Richard Hobbs

I’ve not written much recently, mainly because not much has happened! Today, however, stuff did happen, so here I am!

As you may know from my blog entry on 23 September 2008 entitled An enjoyable pair of weekends!, at the Matchless‘ MOT at the beginning of July this year (3.5 months ago), the odometer on the bike read 31666 miles. When I got home from my ride today, it read 32668, meaning I’ve now ridden just over 1,000 miles!

What a milestone!

I have also recently obtained my self-bought early Christmas present – a bike cam! This small video camera can be stuck anywhere (car bonnet, car ceiling, bike handlebars, crash helmet etc…) by using the included handlebar mount and universal sticky mounts and cable ties etc… so I did my first test run with the camera today to see how it all works.

It didn’t go completely to plan, as I had intended to video an entire 20 mile run, but I accidentally hit the stop button while putting the recording device back into my pocket, so I ended up recording none of it! I did, however, still have the bit that I recorded going from my initial starting point to the beginning of the route, so I’ve edited it accordingly and put it online, both on Youtube and here on this site:

- Matchless Classic Motorcycle Ride – Richard Hobbs
- Matchless Classic Motorcycle Ride – Youtube

The sound quality, as I’m sure you will notice, is pretty awful – this is mainly because I haven’t found a sensible place to put the microphone yet – I had it sticking out the top of my pocket this time, hence the wind noise, but I will try putting it in the pocket next time to hopefully reduce wind noise, but still capture the engine noise!

The camera, by the way, was bought from Board-Cams for the price of £129.99. I have the “Board-Cams 520 Helmet Camera & Personal Media Player“.

Anyway, that’s it for this time… so until next time, goodbye!

The good weekend I’m referring to this time is more like “Saturday” actually, as on the Sunday, I did next to nothing! On Saturday, however, I visited the Great Chesterford Steam-Up and had another relaxing but fun day!

Great Chesterford Steam-Up

Photos and videos can be found here:
- Great Chesterford Steam-Up Photos
- Great Chesterford Steam-Up Videos

Although I was the only member of the AJS & Matchless Owners Club to be booked into the Steam-Up, I checked with the organisers whether it would be OK to bring a few friends along, and having discovered that was fine, I phoned up 4 fellow members of the club, who mostly agreed to go on the day, depending on various criteria… However, one guy sadly caught flu, another saw the morning drizzle and quite underdstandably didn’t want to risk it, another ended up having to work all day, and the final person had somewhere else to be in the morning and never quite made it over there for the afternoon! Not to worry though, ’twas still an enjoyable day out, and if any of you read this, please don’t feel guilty for not attending in any way!

So anyway, the day started out drizzly, and also ended drizzly, but thankfully during the bit in the middle when there was no rain, I managed to ride to the Steam-Up, spend a good few hours there, and then managed to ride home, without getting rained on once!

I also did my first bit of non-satnav-assisted navigating for a long while… having obtained my first satnav several years ago, I’m slowly forgetting the art of getting to places without automated voice guidance! Nevertheless, I made it there with only one minor hiccup – the map showed a railway line, which was going to be my landmark for turning right to head down to Great Chesterford, but sadly, the railway line runs under the road and is invisible from the road unless you are in a truck cab, for example, so if it weren’t for the fuel stop at the petrol station just on the respective roundabout, I probably would have missed the turn! Anyway, lesson learned for next time!

While shopping for groceries the other day, I saw the most amazing thing in the world… an “Instant Farm”!

Instant Farm!

As you can see, this appears to be 3 capsules in a plastic container, which, at some point, presumably turn into farm animals!

How on earth does this work?

It must be magic…