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Just to get your juices flowing, here are a few pics of the location.
Hills? Yep there a few there, nice loamy ones!
You can cut some moves for the camera
The palatial Bunk house. (better than camping!)
Down stairs
Up stairs
The campground Kitchen
The camp Ground during the AORC
A good place for a fire and some bullshitting over a beer or two.
For more detailed info on location click here
Those slippery causeways aren’t just a trap for the newbies, I have seen a few seasoned riders take a dive on a slippery Causeway. Lefty comes to mind on that very road and Moose learnt the hard way on a trip to Hillend on another.
New Avatar pic there TB!!
Some extra pics not used in my report
Early start Tamworth
The mighty Honda CT110 Postie Bike
Somewhere near Tamworth day 2
Sommerton fuel Stop
Out near Nyngan
Coolabah fuel stop
NX’s on the airstrip
Me having a great time
Team Honda
TB, the collective noun for a group of NX’s is a “Vomit”
Anyhow. The run home.
We had over 1000kms to ride to get home and only two days to do it, so the plan was to put a big one in on the first day and hopefully get about 700kms done by dark.
So we headed off at about 8am and chose to do the run to Bourke down the road to Fords Bridge. As I mentioned before it had rained the night before and the red clay road was slick to say the least. That combined with all the wildlife with no road sence made for a very entertaining ride for the first 100kms to Fords Bridge. From there it was a relatively easy run to Bourke except for one crazy Emu that tried to take me out before getting itself hung up in a fence.
Our first job after fueling up in Bourke was to rescue our mates that got taken out by the Kangaroo from Bourke Hospital. A broken arm above the elbow on one and a few broken ribs on the other had slowed the boys right up!
With the boys loaded up in the car we headed off with Brewarrina our first scheduled fuel stop. We didn’t give that fact it was Easter Sunday a thought and the only fuel station in town was closed! Thank fully we still had a bit of fuel on the support vehicle, enough to get us to Walgett, the next town 100kms away!
Just before we got to Walgett, I noticed the tachometer was starting to do weird things with the needle bouncing about wildly! I didn’t worry too much about it and pressed on. After we fuelled up in Walgett, we were headed towards Wee Waa and the NX all of a sudden started miss firing intermittently and then would run fine for a while, then do it again. The periods between the misfires started to shorten until it was about 10 – 20 seconds apart. Because the Tacho started to go crazy leading up to it, I presumed I had a serious electrical problem. Most likely the CDI as it was one we had rebuilt using Brian Hare’s technique. With this in mind I just pressed on trying to get the bike as close to Tamworth as I could as I knew I could get some assistance there.
Meanwhile, behind me Charley was having his own problems with the NX he was riding throwing teeth off his rear sprocket at an alarming rate of knots. Not much we could do at this stage but press on and limp the bikes to Tamworth. Just as we were leaving Boggabri, I heard a bang and a tyre squeal behind me, Charlies NX had thrown its chain and he did well to stay on the bike. We put the chain back on the best we could on a sprocket with only a dozen teeth on it and tightened the chain and we were on the road again. But really limping now as my NX was missing so badly I could only get 80kmph out of it. As it got dark we rolled into Gunnedah and decided that would have to do and we pulled into a Motel opposite my Uncle’s house.
Pizzas and beers were smashed down after we convinced the Pizza delivery girl to go get us some beers and cigarettes. The boys bunked down in the Motel and I took the opportunity to catch up with my uncle.
Early the next morning, saw us swapping the CDI’s over on the bikes to see if that was the problem. Nope! Still misfiring. OK take the tank off and have a poke about. I reseated the earth lead for the coil and changed the spark plug while I was at it. First press of the button and she fired up and ran sweet! You little beauty!
We still had to deal with the stripped back sprocket on the other NX, so Boony came across from Tamworth with a trailer and we loaded it up and took the bike to his place, in the meantime he did a ring around and managed to score us a brand new sprocket for the NX on a public holiday!!!! Matt from Bikes and Bits the Honda dealer in Tamworth opened up for us and not only did he have the sprocket in stock he said to consider it a donation. What a champion bloke!
WE then headed to Boony’s place and swapped out the sprocket and chain. The chain had seen better days and was missing a heap of rollers, so a 2nd hand one was found in Boony’s shed and we were good to go!
As you can see the sprocket was way past it’s service limit!
.This left us a 3 hour run home that was pretty uneventful as both bike ran great! However a half hour from home the heavens opened up on us once again and we finished the ride in the flogging down rain!
We ended up doing 2375km over the 6days, here is a rough map to give you an idea of where we went.
Would I do it all again? You betcha!
Saturday night was the big social night, with presentations, auction and a band. Before the festivities started we all lined the bikes up for a photo shoot.
Charley was in his element!
It isn’t all that often you get to see four NX650’s in the one place these days
As a matter of fact the NX was the most popular bike on the Scrapper run, there was no other make or model that had four of the same bike there!
Peter rode his NX down from Brisbane
On Saturday night we partied on until late in the night. Just on midnight it started to rain, like it very rarely does in the desert! I headed to bed with thoughts of a 700km trip ahead of us in the morning, some of it, on what was very slippery sticky red mud!
Return journey report coming soon!
Sorry if my report was too eloquently written for you TB, I was hoping for a literary masterpiece. It was wasted on you though.
:whistle:
