rabbitstew

Well, the problem with this, is that unless you have just gone past that same corner 5 minutes before hand you have no guarantee that there isnt horse crap on it when you go back around it later. When you come into a corner on a motorbike you are watching the road for man holes, horse crap, oil, lumps of 2x4 timber, bricks etc as well as trying to look ahead to see if theres any on coming cars on the wrong side or even parked up vehicles etc. So your eyes & brain are going at probably 200mph, processing like mad. Usually on my ride out I tend to ride the same bit of road twice, so I know roughly there wasnt any problems or obstacles there the first time I did it but thats not to say its clear the 2nd time around. The roads I mainly ride on are back roads in the country, so very often you come around a bend to find mud on the road, or a tractor or a combine. So you keep an eye out for the usual tell tale signs and ride according to how far you can see. You get to know what to look out for and where based on experience. This thread seems to have turned into those horse riders assuming that anyone who is moaning about horse crap on the road are the same people who dont slow down for horses. They are 2 completely different things. I always without fail slow down for horses. Both my motorbikes are quite loud - especially my Ducati, so as soon as I see a horse I usually kill the engine and glide past slowly. That has nothing to do with horse crap on the road. I have loads of respect for anyone who rides a horse. I went on one once, it must have been about 250 years old and as it plodded along at all of 2 mph I was hanging on for dear life, completely crapping myself. It was one of the most scariest things ive ever done. Strange when I feel perfectly relaxed on a 1000cc sports bike so I guess its the fear of not being in total control of something. So, from the discussions so far, apparently horse riders cant make sure the horse has had a dump before going on a ride out and noone has yet commented on putting a poo bag thing on the back of their horse to catch the poo. What other options are there? As a rider, are you aware when you horse starts taking a dump? If so, would it be possible to quickly steer the horse to the side of the road so it poo`s on the grass verge? Rather than on the "racing line"?

Amazing!

Most insurance companies will try to charge you some sort of "admin fee" for any changes at all mid-policy, whether thats changing your number plate to a private one, or changing your car. The insurance company I was with last year for one of my motorbikes charged me £70 to cancel my insurance policy completely. Amazing when you think they only charged me £62 for the entire year to insure my Yamaha R1!!! So the cancellation fee was actually more than the insurance cost me in the first place!

wtf!

Obviously no experience of horses - nobody feeds their horse before exercise - and even if they have just gone in the stable/yard/manege - they are still likely to go when out and about Somehow knew you would disagree with me. So you dont feed the horse before exercise, so whats to stop you making sure it has had a dump before you go out. Maybe walk around the yard a few times before venturing out on the public road? Maybe fit one of those bags you see on changing of the guard where if they dump it goes in a big bag?

Groan!

Im sure our resident "parking fine expert" will be on here shortly to advice you.

As a biker, coming around a bend, and being faced with a steaming pile of horse crap in my path is usually a brown trouser moment, as if you are leaned over and hit that you`ll soon be sliding off down the road. I really do not understand why horse owners have to deliberately let their horses crap all over the road. As a dog owner, when we go on long journeys, we make sure the dogs have had a good dump in our back garden first. We dont start off on our drive out with a dog bursting at the seams who then needs to take a dump half way through our trip. Why cant horse owners think "i know, im going to go for a ramble on public roads, lets get the hard hat on, the high vis and make sure the horse had unloaded its bowels before its journey". No... they sit there, feed it up till its bursting at the seams then go for a long leasurely plod out, making sure it dumps its cargo on the best corners for us bikers.

Like I said when I posted this clip on here a few days back, the guys an idiot. As an experienced biker, i think this guy just was riding like a knob really. He was all over the shop throughout all of that clip, overtaking the other bikers and had little road riding common sense. Initially I thought maybe he had come into that last bend too hard, saw the car, then panic`d. When that happens you have 2 options. Tip the bike in further, get your knee down and take the bend tighter, or panic and slam on the brakes - which causes the bike to immediately stand up, and you just go straight.... so straight off the road basically. Ive done this once before (just the once mind you) & seen friends do the same thing in the past. However, looking at that, he doesnt seem to be going that fast and the when he goes into the bend the bike isnt leaning over much at all. So he could have easily leaned over more, eased off the power and took the bend. He seemed to enter the bend with the mind set that he was going to straight line the corner like he was doing before in the video. I dont think he saw the car at all until the very last minute at which point he was already over the white lines. It looks like the car possibly brakes and the biker slammed his brakes on which stood the bike up and off the side of the cliff he goes. What he should have done was to come in slow, keep tight to the inside line and once he can see the exit put the power on then, especially if he didnt know the road, or couldnt see far enough ahead to know what was around the bend. Modern leathers are pretty awesome. Ive 3 sets of Dianese stuff and back in around 1999 I had a my worse crash which was a 120mph high side - which is where the back end of the bike looses grip completely, snakes and throws you off. I landed on the tarmac on my head/shoulders and somersaulted down the road, the bike somersaulted too, bounced off me and I ended up sliding for what seemed ages until the the friction slowed me down. The leathers have kevlar reinforcement in all the shoulder/elbows etc, and I could see where the leather had worn through to the kevlar which protected me. Likewise, I had a back protector in and I could see where something on the bike had pieced through my leathers and would have certainly got my spine had the back protector not stopped it. It certainly proved to me that whilst my set of leathers cost me £1000, it was worth it as the thought, technology & testing which had obviously gone into them worked. I walked away with just a bit of bruising and a written off bike. So for this guy, rolling down some soft grassy hill side, the leathers wouldnt even break a sweat.

I dread to think what the custom/import tax on that was. I had to pay £100 for a pack of business cards my head office in the US sent through to me the other month. I could have had them printed here in the UK for hardly anything. Will be awesome to see how this build goes!!! Good luck!!!!!

The young arab lads they interviewed on that show, (if i remember correctly), said they came to London because the English girls were quite "friendly" and "outgoing" (ahem), compared to the girls back in their own country.

And i thought some of the coach tours ive had in Greece were bad, when they are close to the edge of a drop with no crash barriers and you look down and see burnt out cars and stuff. When he goes through that water fall at the end and cant see where he`s going....

Oh, i have now. Got a contour hd pro helmet cam which i wear everytime im out on the bike now. Just need to get some err... numberplate obscuring done then I can upload some vids to youtube.

I had exactly that experience once when I was out on my motorbike. Riding along minding my own business doing about 30mph around town. Old woman trying to pull out from a car park, starts to pull out, sees me approaching so she stops. We have eye contact and whilst shes looking me directly in the eye pulls straight out in front of me. I have nowhere to go so hit the rear drivers side of her car, do a superman impression over the back of her car. She stops and says to me "Sorry, I didnt see you!". To make matters worse, by the time the insurance companies got around to sorting the claim out (8 months later) she had then changed her tune to say that I was speeding and the witnesses couldnt remember what day of the week it was, let alone whose fault it was. In the end it was settled as a 50/50 liability so I lost a load of my NCB.

The problem with insurance companies is that (normally) they dont know, understand or really care what these things are. They will probably just hear the word "exhaust" and say "yep thats £80 extra for performance exhaust thank you".

Dunno, job to tell really but it looks like he might have been doing a bit more than 30mph, but then again the other car did pull out in front of him. Maybe cos it was Matt Black he didnt see it?

Ive wondered that too! I have to do the same if a customer wants to pay for me to visit them and i buy the flights / pay for the costs. I have to add VAT to the invoice I send to the client. God knows why.

I dont. I pay PAYE on my earnings and so 40% of everything I earn gets taken by the tax man. However, I do the company I work for`s accounts hence responsible for paying their corporation tax. However, nearly all of my mates seem to be self employed or run their own limited business`s these days by the looks of it. I guess that explains why they all have money to burn and yet i dont. Think I need to look into if theres anyway I can reduce the tax I pay!

Sod that, can you find the blond passengers phone number?

We did ours the other week - got in early. Only £6k this year.

I feel sorry for the car driver! Me too - he must have had a brown trouser moment and is lucky himself he didnt swerve out of the way and end up crashing.

Depends on the insurance company I would suggest. If it says that the car has to be roadworthy as a condition of insurance then you could be in a grey area now that the new rules came out that if a car came with cats it has to have cats on it to be considered road legal. So if the DVLA or whoever enforce it stopped you for a roadside check and found you had no cats then your car would be considered unroadworthy. If the car has decats and is involved in a claim then it will be entirely up to to the insurance inspector or the local garage giving the estimate as to what they put down. My Yamaha R1 was involved in an accident many moons ago and it had race body work, no headlamps, race exhaust etc and the garage simply put down the prices for the standard OEM items on the estimate. The insurance company didnt query it or send one of their own inspectors out. The last time I had a car written off (probably around 2005), the insurance inspector came out, looked around the car - didnt look underneath it or even open the bonnet. It had various non standard bits on it, including entire interior out of a sportier model, again they didnt question it. As others have said, MOT is a separate thing and again, with the new rules if your car had a cat then it has to have a cat for its MOT whereas previously it didnt - it only had to pass the emissions test.

As a biker even I was shocked by this idiot... http://video.uk.msn.com/watch/video/rider-records-near-death-escape/2ie4its4?ogvars=bWt0PWVuLWdiJmZyPWZhY2Vib29rLWxpa2Utc2VuZCZhcD10cnVl&from=en-gb_fblike

One thing with the humbrol is that I found it was a bit thin so you`ll need a few goes at filling the chips in. Worked for me tho!

I had an idiot this morning. I pull out of a T junction with plenty of room before any cars reach me. I accelerate to 30mph in a 30mph zone and this KIA zooms up behind me as if to say "you pulled out in front of me". I continue doing 30mph and he`s now practically touching my bumper. He backs off, and zooms back up a couple of times. I very very very seriously considered doing an emergency stop there & then and had I been driving some old banger instead of my bmw I may very well have done. After a few yards of this behavior the KIA driver then turns off down a side street, no indicators or anything.