Yamaha 1300 Tourer - Yamaha 1300 Tourer Fansite

Last night, just as dusk was coming on, near disaster struck. We had had one of those perfect Iowa October days of riding, hopping from town to town. While heading North out of Witten, Iowa, home of Denise Long, who was the first female basketball player to score over a hundred points in a high school basketball game. She actually scored one hundred-eleven points in 1968, against Dows, a record that stood for 38 years. Witten days was taking place the next day and the word was that Denise was coming home for the festival. But I digress . . .
While going the speed limit down the county road, there was one of those big thud noises that only mean one thing. I did not even see it coming, but saw a flash of brown in the fraction of a second that it takes a nerve ending to transmit pain. The collision transmitted up through my left foot that something was wrong. Indeed I looked down and saw that my left front Multi-Link Crash Bar was about four inches farther to the rear of the bike than it had been minutes earlier. My foot was only slightly sore the next morning. We slowed and cruised back to see if the culprit was still around to no avail. Then we looked over the bike and found no serious problems with continuing the ride, although the gear shift was a little more difficult to operate than previously.
Let me say first of all how lucky I feel we both were. If not for the crash bar I do think the least that would have happened is a broken ankle and perhaps the culprit could have ended up under the rear wheel where we would have, well, lets just say we could have had a major brouhaha . . . five weeks, 3200 miles and one dented raccoon could have ended my 1300 career. After surveying the damage I can probably repair the the crash bar to it's original form with some applied heat and canoodling, since it appears the bar is still reasonably sound and so far I have not deduced any damage to the main frame of my beloved 1300 tourer.

Be Aware,
Ride Safe