Yesterday I rode up to the dry ski slope in Southampton to get in some practice (first time in two years!), although I probably still won't get to go abroad this season, even if I wait until March
The trip turned into a bit of a palaver, unfortunately...
Firstly, a few weeks ago, one of the pins on the connector to the Optimate charger lead broke. "Oh well," I thought, that shouldn't be an issue.
Wrong!
I switched the bike on, pressed the starter: Chug, chug, bzzzt! The dreaded sound of a flat battery
Ok, into 2nd gear, let's try bump starting it... let's try again... and again...
Finally, after half a dozen attempts, it finally fired, huzzah!
Except then, as I'm riding off, the oil light came on
Now I was going to replace the oil and filter anyway, and I knew the level was down, but I decided to give it a little longer as, at one point, when I braked, it went out, so it couldn't have been critically low.
However, as I was on the road leading to the bottom of the M275, it was still on and I was just deciding to head back and top up, when it went out again and, this time, it stayed off (phew!)
So I kept the revs up higher than normal to make sure the battery got a good charge and got to the ski slope without further incident (except I had to take a break from skiing after 30 minutes because I was knackered through the lack of practice and having to bump start the bike).
Fortunately, after that, I got back into the swing of things and the ride home was uneventful with it starting on the button and the oil light staying off.
Today I decided I'd fix the Optimate lead which involved a lot of faffing around to get at the Tamiya plug, then cut the old one off and solder new connections on.
Except that, having finally got it sorted, one of the pins was off centre, so I decided to use a pair of needle-nose pliers to straighten it out, unfortunately, because I was tired, I carelessly got one jaw of the pliers into each side of the plug and ZAP! a nice big spark appeared and a check with the multimeter showed that I'd managed to blow the fuse...
So now a new set of fuses is on order and that's another job to sort out.