4. My Ride – Then and Now

The motorcycle I am going to be riding on this trip is a 2010 Honda NT700V that I bought used, with just a couple thousand miles on it.  Other bikes out there have names like “Shadow” and “Viper” and “Gold Wing”; by comparison, “NT700V” seems a little lame.  In Europe, it is called “Deauville,” but that doesn’t sound all that much better.  (The cycle from my first trip was at least called “Hawk.”)  I bought it after quite a lot of research; it is one of the smallest true touring bikes on the market.  It doesn’t look terribly sexy, which may be why Honda only sold it in the US for two years (2010 and 2011), but I am very happy with it.  The term “touring” implies several things: upright seating position, large gas tank, built-in fairing, and some built-in storage bays (fairly limited on this model), among other things.

Stock photo of the Honda NT700VA, my 2015 motorcycle.

As can be inferred from the name, it has a 700 cc engine, which is basically an oversized 650.  In 1980, a 650 was considered a solid, mid-sized engine; the biggest engines of the time rolled in at 1000 or 1100 cc’s.  Now those are considered midsized, and modern Gold Wings come in at 1800 cc’s, basically the same size as the engine in my Toyota Corolla.  But 700 cc’s is enough for me, and quite a bit more than the 400 cc’s of my 1978 Honda Hawk.  In terms of horsepower, it is more than double, coming in at around 65 HP.  Most American riders these days seem to consider anything under 100 HP “underpowered.”  The issue here for me is mostly just plain weight.  If the cycle goes over somewhere in, say, Yukon, I figure I need to be able to get it back on its wheels by myself; there might not be anyone else around.  This bike weighs in at about 570 pounds, which is at the upper limit (I hope!) of what I can successfully wrestle.  The old Hawk weighed only 400, and I could handle it without issue.  The bigger touring cycles weigh in at 700 pounds or more, and the Gold Wings are an incredible 900 pounds.  No way could I get that up if it fell over. 

Despite weighing 570 pounds, the NT700V gets better than 50 miles per gallon on regular gas.  This is considerably better than the 40 mpg my Hawk got, despite being almost a third lighter.  Part of this I attribute to modern engine design that includes fuel injection and microprocessor-based ignition (timing of the spark plug firings); the Hawk used carburetors and a form of analog electronic timing.  Also, the new bike has a liquid cooled engine (i.e., it has a radiator), as opposed to the air-cooled engine of the Hawk, which reduces operating temperatures.  There may be other factors as well that I’m just not aware of; Honda engines are noted for both reliability and fuel efficiency.  Part of the weight difference comes from the fact that the NT700V comes with “shaft drive” (like a car), as opposed to chain drive like by old Hawk or belt drive like some other bikes.  This device adds 50 or 60 pounds, but eliminates the need for chain maintenance – something to think about, especially when travelling over unpaved roads.  (New chains are much “higher tech” than they used to be; they include O-rings that keep the lubrication inside and the dirt out, but you still have to spray them with rust inhibitors every few weeks or few thousand miles, and monitor the tension.)

1978 Honda Hawk - image from the Internet.  Very similar to the one I rode in 1980.

I got some extra features on this cycle, since I knew that I wanted to take a long-distance journey with it at some point. First, I shelled out the extra thousand dollars to get antilock brakes (ABS).  You can get away with your rear tire locking up – you get fishtailing – but if your front tire locks up the bike goes down, guaranteed.  I figure you only need it once.  I also got electrically heated handgrips.  When riding in cold weather, it is your hands that suffer the most.  In upper Canada and Alaska, it can snow any month of the year, and anything below about 50 degrees Fahrenheit can be agony on your hands after an hour or so.  I also got an electric charger (the modern replacement for the old cigarette lighter), so I can charge/power my smart phone or some other device while I’m on the go.  One thing this motorcycle does NOT have that the old Hawk did was a kick starter.  It seems that no modern cycles include this feature.  So one hopes extra hard for no electrical or battery problems. 

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZAMM), Pirsig argued that the doing of maintenance on one’s motorcycle should not just be done for the sake of the bike, but also the rider.  Working with the innards of the machine could bring you into harmony with yourself, he claimed.  I spent a lot of time working on the Hawk during my 1980 trip; not just changing the oil, but adjusting the chain tension (by loosening the rear axle and moving the tire), cleaning the spark plugs, even re-gapping the valve clearances.  It gave me a sense of confidence that I could take the thing apart (to an extent), put it back together, and it would still work (even a bit better sometimes), but I never found any joy in it.  But today, that is all gone.  Once microprocessors became involved (ignition, fuel injection, ABS, the instrument cluster, etc.), anything other than changing the oil became something you needed a professional with a dedicated computer to do.  Even they don’t repair components anymore, they just replace them.  And why change the oil yourself when you have to schlep the used oil down to the garage anyway to have it properly disposed of anyway?  (Pirsig talks about draining the old oil into a field or gravel bed, something that is much more strongly frowned upon today.)   At the same time, cycles have gotten so reliable that tuning between “checkups” is essentially unnecessary.  And between cell phones and AAA, if you do break down it is much easier to just have a specialized tow truck come get you.  RIP, Motorcycle Maintenance.