202 On Tour

When I woke up at 7am the only thought i had was of the handlebar clamp bolts – and more specifically the fact I didn’t have a spare. One you can live without for a little while. Two missing will definitely slow progress…

So I jumped out of bed as, from experience, a lot of people leave between 7 and 8 am.

The first fella I asked was seated and ready to go but still happy to have a rummage around. He seemed to have mainly screws though. Re thinking my strategy, I then went to the nearest camp of old Landcruisers and not only did old mate have an M6 bolt, he had two, and he cut them both for size with his Milwaukee portable Angle Grinder!

So you can imagine how I felt when I got back to the bike and realised what I needed was M8 bolts🤦.  I returned, asking if he offered an exchange program 😁,  but he insisted I keep the  M6s while he dug out some M8’s.

It was at this point where I realised that I should probably have removed the snapped stud last night while i had the top of the clamp off. But since I had freshly locktited the other three last night , and it needs 3 or 4 hours to set I was pretty much stuck with current configuration until something went wrong.

After making sure we left the key (Liz took the key with us on the way up😗), we backtracked the 6 kms to Bramwell Roadhouse for fuel and breakfast.

There was 10 minutes of paranoia at the roadhouse, last night while loctitng the bolts on the handlebar clamp we had been careful about the position of the bars and had left only a smidgen of 1 to 1.5 mm of scored handlebar tube visible. But now there was 4 mm?? The bars felt ok and I couldn’t move them. So wth?

Turns out in our tired state last night we were looking at the lhs of where the bar meets the clamp, and this morning we were looking at the right!🤦🤦

Nice to have that problem sorted…

By now time was creeping away so we made the decision to stop at Archer Rivet rather than the hoped for Coen which was 65 kms further down the road.

The road south of Bramwell to the intersection with the PDR is generally pretty good, though theres a handful of spots where the corrugations get to “nasty” on the sidecar corrugation scale – after all, it was along here we broke the mudguard on the way up.

I also made the observation that south of Bramwell the road tracks the old Telegraph Line, and is therefore generally  a lot lot straighter. North of Bramwell we were on the Bypass Road which followed natural undulations and had a lot more curves where corrugations and sand/dust builds up.

The road south is also much closer to being sealed, and theres plenty of opportunities to take to the table drain and bypass the worst of the corrugations. And so that’s what we did.

Helps also that it is sealed all the way from the intersection back to Archer Rivet…

Had dinner with Adam, as fella from Tassie who has been on the road 3 yrs aboard his R1250GS – he had come out of Bamaga this morning and was cruising at speed and loving the roads

Memorial at Archer Rivet to “Toots” Holtziemet, a legendary female truckie up here who was killed in a loading accident at Weipa wharf in 1992