Mike's Blog

Mike Calvert: microlight pilot, BMAA aircraft inspector, motorcyclist, home brewer and all round tinkerer!

Thread Lock

So, following on from my post about a brake caliper mounting bolt on my motorbike working loose and falling out, Nick (aka Muddydisco) suggested threadlock. Now as it happens I recently got to know a nice chap Tom who is a professional motorbike mechanic, and he’d invited me over to his garage yesterday to see…

March 10, 2013
Balls!

No-one to blame but myself for this, but having taken the front brake calipers off the bike, I refitted them, and as they aren’t the original Kwak brakes I don’t have any torque settings for the bolts, so just as I’ve done before, the mounting bolts were done up to ‘very firm’. Well, apparently not…

March 9, 2013
Should cyclists wear helmets?

I’m not judging – honestly – I am an ‘All of the gear, all of the time’ person, and so MY opinion is that cyclists SHOULD wear a helmet – I do on my mountain bike, and I won’t let the kids play on their bikes without a helmet – I’d say that if you’re…

March 3, 2013
Brew Day

A brew day video Spot the typos in some of the comments…..

March 1, 2013
Catch up!

Blimey, I’ve been neglecting this blog a bit!! So, I’ve been keeping busy, filming my commutes on the bike, and I have a few more videos on my . I’ve done an oil and filter change on the motorbike, and then discovered the exhaust was leaking. That was temporarily patched up, but a visit to…

February 18, 2013
Filtering – proof that the traffic police are quite happy with it :-)

Proof that when done sensibly, even the Traffic Police have no issue with filtering. This is the A904, heading home from Edinburgh, long traffic queue held while crashed cars are recovered. The Traffic Officer didn’t seem very interested in bikes, but was perfectly friendly and had a brief chat with me after I filtered to…

January 15, 2013
Just one reason to drive a bike and not a car

QUEUES!!! Heading east on the M9 this morning I was confronted with a huge long queue of traffic – it turned out it was caused by an accident in lane 2 (the outside lane to this not familiar with the Police lane numbering system) – and the queuing traffic stretched for miles and miles. Filtering…

January 8, 2013
Video and music..

Well, I’ll not be winning any video editing awards for this effort!! I had intended it to be a vlog, but the sound wasn’t great, and the vlog was rather meandering and not very good, so I dumped the audio from the video and lobbed a bit of music onto it. Stunning, eh?

January 7, 2013
Am I the only person obeying a temporary speed limit??

There’s a temporary 30 mph speed limit on this country road because of road works for the new Forth bridge. Unfortunately, at times it seems I’m the only person obeying that limit! At the end of the section of road that carries the 30mph limit there’s a road off to the left that would be…

January 6, 2013
A day in the garage, working on the bike

I spent pretty much all of Sunday in the garage – I’d got a touring scotoiler kit off ebay that fits behind the number plate, but when it arrived it was full of dirty, contaminated, oil. Spent ages emptying the scotoiler and the reserve, flushing/cleaning with very thin oil, then proper oil. Once that was…

December 31, 2012