Weekly Update 2020-07-12

Good Sunday evening!

(Today I tried changing the tyres on my 990. It ended in me hobbling out of the garage with one new and one old, flat wheel on the bike. I was so wrecked I asked Rowan to do the newsletter this week. - Jaco)

This week I am giving Jaco a break from his newsletter ‘duties’.

## Philosophical ramblings

It was absolutely stellar weather this morning, and the perfect chance to get out on the adventure bike. But I had unfortunately made other commitments; husband duty. The weather forecasts had promised a cold and rainy weekend, so I thought I could get ahead of the game since next weekend we are riding the dirt bikes in Swellendam.

This brings me neatly onto this weeks topic; how many bikes should you own? For a bachelor or bachelorette the equation is simple:

n + 1
where n = the number of motorcycles you currently own

In other words, there is always space for one more.

However, if you have a partner, things can become more complicated. They might say things like “you are much nicer when you come back from a ride” and “if you feel like riding this weekend, I don’t mind going to see some friends” occasionally. But there is always an underlying risk; one two many bikes will push them over the edge.

And so the simple equation becomes an inequality:

n + 1 < p
where p = the number of motorcycles you would need to own for your partner to leave you

It sounds simple, but be warned; the p-constant is often an irrational number!

## New rubber

This past week we got our hands on some Leader Tread gummy tires. They look the business and I am very keen to test them out. I’ll track the hours I get out of them and do a write-up at a later stage. We have also been contemplating the benefits of doing our own tyre changes vs sending it in to the shop. I dropped my wheel off at the shop, and this weekend we will attempt the change on Jaco’s bike so we will have a good comparison.

## Brand-used bikes

Apparently a ride on Jaco’s KTM is all it takes to convince someone to buy a dirt bike. This week we went to view a late model KDX200 which Hugo was considering. On the surface it seemed like a good deal, but there were unfortunately some deal breakers.

While scouring Gumtree I noticed a few things:

- There seemed to have been a significant increase in the number bikes for sale
- There are some good deals to be had on less common bikes
- There is a new trend where it is possible to lease fast-food delivery bikes for around R600/month

Our data analytics on Gumtree confirmed that there has in fact been a significant increase in the number of adverts. We have some hypothesis here and will probably do a piece on this at a later stage.

## Website

Jaco is still putting the finishing touches on his BMW R1200GS review and it should be up on the site some time this week.

## Upcoming

- Look forward to more video. We are stepping things up with some moto-vlog and video bike review content in the near future.
- A review of my 2017 BMW F800GS

That’s it for this week. If in doubt, just send it!

Rowan Page

(P.S. from Jaco: I checked Rowan's math in his text and may have spotted an error - surely the equation is n <= p ? ... as you can drop the +1 and furthermore you would only know where that line is when you've stepped onto [or over] it. )