Why do I need an adventure bike?
 

Hi there.
Just a quick question. I am planning a trip to Morocco and fancy some 'mild' off road riding but am a bit stumped. I currently ride a CBF600 due to being a short arse and would rather feel comfortable riding than facing a bike I cant get on without platform shoes. I used to own a F650GS which was bought with the trip in mind but I had nothing but reliability problems and constant blank cheque writing to the thieves at the BMW dealership so got rid as soon as I could. Will the CBF be ok for the trip and will I be able or have to put dual purpose tyres on? (ie.Metzeller tourance etc.)
:confused1:
Cheers people,
Phil

It depends on how you treat the bike. IMO you can do almost any road with any bike if you take it slow enough. As you're CBF isn't designed for off-road then you should take extra care to check the bike more regularly. You should do a service sooner and if riding in dusty or dirty conditions clean the air-filter.

As for tyres, this will depend on the size of the rims on your bike. You can check for example a tyre distributer whether they have suitable dual purpose tyres for the riding you are doing. try Pneus Online: Expert store for tyre selling online and motorized classifieds
Note that in Morrocco there is a lot of sand, so if you want to ride sand, the best is a very light bike. Otherwise the roads are good quality and you're CBF would be fine.

Lots of really good roads to keep you occupied for weeks in Morocco, the pistes are stony, and if you are sensible, rideable but, there could be wet, muddy, slippery patches and washed out gullies which will be testing/stop a road bike. Depending when you go, snow could be a problem at higher altitudes. You could use the road bike and hire an off-roader in Marrakesh or Agadir for a few days.

Any bike will do. Check out MotoEdde's blog. Around the world on a K75. It puts it all in perspective...

I have to agree, but having done dirt and deep gravel on a ninja 250 I'd suggest that some bikes are definitely better off road than others. If you take the bike you love you'll enjoy the trip more, but the roads you want to do and the bike you love might not be a great match. If you're taking a street bike it'll be much happier, and make your life easier, if you stick to pavement as much as possible. If you wanted to spend more time off road then you're going to be better off with something more dual-sporty.

And yes, if you're going off road tire choice makes a huge difference. Street tires feel very slippery to me in gravel and loose dirt. You have to ride much slower, and have a harder time making quick directional changes (to get away from that car that suddenly came speeding around the blind corner).

Bikes can be lowered if height is an issue, and there are many to choose from. BMW isn't the only company that makes dual sports.

Sort of depends on your definition of off-road. Gravel roads are easily rideable on anything if they're in half-reasonable condition. Hardpac dirt roads are too if it's not wet.

If you're venturing onto slightly more tricky stuff, then you will find things a little more difficult depending on your riding abilities. Cbf6 not a very light bike. If (when?) you drop it there's plenty of stuff to break. Might find it difficult to find anything other than road tyres for your wheel sizes. Beware of lack of ground clearance, particularly denting your exhaust pipes.

If you've not got any off-road experience at all then the cbf should be perfectly fine for the kind of non-asphalt roads you should be looking to ride. Anything that is going to be tricky enough to cause real problems should probably not be getting anywhere near to being on your route plan.


Most people do the opposite, buy something with off-road pretensions (often with a bmw badge on it) and then ride a handful of gravel roads at granny speed before declaring themselves to be hardcore 'adventure motorcyclists'.

My Kawasaki ZR-7S is quite similar to your CBF in terms of ergonomics, tire size, and number of cylinders. I've had it on gravel / dirt roads in the Yukon and Baja (wet and dry). I say without hesitation that it does very poorly under those circumstances. Progress is slow, painstaking and insecure. So, sure, it can be done but it's not fun and, frankly, not that safe, particularly if you hit a softer patch of dirt or a deeper patch of gravel. More than once I felt at the edge of control.

Of course, a pair of Vespas once successfully completed the Paris - Dakar so perhaps it's me and not the bike.

The conventional wisdom is that deflating the tires substantially will improve handling off pavement. I never did that because I was encountering routes that kept shifting between pavement and gravel and the thought of repeatedly deflating and inflating was just too much trouble.

I do recall investigating the availability of dual purpose tires that would fit the 17 inch wheels and, about four years ago, Avon Distanzias were available in the correct size.

There is supposedly something about the manner in which parallel four cylinder engines deliver power to the the wheels that makes them bad choices for unstable surfaces. Perhaps someone more technically knowledgeable can weigh in on that topic.

Normw

Go back before about 1980. There were no "Adventure" styled bikes. People managed perfectly well on a Triumph or Enfield. The only difference was that these bikes had tyres available for the conditions. With this in mind I've run a Hinckley Bonneville on Heidenau knobblies and you can go anywhere an F650 can. More to the point, if you are under six foot you have a much bigger choices of places to put your feet down and unlike an XT225 you can do motorways two up as well.

There is no reason you can't use a four cylinder engine. For competition (the bane of all of us trying to buy stuff that isn't designed for twelve trips round a half mile loop with a weekly rebuild) they aren't used because of weight, complexity and the need to keep the revs up/be in the right gear. Learn to use the power and torque where it is instead of trying to copy Dougie Lampkin (whose bikes do more miles on trailer than their wheel) and a four will be fine.

My only concern about road bikes is the build. The F650's I had dropped to bits faced with off road use, the Triumph has it's moments (minor stuff like the horn bracket) while the XT seemed unbreakable. Styled bikes like the F and Bonneville are designed for weekend use while XT's etc. seem to get a bit extra metal. The Bonneville was a lucky choice, the 60's style made them fit extra metal not by design, but through style. If you can get 17-inch tyres with a decent tread and you are willing to find out about the shocks and welding on a road bike, go for it.

Andy

I'd recommend distanzias but only for the road, I tried them on a muddy track and was not impressed. Just fitted a Heidenau K60 to the front of my ttr 250 but haven't tested it yet, I prefer knobblies for off-road. I can't imagine "blipping" a 600 4 over gullies or boggy patches what ever tyres it's got on...

Depending on the configuration of the motor, the delivery is different. multicylinder bikes put the power down in a more constant stream, 4's more than twins & V's. Singles put the power down once every two rotations of the motor, so the wheel has a <very> small period of time to recover from a spin. Kinda like very basic traction controll!!


There is still no reason why you couldn't use a 4 on the loose as Andy (above ) has said you just need to match your right hand to the situation. Matching that with a single is much easier than with a 4.

I think Singles are a bit of a Marmite thing, love 'em or hate 'em...

You will be fine on any bike in Morocco with standard tyres - it's the easy bit of the Sahara.:thumbup1:

In 1978 I rode a Yamaha RD350 across the Sahara (from Morocco to Nigeria) with standard road tyres (K81 Dunlops).

Nowadays I am sure most of the roads are bitumen - when I travelled it was basically sand all the way from Oujda south (around 4,000km of sand till I reached bitumen again in Nigeria) - but even with sand it is quite possible.

I had 50 litres of fuel and water mounted on my packrack and back seat (to get me through the 900km fuel less stetch beween Tamanrasset and Agaadez). As you can imagine the bike was totally unbalanced, on top of that my peaky 2 stroke engine had no power below 5k rpm and then came in with a blast, so it was not ideal, but I stil got there. :biggrin3:

Riding on sand meant that I would fishtail the bike up to around 50kmh at which point it would stabilise somewhat. The big problem with the sand is the previous vehicle tracks - if you got stuck in one it was very easy to go down so I used to ride a long way off the track - often up to 1km - as all the old ruts made by trucks over the last 50 years just remained (there was nothing to cause them to go away).

The biggest challenge was when the sand became undulating (dunes). I had to accelerate to around 80km going down the hard side of the dune, and then struggle to maintain momentum getting to the top of the next at around 40kmh and fishtailing wildly, before I could gain speed again on the descent. Managing fuel consumption on a thirsty 2 stroke twin was not easy either.

The next challenge was the corrugations on some of the more frequently used gravel surfaces - you had three choices, go very slow (walking pace), ride very fast (100kmh+ to skim over the top of the corrugations) or anything in between.

Fast was best but it was very tiring and very scary when you hit the inevitable soft patch and got all crossed up. At lower speeds everything would bang around and I ended up snapping engine mounts, chain guard and holing the bottom of the tank (from hitting the frame).

This is turning into an interesting discussion so I'll venture further.

Older road bikes, especially those of the 60's and 70's (I've known a few) tended to have, compared to modern ones:

1) Narrower tires.

2) Often, a front wheel with a larger diameter than the rear wheel. My Honda Turbo (and there's a road bike if there ever was one) had an 18 inch front.

As I understand it, both of these factors make for better performance on dirt or gravel. Witness the relatively skinny tires on dirt bikes and the common 21 inch front wheels on dual purpose and off road motorcycles.

Mr. Treefrog's CBF and my ZR-7S have fat tires on equal sized wheels. Strike one.

The ZR-7S has an unusual amount of torque for a parallel four. This is because it is based on the old GPZ engine and has only two valves per cylinder. As I understand it, two large valves give you much more torque than four small ones. This bike can be ridden around in 5th gear (no sixth) quite happily at surprisingly low speeds.

But, notwithstanding the ease of finding the torque sweet spot, it still was very unhappy, in any gear, at any speed, off pavement. Fishtailing is exciting once or twice, then it becomes highly stressful. So does a front end wobble. Strike two.

Finally, the ergonomics of a bike like a CBF mean that its pretty hard to stand up for more than a few seconds at a time, at least without developing a backache. The bars are simply too low. And standing up is something that's really helpful in coping with the rougher or softer bits. And then there's that issue of going down hill. Strike three.

Respectfully submitted,

Normw

Older road bikes had very little to break when you dropped them, and what did break was usually bodge-able or cheap and easy to replace, compare to todays plastic nightmares.....
Things were much simpler in them days...

Thanks to all
 

Cheers to you all for your replies. I think I'll stick to the tarmac for now and just enjoy the scenery rather than worrying about venturing off the beaten track and breaking my legs. It'll be my first trip so plenty of time to return on a more capable bike if I fancy being more adventurous.
Also off to iceland for a wedding of all things in November and have heard good things about the organised bike tours but will have to win the lottery before I can afford that. Cheers.

Why blip? This is some sort of MX technique to load the rear suspension and put torque into the rear wheel without speeding up too much. The disadvantage is that if the wheel grips (less of a problem if you're on the fourty seventh lap over the same bit of mud) you will speed up. On a 350 single going in circles for half an hour lurching from one near crash to another is the name of the game, speeding up then saving it is a good thing. When you are trying to go 300 miles a day in a straight line, smoothness and easy of use are the thing. Simply adding a little power in plenty of time, shifting your weight and letting the bike skip over the soft bit the way to go IMHO and works equally well on a 125 stroker or a Pan European. On a 350 Enfield its easier still as full throttle is "a little power"!

The Pan of course a *** to pick up when this doesn't work.

Andy