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Old 06-19-2010, 09:57 AM   #21
Mr Lefty
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Join Date: Feb 2008
Location: Denver CO
Moto: 01 BMW F650GS Dakar
Posts: 15,677
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Quote:
Originally Posted by jtemple View Post
Here's a little story about the delivery of my bike...

They were scheduled to deliver it at 3:30. I left work at 2:45 to get home for the delivery. I live about 10-15 minutes away from work. So, there I am, at home, washing my lunch dishes, just waiting around for the delivery. DING! I have an email on my phone. I check it, and it's from Steve at Hall's. I'll paraphrase...

Steve: bike shipper called, they want to schedule delivery but can't get a hold of you

Instant panic. The bike that I've waited so long for might not come today!

DING! I suddenly have two voicemails. My phone never rang. I check them, and it's the truck dispatcher, and the truck driver, trying to contact me. They can't find my house (it's new construction and doesn't show up on GPS systems with old-ish maps).

I try to call the shipper back. My call won't go through. I look at my phone and there's no signal. Normally, I have a full strength signal at my house. I'm getting email on the phone via my wifi connection. I have no land line. If my cell goes out, I can't make phone calls. Great. Queue up the AT&T/iPhone jokes.

I email Steve: my phone has no signal, can you call them for me?

Steve: sure, no problem.

So, Steve is playing the middle man, relaying messages between the shipper and I. I find out where the driver is (about 5 minutes away from my house) and tell them I'm on my way. I found the truck, and had him follow me to my house. YAY!

I've had the bike 24 hours, and already have about 320-350 miles on it. Last night, I rode it to bike night in Sioux City, IA (about 100 miles away). The trip back was late at night, and the route is fairly close to the Missouri River, so I was just coated in bug guts by the time I got home. I've cleaned my gear. The bike is still filthy. I'm going on a mountain bike ride with my sister here in a little bit, so the bike will have to wait. I'm also going to give it its first oil change today or tomorrow. When I break in bikes, I like to run them a little and then make the first oil change nice and early, to clean out any shavings that might be in there.

The oil screen cover is leaking a little oil, leaving about a quarter sized spot on the ground when the bike sits over night. It's probably just not tight enough. I'll address that when I change the oil here in the next day or so.

I also have some condensation inside the gauge cluster. I don't know if that's normal or not.

The bike also seems to die fairly easily, almost as if the idle isn't set high enough, even though the idle is set exactly where it should be (1650 RPM). It might just be because the engine is new and tight. If you're running at fairly high rpms and just pull the clutch, the dip in RPMs goes slightly below idle speed for a second, before coming back up. All of my bikes have done that, so it's normal. However, on this bike, sometimes it's low enough to kill the engine.

I'm still getting used to starting it and holding that "starting device" (that's what the manual calls it :rofl ). It's a little lever above the clutch lever. When you hold it in, the RPMs run slightly higher. My ZX-10R used to just do that automatically. What does that lever do, anyway?

Neutral is tricky to find, but I'm getting the hang of it.
sounds like a choke
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