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Naked

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Forrest Gump would have something to say about buying a used motorcycle, much like a box of chocolates. Unless you're kicking tires with an 8mm socket in your pocket and the the owner's permission to disrobe the bike, you never know what you've got until you've got it home and have it unclad. I posted earlier about an initial teardown, leaving the headlight/instrument cluster faring still in tact along with the LH radiator shroud. It all came off this past weekend to prep and paint all the plastics. A couple of notes: Large wood screws are no substitute for proper, specified and engineered hardware. There's one instance of these beasts force-threaded into the embedded nuts on the rear frame crossmember to which the rack is attached. This kind of quick and dirty fixing gives me the shivers. And it pisses me off. A trip to the hardware store would have taken care of the problem, even if it were a roadside repair (which, I can't imagine it was). Always a...
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Gone ADV

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There's been a motorcycle shaped hole in my life ever since I sold the Blackbird three years ago. It was the last of a string of Hondas, starting with a CL 175, a Nighthawk 450, a CB 750 Custom, a Valkyrie Interstate,  and the CBR1100XX Super Blackbird. I gave up the Blackbird after I snapped off my right biceps tendon, which happened about a year after I snapped off the left one. After ten years of ownership, the Bird was spending more time in the garage than on the road while I was recovering, and somehow I came under the spell of some crazy notion that I was done with motorcycles. So I turned my attention to overlanding. Built a Montero, and an H3 and have been enjoying the adventure ever since. But at 14mpg in the little Hummer, adventuring on my own was overkill and having it as my daily driver was gouging the budget, so about six months ago I started my research on ADVenture motorcycles. Think The Long Way Around. The search was narrowed by a lo...
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Progressive 465 Series Monotube Shock

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The original plan was to swap out the stock spring and go with a Top Gun 8kg spring upgrade to handle the load. That all changed when a) thinking all along that the adjustable stock spring was at its highest setting, but was in fact bottomed out with a broken pre-load adjuster, and b) when I tried to compress the Top Gun shock with a set of Tusk spring compressors for the install. This is what FUBAR looks like. I figured if the pre-load was busted at its highest setting - 5 - I could live with that being a fixed value, as long as the Top Gun spring compensated that stock spring's shortcomings. But, the Tusk compressors slipped because I didn't tape the spring where they mounted, and because there was no way in bloody hell they were going to compress that spring far enough because they weren't long enough to grab enough spring for the compression in the first place. I was leaving the following afternoon for a 900-mile weekend ride. I ordered a Progressive 465 Series ...
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