Sunday, July 20, 2008

The ME880 conquers the pre-resurfacing pavement

A short ride today to prove out two things:

A. That the Dynabeads method works on my new ME880 front tire on Brigitta at maximum foreseeable speeds to keep it balanced.

B. That the thread pattern on the ME880 front tire can handle the rough conditions presented by roads in the process of being re-surfaced. Conditions which had concerned (read terrified) me while riding on the I-70 superslab and in city traffic in Boulder.

I went out to Quincy Road west of it's junction with the E-470 super slab. It's a straight two lane road at this point for quite a few miles and you can see ahead for a very long distance. Once I was past the Arapahoe County Fairgrounds, I knew there'd be no real traffic for a while so I opened up Brigitta until we were flying along to it's speedometer limit of 85mph. No problems with the front tire or the motorcycle for that matter.

I only held this speed for a short time, got turned around and repeated heading back westbound towards town.

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Once back in town, I headed towards the junction of Alameda and Tower. Its here they're working presently on resurfacing the street and have "conditioned" the road for the eventual pouring of fresh asphalt.


A Closeup of the surface

Brigitta, now laughs at these road conditions

I am happy to report that the new front tire did great on this kind of road surface. Sure, you still feel the motorcycle wiggling under you but I was able to maintain speed with traffic.

In fact, the motorcycle felt so much better on this surface that I turned around and did it again! Before I would have been looking for an exit street to smoother pavements, now it will not dictate my route!

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