Hey… I’ve been a biker for A YEAR! As of today.

I have thoroughly enjoyed it and have never, so far, touch wood, fingers crossed, dropped a motorbike.

Hooray!

A teeny tiny motorbike spotted on my way home from work. If the giant guy doesn’t give you an idea of the scale, check the numberplate which is almost scraping the floor.

New underpants required, I think.

What a preposterous idea…

Then again, if I’d had one of these, maybe she wouldn’t have fallen off.

I went to look at the aforementioned road today. It’s rather wet…

Now, you see, I fancy strapping my indestructable camera to the front of the bike and riding through it.

Anyone know where the air intakes are on a CBF600S? Or have any other hints as to how to tackle this particular task?

Yes, my boots are waterproof for when I have to get off and push.

So, I took my first pillion out on Sunday. It was just a little shaky to start with, but I soon found it pretty straightforward.

After a while, I pulled over and turned to tell her that she was a wonderful passenger and I couldn’t even tell she was there. Imagine my surprise when I found out she wasn’t there, and had fallen off the back some two miles previously.

Ah… so that’s what the overconfidence phase of motorcycling feels like.

Today I learnt what happens when you have to do an emergency stop from 70, and you overdo the back brake on a damp road, on your back wheel decides it would like to overtake you on the right and your bike decides it would like a little lie down on its left side.

The skidding around I did on my pushbike at Carsington seemed superfluous at the time, but fortunately it gave me a nice instinctive knack for keeping a single-track vehicle upright. But I did need a new pair of underpants. And it was back to old-man mode for the rest of my 60 miles.

I happened to bump into* my instructor later on - and I admitted what had happened. He said that a) it is very slippy out there today, and b) it still happens to him, as he realises he’s not actually superhuman and has limits.

(* well, ok… I was riding near the bike school, and spotted him with a trainee in classic “we’re heading back to base” mode, so I nipped right round the roundabout and dropped by for a chat - it’s quite handy that he has the only bike of its kind in the UK, so I knew it was him)

So I bought my bike from a dealer (who shall remain nameless other than in the title of this post and a little bit further down) which was about 30 miles away, and at the time I consciously figured - due to the distance - that I would treat it like a private sale, helped by the fact that the price I paid was lower than the book price for a private sale.

While I was looking at it to buy, I noticed the chain looked a little old and corroded and pointed this out to them. “Oh yes… we give it a full service and pre-delivery inspection, so if it needs a new chain, it’ll have one”.

So it’s a good job I did treat it as a private sale because while lubricating the chain today, I noticed a mark on the swingarm which says “replace chain” and the chain tension adjuster was many millimeters past this mark. So their pre-delivery inspection didn’t involve making sure the chain was ok.

Oh yeah… nor did it involve putting the right amount of air in the tyres.

So, my advice would be go, by all means, to Midland Superbikes for your bike - but, as I did, treat it as a private sale.

And check the tyres asap.

At least it has fixed the funny, nervousness-inducing handling problem I was experiencing.

Oh, and I’m getting the chain and sprockets done on Thursday. So that’s nice.

Update 18-January-08: They said they had fitted a new battery, too. Well yesterday I had my new battery fitted. I’m not sure that was true either.

So I picked my new* bike up this morning and rode around a bit, visiting the odd cup-of-tea-toting friend/family on the way.

There’s something definitely wrong with the bike, though. It seems very slow. For example, it took me a good 35 minutes to travel 0.9 miles back from a friends’ house to home.

Of course, like on my test day, I did manage to get just a little bit lost on the way.

(*to me, not new new)