Ive mentioned the tank water drain issues before so I wont go on about that in this post. Thats in the hands of KTM to see what they can do.

Last weekend I had a couple of days away on the bike. I packed a few things in to my bag and tied it down on to the back of the Duke and off we rode for a 300 mile run along motorways, A roads, B roads and very bumpy fen roads in Lincolnshire.

Saturday started off with an early blast up the A1 in the rain. This confirms that the Duke is what I call a wet bike in that it sprays a lot of muck and rain up the back of the bike and rider. Its inevitable because the air flow created by the upright riding position pulls the crap up the back of the bike. Its not serious but is something worth noting just in case thats a problem for you. At motorway speeds and just over its actually pretty good for a naked bike. I wasn’t over tired after the 100 mile blast to my first stop off for breakfast.

After breakfast a slow jaunt of approx 100 miles at 50mph and less was enjoyed. The bike is a little vibey at 50mph because its just a bit too low for 5th gear and is a bit buzzy in 4th gear. Riding at 52 or 48 for a sustained ride would be better but traffic dictated the speed so I put up with 4th gear. As expected country lanes are a total blast, even at slow speeds. The longer travel suspension takes the bumps in its stride even with my 16 stones of fat bloke on top of the bike. That slow relaxed ride out allowed the engine to use little fuel. I calculated 88mpg!!! on that run. Unbelievable but its not something im that concerned about and wont attempt to repeat again in the future

Sunday morning I left the bed and breakfast fully fuelled up and took the b road route back home over the Lincolnshire fens. There are a mixture of long straight but very bumpy roads with a load of slow sharp bends thrown in for good measure. This is where the Duke comes out to play. You can really hoon along those roads, slow down late for the bends and ride the torque of the single engine out of them to quickly accelerate back up to speed for the next blast down the straight. The grin factor was 10 out of 10 for sure. My luggage on the back stayed in place curtesy of my newly purchased rock straps.

The weather was cold but dry and I’m pleased I had the hand guards fitted because this meant I could wear summer weight gloves but still keep my hands warm. They will be too hot for sure in the summer so I will remove the plastic guards and leave the alloy frames in place. This is a two minute job.

Would I make any changes to the bike after riding it hard for 300 miles? Hmmm. Id probably change the rear tyre because I could feel it losing traction here and there. Its a good tyre but I prefer something a bit softer and am happy to live with the reduced range over traction I was pushing very hard though so don’t panic. Its not a crappy tyre…

I might put a different set of grips on the bike to soften them up with the hope that they will soak up some of the vibes.

The one tweak I did make Saturday evening was to push the bars forward by about 2 inches. I did this to change the grip angle because I was getting sore thumbs. Maybe a different set of handle bars may be needed. Don’t take this as a fault of the bike, more of a tweak that I made for my seat to bar positioning. Bars are not expensive neither so I may get a set in and have a play. Moving them a bit did solve my sore thumbs on Sunday so maybe thats fixed it.

Tank range is excellent. My brother on his Rocket 3 did the same run at the same speed as me on Saturday. I filled up with £7.94 and he was still filling up at £16 when I lost interest in the amount of fuel he had used over the Duke.

Mirrors are blurry at high revs as you would expect for a single. Brakes are excellent. It’ll stop long before I do if you know what I mean

All in all Its a really cool lightweight cheap bike with loads of attitude and fun. Some of the people on the KTM forum say its a girls bike… Whatever…

KTM UK have reported the issue to head office in Austria but who knows what will happen. I doubt I will get a new tank with the drain in the right place so I guess that one day the bike will conk out and i’ll need to drain the tank to clear out the water…

I’ll keep you posted.

The shot below was taken from the right side of the tank. In other words, the right side of the shot is actually the front of the tank. You can just see the water pooling at the top right and the drain at the top left of the shot… Doh!

I wanted to securely mount my iPhone in a waterproof secure mount on the handle bars and keep the phone charged up whilst using TomTom and music. Previously ive used a waterproof box which was too big for the iphone and did not offer any wat to charge the phone up. Another solution in the past gave reasonable charging off of the engine but the mount was so crappy that i hardly ever used it.

Times move on and new products come out on eBay This time ive chosen a really slim waterproof case from Ultimate Addons costing approx £30 connected to a ram mount that I already had in stock from previous installations.

Ive decided to use a battery pack to charge the phone up instead of hard wiring in a 12v socket for a car style charger. I always found that the car charger would eventually slip out of the 12v socket due to the bike bouncing about and of course you had to wire it up to the battery. I guess that’s the obvious solution if you tour all the time and always use GPS but for me I wanted something easier to install and remove… I found a 5000 mah 5 volt battery pack with a USB output that would run my iPhone for 20 hours (claimed). I bought a male to female 1.5 metre long USB cable and plumped it in to the bike. That connects to the standard white Apple USB cable and then slips in to the bottom of the case and charges the phone up. The battery pack sits neatly under the saddle out of harms way… Sorted.

The velcro strap in the bottom picture is my personal add-on to the case. Don’t want to lose the phone if it all come apart whilst riding.

Had a quick 10 mile jaunt on the KTM. Its pretty vibey at the moment but things will smooth out a bit after a few hundred miles.

The photo above was taken on Monday March 12th and is Gear4 Motorcycles demo bike. At that point it had only done 270 miles from new so I had to be mechanically sympathetic to how it was ridden but even being careful it still wants to go.

Back in 2002 I had an Aprilia Moto 6.5 which was a 650 single. That was a heavy bike and only pushed out just over 40bhp so it doesn’t compare to the Duke at all. This bike is approx 160kg’s wet and sends out 70bhp. Insane for a single I can tell you. For example, you’re doing 70 and you need to overtake… Just do it. Don’t change gear coz it’ll just take off even with my extra girth teabagging the saddle

The riding position is massively different to the R6 as you would expect. You kind of sit in the bike and there is little room for moving backwards and forwards. I suspect tall riders will have a space issue. For my 5’7″ frame its just right.

30 mph speed limits need to be cruised in 2nd gear. 3rd gear brings the revs down to sub 3000 rpm and Duke doesn’t like that at all. He kicks and bucks allover the place… Get the gearing right though and its great fun.

The bike is meant to do upwards of 50mpg. I reckon I will be able to consistently get it lower than that because the bike just wants to go all the time. Even out of bends you just twist and it goes GRRRR and off it goes….

More to follow on this. Delivery is set for sometime next week. Click on the picture above for more flickr pics.

The following weekend I reinstalled the high bar conversion but immediately noted how heavy the clutch was again. This made me turn my attention to the clutch cable that I was using. Basically, it was cheap and crappy so this got me thinking… I started googling clutch cables for other Yamaha’s with high bars like the Fazer and FZ6. 2004 bikes has the same engine as my R6 so the clutch workings required the same type of connector. What I couldn’t find out was how long the cables were. A call to the local Yamaha dealer didn’t sort the problem neither. They don’t have that kind of information to hand and didn’t have a Fazer cable in stock to measure for me.

I started googling bespoke clutch cables and came across Venhill. They are well known for their brake lines, cables and so on. Two hours later I’ve measured my preferred cable length, filled in the printed form available on their website and have posted my original clutch cable off as a template to them. Approx £30 and one week later my newly hand made clutch cable is fitted on the R6 and I now have a super light clutch again. One very happy bunny for sure.

On closer inspection you can see the quality of the Venhill cable is excellent. Far better than the original even. Below is a photo of the termination at the handlebar end. Very slick and worth the money.

The job was done professionally by of Mike at Ultimate Bike Gear. Time was taken to correctly torque up the relevant nuts and bolts and a coating of ACF-50 grease was applied afterwards to help stop winters claws taking the shine away from my 20’500 mile bike. The ride home felt good even though it was peeing down. Crucially the bike no longer slipped sideways when riding over drain covers that are littered around every bend in my town.

Need to get some careful miles on the new tyres now before the fun begins.

 Front tyre after a short wet ride home

Rear tyre having followed the front tyre home on the same short journey

Check it out

Having ridden the 6 with the high bars for a year I can tell you now that its like adding 20 bhp to the engine because you’re inevitable lower with the standard setup so there is less wind drag on the bike so it goes and then goes some more… Need to learn to behave again. Also need to build up my arms and core strength again because after a quick 20 mile blast last night I was knackerred. This morning though another 30 miles and I was back on form again. The R6 is such a planted bike even on the crappy winter roads of Cambridgeshire.

The bikes running nice and smooth after the winter service I’ve been giving it over the Xmas break. Tomorrow a standard exhaust can is arriving by courier courtesy of eBay. I’m going through a return to standard thing at the moment. I like the look and sound of the blue flame can thats currently fitted but for £85 ive managed to pick up an original Yamaha can still in its wrapping from the factory. For that money i reckon it was a steal because they are over £1000 new from Yamaha.

Ride safe out there readers. The UK is still in winter so the roads are still crappy and covered in winter salt…