Cogswell

My guess is that even the worst tire today is probably light years better than the best tires that were available when our bikes were new. Probably can't go too wrong with any of them. I'm not familiar with many of the brands / types mentioned - I'm supposing that most of them for general use are 2 compound tread or even 3 - I would be partial to that feature. My Road 2's are 2CT and I'm getting around 9,000 miles from a combination of touring and spirited riding through the canyons - they could go more for commuting, but by then they're getting squared off and the handling suffers sufficiently for them to be replaced.

Sweet! Nice pics - thanks for sharing.

^^^ Agreed - we'd love to see photos of your ride and the Scottish landscape where you live. Cheers

The creativity / enginuity we see on the forum never ceases to amaze me. That's a simple, elegant solution to ease fault diagnosis. Thanks for sharing.

If you have a Mityvac or similar vacuum pump (I use mine on brake fluid changes) that also works to pull oil out of the sump. This past winter I used it to pull the power steering fluid out of the reservoir on my truck - works great. Look on Amazon for some silicone tubing - it's far more flexible and does not hold a shape like the vinyl tubing that is more typically available.

That's interesting on the date codes. I wondered when going through Walmart for $15 less than ebay if that somehow relates to how much Walmart charges the Vendor vs Ebay, or if they sell their older inventory on Walmart for a bit less and newer on ebay. I'm thinking maybe the latter. Regardless, what I got is fine - they'll be worn out before they go stale.

We're spoiled . . . !! Believe me, we are. For all the bashing of America, everyone here has it pretty darn good and most don't even know it. Hard to figure why such price and availability disparity . . . It must seem so good to be true that I attached the invoice. I wish it could be shared around, but shipping is prohibitive. Anyway, hard to know about end of stock. If seems this vendor still has them available. If through year end they still have them, depending on how much I ride this year I may snag on one more set to put away before they're gone for good.

So the new PR2s arrived. Ground shipping (included in price) was 4 days via Fedex. Both made in Spain (same as previous sets), front date code is 0521 and rear is 4819. Not quite garden fresh, but I'm good with it. Oddly my last set from this vendor were both 2020 manufacture so no telling how stock is is being rotated. Regardless, for $205 ( via Walmart online) at my door for the set, I can afford to change them out a bit more often.

And, it's the cover shot right now! DOH! And she's a beauty! There goes my diploma from the Honda school of observation!!

My experience with double gaskets on the filter was on 1st start as soon as pressure built oil was spraying everywhere. It wasn't the slightest bit subtle - but that was just mine, you never know. Regardless, if it were mine I would first get it on the c-stand and be sure you have adequate oil in the sump. Then, wearing some safety glasses or better yet a face shield, start it up and observe what's going on. With that much oil about it should make itself readily apparent. If you can't find anything, then you might clean it - maybe pressure wash, then run it some more and using either paper towel or kleenex run it over suspect surfaces such as the oil lines and see if oil shows up on the towel. If you have a slight leak that has added up over time that may not be visually apparent that should get it. Also, have a look at your cam cover gasket bolts - IIRC the torque on those is 9 ft-lbs.

Having both my vote is non-vtec every day of the week and twice on Sunday. Honda hit its peak with that motor.

The ABS models have gold calipers and I've always liked that - adds some interest to the color scheme. At the risk of not keeping my 5th gen 100% stock, maybe doing the same on it could be a good wintertime project. Hmmm . . .

Wow - those types of problems really are a be-otch. By replacing the entire harness you may unknowingly address whatever the issue is, ground, or otherwise. That is, by pulling connectors apart and removing grounds you might distrub whatever corrosion is causing the issue and it may appear that the new harness fixed it when in reality it might have been that the replacement process ended up identifying the problem vs a new harness. Given that you were smelling something hot when this happened might indicate some high resistance in a circuit vs a bad ECU, though the latter could be an innocent bystander in the electrical shootout. Anyway, one of my maintenance practices which I've fallen behind on has been about every 3 years to separate every connector on the bike and using a flat toothpick treat every pin on each connector with Oxgard. Since by replacing the harness you'd be doing much the same anyway, going through end to end methodically to do that might be one way of finding the gremlin. Grum's certainly on to something with the main fuse - it sure seems common. Best for getting this sorted out - please share with us when you get to the bottom of it.

Yes, both G5 & 6.

Tom, Many thanks for all the years of helping us keep our bikes on the road! Best for what comes next for you. Cheers

Possibly a center stand dolly could help roll the bike around for easy parking. Also, a chock on the floor could aid in parking the car precisely each time to maximize space for the bike. Where there's a will there's a way!

It is indeed. I have loved the PR2s since they first came out and feel very lucky to be able to still get them and particularly at such a deal. I looked at international shipping and it's prohibitively expensive - in the $thousands, so unfortunately no way to share the good fortune across the ocean.

So, I ordered a set of PR2s from the same ebay seller on Walmart for $205 delivered. The Pilot Powers on my spare wheels are mid 2014 date codes so have to go. I'll report on the upcoming PR2's dates when they arrive.

I found these from the same seller on Walmart.com, same free shipping, for $15 cheaper. I have not purchased through Walmart previously, so not sure how well that works. Can save some cash though . . . Must be Walmart's seller fees are less than Ebay's.

Just put a new set of Michelin Defenders on the Honda cage. It took Costco almost 3 weeks to get em in. Caught their $150 off promotion and beat the coming price increases though, so worth the wait.

It wouldn't surprise me to see shortages of stock in tires - can't find what you want no matter the price. Not a prediction, but an observation that seems plausible given the incompetence of leadership. Weird, weird times.

Grum, That pricing is truly awful - if I did my conversion correctly, here it seems to be about $1.15 / L to as high as $1.60 /L depending on location and type - diesel seems to be running toward the to higher end of that (trucking is going off the charts, so that may contribute to the latter). The lefty Great Reset crowd is LOVING this. Biden’s energy secretary openly laughed when asked about how high gas prices are hurting average people - responded that "we should all be driving electric cars". George Soros and his evil crowd are also laughing - all the way to the bank. Create or make a crisis worse while the masses suffer from it, then pick their pockets by force. Beware the Great Reset, it's poised to ruin our lives.

True, now a lot of money being made. But, for a while in 2020 when driving went to nothing around April / May, the price of oil (not gas) went negative! There was so much excess oil and no place to store it, that producers had to pay people to take it from them! So I guess they figure they'll try to get back even. Oil is a tough business. With the all out assault now on the industry I don't think we'll ever return to cheap gas as we've had at times in the past.

I'm curious what people's thoughts are about plans for riding, particularly long trips, with the cost of fuel roughly doubling vs two years ago. Cutting back, staying about the same or balls out - ride it in to the ground before they take gas away completely. And if you're not cutting back, where do prices need to get to make you do that? What do ya'll think?