Safety Report - October 2026
October 2026
Fall is here and when you read this there will be one BRC class left for the year. It has been busy but very successful. The next step is to haul all the bikes to the shop for winter storage and Spring maintenance. The next seven weeks after that I am punched out for deer hunting and then we start all over the first week of December. We have our scheduling meeting on December 5. The position of manager of the Wisconsin Motorcycle Safety Program is now vacant. I certainly hope it is filled by then. Safe Rider, along with the other training sites in the state, need the support and direction of a good leader.
Shawn and I, along with our annual vacation riding partners, Jonathan and John got home yesterday from our annual week-long ride. For something different this year, we set northern Minnesota as the destination. After spending two days with friends on their farm near St. Cloud, we headed north to get some miles. From finding the source of the Mississippi River at Lake Itasca State Park, we probably crossed the river about fifteen times in the next two days. From a small trickle to what we see along the west side of Wisconsin is quite a difference.
The only glitch on the trip was when one of the guys noticed a softness of his rear tire. After carefully checking for nails and finding nothing, he went to add air, and the valve stem broke off. Apparently, it had a crack and a slow leak. Luckily, it broke at a stop and not on the road. Since we carry more tools than just a cell phone and a credit card, we pulled the back wheel, and he climbed on my bike with his wheel. It was a ten-mile ride to a tire shop and in about ten minutes we were back on the road to his bike. On the way home we made the mandatory stop at Aerostitch in Duluth to buy some of their great products and just look at everything in the store. Construction on their street made it a challenge, but worth the effort to get there.
The safety lesson for this month is that valve stems, like tires are rubber and can weather check and degrade. For a very small price you can replace valve stems whenever you replace a tire. Especially if you are not changing tires every year. If you change two or three tires per year you can get by with a yearly valve stem replacement. Saving a couple of bucks is not worth the risk.
Now I’ll do a product report for something that really impressed us on the trip. Shawn and I have used Cardo helmet comm system for about three years. I reported on them the year we got them. Cardo just came out with an upgrade to their app and the models that we have. John and Jonathan upgraded to the Pack Talk Edge like ours just before the trip. Cardo developed what is called open or public mesh. The upgrade was free and the new app has controls for it. When anyone with the system is on open mesh you automatically pair and connect to them. You can connect up to thirty-one riders at once. (Way too many for me to ride with.) When we were on the road, we met a Gold Wing rider going the other way. He started talking to us as we rode. It was our first experience with the new tech. As more people have this system it should make trips interesting to talk to others on the road. The units automatically connect, either with the open mesh system or you can set up defined groups for private communication. The clarity of voice and music is great with the JBL speakers. I have received phone calls while on the bike and no one can tell that I’m going down the road. (Hands free of course. Voice commands control all the functions.) It really simplifies the process over the many older systems that we have used for twenty-five years.
Get out and enjoy the Fall riding but be careful of deer and wet leaves.
Ride Safe,
Gary
Gary
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