I’ve planned an Alps tour with a GF.
Links to Google Maps tracks…
2 Lienz to around the Sella Group
5 Landeck to Stanzach short way
6 Landeck to Stanzach long way
The idea was to allow ourselves some short cuts and extra roads to use, depending on how the trip goes. We may also take an extra hour to ride into Lichtenstein, just to say we were there.
I’m one of the riders who wanted my feet down on my first bike. I am not ashamed of this. It was some security and I needed it. Being able to put both of my feet down gave me confidence that I wasn’t going to tip over, wasn’t going to damage my bike, and was going to make the ride. When I found my lowered F650GS, I was ecstatic. Honestly, it’s been the perfect starter for me. It’s got a propellor on the side, I can get my feet down, and it’s Mandarin Yellow. It’s autobahn-friendly, dirt-friendly, and (grrr!) garage-friendly. And, if I didn’t mention it, I can get my feet down. With a slight bend in my knees! I spent a year and a half with it becoming a confident and reasonably capable rider. To that end, it served its purpose with distinction.
My confidence grew as I got proficient with the baby GS and I was starting to wonder what it would be like to ride a non-lowered bike. I was starting to only use my toes at stops. I was bending my knees so that my heels weren’t down. I was experimenting with not having my feet down by tripoding all the time. Due to some motor issues this summer, I made the decision to buy a second bike. The prospect of a vintage BMW floated by, but I dropped it due to not wanting two dead bikes. 
I wanted to try something sportier and smaller, but also, something that was a bit taller.
I went with a Honda CBR250R. Before I broke it in, I could sort of get my feet down, but not all the way. My heels had quite a sliver of air under them, depending on where I was on the seat. My feet came down in front of the pegs (gasp!!) when they came down at all.
Riding the CBR250R is a completely different experience from the GS, not the least of which is the fact that my legs are straight and my feet are mostly down when I am stopped. I tripod it everywhere, because both feet don’t go down on the ground like on the GS. And it is good. My increased confidence lends itself well to the higher seat and less foot contact. My improved balance makes handling the more top-heavy CBR much less of a challenge. And, frankly, having my down leg straight is really stable. Much more stable that I could have ever imagined when I started this whole riding thing. Now I understand those guys who look so cool and calm with a bike balancing against one leg, the other foot up on the peg. I can do that too now. 
Recently, though, I’d started to question my choice of the CBR, due mostly to the cost and the extent of the issues with the GS, partly due to the amount of back pain I’m enduring as I convert to the new riding position. I got the GS back on the road last night, and I now have a different perspective on the matter.
After riding the GS last night, I know that the CBR was not only the right decision, it was a good one and a very good one at that. Just as wonderfully good as the yellow GS has been. The CBR is teaching me confidence in a different way than the GS did. And honestly, the stupid GS pretty much rides itself. You tip it into a turn, it pops right back up. It’s so stable. The CBR wants to lean and lean and lean. Just going right to my dream bike, a 1983 R65, would not have given me a new view of riding like the CBR is giving me. I also wonder if starting low gave me a edge up on the going taller game – basically, I have something to compare taller to. I can from the get-go understand why the taller CBR is just fine and in some ways even more stable at a stop than my low GS. I can appreciate the CBR more because I know what it is not. Also, did I mention the GS is low. Like too low. What do I do with my legs low. I still love it, but now I think it needs a lift kit – I’ll find someone in the US to swap regular parts over for my short parts when I get home so I can put down a straight leg instead of a bent one and get some of that newfound stability.
I think that I can serve as the poster girl for starting with a lower bike and moving up. The low GS gave me the tool I needed at the time. It’s still a fantastic tool that I adore riding. But I didn’t stop there. I moved a bit higher, and I can now see an F800GS in my future. The seat height no longer scares me. I might not be seeing that if I was still fighting with a taller bike from day one. Just like your first bike doesn’t have to be your last one, it also doesn’t have to be te tallest one you ever ride. You can always move on up with the next one.
The answer to getting your feet down is do it if you need or want to, but stay open the idea that one day, you might find yourself pretty comfortable up in the air, sticking a toe out once in a while to touch down. It worked for me.
note – It was pointed out to me that the CBR is very light, and that is helping with the transtion. Yes. And there will be more transitions in the future, thanks to that.
I said ouch. That really doesn’t cover it. A PDPH headache is profoundly disabling and should not be taken lightly. I thought about it, and came up with this description: PDPH is like your head having back labor without the breaks in between contractions. Add in repeated hammer blows, and you are getting close. IE – if you’re a guy, you can’t even begin to imagine what this feels like. I suppose you could start with crushing your balls in a vice, but even that would just be starting to get close to back labor.
On day four, I caved and called the ambulance. I’d woken up at 0230 in pain and was unable to find a position that reduced it. I’d tried drinking more water, taking an extra acetaminophen, and walking around. I ate a couple of gluten-free rolls. Nothing was helping, so I picked up the phone. The first ER sent me off to the big university hospital where my neurologist is based, and things got moving there. The ER doctor smiled a sad of kind smile and said “we can try some different drugs, but you just need to lay down”. I must have had the most incredible expression on my face. I remember telling her that I just wanted to sleep. Some medication appeared, and I fell asleep. Two hours later, I awoke and was whisked upstairs into a double room, where I promptly fell right back asleep. For several hours. Make that days. I slept through day five and most of day six. As I did this on one side, without moving very much, I managed to pinch a nerve on the left side of my skull, which took some time to unkink and left me with a stuffed up eustachian tube for a while.
On the afternoon of day seven, I sat fully upright for the first time in a week. A few flights of stairs brought back the tinnitis, but it abated after a while. The Chief of Neurology visited and said “you sign the form, but it really doesn’t prepare you, does it?” No, it does not. She was quite kind, something often missing in doctors, and went through my symptoms and how the situation progressed. She noted that when she saw my chart, the first thing she thought was “skinny chick, she’s toast”. And there I was, toast. She also confirmed one of my suspicions – that the most damning factor is low blood pressure. As I’d woken up one morning and produced a spectactularly fabulous 80/60, you can see where I was coming from.
Day eight was finally the day that I could say I was human again. After a week of either significant or total disability, I was so thrilled to simply stand up tall that I wanted to walk around for hours. Had the sun been out, I think I would have fainted from joy. I was discharged and went shopping, just to look at things that weren’t on the floor.
The moral of this short series is that, in the words of Mark Twain (who is actually not the author of the quote), there are lies, damn lies, and statistics. And in this case, the statistics told the truth, but not the truth that applied to me.
I mentioned the 20% thing, and my response. While I was holed up under my desk, I took some time to read up on current medical literature to figure out how that 20% was derived. By the way, morbidity is a fancy word for occurence. No one died.
Once you get the headache, the dura needs to heal so the CSF will stop leaking and the headache will stop. Roughly 24% of PDPHs clear up in 1-2 days, another 29% in 3-4 days, and another 19% in 5-7 days. By two weeks, a total of 80% of PDPHs have resolved themselves.
In any population, there are people who have issues and people who don’t. Over the whole population, you can get a general risk factor. But.. certain parts of the population are probably going to be more at risk that others. In my case, I hit the jackpot.
There are three significant studies of the morbidity of PDPH in dural puncture patients. The earliest and most quoted is from the late 1950s, and already a disturbing trend was evolving: there’s something about Mary, and it’s not her hairdo. After controlling for the possibility that women are simply over-reported (due to punctures during attempted epidurals on the delivery table), it was becoming clear even back then that being female is a clear risk for PDPH. Being female raises the risk to close to 40%, effectively doubling it. The two later studies looked at other physical factors, such as weight, physical health, physical fitness, and age. Again, the studies were controlled for the potential over-reporting of females of childbearing age, but an even scarier, and more complete, picture emerged: physically active females with lower body mass indices and age from 18 to 40 years old were shown to have a morbidity rate of 70%. Interestingly, being obese and having high blood pressure cuts the risk to nearly zero. There you have it, donuts are your friend.
It turns out that those of us who love our yoga, our running, our daily attack on fat molecules, also maintain very healthy and flexible tendon and ligament tissue. The dura is just one big ligamentous envelope. One big slow-to-heal ligamentous envelope. Healthy ligaments are stretchy and under some tension, so the small tear that the needle makes pulls open. Less healthy ligaments don’t stretch, they just kind of sag there, so the sides of the tear do not pull apart at all. The pulled-apart opening takes longer to heal, because the little ligament fibres have to reach the other side to join up and patch themselves together. Curse the situps and the sun salutations!
Ouch. That would be me, right there, physically fit skinny chick. Had I known about the 70%, I still would have gone through with the puncture, but I think I would have been less surprised by the onset of what turned out to be the most miserable week of my life so far. I would have been more prepared for the disruption. I might have even taken the pain more seriously when it started and just laid down. But I didn’t, and I didn’t. Ouch.
The release form is rather vague. The doctor is often vague. “About 20% of the people get the headache.” Ok, so, for a healthy, physically active female, this should be nothing. No risk. Um, yeah.
At a time ranging between 12 and 48 hours after the dural puncture (the dura is the membrane that covers the brain and spinal cord), a certain group of people experience a pressure drop in the cranial cavity due to leaking cerebral-spinal fluid (CSF). This pressure drop can be very small or very large, but in all cases, it is very painful. Not that the brain feels pain (it doesn’t), but the tissues surrounding it, and even the skull itself do. Nerved and blood vessels get crunched under the weight of the brain, which is no longer floating in a nice CSF bath. In fact, if care is not taken, you can get a nice concussion going. Yuck.
For me, the onset of the PDPH was about 22 hours after the puncture. I was driving to work when I noticed that my neck was becoming increasingly stiff and painful. That was my brain, snugging up to the rear cranial shelf, crimping some veins while it was at it. A quick check of the internet when I got to work revealed that yup, I had a PDPH. Ok…..
When I signed the form, my doctor was careful to tell me that there was no real cure for a PDPH except time. Pain pills don’t work. The only thing that works is lying down, to equalize pressure throughout the spinal and cranial cavities. You can take a bit of the edge off with caffiene and its wonderful vasoconstricting properties, but you cannot stand or sit up.
I spent the day with my laptop on the floor and my head between my knees. I kept this up for another two days, managing by keeping my head down, taking a small amount of acetaminophen, and a large amount of tea. Most interestingly, I could drink coffee. Normally, coffee makes me sick. Too much caffiene is too much stimulation for my poor little self. But in the throes of this mess, it was nothing. Not a single cell was jittered.
Wow.
For those who don’t get the joke (seemingly everyone I know), the title refers to a line in the movie Spinal Tap, in which lead guitarist Nigel Tufnel informs journalist Marti DiBergi that his Marshall amplifier head is “one louder” because the volume knob is numbered from one to eleven, instead of one to ten like a regular production model.
There you have it. I have now had a spinal tap. Also known as a lumbar or dural puncture, it’s a test used to identify issues involving cerebral-spinal fluid, the stuff that keeps your brain afloat in your head and prevents concussions from occuring when you move your head around. The actual spinal tap procedure is not particularly painful. If you’re me, it doesn’t really hurt at all. Removing the needle is more painful than inserting it. Et cetera. If you don’t mind, I’ll keep the reasons for the test private. The results were completely negative, which should suffice.
All of this is not sounding especially exciting, is it? Certainly not enough for a blog post from this somewhat reluctant blogger. You are correct, so far, the whole spinal tap thing is, frankly, another boring medical procedure that people occasionally have to undergo. You go to the doctor’s office, sign some forms, and get poked in the back. Typically using 22g Quincke needle, between L4 and L5. About 5ml of fluid is removed, you lay down and rest for a little bit and then you go your merry way.
My neurologist, a rather studied dude who carefully answered my questions about the procedure, was rather business-like throughout the whole affair. The actual puncture is a very routine procedure, one done by neurologists on a very regular basis. It is the full Monty, while the more common epidural insertion is the specialty of anesthesiologists. In an epidural, care is taken to avoid a dural puncture, because firstly, it’s not necessary, and secondly, well, it can cause issues.
The issue in question here is called the Post-Dural-Puncture Headache. It’s why you have to sign that release form before the test.
The 11mm Brembo master cylinder fitted to the rear braking system on many Aprilia, BMW, and KTM motorcycles is a weak point, to put it mildly. Regardless, it is fixable. See below for how and why.
0. Tools required
Inside circlip pliers
10mm socket
5mm hex drive
2mm long drift (10cm) or 2mm Allen wrench
Tack hammer
Long-nose pliers
Flat-head screwdriver
Dental picks
Dremel with small round cutting bit
One full rebuild kit from Brembo, part number 110.4362.41
1. Remove the master cylinder from the bike. To do this, remove the bolt holding the brake fluid reservoir and washer with a 10mm socket. Return the bolt and washer to the hole to insure they are not lost. Drain the reservoir and replace the lid and gasket. Release the brake line fitting from the top of the master cylinder and back it out entirely. Remove the two bolts securing the MC to the bike using a 5mm hex drive. Lift the MC away from the bike, clearing the brake line at the top. The push rod will slide out of the rubber boot at the bottom with a slight tug. Return the two hex screws to the bike for safekeeping.
2. Retire to somewhere warm (or cool…), you might be there for a while. Bring the MC with you. Spread some paper towels or other protection out, and drain the master cylinder fully. Set aside the rebuild kit for later.
3. Carefully examine the MC. Remove the rubber boot by tugging at it gently. To help it, insert a flat screwdriver into the groove at the base of the MC and gently prise the boot away. Looking down the bore of the MC, you will see the piston at the center, a white spacer surrounding the piston, and a circlip holding it all together. The circlip may be rusty, if it is, you have some work on your hands. See below for a good (bad) example of a rusty circlip.
4. Remove the circlip using inside ring removing pliers. If the piston is stuck, use a long 2mm drift or a 2mm Allen wrench to drive it out from the top side. Tap the drift or the Allen key gently with a tack hammer, checking the other end for progress occasionally. When approximately 4mm of piston are exposed, gently grab the piston with long nose pliers and slide it out. This will all require some effort. The spring and spring seat will also come out at this time, or can be shaken out gently. Examine the piston for corrosion and clean it.
5. Now for the fun. The white sleeve may not slide out willingly. If it did, you would not likely be attempting this repair. A rather easy way to remove the sleeve is to grind or cut a groove in it. I used a 2mm ball-shaped cutting bit on my Dremel and ground out two channels, one the full length of the sleeve. Using the circlip pliers, twist the sleeve in the MC body and slowly work it out. Another way to remove the sleeve is to turn the bits of a 90° circlip tool to the outside and use it as a puller. In either case, take care not to damage the surface of the bore. It is not a sealing surface, but smooth is very important to the cylinder staying functional for any length of time. After removing the white sleeve, remove the o-ring that is still in the bore.
6. Once the white sleeve is removed, you will have to clean the inside of the outer bore where the sleeve was sitting. If the circlip was rusty, you will likely also find rust inside of the bore. Using Scotchbrite, steel wool, or very fine sandpaper, remove the red rust from the bore. Clean the bore to remove the residue from this round of cleaning.
7. This step is critical to determining whether the MC is going to be repairable for any length of time. After the red rust is removed, use a pick to investigate the condition of the outer bore. If you have tiny fingers, they will work, too. Now, you are looking for corrosion of the aluminium cylinder body. This is the corrosion that is causing the piston to stick, not the red rust. Using a pick, gently flake away any aluminium oxide that has built up in the bore. Under the oxide will be pits. There is no getting around this. Fortunately, these pits do not interfere with the operation of the cylinder if they are properly treated prior to reassembly. This process is slow and time-consuming, but will pay off in the end. When you have removed the fluffy stuff, carefully clean the entire MC and the reservoir and feed line. Blow them out well with clean water and air, and dry thoroughly.
8. When you have removed the aluminium oxide from the bore, it is time to open up the rebuild kit and start putting things back together. Remove the white sleeve from the kit and test fit it to the bore. It should float smoothly in the bore with only very slight resistance to turning or sliding. This indicates that the bore is free of oxide. Remove the white sleeve, and coat the inside of the bore with Loctite Silver or Heavy Duty (black) antiseize. Do not use copper-based antiseize! This coating should be very very light. Coat the new o-ring with brake assembly grease (HMW polyoxyethylene, supplied in the kit) and insert it into the bore. Insert the white sleeve and twist it gently in the bore. Assemble the spring to its spring seat, and slide the spring into the bore. Coat the piston and seal with brake assembly grease and insert them into the bore. The piston will stick out a bit.
9. To finish the assembly, fit the new circlip to the inside circlip pliers. Secure the master cylinder body and hold the circlip over the piston. Using a suitable drift, inserted through the center of the circlip, depress the piston into the MC, and secure the circlip. Treat the circlip with a drop of wicking grade low-strength threadlocker and, using a pick, draw the threadlocker around the circlip to coat it evenly.
10. Bench bleed the MC and install it to the motorbike, in reverse order of removal. Fully bleed the braking system, including at least one ABS activation in the middle of the process.
Conclusion: The boot on the MC is poorly designed and encourages water to enter the space within the boot. Basically, the boot should be inserted into the MC, not sitting on the outside. This moisture leads to corrosion of the circlip. However, corrosion of the circlip is not the reason the whole thing fails, it is just part of a chain reaction of fail. Once the iron starts to go, it triggers a galvanic reaction in the aluminium and the aluminium begins to corrode. The problem is that aluminium oxide is fluffy. Very fluffy. And very incompressibly crystalline. This increase in volume puts pressure on the white sleeve and eventually causes the piston to bind.
My fix: Forget grease. It won’t hold up. Use a heavy duty anti-seize product like Loctite Silver or Heavy Duty (black) to fill the void between the sleeve and bore, and then coat the circlip with low-strength (green) wicking threadlocker, which is commonly used as an anti-corrosive coating on automotive fasteners. If you are in Aviation and have access to Alodine 1424 or the like, a coating of this on the inside of the sleeve bore (along with overnight drying) will also go a long way to preventing repeat performances.
It doesn’t sound too hard, does it, to buy a pair of coveralls that fit? Well, I am female….
Years ago, I purchased a pair of navy blue size 38 regular Dickies coveralls for use around the house and garage. They got about 10 minutes of use before they were ditched for old jeans and a ratty tshirt. Why? Remember what I said about coveralls that fit?
Admittedly, there aren’t quite as many women wearing coveralls as there are guys out there, so it’s no surprise that a decently-fitting pair is hard to come by. Add in that a fair number of the women out there who do wear coveralls aren’t built like Lauren Bacall, and you have a market that isn’t all that attractive to coveralls makers. Because it consists of about four total women.
The difference between coveralls for men and coveralls for women is easy to spot. Women’s coveralls have room for boobs and butts. They also have shorter back-waists – the distance from the collar to the waistline. Mine went into the bin-of-things-we-don’t-know-what-to-do-with because minus the boob and butt room and being too long on the top, I was spending more time adjusting them than a Major League Baseball player spends adjusting his you-know-whats.
Last summer, I was going through that bin and pulled out the coveralls. Hmm, project? Sure! I’d already re-sized and significantly altered a two-layer Nomex suit for racing cars, how hard could a pair of coveralls be? The good designers at Dickies were a lot more serious about these things staying together than peeps over at Speed Sport Racing! The coveralls took me over eight hours simply to dismantle to the point that alteration could begin. Adding to the mess was the most complex elastic waist I’ve ever seen, one that requires a special machine to properly install. I got the bulk of the fitting done over the next few weeks, but the elastic waist and its complexity beat me, and I put the project on hold for a while.
Until today.
Alterations are typically bread and butter work for a seamstress. Relatively simply even when complex, and rarely requiring more than a few pins here or there to set up seams. Occasionally, you get something over the top, and you have to resort to machine basting. At the very tip-top of annoying and difficult seams come the ones you have to hand baste – sew by hand before you sew them properly with a machine. I had set aside the annoying elastic waist when exuberant pinning did not solve the problem. Sometime in the winter, I took a stab at it with machine basting. Today, I sucked in a lot of air and got out the pin cushion and thread: I would hand baste this thing and finish it off. Four hours later, three spent out in my garden in the sunshine, and I was rewarded for my effort with a pair of very stock-looking, properly fitting coveralls.
They look completely off-the-shelf. I like that. I just wish they had been off-the-shelf to begin with!
What? you don’t take apart your motorcycle on your birthday? Well, I do. Pics are for the rest of the brave F650-riding community. You can see the placement of the three switch diodes, and the BMS diode in the wiring tray and harness. Next up is the actual diodes, which are ultrasonically bonded to the tabs. This is a decent method of fixturing, but as with all mechanical fixturing, it’s prone to fracture. The result? A No Run or No Start condition that is one heck of a pain to diagnose.
There are a lot of firsts in motorcycling – the first big lean, the first successful evasive maneuver, the first time to split lanes. This is a picture of the right side footpeg on my F650GSa, freshly ground. The pegs on the F are spring-loaded and retract under contact, so the grind is less of an event than it is on most bikes running fixed pegs.
Grinding is a weird sensation. If your foot is positioned properly (toe tucked in), you only feel the vibration through the bike. You can hear the metal grinding away, and it’s a bit surprising. It was one of those “oh, that’s what that is like” moments.
I think I want to do it again on the other side.