Repairs, Recovery

Seven weeks since the crash, and at last, the bike is getting worked on! I did a real assessment of the damage, and started removing broken plastic and damaged components. The good news is that only two pieces of plastic and the windshield need replacing, as well as a bolt that holds the handlebars to the crown. There's some aesthetic problems on tank- a giant gouge running the length of the plastic cover is especially ugly. But that's a $400 part, and it only contributes to the bike's look. I'll have to find a custom solution.

Since so little of the bike took any punishment and the damage done was relatively cheap to repair, I don't have to worry about a large bill. Two hundred dollars and a few weekends of work, and the bike will be where it was before the wreck. I sure wish my body had been that simple and quick to fix!

My wrist has surged forward in its recovery, and should be somewhat normal in a month or two. It won't be until then that I can get back on the bike, but its for the better. By the time I'm physically able to ride, I will have completed repairs on my bike, and it will be far too cold for daily commutes or weekly trips. But there's icing on this awful cake- I now have a great reason to enroll in an advanced riding school this spring. No matter how experienced the rider, there is always someone better who can help you become a safer, faster, smarter rider yourself. I'll be hitting the track on a sport bike, learning how to take high speed corners, avoid crashes, and drop the bike safely. Hopefully, a little more training will be another tool to keep me from ending up in the hospital again.

Broken, but not for good.

In the end, my crash resulted in a broken wrist, dislocated shoulder, and a lot of bruises and gashes. It took an agonizing forty five minutes for the ambulance to arrive and drag me off to the hospital for surgery that night. I had managed to take out a pole and sign during my fall, but miraculously, the bike was almost unharmed. The windshield was obliterated, shattered into fifty pieces in the bushes around me. Some plastic was broken or heavily torn up. One piece had melted to the exhaust. And my handlebars were partially broken off.

All in all, ninety percent of the damage was to plastic. The bike still starts, still runs, and I'm sure is still ridable except for the handle bar damage. Not bad for a major wreck! But getting back on the bike is another thing entirely. My throttle wrist took some serious punishment, and as result is now held together by a plate, four screws, and four pins. I probably have another month before I can hope to ride on that. My shoulder has another six weeks of recovery itself, so riding is out of the question until about the time that the weather gets too cold for riding. Great.

The way I figure it, I'm looking at about seventy five bucks in REAL damage, and another six hundred in very expensive plastic. So the F650 may soon have a big change in appearance, since I can't even vaguely justify that kind of money for aesthetics. My next task is to figure out how I can make a very distinct bike look nice without its plastic shell. And of course, to heal enough to get back on the pavement.