elizilla

Yes, on a friends VTEC, but that was because the oil feed line had seperated from the nozzle. After that was fixed and the PO set to run a little leaner there was no fling off getting on the tire profile. There is some on the sidewall, on mine too. Table 21 is very lean, are you sure you have no EMI? I think there is pulse count mode so you can compare the number of pulses against distance travelled. If your setup still suffers from EMI maybe you could replace the pick-up with some caoxial cable. The EMI coming off the coils was so bad that I eventually gave up on running the controller anywhere in the front end of the bike. I relocated it to a spot on the tail, where it is protected by the support arm for my three case Givi rack. Once I moved it I had no EMI in any of the tests. I think that part is OK. Also, I have used less than half a quart of oil, in 6000 miles. So it's not like it's pumping vast amounts of oil. It is supposed to fling a little bit - that's the whole point, that's what keeps the chain clean. But the flung oil is supposed to drop onto the road, or into the chain guard or something. It's not supposed to be channeled to the tire. I think it's something about the way the air circulates around the rear of the bike.

This week I did my end of summer update to my chain oiler blog. Oil continues to end up on my rear tire. Here's the photo I used in the blog: This is what my tire looks like, 700 miles after I last cleaned the oil off it (with brake cleaner). I have not had a problem with oil on the tire on the TDM, even though the ScottOiler I installed on that bike has been dispensing about four times as much oil per mile. I think there's something about the shape of the VFR, or the way the wind blows around its rear wheel, that allows the oil to fling onto the tire. Some chainguard mods might help. Like if it were a little longer at the back. Has anyone else found oil flinging onto their tire, and solved this problem? If so, how? Thanks!

Last spring I wrote about installing three different chain oilers and that I planned to compare them. Here are my results so far. I have not had to lube a chain all summer. I have not had to clean a chain all summer. I have not had to adjust a chain all summer. Yet my chains all look clean and new. This is awesome and I am very happy about it. However, all three chain oilers drip on my garage floor. I have developed the habit of pushing a piece of cardboard under the chain, each time I park a bike in my garage. I feel this is manageable and beats the heck out of constantly having to fiddle with chains at gas stops. Hawke Oiler The Hawke Oiler is out of the running, because the V-Strom is gone. I only put about 500 miles on with the Hawke Oiler, before I sold the bike. This bike spent half the summer sidelined due to unrelated problems (water pump seal). During this time it marked my garage floor more than either of the other oilers. It never stopped leaking no matter how long the bike stayed parked, and it wasn't just a few drops - it was a puddle. I think the reason it never stops dripping, is because the aquarium tubing it uses has too large an inner diameter. I've been told by other Hawke Oiler users that the manufacturer will provide some sort of choke to put in the line, to stop this from happening. So I wrote to them and asked for this. I never got a reply.I am also not convinced that manually managing an oiler by pushing a button is the best plan. I am liking the "set it and forget it" aspect of the other oilers; automatic chain oilers should be automatic, IMHO! But it works fine once you push the button, the oil goes onto the chain, though the applicator is not as precise. I cannot confirm whether it would improve chain longevity since I stopped the trial so early, but I think it would help - the chain never dried out, which is the goal, right? If you prefer an oiler you manage manually, and you don't mind the mess, the Hawke Oiler is likely OK. But really, the ability to place the button somewhere easier to reach, is the only improvement it offers over a cheaper option such as the Loobman, or this home brewed oiler I found on the V-Strom forum. Or this one posted to VFRD by JETS. ScottOiler The ScottOiler, on the TDM, has now run for about 1500 miles, and run through about half a quart of ScottOil. The chain was already close to shot when I installed it, and I hoped the ScottOiler would keep it going a bit longer. But I quickly gave up on eking it out, and I replaced it about 900 miles ago. The ScottOiler has kept the new chain nicely wet and clean. It drips just one drop of oil on the floor every time I park the bike, so the mess is very slight. At one point I ran the reservoir down too low, and it turns out that when you do that, just refilling it is not enough - you have to bleed it. I ended up using the mityvac to pull oil through the applicator to get it started again. Note to self - add oil *before* it runs low. Apart from having to bleed it when it ran out, I like the ScottOiler, I think it works very well. Pro-Oiler The Pro-Oiler, on the 4th gen VFR, now has about 6000 miles. I have used less than half a quart of oil in this time. I installed a new chain and sprockets at the same time I installed the oiler. It uses a lot less oil than the ScottOiler, but it still marks spots on my garage floor. The spots are not nearly-clean oil dripping from the applicator, like they are on the other two oilers. The floor spots are thick, black, tarry sludge that drips from the end of the chain guard or the countershaft sprocket area. The Pro-Oiler seems to be getting every bit of cleaning ability from every drop of oil flung. I have turned the Pro-Oiler down, down, down, to deliver ever smaller amounts of oil. I've now got it set on table 21, level 1, when the recommended setting for clean dry weather is table 17, level 3. The chain continues to look perfectly clean and not at all dry, and I have not had to adjust it. My big complaint may not have to do with the Pro-Oiler; I think it is a characteristic of the bike's geometry: Oil keeps getting on my tire. No matter how much I turn the oiler down, I keep having to clean oil off the tire, and I don't like this at all. I am considering filling the Pro-Oiler with ScottOil, since it would be easier to wash off. (Right now I am filling it with the same 10w40 synthetic I put in the engine.) I am also considering modifications to the chain guard, to try to change the way the oil flings. And I think that I might do well to swipe the spots where the tarry oil sludge collects, with a paper towel, at gas stops. Remember, the oil from these oilers is supposed to fling off and take the dirt with it - it's a total loss system. It's just not supposed to be deposited onto the tire! (Note: brake cleaner is the hot ticket for scrubbing oil off tires, much better than degreasers and soaps.) The photo at the top of this post is a close-up of the VFR's chain, and the oil on the tire, at 6000 miles. I last cleaned the tire about 700 miles before taking this picture. I have never cleaned the chain, and I have not adjusted it since the day I installed it. Conclusion I like the dual applicators in both the ScottOiler and the Pro-Oiler. They deliver the oil precisely where it needs to be, instead of squirting too much and then counting on fling to carry it around. The Pro-Oiler's dual applicator is smaller and more elegant, but the ScottOiler dual applicator works just as well and you can order it separately. If I hadn't sold the V-Strom, I might have ordered up a ScottOiler dual applicator and retrofit it to my Hawke Oiler - I am sure it would have reduced the mess.The Pro-Oiler just barely nudges out the ScottOiler, as my current favorite, because it can be precisely tuned to use so much less oil, and because the parts are more elegant. The ScottOiler is a very close second. And I think the TDM is a better bike to run an oiler on, than the VFR, due to the issue with oil on the VFR's tires. I will post another update when I have put more miles on these remaining two oilers.

I've got about 5000 miles on mine now. I started out with the controller mounted up front in the fairing, but oil was going all over my tire. I suspected this was EMI, so I redid the EMI tests, and discovered that it was indeed still getting EMI at certain times, though not continuously. I eventually gave up on any mounting locations in the front of the bike, because none of them were completely EMI free. I moved the controller box to a spot on the outside of the tail, where it is protected and partially hidden by the Givi Wingrack. Since then, I have been 100% free of EMI. However, oil continues to get flung in too high of quantity, and it ends up on the edge of my tire. I've dialed it down to 1, but I think I'm going to actually go back into the programming and switch it to one of the columns that puts out even less oil. I may also look into some chainguard mods - I think if my chain guard was an inch or two longer at the back, it might help with this issue. I like the maintenance free aspect; the chain has stayed well lubed, and I've done absolutely no fiddling except when I've been doing regular oil changes. If I can just clear up the pesky oil-on-tire issue, I think I will be happy with the Pro-Oiler. The other two oilers put more oil on my garage floor, and are requiring more fiddling, but neither has oiled the tire. I'm not considering any of them out of the running just yet!

Sweet! I've got one of the Signal Dynamics LED battery monitors in the V-Strom and it's worked very well there. It shows green when all is well, yellow for marginal, red for worse, and flashing red for terrible. It started showing yellow, about a month before I had any other symptoms of battery failure, and a couple weeks later it went to red. Sure enough, one day the battery just wouldn't start the bike. (I should have replaced that battery as soon as I started seeing the problem on my battery monitor, but I was busy so I just started taking the VFR for all my out of town trips, and only riding the Strom locally, until it eventually crapped out.) So after that experience with the Strom, I was a convert. I ordered two more of them, for the TDM and the VFR. I haven't installed it in the VFR yet. I did install it in the TDM. I'm not as happy with the LED monitor there - the light is red or yellow anytime you sit at idle for more than a few seconds, with the brake lights on, and if you have the turn signals on it will switch between red and yellow, in time to the flasher. My boyfriend installed one in his TDM and has the same results. I've been all through the charging system and found no problems. I think the changing LED color is simply not calibrated to the correct range, to track "normal" on a TDM. But an analog gauge would work fine even when "normal" isn't quite the same voltage. I might order a couple of these, one for the VFR and one to replace the LED monitor on the TDM.

I have the same MP3 players, for the same reason. I bought several of them for about $5 each. The silver ones get "borrowed" pretty quick. The pink ones are easier to hold onto. There's a plan for a roll-yer-own amp out there, google "cmoy" and it'll turn up. I wonder if the one you made is similar? You can buy cmoy amps on eBay, there are kids who make them in altoids tins and sell them out there. I've never yet had any audio project that required me to solder, work decently, so I've been sourcing pre-made components. When I was looking for an amp I wanted something that would run off the bike's 12v system, instead of needing it's own batteries. None of the cmoy kiddies were making this, so I ended up buying PIE part LD-1, "Adjustable Line Driver With Subsonic Filter". I've got several now, I just order them from online car stereo shops, they cost about $35. They work fine except they use RCA jacks for the lines in and out, which means thicker cables. No big deal when they're under the seat, but they bulk things up when installed in a tankbag.

Next up, we have the Scottoiler. This is the most commonly available oiler, the one that everyone else compares themselves to. It's the only oiler in my comparo, that is sold by multiple vendors here in the USA. I found it was available from a vendor I already know and think highly of, Adventure Motostuff in Carson City NV. Chad at Adventure Motostuff hooked me up when my V-Strom's chain went bad on a trip, a couple years ago. It's an awesome store, with things in stock that I would normally have to order. When they came up in my search for a Scottoiler vendor, I looked no farther. There is a basic, Universal Scottoiler. Then there's a Touring Scottoiler with a larger reservoir. And there's an optional Dual Injector Kit. I decided to get the touring version and the dual injector. The items in the kits I ordered are pictured up above. The things on the white paper are the contents of the dual injector kit, and the rest of the things are the contents of the touring kit. As you can see, there is an intimidating array of stuff! Don't let this scare you off, though - you don't use all of it. It just comes with all these pieces, so you can fit it to a variety of bikes. But even with all that, it doesn't have everything for every bike. The instructions list several bikes, including the VFR, that they offer extra special parts to fit. They say they'll send them for free, just write and ask. So if you are installing it on a VFR, make sure you drop 'em a note and get your free extra parts before you start trying to fit it. I was fitting it on a Yamaha TDM850, so I did not have to write for the extra parts. So the first thing I did, was fit the Dual Injector Kit. This turned out to be pretty simple - there's a bracket with several holes in it, that you can turn whichever way you need to, to line it up so the fingers brush lightly on either side of the sprocket. You could attach it to the spot where the spools go in, except this bike doesn't have the fittings for spools. You can glue it on (they provide glue). Or you could do what I did, and just zip tie it in place. They provide lots and lots of zip ties. They provide a lot more of the stiff black tubing than you need, and in the instructions there is a method to make replacement applicator fingers out of it. So I've squirreled the extra away on the end of my workbench with all the other extra parts I keep accumulating. Note the clean chain and sprocket. The VFR had a brand new chain and sprocket when I installed the Pro-Oiler. This bike is not so lucky; its chain has about 8000 miles on it, and I had let it get pretty filthy. I cleaned off as much of the accumulated dirt and grime as I could, not so much for nice pictures, but to reduce the chance of that gunk clogging up the ends of the applicator, and to reduce the amount of truly filthy crud available to be flung all over the wheels and bodywork when the oiler rinses it through. Next, I fit the reservoir. This is actually a bit easier than it was with the previous two oilers, because I didn't have to find a place to hide it. That big square thing in the kit picture, is designed to bolt on under the license plate. In Europe, bike license plates are square and exactly that size. And since most bikes sold here are also sold there, the stock tail section on this one had plenty of room for the square box. If you've bobbed your rear fender, you won't have space for it, so don't buy the Touring Scottoiler - get the Universal one instead. Note, my Michigan plate doesn't hide it, so the box looks kinda goofy. I'll hafta find something else to augment my license plate, I guess. Or just leave it exposed even if it is funny looking; I guess it will make it easier to keep an eye on it. I had to enlarge the holes in my license plate slightly, since they were about 2mm short of matching up with the attachment holes on the Scottoiler box. And I had to drill one additional hole, at the bottom of the fender, to attach the box. The box has a compartment in it to hold the oil. It's got a yellow thing in it that floats on top of the oil and is easily visible, so you can monitor the oil level through a window on the left side. Or through the even larger window on the back, if you live in the USA and your license plate is too small to cover it. There's a bracket on the right, to hold the RMV, which is a syringe-like thing that meters out the oil. Here's a photo from that side, so you can see it mounted on the bike: Note the yellow tube sticking out, top and center. This is the tube you use to fill it. It pivots to hide in a little compartment, and the license plate bolts over it. You take the license plate off anytime you need to fill it. According to the instructions, that would be every 4000 to 8000 miles. I plan to just top it off every time I change the oil in the bike. The arching yellow tube runs from the reservoir to the RMV. The blue tube that comes out the bottom of the RMV and loops up and around into the tail of the bike, is the tube that goes to the dual injectors and applies the oil to the chain. The black tube that comes out the top of the RMV and goes into the tail of the bike, connects to a vacuum port on the carbs, one of the spots you would normally connect the mercury sticks to when you synch the carbs. There's a dial on the top of the RMV. At one end is prime, and the other end is the slowest possible feeding of the oil. When vacuum is applied at the top, the valve opens, and oil starts feeding out the bottom of the RMV. The oil in the RMV is replenished by oil that siphons over from the reservoir - it's important to prime that hose by getting it free of bubbles. The fill hose at the top of the reservoir doubles as a vent. The kit came with a half liter of Scottoiler oil. This stuff is blue, and according to their literature it is water soluble. I decided to test this claim. I squirted some on my fingers and tried to rinse it off in the sink. It's not that water soluble. It didn't feel like it rinsed off my fingers very much at all, even with hot water. But hand soap did seem to cut through it a little more easily than it cuts through motor oil. The instructions recommend that once you fill it up, you prime the hoses by running the bike to get vacuum, and using the Scottoiler fill bottle, push air into the fill tube, which pushes oil from the reservoir to the RMV, and this pushes oil out the bottom and into the feed tube. Personally I would prefer not to sit sniffing the tailpipes of a running bike for that long, so I used some of the extra black hose to run from the top of the RMV, to my mouth, and applied vacuum that way. And I used my Mityvac to apply pressure to the filler hose, because it was kinda awkward using the Scottoiler bottle to do it. It took about ten minutes to push the oil all the way through the tubing. One I had the lines filled with oil, I put the vacuum line back in place. I started the bike with the dial still set to prime, and oil came out both sides of the dual injector. Yay! I then adjusted the dial until oil came out at a rate of about one drop per minute. Seems to work! I'll take a test ride tomorrow in daylight.

I had gotten mine going this past Saturday morning, and I ran it all weekend basically on setting 3 of Table 17....and yes I did notice oil in the exact spot you mention....my rollers looked wet though, but the links are still dirty.. Mine seems to be throwing black grime all over the hub. How is it managing to fling in towards the center of the wheel? It's very odd. But I only have about 40 miles on it so far - I finished it Friday night, then spent all the rest of the weekend messing with water pump seals on the V-Strom instead of riding. I still haven't even fed out all of the red stuff that came in the pump. (What is the red stuff, anyway? Maybe I should cycle it through "prime" a few more times, and push that red stuff on out.)

I put mine on at the same time as a new chain and sprockets, so it's not rinsing dirt out, so much as it's having to fight the thick grease that a new chain comes with. I'm kinda worried that this heavy grease will plug up the applicator nozzles, so I'm keeping an eye on that. But so far, so good. It'll get its first extended test on the trip to TMac. Meanwhile the Hawke Oiler continues to pee oil on my garage floor, as the V-Strom sits parked waiting for me to finish this water pump seal job. And the Scottoiler isn't installed on the TDM yet. So the Pro-Oiler's winning my comparo so far.

In my last entry, I described the install of the Hawke Oiler. Next up is the Pro-Oiler. The Pro-Oiler is made by a company in Belgium. But they delivered it to me in the USA without any trouble. The packaging was very good, with things in individual bubble wrap bags. There was a stack of instructions, about 50 sheets of paper. I was relieved to note they were stapled into three bundles, because I figured this would mean that two of them must be other languages and I could throw them out. Alas, my hopes were dashed - all three were in English. One section was the installation and operating manual, one was troubleshooting, and the third was the FAQ. And now that I've been through it, I can say that this is definitely not a project to attempt without reading the instructions carefully first. The Pro-Oiler components are first rate! The picture at the top is the contents of the kit. Interesting that the reservoir appears to be the exact same Nalgene type bottle that came with the Hawke Oiler. However, instead of coming out the cap, the oil feed line comes out of the shoulder of the bottle, which will make it possible to remove the cap without moving the bottle, nice. Like the Hawke Oiler, the feed line has a tube inside the bottle, that reaches to the bottom. The vent is a second tube sticking out right next to the feed line, rather than a simple hole in the bottle, so I suspect it is a bit less likely to leak. The tubing is much stiffer, and much thinner, than the aquarium style tubing used in the Hawke Oiler. The pump is smaller, and has an arrow on it indicating the direction the oil flows. The controller has a shielded cable coming out of it, that has six very small wires in it, black/blue/green/red/white/yellow. The yellow wire is never used in any configuration - I am guessing this shielded cable simply comes with six strands and they only need five of them. The junction box is a little project box with a small circuit board in it. It doesn't have any holes pre-drilled for wires - the instructions say that this is so you can drill your own holes in the best location for your install. There are three Posi-Tap connectors, a couple pieces of Dual-Lock, and a number of zip ties in several sizes. The applicator has dual nozzles and a bracket that attaches to one of the screws that holds the chain guard, and points it perfectly with one nozzle on each side of the sprocket. (The kit is bike specific.) No need to wrap zip ties around the swingarm, and no need to heat and bend tubing to get it to the correct angle. Here's a closeup picture of the applicator: And here is a picture of the applicator, installed on the bike: I routed the tubing along the brake line, and zip tied it in place, to get it up to the underseat area. I decided it wasn't necessary to drill a hole, since the tubing is so thin and stiff, and the VFR had plenty of access to route the tubing up under the bodywork. The most difficult part was finding a spot to stow the reservoir bottle. The underseat compartment in the VFR just isn't very deep, and it was hard to find a spot where I could orient the bottle properly, and still have reasonable access to it. In the end, I decided to velcro it to the outside of the seat rail, inside the bodywork, on the right hand side. I decided to use standard velcro instead of dual-lock, because dual-lock is really only sticky a half dozen times before those little bristles start to wear out, and because it's a huge pain to pull it apart when it isn't worn out. I cut a strip of velcro about eight inches long, and applied one side to the seat rail, where it runs for a couple of inches on either side of the spot where the bottle attaches. The other side, I wrapped all the way around the bottle. This should keep the ends from peeling up as I take the bottle in and out. The weight of the bottle rests on the bodywork. I think this should hold it well enough, but I will definitely keep an eye on it! Also, I've failed to follow one part of the instructions - they want me to have a 30cm vent tube. I don't know where I would put that much tubing, so I shortened it. Another thing to keep an eye on, I guess. I have more tubing in case I do need to lengthen it, though finding a spot for it to stick up and out would remain difficult. The pump needs to be within 40 cm of the bottle, and not more than 10 or 15cm above or below. I could have put it very close to the bottle, but the tubing is too stiff to bend that much. I tried heating this tubing with my butane torch and bending it to a more convenient shape, and had limited success. So I put the pump about 30 cm away, near the center of the underseat compartment. I put the junction box next to it, so I wouldn't have to splice longer leads onto the pump. The Pro-Oiler needs a tap into the speedometer sensor wire, to determine how fast/far the bike is going, so it can meter the oil accordingly. On the 4th Gen VFR,the speedometer sensor wire is pink, and runs from a sensor on the countershaft compartment, to a three terminal plug that is one of several that are held by a bracket on the outside of the seat rail, under the bodywork, on the left side. This seemed the most convenient place to tap into it with one of the Posi-Tap connectors, and attach the blue (not yellow) piece of wire from the kit. Four wires from the controller cable, are connected to terminals in the junction box. For a bike with an electronic speedo sensor, they are black/blue/red/green. If you have a reed switch, you use the white wire, and nothing uses the yellow wire, whose very existence is confusing since the instructions keep referring to a yellow wire, when the wire they provided to connect to the speedometer sensor was blue! The yellow wire in the cable was already cut off short, and I cut the white one short as well, so I wouldn't have to deal with either of them - there isn't a lot of room in the box! The four wires from the cable, and the blue-that-should-be-yellow wire from the speedometer sensor go into five of the terminals on one side of the board. The two black wires from the pump (which are interchangeable), the red power lead and the black ground lead, go into four terminals on the other side of the board. There's a nice clear diagram in the instructions showing what wire goes to what terminal. Here's a picture of the underseat compartment with these various components installed, the lid off the junction box so the circuit board inside can be seen, and the tubing routed: The controller box, I first placed on the fairing, where I could easily reach it with my left hand. But when I did the EMI check, it failed miserably - the pulse counter was seeing about a dozen pulses a second. I spent several days trying to figure this out. There's a troubleshooting flowchart for this, that includes a lot of discussion of how/where to connect the ground ("earth") wire, none of which helped. I eventually determined that there is a bad EMI spot on my bike, on either side of the fairing, just in front of my knee, and when the cable goes through that spot, it finds EMI there. Probably the coils. There was no way to route the cable in such a way that it would stay out of the bad EMI spot, yet still allow me to place the controller box right side up in that spot on the fairing. In the end, I placed the controller box on the instrument panel, and routed the cable along the center fairing stay, over the top of the airbox and under the gas tank. I'm not sure I like having the controller there, but I guess I'll see how it goes. If it turns out that it drives me crazy, I'll find someplace else, somehow. I could mount it back on the tail, under the Givi rack. Or maybe sideways or upside down in my original spot. (Edited 5/20 to add: I have since discussed this with a friend who is an electrical engineer. He thinks that the EMI problems would be reduced by adding a ground wire that connects the cable's metal sheath to the frame. I haven't tried this yet. I didn't see anything like that in the instructions, but maybe I missed it - there are an awful lot of instructions!) (Edited 9/25 to add: Turns out the cable did not have a metal sheath, it was just heavy plastic, so there was nothing to ground. In midsummer I relocated the controller box to a spot on the tail of the bike, protected by the support bracket for the Givi rack. This completely stopped the EMI problem, and I actually like it better, since it's more unobtrusive. But it does mean that I can only adjust it when I am stopped.) The instructions describe setting a correction factor, that tells the Pro-Oiler how many speedometer pulses per wheel revolution. You spin the wheel ten times, and the system counts how many pulses that is. You divide by ten, and that's the correction factor. I discovered that the VFR doesn't produce any pulses unless the engine is running - simply turning the key so the Pro-Oiler has power, is not enough. And if you don't have a correction factor set, the Pro-Oiler gives an error code of "CF-Err". Turning on the engine and leaving the bike in neutral allowed me to turn the wheel and count pulses properly. The Pro-Oiler's pump came with some red liquid (ATF?) already inside it, plus the controller has a prime function. This made it much easier to prime. This is a far more complicated installation than the Hawke Oiler, in spite of all the slick purpose built parts. Just installing all the parts and getting them working was a tough job, and programming it is complicated. There are charts and diagrams enough to please the geekiest engineer. It was a little overwhelming, actually, but I got through it. And I am very impressed with the quality of the components, and the hard work that obviously went into the design. I have high hopes for this oiler. Here's another Pro-Oiler install description from Rad, that I found helpful when I was doing this.

This Hawke Oiler has been sitting on my workbench for a couple of years. Last Saturday, I finally installed it on my 2003 Suzuki V-Strom, as part of a chain oiler comparison I have decided to do this summer. Above is a picture of the contents of the kit, along with a few handwritten labels so that people looking at the picture can tell what the various items are, and a ruler to show the relative size of the items. I don't think anything in this kit, was manufactured specifically for the Hawke Oiler. Instead, it's cleverly cobbled together with off-the-shelf components. The installation instructions are on the website. All in all, the installation was fairly simple. The V-Strom has a lot of room for such things, which also helps. It came with some little gray stick-on cable routing brackets to hold the applicator, but I didn't feel they were very trustworthy, so I augmented them with some long black zip ties as you can see in the picture below. (White zip ties would look prettier here, but I used contrasting black ones so they would show up well in the photo.) The instructions recommend using heat to mold the tubing to the correct shape. I used a little butane torch, and this worked well. Then they suggest you use GOOP to glue the applicator in place, to keep it from pivoting. It seems effective enough. Here's a picture of the installed applicator: Then you route the hose along the swingarm, and up into the bike, taking care that it has enough slack for the swingarm to move up and down, and that it won't get caught on anything. I ran it up and into the space under the seat. I drilled a few holes, to route the hose into the underseat box, and to run small zip ties through, to tie the hose and pump into place. After examining the oil reservoir bottle, and thinking about how I would fill it, I decided to include a bit of extra hose between the pump and the reservoir, because I'm going to need to pull this bottle out sometimes to fill it, and I want enough slack that I can do this without spilling. Here is a photo of the underseat compartment, with the hose, pump, and reservoir bottle: I drilled a 3/8" hole in the fairing for the switch. The switch is just a push button. I routed the wire along the frame, from the pump to the switch. The wiring is a bit nuisancy. Both the positive and negative leads coming off the pump, are enclosed in a heavy gray plastic sheath. This sheath was difficult to peel apart, to separate the wires. The red wire attaches to the switch, but the black wire is simply a ground. If the two wires weren't both in the sheath together, I would have grounded it to something close to the pump. But since the sheath was so hard to peel, and the red wire had to go to the front of the bike, I routed the black wire along with it, and grounded it up near the switch. The red wire attaches to one side of the switch. The fuse attaches to the other side of the switch, and then I had to splice in a little extra wire to reach the switched accessory power panel that I already have installed in the front fairing. (Unlike, say, grip heaters, I don't think it matters whether the oiler is run from switched power, but since I already have a switched accessory block set up, it's convenient, and it will prevent pesky children pushing that button and dumping oil on the ground while the bike is parked.) The Hawke Oiler website recommends using synthetic oil, so I filled the bottle with a little Mobil One 10w40, and I was ready to try it out. The Hawke Oiler depends on the rider to decide when to oil the chain, and how much. When it's time, you simply push the button, and it oils the chain. But before this will work, it needs to be primed - there is a lot of empty hose between the reservoir and the applicator! Priming it turned out to be kind of difficult. Every time you push the button, it cycles the pump just once. This is not enough to draw the oil from the reservoir. In fact, pushing the switch a hundred or more times doesn't move any oil, though the pump got kinda hot. This was very frustrating and it made me think that perhaps I had not hooked it up correctly. It turns out, though, that the secret trick is to prime the hose by sucking on it. I used my mityvac, first on the hose between the reservoir and pump, and then once that hose was almost full, I plugged it back in to the pump, and used the mityvac on the other side of the pump to pull it right on in. Once there was oil in the pump, every time I pushed the button, the oil traveled about an inch down the hose. Eventually it came out of the applicator tip. So it appears to be working! I have not yet taken it for a test ride, because the V-Strom is currently waiting for a new water pump seal. I have that seal on order and I look forward to testing it soon. In the meantime, oil did drip on my garage floor. I am not going to assume this is normal, though - likely it's the result of me testing it by pumping until oil came out. If you pumped it while riding, and didn't immediately park, I don't think the bike would mark its spot like this. Supplies needed for the install, that were not included in the kit: Extra wire Connectors to link the pump to the switch, the switch to the fuse, and the fuse to the extra wire. GOOP More/longer zip ties than the ones that were included, in contrasting colors if you want to take nice photos Things to know, that are not covered by the directions: Leave some slack in the hose so you can get the bottle out. Prime the pump. It took me about six hours to install it, but half that time was spent trying to figure out why I couldn't get the oil to come through, before I got out my mityvac and primed the pump. I was also taking things very slowly and carefully, and taking a lot of pictures. Knowing what I now know, I could probably install one of these in an hour or two. Of the three oilers, this one is the simplest to install.

That is extremely cool. I have a patch of velcro on my remote, and I stick it to the top of my brake master cylinder. But I have destroyed a few remotes when I've forgotten to take them off there when it's raining. Those suckers are expensive! I've also seen kits to do this, but they're even more expensive than the remotes. This mod combines the best of both worlds.

The trick with the bicycle shorts, is to wear them in place of the underwear, rather than layering them over the underwear. Pretty much all briefs or loose boxers will give you seams or folds between you and the seat. These are killer on longer rides. Even if you're wearing jeans, if you have bicycle shorts under them in place of those briefs, you'll be better off. Heck, even though women's underwear is designed to be much smoother so it'll look good under clothes, it still has seams and elastic leg bands in very bad places that will hurt on any ride that's more than an hour or so. I can only imagine how much worse men's briefs would be, with their lumpy shapes and heavy facings around the leg openings and the fly.

Make sure everyone in the group knows it's a group and has agreed to ride in a group. Just because you all know each other, and you're all camping at the same spot, does not mean you're riding as a group. If someone at the campsite says that they don't want to ride with a group, listen to them! Don't follow them, crowd them, refuse to pass them, and then panic and start imagining that they're dead in a ditch when they find a way to escape the group.

I tried that on my first vtec. Got the gels out of a bicycle accessory seat cover. I hated it. I also tried a factory suzuki gel seat on my old bandit. Didn't like it either; they're just squishy and isolate you too much from the bike. YMMV tho'. The other problem with the gel, is that it gets really, really hot if you park your bike in the sun. There's a guy on the V-Strom forum, who lives in the tropics. He posted an accessory to help with this - it's a rolled window shade attached to his top case. When he parks the bike, he pulls down the shade and attaches the handle to his steering stem, to keep the sun off his seat. :idea3: :laugh:

I have the previous generation Autocom, the PRO-7 model. It's been wonderful, can't say enough good things about it. It's got a lot of miles on it, has been used heavily for several years now, but still works like new. I run either CB or FRS, and music. The truckers tell me that my mic sounds so good that they can't even tell I'm on a bike. Prior to that I had a Chatterbox that gave me no end of trouble; it lasted only one season.