so yesterday all my troubles seemed so far away no no not that !, yesterday was forecast to be a dry day so I thought I'd wash the muddy stuff off the bike and take it out to give it a proper test ride,
it started to rain as I washed it.................. but I'm a tough biker so I went indoors and did some moaning,
it stopped raining after a while so I carried on with my plan but with less enthusiasm on the cleaning bit,
the ride went well apart from two things, one was that the bike needs new steering bearings (ordered) and the other is that it has a slight miss-fire at very small throttle openings, maybe this will clear up after a basic service or maybe it needs the throttle bodies cleaning or maybe it is something else, it's definitely one of those three....maybe
and the other thing I did was to fit new chrome headlights instead of the awful black ones that are on it (originals got smashed), these black ones had projector beam style lights and were good if you wanted to pin point the opening to a mouse hole but rubbish if you want to see something like, I don't know maybe the road in front of you !,
the chrome lights I originally had on the bike were ok in quality but they never gave out the best light spread, it was just enough but that wasn't a problem as to be honest this bike for me is about looks as much as anything, so the new replacement chrome ones I bought I expected to be the same as before,
now when you search ebay you can find things that appear to be the same but at vastly different prices, I have now learnt that there is a reason for this as my replacement lights cost £25 and other places were £60,
as I started to fit them it was clear that these lights were so cheaply made that some made by 'Blue Peter' out of sticky back plastic would have been better quality, the wires are so thin that stripping the insulation off just pulled copper strands out, the part where the bulb (H4) fits had no spring clip to hold it in place but 'tangs' to bend over to keep the bulb in place, the bulbs that came with the lights are so awful that when I pushed the electrical connector onto it, the locating parts of the bulb just bent back and the bulb went nicely through the hole and into the light housing, the 'parking' light bulb was such a gentle push fit into place that a butterfly could pull it out, and after a very large amount of cursing I got them temporarily in place and found the amount of light given off by them barely lit up the back of my shed wall without the internal lights on,
a £60 set have now been ordered (I can see better electrical connections in the picture),
nothing else will happen now until my steering bearings come and then it depends on the weather and temperature as I'm old and arthritic now 
still it will give me time to carry on carving my wooden dolphin 
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wish i could get my old crashed 9r back 
it's on holiday.
