Like: Always put your oil drain plug back in with a torque wrench, until you’re comfortable with the “feel” of the 16 ft/lbs it takes. Never replace spark plugs on an engine that isn’t stone cold. You can boil the fork oil out of those soaked brake pads, but when they’re $20/pair you really should replace them.

And: The right tool for the job always makes things easier. Sometimes, the right tool for the job is the difference between the possible and “time to trailer it to the shop.”

One fun thing I learned about recently: Plastic Razor Blades. You’d think (as I did) “what the hell good is a plastic razor blade?” But oh, dear reader, they are magic.

Got sticker residue or pine sap on a painted surface? Of course you do; we all do. Metal razor blades are great for removing sticker residue and pine sap from glass, but they are also very, very good at scraping paint down to the metal. No bueno. Let me tell you this: use your plastic blade to scrape the pine sap first, then hit it with isopropyl alcohol (on a microfiber cloth, not a paper towel!) to dissolve it. For sticker residue, loosen it with isopropyl first, then scrape off the goo with the plastic blade. It won’t scratch your paint, I promise. Wash these surfaces afterwards, and wax them with good wax (I like Zymol, but use whatever warms your heart; the important part is that you wax the paint after scrubbing with alcohol!)

Because single-blade razor blades have been around approximately since the Bronze age, there exist infinite handles that fit this form factor. Search the internet for the handle of your choice, or buy one from a local hardware or big-box store.

Another great (if dangerous) tool I was recently introduced to: a Hose Removal Tool. Now, you’re thinking, I’ve seen those; they’re small and work great for fuel lines and breather hoses. Gracious no, not those little pliers. We all have those (and indeed, they are often the Right Tool For the Job.) I am referring to the stuck coolant hose, which requires this thing. Yes, it is quite dangerous to use; you can injure yourself grievously with one; I don’t have to describe it because I’m sure your imagination will do just fine. But, and we’ve all been there, when you are arguing with a coolant hose which hasn’t moved in 20 years, and you don’t want to destroy the hose in the removal process, this tool will get you there in a jiffy. Just… be careful.

Last in this installment: We all have circlip pliers, right? Yes, you can live without them. No, you don’t particularly want to, when they make removing and installing circlips this much of a breeze. But imagine a lock ring, with no circlip (this is what you will find inside, say, the starter assembly in an early-to-mid-2000s BMW oilhead). Having struggled with that particular lock ring during my annual starter rebuild and impaled myself on one too many flathead screwdrivers attempting removal, I’ll say: if you encounter lock rings in your life, get the Lock Ring Pliers.

A weekend trip for a New Englander is a choice of Quebec, Ontario, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. They depend on your starting point, the length of your weekend, your group’s tolerance for long rides and your wants and needs for travel. Quebec is fascinating since most of the people there speak French. The Gaspé Peninsula should be on every motorcyclist’s bucket list. Also, Poutine. Nova Scotia is quite beautiful and very motorcycle friendly!

A trip to the Canadian border will take you some or most of the day from the Boston area so it’s important to plan ahead. There are loads of fantastic campgrounds and bed & breakfasts in northern Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine, so your trip doesn’t have to cost a fortune, or be a death march. You can zip up north Friday afternoon, stay the night and cross into Canada in the morning to ride for lunch.

It’s important to know a few things about riding across a border crossing, if you’ve never crossed one without involving an airport.

1. You’ll wait in line: Unless you pick a tiny crossing (which I highly recommend) you’ll be stopped in traffic waiting for your turn with the officials. Take a look at a map, and you will see all the roads in New England that cross into Canada. The smaller the pass-through road, the better. You do not want to be stopped on your motorcycle on a four-lane highway waiting to cross the border with three thousand other vehicles, especially on a hot day. Choose a small road with a single-lane one-shack crossing and you are more likely to get a bored and friendly border official who will talk to you about your trip and give you road and lunch suggestions.
2. You cannot bring any firearms with you. Canada has quite different gun laws than the US does. Your CCA has no reciprocity. If you try to hide your firearm from the border official, you may or may not get away with it. If you lie and they find out, or search you, you will be in a whole big heap of trouble. It will involve more border officials with their own guns, handcuffs, the term “smuggling,” someone else touching your motorcycle… It’s not worth it; leave your guns at home. Everyone in Canada is super nice, anyway.
3. If you are in a group, you must meet the border guard one at a time. Everyone hangs back at the red light, and once clear waits for the rest of the group well up the road. You should all have the same idea about your trip, since if the border guard gets five different stories from five different people they are likely to become suspicious. It doesn’t take much.

1. They might search you. There is no rhyme or reason to the people they decide to search, and they like it that way. Do not be in a hurry. Also, remember #2 on this list — don’t carry anything you don’t want them to find. This includes but is not limited to: firearms, ammunition, illegal drugs, legal drugs outside their original packaging, prescription drugs outside the bottle that has your name and your doctor’s name on it. Border officials are humorless.
2. You don’t need a passport to enter Canada. But you do need a passport to reenter the United States! Bring your passport, because this is a large pickle and you do not want to be in it.
3. They might not let you in. If you’ve ever been arrested (I know it’s tempting; I know it is. But do not, and really listen to me here, do not sing Alice’s Restaurant at the border officials. They’ve heard it, and they don’t find it funny anymore) they might not let you into the country at all. If you have been convicted of any of the following crimes (and take special note of the fifth one here, since the US does not weigh DUI as heavily as Canada does) you may not be let in. Poke around on the Government of Canada’s website for more information.
   • theft,
   • assault,
   • manslaughter,
   • dangerous driving,
   • driving while under the influence of drugs or alcohol, and
   • possession of or trafficking in drugs or controlled substances.
4. Everything is in KPH. Most motorcycles have KPH on the speedometer in tiny numbers; some have only MPH. Many GPS units will know that you’ve crossed into Canada and will translate the speed limits into MPH for you. My Yamaha lets me convert my entire dashboard into kilometers, which is super handy! Check your owner’s manual! Or, if you’re great at math on the fly, 1 mile is 1.6 kilometers. Quick, what’s 50 KPH in MPH? You really don’t want to have to come back to Canada for a court date for a speeding ticket.
5. Your phone will not work. Unless you have an international plan, it’s best to turn your phone off at the border. Your cell carrier will charge you stupid amounts of money to connect to a Canadian network. It will warn you at the border, and it will tell you exactly how stupid those charges will be. This means no googling places to eat, or the weather, though, so again, plan ahead.
6. You can only bring back a limited amount of stuff. If you’ve purchased various gifts or mementos they’re probably fine but it doesn’t hurt to mention them at the crossing. The US Customs and Border Patrol has a lot of info on this. Short form: two bottles of wine is fine. A case of wine will cost you in taxes.
7. They have different holidays! Here’s a fun note. When you have a Monday off due to a federal US holiday, it’s likely Canadians don’t — so you won’t have to worry about the same traffic and crowds you would if you went somewhere in the US. Check your schedule and see if you can find an offset holiday.

Now you’re ready! Find a nice place to stay in northern New England and go have an adventure in Canada!

What did I miss? Where’s your favorite Canadian adventure?

You may be thinking, I don’t have a sport bike, why would I pay any attention to track days?

Dear reader, you haven’t lived until you’ve whacked open the throttle on your daily rider on a track. As Tony’s Track Day stickers say, “No cops, no cars, no limits!”

It’s not just about going fast. It’s about learning to control your machine through a variety of twists and turns, where you know there won’t be any sand, or police patrols, or left-turning SUVs in your path.

I rode one of Tony’s Non-Sportbike Track Days (on my Super Tenere) and I had a seriously fantastic time — not just from the thrill of going faster than I’d ever dare to on the street, but from the feeling after the track day of knowing my motorcycle so much better.

Track days will make you a better rider. You don’t need a sport bike to participate.

From Ed Conde, the guru who is behind the New England Riders group, are some clues that you will very much benefit from signing up for a track day. Can you identify with more than two of these?

1) I like sweepers much more than twisties
2) The Cherohala is much better than the Dragon. The Dragon is too much work!
3) I have bad days riding and can not figure out why.
4) I sometimes go wide in turns and the only way that I know how to fix it is to go slow.
5) I sometimes have a line of cars backed up behind me. They are always so impatient!
6) I have a hard time visualizing the best line through a curve.
7) I sit upright on my bike and do not know how to lean with my bike to conserve lean angle and make steering easier.
8) I take longer to brake than I should.
9) I have trouble forcefully and consciously countersteering my bike in tighter turns.
10) I do not really know how to trail brake.
11) I am afraid to downshift when slowing from road speeds. My upshifts are also not smooth.
12) I am not sure what I should be doing with the throttle in a turn.

It’s always easier to go with people you know, and a track day buddy is the best. Are you a New Englander? Want to know more about track days? Ask away!

You’ve also seen folks riding motorcycles without any gear and, depending on the state, without even a helmet.

Often the type of gear the rider wears rider is dictated by the crowd they fall in with as a baby biker: the “ATGATT” crowd do not let others in their ranks get away with anything less, and freely shame those in no gear. The gearless riders “live and let live” and do not shame others about protective gear, or mention at-fault accidents, or the potential for more protection. It is akin to religion: whatever you were brought up with, is your current belief system. Anything else is foreign, ridiculous, unthinkable.

Can a gearless rider be converted? And should “ATGATT” riders be preaching gear, or simply quietly setting an example, or shutting the hell up?

“I am worried about your eternal soul bodily integrity” doesn’t generally garner any warmth.

Can it be that riders who do not wear gear simply wholly accept road rash, blood, injuries as the inevitable outcome of any crash? Do gearless riders and their friends accept a different eventuality? Is it a given? Are they battle scars, war wounds? Of course you’re torn up; you crashed your motorcycle. Is it more dangerous, more risky, more thrilling this way? That’ll take months to heal, man. Good luck getting any sleep. Those bandages sure look uncomfortable.

The “ATGATT” crowd says: Do not accept this eventuality. Think harder about your well-being.

What a gearless rider accepts as inevitable, other riders take every precaution to prevent.

Some “ATGATT” zealots get tangibly angry upon hearing about a rider who has crashed their motorcycle and needed stitches, skin grafts; has a cracked skull or a broken jaw; posts pictures of several square feet of road rash, some of it right down to the bone, weeping blood and lymph fluid. No-one likes to see or even think about that. It is much easier to live in denial.

We have all encountered riders who insist they’re not going to crash. Of COURSE I don’t wear a full-face helmet. I don’t need one if I’m never going to crash. It is comforting to think we are safe. We have normalcy bias, an illusion of control, harbor too much optimism.

Mustn’t gearless riders think about the fact that the right gear for the conditions keeps a rider cool or warm as needed, protects (especially the eyes and hands) from road debris and bugs, keeps sunburn to a minimum, and, yes, will often keep a low-speed “oops” from being a trip-ending incident or a hospital stay?

Many “ATGATT” riders assume that riders who do not wear all the gear, are not serious riders, and this (forgive, as the data set is in the tens but vociferous) is because any small mishap – a stone tossed up from the road; an insect large enough, at 50mph, to break skin; a cloud of sand in the face obscuring vision for several vital seconds; a low-mph drop – can end that rider’s trip. Can a serious motorcyclist plan a multi-day tour without any insurance against the smallest injury? Can a serious motorcyclist truly accept that any small mishap will keep her off a bike for weeks to months while skin, muscle, bone heals?

And in these gearless circles, are there lessons to be learned? When a rider has an “unplanned getoff” do those who know and love that rider say, that could have been me? Is there any analysis of the preparation, and the outcome? What can I do to prevent those injuries should I ever fall off my motorcycle? How could that rider who crashed, and is now sporting bandages over road rash, or stitches, or worse, done better?

Motorcycle gear has advanced quite a lot in just the last few years: fitment, abrasion resistance, armor, adjustability, breathability, waterproofness have all improved. If you’re a gearless rider who hasn’t looked at motorcycle gear beyond a sweaty leather jacket in a couple of years, you owe it to yourself to try out a Cordura piece or two.

Have you seen the rider in a scuffed-up Aerostich and scratched-up helmet, roll into an event and regale the attendees with a story about his crash that same afternoon?

It’s something. Listen to him, after he’s had a few ibuprofen and a beer. He’ll tell anyone who is willing to listen exactly what happened, and maybe what he did wrong, just so someone else doesn’t make the same mistake – and he may also say, I was wearing all the gear, and I don’t even have a scratch. Better replace these gloves soon though.

I like this helmet. I don’t love it yet, but that’s where I’m going here. Helmet customization. Those of you who are Arai Signet loyalists know the first drill: back of a spoon to the forehead!

I can’t endorse purposefully compressing the hard foam inside your helmet. There’s that risk/reward scenario again — the more you compress the foam yourself the less compression it will offer your head in an accident. But without making a little more room for my oval skull the helmet was unwearable for more than 40 minutes. It didn’t take much compressing to make the helmet a comfortable fit.

The big problem I was having with this thing, though, is that I couldn’t breathe in it.

The chinbar on this helmet has a “chin curtain” which offers an excellent seal against wind, which means it fogs up my eyeglasses. Also, along my commute, in the sun, with the clear visor closed, I felt as though my face was in a greenhouse. I don’t like riding with the visor open, since I get sunburned very easily aaaaaand I don’t like bugs. The chin curtain holds onto the bugs that fly in through your open visor, until you can unlock the chinbar to evict them. Meanwhile they’re trying very hard to get out of there THROUGH YOUR FACE ooohkay no thanks.

There’s no easy information available on the web about this thing. I can’t be the only one ready to cut it off the helmet, can I?

So I start to pull at it, and I find bolts buried behind the hard foam of the chinbar.

The helmet is only slightly modified (ahem) and the chinskirt can be reinstalled pretty easily. I put the bolts back in.

A ride with the newly-customized helmet shows it moves a LOT more air and doesn’t suffocate me at stops, isn’t noticeably louder, does not argue with my comm system’s boom mic nearly as much as it used to, the chinbar is easier to close, and now I can ride with the clear visor closed all the time without cooking my face or fogging up my glasses. Big win!

The motorcycle did not make contact with the SUV. But the rider insisted that “laying the bike down” was the best course of action, and insisted that all of this was the fault of the SUV driver.

I’m willing to accept that the SUV probably didn’t yield to the traffic already in the rotary per local law. Heck, that driver might have been toying with their phone instead of watching where they were going. But the blame in this case falls with the motorcyclist.

Let’s break it down.

Last I checked, the coefficient of friction of metal and plastic on pavement was quite a bit lower than that of rubber. That is, given similar momentum, a motorcycle will slide a lot farther on its side than it will upright on its tires with the brakes well and properly engaged.

So unless the brakes on the motorcycle he was riding were completely shot (not the SUV’s fault) or the tires were so old they had no grip left (I know, I’m reaching), or the SUV got very, very close to the rider (not bloody likely given the fact that there was no contact), the crash was entirely the motorcyclist’s fault, for not knowing how to brake.

Let’s stop kidding ourselves, fellow motorcyclists. It does us an injustice. When we say “I had to lay ‘er down” we are saying we had to crash to avoid a crash. This makes approximately zero sense. In fact, when there is no contact you are worse off from an insurance/at-fault standpoint. When there is no contact, it is a single vehicle accident and you cannot sue anyone for damages.

You cannot expertly throw a motorcycle to the pavement without some kind of training. Are local clubs holding “lay ‘er down” seminars on a sacrificial bike? Have they done this so often that they know where the bike, and they, will go, upon pavement contact? Mustn’t they be spending a ton of money on the gear they’re replacing, or hospital bills for all that skin loss?

Do yourself a favor, each and every rider. Hie thee to a deserted parking lot and learn to brake. Use both brakes. Unless your motorcycle is a relic, your brakes are better than you think they are. No “toss you over the handlebars” myth applies. Front brakes apply the majority of your bike’s braking force, so use them. Learn to make your tires howl without breaking contact, and learn to love that sound. Learn how fast you can brake without skidding. Learn to ride out a skid that does happen. If you have ABS, learn what it does and where it engages so that it never surprises you.

Knowing how to stop your motorcycle is just as important as knowing how to make it go fast, and someday, when that SUV enters a rotary, unexpectedly, right in front of you, you won’t be picking up pieces of your bike in the road. You’ll be cursing that ignorant driver and continuing on your ride, none the worse for wear. Okay, your brakes might be a little warm.

But relegate the “lay ‘er down” myth for the ages. You’re just admitting that you’re a bad rider.

I’ve ordered two Kermit Chair bags from him. They replace the bags the Kermit chairs come stuffed into, AND you can fit your leg extensions in there too — it really helps you keep track of all the parts of those stupid expensive chairs.

I recently went looking for tank panniers to fit on the AltRider crash bars on my Super Ténéré, and found a few expensive bags that didn’t quite fit. I contacted Brady, who had already worked out the dimensions of these things, and he made me a set of bags designed just for these crash bars. They’re a fantastic fit and super convenient!

From Brady: Standard rectangular cordura liners for hard luggage are $35/each + shipping. Standard bags include: 1000 Denier material, carry handles, double pull YKK zippers, top or side opening. Other options are available as well for additional costs.

I have no connection to him other than being a happy customer; I highly recommend his work. Contact him directly at [email protected].

Having owned and used Sena’s SMH10 for bike-to-bike comms and piping music for several years, I loved it and was eyeing the camera version. About a year ago I received the 10C as a gift. I’d won a GoPro3 in a drawing a month before and, while the GoPro filmed my commute and other things easily enough, the 10C has a couple of huge advantages over the GoPro and other action cams: (a) it talks to you and (2) you can fiddle with your camera while on the move (maybe not the smartest thing, so keep your eyes open and don’t go poking at it in the technical twisties). The audio function lets you know just what it’s doing: “camera on,” “recording,” etc. as well as a shutter release noise for still shots.

The 10C mounts to a helmet as easily as any other Sena communicator – it includes speakers and a microphone (boom or wired, depending on your helmet design) and will take a reasonably patient person about an hour to fit the mount and all of the pieces, and tuck all the wires out of the way. The unit itself is unobtrusive (again, unlike a traditional shoebox-on-your-helmet action cam) and has two planes of adjustment: up/down and side-to-side swivel. A few tests of stills and short videos will make the needed adjustments evident.

Battery life is surprisingly good for a camera and helmet comm system. If you anticipate only occasional camera use the battery life for communication is an easy all-day affair. If you’re camera and video heavy you can kill the battery inside of four hours. If you’re recording video constantly you’ll kill it in two. There is a good (or annoying) feature, however: the 10C will not let you obliterate its battery with its camera. It will turn the camera off when the battery has only a couple of hours of talk time left, and you will not be able to turn the camera back on until you’ve recharged. But you’ll still be able to talk over your comm for at least an hour.

Once I got used to the functions of the 10C, the GoPro ended up in a drawer, and after months of neglecting it, I gave it to an action-camera-less friend. The Sena’s ease of use made the GoPro seem like only a small step up from my old pink 8mp Nikon Coolpix, and heck, I have a RAM camera mount. Where is that old Nikon anyway…

The 10C has a couple of playback/review options: you can use a micro-HDMI cable to plug it into any HDMI-capable TV, or you can pop the microSD card out of it (spring-loaded and tiny! Be careful!) and into anything that’ll read it (I use an LG tablet with a microSD card slot). This means that at the end of the day on a motorcycle tour, I can fire up my tablet and bore everyone with all of the photos and videos I took that day!

The best feature, to my commuter’s mind, is the video tagging: in video tagging mode, the 10C will capture the previous minute, the current minute and the following minute in three one-minute clips. Imagine: set to video tagging mode, the moment you are out of danger, hit that button and save all that preceding mess to video. I don’t need to elaborate; we’ve all been there.

The audio functions can be surprising if you’re like me and start using technology before fully reading and understanding all of the literature. It will record your voice while recording video, so it’s great for all you budding moto vloggers, but it can also record your conversations with other Bluetooth-comm enabled riding buddies, who may or may not want to be recorded. It will also include whatever music you’re piping into your helmet at the time, so keep that in mind if you’re planning to upload to YouTube. Any music that is copyrighted will get your video flagged for takedown. The audio is single-stream and cannot be edited out; choose wisely or go with silence. Also, I found that wind noise will disrupt the soundtrack pretty significantly at highway speeds.

Which brings me to the cons: there aren’t many. This is a spectacular piece of kit. But I wish it had the app depth the 20S does – you can control some features of the 10C with Sena’s smartphone app, but (IMO) the most important one, communicator pairing view & hierarchy control, is missing. Also, while the 10C’s communicator functions can be controlled by the Sena remote, the camera settings and functions are not part of the remote’s protocol. There I go diving into technology again! When I saw the remote was compatible with the 10C I made a bad assumption, hoping to take pictures without having to take my hand off the bar. Alas. It is nice to be able to control the communicator and music functions from the handlebar, though.

I would embed a video here, but there’s no real way to show you just how good the videos are, from this thing. Uploads to the internet suffer compression loss and look like any other crappy youtube video, unless you do your own hosting and can handle the bandwidth (which I don’t).

You can find all of the specs for the 10C at the Sena website (www.sena.com), which states: “It’s capable of full HD video (1080p:30fps and 720p:30/60fps) with 3.5 MP still shot image capture and shot, burst and time-lapse photo modes.” On a large HD TV the video isn’t great. It can tend toward being sort of blocky and streaky. But on a tablet the video is gorgeous. If you’re in the market for a Bluetooth comm system and an action camera, it is hard to go wrong with the 10C.

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