Last Run of the Year

A short spin today on some local back roads. 12C (54F) so not much like winter.

Winter Solstice

Happy solstice! As one who doesn't much like Christmas & New Year I've taken to celebrating today.

The winter solstice occurs (in the northern hemisphere) when the axis of the earth's rotation is tilted away from the sun by the maximum amount. This happened at 4:19 GMT this morning to be exact.   

Winter solstice

The solstice causes the shortest amount of daylight. At my location at 56 degrees north the sun rose at 8:45 GMT and will set at 15:44 GMT giving 6 hours and 59 minutes of daylight. From now on this will increase.

This is midwinter but due to seasonal lag the coldest temperatures are yet to come. Seasonal lag is about a month so late January/early February is, on average, the coldest time of year.

Thus far winter here has not been bad. There were early frosts from the start of November but currently it is dull, dry & fairly mild (8C/46F) Zero chance of a white Christmas. Certainly no problems with getting about on the bike so long as I wrap up.  

Winter scene

The CBF is my transport at present

Maximum Luggage

I snapped this Kymco scooter with an impressive carrying capacity last week in the Spanish Canary Island of Fuerteventurea.

The pair of huge cases is used to deliver pollo asado (roast chicken)  

CBF Headlight Problem.

You may recall that I had a problem with the headlight fuse blowing on my CBF250. I put this down to a bad contact in the fusebox. I cleaned it up and all seemed well. But in the darkness of the Scottish winter the problem re-emerged.

I checked for bare wires causing a short but they were all ok. I replaced the fuse and the headlight worked….for a short time. The fuse blew again when I pressed the started button. This gave me a clue as to what might be wrong.

Bikes in the UK have had, for a long time, "always on" headlights - they don't have a on/off switch. This is for safety reasons. For staring the CBF has a microswitch that momentarily switches off the headlight when the starter button is pressed. This will allow all the power of the battery to go to the starter.

I opened the handlebar switch and found something wrong. A wire from the microswitch was trapped under a metal plate. The insulation was burst exposing the wire. This could cause the fuse to blow when the starter was operated.

I taped up the wire and the back of the plate and this has worked thus fair. Here's hoping. 

 ***Addendum***

I can't blame Honda for this. About 9 years ago the microswitch stuck and I opened things up to clean it. I must have trapped the wire then.