Hello all. Boy has it been a long time! I can't remember when the last time I logged my MPG into mileage tracker.
I just wanted to touch base with you guys. I'm glad to see so much interest in modding the Ninja 250. It makes me feel like I encouraged that trend to some extent.
In October 2010, I started a new job in New York with a pharmaceutical company and rented a condo about 6 miles away from work. Since I lived so close to work, i did not have a far enough commute to really worry about commuting costs on my Ninja. I did, however, purchase a cheap commuter car (Saturn SL1 with a 5spd) to get to work on days where the weather was bad (And it gets bad sometimes in the Hudson Valley). I've applied all I have learned in driving technique from my experiences with my Ninja to driving the car and was able to average 52mpg in the car (which EPA's 29mpg combined!).
In February of 2012 I moved again, this time much farther away from work to live with my girlfriend. The new place is half way between our jobs, and we both have good jobs that we did not want to give up.
My commute to work now is 48.5 miles, one way, 90% highway. That's right, I'm doing almost 100miles a day now, and it's a great reason to focus back on fuel economy. This is my first time experiencing long distance commuting during rush hours, and I'll tell you what... it makes hypermiling much more interesting because there are huge metal road ornaments all over the place. A normal commute to work involves about 75% clustered moving traffic at normal speeds, and 25% <30mph slow clusters, including moments of stopped traffic.
In my saturn I've been able to average 48mpg in these traveling coniditons. I commute on the Ninja as much as possible, and have been averaging about 80mpg on the commute. My riding position is tucked if i am up above 55mph, otherwise I am sitting upright. Now, if you remember back during my experiments i had talked about experiencing low back pain because of prolonged tucking. I am grateful that my job provides free massage therapy because of the repetitive lab work i do. I have the massage therapist work on my lower and middle back every week, and so far so good.
I'm sure many of you remember me talking about designing and building a full streamlined fairing for my bike, and believe me, I still would love to do it. The problem i had was that i did not really have the work space to do it. Well, now I have a 1000sqft workshop that i share with 2 friends that houses our toys. Does this mean I'm going to start tooling on the Ninja? Not quite yet. At the moment, I have 2 other projects that I am working on that i would like to complete before I venture into modifying the ninja more. Both of them can be seen in this picture:
Completely restoring my 2000 YZ 250 dirtbike and rebuilding my 84/87 Buick Grand National.
I'm going to start entering fueling data into mileage tracker again. This year I'm going to play with Jetting when it gets warmer out. I'm interesting to see how that will change my FE.
Talk to you guys soon!
By the way, my bike has 25,350miles on it now.
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