It’s not often I end up pushing a broken down bike home, but when it happens it’s a memorable experience.

It just died a few miles from home. I found a blown fuse which I promptly replaced with the only spare.

That was good enough to get me another 500 yards..

From there it was ‘just’ a few miles home -up hill. After some time pushing the bike in the hot afternoon sun with all my leathers on,  I thought there must be a better way…

My wife was at home so we arranged to tow it with the car while I held a strop in one hand, and steered the bike with the other one (a hairy experience).

A quick examination via google pointed me to a dead fuel pump.

Several hours later, I had the bike in pieces

The local KTM agent wasn’t quite that helpful, He simply advised me of a price of $600 and an unknown arrival date.

A quick search on Ebay found one for $130, which will arrive in a months time.

To be continued…

I’m a bit old school and usually do bolts up by ‘feel’, but yesterday, a torque wrench saved me a lot of grief.

Some of the newer stuff out there requires a bit of ‘finesse’, because the bolts and castings are about as strong as plastic.
In other words, soft castings and even softer bolts are very easy to break.

This miserable little 5mm bolt held the KTM’s oil filter cover on. If you look carefully, the thread was starting to deform near the head of the bolt as I tightened it up.

It’s meant to be tightened up to 8nm, but it felt like it wanted to strip itself. That meant either the thread in engine casting was stuffed  or the bolt was.
Fortunately, the bolt was stuffed and is easily replaced.

The worst case scenario is when it breaks in the engine casting, making it awkward to remove it.. luckily, that didn’t happen.

It’s been a long time since I’ve written about motorcycles here,  That’s because there hasn’t been much to write about until now.

A ‘low oil pressure’ warning come up on the KTM, as i’m riding along one morning. It’s the sort of thing that can give you a sense of dread, but I’ve sort of had this experience before.

The bike sounded fine, and the temperature was normal, so I just kept going with my fingers hovering over the clutch lever.

Like so many things these days, warnings and alarms aren’t always credible.

I never that saw that warning again on the way home, but I thought I better find out what the problem is anyway.

A search of google brings up all sorts of horror stories, which didn’t do my mood any good, but gave me a few places to look.

First up was to check the oil level. It’s finicky to check this as the engine must be hot and the bike needs to be level.
To do this, I lie on the ground, hold the bike level, and look at the sightglass through the hole in the fairing at the same time. It sounds a bit awkward, and it is!

Second thing was to drop the oil out, and check the oil filter and the 2 oil screens.
To do this, the lower fairings need to come off first, which requires patience (lots)
The oil screens are easy to get to, one of them sits behind the sump plug and the oil filter simply sits behind a cover on the right hand side.

In short, I never found any problems, so I guess something went astray in the electrical/electronic department.

It’s just another thing to keep an eye on for the moment..

Form before function?

I’ve always prefered to put function before form. To that end, I’ve always wanted the KTM to handle as possible on the open road, but this means it sucks at just about everything else.

It sucks when dealing with motorway traffic and city riding in general. -it’s hard on your wrists, and the bike gets hot, then the radiator fan blows hot air all over you.

These days, I’m now using the bike every other day beause my oldest daughter borrows my car often during the week.

This means I need to make the KTM a more practical bike for everyday use.

Some of it’s issues is the difficulty to strap anything to it easily, and my kids reluctance to ride on it’s pillion seat.
(to be fair, it’s not a comfortable seat and they keep sliding forward all the time)

Towards that end I’ve added a packrack to the back of the bike to solve these problems.

Now I’m wondering why I bothered struggling to tie stuff on the back of this bike all these years, when it could of been so much easier…

But with a packrack, life is so much easier..