Short people got

Every reason to own a GS Adventure. It's just that with my 29" inseam I had to get a little creative to make the bike a little shorter so that I felt more comfortable on it. The last thing I wanted was a bike that I could only touch with the balls of my feet when I was fatigued at o'dark-thirty.

Actually creativity had nothing to do with it. All I had to do was buy a set of Ohlin shocks designed to lower the standard GS and walla, a bike I was a lot more surefooted on. The only prolbem was that this threw the sidestand and center stand off. You can see from the picture that after the lower shocks were installed there was a large increase in the distance from the base of the rear tire to the ground.

I remember taking my bike in for the 600 service and when I went to pick it up John commented on how he almost blew out his back trying to get it up on the centerstand. Well, I had planned on leaving it that way but as it started getting a little closer to the rally I decided that I had to do something about it.

First I didn't want to deal with having to lug this pig onto the centerstand when it was loaded for the rally and secondly, at the mid-point I'm having a new rear tire and oil change done on it at a dealership that doesn't know the bike and I don't want anyone getting hurt in the rush.

So to shorten the centerstand I asked Amy's dad (AL) to help out. He and I had already looked at what was going to be required earlier because I had asked him to shorten my side stand some time ago. I headed up to their place one of the weekends of the EAA show so that he could take a gander at the stand to refresh his memory and then left it with him to do his magic.

About a week later he had it done and flew, yes I said flew, it down to me. You see, he's a pilot and every once and a while we get these special delivery packages that probably have the airport employees ready to call in the drug sniffing dogs the next time I show up.

Once he flew it down and dropped it off all I had to do was paint the stand and get it back on the bike. I really didn't know what to expect once I got the stand back on the bike. All that he could lower it was 7/8" because of clearance issues with the sidestand that was shortened and had a bigger footprint put on.

Assembly was a little bit of a PITA because I couldn't get the springs for the stand to do what I wanted them to do. Eventually, after a beer and more tools, I was able to get everything bolted and clamped back where it belongs.

The result was a bike that was a hell of a lot easier to get onto the centerstand which takes one more thing off my hands to worry about during the rally. You can see from the pic that the mod brought the back wheel closer to the ground by the size of a 2x4