The personal and professional website of Douglas Van Bossuyt
Today I rode my bike to school and then on for a little fun in the twisties up on Lewisburg Saddle. On the way back, a Ninja in the 500-750cc range pulled up next to me at a stoplight. He revved his engine a few times and motioned that we should race. The light turned green and we took off the line. I watched the look of surprise on his face in my rear view mirrors as I pulled away.
Pretty good for a scrappy old bike from 1984!
Total mileage: 25-ish
The other week I managed to win an E-bay auction for a genuine Honda Shadow engine guard. It’s pretty rare that you see these things go up for auction. Even rarer that you can buy them for under 100 bucks. It was my lucky day.
Below are a few photos of the installation of the engine guard. When I went to install mine, I had a few troubles figuring out just how to mount the whole contraption. Hopefully these photos will be of use to someone else in the future.
Note that the flat metal bit that goes inside the frame tube does not actually connect to anything on my 1984 Honda Shadow. It is simply left dangling out in the air. Perhaps on other makes or models of Honda, it actually bolts to something. On mine it dangles awkwardly. This doesn’t seem to affect the strength or rigidity of the bars at all.
Later that day I went out and bought two cheap highway pegs to mount on the bars. It is much, much more comfortable to ride my bike now. In the future I plan to upgrade to forward pegs to let my feet and legs stretch out a bit more. The one nice thing with the way they are mounted now is that I can heel shift and heel brake from cruising position.
I took the bike out today first to school for lunch with Brent before going on a ride past the airport.
My gas tank was low so I stopped for a fill-up. The motorcycle took 2.397 gallons and the odometer recorded 117.1 miles. Fuel economy was 48.85 mpg. The 10% ethanol has a big effect on my mileage!