Revamping my skid plate

I have a skid plate made out of aluminum that also holds 2 liters of water. Those two liters are the emergency water that every rider must carry and having them in the skid plate rather than in your backpack or somewhere else on your bike has its advantages. First off I would really recommend trying to put as much stuff as possible on your bike instead of carrying them on yourself. Having extra weight to carry will be tiresome when riding long days. The skid plate is about as low as you can get on your bike and it is good to try to put any extra weight on your bike as low as possible to keep the center of gravitation low. So having those 2 extra kilograms on the skid plate is perfect.

Johan doing his TIG magic

I was down at my friend Johan at Pro2 and his shop the other day to get some help to modify my skid plate since I can not weld aluminum myself. I drilled a hole through the water tank and put in a tube that I can use to get better access to the bolts when mounting and demounting the plate when servicing the bike. Everything to save a couple of minutes each day when servicing is worth doing.

Johan did a superb job and all it cost me was a couple of brews. Since Johan is also going to the Tuareg rally I will repay him in the Sahara. :)

Cook it, peel it or leave it

Cook it, peel it or leave it; is a pretty well know slogan among world travelers and it holds equally true for how you should approach food served during rallies. Most often desert rallies take place in countries where the type of bacterias that are found in food can be quite different to what your body is used to. And it is not unusual that the handling of food is done under conditions that are far from ideal when it comes to hygiene. Thats why I always bring my own food and if I am to eat any of the local food it has to be really hot and newly cooked. If its luke warm or has been kept warm for a long time I wont touch it. Same goes for salads and stuff.

Lunch break in a canyon in Morocco

The food I bring is mostly dehydrated food that come in ration packs. All you need to do in order to cook them is to fill the bag they come in with boiling water and wait a couple of minutes and then they are ready to be eaten. During the day when I'm riding I will eat various energy bars and I always try to throw in some canned food to mix it up since only eating energy bars can be quite tough on your stomach.

This is how my typical food intake would look like, and will look like this year too.

• Breakfast: Dehydrated breakfast ration pack (cold)
• During the day when racing: Various bars (Flapjacks/protein bars), canned tuna or similar
• Dinner 1: Dehydrated dinner ration pack (hot)
• Dinner 2: Dehydrated dinner ration pack (hot), and some small pieces of what I find eatable from what is served by the rally organization.

Apart from that, I just try to constantly eat while I am at base camp in order to get as much energy back into my body as possible. A friend of mine wore one of those heart monitors during a race and it showed he had burned 7,000 calories during one race day so you really need to eat as much as you possibly can.

Dehydrated breakfast

Bringing your own food and being really picky with what you eat of the local stuff is an easy way to avoid getting ill during a rally. Getting the shits during rallies in Africa is so common it's not even funny. Just ask anyone who's been to a rally and they'll tell you.

Wheel bearings

So, it's about three weeks until the bikes are loaded on the service truck and begins the journey down to Spain so its time to start doing bike preps. I've mentioned the steering dampers I will be using in an earlier post and today I  want to say a word about wheel bearings. Or actually two words: Change Them!

During the years I have made it a habit of changing the wheel bearings every year on all my bikes no matter if I got them brand new or used. I have had a rear wheel bearing fail on me once and it totally destroyed the entire hub. Costing me several hours of work to replace the hub. When it happened I had checked the bearings when I changed tires just a couple of riding hours before it happened and they all seemed fine. So I learned the hard way that when bearings fail they can fail so fast that you will not notice it until it's too late. And I might add that that particular bike was less than a year old and with me as the first and only owner.

Fill the gap with grease and your bearings will live longer

While I'm at it I might as well share a tip about wheel bearings. Once you fit the new ones on there will be a gap between the bearing and the sealing. Make sure you fill that gap up entirely with grease (also do this if your bike is brand new from the factory). The bearings themselves are sealed so the grease will not lube the bearings but it will act as a barrier and prevent water and dirt to get in and reach the bearings. And water and dirt is what will kill your wheel bearings. I've done this for a couple of years and it really does make a huge difference.

If we go back to fact that bearings can fail fast it should be obvious that I will never go to a rally without having brand new wheel bearings on. Most manufacturers have wheel repair kits that contains all bearings, seals and spacers that you'll need and they are relatively cheap and it's quite an easy operation to change them. So changing my wheel bearings is an easy insurance that my bike will take me through deserts and rivers for thousands of kilometers without any troubles.

Got a decent 180 km of riding this weekend

I'm getting more and more comfortable on the new bike and I think we will be pretty good friends by the time we get to Africa. The handlebars feels a bit lower compared to my 400 even though I have risers on but maybe thats just imagination. Anyhow, I don't want to put any higher risers on than I already have so I'll just have to get used to it.

They told me to use
engine ice in the desert...

My plan is to continue to focus on riding all throughout February and then I will service and modify the bike and pack my rallybox in March. The truck with all the bikes and luggage leaves for Spain on March 20 so I have about three weeks to get everything sorted. The rally box contains everything I need for my bike during the rally. Filters, oil, spares etc. I also need to fit all my food and sleeping bag in there as well. That combined with a weight limit on the box means the packing of the box is a project in its own and it will probably get its own blog post later.

Some info about the Tuareg Rally

The Tuareg Rallye has been around since 1999. Last year it gathered more than 200 motorcycles and 30 cars. It starts in Almeria, Spain and continues down through Morocco and then turns around and finishes in Mojacar in Spain.

The rally track stretches over more than 3000 kilometers and the competitors will have to navigate their way from the port of Nador in the north, through the impressive Atlas Mountains and the city of Missour, and then continues down to the massive sand dunes in Erg Chebbi in the vicinity of Merzouga in the south close to the border to Algeria. Once in Erg Chebbi, which is part of the Sahara desert, the competitors will have to face long days with nothing but sand and dunes that can reach up to 200 meters high.
After conquering the desert, the competitors finds their way back to the northern parts of Morocco through ravines, river crossings, and rocky donkey trails to finally reach Nador again where a ferry awaits to take them back to Europe where the rally ends with a final special stage between Almeria and Mojacar.

Early morning at pre-start

I personally think that the Tuareg rally is the most affordable desert rally that is currently out there. It is relatively low cost and the organization is very good. Plus, the regulations are very forgiving in the sense that if you fail to finish one day, say you have some mechanical problems for example, you can still start the next day. Of course you will get the appropriate time penalties (which can be quite heavy) but they will not kick you out. So you can still have a lot of fun and get a lot of riding and experience even if your chances of a top position is gone.

Another good thing about the rally is that they don't require you to put on a lot of required extra stuff on your bike, like sentinels and iritracks and whatnots, which also helps in keeping the costs down for the individual rider.

Training for the desert in subzero temperatures

Its at the end of January and there is still quite a lot of snow left here in Sweden in and around Stockholm. I need some time in the saddle so my plan is to get as much riding time as possible up until the rally in March so since it was a beautiful winter day today I took the opportunity to get some good riding on snow covered dirt roads.

Pogies keeps your hands out of the wind

Riding with spike tires on snow covered roads is actually quite fun and I can really recommend it if you never tried it before. The only real differences compared to riding in the summer is that you need to put on a lot more clothes and if it's really cold you might need to cover up the radiators with some duct tape or cardboard so the engine gets warm enough.

It was about -7°C today with a clear blue sky and nice, dry snow. I had to stop every now and then and warm up my fingers but apart from that it was great and I got a couple of hours of riding. This was my second ride with the new KTM 530 and I'm starting to get used to it now. It's heavier and got different motor characteristics compared to my KTM 400. I think I need to adjust the gear selector a little and I also need to experiment with some different size sprockets to find out what I will be using in Morocko. I spoke to my riding partner Carl and we are currently thinking of using 14/45, with the possibility of switching to a 13 front sprocket if we need to in the dunes. The plan is for us to have as identical bikes as possible so we can share each others spare parts.

Clear skies, beautiful sun and cold temperatures

The rally is getting closer but when there is snow everywhere and you are standing with your hands in your underwear trying to get the feeling back in your frozen fingers the dunes in Sahara feels very distant...

Steering damper or big biceps?

One bike modification that I will be doing differently this year compared to my earlier desert races is the use of a steering damper. I have never used a steering damper on any of my bikes before. Not at home when riding enduro or offroad and not in the two previous desert rallies either. Mostly because I have never really felt the need for it.
In 2008 in Morocco I rode a KTM 625 which is a pretty heavy bike that more or less behaves like a freight train plowing through any obstacles and sandy courses so I didn't have any problems with driving without a steering damper. And when I'm at home I usually never ride for long enough periods of time that I will feel any fatigue caused by a nervous front wheel. But in 2010 I rode a KTM 400 during the Tuareg rally. The 400 is a much lighter bike that becomes quite nervous when riding at high speed in tough terrains. For the first time I actually noticed how much the front wheel was bouncing back and forth and during some stages when I was going flat out on loose sand roads I actually had to slow down because I simply couldn't hold on to the handle bars anymore. A friend of mine who was riding with me later described the situation as: "Ronnie has a steering damper, Danny has arms the size of my thighs, and I have nothing but pain". Ok, granted that I'm in fairly good physical shape but I was also getting tired at that stage so after last year's rally I promised myself that I would never race again without a steering damper.

Öhlins steering damper

So, said and done. My new KTM 530 has been equipped with a Öhlins steering damper. For you who don't know, a steering damper works by dampening the movements of the handlebars. But it does so in a way that it only dampens fast movements. This means that when you are turning the handlebars during normal riding no dampening takes place and you will not notice it at all. But when fast and sudden movements occur, say for example when you hit a rock with your front wheel, the movement is heavily dampened. So instead of sending the front wheel, and you, off in a random direction the front wheel will keep straight and you can continue riding in the direction you intended.

Now this will of course help you avoid some situations that might otherwise lead to a crash, but it will also save you a lot of energy since you don't have to do all the dampening yourself as you otherwise would when you are using your arms as steering dampers.

So this year I am not going to slow down on those loose fast tracks or in those tricky dried out river beds. I'm going flat out all the way... ;) And hopefully I can avoid crashes like the one last year when I hit a rock in the middle of a curve that lead to a face plant and a sprained ankle.

Or if nothing else, it will at least be a cool looking piece of gear on my bike.