The New Garage Chronicles

"You're good, you're good", I tell Essie as she exhibits the symptoms of salt-poisoning (erratically behaving thermometer) and asphyxiation (weird throttling at 8000 RPM/when hitting 90 with the snow shoes on)

I feel like I'm gonna super jinx myself by saying this but we've been having gorgeous driving weather and I've never been happier to commute. It's just below freezing, so the road dries super duper fast and doesn't really form ice, it's overcast so we have visibility for weeks, it's almost calm and it's quite dry so I'm not having to deal with weird wind conditions while driving.

My only wish would be that it would be just a hair colder, actually -- the road being so near zero still warms up quite a lot after a few dozen tons of truck cross it, and my tyres aren't super performant when warm, and as long as it doesn't get super windy a few degrees colder doesn't really matter as far as what I have to wear. Literally the only bad part of the commute rn is that I don't like driving 80 (partially due to it being dark and partially due to the harder tyres making some rough parts of the road unbearable) but because it's so clear and nice, most people with bigger headlamps and two tracks don't have to deal with the same problems as I do, so I'm constantly forced by traffic pressure to go juuuuust a little faster than I'd like ti.

Extremely strange that one of the lesser skills I've developed as a motorist is the ability to gauge the weight of other vehicles from a distance.

A dirty driving secret about me is that in the winter I determine the route I take home entirely on how many left turns I have to make on ice.

It's officially "everything is fucking frozen over" season. I've got a fresh winter tyre at the back and two old but decently good tyres at the front, but I'm still taking every corner very gradually (either at well below 30km/h or treating myself as having a steering radius of 9+ m) because Essie truly steers like a cow on ice.

Mind, this isn't really her fault. She's got a surprisingly tight steering radius for something with a 1.5m wheelbase, and even though she's got a fairly high center of gravity, I can still corner pretty tight with her when it's dry. On ice, however, the back loses traction very easily because the geometry of the back tyre runs pretty flat overall.

Also, she's not exactly a dainty enduro bike I feel comfortable catching the weight of if I need to suddenly brake, I'm already having to use my weight a lot as a counterbalance just driving a straight line, and at low speeds I really need the torque from the back wheel to help right her if I suddenly start slipping. Anything past about 20 degrees lean is just gonna result with the back wheel chasing ahead, it's not an unremediable situation but it is very scary when it happens.

Then again, the weight is one of the things that makes her feel so planted while driving in bad conditions, so I can't complain too much. I'll get used to the Rear Wheel Wiggles soon enough, probably but for now I'm taking it pretty easy.

I saw northern lights on the drive home today :) it got cloudy after about 3km and stayed that way until I got home, but the one leg that had them also had a star-bright sky and a full moon.

Today I discovered that my anti-fog/anti-frost spray actually works -- I've just been using way too little of it and applying it incorrectly. The bottle is almost done so I've been trying to use it up so I can switch to a different kind that is apparently better in headwind, and today I had to take a trip through scenic Silent Hill to get home.

The correct way to apply the anti-fog coat so that it actually works is apparently: 1) use soap water to clean the windshield 2) squeegee it as close to dry as you can 3) cover as much of the windshield with the spray as you can 4) let sit for like ten to fifteen seconds before wiping it around, not off, the windshield 5) let dry for a few seconds more until it's see-through again. Optionally 6) squeegee the inside clean, but only apply antifog around the edges.

I have a tall 80cm windshield on Essie which is great for windshear, but awful because it fogs up and freezes over super easy even in not-particularly-hard headwind. The top 15cm of it curves back to create a tension surface for stability, so coating that part is useless, it'll just blow off -- and unfortunately the 15cm point is just about where my eyesight rests normally if I'm sitting up straight. Turns out I do probably actually need to crouch a little bit while going at speed as if I'm driving a racer seat bike instead of a saddle-seat one :|c

I think I've mentioned before that the water evacuation properties on my big windshield aren't actually half bad as long as I'm going decently fast, but some mornings it really annoys me that the optimum speed for water evac is just, like... A shred faster than I like going when it's not a rush hour. This means that sometimes, in order to minimise fogging and to see better, I would have to go faster, which is exactly as unintuitive as it sounds.

It's worse now when the roads are Moist and have high albedo, especially since I'm driving straight into the rising sun, but it's lowkey just kinda comical that I will have better visibility in sheet rain with a bit of headwind than I do going up'n'down a couple specific hills on my commute (one of them right before the fencing ends, too, in the middle of moose country) and I have to lean around the thing keeping wind off my face to see shit.

And, y'know, sometimes the commute goes through scenic Silent Hill, and at that point there's really nothing you can do about visibility. At least once it gets close to freezing temperatures and the relative moisture goes down, I've got antifog spray to help me out, it just doesn't work if the woter doesn't want to crystallise.

I wish the Citroën and the Toyota tailgating me on the highway a very "electrical issue in your ignition".

Now when we're out of Eat The Hell Weather Season, I notice that my windshield is getting extremely cloudy from the surface damage scrubbing and wiping it has done. Time to figure out how to buff acrylic without making the problem of poor visibility worse, I guess :|c

Summer tyres get. The back tyre is a racing type without any pronounced tread, it'll be interesting to see how slippery it is in the rain and on sand etc. but it should hold up better on the highway due to having a slightly smaller contact patch overall. It's got whiskers on the sides, which should probably help with water evacuation but ngh. I honestly like having a bit of tread. Luckily the front wheels didn't need replacing yet. They're probably gonna last all the way to 20k at this rate.

I need to learn to stop to fill my tank, that's the second time in a month I basically rolled into town running on empty. Essie can be pushed pretty easy but I would rather not do it in the middle of the night.

I am getting garbage mileage, holy shit.

Mine daughter, please, gas is expensive enough as it is. I'm sure we can do better than 4,5 l/100km

Van's Goldielocks Guide to Passing a Motorcycle on the Highway:

1) If they're driving significantly slower than you, assume they're not doing it for fun. Road conditions matter a lot and going slower than you think you can is one of the best ways to maintain control over a bike. They might be experiencing crosswinds, poor traction, or any number of "oh fuck if I speed up I'll definitely skid out" conditions that a car won't.

2) Group early to indicate you wanna pass, but leave some space. Bikes don't actually have a shorter braking distance, but they do brake faster than a car, and you want to be able to react if something happens, too. If the bike is hogging the lane instead of grouping to give you space, assume something about the road conditions is forcing them to take that line.

3) If you drive an SUV, a pickup or any other heavy car, remember that you, too, create a bow wind. If you're passing someone fast, they might need to correct for it, so leave as much sideways room as you can. Use the whole neighbouring lane.

4) Have patience, especially in rough weather. Rain on a bike is even worse than in a car, but gusty wind can be just as dangerous and even harder to anticipate. The most common reason a bike is wobbling aggressively is gusty crosswind, which takes a lot of focus to deal with, and might make it impossible for the driver to react to you passing by giving room and slowing down.

Nobody who's slower than the traffic flow on a bike is interested in racing you. If we wanted to outrun you, we probably would have, but there's tons more reasons why we might be slower than a car, the majority of which only increase the difficulty of driving safely.