Long time, no see.

Well, it has been almost six months since I last put anything onto this blog, but I figure if I have any hope of ever doing more journalistic work whether bike related or otherwise, I better keep pumping articles out and use this as a bit of a portfolio, as recommended by a certain Penver.

Anyway the bike is still going strong, and although Buell have teased me with both the 1125R and the Ulysses XT I figure I'll be holding onto her for a while still, especially in light of proving to the world that Buells are in fact reliable.

Well today saw me going for my first rear tyre change at just over 17 000km. The stock Pirelli Scorpion Sync is really a fantastic compromise between grip and high mileage, and thus I made the choice to replace it with the same tyre, which proved to be quite a mission.

Buell Tygervalley was pretty much the only shop with stock, but already wanted R300 more than anyone else, and wanted to charge for an hour's labour of R350 on top of that.

So I phoned around and my old friends at Suzuki South sorted me out, but had to make a special order and thus I ended up waiting a few days. And there there was the joy of finding out that they don't have the tools to work on the bike since it uses imperial bits instead of the common metric ones found around these parts.

Oh well, who needs to get to work, when bike shops have all the time in the world on their side...

Long story short they managed to buy the imperial tools required, and we had quite a bit of fun taking the wheel and belt off and getting the tyre swopped. Being a mechanical n00b this was of course educational for me, so I don't really mind at all.

So hopefully this weekend we'll be doing some tyre scrubbing, and since I've decided to keep the bike after all, I'll be pushing some money towards mods so I have something to write about.

Oh...the Jardine was a phenomenal cock up, but I'll get to that later when I have the pictures at hand.