 243 which hasn’t failed me yet. The rest are the usual hex bits and the required torque wrenches.
The BabyFace bar bolts just require 5 & 25Nm torquing, with the engine bolts requiring 45Nm.
The instructions recommend an engine jack, but since I don’t have access to a specific motorcycle one, I simply put the bike on its centre stand, then a car jack under the engine until I could feel it taking some weight, and the bike didn’t move.
From that I just went one bolt at a time, doing first the left, then the right slider. It was actually simpler than expected. Only one of the original Yamaha bolts had any threadlock on it, but for scale I put a small drop on each of the four engine bolts. Each bolt I removed I labelled and put in a ziploc. Force of habit.
Basically, remove a bolt, clean the theads and washer (as it would be re-used), thread the new BabyFace bolt through the slider assembly and washer and into the hole, hand tighten, then do the second bolt for that side and then torque them both down. No problems.
As you can see, they suit the style and colour of the Tracer, so I’m really pleased with them, and despite the sparse instructions, fitting was a breeze likely thanks to the quality engineering.
As expected, they feel incredibly solid on the bike, fit in to the design and in a good way, disappear.
Pros:
Cons:
At the tail-end of Golden Week this year (May 5th to be exact) I took part in Touge Express’ 2017 Coast to Coast Twistybutt, an invitational run across Japan from the Pacific Ocean to Japan Sea purely via the mountain pass roads or ‘touge’ as they’re known. 500Km of turns with the occasional short local road connecting them.
If you were on a straight road, you were probably on the wrong road.
So where is the tale of this crossing? I did write one, but it’s not here, it’s on a real motorcycle website, so thanks to Chris and everyone at RideApart for bringing tales from the touge to the broader world – they’ll be all the better for it!
The Twistybutt – Japan’s Iron Butt Challenge
I have a bit of a commute for my job, so I’ve tried to find different ways to make use of the time in a more constructive manner, and one of those ways is to listen to podcasts. As I have quite a few on my list right now, I thought I’d break this up into two posts – ‘Motorcycles’ and ‘The Rest’. As an aside, I’m currently running a cheaper Android phone (a Lenovo Moto G5+) and the DoggCatcher podcatching app. (I did a round-up of my podcasts in 2009 and 2011; a few I still listen to, some have gone away.) Anyway, on with the list:
Adventure Rider Radio RAW – Out of Canada, this is a monthly panel show, usually running 90-120 mins. of experienced overlanders discussing situations, kit, their books etc.. I’ve not done anywhere near the travelling they have, but it’s often interesting for tips and funny anecdotes, as well as differing perspectives on how to travel for long periods. The same production team also make the weekly Adventure Rider Radio, but this can be hit and miss as there can be a lot of native advertising in some episodes – probably worth a try though.
Front End Chatter – Two motorcycle journalists from the UK discuss street bikes as well as some racing content and usually runs for 60-90mins every two weeks. There’s a lot of light banter and some very decent Q&A in most episodes.
Two Enthusiasts – Two American chaps, based out of the Pacific north west of the US discuss bikes, with a slant to technology and the motorcycle industry itself. This is an extension of the usually decent news website Asphalt and Rubber, and each episode goes for between 60-90 minutes.
Moterrific – Two American ladies this time make this podcast on a semi-regular monthly schedule, with each episode running around 60-80mins. They discuss areas to ride, gear, and dip in to some of the challenges women face in the hobby from perception, to decent gear, to bike height.
Tabibike Ladies Bike – A Japanese podcast which doubles up as both motorbike podcast and Japanese study for me, where the two hosts discuss bikes as well as bike culture, all the way into food and happenings during rides. This podcast is a little shorter at around 40 minutes per episode.
So those are the ones I’m currently listening to, but feel free to recommend others.
We were up in Shiga Kogen (Nagano Prefecture) again a few weeks ago for yet more snow fun, and decided to go and see the famous snow monkeys in the hot spa pools of Jigokudani Park, since we were in the area and hadn’t been before. There are a million or so amazing photos of these monkeys around the internet so I won’t post any of my own of them, but instead, a couple of the valley running through part of the park to give you an idea of what it looks like when you take a step back.
The park is actually a ~1.6Km walk from the car park area to the monkeys, and requires a fee of ~800yen per person to get in to see them, so be aware. The walk up is through a beautiful valley side though, a long, winding, if somewhat icy track, which is quite relaxing. At the base of the stairs which mark the final few hundred metres, there’s a group of old traditional houses and a steam geyser – and the occasional naked man in an outdoor bath (routenburo) if that’s your thing!
You can see above where most of those amazing photos actually happen. It’s not always this crowded though, if you take a look at the webcams when they’re live, it’s often fairly empty. It is of course well staged – the monkeys are fed by the park staff to encourage them to come down, though guests are understandably discouraged from feeding the monkeys. As someone who has had a close face-to-face encounter with an adult male snow monkey in a carpark on a previous snow trip, I can vouch for not getting too close.
Also of interest to me was a group of old, and somewhat battered looking motorcycles down by the track, some Honda (Super) Cubs and an old CD90, all muddied up and with chains on for the snow, ice and mud. They look like they’ d seen some fun for sure. They seem to be used for running basic deliveries, and I dare say they’re probably road legal, but sadly there were no owners around I could ask. Definitely the types of vehicles you want for this terrain.
A modern motorcycle has a number of safety systems built into it to help the rider stay safe, but we all know you’re also at the mercy of the other person and the universe in general. Insurance helps for sure after the event, but what if you need that little extra protection avoiding an accident?
Here in Japan we can also call upon the gods, and get ourselves an O-mamori [守り]. These are small amulets, commonly looking like small bags, which are purchased from shrines, and intended to bring good fortune or ward off evil and bad luck. The bag usually contains something which has been blessed, for want of a better term – I don’t know what’s in mine since part of the deal is that you don’t open it.
I had an omamori bought for me from a local Shinto shrine, and I now have it safely tied on under my motorcycle seat, to help ward off crazy minivan drivers, Prius drivers, and all the others who seem to forget there are vehicles with less than four wheels. This one then is of the traffic safety or koutsuu anzen variety, and let’s hope it serves its purpose!
There’s a little known requirement that you have to go on a full day out on your motorbike within a week of getting it.
Actually, that’s not true. But it should be true.
To do my part then, I decided to take a day off and ride down the Pacific coastal roads to the southern end of the Izu peninsula, to Shimoda.
I love coastal roads; just riding along, with the vast ocean on one side – hopefully with a sturdy looking metal barrier between you and the cliff down to that ocean – and a rising mountain on the other.
If this sounds good to you, then welcome, and come on down to Routes 134 & 135 on Japan’s Pacific coast.
The day started at around 7am, I’d gotten all my layers on, and warmed the bike up a little too, and then made sure I had a hot flask of tea in my backpack. The sky was a perfect blue, with almost no cloud, bright sunshine, and most importantly at that time – no ice or dampness on the road.
Since I was exploring the new Yamaha as well as the road, I decided to give one of the ‘other’ riding modes a shot – it has A, B and Standard. I’d only been using standard up until now, but decided to give ‘B’ a try as this is intended as the smoother, power-reduced rain mode. I thought that would give a nice gentle start to the day. Indeed it is exactly what that suggests – it’s smooth – it really is a wonderful mode to start the day on. It still pulls, there’s still the torque, but it’s like it’s massaging you into the ride.
The coastal road I take is a toll road, it’s true, but raised up, you get to look down on to the beach and the rivers flowing into the ocean as the sunrise hits the beach and you get to see the sun on the side of Fuji-san, all snow capped, before looking left again at the handful of surfers and fishing enthusiasts casting out from the beach. Part way along this straight section is the Seisho Bypass Service Area (SA). It’s often a big meeting spot for motorcycle groups, but as I approached it I didn’t see a single bike unfortunately, so I passed it by this time. When I’m riding alone, if I see some people in there, I’ll sometimes stop off for a chat and exchange route ideas and good stopping points – but not today!
There was something of a cross-wind on the road, but unlike the old Honda, this was much less tiring (and chilling) thanks to just the small amount of fairing and screen on the Tracer, and the bike held its speed more consistently.
Once you get a little past Hayakawa at the west end of the road, the twisties start kicking in, rising and falling around the cliff edges, switching from cliff cutout roads, to short bridge sections seamlessly. It’s fun. Again, there’s a choice of free roads with a little more traffic, or toll roads, with a little more flow. Be aware some of these toll roads are not ETC/NEXCO ones, you need to stop and pay, a bit like the Izu Skyline.
The road takes you down past coastal towns like Manazuru, Atami and Ito, but as I rode along I saw a couple of small signs for some place called ‘Hosono Highlands’, which sounded interesting, so I turned up an already narrow road, up into the hills, where the road gave way to a narrow, barely paved forest track, past some camping and cabin areas, before popping out into a clearing with what looked like some brand new parking spaces – the Hosono Highlands!
I parked up, and was having a nice cup of two when a couple of cars pulled up coming the other way, and out jumped eight retired people, who made a bee-line for the bike and we spoke for about ten minutes about why we were all here – they had planned to come up, to see the highlands, whereas I was there almost by accident. We also discussed whether Japan still makes good motorbikes (they do), whether English is difficult to learn (it is), and after a swift toilet break, they jumped back in their cars and left. One of the drivers had commented the road extended further up in to the the mountain, past a golf course, to the wind turbines I could see higher up.
It looked like a nice road, so after pondering the view, I decided to go up a bit further. For about a kilometre it a was fun, cracked road surface, steep inclines and corners, with autumnal leaf-fall and branch debris here and there, so it took some concentration.
Anyhow, I came around a corner into a shady wooded area and saw what looked like a run-off stream actively flowing across the road. Not so unusual in the hills around here, but only when I was too close to it did I realise from the reflections that it was actually solid ice.
Pants.
All I could do was make no change to my speed or direction and hope I was balanced enough to get over. Fortunately it seemed I was, though for a second or two I could feel the ice passing under the tyres, but my momentum carried me over. I decided to get off and take a look at how this thing had duped me, and sure enough the water had frozen in rivulets rather than as a flat sheet, and was well over a centimeter thick even at its thinnest point. I decided then it was better to GPS mark the road, and come back to do it in the Spring, rather than have less luck further up!
Fortunately, those leaves and such at the side of the road had virtually no ice on them, and so it was quite simple to walk the bike back down that way, bypassing the frozen stream. It was disappointing, but that road will make a nice addition to a future day out on warmer days.
Back down to the coast road, and more great views and soon another small road, this time down to a beach, which, given that it was about 5degC., was pretty much deserted. However, given the blue skies and sunshine, if you didn’t know that, you could think from a photograph it was a wonderful Summers day.
It’s called Sotoura Beach, and when the weather gets a little warmer, has quite a good crowd down there. On this day though, it was just me, and some fisherman repairing nets in the small harbour nearby.
(Note that in a few photos my bike looks like it is on sand – it isn’t – I walked out to check the area and found it was actually an old asphalt car park with a very thin layer of sand and gravel on it.)
After another cup of tea just looking at that blue ocean, I pushed on just a few more kilometres to my lunch spot, the appropriately named Cafe Mellow, which is next to a small hotel we’ve often stayed at, called Ernest House.
[As this post is a little long, I won’t fully recount the trip back, which was yet more happy riding, avoiding some bad drivers, and getting to test the headlights out. I’ll also see if I can get a short road video together for it. After 350Km that day, I have to say, I’m really pleased with the Tracer for sure. ]
In July 2006, just after buying a Honda CB400 Super Four, I wrote:
I wont be able to afford a new one any time soon, so I’m hoping it’s as reliable as people say.
That time turned out to be ten and a half years, as today, after a lot of saving and the trade-in, I took ownership of a Yamaha MT-09 Tracer!
Yes, I know it’s quite angular, as is the way with the Yamaha MT series, but it’s an incredibly fun bike to ride, with a growling three cylinder engine, and yes, it has some (unnecessary?) horsepower, but for me it’s all about that sound, and the torque from that engine, which perhaps given my … er … mass, was sometimes lacking at times on the Honda. It’s very easy to ride, and today I just stretched its legs a little on some expressways, before taking it down the narrow and busy roads around our station; and it was superb on both.
Too many differences to go into here, but just in today’s ~50Km, it assured me that this is another great bike. That said, “I wont be able to afford a new one any time soon, so I’m hoping it’s as reliable as people say.”
(For the record, the Honda was superbly reliable).