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Month: January 2015
If you’ve ridden in the cold or wet you will know full well how big an issue a steamed up visor is. A whole cottage industry has grown up around this issue, with the Raleri FogStop being one such solution. Raleri kindly sent some of their products in for review, but I shall endeavour to keep this review honest. The FogStop works in a similar fashion to the popular Pinlock, in that it’s a secondary internal visor providing a double glazed setup to prevent your breath condensing on the cold exterior visor. I’m going to compare against the Pinlock a lot, as it does cover a huge chunk of market and is more commonly available and known. The FogStop inserts fundamentally differs in that no specialist visor with specific pins is required, it simply has adhesive edging to stick straight onto the visor. Great if your visor isn’t Pinlock ready or isn’t available for your lid (e.g. my Bell M3R). Oh and the FogStop is cheaper too.
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Schuberth S2 Helmet Review
I commute into London every day all year round, so when it comes to helmets I need something that didn’t just look good but also practical. Spurred by previous helmets being noisy, leaking rain, lacking Pinlock and other annoying niggles, I decided to splurge out on a premium lid. I was drawn to Schuberth due to their rep for being good quality and really quiet as being big into my music, hi-fi and home cinema I was keen to keep my hearing in good shape. I also wanted a design that would stand out and help me be seen on the road. Helmet City had a number of Schuberth lids heavily reduced last Autumn (~£200 off!), so I just had to check them out.
For my birthday my lovely wife signed me up for the IAM Skills For Life course, something I’ve wanted to do for a while which should really help improve my riding. On Sunday I attended the first day of the course – the machine control day. Out on North Weald airfield I was practising some key riding skills; low speed riding, balance, emergency stop, counter steering and so forth.
The riding was not easy, but really useful to practice in a safe environment off the road and quickly highlighting some bad habits I’ve fallen into (in particular how I cover my front brake). There were loads of IAM observers on hand to help, give encouragement and ask the right questions to aid us pinpointing our own mistakes.
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Sixth Sense Skills 16
A full review of that Nautilus Stebel horn can be found here.
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Ushering in 2015
And there we have it, another new year and a year older, possibly a little wiser too. The tail end of 2014 was insanely hectic for me with my day job sending me out to Gothenburg and Boston, followed by a mad Christmas break visiting all our family in Shropshire and North Wales. It has been good to be back in London and back on the bike. It’s funny how some time away from two wheels leaves you hankering and longing, but once riding again at first you feel awkward, slightly nervous and rusty. It’s taken a couple of days to relax and get reacclimatised, but it’s good to be back.
I suppose I should have some New Year resolutions and plans, so here we go:
- Do my IAM. My lovely wife treated me to their Skills For Life course (starting Sunday), which I’m looking forward to and hope to complete this year.
- Update my YouTube channel. Life has been so busy lately, I’ve done little video editing, however I have some plans for a new video series in the pipeline.
- Bike maintenance wise, I hope to give the Fazer’s forks a good service and swap on some braided brake lines. I also have some yellow wrap for the headlights which I’d like to try out for the dark nights.
- Fingers crossed, I’d like to resolve my incident from September 2013, which is due to go to court at some point.
- Lastly, it would be great to get my wife another bike. Hopefully she’ll complete her PhD and get a job, so finances can resolve this.
Happy New Year to you all – ride safe!
If like me, you have a Rukka jacket with a back armour insert that’s worse for wear, then you’ll be interested in this replacement from Forcefield. Well known for their quality armour products, Forcefield has a range of armour inserts in many different shapes for all manner of jackets. For Rukka back protector owners you need the 009 model, which as you can see above is a like-for-like replacement. Well, not completely, the 009 insert is slightly thicker than the original Rukka RVP insert and is CE Level 2 certified to afford greater protection.
If you’re not lucky enough to have a warm dry garage, then you have a choice of leaving your bike to face the elements or you use a cover like this. I managed to blag this Oxford Aquatex cover in a recent competition from Helmet City, but it’s readily available for about £20.