jimf

I got a V-Stream sport touring screen on Thursday. Swapped it in that night and rode ~700mi over the last three days. Previously I had tried the Ermax touring, Ermax sport touring, and Ermax sport touring + Puig deflector. Of those three I liked the last the best, but it was still pretty rumbly, especially at speed. They were all hell-and-gone better than the Yamaha screen though. The V-Stream is better. Nice clean air up to about 65mph, then it starts to get rumbly. It's not particularly loud until nearly triple digits mph. The bracket works well at keeping it from bouncing around, better than the Ermax which uses the Yamaha mounting plate. It has quite a bit less flex than the Ermax touring screen likely both because of its shape and the fact that it's a lot thicker. It's slightly taller than I prefer, I can't see over the top of it to see the road right in front of the tire, but the light smoke color is plenty clear enough. I was worried that it would block so much air that I'd stifle on a hot day, but it got up to about 80F and there was enough air coming around onto my arms and through the mesh jacket that it wasn't a problem. Works for me. Works really well for me, even. It also turns out to be an intensely good bug killer, and the world needs fewer bugs.

That is a nice, simple solution; I'm ashamed I never thought of it. I've been dithering over buying a top box, which would be really handy for holding bad-weather commuting gear -- which is in panniers now, but I gotta really want it to open that up and have everything fall out. If I'm springing for a "real" moto topbox I'd pretty much want to use the Yamaha unit because I already have the mounting hardware. Going with a budget approach like this one wouldn't have me thinking, "I really wish I just got the Yamaha stuff." Right about now I think I probably should be thinking "budget."[1] Regarding the appearance, I was going to say "That looks pretty ghetto," but really it looks more workmanlike or perhaps truckish. It's not so dissimilar from the look of a lot of the "adventure" luggage but a fiftieth of the cost. It's definitely the cleanest looking shoestring-budget top box I've ever seen. Thanks for the idea! [1] Like maybe I shouldn't buy a bunch of moto or guitar stuff[2] after just popping for a Canon 5Dmk3 the other day.[3] [2] Camera stuff? Moto stuff? Or music stuff? Some decisions are really hard! Can't I have *any* cheap hobbies? [3] Especially after giving only a vague "I'm getting a camera that works better in low light" to my wife[4], without mention of price.[5] [4] Hey, it's a "family" purchase. I need the low light capability for stage shots of my daughter's acting troupe.[6][7][8][9] [5] If one box shows up it's one thing, but if LOTS of them start showing up there are always uncomfortable economic discusions. [6] No, really. [7] Ok, mostly. [8] How about "to some degree"? [9] Well, it really will be a big improvement for that.

I don't find the FJ's pegs so much like torture instruments, but the original pegs are unbelievably slippery when wet. If the bike is fully loaded I use the peg to climb on, and in the rain that becomes absolutely impossible, I just slip off. (Ho boy did I look like a complete idiot in THAT parking lot.) My solution -- sitting in a bag of parts right now because I ran out of motorcycle wrenching time last weekend -- is going to be a set of Super Tenere pegs. I really like their design, which has a steel bear-trap metal part with a rubber insert. Stand up on them and your boots hit the bear-trap teeth for excellent traction, but rest your feet lightly and they float on the rubber bits. I was actually looking for a pin plus circlip to use for this, as you used. I wouldn't worry about the circlip, I've had at least one motorcycle whose pegs were held on that way (the Daytona, I think); it should be just fine. Unfortunately I wasn't able to find the pins at my local hardware store (they had zillions of circlips but nothing to circlip them to, go figure) so I opted for clevis pins, which are secured with cotter pins. They had lots of those. As a backup, if I decide the cotter pins are too intrusive or rust too easily or look too ugly or whatever, I bought some bolts and nylock nuts. The only problem with the Tenere pegs (besides that they're a bit expensive, $84 from BikeBandit for the pair with the rubber inserts IIRC) is that the peg is 24mm wide at the hinge point and the FJ's mounts are 21 or maybe 22mm, so I'll have to grind them down slightly. It's all a small price to pay to never slip off the damn things again.

... like you I added a dash of epoxy - as indeed I had done earlier on my BMW, which used the identical lights without problems. Those screws could/ should be a couple of mm longer. Added later. I recall that I also drilled out a little more depth under the head of the screw (in the 'tab' part), no more than about 5mm, to allow the tiny screw to bed further into its thread. Done carefully, there's plenty of 'meat' there, and the metal is soft enough. Then some Araldite on the screw threads. Huh, it never even occurred to me to drill it out more; that would likely have solved my snugness problem on the one unit. I had been afraid of using much in the way of torque on that bolt just because the metal was so obviously soft/weak, they were obviously going to be easy to strip. I may well do that if I have to swap in one of my backups at some point, so thanks for the tip. I'm glad to hear that you had already done the epoxy trick. Great minds thinking alike and all that. :-) I had never before heard of Araldite, I had to look that one up. I use loctite as a matter of course on any bolt on the motorcycle, but in this case where I was epoxying the junction together anyway I just smothered the bolt in epoxy too.

I believe these are the same Cree LEDs that I'm using. I've been pretty pleased by them, even independent of the very low cost, but one thing to be aware of is that there have been failures where the mounting bracket attaches to the main light. It uses a tab/slot arrangement with a small bolt that holds it together and the manufacturing tolerances are pretty poor. One one of mine (but not the others) it wasn't possible to get a snug fit, which can lead to early fatigue failure. I believe if you look around on this site you'll find photos of a case where the junction failed, the metal of the slots tearing away. In that particular case the lights had been mounted on the fork lowers, ie they were unsuspended and subject to some pretty heavy shocks as a result. I'm sure that had a lot to do with the premature failure, and the way you and I mounted them would be far less stressful, but the poor tolerances didn't give me the warm fuzzies. To give me greater peace of mind I coated everything with a good dollop of epoxy before I bolted the two pieces together. That completely solved the poor fit and should add a bunch of structural strength. It seems like cheap insurance. I've heard that the LEDs themselves have a high failure rate, although that seems luck-of-the-draw -- some people have them fail almost immediately, others have used them for a year or more without issue. I haven't done more than fair-weather commuting on mine, and they won't see their first tour for another couple of weeks, but so far so good. I bought two pair not realizing just how inexpensive they were, so I have spares. :-) I was going for light in the corners, not conspicuity, and thusly aimed they work quite well. Certainly it's hard to complain about the bang for the buck, two pair plus brackets to mount them to the crash bars was about US$100 total. Here's a link to my setup, which was mostly a clone of another I found here: http://fj-09.org/post/26977 (Hmm. Moving to a new server appears to have busticated the photo links. I'll see if I can fix that.)

Installed a Kaoko throttle lock, even though I have Yamaha heated grips. I describe the installation here: http://fj-09.org/post/39477

Err, you have misinterpreted what I was trying to get at. I was comparing the time to correct a skid caused by overbraking between human and ABS, not time to initiate braking in the first place. The latter is a very interesting topic these days, though, which I'll get to a bit later. The best way to utilize an ABS system is to keep just under the point where it engages; this is very, very close to the optimal braking force relative to available traction. If you can do that consistently, regardless of conditions or distractions, then ABS won't be especially helpful. Unfortunately, in the real world, nobody is that good all the time and very few are that good in anything but ideal conditions. You have made a very large omission in this analysis: You assume that "brakes on" is the same in both cases, and it isn't. Once you're skidding you lose a huge fraction of available braking force; it's the difference between sliding and static friction, and the difference is huge. So, all that time you're taking to reduce pressure and recover from the skid is spent with the brakes operating at a small fraction -- typically well under half -- of the available braking force if you weren't skidding. By cycling rapidly the ABS is going in and out of the skid point, spending some of its time not skidding, whereas you spend none of your time not skidding. An ABS system would have to have the brakes completely disengaged more than half of the time to do worse than you are, and that just isn't what happens. Let's take some example numbers to illustrate. We know that sliding friction is less than half of static; let's just say it's (a very generous) 50%. If ABS were spending half of its time without the brakes applied then it couldn't do any better than 25% of optimum (half of the time braking at half of available force). If it were spending all of its time sliding, it would do no better than 50%, the difference between sliding and static friction. In the real world, however, ABS systems typically brake at 90% of optimum or better. (Many magazines supply both figures for motorcycles so you can see that this is true.) That would simply not be possible unless the ABS system were spending the majority of its time not only not skidding, but also running very close to the optimum braking force. ABS systems do not work by watching for a skid and just fully releasing the brakes for awhile. They watch for a skid, reduce braking until the skid stops, and then reapply until the skid starts again. The faster you can run that cycle, and the less you have to reduce pressure to get the wheel rolling again, the closer to the best possible braking you'll get -- crossing over and under the skid point, but never by very far. Anyway, the thing to remember is the flip-side of the "they operate 10% worse than optimal" number: Even if you have completely screwed up your braking, an ABS system will allow you to get 90% of the performance out of the brakes anyway. If you do not have ABS that number drops below 50%, and only that good if you keep the bike upright and don't just let go of the brakes in a panic when the front starts sliding, which is one of the two things almost everyone does the first few times they're confronted with a front-wheel skid (the other is that they crash, or in the common vernacular, "lay it down"). Which brings me to another point, one of the ease of determining maximum braking force. Without ABS the right way to brake is to ease the brakes on, initiating weight transfer and gradually increasing braking force until the wheel is just starting to cry a little. Alas, that is a pretty damn hard thing to do when you're staring at the front quarter panel of the asshat who just turned left in front of you. It is common -- very, very common -- to jam on the brakes and just plain fall down, even when there would have been plenty of space to stop. This is the whole point of the MSF emergency braking drill, to teach you how to brake hard and fast, but not too fast. ABS, however, gives you another option, and one that works very well even in the most panic-strewn situation: Grab all the brakes you can, engaging the ABS, and then reduce brake force until it stops cycling. The ABS will immediately be giving you 90% of optimum, and once you drop below the cycle point you will be at or very, very near the optimum. Most importantly this works well given the reflexive reaction is to grab too much brake anyway, with your mind taking a second or so to catch up and remind you that modulation would be a good idea. Also, very few people are any good at modulating the rear brake. I mentioned before that I locked mine 100% of the time in panic situations, causing loss of stability and risk of highside. Recognizing that I was unable to properly modulate the rear I trained myself not to use the rear at all in such situations, and the end result was far more control when things went pear-shaped. ABS changes the equation on that, too; it's entirely reasonable to smash down on the rear because the ABS system will control the skid for you. No loss of control, and again you get about 90% of maximum available braking force. That's a whole lot better than the 0% I was getting with my "no rear brakes" technique, right? Now, that's not actually a big improvement in the real world because even a cruiser only gets a maximum of 25% of braking from the rear; most bikes get perhaps 10%, and sportbikes more like 5%. Even so, that paltry 4% could be the difference between stopping in time and an ambulance ride. I'll take it, TYVM. The 80% number is a rule of thumb across most vehicles, but as I just mentioned the number can be much higher for some motorcycle types -- it depends a lot on where the center of gravity is. The higher and more forward it is, the more you get from the front. Regarding "can't easily tell if front or rear ABS is kicking off," that is something you can learn to differentiate with a little practice. It's not hard at all to tell the difference between pulsing in your fingertips and pulsing in your boot once you get to the point where your brain is interpreting rather than panicking. With or without ABS the best way to get good at this stuff is to practice, practice, practice. I do so almost every ride, rain or shine. I'm not ashamed to say that I was completely terrible at it when I first started riding, so much so that I would routinely get waaaay close to hitting someone who pulled out in front of me even though I should have been able to come to a complete stop before I was halfway there -- this despite MSF training. With regular practice I got much, much better. The FJ is the first bike I've ever owned with ABS, and I'm also not ashamed to say that when I first started practicing with it I also had a hard time determining which end was pulsing. The more times I activated ABS the better I got at being able to figure that out. Also, the better I got at being able to determine the line at which ABS would engage. Pre-ABS that was kind of scary to push the brakes to the max since a locked front can easily put you on the floor and cost hundreds or even thousands to repair the bike. The technique I worked out is very simple: Give the rear a nice big push and let the ABS system sort that out, ignoring whatever I'm feeling in my boot. At the same time, try my best to ease the brakes on to get the weight transfer going, but if ABS starts cycling I'll feel it in my fingers and reduce pressure a little bit until cycling stops. Because I do this again and again using the same strip of tarmac and braking/stop points, I have been able to objectively determine that this technique has allowed me to become far more consistent at it than I ever was without ABS. Time for a sidebar I mentioned before, on the difference between human and computer initiating braking. About five years ago now the insurance figures started to come in on the first Volvo model that included an automatic braking system. The numbers were startling: The automatic braking system reduced the overall accident rate by more than 80% versus Volvos that did not have that feature. Going back to the early 1990s, the theory was that pushing ABS as a standard safety feature was going to reduce accident rates a lot. As the numbers came back from accident statistics it turned out that they had no effect at all. The theory most commonly espoused as to why this was the case was "risk compensation," the idea that having additional safety features makes you feel that you can expose yourself to greater risk because you are "protected." While it's likely that this is the case for the more extreme amongst us, speaking with a number of "normal" people I found that few people had any idea what ABS did, and many didn't even know their car had the feature at all. I drew a different conclusion: I believed that the problem wasn't that the car's braking system was not performing as well as it could, but rather that most drivers involved in accidents weren't applying their brakes anywhere near soon enough. By the time they realized they ought to be braking hard the braking system was not going to be adequate no matter what, so ABS or no ABS didn't matter. Those Volvo statistics vindicate my point of view. When the computer figures out that you're in trouble and initiates emergency braking for you, accident rates drop by a huge percentage. Moreover, those ABS systems proved more than adequate to get the vehicle stopped a gigantic fraction of the time. Braking early is way more important than getting that last 10 or 20% out of your braking system. The lesson for us motorcyclists? Look as far ahead as you can to see the danger points. The faster you see them the faster you're on your brakes and the more likely you don't hit something.

Here is the thing: ABS is not magic. It's a recovery system. Those statements that "ABS does worse" ignore the simple fact that if you're braking optimally ABS will not engage. It only does so when you've screwed the pooch and overcome available traction. Moreover, ABS will correct for this faster than you -- or anyone -- can. Human reaction times are rarely much better than 0.3sec at the best of times. With more than one braking channel to contend with, and your attention split between braking and whatever it was that made you have to drop anchor in the first place, it's almost certain to be two or even three times that long. In contrast, even the lousiest ABS systems are significantly faster, and they are that fast every time, no matter what is going on around them or how many wheels they are controlling. To give you a real-world example, the first round of budget ABS systems from GM back in the early 1990s, which were considered laughably bad even at the time, still managed a cycle time of .18sec -- half the time of a human under optimal conditions. Today's systems are at least five times faster than that, typically ten times, and some are more than 20 times faster. I'd have to go dig around to find the FJ's cycle times, but from experience I believe it's cycling no slower than .03sec -- fully an order of magnitude faster than the best you'll be able to manage manually, and likely 20-30x faster in an emergency situation. What's more, it's that fast on both channels simultaneously. You aren't; while your digits can manage to react in a few tenths of a second, your ankle has nowhere near that dexterity. On top of that, human dexterity and reaction times drop off a cliff as soon as attention is split. Reaction times don't halve when you've got two things to contend with, they fall off 80+%. (There is of course a range, but very very few people do much better than that, and only with a lot of training so it becomes reflexive.) This explains why it is, as you point out, extemely difficult to beat ABS systems under non-ideal situations, especially with multiple distractions. Humans are just not very good at that. I'm pretty darn good at modulating the front brake optimally, the result of many hours of mountain bike riding and near-daily emergency braking practice on the bike (a habit I developed after screwing up a few times avoiding morons. The rear, though? Nope. In emergency situations I lock the rear 100% of the time. Pre-ABS the best technique for me was to ignore the rear entirely so the bike would remain stable, and put all of my attention on modulating the front. It made a big real-world difference. Granted, there are people who can do that pretty darn well; you can watch them in slow-mo on every MotoGP broadcast, for instance. But even they are doing it under tightly controlled circumstances, and they screw it up quite a lot as soon as you put moisture on the track -- never mind automobiles. Also granted, the situation on dirt is very different. ABS systems tend to be awful in dirt (and even worse in snow!), where lockups can build a wedge of material ahead of the tire and improve brake performance dramatically. The best ABS systems can adapt to conditions and do very well anyway, but simple systems like in the FJ are quite bad at it. (Then again, so is its suspension, and look at all that vulnerable stuff on the bottom that you can easily destroy with rocks. It's not intended as a dirtbike, no matter that some of us will use it that way anyway.) On the other hand, there is a good reason why a lot of bikes that are intended to be used a lot in dirt offer a mixed-mode ABS where the front wheel uses ABS and the rear does not. Front wheel slides cause crashes frequently and ABS can reduce that likelihood. On the dirt, then, the question is a value judgement between improved braking on the front versus the increased likelihood of crashing. On a lightweight dirtbike the answer may very well be "no ABS." On a $20,000 R1200GS, however....

Most excellent. What parts did you need to buy? This is on my list of things to do to the bike before spring. I think all I need is the peg, the rubber bit, and the bolt that holds the rubber bit on -- and I can reuse the pivot pin and retention clip from the original pegs. Do I have that about right?

Mine were fine, but the mechanic who did assembly is one careful dude with a habit of checking everything. He's the primary reason I bought the bike where I did, even though I surely paid a few hundred dollars more than I might have at one of the bigger dealerships. Shops that have good service should be supported. Anyway, that's my way of saying that it may depend on who did the assembly. After hearing reports of losing those bolts on this site I had planned to pull them out and loctite them, just to be sure, but I never got around do it until I installed the heated grips 5.5 months later.

There's an member map: https://www.zeemaps.com/map?group=1528942 The link is at the top of the page ("FJ-09.org Member Map"). I'm in Arlington, MA. The riding in my immediate surrounds is urban/suburban and not so much fun in terms of traffic, traffic lights, terrain, or cops so I take regular rides out to western MA and up to VT and NH to compensate. If anyone else does that, it might be fun to hook up sometime. I can't believe the gorgeous (or at least very warm!) weather we're having in the northeast this fall, very unusual for this time of year. Unfortunately home and work has kept me near the house for the past several weeks but at least there have been plenty of lunchtime rides.

Thanks. I was just playing around with the windshield mount this morning and determined that all of the motion I was concerned about was in the rubber mountings for the windshield itself. The mounting plate is solid. So, your note comes as no surprise. I'll be pulling out the drill tomottow, I think. I might end up having to give the EZ Pass transponder a new home, looks like it might be a little tight for thta behind the GPS. I looked at the dash display mounting too. I think that could be made to work, but it would need a plate to be fabricated. I don't see myself doing that.

Ha ha ha, that's the understatement of the week.

I have a friend who mounted his GPS on the windscreen bracket of an FJR and said that he was worried it would break the bracket, it bounced around so much. As such he was skeptical of doing it on the FJ. (He also owns an FJ, BTW, we have a fair selection of FJ owners in my favorite riding group.) I don't know what the FJR's bracket looks like, but I have a hard time believing that the FJ's bracket can't hold the added load -- both because it's fairly beefy metal (both the screen support and especially the sliding base) and because the bracket is supported by four substantial bolts around the mounting area hupelde used. I'm more worried about the whole bracket bouncing around since it's all but impossible to screw down the screen slider firmly enough to prevent that, at least not with the stock hand knobs. Anyway, I would also love to hear how stable the mounting is in practice, although I do intend to give it a try myself in the upcoming couple of weeks regardless. I'm also going to take a look at the display mounting points to see if there's anything useful there.

Should be this one: http://www.amazon.com/Ram-Mount-Motorcycle-Clutch-Reservoir/dp/B0012TT8BK/ref=sr_1_13?ie=UTF8&qid=1446077349&sr=8-13&keywords=ram+handlebar+mount The photos actually show two different versions of the mount; I'm not sure what the difference is other than where the "RAM" logo is printed on it.