I attended a wonderful wedding recently in the Bunya Mountains between two friends of mine, and it was lovely. The ride to and from there was less than fun, however.
I can handle:
- A four hour bike ride, that’s easy.
- Five or six kilometres of fist-sized gravel on a sports bike.
- The seals on my front master cylinder deciding to refuse to live up to their name.
What I can’t handle is the terrible state of back-country Queensland roads and ending up with incredibly sore wrists by the time I was half way home. 🙁
In other news, Kawasaki wins again on the parts front - went down to TeamMoto’s big warehouse store at Springwood and ordered a rebuild kit for the master cylinder ($93) and a replacement seal for the top ($25ish).
The three-brake-line system that the bike runs as standard needed replacing because the lines were bulging even under light braking situations. I found a local manufacturer called HEL Performance and I have ordered some from for the reasonable sum of $160 delivered.
I’d highly recommend them because they allow you to choose from a variety of colours for both the lines and the fittings and have a massive back-catalogue of supported bikes with their associated configurations of lines. I have chosen to go with a more race-like dual-line setup which runs a line for each caliper directly to the master cylinder. This configuration allows for more direct feedback and improved performance along with reduced parts count and ease of bleeding.