My last Saturday in London was meant to be nice and relaxing... NOT!

This is how the story unfolded: After waiting for a new WP rear shock for 2 months, I was told WP are are having problems and won't deliver. Naturally they only told me that when I started getting really pushy as "I have to be on the road next week!", before that the reason for the "delay" was "extended factory holidays" and such malarkey.

So with one week to go, I had to find an alternative, and the Ohlins Su201 (46 PRCS) seemed to be the best option. Sure, it's supposed to be for the Vstrom 1000, but suspension & Suzuki experts KAIS performance (in Manchester) said they have fitted a few of them on 650s... so I ordered the very pricey full-feature kit (preload, compression AND rebound adjustable - wow) and set my alarm for 6 o'clock this morning to drive to Manchester and have it fitted.

Left North London at 7, was there by 10. After about 5 minutes, I get a smiling Mr. Andy saying "we have a small technical issue..." - it turns out the shock is different than what they were anticipating and the particular unit did not fit my bike, since the reservoir that hosts the compression damping adjusters is fixed on the unit instead of the {anticipated I suppose) loose unit. Grand.

So a solution had to be found and it turned out that the folks at KAIS managed to change the head and use an external reservoir that did get fitted on the bike, minus the adjusters. So no compression damping for me, in the end got only rebound and preload adjusters but hey-ho. Things can never simply work, can they?

This is the result:

So after riding 700km on the lovely M1 & M6's of this country, I'm spending the remaining day trying not to smash to pieces a new Acer laptop with Windows Vista on it. It comes from the shop with so much pre-loaded useless/dangerous software that I spent hours just uninstalling stuff. Of course the Operating System itself is living up to its tradition as well - the automatic update process is already broken, there are zombie services (can't delete/restart/fix/touch them in any way)...

I will so not miss this when I'm gone :-)