That’s amazing. I hope I’ll get that sort of reliability. Have you got a photobucket page with the photo’s of the trips at all? Had to Google HPN, but that is one of the bikes that has always inspired me for adventure RTW motorbiking, even before I knew what it was.

Bloody hell. 70’s? Did you have to put a 8” floppy disk into it? Must had some sort of pump mechanism controlling the induction rates?

That was definately something on my concerns list as well. The problem is that with such a large group of typical owners not knowing anything or want to know anything about their bike but still providing info, it's hard to take info on a solid or not. This was one of those areas where sorting the solid from the crap became an issue. I’m still not sure if they have been squeezing the margins in the design or it’s caused by the geometry/ location of the components or somthing else. Having a non-sealed battery above the motor would obviously speed up the drying out of it. After our battery failure a sealed battery was always going to be on the mods list, on any bike.
I can’t remember if the bikes with the VR at the front of the motor have had any problems out of the ordinary. Loose battery terminals are most often the cause of ‘problems’ .Not sure if issues caused by loose terminals could really be called problems though. Luckily a lot of the accessories wiring was built by and with the help of my auto-electrician mate. Didn't really know how to use a soldering iron before that, but received a crash course (still produced some cold and dry joints though). Similar for all the steel work with another friend.

Not my normal reaction to old timer advice at all. Been riding with a few guys from ADVrider over the last year a few times, and learned a tonne. Mostly on trail riding setup. But it’s not all relevant for RTW riding, or it’s sometimes a narrow-minded dogmatic opinion (often not even related to the bike itself), which is never useful. Have to be selective on the advice you take. Some of the guys only have to look at something to offer advice, but other actually wanna have a go at it to see what it’s really like. Most people I’ve read giving senseless input threads like this have never even sat on the bike they criticize.

Cheers. Appreciate the offer. One thing I haven’t been able to work on is the troubleshooting aspect of dealing with faults, because I’ve had nothing wrong with it yet, so I might have some posts related to this. I’m bored of working on mods now, and am finally finished (good thing because I’m leaving next week). Having been working on these bikes for as long as I have, I don’t wanna turn a single spanner until the next service. Just hope that some of the other non problems solving mods won’t cause some issues. At least after having done all the work myself I should be able to come up with somothing.

Not so sure about that. Reason for me even getting involved was because of some of the posts on the first page. Again, probably never owned, spend time with or sat on one.

Agree. There’s always the blog subscription.

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