| Author | Message | ||
     Nade |
Hiya's, I went for a weekend ride away a couple of weeks ago and had a few issue's with my XB, so I thought I would share the tale here. So this starts 50km from home, and I'm riding with a group of 7, myself and one other pull over to wait for the rest to catch up after a winding section. As I restart and continue on, I notice my CEL is on! suddenly I'm on hyper alert, looking for an oil light, or a miss, or anything to indicate what might have caused it to come on.....and then I realized the fan hadn't come on when I stopped! It wasn't a cold day, but overcast and humid from night rain....it should have come one as I wasn't being gentle with my application of the throttle. I deemed it safe to continue on to our next planned stop about 90km away, as it was open country for the most part and the movement of air from traveling at 100km/hr was enough to not cause any issues. At the service station I pulled the seat and checked the fuse's and found the fuse for the fan blowen. Service station was sold out of the micro ones.....but luckily I found one in the spare slot. fitted it and we were off again.....until about 1/2 way to our next stop when some winding twisty sections caused the fan to want to switch on and the fuse blew again. This time I was starting to get worried. We stopped for fuel before our last leg and while swapping the fuse out we noticed a red object wedged into the fan. BINGO!!! The previous owner had done the 'breather/ airbox bypass' mod and had used plastic bungs in the original brether holes. These were held inplace with Aluminium tape, and I guess over time the heat had made the adhesive weaken and then the bung had fallen out, found the fan and gotten jammed by a blade against the rear grill and this was causing the fan to try and draw too much and blew the fuse. Once we pulled that out, all was good and I was off again. This last leg of the outward journey has a 26km section of pure motorcycle heaven, on a good day. Towards the mid point of this my front brake lever was beginning to squish my index finger on the throttle and cause me to twice over shoot on corners. The last time I realized the brakes were hot, and used up....and so was I. I had been enjoying myself so much I missed the changing road conditions and the fading brake. Lessons learned...almost the REAL hard way. Anyways the return trip was relatively uneventful, and I have since fitted BREMBO pads up front and so far I'm suitably impressed.  |
