Wintersdark

I really don't like the front end around the air intakes, not even a little bit.

Factory torque settings for the drain plug are insanely high. Afaik pretty much nobody uses those values - steel plug into an aluminum oil pan, it's gonna pull the threads out.

Huh. My set of Road 5's (that recently came off for the winters) required very minimal weights - IIRC 5 front and 15 rear, something like that. My Anlas winters are a lot worse - some 30g or so each.

That's a big part of why I'm here on a Tracer, too. Thought about going all ADV - my brother in law is hard into the whole thing, along with a local group - but my body just can't handle the punishment of offroad riding anymore. I'm too much of a wuss now On the other hand, I can go on street rides with them, and leave them in the dust while still fitting right in at stops. The KTM SuperAdventures are awesome offroad, but they loose out on pavement

Man, if it never snowed, I'd be out on my bike every day. As it stands, I still have to park it when it's actually snowing, in case we get stuff like that. Short days, though? Darkness puts riding out of the question? Do you Aussies not have headlights?

What's funny here is that this is a more mild winter - our normal winters are insanely cold and dry. But it rarely snows (we get 333 days of sun per year) as any moisture just freezes out of the air before it can build up enough to really snow. But instead, thanks to global warming, our winters are getting warmer. Instead of -40, we're capping out around -26, and spending a lot more time in the single digit negative temps - prime snowing temperatures. Sucks for me, as the cold is fine, but lots of snow is much less manageable. I hear ya about the shorter days, that sucks a lot. I work 7am-7pm / 7pm-7am shift work, which means it's dark when I go to work, and dark when I go home, every day, regardless of which shift I'm working.

Not in this; though. A little snow or slush sure, but there's like a solid foot out there right now. That's just gross. It's supposed to clear up now, though, after it snowed clear through the last 3 days.

Yeah, winter came early this year. 😭

Just get heated liners? I've got these: Firstgear 12V Heated Glove Liners (LG-XL) | 50% ($45.00) Off! Once you wear heated glove liners, you'll never look back. The... and they work fine. They're thin - made specifically for wearing under other gloves. I've moved to full heated gloves, though, as I prefer armor - I can deal with road rash on my arms and legs, but not my hands

Totally honest here: If I could order those panels in a matte black, I'd do that. I wrapped mine - I've got the Grey/Red/White 2019 model, and really didn't like the white lower panels (it's the only spot of white on the bike!). Wrapping mine went pretty well, but TBH when it comes time to redo it, I'll just spray them with plastidip. The vinyl works great, and has held up really well now it's into it's second winter, but it's pretty challenging to apply to this part. Not impossibly so - this was my first vinyl wrapping experience and it went pretty well - but it was challenging. They really do just look significantly better in black, though. On pretty much every GT color scheme.

The autoignition temperature of gasoline is around 280C/500F in a lab. With a watercooled engine turned off, there shouldn't be anything exposed even close to those temps - and splashing fuel is going to cool stuff very fast. Hell, you can touch anything on the bike except the exhaust headers without risk of burns while it's running. Tests, such as here: Fuels > Autoignition Temperatures Detailed Results show a failure of pump gas to autoignite even over 1200F on exhaust. So, the risk of fire is basically nonexistent. In a somewhat related note, had a local riding buddy recently have one of his fuel injectors (or at least the the connection to the throttle body) *fall out* while riding his GSX750. Sprayed gas everywhere at highway speeds, shooting it forwards up into the console where wind blew it back across the top of the tank, soaking him. Not exactly what you want to have happen at speed; bike suddenly barely running, gas all over you. Be so damn surprising and terrifying. In an otherwise somewhat related note, not paying attention due to the presence of a sexy lady near by is also how I managed to get in my first motorcycle accident. Turn - all full of 16 year old guy on his new bike hormones - wave to the pretty girl...... and rear-end a stopped Jetta at 50. Good times!

A direct violation of what?

I've often thought about it but yeah, ultimately I'm just never in a situation where I desperately need that extra capacity AND will find it particularly onerous to just slowly squeeze in the extra fuel. The Tracer's tank is reasonably sized, and at least everywhere I find myself gas stations are readily available or there's lots of advance notice. Hell, even on my MT07, it was so rarely an issue that filling the last part slowly was rare enough as to just not matter. Contrast that with the terror of potentially damaging the tank in the process (my willingness to get my hands dirty coupled with my general idiocy make this a real danger)... nah. Also: am I the only one who just stays on the bike when filling? I don't think in 25 years of riding, I've ever gotten off my bike to fill it.

High or low doesn't impact slope: the two positions raise both the front and back of the seat equally.

This bothers me too. A lot. I mean, it doesn't really matter and it's easy to forget about, but as soon as you look at it along the bars, from side to side, it just looks wrong. Nobody looking at the bike has ever noticed it, but it drives me nuts every time I take stuff apart and put it back together.

Hah I didn't call and ask first because I'm dumb, but I ran ethanol free, and my bike did indeed run overly rich (MT07, mind you, but yeah). Called them, and they said exactly the same thing: that it's tuned for E10 as that's what's pretty much universally available. Apparently, being at higher elevation (3400+ft ASL) really contributes too.

The reason this happens is that the ethanol will bind with moisture over time. It's not a problem when you're riding a lot, but when you're bike (/lawn mower/etc) sits over the winter, the ethanol in the gas will bind with moisture and separates. Hence running bad, and potentially causing some corrosion issues.

Hmm. I will interject that my bars (2019 GT) are indeed *not* standard. They're 22mm at the grip, but IIRC 1" where they attach to the risers (I assume 1"; wider, but I don't recall the exact measurement). So if replacing them, you'd want to do some measuring first just to be sure you're getting a set that fits.

Unless you're putting regular into a high compression engine and having detonation, in which case you'll destroy your engine over time. If there's no detonation, then yeah, it doesn't matter.

Exactly. I mean, a dollar more at the pump is simply not going to break me. If I'm so hard up that I'm looking to shave a single dollar when I get gas, then maybe the 13k bike is something I should reconsider I feel people are funny about gas pricing in general. I mean, sure, nobody wants to pay more, but even with my old pickup gas was simply not a major part of my monthly budget. I put a lot of miles on my bike, but really, it's just not a lot of money relative to basically any other expense. Like, I end up paying roughly $600 a year in tires alone. Not using the premium that's asked for by the engineers who made it can result in increased engine wear or catastrophic failure. That's kind of a big deal, and definitely not somewhere I'll risk saving the price of a cup of coffee once per week. Ethanol vs. non-ethanol is different, however. Here anyways, there's no cost difference (it's just a matter of finding which stations have ethanol free premium, but it's all the same price) and also - with the potential exception of if you let your bike sit - there's no wear/damage issues with ethanol. Ethanol free is (slightly) more power-dense, which makes it (here, where the sticker price is the same) slightly more cost effective in theory, though I've never seen a difference in mileage in practice.

If the heated seat was tied into the controls for the grips, I'd probably buy one. I'd love to be able to control them all together, ideally yeah with settings in the menu to set them up in a similar way the grips are set up. Being separate though, and thus needing (yet another) separate control, I'd just buy a heated insert for my existing seat instead, as they're a tenth of the price. My handlebars are kind of scary now. All the stock controls for the GT (which start out kind of intimidating), controls for my heated gear, wireless charging phone mount, buttons for my front flood light and RGB LED kit, It's kind of crazy. There's literally no open bar for attaching more stuff. What I really should do is build a nice, neat control panel with LED's I can mount to the riser cap's 10mm holes to get everything all into one neat little panel.

Yup. I dremel the pins off 100% of my bikes inside the first week I own them. Ultimately, you want to adjust the angle of the controls to your body anyways, so the pins tend to be counterproductive unless you're the mythical Average Rider. I've never once drilled handlebars, and I've never had a problem with controls rotating in use. If they're loose, as others said a wrap of electrical tape as a shim both protects the bars and fixes that, but to be honest I've never once even needed to do that. My Tracer's controls aren't shimmed, the pins are long gone, and the controls are completely immobile.

I've run mine with 87 and 91, and it was indistinguishable in use. However, I'm at 3400'ASL, so there's that. But, the manual asks for 91, it's a high compression engine, and while the pump price for 91 is significantly higher than 87, the actual dollar cost difference in a tank of gas is trivial. For me, gas is currently [CAD] $1.039/l for regular, and $1.319/l for premium. That's $18.70 for the tanks full 18l capacity of regular or $23.74 for a full tank of premium. Things might not be great financially, but I'm perfectly willing to spend the $5 per full tank to avoid increased engine wear eventually causing catastrophic engine damage. It's even less of an expense on US road trips, what with you guys having such cheap gas.

I didn't need the inserts on my older '80's carbureted bikes, but definitely do on my newer EFI bikes. YMMV, but that's probably why they aren't built in. Having to cut the two included inserts to get four, however, does seem really janky given it's a 4-channel tool; why not just include 4? It wasn't a big deal, but yeah, it was surprisingly hard to cram the inserts into the vacuum hose. I thought of all sorts of ways to make it easier, but got "lazy" (it really would have been less work to bevel the edges of the inserts, maybe lube them a bit) and just fell back on the old stand by: Brute Force And Ignorance.

I've had mine to 225. Where exactly you end up depends heavily on your size, weight, whether you've got the cases on the bike or now (they're not very aerodynamic), and all that stuff. Realistically, I found roughly 215 was (stock) top for me, but adding a couple teeth on the rear sprocket made a noteable difference, and removing the bags and getting down flat on the bike gets me around the 225 mark. The Tracer isn't rev-limited for speed, it's purely a HP vs drag issue, so top speed varies between situations.