Picked up the ten this afternoon and managed to put near on 100 miles on it.
Mixture of back roads/main roads and light lanes and i think ive found a keeper !

Things that are getting sorted are pegs they are just too small,seat needs some working but other than that quite impressed so far. I work as a fabricator/welder so instore for next week is to make some engine bars,skid plate and rear rack plate.

Thing that done it for me today was the fact i was riding along some back road and stumbled across a local byway and thought yeah why not and the bike just felt right at home.Cant wait to get the thing run in then can really open it up.Last nite i thought i had made a monumental faux paux by pxing my rc8 for the tenere but now i have no after thoughts except the fact after 90 miles the rc8 was out of fuel after 100 miles on the ten the fuel gauge hadnt moved from top bar lol.

cheers for the advice fellas and hoping to catch up with some of you in the near future !!

cheers jim

Congrats on the new bike Jim.

The 660?

And don't believe the fuel gauge, my Wee-Strom was looking at getting 1000km to a tank full of fuel when I first bought it [the reality is it gets 425km around town with 3-5 litres left in the tank and I once got 500km on a tank on a trip but think I was down to the last litre or so left].

If you make the bars and rack and a bash plate you might have a nice little sideline business for the local owners over there.


Cheers,
Ock [in Oz-tralia]

Yeah it's the 660, been out today and so far near on 200 miles done and still plenty of fuel left bonus !!

As soon as it's run in I think the Kev mod,a pipe and filter are Gunna be ordered

and it will be like having a new bike all over again !!

Glad to see you are enjoying the Ten. After many bikes over the years, the Tenere is the longest (sorry second longest) surviving bike in the garage. I usually get bored after 2 - 3 years and go for a change, had the Ten since June 2008 and I still love it. Had a brief affair with a XJR1300 but despite the performance, it just wasn't as good as the Ten and only really got out when the missis wanted to come with me. The XJR was morphed into a px on a Landrover earlier this year!

The only other bike that has outlasted the Tenere is a TTR but she is a dirt-only ride, so it's not fair to compare.

Over the years I've used the Tenere for everything, within a couple of months of picking her up I'd covered over 8000 miles through Europe, riding from the UK to the Arctic, to Greece and over to Portugal. With nothing more than a roadside oil change someplace north of Thressaloniki she performed faultessly, even managing the whole trip on a single set of Tourances (and fully loaded too). In 2010 a few of us took soem Teneres into Portugal where we covered ~800 miles of dirt, as well as the road rde from the four corners of England and Ireland to Spain (via the ferry), and the long haul from south Portugal back to the north of England. Again, she never missed a beat (which is more than can be said about the rider), other than taking on a small puncture.

I personally think this bike is good at everything, but not great. OK, it lacks top end speed, but it reaches the legal limits without any drama, and it will ride at them too, for days on end if the rider can take it. It's frugal, a couple of years ago I rode up to Skye with a couple of mates who all had big naked bikes. The p!$$ was taken out of me for taking the Tenere over the XJR, they did say they would wait for me when they go there though. The very fact I could have rode the entire trip on a single tank of juice (but chose to top up at the Green Welley), and the comfort of the riding position meant that I was in Skye 30 minutes before them as they needed to stop for fuel and comfort breaks. A GS or Varadero would have done the same thing with a little more power, so like I say, it's a good bike but not great.

Off tarmac the bike will out perform the likes of the GS and Varaderos, but not smaller dirt bikes, again good but not great.

Every bike has it's faults and let downs, and for some people they want things better in some areas than others. If you want road performance over anything else then the Tenere isn't for you. If you want trail ability with no road riding, then the Tenere isn't for you. If you want to be able to go anywhere, then the Tenere is the best bike for the job.

As the old saying goes, "You can go fast, I can go anywhere"

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Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.