Robin: Hey everybody, I'm Robin Dean.

Travis: And I'm Travis Burleson.

Robin: And this is the Riding Obsession podcast. You can visit us online at theridingobsession.com. This week's episode is sponsored in part by RLB Hydraulic Services. Big thanks to Rick and his family over there at RLB. They really know their stuff. I needed this obscure O-ring for my bandits alternator and they had it ready and waiting when I arrived. So thank you. Travis, how was your week?

Travis: Uh, it was fine. Same old, made some beer. Waited for my, uh, BMW parts have shipped to put the F-650 back together. I like beer. Yeah. It'll, you can come over and drink some in a month when it's ready to drink.

Robin: Is there a particular, uh, flavor to this brew?

Travis: Uh, it's an amber.

Robin: Amber ale. All right.

Travis: Yeah. And then I might make a stout later today if I feel like it. Otherwise I might pull the carbs on the, on the CB1000. Priorities, man. Beer carburetors on either way. There's like hoses and stuff.

Robin: Column A, column B, porters, stouts. You're speaking my language. Motorcycles, carburetors, things I like. Well, what else?

Travis: Oh, you know, that's it. Nothing new over at, uh, in the house front here. Just, uh, you know, walking the dog and griping about the neighbors who don't scrape the ice off their sidewalk.

Robin: At least the weather's a little bit better. It's a little bit rainy, but at least it's not as cold.

Travis: Yeah. Until the rain starts freezing later tonight.

Robin: Oh, that'll be fantastic. Ice biking in the streets. Well, believe it or not, I've been getting in shape. I'm starting to hit the gym again. Cause I want to be in better shape for next year's riding season, considering all the miles I plan on covering.

Travis: I've just been doing pint curls.

Robin: Pint curls. Very healthy mentally.

Travis: Yeah, it's good. It's a good, because the resistance, you know, they get lighter as you go through. So it's a good, uh, paced out workout.

Robin: Nice. Well, I finally almost got the entire oil leak for the bandit resolved. Um, finding a leak is a lot harder when it's in multiple locations. Uh, so in this case I had a leak in the oil pan, a leak in the shift shaft seal, and also a leak at the alternator where the O-ring failed and all of those. I thought, oh, I've got an oil leak. Maybe I could write an article about how you find one, you know, the baby powder trick and all that stuff. And it turns out three locations, no joke, three locations. Really the oil pan leak was nothing more than a washer. So there was some argumentation on the forums about whether or not the washers were rubberized to seal, you know, seal the oil in. And it turns out they are. I questioned that and everybody said, no, they aren't. And then I pulled it and then lo and behold, I see this little black layer. So you had a little bit of a, what was it called? Permatex blue. Took care of the problem.

Travis: RTV silicone, high temp silicone.

Robin: Yeah. So pretty soon here, I'm gonna be able to take care of that issue. So, okay. There's the carburetors, there's beer. There's oil leaks. And I think that pretty much sums everything up.

Travis: Yeah. And in BMW parts, like $225. I think we talked about that last week. That's how much they cost dead, dead on. Nope. No pennies. We're shipping it.

Robin: Exactly. $225. So some guy on a street corner was like, uh, dude, $225.

Travis: That's what I, you know, a head gasket and a cylinder gasket and a case gasket and this bearing and these washers.

Robin: $225 bucks. Whatever. You know what I mean? Cost me 50, but it'll work out. Well, let's move on to updated site features and developments. Um, end-user GUI geekery and such people may have noticed a. The site being down to some degree, or at least less functional for a short minute there, because, uh, I woke up one morning and I found a bunch of 500 errors. Effectively the service provider we were using decided to, uh, take it upon themselves to alter some of the code because of bandwidth usage. And as a result, they broke some of the things that were operating on the site. I'm not going to rant too long in the negative about them, but let's just say that their name rhymes with ghost hater. And I no longer subscribe to their services. We are no longer on their servers. We've moved over to a much better server. Uh, I'm going to be advising based on my recent experience with this new server that I absolutely love that most of my clients, I do any web development for it. They're going to want to move over to the server as well. You know, the GUI is a little bit more hairy, but I dig it at any rate. Once everything was back in place and the site was brought back, I started working on the weather page again, which I hope everybody will start putting to use once the seasonal winter comes to an end, most importantly, I build these kinds of things for myself. And then once it's built for me personally, greedy style, then I start to set everything up so that people can tweak them to their own preferences. So if you want to be able to do that, you just visit the riding obsession.com forward slash motorcycle dash weather. Soon you'll be able to adjust the settings to your preference based on signing up for an account. If you sign up for an account with the site, you'll be able to update maintenance logs and other features yet to be discussed. Also, our calendar, I got in touch with sport bike track time and asked if they had an online schedule available that we could implement on the server. So if you check out our events calendar, the calendar view up there in the navigation, you'll actually be able to see all of their upcoming track days or track events. So thank you to sport bike track time for making that available to us. Another thing I intend to add to the podcast for the site is a transcriber, which I think will be both funny and entertaining as well as necessary. Uh, so some of our articles will literally be the transcription of these podcasts in their raw form. Looking forward to seeing that, how that turns out. And now on to post ride topics. Travis, what's interesting to you this week? What has inspired you in motorcycling?

Travis: It's funny. You should mention track days. It came up the other day with, with my lovely wife. I'm not sure exactly how it came up. And she was saying to me how she's not really interested in doing track days, which is fine. I don't push her to do anything she doesn't want to do. I was that way when she started riding and I said, if you want to take the class and learn and you don't like it, that's fine. You can ride with me on the back and that's fine. And you don't have to ride your own. And then she took the class and she liked it. And then she said, I don't really want to do track days. And I, that's fine. But then we got lunch with our friend, Kathy, who you've met, who's a rider. Yeah. And we got lunch with her the other day and Kathy said to Laurel, hey, do you want to do a track day? And, and maybe convinced her a little bit. So I'm not going to push her to do it. I definitely want to do one this season since I haven't done one yet. It's more just a matter of scheduling and funds. But it should be, it should be interesting. And we'll see how the Buell does on a, on a track day. It doesn't really have a whole lot of lean clearance, but I, I think the experience would be, would be fun for her. I mean, I've definitely gotten a toe touching on the Buell in the roundabout. You got toe touching on the big one too. Yeah. I think the hill helped me a little bit on that. It was uphill left-hander.

Robin: Yeah. There's no leaving a track day, not being a better rider. A track day is a great way to become a better rider, a safer rider. You learn a lot of techniques that are beyond the basics. I mean, you take the basic motorcycle course. Yes. You learn a lot. Motorcycle safety is the priority with that class, but that doesn't change with a track day. Track day isn't about going to a track and going crazy. It's a safe opportunity to explore your limits while learning about techniques and motorcycling previously unknown to you. We actually offer a downloadable introspective pamphlet on the site. Uh, it's free if you look it up. If you go to the site and you type into the search box motorcycle track day, you'll see three entries. One is an experienced perspective written by Joe Nardi. The other after that is the beginner's perspective written by yours truly. And then there's a third that is the intermediate perspective written by a man who likes to stay in the shadows. And I won't mention his name. Um, but I highly recommend that you go to the site and look that up. And if you really want to help the site out, then if you click on the store, our three perspective track day. Right up is available for purchase there. And it helps us out with the funds and such, but yeah, it's like a track day is a great thing. I actually just got invited by Joe Nardi to go on a long distance dirt sport touring trip. Uh, you know, hard luggage, long distance, about a thousand miles, all Colorado. I'm not sure I'm going to be able to do that because we've already scheduled so much this year. But man, I mean, the idea of it, we don't have enough dirt on the site or the sport touring genre. I sure would like to do that. And it's something I look forward to doing that I've never done. And I'd like to learn from that as well.

Travis: Is he going to loan you a bike for that? Nope. Are you going to take the bandit down dirt?

Robin: I'm not going.

Travis: Oh, okay. I'd have to get all new gear. It's a whole different, a whole different bike outfit. Oh yeah. You cause your outfit matters.

Robin: No, you gotta, it's a different boot setup. It's different gear.

Travis: Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, you want probably motocross or you want dirt boots for the support for standing, but otherwise you don't really need, you don't need a different jacket.

Robin: It's the armor that really gets me. It's like, I'd have to do some investing.

Travis: Yeah. It depends how much you plan on falling.

Robin: Yeah.

Travis: Oh yeah. What else is new? Um, yeah, I mentioned the, I went to the store today and got the O-ring and gasket set for the carburetors for the CB 1000 big one. Yeah. It's just, you know, I, when I bought it this summer, I wasn't sure how long I'm going to keep it and then I've just been sinking money into it since then making it kind of making it mine and so I think I'll keep it at least for another season because it's fun and it's a cool bike, but it doesn't run as well as I think it should. So I'm going to pull the carburetors off here while it's snowy and icy out and just blast them full of carb cleaner. Maybe do a chem dip, replace all the rubber, maybe rejet it. I have to do some more research on, on jets for that, but typically bikes from the nineties that are carbureted are carbureted very lean to meet the emission requirements for manufacture and run significantly better if you bump up the jets one or two.

Robin: Oh, nice. So then would you really consider that bike to be semi-universal in a lot of ways? Is it fairly, is it generic enough that it's comfortable to work on and consider as a, as a regular ride?

Travis: Yeah. I mean, if you can find one, they only sell them in the U S for two years, so they're a little harder to find. It's a CB, a CBR 1000 motor with different carburetors and different cams. Um, but yeah, it's, it's basically a UJM from the nineties. It was, uh, it was a retro bike, a modern, it was a modern retro that was built in the mid nineties. So it was, it was a nineties bike that was supposed to be like a throwback eighties bike, but it was liquid cooled and four stroke and had a vacuum petcock and CV carbs.

Robin: Yeah. That's what caters to my question is whether or not, if there were ever a problem with any of its stock parts, would it be easier to fabricate or sort of improvise parts for, as compared to something else that's a little bit more geometrically, uh, exclusive for lack of a better term?

Travis: No, it's, it's a naked bike. It's a, so you can bolt, it's easy to bolt stuff on. Uh, I have seen on the forums and the Facebook group guys who welded in hard luggage mounts, as far as I know, there isn't a manufacturer making hard luggage for that bike, but I've seen them with hard luggage and it's, it's an all steel double cradle frame. So you can basically do whatever you want to it. And it's all one piece. So there's, you know, it's one of those when we, when he took the BMW apart and dropped the engine out of it and you take the subframe off and you look at the frame air quotes frame, it doesn't look like a motorcycle. It just looks like a, like a chunk of aluminum. Um, but you know, the CB, when you take the frame off, looks like a motorcycle still like the frame looks like a, so it's, it's a basic sort of bike and the, the engine was in different models. So there's always, you can always get engine stuff. You can actually swap cause it has 18 inch wheels, front and rear. And some guys want to put 17s on. Does that work? Yeah. There's a couple of different other Honda models that are just a direct swap out.

Robin: Oh, wow. Nice. Well, whatever your winter projects are, you know, there's also the little stuff, don't forget the little techno maintenance bits, such as communicator batteries. Um, I started thinking about how I've put up the helmets and I left my Siena's on there and they've fully discharged. That won't be good come beginning of the season. So I brought everything up and charged those up and all things like that.

Travis: Yeah. It was lithium batteries. You don't want, you wouldn't want to store them with a full charge on them and then maybe go ahead and, and, and pop them in and top them up, uh, you know, once a month, once every other month, uh, depending on how long you're off of them to keep those lithium batteries working. Right.

Robin: And I got to tell you, you're not alone in the winter projects area. I've got that oil leak that I still got to target with the bandit. I got to replace its brake pads. Uh, there's a taillight flicker and one of the led bulbs that I ordered from super bright. I feel like they owe me one on that. I plan on a bed linering, the oil cooler shield. I got to lubricate the cables. It's time for me to get a deer whistle. That's just been, I have a, I have an open threaded slot. On the left front of my bike, that's just waiting for a deer whistle. It'd be obscure. It would look fine. There'd be no problem. I, and I haven't done it. I don't know why. Uh, and then I also, you've done this before. I want to light my Shad SH45 top case. I want to actually install LEDs on it. And I keep thinking of inventive ways because the reflector system is embedded both into the top lid, mostly into the top lid, but also two little segments on the bottom. And I want the whole thing lit. So I've been thinking of ways to like install a connector that when it's shut, it will actually complete the circuit, allowing it to, you know, do such.

Travis: I would say just use the kiss method, man. Keep it simple, stupid, simple, stupid. Just have a little, a little wire in the back of that case. Isn't going to get in the way.

Robin: Yeah, but that doesn't, it doesn't end there. I mean, I've got, we got four bikes in the garage. So with my wife's first bike or starter bike, the, you know, Nighthawk 250. I just, you know, I got to replace a seal and get a special tool for that. And then onto the Hawk GT, which is, I mean, I've been ranting all this moment about the bandit and that little bike. My actual winter winter project is the Hawk GT, you know, any, the valves I'm going to put in tank sealer, the fuel pump, you know, throttle cables, front, the rubber on the front left tank that holds it up is gone. Uh, the airbox hose, we actually did pretty good with that. The exhaust gas get the cam mounts. The carburetor needs checked. Getting a fender eliminator, Acorn bolt for the gauges, foot pegs are rusted out. Steering head rollers are kind of going bad. The seat bracket hole in the front of the engine case, front sprocket, replace the coolant, change oil, buff the plastic derailleur. That's it, man. It's it, it, that's what I want to be working on, but I still got to get through the flagship bike first.

Travis: Yeah. Keep on your, your main, main ride. Well, that's what I got. I mean, you know, I said the big one serviceable. I took the, I took the Buell out the other day though.

Robin: Yeah.

Travis: My wife's Buell blast. Yeah. That was supposed to be a bike night at the, uh, the cycle gear near me. Okay. And I showed up and the two guys like you're the third person that's been in here all day. We're not doing anything. I was like, okay, but it was good. I was, I dropped it on the ice on the road. Like I turned down one of the little neighborhood roads and it was just glare, it was just glare ice packs. No, that was glare ice. Wow. And, um, like my neighborhood roads kind of like that in spots, but not all over and I was fine, you know? Cause that bike's so light. Nevermind you is the bike. All right. Oh, bike's fine. Those good. They've, they made those bikes to get dropped.

Robin: Oh, okay, cool. Yeah.

Travis: Yeah. I was, it was fine, but it was funny on the ice, man. It was just, I mean, I was crawling, I was feathering the clutch in first gear, you know, both feet on the ground, like sliding on the ice. And then the front end just went and I'd stepped, I just stepped off. Hey man, are you reading anything these days? I'm still trying to force my way through Zen in the yard. It's just, it's not interesting.

Robin: It's a great book. I don't know what you're talking about.

Travis: It's just, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a book about philosophy and not a book about motorcycles.

Robin: People should know that before they start. They need to know that. I don't think that enough people that have read the book have explained that to them because it's really kind of a book for non motorcyclists.

Travis: Yeah. And I, and I'm not, I'm not big on capital P philosophy and it's capital P philosophy.

Robin: Well, when was it written?

Travis: Why?

Robin: I, why? When the book was written, it was answering questions that needed to be answered, and then once those questions were answered, everyone has decided that that's already been done. And so when they go to read this book that was written some time ago, they see it as though they're reading it in a cliche environment where at the time. This, this was new and a really great concept and wasn't intended to be about motorcycle maintenance as so much as it is trying to simplify your approach to life by comparison to things you would do while working on a motorcycle or anything mechanical.

Travis: Yeah. There's a, there's a metaphor in there.

Robin: Yeah. It's so Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M Persig. Travis says it's probably his favorite book of the year. 2016 podcast episode one. What about a Jupiter's travels? You're going to have to get through that to earn. You have to earn the right to read Jupiter's travels by getting through Zen in the Art of.

Travis: I'll slog through Zen in the Art and then go through, uh, I actually, I do want to read Jupiter's travels and you, are you through it? Have you finished it?

Robin: I finished it. And you know, I've heard some of my friends had said that once he gets three fourths of the way through, they felt it got a little bit slow. And I completely disagree. Uh, there's a lot of chaos and difficulty that happens in the three quarters of the way journey section. But Jupiter's travels basically a book by Ted Simon, which narrates his four year journey through 126,000, 126,000 kilometers across 45 countries on a Triumph Tiger in 1976. I believe maybe it's, maybe it started in 1974. That's the year I was born. And he goes, it takes him four to six years on a five on a 500 CC bike that is just loaded to the gills. It says 1973 to 1977 here.

Travis: On a 500 CC classic British.

Robin: Triumph. Yeah.

Travis: I'm not like, not the new Triumph Tiger adventure bike. Like, no, like a heavy steel lump of British iron. Yeah. During the seventies, man, with no suspension and no internet and bad carburetors and a distributor.

Robin: Yeah. I mean, it's hectic in the time from when he starts to the time when he finishes, I'm not giving anything away with this, but the staff and the management at the newspaper that he's reporting to changes a couple of times. So now and then they wonder why he's even part of the scheme. They upset about him existing, you know, the funding and all that stuff. It's pretty crazy. Uh, so yeah, have a good one with that. And then there's one third book that I wrote, I read before this, um, by Melissa Holbrook Pearson called the perfect vehicle, what it is about these motorcycles, something to that effect. Where, let me get the exact title here. The perfect vehicle. What is it about motorcycles by Melissa Holbrook Pearson? Yeah.

Travis: So there's plenty of writing topics there. Also reading, uh, Tolkien's translation of Sir Gowan and the Green Knight, not motorcycle related, just getting my way through it. Cause it's a good, uh, wintertime Christmas story.

Robin: If we get a podcast question about that book, because you just said that, I'm going to be enormously upset.

Travis: And some people really like Tolkien. I like Gowan and the Green Knight. It's a good story. If you like King Arthur.

Robin: All right. So two years ago, we rode from Chicago to Portland and back.

Travis: Portland, Oregon.

Robin: Portland, Oregon. Now it's time to figure out a way to do the opposite East coast, Chicago to Portland, Maine and home. And I want to do it the longest way possible.

Travis: And this time we're going to go West. We're going to call it long way round.

Robin: My biggest concern is twisties. I want twisty roads. Obviously you can't have what you want all the time, Nebraska. But effectively a lot of the roads we took, they were beautiful. And some of them were main drags. I think we should out, we should restart to different roads that are available that are a little bit less traveled, twisty, curvy, sweepers, speed, happiness, all the stuff we love.

Travis: Yeah. Which is going to be easier going East from the Midwest because you have the Appalachian ranges there, the hills in Kentucky, there's, well, I mean, there's Indiana, which is kind of the Nebraska, this side of the Mississippi. You know, what are you going to do in Nebraska, the Dakotas? There's, you don't have an option, but I think going East is more options.

Robin: Let's look at it this way. We just need to consider what cities do we want to use as peg points so that we can, at least for today, all we have to do is get the expressway backup route started. So all we want to know is where are we bouncing to? And if I remember correctly, we want to do the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Travis: Yeah. The main, it's main stopping point. So you lay out, you know, pick some, some places where you're going to get a hotel, where you're going to be, where there's going to be gas, where there's going to be a shop if you need one.

Robin: I think this year will be much better for camping. We're seasoned to it. We both know how to do it. And I think we can save a lot of money doing it that way.

Travis: And a lot less Nebraska.

Robin: A lot less Nebraska. Folks, we have an entire list of things that we would bring on a camping trip. That's about to be altered significantly based on our experience last time for more compact usability and such. Well, here's my thought. If we can get right to the twisties, we should get right to the twisties, meaning where are the nearest not flat roads, it's not going to be less than three to five hours away from wherever we decide is the starting point. But we can at least point to that and then stay twisty throughout. And my thought is that the first place we want to end up would be perhaps Western Tennessee.

Travis: Yeah. Depending, there's a couple of ways you can approach that. I know I've heard good things about Southern Indiana.

Robin: Oh yeah.

Travis: But it might be best to just slam down the state of Illinois and then get to the hills there that are in the, you know, the Tennessee, Kentucky sort of region, which is Southern Indiana as well.

Robin: Yes.

Travis: Even if you just look at the Google maps satellite images, which we have up here, you can see where it goes from flat to hilly. You can see the difference in terrain. And if it's hilly, it's harder to build straight roads.

Robin: Things start to get nicer around Shawnee National Forest, just West of the Kentucky border.

Travis: Yeah, Shawnee is one of my, my wife, uh, she very, she enjoys that, that part of the country.

Robin: We could start there and then head down towards.

Travis: So go aim for Carbondale, which is in Southern Illinois. I actually have some friends in Carbondale. Uh, and then kind of shoot towards Nashville.

Robin: I like it. Let me do that first. So let's say our starting point will be Chicago, Illinois. I'm typing that into ridewithgps.com. I like using their service and hitting go. Do you want this to be your start point? Yes, I do. And from there, we now have one pinpoint. Now I'm going to type in where Carbondale.

Travis: Carbondale, Illinois, which is Southern, Southern Illinois, where Southern Illinois university is home of the Salukis.

Robin: Do we want to avoid highways or go ahead and create an expressways route first?

Travis: Middle Illinois is boring. Maybe expressways.

Robin: I like your style. All right. Now we've routed to that location. And from here, we're just creating the expressway route and creating connected dots with the cities. From here, we want to get to Nashville, Tennessee, and there we go. Now we've routed to there. So that's Chicago to Carbondale to Nashville from Nashville. I'd say we should get to Chattanooga.

Travis: I hear tell there's some sort of choo-choo solution.

Robin: And then from Chattanooga, we want to head direct to Etowah, typing that into ride with GPS, hitting go. Do you want to route to this point?

Travis: I sure do. And you can tell here, even with, uh, you know, basically the most direct route. The, it doesn't make a, a straight B line. There's no, cause you have to go over the Appalachian mountains. That's a good sign.

Robin: Yes. And this is again, an expressway route. This is the, I'm exhausted. We're behind schedule. We got to get there. Expressway, gun it. We're done. Quick route. After this, we'll create a non-expressways route, which is similar in efficiency, perhaps an hour or so slower, depending on how much you ride in a day. And after that, we'll do pure twisties, which will take the most time. We're going to do an entire show dedicated to that folks. So be ready for that one. It'll be an hour of hectic communication and possibly we'll give you a video feed.

Travis: Yeah, but that's a good, a good start. Look at planning the route.

Robin: Yes. I'm going to hit save. We're going to call this TRO 2016. And then we'll keep this one as private and save. Close.

Travis: And you can see on the elevation changes there. When we go from Chattanooga to Etowah, the elevation starts spiking. That's going to be fun, man. You start hitting the mountains.

Robin: Now I've ridden the Blue Ridge Parkway. It's a fine, fine experience. Seriously.

Travis: Now we're going to take a look at this week's badass prototype slash upstart brought to you by the super slick. Ultra badass motorcycle Megapassi of incredible power.

Robin: You can do better than that. It's given some excitement. You're like, now we're going to do that thing. I don't really like this. Hey, Rami, do a podcast. I don't really like this. Oh, I don't know. Hey, Rami, you want to do a podcast?

Travis: And now we're going to look at this week's badass prototype slash upstart brought to you by the super slick, ultra badass motorcycle, Megapassi of incredible power, the super slick ultra bad ass motorcycle Megapassi of Incredible power.

Robin: It's super slick ultra badass and incredibly powerful.

Travis: Did it to de. So, a friend of ours posted an article here, and I thought it was quite interesting, having a BMW motorcycle that's currently in several pieces, but BMW tend to be at the forefront for technology. I remember a couple years ago, all of their motorcycles, like the base, most basic motorcycle, they all came with heated grips and ABS systems, so they were one of the first manufacturers to put ABS systems on their motorcycles. And of course, with their newest flagship model, the 1600LT, the K1600LT, they pack as much technology as they can to that. And they announced recently that they are going to start testing, at least porting over their laser headlight system from their cars, their laser headlight system that has been developed for their automobiles into their touring motorcycles, which I thought was really cool, and I had to look it up and kind of see what it was about, because it's not like laser beams shooting out of the front of your bike. Well, that's no fun, man. Though the lasers will actually start stuff on fire. There are lasers involved, and they are powerful enough to ignite flammable material. But the better way to think about it, it's a laser-powered headlight. So there's a couple of laser diodes that go through some reflectors and a prism and are focused, and then they are shot forward, and then they hit a phosphor-embedded lens, a phosphorous-embedded lens. And what happens is when that laser energy hits the phosphorous, it excites those molecules, and then those glow with a really exceptionally bright white light.

Robin: So essentially, it's a phosphorous bulb, but the lasers are what's triggering the action?

Travis: Yeah. So kind of like a fluorescent bulb.

Robin: Yeah. So it's gas-based. Well, I mean, all light bulbs are sort of gas-based, but they have the...

Travis: Yeah. So on a fluorescent bulb, you send electrical current through a gas mixture, and it excites the molecules in the gas tube, and then those emit light. Actually, those emit ultraviolet light, and then they hit the coating on the inside of the bulb that turns it into white light. But instead of electrical current, it's going to be a laser beam that hits this, and it creates this really bright light. And then that shines backward from the perspective of the driver or the rider, and then hits a diffuser reflector, and then it sends it diffused and reflected forward out of the headlight assembly.

Robin: I was going to say that you need a laser pointer, a pie chart, and a high school biology book to discuss cones and rods, but I think that's moot.

Travis: Yeah. But the advantages are it's up to 1,000 times brighter than an LED light would be and consumes somewhere between two-thirds and half the power.

Robin: 1,000 times brighter?

Travis: Yes, which is exponential. You lose that because brightness is exponential.

Robin: Sure. But then again, there's still the upside to LEDs and the instant on and all the stuff that goes with that.

Travis: This will be instant on, instant off, because the lasers are diodes. They're on and off. It's not like a xenon where there's a warm-up.

Robin: Sure. So it's almost as though it is similar to the LED concept in that there are many bulbs?

Travis: No.

Robin: It's a singular? Yes.

Travis: Yeah. Well, I think in their design, there's three laser diodes to start with that are then the lights reflected and mixed with a prism, but not an array. It's supposed to be able to illuminate up to 2,000 feet away, which is at least twice or three times as far than an LED. We use less power. The light temperature, so the color of the light, will be about 5,500 to 6,000 Kelvin, which is, that's like where your good LED xenon bulbs are that's close to daylight color.

Robin: Yeah, that's going to be really bright on not only the reflection, but refraction. I noticed with the bulb that we tested for the Hawk GT that all of the signs that were illuminated during my test ride at night were brightly, a lot of lumens coming back at you. It was strange because anything that was non-reflective, I could have used a little bit more. I wanted a little bit more bulb. I wanted a little bit more brightness to that. I wanted to see where I was going a little bit more clearly, but I was satisfied. What was amazing, though, was just that intense daylight look of these glowing signs everywhere, and you're saying this kind of does the same thing.

Travis: Yeah, so it's that same color temperature, high output light. It'll be high beam only. I think, obviously, it'll still be LEDs for the low beam.

Robin: For all you oncoming traffickers, you'll get to enjoy a nice sunburn.

Travis: Also, it won't be United States legal because America. America. Because we have outdated regulations regarding our highway code and what can be on and off the road, though with motorcycles, sometimes you get aware of stuff, but they aren't going to sell them here.

Robin: I wonder what's going to happen when we finally get electric motorcycles that are a regular part of the market. How's that going to be treated? I'd really like to see an electric sport tour, a battery-operated sport tour. We got to talking about this. There's also the option of natural gas and compressed gas.

Travis: Yeah, I haven't really seen one, but there are people out there with standard passenger vehicles who have converted them to compressed natural gas or propane.

Robin: Yeah, there's also those who have done the at-home version.

Travis: We were discussing earlier about whether or not that'd be feasible on a motorcycle. Propane might be a... The trickiest part really is, one, your fuel injection system and hacking your ECU to make it work, and then storing the compressive tank somewhere, which they tend to be bulky. But I think you can make it work, especially if a manufacturer decided to purpose design a CNG motorcycle, since there are a lot of commercial vehicles.

Robin: There are entire gas stations devoted to it. I looked it up in images on Google, and I saw a bus pulling into a pump, and they've actually got that available.

Travis: Yeah, and a lot of municipal services now have switched to compressed natural gas because it's a lot better. So all your garbage trucks and your taxis and your municipal hauling trucks, yard waste cleanup, that sort of stuff are all running on CNG. And for a commuter bike, it's better for the environment, and it's cheaper than gasoline, and you still get the same kind of power, and it's still an internal combustion engine. Like I said, most internal combustion engines can just be converted with minimal effort.

Robin: This is one of those things where there are so many good ideas happening at once that they conflict with each other in some ways of getting any kind of a hold on them, any kind of a market for future changes. But I still say that I would love to see an electric bike that had what I require of a sport tourer. When I say sport tourer, I want something that has what it takes to haul two up, my wife and I, with three parts luggage, full luggage, 250 miles per charge at least. And that just isn't in, it's not in the scheme yet. And I want it, and I think a lot of people want it.

Travis: And we were talking too, even if you doubled or tripled the capacity of batteries as they are right now today, the problem is once you hit that limit, you're done. It takes 6, 10, 11 hours to charge that battery up. And we were thinking too, actually what got us on the compressed natural gas is you have that propane canister that you use for your heater or your grill, and you go to the store and you give them your empty tank, and they give you a full tank, and the format's the same, and you just swap it out. And then that tank gets checked out and serviced and refilled. And it'd be really great to have that in like a battery pack solution. It's a standard format. And you go to your gas station, and you pop out your empty battery packs, and they give you fully charged battery packs that are the same format and industry standard.

Robin: And then you're— I think that kind of shell system would be great too, just to, like you said, standardize it, then as the tech develops, there's no need to change the casing. You simply change the guts of it.

Travis: Yeah, exactly. If you come up with a better, you know, as we went from alkaline to nickel cadmium to nickel metal hydride to lithium to lithium iron, you know, lithium polymer battery, you just change the insides and make it fit the form factor. You know, make it—of course, you know, this is for a vehicle, so it'd be a reasonable size, and it'd be pretty chunky. So you could fit different form factors in there as the technology evolved.

Robin: Yeah, I like that plan. I like the concept of it. Even if a gas station, quote-unquote gas station, could have all of those formats available, having some kind of standardized outfit for it would make it so that there's no need for them to abandon any of them at all.

Travis: Yeah, and just like when you go to the propane, when you go to the hardware store, if you have whatever American gas tank, and they have— Fred's Gas. Yeah, and they got like Blue Rhino or whatever, you know, they're a different brand. They'll still swap you out because the tank's the same. It's just the label on the outside. And when the company comes to pick those up, they bring it back to their facility, take the label off, inspect the tank, make sure it's still safe, refill it, put their label on, and send it back out to go to someone else. And I think, you know, there's no reason that Shell and BP and all those companies couldn't start making batteries.

Robin: And on that note, I want to say thank you for listening. This has been the Writing Obsession podcast. You can visit us online at https://www.thewritingobsession.interwebcom.net. You can visit us online at thewritingobsession.com. And this particular episode is sponsored by RLB Hydraulic Services. Big thanks to Rick and his family over there for getting me that O-ring I needed for the alternator on my 2003 second-generation Bandit.

Travis: That's the second-generation Bandit, not the third, not the first. Not the first, not the third, second-generation. Anything you want to say, Trev? Thanks for listening. If you have any tips for dropping an output shaft bearing into the engine case on a mid-2000s Rotax engine from a BMW 650, put that in the comments and let me know, because I will be doing that shortly.

Robin: And also feel free to email your questions or concerns to podcast at thewritingobsession.com. Thank you for listening. Safe travels, everyone.