Spare Parts & Tools

Spare Parts are always emergency parts and who knows what will happen? Let a specialist check your bike can prevent the worst but sometimes it makes the worst happen. A well maintained bike will drive better and will less likely breakdown. If you can’t remember the last suspension maintenance this is a must have for longer and especially off-road trips. Also very important are the bearings of the levers of you rear suspensions. If you’re engine brakes you’re f… anyway. Most problems need special tools and if something brakes you will not have all the spare parts with you anyway. That’s why I never carry engine parts. A check you can do before with low costs is a pressure lost test. It will indicate problems with valves and pistons or pistonrings. Luckily most engine problems don’t lead directly to a breakdown sot that you still can drive a few kms with them. Carburettor, injection- and ignition system are much more often the reason for breakdowns. But even a not working cooling fan can bring you in serious trouble like I experienced during Balkan Compact. The major breakdowns during Baltic Sea and Siberia were from the same kind. Both were easy to solve with some basic knowledge of electric circuits of your bike and the right tools. A small multimeter is much more useful than the most other tools. I know enough about all that and still don’t carry the right tools with me. Why, maybe not enough problems to motivate me in the past? Maybe it’s just laziness.

The History of Use contains a few general spare parts and is incomplete especially for Siberia. The carried tools are missing completly. This section is something I plan to rework soon. That’s why you don’t find more comments.