magg

Chris: Yes, I know sand is tricky. :) I've done some field testing this summer, and the offroad tyres we bought from SIP (Kings tyre, I think or Duro something) actually did quite well. They did get me out of the sand after abit of work. 2-3 hours of fooling around in the sand pit did however kill my clutchplates. But that sort of confirmed that they worked quite well. It was good fun as well! The point, though, isn't really to ride hard and fast like they do in the Dakar Rally. We just need to keep a good average speed so as to be able to finish the days stage in one piece and preferably before dark.. :) Schwalbe has been so kind to sponsor us with 12 Schwalbe Weatherman tyres. While useless like any other regular vespa tyre in the sand, it did surprisingly well on gravel up to a certain size. And as long as the gravel was nice and packed they did alot better than those knobbly ones. The important thing is that they will not wear down as quickly. I did a 1700km trip with them this summer and the rear tyre is only worn down by about 1/3 of its original tread depth. These are going to be our main tyres for most of the trip. I'm thinking the offroad tyres only come on if we need to cover a fair bit of distance on bad roads. While we make a point of beeing totaly self supported (hence the Correos-boxes with tools, spares etc..) the knobblies will go in the truck of one of the other participants. And if we couldn't have done that they'd stayed at home. We'll managed somehow.. :) And at least some of the sandy bits can be driven around. The beach riding in Mauri can be skipped if we stick to the main road in the desert. However, we will loose the military escort that the Mauri governement has offered the rally. Al qaeda in the maghreb threatens with kidnappings every year, so to counter that there's that military escort.. I've read about the Scooters in the Sahara-Brits, but it's not them. These guys have newer pizza bikes and have tuned their bikes quite a bit. They also have a support vehicle. It is going to be interessting to see how they hold up. This is theire webpage. : http://www.bamakoorbust.org.uk/page1.php I'm not selling my scooter. It's coming home again no matter how rediculous that may seem. After Guinea-Bissau we hope to put the scooters in a container to Oslo and fly back home. I only get 3 weeks of paid leave from work, so I got to be back the 6th of February. Oh, and I like that "Ignition-Modifikation". I've got to see if I can fit something similar to the PX engine.

I'm sorry for the english reply here.. I just noticed our number of hits skyrocketed the last week and had to find out why. :) Obviously, this post is partly to blame! We are going to participate in the Budapest-Bamako rally this winter. It's going to be a little like The Tortoise and the Hare (you know Æsop?) In the motorcycle class, everyone except a few crazy brits on pizza bikes (honda innova 125cc) have more ccs and so called "proper" desert bikes. Pepper_hh: Good to hear you are still going strong! I presume you are "Chris" that I have been messaging with a few months back? The Rally route has been changed now, so we will be doing a little more gravel than we thought. We're not going to Bamako (shame about our team's name). Instead we go to Guinea-Bissau. A rought estimate is around 1500-2000 km of gravel along the beaches of mauretania, border area between Mauri and Mali, Nikolo-koba in Senegal and Guinea Bissau. At least that is what I can tell from looking at Google Maps. This means we probably will need to bring those annoying offroad tyres (in addition to the Schwalbe Weathermans) if we want to be able to keep our average speed high enough to tackle the daily stages of between 400 and 600 kms.. So far, this is about what our route will look like.. : http://g.co/maps/yjwr7 Sip has been generous enough to sponsor us with 8 sip performance shocks (front and back, one in reserve). I must say I was a little weary of using performance shocks on a trip like this, but all our stock shocks were worn out and not really capable of handling the extra load on the back in a good way. So far the shocks are doing really well. :) Magnus