The Blog of Boban Acimovic

Grip puppies are made to reduce handlebars vibrations on the grips preventing hands fatigue. For riders with bigger hands they also may provide a better comfort because of the increased diameter. Someone may argue that they may also endanger the feeling of the front end but in my experience that is not the case or at least there is enough good feeling in a regular traffic riding. Sports riding on a track is probably different story.

Most motorcycles have a side stand with relatively small foot which secures the bike nicely on a pavement but if you try to park on a gravel or muddy terrain, you may experience problems. The side stand may sink into the surface and the bike may fall. I used some kind of side stand foot enlargements on all my bikes since 2014 but this time I wanted it for my new Triumph Rocket 3 Storm R and I couldn’t find it.

D3O is a protective material made by D3O Labs , British company specializing in impact protection technologies. It’s a flexible and pliable material which solidifies in the event of collision. It is used as a low-profile impact protection for phones, laptops and other electronic devices, motorcycle riding gear, defense products like helmets, body armor and footwear, etc. Held has it’s own palette of D3O based protectors in association with D3O Labs and we are going to review most of them in this article.

Is Akrapovič sport exhaust just a nice add-on for BMW K 1600 GT or does it do something more? What kind of sound does it make? Does it change the behavior of the bike? It was quite difficult to find these information online but I still decided to give it a try. Hence, let’s share some more information about it. Exhausts are packed flawlessly. I haven’t checked if they are really 3.

Alpine MotoSafe Tour and Race Alpine Hearing Protection is founded 1994 in Netherlands as a producer of customized earplugs for professional applications. They claim their motorcyclists earplugs are the best for the motorway and racing circuit. Their earplugs have special filter which reduces wind noise while keeping the sound or the engine and helmet communicator. Their main products are MotoSafe Tour (with black filter) and Race (with red filter) which provide 17dB and 20dB noise reduction respectively.

I am not sure if I have previously mentioned, but my previous bike was K1300R which I owned from 2013 till 2023, quite 10 years and I was very happy with it. There were no particular reasons to sell it except that I wanted a new bike and I couldn’t keep both of them because of the space in my underground garage. I got SW-Motech tank ring and Daypack bag on this bike and it served very well, great quality.

I have already explained in the previous blog what means “best quality inner bag(s)” means to me and that is not just the quality of materials and manufacture, but also the weight, space usage, space optimization and so on. I found out that Kleinert inner bags for side cases for BMW K1600GT/GTL and R1250RT are the best at the market, in my opinion, and in this blog I would like to announce the winner for the top case.

What would “best inner bags” mean, just the quality of the bags or something more? Well, since plastic side cases very often have irregular inner shape, in my opinion, optimal space usage is as important as the quality. Instead of the further explanation, let’s see the internals of the BMW touring cases: BMW offers good quality inner bags but according to the pictures and forum’s opinions I could find online, they do not occupy all internal space.

Like promised in the previous blog, we will discuss here more about the newest Sena communicator for the newest Shoei helmets Neotec 3 and GT-Air 3. After installing SLR3 into the helmet, the main impression is very seamless integration. All cables safely routed, virtually invisible, speakers fit exactly to the sockets, everything is so clean. Great work both from Sena and Shoei. On the left cheek you can see main controls.

Are you wondering who would ever write a blog of installation of some rubbery impact protectors for some motorcycle’s side cases? I completely understand you. 😀 So why did I write this? I recently bought K1600GT and started looking for some aftermarket parts. But I was surprised that there are actually not many information about some of the products, very often no pictures or just bad quality ones, no videos, quite strange.

Guitarists are fans of loud amplifiers and music in general, but this is not the case with all neighbors. 😆 I started silent practicing with plugging the headphones to my Fender Mustang and this worked well, of course, but I always had to seat close to the amplifier which was not that practical. By searching the Internet I found out about different Vox headphones amplifiers which offer just one kind of sound so if you want to have for example clean, blues and metal sounds, you need to buy three different devices.

After getting the Strat and Yamaha keyboard, I still felt something is missing. Of course, I wanted a Les Paul as well. 😃 Like always, I investigated a lot but it was still hard to decide which model to buy. I looked at all Les Paul series, I read lot of articles and my conclusion was that it is quite risky to get an original one because of the neck problems.

I have heard many advises that the best way to learn to play music and visualize it would be to play keyboard, so I decided to get one. Of course, I didn’t have plans to become a great keyboard or piano player, nothing like that, but just to get one for fun. I know about Yamaha, Roland and Korg from my childhood but again, after so many years I had to discover what would be the best buy for a beginner.

Even though I have a tuner on my modulated amplifier, I wanted to get a clip tuner so that I can use it on any guitar including acoustic ones. After some research I found out the one which shows tuning of all six strings at once. If there is some string out of tune, you can immediately see which one and quickly tune it up. The name of this magical tuner is TC Electronic Polytune Clip.

Although my son had Fender Mustang I, I wanted more trendy amplifier with wi-fi and bluetooth features being able to download the effects and so on. After some research, I found out that there are two options, either Boss Katana or some newer Fender Mustang model. First I looked at the Fender GT series and later found out that there is even newer line, GTX. After reading some reviews and comparisons, I decided to get Mustang GTX50, but then I realized that more powerful model GTX100 comes with the GTX-7 foot switch and that the price difference is not that big.

As I child, I dreamed of having real Stratocaster and the time has finally come. I looked online at many Strats but one special caught my eye. I didn’t want a vintage guitar, I develop modern software so I wanted a modern guitar as well. I respect the quality of stuff, so getting something made in Japan sounded really good. The decision was made and I ordered it. My dream came true on 17.

I played guitar as a child, even performed at my primary school’s festival. So why did I actually stop playing guitar? At a time, guitars were really expensive and my parents bought me a beginners acoustic guitar which was quite bad even though it was still relatively expensive. The action was too high and this started being worse during the time. I figured out I could fix this a little bit by inserting a folded paper between the neck and the body which helped but it was still not good.