Adventure Motorcycle Blog

Exhausting is an excellent way to describe all the surprises that we encountered today. To tell the whole story, we need to back up to yesterday and talk about some of the mechanical issues that were discovered after we checked into the hotel. Tuesday night, Jeff and Ron changed their oil in the parking lot of the Days Inn-Grants, but Jeff also discovered his chain appeared massively loose. The problem with that is that his axle was already pushed as far back as it would go, leaving much slack. He decided to use my chain linkage tool to take a link out, but due to the size of the rivets, he couldn’t get the tool on the chain. We were all tired and decided to address the chain issue this morning. We took his chain off, and Jeff jumped on my bike and went to True Value to see if they could grind a rivet off, but they wouldn’t.
A couple of stops later, he ended up at Jake’s Custom Paint & Body, where he met Jake and then another Jake. Young Jake used a grinder and was able to grind it, then punched a shaft out so one link could be removed. Once back at the hotel with the chain, the three of us got that on as soon as possible so we could take off. The day consisted of 141 miles, and probably 110 was all desert floor riding and ascending/descending mountain passes. Here is where the fun started. We were in the middle of nowhere when I felt the back tire act sluggish and bog down. I immediately knew what that meant.
I put the bike up on the center stand, took off all the luggage, dug my tire tools out, and then Jeff helped me pull the back tire off. Daking the bead was a massive pain since those Moto Z Adventure tires are so thick. The three of us had to use four tire spoons, and the weight of two was used to free the tire from the rim. This is where I screwed up. Once we put the heavy duty tube in the rim, we had to use the spoons and our weight to get the bead to lock in. I didn’t realize then that one of the spoons I used pinched the new tube and put two small holes in it. This was discovered once we had the tire back together and had the pump on it for a bit. Zero PSI was showing on the pump. Well, this was a problem. That was my only spare, so I used Ron’s spare. He had an 18 in, but the other dimensions were different. We got it in the rim after a little bit of wrestling with it, and it actually started taking on air. We were probably a couple hours in at this point. We were hot, tired, and ready to press on. I packed up all my gear, and then off we went. The tire was great for probably 15-20 minutes, and then it lost all pressure. We were racing against two factors and darkness. I made the call to keep on chugging along with a flat rear tire just so we could get out of there. We estimated we traveled another 50 miles on a rear back tire flopping around, including a bit of blacktop. The bead of the tire combined with all the downward weight kept the tire semi-true.
We knew we didn’t want to spend the night in the desert. We went through washouts, tons of sand, inclines, and mud, and the bike kept on trucking. Jeff rolled into Cuba before we did and stopped at a small automotive tire shop. The owner told us to be there at 8:30 tomorrow morning, and he would patch up the tube for us. On the way to the Airbnb, we stopped at McDonald’s and filled up on fuel. This Airbnb is an A-Frame setback against the desert landscape. We got here after dark, so it will be a quick turn for tomorrow’s adventures. Anyway, let’s see what the tire shop can do.

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