Moto Broad

Holy cow, how did I live without this thing?

The Gerbing jacket liner ($199.95) utilizes Gerbing’s patented Microwire technology to smoothly distribute warmth throughout the liner, with no hot spots, and no bulky electronic components. It feels like a cushy windbreaker — nowhere near as bulky as my Olympia jacket’s winter liner.

Gerbing 12V jacket liner

I’d looked at the TourMaster Synergy liner ($199.99) and the First Gear liner ($199.95), but both are slightly, well, lumpier than the Gerbing. All three brands would be satisfactory, I think, but when I tried on the Gerbing, it was love at first zip. (I couldn’t find Gerbing equipment at local shops; I purchased from Shango Rider’s booth at a motorcycle show. Dan Allen is the owner; he’s very knowledgeable and gave great service.)

Gerbing offers very flexible sizing options: for example, you can order a small jacket with long sleeves, a large jacket with regular-length sleeves. etc. (Because Shango Rider didn’t have the “perfect fit” in stock, Dan arranged free shipping from the factory to me. How cool is that? And the liner is indeed a perfect fit; Dan’s suggested size/sleeve combination was spot-on.)

On my SV650, the battery harness was easy to install: there are just four bolts to remove the seat for access to the battery. I removed the bolts connecting the battery cables and existing pigtail for the Battery Tender, added the contacts for the Gerbing harness, threaded the wires so the Battery Tender and Gerbing connectors were accessible from the outside, and reinstalled the battery bolts, seat, and small side panels. The hardest part was threading the cable ties through the frame to anchor the Gerbing connector — I spent some time blindly stabbing behind the frame spar until I finally found a way through. There’s a lot of stuff crammed in there, and it’s hard to find your way when you can’t see.

When I finished, the install was neat, and the Gerbing connector was easy to reach for plugging/unplugging. There’s even a little attached cap to protect the connector when it’s not in use.

Cable positions

It does take a little extra preparation to ride —What do I plug first? Oops, I can’t zip that just yet! — but it’s more than worth it. Without the bulkiness of the original padded liner and a sweatshirt, I can actually bend my elbows and turn my head easily (you just need a light shirt; I wear a long-sleeved cotton t-shirt under the liner).

With your core warmed, it seems that your body is more willing to send blood out to the extremities; I found that my hands didn’t get cold as soon on a ride, and they were never as cold as they had been on previous rides without the warm liner. If I can find some hand guards to block the wind, I think I could get by without buying Gerbing’s electric gloves. Only my thighs were icy; now I can see the appeal of chaps.

That’s what makes motorcycling (or any hobby) expensive — the accessories! But I have to say that the heated jacket liner is a wonderful investment in comfort and riding enjoyment. I’d describe it as an essential piece, not a luxury.

Now if Gerbing just made an air-conditioned jacket liner for summer in the South…

Sometimes a balaclava is just too much. Besides, it’s a bit claustrophic (now, baklava, that’s a different story). I was looking for a neck warmer that wouldn’t require encasing my entire head for warmth, and I think I’ve found it.

The Schampa Zip D’Zip (hey, I didn’t name it) is a soft fleece neck warmer with a front zipper. Easy on and off, and truly cuddly. It’s high enough and thick enough that it acts as a soft gasket to keep wind from whistling through my helmet, so I think it may replace the bank-robber balaclava I used last winter.

Funny how my helmet doesn’t feel all that well-ventilated in summer…

So much for spring. It’s in the mid- to high-nineties now in Jawja. While my bright yellow Olympia jacket has open mesh sections, it’s still stifling unless I’m moving. And while my HJC helmet seems overly well-ventilated in winter, it doesn’t feel that way in the summer. But I refuse to ride without gear.

As long as I’m going 60+mph, it’s bearable, but the heat is miserable when I’m stuck in traffic. So I’m trying out a “Cool Off” neckerchief my cousin Julie sent me. She and her husband have a Harley, and she claims the Cool Off really helps. They live in Florida, so I figure it’s worth a try. The Cool Offs are made by Allegro, and they’re available from a variety of suppliers, including Safety Company (how’s that for a unique name? What — was “Brand X” taken?).

At first, the Cool Off looks like a thin, flat tie (left, below). Hold it up to the light, and you’ll see a few translucent grains (about the size of small aquarium rocks) in three of the sections. Soak it in water for 10 minutes or so, and — foomp! — it puffs up like a wet marshmallow (right, below). Fasten it around your neck using the pull-through buttonholes, and it’s secure. Evaporation cools your neck; I found I needed to turn it over periodically at stops to get a fresh cool surface, but it was a nice relief.

Not as refreshing as a cold blast up your pantleg (still looking for freon-powered riding boots with ducting), but it does help. And it stays puffed up for days! (Of course, that may be because moisture has no place to go in our humidity.)

1. Take all the armor out of riding jacket and give the jacket a spin in the washer.
2. Put the  jacket in the dryer on the recommended cool setting.
3. Be driven mad by the loud clunking noise coming from the dryer.
4. Hang the jacket in the shower and hope it will dry out over the next four humid, rainy days.
5. Knuckle down and work on those book chapters that are due Friday.
6. Clean house.
7. Check www.weather.com every 30 minutes to see when the sun will shine again.

We had actual snow here in the Atlanta area over the weekend; as you can imagine, it pretty much shut the city down. Weather guys are exhausted from rolling up their sleeves and pointing at amoebic onscreen graphics showing impending snowy doom. So, not too many bikes on the road today. I’m housebound myself, working on computer projects.

But I believe I’ve found the answer to fogging faceshields: FogTech. The little packets are pricey (just under a buck apiece at most retail outlets, although a bit of Web searching can beat that), so I’ve invested in the more economical bottle for at-home application.

Five-pack of FogTech Packets

The beauty of the wipe-on packet is that it’s painless: open the packet, wipe the moist towelette across the inside of the visor, and you’re ready to go. No polishing a smeared waxy coating until it’s achieved a tolerable degree of bleariness. This is completely clear as it goes on, with no distortion of your view. It’s supposed to last for several cold days before you need to reapply.

When you first apply it, you may think, “This is too easy; it can’t be effective.” But it really does the trick: absolutely clear, no fogging, no streaking. It’s my new favorite thing.

I met a dear old friend (old as in longtime, not as in, um, old) for lunch today. He was riding his commuter scooter in the 40-degree weather, so I couldn’t very well wimp out, could I?

I put on two shirts, two pairs of socks, my nice thick balaclava (Biker’s Comfort in Action Stop-Wind, from BikeBandit), and my winter Cortech Scarab gloves. If I’d had more than 20 miles to go, I’d have donned the Olympia C4 Thermolite glove liners, too. But the gloves have a Thinsulate lining, and that was plenty. My HJC AC-12 helmet has a removable chin deflector (it makes more difference than you’d think), which keeps the wind from aiming directly for your eyeballs. Only the tops of my legs were cold, and once they went sort of numb, I was pretty comfy.

My friend’s scooter is great! it has a roomy little trunk and comfy seat, and he just rolled it right up onto the sidewalk in front of the restaurant (let’s face it: when you’re riding something this cute, you can get away with anything).

I only saw one other rider out, a hunkered-down leather-clad sportbike rider. It was worth it to see my old friend, and to bask in the clear blue day. And when I got home, my neighbor took me for a short ride in the gloriously rumbling Mustang show car that he’s prepping for the World of Wheels event next weekend in Atlanta. Wahoo!! So loud you can’t hear yourself think, and wondrously over-powered. I was squealing with joy as we fishtailed down the country road. You’d think such a display would scandalize the locals, but most of us are hotrodders around here, anyway, so that throaty blast is a welcome sound.

I survived the mountains. And my butt was completely unclenched after a couple of days.

Yes, I was the bright yellow roadblock, but I relaxed and smoothed out by Monday. Hwy 60 from Blue Ridge was a workout, but I loosened up a bit by the time we got to T.W.O. On Sunday, we went to Helen ’cause I hadn’t been there in years. Now I remember why; tons of tourist traffic, and greasy tourist food.

On the way back from Helen, we went to Pappy’s Riverwalk Restaurant on 129 (’cause there’s no dinner at T.W.O. on Sunday nights), then back down 180 (Wolf Pen Gap Road).

Oh. My. God. Late, bright, sunny afternoon on 180 with the brutal sun strobing through the trees. Continue Reading »

In the MSF class, the instructors harped on conspicuity, which is a chewy word for visibility. I’ve caught myself overlooking bikers in all black, on their black low-slung cruisers, with their half-watt taillights, so I know how easy it is to not see us.

So I ordered a yellow helmet, thinking, “well, it’ll be ugly, but it’ll be safer.” I’ve never had a piece of yellow clothing, nor lusted after anything yellow. I’m a teal/taupe person from way back.Yellow was so not my fave. So I purtied it up by ordering a spiffy iridium shield.

Continue Reading »

If I’m going to travel — or even go to the grocery store — on the bike, I need baggage, right?

I started with a magnetic tank bag from RoadGear; it has a clear map window on top, and an expansion zipper. The map carrier even unzips from the rest of the bag so you can (for whatever reason) carry the map by a little string strap. I guess that’s so you can slog into a Waffle House when you’re lost and consult the map that got you there. (Below, left — collapsed. Right — fully unzipped and stuffed. Click for larger view.)

It’s held on by prodigious magnets (so if you have a non-metallic tank, it’s no help), and holds plenty.

But going to the store for cat food two cans at a time isn’t practical, and I can’t wad so much as a pair of jeans in the tank bag. Continue Reading »

Once I saw my poor, dead bike, I knew there was no hope of repairing it. And, of course, GEICO totaled it. So I started looking in the paper, online in local showrooms. I had my heart set on another SV650, and I wanted a yellow one. I soon found one on Cycle Trader, near Greenville, SC, less than two hours away. It was a 2005, with only 800 miles. I thought that was a bit suspicious, but called anyway. I immediately liked the sellers, and made arrangements with a friend to take his truck up for a look at the bike. He thought I was jumping into the purchase, but I just felt so good about it: right color, low mileage (he was skeptical), nice folks.

Turned out that there was quite a story behind the bike. Continue Reading »