April 2025
2002 Triumph Tiger 955
A good friend in Perth decided that he still needed an NZ bike after having sold his trusty ex-America 955 Sprint, and had been browsing Trademe. He had some interest in visiting a few of the many gravel roads we have, so was looking at 'Adventure' style machines.
I happened to find one he had not seen which was in Westport, so was not so far away that I could not recover it with a bit of planning, and it was a Tiger that shared the same trusty 955 triple engine which had conveyed us for so many miles in grand style. I had no experience of the Tiger version but had often thought that the riding position might prove to be a lot more user-friendly than the sporty crouch the Sprint afforded.
A deal was made, and I collected the bike between showers and after dark a few nights back and rode it to our luxurious "chalet". Kind of. I was a little apprehensive to be riding off on such an unknown quantity in an unfamiliar town, but the layout was so much like the Sprint that I felt immediately at home - sit-up-and-beg riding position and all. It wasn't until morning that I got to have a good look at it and work out the vaguaries of the panniers and topbox, which were by no means the only sensible touches this bike featured.
I am not sure if we understood that the mileage was in miles or not, as Trademe does not cater for miles-per-haps, but the legendary reputation these engines have for reliability was a major factor in why we bought them for the America tour, so I have no qualms that this bike will provide all the service it is required to in Steve's hands.
While the speedo does have Km graduations as well as mph they are so faint that you would run the risk of buying a tree while trying to make sense of them, so its really a matter of doing the math on the fly, just as we have been doing with our American Sprints which used mph as their staple diet.
Sue took this final pic in Westport after we had just managed to fit everything we were carrying into the cargo holds, despite some concerns that we had brought far too much stuff with us for a simple ferry trip, although we were planning to take the slowest possible way home. From here we would cruise down the coast road to spend a night at the Blackball Hilton, which has always been a good place for us to be at.
Ok, I'm not the shortest kid on the block, but having feet flat on the ground and knees bent means that the seat height is pretty manageable for most riders. It is the swinging of the leg over the panniers while avoiding the topbox which is the art, and Sue took a while to perfect getting aboard the aft seat once I was ensconced. Once underway, even at a slow walking pace the bike is very controllable, and despite being fully loaded and having only about 30 minutes experience on this bike at all, I was making quite serious U turns on this rather soft gravel carpark with confidence. From my perspective that says a lot about the bike's manners.
The ride was quite a revelation from many angles, as we glided along in more comfort than any bike I have ever ridden thus far. The suspension is bordering sublime in its ability to soak up bumps, brakes more than adequate and with a rear brake that earns its keep more than that on a Sprint. The bike's ability to turn tight bends into a fun factor took some getting used to, and I think I could feel the effect of the front axle being placed in front of the fork sliders. It is a type of feedback you get when pushing it into bends quickly and tight. Not scary or anything, just a feeling from the steering.
The engine is a treasure. Much more flexible than the Sprint, not only pulling away briskly from low speeds in higher gears, but climbing serious hills in 6th gear without feeling at all that it needed changing down. The gearing feels slightly lower than the Sprint, but overtaking - also in 6th - still elicits the turbine-like feel of the triple and despatches slower moving obstacles with great ease. I love it. It feels like the bike we should have ridden around America on, although the bodywork does not offer the degree of shielding from the slipstream that the Sprint does. I would almost trade that extra weather protection for this easy riding position, although each has its advantages.
I was quite surprised to make ground contact on a left bend where the suspension got a bit loaded up by the road contour, and it felt like it was quite close to my footpeg. I assumed the sidestand would be the culprit, as it mounts right below there, but a quick look at our first stop at Punakaiki indicated that the sidestand was not guilty. I had by now gotten the distinct impression that the suspension was set way too soft for our fully laden state, but not having any handbook to explain how to set it meaned I would need to look online for an owners manual. It might also compromise our wonderfully compliant bump suppression which was still astounding me.
We made it to the Hilton way too soon, and whipped all the luggage off and took it to our room. They now have a large carpark behind the hotel, so I took the bike there and parked it where it was in clear sight of our window. I still feel a bit squiffy when riding other people's bikes lest anything untoward should take place...
A pleasant evening with great food and a free breakfast later we were readying ourselves to hit the road for Reefton. We have a reliable eating place there and never miss any opportunity to avail ourselves of it.
I had not added any fuel since we collected the bike, thanks to the generosity of the previous owner, and I figured it would be a cinch to leave refueling until Reefton. The Sprints have about the same fuel capacity as these, and there is still a gallon left when the low fuel light comes on just as the fuel gauge hits zero. That is a very thoughtful way to have set things up by Triumphs design team I have reason to state, having pushed the envelope on many occasions, with the worst outcome resulting in a 50 yard push to the nearest gas station after getting 60 miles on an empty gauge.
I do hope this Hotel continues to enjoy a steady trade - always a special atmosphere to enjoy for an evening.
And yes Veronica - that looks like a stainless steel exhaust system..
The ride to Reefton is one of my favourites, especially the Blackball to Ikamatua section which is rural NZ at its west coast best. There was very little traffic to contend with, and I was now sitting at an indicated 65mph having noted the average speeds of other motorists compared to our own. The speedos on the Sprints average a 10mph overread at cruising speed and I suspect these do likewise, although I was playing safe in case I showed up on some constables radar.
We completed this stage of the plan with wide smiles and parked up opposite our chosen cafe. A leisurely morning tea that was more like lunch progressed to a brief look around town and a good load of fuel. We then headed to one of my most favourite stretches of road in this country - the Rahu Saddle - a beautiful bush lined and well surfaced road that meanders about in a most pleasing fashion until reaching Springs Junction.
But one small thing occurred that managed to distract me a little from the task in hand. We passed through Blacks Point just out of Reefton, and were just idling along having a good look around when the engine missed a few times and lost power. I instinctively gave it some throttle and it almost immediately came back to life, but two idiot lights were lit up, the engine fault light and the low fuel warning light, although they both went out after a few seconds. I pondered this at some length, knowing that we had just refuelled, so it seemed to me we had briefly lost some fuel pressure, or perhaps a reading from the throttle position sensor. When restarting after a brief stop at Springs Junction the bike was reluctant to light up, until I gave it the merest amount of throttle, after which it was back to its sweet self, so I began to adopt the position sensor as my most likely culprit. There was a little too much slack cable at the twistgrip for my liking, so it was possible that the sensor was managing to settle below the bottom limit of its internal windings and thus appearing to the engine management as having disappeared. The fuel tank will need to be removed to make sure the sensor is not just falling off its mounting, but that shall happen once we are home, along with a few other minor repairs I have identified as needing to be made in order for the bike to deliver its best.
We cruised on down to Hanmer for our last night on the loose, and parked up in the main drag having arrived a bit early to inhabit our room for the night. I was taking another look for the ground clearance issue which had reappeared due to some fairly uneven surfaces we had met on the way down from the Lewis Pass. I discovered that the end of the riders footpeg on the left side was showing a bit of grinding having taken place. That led me to finding that its entire mounting plate was coming loose, and fortunately there were adequate tools in the underseat toolkit to deal to it. Perhaps this was the guilty party after all.
Hanmer is a busy kind of place mostly, and with the winter season coming up it will probably take off in a month or two, so we felt lucky to be here now when it was relatively quiet. I met two other motorcyclists while parked in town, and we compared notes. One a day rider from Rangiora, and the other a more ambitious round-tripper from Blenheim who had come down the east coast and would be heading home up the centre in the afternoon. I made a mental note to organise my life much more in this fashion in the future.!
Otherwise the autumn colours and wandering around abandoned ancient buildings whose previous energies are still overly apparent and rather unsettling made for interesting afternoon about town while our steed languished in the safe carpark of our lodgings.
This was the view from our TV lounge, which echoes the previous observations..
In the morning we fed ourselves in the shared kitchen then loaded up and headed away with no real plans for which way to head home other than we wanted it to take all day. There are not many options for much of the way, but we had contacted some friends on the western side of the canterbury plains and they were keen for a catchup, so we would detour via Oxford once we were closer to Christchurch. We were buzzing along in the direction of Culverden when I looked off to the north and suddenly decided that Waiau had not enjoyed our company for a long while, and if we were in Waiau it would only be right to exit via the Leader Valley, which is another of those roads you remember from many visits.
We thus veered left at Mouse Point and rode through Rotherham and over a record number of new seal patches to Waiau in extremely clear air and skies. The scenery out here is marvellous and reminds us why we keep coming back to look at it with more gratitude each time. There is a lookout at the top of the hill just as you leave Waiau heading for the Leader, and it is always worth a pause.
We had no sooner stopped when we heard the sound of a large Vee Twin approaching, and a young chap pulled in on a Victory. Shame they stopped making them, as they are a very good looking bike. This was a man from Christchurch who had already ridden up to Kaikoura today and was coming back to visit his Dad in Waiau. We seem to be meeting a lot of Dudes doing a lot of miles on this mini adventure trip, and they are all happy to chat and compare notes. I have always found motorcycle people to be extremely gregarious, regardless of which part of the world we have been riding, and it always seems that we have a lot in common besides motorcycles..
Fabulous view on a fabulous day on someone else's bike. I have shed all sense of responsibility on this day.
I also notice that the main stand looks to be sitting a bit lower than it should...
The remainder of our ride home went extremely well and a bit too quickly, but we did sample a short stretch of gravel road just to see how it handled. As expected the front felt well planted and manageable while the rear tracked around on the surface due to its road tyre. Not scary but a little unpredictable.
The Tiger lurked in the shed for some time as I sorted some car problems and sent a completed bike home, but today the opportunity arose so bits started coming off it. The pleasing acoustic instrument was revealed to be of local origin and proudly stated so. If they are capable of producing such an excellent muffler their future should be assured by that alone.
The underseat area is pretty much dedicated to housing necessary items, so it lacks the handy storage of the Sprint. All the better that it has a topbox then. The front portion of the seat had suffered some damage as regarding its locating arrangement, and some bent bracketry had resulted in it being on top of, rather than underneath some retaining pins, so that got straightened out first. Pleasingly that also made the rear section a better fit and cured a bit of sideplay in the rider's seat.
The topbox mount and luggage rack came off allowing access to the rear indicators which were both suffering brewers droop to an unrecoverable degree. All four indicators on the bike are similarly afflicted but replacements were supplied. I was pleased to find that besides fitting accurately, they featured lamps rather than LEDs so would not upset whatever type of flasher arrangement the bike uses.
The rear spring preload adjuster was now accessible and I wound it right out in order to expose the graduations which allow setting it with some accuracy. Having downloaded both owners and service manuals I was now able to set the suspension for various loading configurations. The one that would probably be mostly used would be 'max', due to the touring the bike is intended for. This equals 'fully loaded', and while I found the spring preload to already be at max, the rebound damping was a fair bit on the soft side.
I can at least now see the setting numbers so it will go back down to '5' and I shall experiment with both settings to see what gives the best result.
I had not previously given any attention to the front suspension as I assumed it would be in standard form, but I immediately saw that it had been lowered by 1½ inches by allowing the stanchions to sit that far above the top triple clamp.
As the new owner of this bike is shorter than me, and the Tiger seat is about 1½ inches higher than the Sprint, having things set a bit lower than standard would be to his liking, as long as it was not going to result in ground clearance issues. As it happens, there were already some issues as far as left corners were concerned, so it was time to find out what that was all about.
Being able to get down to ground level on my well-conditioned shed floor revealed the problem immediately. The left foot on the main stand has been grounding itself under hard left cornering and has managed to alter its shape rather neatly. The main stand on the Tiger is an optional fitment, and besides the factory kit there were some third party kits also available back then. I think that this is one of the latter types, mostly because it is a bitch to get the bike onto it without using a 1 inch thick piece of wood under the rear wheel.
As I had noticed in a previous photo the stand at rest sits slightly below horizontal, whereas the publicity shots all picture the stand as perfectly level, and the feet are slightly above chain height if anything, so it would be a nice cure to try and arrange for this to be the case.
Because the stand was a kit, the mounting plates were provided with it, rather than it being frame mounted directly. The mounting plates are quite accessible and the resting position is set by a mostly horizontal part of the contour at the trailing edge. It looks as though it would be a fairly easy task to grind these edges upwards a bit to raise the park position.
If I was really lucky it might be possible to use an angle grinder and do so with the plates still in place, although there is some evident play in the left side plate - possibly due to the grinding activity - which suggests that it is slightly loose where bolted to the frame. I will investigate further but can see that it would be prefereable to take it all off the bike so that it could be properly smoothed and painted after being reprofiled.
I had already noted at some stage that there was a spacer fitted between the swingarm and the chainguard, and it did not take too much pondering to realise that this had been done in order to lower the rear of the bike by rotating the chain adjusting hub by 180°, so that was probably done when the front was lowered. No coincidence then that the change in height when doing this also amounts to 1½ inches.
Perhaps the grounding issue prompted the owner to put the rear back to where it started from.
As the rear luggage setup was removed and the two front indicators had to come off with their respective bodywork in order to remove the fuel tank I decided to attack the indicator replacement task straight away. While the originals were totalled at least several times by the look I was going to re-use their wiring so that the original connectors would still be in play. While that is not in the order of great magnitude it takes as long to do these fiddly jobs as it does to reassemble a bottom end on an old triple.
So here we have the old lamp top, with its old wiring threaded through the new lamp mounting and the new lampholder at bottom with its wires cut to match lengths before making a solder joint with a heatshrink covering.
I often say to owners of bikes that come to me - I have to look at everything unless I miss the thing that is going to cause problems. So it was with the new indicators. I am guessing they come from China, and while 'genuine' spare parts can be equally hit and miss, the Ali Express offerings certainly need a second take.
I pulled the lamp out and the lampholder apart just to make sure it was good to go before making my solder joints. Glad I did, as the earthing wire was simply twisted around the spring and looking flimsy as hell. It was no great shakes to solder the wire to the spring, and in fact it made the whole thing work better as I was able to kink the wire so the spring self-centred when the bulb was removed or refitted. And no - it wasn't one lampholder that missed getting soldered during assembly - they were all like this.
When all four were complete and some wiring repairs at the bike end where the front indicator wiring had been hacked around for some extra lamps now absent the rear pair got fitted while the fronts will wait until the tank is restored. The rears worked happily enough although flashing at a faster pace due to the fronts being absent. Happily the new lamps make the whole appearance of the rear of the bike look tidier than the taped and cable tied jobs. Every improvement is cumulative.
The battery and battery tray needed to be removed prior to the rear tank mounting being accessible, and while the two fuel lines from the internal fuel pump are 'self-sealing' I decided to wait until I could move the bike outside to complete the tank removal. Very pleased to have had the service manual to refer to before starting this process.
Meanwhile a shot of the cockpit, all at once the same as the Sprint but different, mostly because of the handlebars.
The fuel tank came off in exactly the way the service manual said it would, so that was nice. As with the Sprint it revealed a large airbox which would also need to be dispensed with in order to access the throttle bodies and throttle cable adjustment, so that came off too. The throttle butterflies were all neatly synched and the cable adjuster was easy to access so I was able to remove the free play easily. While messing with that I discovered that the clutch cable was also loose at its abutment down by the crankcase, so that got adjusted as well.
While I knew exactly where the throttle position sensor was, it was totally occluded by wiring harness and cables to the point that it took some effort to expose it. I might as well not have bothered, as it was so wedged in behind the frame tube that all I could do was unplug its wiring connection and clean all the contacts. I gave its housing several good doses of contact cleaner and spent some time working out out how the hell it could be removed. I then checked how the manual described, and as suspected the throttle bodies all had to come off, which in turn disturbed a gasket between it and the cylinder head, the composition of which was not clear.
Position sensor is located immediately behind the frame tube where the engine mount happens.
Discretion being the better part, I decided to leave well alone until I found out if what I had already done may have cured the fault before embarking into unknown territory. The airbox went back on somewhat easier than my Sprint one does, as it seemed that the spring loaded rubber tubes over the throttle bodies behaved a lot better.
It took some time to rearrange the positions of cables, drains and wiring to try and get all the couplings going to the fuel tank in the best position. It then transpired that the airbox drain was missing in action so I had to pluck the sirbox again. It came off three times in all before I was happy with how and where everything now was.
I have a small laptop and cable and associated software that allows me to talk to my Sprint. I believe that the ECU is the same type on this bike, so once I make sure of that I will see what it may tell me. There may be a fault code from one of the error light episodes to confirm that I am on the right track, but there is also a calibration test for the throttle sensor which would show me if there were still any sort of connection error.
I see that there is a replacement regulator rectifier fitted, for which there was an invoice that came with the bike. There has been some jiggery pokery done with the wiring to and from but as it appears to be doing its job well enough I shall refrain from interfering with it.
So here it now is, having benefitted from a bit of cleaning as all the bodywork got put back in place, and it is looking quite improved since its collection under the cover of darkness. I investigated the stand issue again and discovered that the sidestand inhibitor switch was loose - easily fixed - and can see that the mounting hardware for the main stand would be easily removed, so I shall proceed in that direction next. It definitely needs its parking position raised somewhat, and more so if the lowering of the rear suspensension is going to be viable. At least it would be nice to have the option.
It is a tall bike to manhandle in a confined space to be sure, and the side stand is definitely the one to favour under most circumstances. That is not to say that the Sprint is not similarly inclined (lol..), and it is mostly in comparison to my normal diet of 70's iron that I treat both of these models with extra respect when on foot. Once under way however, these are joyous machines to ride, and I get the impression that the Tiger is probably the most capable of the two under local conditions.