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A great breakfast run

For those who don't know, a breakfast run is an event for motorcyclists to get together one saturday or sunday early morning (7am to 8am) and then ride somewhere, have breakfast, and then ride some more and split up. It's a great social event as well as a time to go for some really great motorcycle riding. I rode with the Think Bike group this sunday. It was an awesome day :) Some pictures in my ALBUM HERE......

As you can see on the one picture here, it was VERY windy along the coastline, but it got much better and ended up as a terrific day for motorcycle riding with a lot of fun and interesting people to talk to as well.

Ek het 'n "nuwe" oud BMW gekoop

Finally got a decent car... as you all know I'm a BMW fanatic so when I saw this BMW 730i for sale at a bargain price, I decided to go for it.

I make up for it by selling my Hyosung at some point in the next two months.


For the technically inclined it has an M30B30 Inline-6 BMW engine, cylinder displacement is 3.0L. Automatic "lazy man" transmission. Total weight of car is 1725 kg which was quite a bit more than I thought!!

It has a few small things that I'm going to look at immidiately. The fuel gauge is dead, which is typical for all these cars anyway. The brakes are warped, so I might replace the front brake discs, but that's only about R200 each and since I'm going to do all repairs and maintenance myself I can save what I waste in fuel costs. It should use about 1 liter per 10 km.

Part of the motivation for buying this car is to have something for visitors whenever they may come.. I hope they will enjoy the smooth ride! The trunk (or "boot" for the anglophiles) is huge, you could probably fit 4 autofil-larsens in there...but then he's a very small fellow. :)

Some more photos taken in March '08 :)

Greetings and salutations my faithful readers... Nothing special has happened since last time, but I've uploaded some pictures from my latest motorcycle ride in the Boland of Western Cape. These are just a few, see the rest on http://rasterburn.org/~sgt/albums/South_Africa-March-2008/album1.html




There was a big fire in this area this summer, but as you can see it's starting to become green again.

My new address

It's been ages since I last updated this blog, and I apologize for that. To all my millions of readers out there, I promise you that this blog shall once again be updated uh, now and then! ;-) Since january (well actually early december), I've been residing at the following address (in case anyone wants to send me mail, hinthint):

1 Tortelduif straat
Onderpapegaaiberg
7600 Stellenbosch

I'm sure you're wondering how this new place looks like so here are some pictures.

First one of what you would see before you can enter the house... a 2 meter fence with an electric gate (typical south africa):



This is the house itself:


An outhouse where you can sit and relax..:


Another angle of the house:


This is a view of the Tortelduif (turteldue in Norwegian) street:


My current 4-wheeled ride parked outside in the shade. This is a Mercedes-Benz we nicknamed the Galactica, because it's huge like a big battleship. There's also a story behind the car. Some guy crashed into this car in Cape Town, but while his car had a huge dent and windows were smashed, there wasn't a single dent on this Mercedes. Definitely a solid german machine!

Just some more riding

Western Cape has probably the best motorcycle roads in the entire country, and fortunately it's all very close to Stellenbosch.

This sunday had beautiful weather, nice temperature and little traffic so we figured that a sunday ride would be in order (also called a "breakfast run" among riders).

I went out riding with Rudi (a friend I know from my motorcycle dealership) and some others. We went through Helshoogte (long sweeps), Franschhoek pass (tight bends and kneesliding, although watch out for the baboons!).







This one BP petrol station we stopped at had so many surveillance cameras that it was ridiculous. The ones in this photo are just a few of them, I think there's at least 30 cameras there. Too much money? ;-)





Here's Rudi with his 2007 ZX6R:




I rode that bike from Franschhoek back to Stellenbosch. It's quite a powerful bike (599cc fuel-injected inline-4 producing 131 horsepower...) The brakes have an incredible bite and only two fingers are necessary. Suspension is very stiff but very effective.

My only objection is that it feels less comfortable than the previous models of ZX6R and also the lack of torque. I'm not sure how long you can be on this bike before your wrists and back starts to ache. Nonetheless, it's a true sportsbike with great potential. Rudi's friend Tinny (left in first pic) rides an older ZX7R, it's heavier but I think that'd be a more suitable bike for me since I'm quite tall.

Building a pan flute

I woke up one morning and thought building a pan flute would be a neat thing. I have no idea why! It just made sense at the time. ;-) So I went to the hardware store (called Oranjeblanjeblou) and bought 2 meters of PVC pipe. I also bought some other stuff like sanding paper, a little saw, some rubber things for a plug, some wood and some super glue and black paint.

I found that the mathematical equation to calculate the length of the tube is:

TL = (S/F) / 4

Where TL is Tube Length, S is speed of sound (344m/sec), F is desired frequency.

I decided to make 13 pipes so I could have the western musical scale of A, A#, B, C, C#, D and so on. The frequency of A (actually A4) is 440Hz, and the frequency of C# is 554Hz, and so on.

To calculate the length I needed for C#, I would then do:

(34400/554) / 4 = 15.52 cm

Since I had some rubber things that I used to plug up the pipe, I found that I have to add their height (about 0.6cm) despite them not being hollow. I didn't know this at first so I spent quite some time sawing it down properly after realizing my mistake.

I also spray-painted it black, with the exception of the piece of wood I put on the back (not visible in the pictures).

The sound is good but it's very loud.. Maybe I should build a smaller one next time, and maybe one out of bamboo!

So.. there you go, a pan flute made out of materials costing less than 60NOK !