Pondboy's BMW F650GS News

Friday 2nd July
No more boingy boingy. My Touratech Progressive fork springs arrived today, so I managed to finish of my current pond job (and get paid) the slope off into the garage to play mechanics with Mellow Yellow.

As you can see from the picture, the Touratech springs are considerably beefier and show a substantial tightening of the wind at on end compared to the OEM springs. I have not changed the fork oil yet, just reduced the amount in each leg to allow for the extra metal of the springs. Now to go for a ride. Yippee.

Sunday 4th July
Ride out with some of the southerners from the forum. Met them at the the Hog's Back cafe (which was closed) then after a chat cruised down to the German/Italian day at the Sammy Miller museum in the New Forest. (More of this later.)

(Later)
Got up early last Sunday and cruised down to The Hog's Back Cafe to meet up with some of the F650.co.uk members as well as a larger group of BMW Club members. After a leisurely chat and mutual bike admiration session, we split up into groups (the BMW Club guys wanted to ride in a Tour de France style rolling peleton !!) and I hooked up with Eggchaser, Kiwiboy and Chris & Leanne Taylor to ride on down to New Milton in the southern side of the New Forest. With Chris taking the lead for most of the time, I held station as rear guard and had the chance to give Kiwiboy's Aprilia a good look over as he was the rider ahead of me. (Tidy bike IMHO) The roads down were a bit straight for most of us, but everyone was well behaved and it didn't deteriorate into an all out race. Once we reached the New Forest, there were very sensible 40mph speed limits on the smaller roads, as there horses wandering around everywhere and they took to the road in front of us a couple of times.

The museum had collected a reasonable group of bikes outside when we arrived including some cool looking Bimota's and gorgeous Guzzi and some Ducati's in various stages of raciness. Inside the gates was a Benelli TnT1130 which just looked the dog's @+*&ll@%'s. The museum itself was great to look around, and well worth the visit especially if you are into older bikes.

After a good look round and taking soem photo's of the Italian bikes I liked, I wandered out to get ready to leave and found Mellow Yellow being given the once over by a lady and her partner. After the usual question I invited her to try it out for seat height and position, which she found a bit high. At that point Leanne had come out and soon her and the lady were in deep discussion and checking out the merits of Leanne's BMW low saddle.

It was time for me to be off, so I had a quick ride home in time to watch Shumi win in France.

Monday 5th July
Playing around with a logo for the F650.co.uk forum. Here is the first try.

Saturday 10th July
Well, just celebrated Pondson's 16th Birthday. He went out for two chinese meals, one with us at lunch and one with his mates in the evening. I can remember being young enough to eat like that and still sleep at night (sigh).

As soon as he wakes up and I have fed him and the two mates who slept over with a huge English fry up, I'm off to get some SAE15 fork oil to finish off my fork conversion.

Mellow Yellow was a positive joy to ride last Sunday. There is still lots of travel to be had with the new springs and yet the front is much more controlled and stops the bike feeling so wallowy in corners.

Pondgirl came across this picture yesterday. Though I had to share it.