Adventures Aboard a Soviet Motorcycle
Smutyanka has gotten quite a few new toys recently! Some are more necessary than others. In order of installation:
Duck Boards
Urals come with a rubber mat that fits in the floor of the sidecar. It provides some nice traction, but water gets underneath and if you don’t air it out regularly, you can get some pretty [...]
A lot has gone on for Smutyanka in the last couple days! When I last wrote, we were hoping that our battery drain problems were being caused by the fact that we hadn’t been disconnecting the battery after driving. Well, we had another Ural Tourist owner from Soviet Steeds come by and help us take [...]
We put mirrors on Smutyanka this afternoon, and she is now officially road-worthy according to the state of Virginia. We got some that are stable but easily removable, so that when we take her to reenactments, we can remove them easily, along with the modern license plate, luggage rack, etc. I’ll be ordering my helmet [...]
Apparently there was a tidbit on the Discovery Channel awhile back about Urals. The narrator is great and wonderfully cheeky, and he is dead on about the bikes. ”It’ll go sideways, backwards, almost upside down, just about anywhere apart from where you want it to go. But, you’re never really going to fall off it, [...]
In true Russian fashion, now that we have gotten Smutyanka running, she has started dropping parts.
I was driving around the parking lot this afternoon, practicing my right-hand turns (which are difficult on a sidecar, because 70% of the weight of the bike is on the left, where the centrifugal force is on a RH turn) [...]
I decided that this blog is decidedly lacking in a photo of Smutyanka. Here you go:
Smutyanka has been attracting a lot of attention even when she’s just sitting still. The folks on Soviet Steeds had warned us about the “Ural Delay Factor” if you try and run errands in one (add approx. 30 minutes of time to your errands to account for people stopping you to ask about the bike), [...]
