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What I learned after a 9000 mile tour on my Daytona

60K views 172 replies 58 participants last post by  The Underdog 
#1 ·
In rough order of importance:

1. Buy or make some sort of cruise control / throttle lock. This is not optional unless you are some sort of genetic freak.

2. Get a cramp-buster or equivalent for those times where it is impractical to use a cruise control / throttle lock. For example, the Blue Ridge Parkway. Almost 600 miles long and rarely a straight bit.

3. Do not embark on a long trip with a marginal chain. I had to cut my trip short because it is nigh on impossible to find anyone with all the stuff in stock to do a chain/sprocket job on a Daytona and when you do they want big money. Like $500... Side point... If you pull up to the gas station, spray chain lube on, and it boils instantly, your chain is too tight.

4. Mount some touring-oriented tires. I started out on a set of Pilot Powers that were already 6000 miles in. I had to replace the front once and rear twice on the road where I get no friend-hookups.

5. Rope plugs are not a viable solution. I had great luck with these things until I was 100 miles from nowhere in the Nevada desert, then they wouldn't last for ten minutes.

6. Bring tools to dismount, patch, and remount a tire if you are going to be out in the great wilds of nowhere for any length of time. This is not as much stuff as you think. Pair of 6" spoons, patch kit, and a small electric air pump will do it. I had CO2 but it doesn't work if some jackass at a random bike shop that you were forced to stop at takes pliers to your aluminum valve stem for no comprehensible reason and squashes it oval. My backup for the CO2 was a bicycle pump. It worked but boy does that get old fast when you have to do it three or 4 different times on the same flat on a three foot wide shoulder with 18 wheelers going by at 75mph.

7. Guard your phone with your life. Mine fell off the bike at night. I got it back but the battery took an odd bounce and was nowhere to be found. You don't realize how useful a smartphone is until you're 4000 miles from home and don't have it anymore.

8. Get some gold bond powder for your ass. Yeah, it's venturing dangerously into old-man territory but it will help you push through those long days when there's no scenery and you just have to get 800 miles of highway over with.

9. Always have somewhere to be, even if you really don't. Twice I had random people latch on to me and talk to me for, no shit, 6+ hours. Stuff like that will cost you a night's rest and throw your schedule off terribly.

10. Wear a CamelBak or some other sort of hydration pack. It's so nice not having to stop every time you want a drink.

11. Announce your trip on the forum before hand and line up crash-pads along the way. At 50mpg every $60 hotel day is worth about 700 miles in gasoline.
 
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#6 ·
Yes, you can. Double click on the empty area after your thread title in the "Trip reports" forum and voila - you can edit the name of your thread.

And WOW! 9000 miles? On Daytona? Was it like coast to coast? Where did you go? It would be really great to hear the details of this trip! Epic!
 
#13 ·
@Decepticon Don, It has taken a little over a month and I'll have some pics up soon.

@old&ugly, thanks for the editing tip!

@harcourt, yes, I was at Deals Gap! You had the black Daytona right? If so I remember talking to you. Beautiful bike man!


As far as details about the ride go, so much has happened that I don't even know where to start. What began as a trip to see my family while I was unemployed turned into a trip to see everybody I've lost touch with over the last 20 years. Now it's become a trip that I just want to be done with. I know I posted up like it was finished but I've actually still got 360 miles to go.

Hmmm, let's see. Things to say about the trip... I'll start with some complaining... My ass hurts, my hands are slightly numb all the time, and I'm sick beyond belief of hearing fucking wind noise. I've been listening to my ipod on shuffle for so long that I'm starting to realize that "shuffle" isn't actually random and there is a pattern to it that repeats. I've got these weird tan lines on my wrists and probably one on the back of my neck. When I checked into my hotel today I realized I had been wearing the same clothes for three days. There is something incredibly irritating about watching the center of my $250 rear tire wear untill there's a 2" wide flat spot while the sides look brand new. I've sprayed so much lube on the chain that I am pretty sure there is more lube than chain now. My adjusters are maxed out and the chain is still super loose and I'm starting to wonder if it's going to snap in half when I'm like a mile from home.

Now for some observations about habits and random stuff... For some reason I have a tendency to put the tank bag on too far to the right so it's usually touching my right arm but not my left. I think that might be because the bike is leaning to the left when I put it on after gassing up. My right ass cheek gets sore long before my left. My right leg goes to sleep before my left. More warm air comes out of the left side of the fairing than the right. At the beginning of the trip the bike would seem to pull slightly to the left when I would sit back and cruise with no hands. Now it doesn't do that anymore, not sure why, maybe the new tires. Speaking of tires, the left side of the front wore out before the right... When you fill the tank up to the top with gas then wait a minute, you can fit more in. WHERE IS IT GOING? Somewhere, about the middle of the country, there's an imaginary line. West of this line, you can't get 93 octane gas anymore and I don't know why. Someone on facebook said it was because of altitude but that's bullshit because it was 91 on the beach in California and that's right at sea level. My left earbud always falls out before my right. I haven't decided whether that's the fault of my helmet or if one of my ears is bigger than the other.

Ok, I'm sleepy. That's enough for now. In one of my other internet windows on this laptop, I'm putting together a google map of all the roads I took. I'll have that posted up soon along with a few of the best pictures.
 
#22 ·
Allright, allright... Before you all go making me out to be some kind of long-trip messiah, I'll say that I probably never did more than about 400 miles in a single day like without sleeping. Still, though. I do consider it a pretty cool accomplishment. I think I'm pretty well out of the realm where anyone can call me a poser motorcyclist. Well, I don't know how to do stunts, so I guess I'm still somewhat of a lamer in that dept.

So, details. As harcourt said, I went to deals gap. All I can say is that the Dragon is awesome beyond belief. The whole trip would have been much easier on some kind of cruiser type bike but I cannot tell you how much I appreciated the fact that I could remove all my luggage and have my badass little race-bike back. I spent a whole day going back and forth down 129 and that was worth whatever discomfort I had to suffer on the rest of the trip.

Let me reiterate... How fun was the Tail of the Dragon? Well, I rode all 580 miles of the Blue Ridge Parkway and Skyline Drive before getting to Deals Gap and I was sick to death of twisties. Then I sat in a seven mile traffic jam on a one way senic loop in Cades Cove (caused by people photographing deer of all things... you mean to tell me that people in the backwoods of North Carolina haven't seen deer??!!) only to find that my connecting road to the Dragon (Parsons Branch) was 8 miles of jeep trail consisting of gravel, pot holes, fallen logs, stream crossings, and mud. The only alternative was sit out the other 4 miles of traffic jam and detour back 60 miles or so around the bottom of the Great Smokey National Park. Yep, me and the Daytona went off-roading. I pulled out onto 129 at dusk and within two corners I KNEW it had all been worth it.

I still haven't worked out image hosting yet for trip pictures but here's a short video clip of a local girl leaving me in the dust. Action starts when she passes the white car.

[nomedia="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlYWCgcXH9A"]Rob gets PWNED by chick biker on Tail of the Dragon - YouTube[/nomedia]
 
#25 · (Edited)
So, here are some pictures of my luggage setup.

Triumph strap-on tank bag, Chase Harper saddle bags, Cortech tail bag. All bought off craigslist.

I had to make a bracket to keep the back ends of the saddle bags away from the tire. I also changed my rear turn signal mounts from double sided tape to velcro so I could hang them on the backs of the bags when I had them on.

Edit: Ok for some reason, pictures won't show up so I'll just put links for now till I learn how to get pictures to work right...

http://pixpipeline.com/d/1af6cc3691f2.jpg

http://pixpipeline.com/d/a5b7cdabe961.jpg

http://pixpipeline.com/d/186e133f96eb.jpg

http://pixpipeline.com/d/7fdb7d8cd52f.jpg

http://pixpipeline.com/d/e92ebf78d72c.jpg
 
#27 ·
I wanted one of those but nobody had one for 1.25" grips. I got the impression that they were only marketing them to the harley crowd. Where'd you get yours?

I ended up making one out of some steel brake line and a hose clamp that kinda worked on the same principle as the go-cruise but it was a piece of junk. It worked just well enough to be useable.
 
#29 ·
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