I can handle:

• A four hour bike ride, that’s easy.
• Five or six kilometres of fist-sized gravel on a sports bike.
• The seals on my front master cylinder deciding to refuse to  live up to their name.

What I can’t handle is the terrible state of back-country Queensland roads and ending up with incredibly sore wrists by the time I was half way home.

In other news, Kawasaki wins again on the parts front – went down to TeamMoto’s big warehouse store at Springwood and ordered a rebuild kit for the master cylinder ($93) and a replacement seal for the top ($25ish).

The three-brake-line system that the bike runs as standard needed replacing because the lines were bulging even under light braking situations.  I found a local manufacturer called HEL Performance and I have ordered some from for the reasonable sum of $160 delivered.

I’d highly recommend them because they allow you to choose from a variety of colours for both  the lines and the fittings and have a massive back-catalogue of supported bikes with their associated configurations of lines. I have chosen to go with a more race-like dual-line setup which runs a line for each caliper directly to the master cylinder. This configuration allows for more direct feedback and improved performance along with reduced parts count and ease of bleeding.