Richard Hobbs

Well, another good weekend has been had, I’m sure you’ll be glad to know!

Sunday 9th November over here in the UK was Remembrance Day where we pay tribute to, and remember, the fallen of two world wars and other conflicts and this year it was also to mark the 90th anniversary of the end of the First World War.

To honour this day, Imperial War Museum Duxford held a special free admission day with a 2 minute silence at 11:00 and a Remembrance Service at 12:30, among other events such as a truly amazing Spitfire display!

Imperial War Museum, Duxford

The other event of the day was a Royal Enfield Club-organised classic motorcycle run from the Silver Ball Café to IWM Duxford which, of course, I took part in! It was also a perfect opportunity to record a proper classic biking video with my new helmet camera, which I was very pleased about. You can watch the video of the classic bike run here:

- Video of Classic Motorcycle Ride From Silver Ball Cafe To Duxford

I do plan on editing the above video at some point to make a shorter version, but until I get around to it, the above unedited version is all I have! You can, of course, skip through it to your heart’s content or you can watch the entire 53 minutes or so if you are so inclined!

So, anyway, as for Duxford itself, it was a great day as mentioned previously! Lots of things to see, as usual, many of which can be seen in my photos:

- Photos of Classic Motorcycle Ride from Silver Ball Cafe to Duxford and of Duxford itself

The other thing I’ve learned is that the piston rings on the Matchless are letting oil through! Although I’ve been losing oil for a while now, it wasn’t until Sunday when someone finally told me they could smell and occasionally see the oil smoke coming from the exhaust that I realised it wasn’t all coming from the breather pipe and rocker box gasket, so I have my second winter job to do now (the first being to change the oil and clean the filters)!

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!