In the jungle

Ducati Monster 795 registered June 2012

Red. One owner.

4800 kms from new.

Immaculate standard condition. Service history.

THB 320,000

Located in Pathumthani. Approximately 70 minutes from Sukumvit by expressway.

Telephone 0818022786

Ducati Monster 795 registered June 2012. Red. One owner.

4800 kms from new.

Immaculate standard condition. Service history.

THB 340,000

Located in Pathumthani. Approximately 70 minutes from Sukumvit by expressway.

Telephone 0818022786

I bought the 795. Without ABS.

I wouldn't have paid ten Baht extra for the ABS version. I am not going to elaborate on that statement because I don't want to get caught in the crossfire. I would rather spend my time and energy enjoying my new bike than arguing the case.

795 vs 796?

Single sided swing arm? If it had technical merit you would see it commonly on race bikes other than endurance. If you like the way it looks buy it. As I did with my NC30 VFR400.

Wider rear rim and better tyres? OK. You have got me there. I would like the 795 to have tyres with more grip and a wider rear rim but I am not going to pay an extra 250K to get it.

I will swap to tyres with more grip when the stock tyres wear out.

Sorry! It was a typo on my part.

I bought the 795.

No way I would pay an extra 250,000 or thereabouts for the 796 which is in most respects the same.

.

Registered July 2009. 7600 km. Still under Honda warranty. Excellent standard condition. No crashes or faults. Unused tool kit. Spare key.

The bike is in Pathumthani but can be viewed in Rangsit by arrangement.

THB 45,000 ono

Tel: 0818022786

Well I bought the 796. Literally. After a 20 minute test ride I signed on the dotted line. I am expecting delivery in June.

Overall I think it is a great package at what, by Thai standards, is a very reasonable price.

I have owned a couple of Ducatis before so I was unphased by things such as the hopeless mirrors.

The salesman was trying to sell me a set of accessory mirrors at, I think he said, THB 14,000! I don't think so mate.

The bars are not quite right for me but I need more kms to work out what to change. I am relatively small at 5'8" and 60 kgs. My first impression was that the bars are two wide for me rather than too low.

I was getting some wheelspin in second gear at less than full throttle. Could have been something on the road surface but I will most likely change to Pirelli Rosso tyres, as used on the 796, when the originals are worn out. They should give more traction.

Perhaps unsurprisingly my 2009 CBR150R will shortly be posted in the classifieds.

My understanding is that the Honda PGM Fi small motorcycle ECU (which is integral with the throttle body and most sensors) is specifically programmed so that the bike will start with a flat battery.

Kicking, or I assume, bumping it provides a bare minimum of power and that is used by the ECU to power up only those things essential for the bike to fire. I doubt the electrical fuel pump is amongst those as there is probably enough retained fuel pressure downstream of the pump for the initial firing.

I have chapter and verse on this somewhere in a technical article dating from when the system was first introduced.

I very much doubt the same is true of the PGM Fi system used on larger Honda bikes.

I can certainly endorse the Dream as a sound purchase. I have owned a lot of bikes over the last thirty five years and the Dream has undoubtedly been the best value and the most reliable. The one we have gets ridden by everybody. In ten years and 153,000 km the engine has never been opened up, it has never broken down and it has cost peanuts to run. The only significant weakness is the drum brakes.

I use IRC NR58 on my Honda Dream.

Good grip. Good in the wet. Certainly more grip than the crappy stock tyres on my CBR150.

The last rear NR58 I bought was THB 570 with a new inner tube and fitting.

They are available in the correct sizes for your Wave.

I get about 10,000 km from a rear changing when they get to about 2mm tread minimum. Fronts last about 13K.

The 19km per litre figure was set last month on a run from Hat Yai to Bangkok.

That journey was completed at an average speed of 85 km per hour including all breaks along the way with a typical cruising speed of about 110 km per hour.

That is the best fuel consumption figure I have got on a long run but it regularly gives 18 km per litre on such runs.

Maybe the small difference between my 'in town' figure and 'highway' is because Rangsit can be tolerable in terms of traffic if you pick your time of day.

I went for the lightest Jazz VTEC I could get. No airbags, ABS and some other stuff I can't remember. If I remember correctly it's about 50 kg lighter than the all bells and whistles auto version.

That in town fuel consumption figure is for driving around the Rangsit area north of Bangkok.

It is not a one off figure. It is what I get regularly and without trying particularly hard to save fuel.

Honda C50, 1969, three speed with semi-automatic clutch

4.9 horsepower at 10,000 rpm

Fuel = Benzene 91

Highway = 75 km/l best

Honda Jazz 2007 VTEC, manual transmission.

Fuel: Gasohol 91

Town: 17 km/l

Highway: 19 km/l best

I think I could get over 20 km/l with a few small changes to my driving style.

I looked at the Prius but when I did a few calcs it didn't add up for me. At the time I was looking I calculated it would take more than 300 years to recoup the price to change in fuel savings. The fact that Toyota dealers gave wildly differing prices for the battery pack didn't help their cause.

Thinking about it some more I think the reason why I find the seat a pain in the a*** and others do not is probably due to the differences in the way people are built.

Your weight is distributed between hands, feet and backside. The distribution of weight is going to be different depending on your physique. With the stock CBR it just doesn't work for me. Wizzing around town it is of no consequence but I would like to be able to do 1000 km a day.

Maybe I need to play around with the positions of the bars and footpegs on the CBR.

By contrast, with my VFR400 it is wrist ache that is the killer. It may be my age but after about 45 minutes my wrists feel like those of a teenager with a big stack of porn mags.

I am now 5000 km and nine months into CBR ownership.

I bought it primarily to enable longer journeys at a reasonable pace. It hasn't worked out to date.

I have made two long trips and on both occasions it has broken down requiring warranty repairs.

The first failure was the vacuum fuel tap

The second failure was the radiator. I only picked it up from the radiator replacement yesterday and tomorrow it is going back to the dealer because the headlamp has fallen apart!

Judging from reading a selection of the preceding pages it looks as though I have been unlucky.

The top three things I would like to change on the CBR are:

1. The tyres: they look like they will last a zillion km but I swear the tyres on my old shopping Honda Dream have more grip.

2. The seat: I can't wait to get off the bike after about 100 km.

3. The hopeless headlamp(s)

My cunning plan for the headlamps is to use those from a VFR400 NC30. I have a couple hanging around in the shed, they are very close in diameter to the CBR units and I know they perform very well. They use Japanese spec 60W/35W halogen bulbs. The UK spec CBR 125 uses 35W/35W headlight bulbs and I would hazard a guess that the alternator is the same as a CBR150 so I think the alternator should cope as main beam would only get intermittent use. It would probably be simpler to nail some H4 bulbs into the stock headlamps but halogens produce a lot of heat and I am concerned that they may melt parts of the headlamp. With the VFR400 lights the bodies of the lamps are specced to deal with the heat.

The wiring will need some changes to deal with the higher output of the headlamps but I think that can be done without hacking the loom about.

If I can persuade the dealer to let me have my old self-dissembling CBR headlamp then I should be able to put it together for peanuts. Hmm...that may be the hardest part...getting the dealer to give the broken bits to me for free.

I was thinking of the PE 28 as it is readily available and not too expensive at around THB 2100 from a Honda dealer (stock carb for an NSR 150). With the throttle, throttle cable and other necessary bits and pieces it runs to about THB 2500.

Add to that a whole bunch of needles, jets and whatever it costs to buy or fabricate the bits to nail the carb to the head and the airbox. The NSR needle is pretty sure to be way too rich for a CBR.

Given that I am using the CBR as a road bike a PE 26 might be a better choice on the basis that slide carbs generally flow more air than CV carbs but they do not seem to be so readily available here. Whereas, by contrast, I have literally seen PE 28s by the box load on a market stall at around THB 1800. No idea whether they are genuine. I'll pay the extra THB 300 to Mr Honda.

All my testing was done around sea level.

I'll probably do a run up to Chiang Mai in a couple of weeks. Where I live most of the roads tend to be straight line, 90 degree turn, straight line, 90 degree turn etc. After 1000 km plus I still don't really know how the CBR performs in corners.

In part inspired by your enthusiam here I bought a new CBR 150 about three weeks ago.

I have been riding bikes for well over thirty years and I think it is an excellent bike.

I plan on wringing some more performance out of the new toy. As a first step I thought it would be useful to get some objective data on performance in essentially stock form.

If you do not like technical stuff my advice is jump to the next post right now.

I have a device called a Dynojet Wideband Commander which measures air/fuel (a/f) ratio. I am confident that it gives consistent and repeatable results. I have used it for years to do ECU tuning on racecars both on dynos and on track. It is a US$500 piece of kit and I certainly did not buy it just to play with my CBR.

The lambda sensor is installed in a welded boss just in front of the silencer on the CBR. That is the only practical position because of the size of the sensor which is intended primarily for cars. Because the sensor is downstream from the catalyst I have removed it and the front pipe is now a stepped header with two diameter increases prior to the silenceer. Externally the front pipe looks stock apart from the lambda sensor which is replaced by a blanking plug when the sensor is not in use. It would have been a lot easier and cheaper to buy an after-market front pipe but they do not have the dimensions I want.

The Dynojet wideband commander is capable of datalogging air fuel ratio against rpm and two other parameters but I have not had time to set all that up. I will do that in a couple of weeks time. With the race cars I have been running you have to use datalogging because the cars rip through the gears so fast you cannot follow what is happening by looking at an a/f meter.

With the CBR things happen a bit slower so right now I have the Dynojet analogue air/fuel ratio meter cable tied to the left hand mirror stem which is about six inches from my nose when I am in chin on tank mode. The a/f meter will be removed once I get things as I want them hence the temporary install.

Air/fuel ratio results:

The data below is based on 500 km of testing. I do not think the exhaust mods will have made much difference to performance so the following information is, I think, pretty reliable information on a/f ratio for a stock CBR running in an ambient temperature of around 30 degrees. Everything other than the exhaust front pipe is stock.

1. At 75% to Wide Open Throttle (WOT) the air fuel mixture is pretty close to what I think is right at the top end of the rpm range.. The air fuel ratio varies between about 12.7:1 and 13.0 to 1.

2. But as you get near to 11,000 rpm plus at WOT the mixture gets progressively richer. The a/f ratio there is around 11.7 to 11.8:1.

With a programmable fuel injection system you could easily correct that by going tap, tap, tap on a laptop. With a carburettor things are not so simple.

By making the mixture leaner right at the top end I think the bike would make more power and run faster. But not by a huge amount due to aerodynamics and the stock rpm limit. I am not suggesting a simple main jet swap as I think that would make the bike run too lean on WOT at lower rpm.

At the moment the bike is maxing out at about 11,200 rpm in sixth which, if my gearing calcs. are correct is about 144 kph. Taking off the mirrors would probably get you close to the rpm limiter but there is no way I am going to do that. On Thai roads I want all the safety aids I can get!

3. When you are trundling around town I had assumed that pick up, when you roll on the throttle, was limited because it's a tiddly little 150 engine.

But now I have the lambda sensor on the bike the a/f ratio shows that on a steady throttle at around 5000 rpm and 20% to 25% throttle the engine is running pretty rich at 11.0:1. When you roll on the gas it richens further to anything up to 10.0:1 depending on exactly where you are in the rpm range.

If the engine were running leaner here, say 12.5:1, I think pick up under these conditions would be much sharper and fuel consumption would improve.

My initial thoughts on air/fuel ratio:

My guess is that the stock bike would run better with a leaner needle combined with a larger main jet.

Why a larger main jet given that I said it was running rich right at the top end of the rpm range?

Because even at WOT the needle has some limited influence on a/f ratio. The larger main jet would be offset to a degree by the leaner needle. But to know for sure the only way would be to test and that can be a time consuming process swapping different needles and jets in and out.

The catch in all of this is that alternative needles, needle jets and even main jets for the standard carb are not readily available. If anyone knows better please let me know.

I have been told that common practice in Thailand is to re-drill stock main jets to different sizes but for at least a couple of reasons I do not think that is a good idea.

But before masking any changes I want to get the datalogging working so I can nail down the baseline for a stock bike some more.

With a bit of machining it would be possible to fit a throttle position sensor (TPS) to the stock carb but I probably will not do that as the likelihood is that I will change from the standard carb soon. My 'TPS' will be a bit of tape stuck to the throttle with percentages marked on it such as 20, 25, 50, 75.