A little light refreshment

Having been video chatting with bestie yesterday evening until well past bedtime I hoped I would manage a lie in, and I didn't disappoint.  I barely woke up until the heating had switched itself off again after breakfast time.  A very lazy morning was had, followed by a bit of mucking around in the garage, and then somehow it was lunchtime.

The sun came out and I had a long chat with my neighbour who was just back from holiday, and they were very grateful for my looking after the cats and hens.

Then I finally got round to fiddling around with the Africa Twin.  I checked the headlamps to see which one didn't work, pulled off a fairing panel, and took the old bulb out.  It hardly looked like it'd ever been used, but I put a new one in anyway, then checked the voltage from the socket just to make sure, and that seemed OK, so I put it all back together.  Dip beam: check.  Main beam: check.  But what's this?  Why does the headlamp switch have a sort of low beam mode?  And how is that not working when the bulb only has two filaments?

I have had my bike for 16 years and somehow I had never realised that each headlamp has two bulbs!  In true old fashioned terms, the Haynes manual calls them sidelights.  My driving instructor always called them parking lights.  They poke upwards at the base of the lens bowl.  Clearly the sidelight was the one not working.  It took pliers and the bulb coming completely to pieces to extract it.  Now what?  Time to cycle to Halfords and hope that they have replacements.  And amazingly, they did.  Back home it was five minutes work to put the new bulb in, and not much more to put the fairing back together.  I've done it so many times I could probably do it blindfolded.

Then it was time to fire up the old girl, which she did with hardly a cough or a splutter.  Mindful of Fidra's overcharging malaise I did the same battery tests with my multimeter, and everything looked fine.  The poor bike has been through hell and back over the years but she is still ticking.