What did you do with your bike today?

Rode to work, first time this week after the nasty, wet, slushy weather the first few days of the week. Today was a beautiful, clear and dry morning to ride but it was on the chilly side for mid March at 29F, but it should be close to 50F when I'm heading home later.
Of course the fact that I took 30 minutes on Sunday to clean my bike meant it was inevitable that I'd be riding in salt and grit again... I guess this is all my fault

Today I rode my bike for the first time in a couple weeks since I finished installing more LED lights on the back---- larger than what it had before.

And replacing the factory turn signal relay flasher unit with a new one ($25) made for LED or hybrid systems.

There is a "tiny" bit of bleed over that causes the rear left turn signal to shine at about 10% brightness when the right turn signal is activated & the right rear bulb is shining at 100% --but I can live with that.

After my weekly volunteer gig in the morning, I burned up what I had left of a 72 degree day (cloudy and windy, but, still, 72 degrees!) riding around like a chicken with my head cut off trying to find my BrakeFree light. I noticed it missing at lunch, so I backtracked to the volunteer place after calling to see if it was there (it pops off the helmet easily when you set it down). No luck. I had planned to ride some twisties to Walmart to pick up garbage cart bags, but when I was part way there, I decided that I didn't have enough time to get there and home in time to make supper, so I turned around, got ice cream (so it wasn't a total loss), filled up the tank, and went home.

Here's where it was.

I'm such an idiot.🤪 Believe me, I have learned my lesson!!! I will be developing new habits and muscle memory to make sure the dumb thing is attached to my helmet EVERY TIME before I take off!! And then I get home and there's a message from my husband saying he would be home from work late. So I could've still made the trip I had planned and still gotten supper on time. Did I mention that I'm a total idiot???🤪🤪🤪

Yesterday I did some small maintenance tasks on my bike. It was time for a flush of the brake and hydraulic clutch systems, so I did that. Also, I had noticed that my headlight seemed dim on one side:


One side of the H7 LED bulb was very dim. Since they came in a package of two back when I bought them, I happened to have a spare handy. After a grueling 30 minutes, I had a new bulb in place. (The German engineers who designed this torture chamber probably had a contest to see who could come up with the most difficult process for accessing the headlights.)

Oh, happy day!!! We're getting FRESH DRIVEWAY ROCK!!!!!!!

Not something WITH my bike, but FOR my bike, right?? I won't be riding for a couple days, so I hope my neighbor takes the initiative to run his roller over it between now and then.🤞🤞🤞 This is the shared portion of the drive with three other houses; my husband also worked on our private portion so it's in great shape now, too! I oughta go out of town to teach class more often -- who knows what he'll work on while I'm away! ( I'll be gone again for a couple days next week, so we'll see what happens then!!)

I am hoping to have my Goldwing back on the road by the end of the week.
I'm plugging away at all the repairs/upgrades that need to be done.
If I hadn't gotten sick with a miserable cold two weeks ago, I'd be riding by now.
Today I got the dashboard back in the fairing.
And...a big one for me....
The sides of the saddlebags have long lights down the side of them. They originally had some sort of electroluminesent panel in them. They burned out looong before I got the bike.
As of today, those lights have LED strips in them, and boy do they look nice.
Wasn't easy though. The red lenses were held onto the shell with some sort of hot glue. Had to dunk the entire light in boiling water to get the glue to give up.
But it was worth the effort. First time I've ever seen them lit up.
Tomorrow, a new windshield and maybe an oil change.

mike721 said:

Yeah, I hear you just can't wear out a Goldwing, they last forever.
I'm starting to feel the same way about my 08 Vision, it should turn 150,000 in the next week or so unless I switch to riding the 2016 instead.

Click to expand...

Of course I had to say that, of course I found a hopefully minor issue with my 2008 yesterday, though I will say it scared the **** out of me at the time!
I was running down the interstate on cruise control, I was coming up on a truck so I wanted to take it out of cruise, I tapped the front brake like I always do to turn off the cruise and absolutely nothing happened! I was like, what??
I squeezed the brake again, a bit harder NOTHING! Uh oh!!!
I then tried to find the switch, but not using the off switch normally I couldn't quickly find it so I hit the wrong one, at the time I thought it didn't work either but turned out I pushed the wrong one, was actually telling it to speed up!!
I tried turning the throttle to slow down, it was like arm wrestling with a robot, apparently the cruise actuator is VERY strong, it won
So now I'm starting to get too close for comfort with the truck in front of me, 75+ mph with a run away cruise control. This was not a good feeling!!!
I was trying to figure out my next move, thinking about maybe using the kill switch but that might have been awkward but then I thought, hmm, try the rear brake, and it worked.
PHEW!
I checked later, front brakes don't turn off the cruise, and no brake lights from the front brake lever.. rear works on both. So possibly a bad switch or wire... guess I have some troubleshooting ahead of me.

I don't need cruise but I didn't want to ride without brake lights so I took my 2016 to work today, first time it's been out since late fall, I try to keep that one out of the salt as much as possible, it's practically brand new with only 69,850 miles on it.