Touring tip: When it's tool time on the road

Published with the permission of RoadRUNNER Motorcycle Touring & Travel Magazine for Overland Tech & Travel / Overland Expo only. Not for sale or distribution.If you’re like most adventure motorcyclists, you don’t want any type of mechanical problem to deal with during a motorcycle tour. And, of course, the best way to keep that from happening is a heavy dose of preventative medicine before your bike ever leaves the garage. But unforeseen mechanical malfunctions can and do happen out on the road. So, taking selected tools with you and knowing how to use them are sensible precautions for any touring rider.

Key Assumptions: If you ask 10 different riders for their list of necessary tools to have along, you may get 10 different lists. That’s probably because of the assumptions each person is making in several key areas:

•  Length of Trip: The longer you expect to be on the road the more likely it is that something on the bike will need repair. If your trip involves going around the globe, then many more tools and spare parts will be needed than for a weekend jaunt to the mountains.
• Type of Bike & Riding: All other things being equal, dual-sport riding and adventure touring are more likely to result in something coming loose or a bike going down than while street riding.
• Riding Environment: Riding in remote locations usually requires riders to be more self-reliant in fixing whatever needs repairing. 
• Number of Riders in the Group: The solitary rider must carry all of the tools and spare parts he or she might need. In group riding situations the load can be spread amongst the riders. 
• Mechanical Expertise of Rider(s): There’s no point in carrying a lot of tools and spare parts if you don’t know how to use them to make the repairs. Riders traveling long distances in remote areas, however, should have the requisite mechanical expertise and equipment to repair most any type of mechanical malfunction. 

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Is Gross Vehicle Weight Rating . . . Overrated?

We all know most of America is overweight these days. But 2,000 pounds overweight? 

Scott Lesak wrote us regarding his 1997 Mitsubishi Montero (the one in front here), which he has outfitted extensively for overland travel (his brother Mark owns the one following). Recently, Scott weighed virtually every piece of gear that goes into the Montero for a typical camping trip, and after adding in the curb weight of the vehicle, plus occupants, was concerned, if not really surprised, to find the total nearly 2,000 pounds higher than the factory’s listed 5,700-pound GVWR (Gross Vehicle Weight Rating includes empty vehicle weight plus all fluids, occupants, and cargo). He wondered if by carrying that much excess weight he was, a) risking damage to the vehicle, and, b) compromising safety on the road through reduced braking performance, etc. 

To which, of course, the short answer is yes and yes. 

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Vehicle rentals in New Zealand?

My wife and I are headed to New Zealand in March and I wanted to see if you knew of anybody down there who did vehicle rentals?  We are looking at renting a pop-top camper van to spend our 2 weeks traveling around the south island.  Any leads would be helpful! Thank you for your help.

 ~ Beau Johnston (www.LivingOverland.com Gourmet Cooking * Travel * 4WD) via email

10 Great Last-minute Christmas Suggestions

Whether your preferred mode is motorcycle, truck, bicycle, or foot, Overland Tech & Travel editor Jonathan Hanson offers up great last-minute gift suggestions for the overlanders on your list—or a treat for yourself. 

Fenix E11 LED microlight ($27)

I remember when I thought a halogen flashlight that produced 70 lumens from two expensive lithium batteries (for one hour) was hot stuff. The E11 puts out 105 lumens for almost two hours from a single AA battery—or a walking/reading-level 32 lumens for eight hours on low. Astonishing. Headed to the developing world? Take several—they make genuinely useful trade items or gifts. Fenix

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Why I hate Nalgene bottles

Few outdoor product manufacturers have attained the market dominance enjoyed by the Nalge Company, once an obscure maker of laboratory storage containers, after company president Marsh Hyman discovered his son’s Boy Scout troop was using their one-liter bottles as canteens early in the 1970s. The subsequent rebranding of Nalgene Outdoor Products was successful beyond the wildest dreams of marketing people who had previously relied on guys wearing lab coats and pocket protectors as customers. So successful, in fact, that I seriously doubt anyone reading this has not at some point had a drink of water from a Nalgene.

I drank the water, and the Kool-Aid, early on. The original one-liter white HDPE bottles with the wide cap were light, tough, and fit perfectly in the side pockets of my Camp Trails frame pack. They were easy to fill from a stream or bucket, and didn’t leak. You could chill the contents with ice cubes, or freeze the whole bottle with impunity. The Austrian Olicamp bottles I’d been using were leakproof and tough, too, but had a tiny opening and a fiddly two-piece top, so—despite years of yeoman service, including a backpacking trip spanning southern Arizona and three mountain ranges—I shelved them and shamelessly embraced their replacements.

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Review: Desert Travels by Chris Scott, Kindle edition

Times have changed when Chris Scott offers a book as a Kindle edition. 

It’s not as though the desert travel veteran is un-tech-savy—his authoritative Sahara Overland Forum has been on the Web for what seems like eons. But Chris’s participation in threads there always had sort of a message-from-the-wilderness mystery to it—one imagined him typing on a gritty Panasonic ToughBook from the top of a sand dune, sending the signal via satellite using a generator powered by a camel harnessed to plod in circles, or maybe hooked up to the rear wheel of a knackered Yamaha XT500.

However, the advent of a Kindle edition of his Desert Travels means he must have snuck back to his flat in London for at least long enough to arrange the appropriate technology transfer. In any case, for the price of a cup of coffee ($2.99) you can now have the book downloaded to your Kindle, or a device that can read Kindle books (such as an iPad).

Desert Travels covers some of Chris’s earliest explorations in the Sahara, beginning with his disastrous initial foray and precipitous retreat on an XT500, ending with a fractious ride alongside a pseudonymed companion from Algeria to Mauritania, and centered around a foray into vehicle-supported (via a dodgy 101 Land Rover) guided motorcycle trips, on which “five set off . . . only one came back riding.” This period in the 1980s, just before the nomad rebellions began to make travel in the central Sahara, and Algeria in particular, hazardous in places for foreigners, is what Chris refers to as the Golden Age of Saharan Exploration, when anyone with the experience and/or commitment could undertake truly epic trans-national journeys across an area the size of the United States.

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Tested: 2012 Yamaha Super Ténéré

Photos by Tom Riles and Brian Nelson

If it’s Tuesday, it must be Timbuktu!

by Ken Freund 

Reprinted with permission, RoadRUNNER MagazineYamaha has been selling this new Super Ténéré adventure-touring model in Europe for several years now and is finally bringing it to North America. Ténéré (pronounced like “tay-nay-ray”) is the word for “desert” in the language of the Tuareg tribe that resides in the region of the Sahara where Timbuktu is located. The first bike to carry the Super Ténéré name was the 1989 XTZ750 twin and it won the trans-Saharan Dakar Rally six times — so this new machine has good DNA!

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Tested: Kanz Field Kitchen

by Roseann Hanson

When I was little my family had a chuck box for camping. Most of our camping was with the Boy Scouts, for whom my father was a Scoutmaster. His name is Charles, and friends called him Chuck, so I always thought it was his box, spelled with capital letters, as in “Chuck's Box.”

My mind and heart store so many indelible memories associated with that old beat up box . . . cold nights in pine forests (a treat for a desert kid), smoky fires, charred marshmallows, howling coyotes (we pretended they were wolves), tales of the Lost Dutchman Mine in the Superstition Wilderness, and mom serving forth from the chuck box innumerable stews and casseroles, invariably containing Cream of Mushroom Soup. High dining for an 8-year-old. 

Fast-forward to 1987: in our third year of married bliss, knowing how much I loved the old family box, Jonathan built me a wooden chuck box, varnished as lovingly as an Alden schooner. It had a piano-hinged drop-down front, cork lining, silverware drawer, plate slots, shelves, and a secret panel along the back of the drawer, with a row of cutout leaping dolphins. Used on our first and subsequently countless trips to Baja and Sonora, throughout the American West and even the Arctic—first in my ‘78 JF55 and then in several Toyota pickups—it logged 75,000 miles+ of exploration. 

Alas, it was retired when we upscaled to a Four Wheel Camper in the late 1990s. But lately, I had been missing my old chuck box (which is retired to a place of honor in storage, with our original Sigg cook set and brass Svea stove). I'm back to camping out of a classic Land Cruiser, so when I had a chance to test out the Kanz Field Kitchen, I jumped at it. 

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FI-PIG, Gorilla Tape, and WD-40: Essential fix-it stuff

I would like an expert opinion about assembling a selection of adhesives, chemicals, and other products most useful for overland vehicle field repair issues such as cracked hoses, radiators, or fuel lines, and for replacing gaskets, joining metal or plastic pieces, sealing electrical repairs, and so on.

Alexander in Florida

Alexander’s question brought to mind the old aphorism about the perfect two-piece tool kit: WD-40 (to fix the things that are supposed to move but won’t) and duct tape (to fix the things that aren’t supposed to move but do). Kidding aside, it’s an excellent question—a very large number of field repairs involve some sort of leak or breakage that requires a chemical or mechanical fix. I looked in my own kit, enlisted the help of two of our OT&T experts—Duncan Barbour and Graham Jackson—and also queried my nephew, Jake Beggy, a master Toyota mechanic and fabricator. Here’s what we came up with, first in the way of commercial products and then in “bodge” fixes when nothing else is available.

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Fit to be tied: Tie-down torture tests the metal of Expeditionware Transport Loops

I’m never sure which alarms me more: a vehicle loaded with completely unsecured cargo and equipment, or one loaded with cargo and equipment secured poorly. After all, the former implies simple ignorance on the part of the owner, and ignorance can be overcome with education. But the latter implies some rudimentary level of awareness—and then a complete failure to do the simple arithmetic that will tell you what will happen to the 30-pound Hi-Lift jack bungeed to your front brush guard should you be, say, rear-ended at a stoplight. No, I am not making this up, and yes, I checked. Two neatly wound bungee cords comprised the total attachment of that jack to that brush guard. I’ve seen another Hi-Lift bungeed to a very well-constructed internal roll cage (talk about Manichaean reasoning), and uncounted tool boxes, fridges, and Pelican cases all held down by what are, let’s be frank, glorified rubber bands.

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