By Neale Bayly. Photos by Neale Bayly and Jon Beck As the late afternoon sun painted the low-slung eastern mountains with brilliant, golden-light, while sliding toward the muscular escarpment rising out of the Namibian desert to the right, my internal metronome finally came to rest in this moment. Muscles, ligaments, and bones were now arranged in the right order, making standing on the footpegs of my F800GS over the rough…
by Neale Bayly. Additional photos by Blair Young. My heart is working overtime, but my thoughts are clear and my head calm as I slide back over the rear wheel. With some light pressure on the front brake, and my foot hovering over the rear, I execute a slow and measured descent under the watchful eye of Ross McKinney, our lead instructor for the day. With his ever-present smile enlarging…
Part I Part II In part II of the KX250 rebuild, we mentioned these builds have a tendency to snowball into much more than simply getting an engine to run. When a motor looks and runs amazing, wheels and tires look amazing, the plastic should look amazing right? And when you get new plastic you need to add graphics and a new handle bar, and you might as well add…
Inertia (i-nûr sh ) n. A law of physics states that “an object at rest tends to remain at rest, and an object in motion tends to remain in motion.” Scientists call these tendencies inertia. Inertia is a way of measuring how hard it is to change the momentum of an object, whether that’s getting it to speed up or getting it to slow down. That depends on how much…
What could possibly be better than rolling out of bed in the morning
So I’m sitting in the office working on some random project when I get a call from Stacy Berger at Ohlins USA. He starts telling me they have a 2009 YZ250F with the Ohlins TTX44 rear shock and TTX front cartridge kit installed. I said that’s great, must be a nice ride! And I’m thinking to myself, you are telling me this because? “We want you to ride it and…
In our Aug/Sept issue we met with Tom Smith from Coppersmith suspension services to test the Ohlins TTX rear shock and loved it. In our last issue we rode a Yamaha YZ250F with Ohlins suspension front and rear and the suspension couldn’t have been sweater. The time had come for us to get some of these suspenders on one of the EDM test bikes long term. We spoke to Tom…
One of the ways we judge the performance of the products we evaluate is by looking at lap times. Nothing else provides such a clear and simple answer to the question “will this product make me go faster?” It either does or it does not, plain and simple. While not all products can be subjected to this kind of by the numbers testing, most can. The trouble with this is,…