The morning had started great. We needed new tyres and Pro-Imp, the Avon and Coopertire importer in Sweden, made it as easy as they could have. It's great to meet real helpful and friendly people that know their business and get the job done perfectly and in record time. I took the wheels out, they replaced the tyres and balanced them and I put them back in again. Easy process.
Every country has its own specific tyre needs. In the USA cruiser tyres are the norm, in Mexico it's the 125cc, in Guatemala and Honduras it's mainly knobbies as most of the roads are dirt. At Pro-Imp in Sweden we saw a bit of everything, right up to a monster of a tyre for a huge cruiser. What caught my eye though were studded tyres! I hadn't seen those before, despite having been in The Yukon and Alaska. Here they had a whole stack of them. Avon RoadRiders, Super Venoms, Cobras and Storm all seem to sell well here.
Cooper Tire, Mickey Thompson and Avon car tyres sell well in Sweden too and Pro-Imp is busy supplying them throughout this huge country. I also notice a couple of strange machines in the workshop which turned out to be for fitting studs to tyres. Pro-Imp does them on an exchange bases, supplying wheels with studded tyres.
We had sort of worked on half a day to get all this done as it had been manual work before, now we had time to spare and went to look for camping chairs at a place called Biltema. Not sure what to expect we found a sort of combination of Bunnings and Repco. I'm sure that means nothing to non-Australians but for us it was perfect! We were looking for an M8-tap, a 14mm hex key and a 36mm socket and all found them there. The 14mm hex-key is what you need for the front axle of an XT660 Yamaha, the 36 socket to replace the front sprocket of a Bonneville and the M8-tap to fit the Barkbusters to Triumph Bonneville handlebars (I had used M6 until now but Barkbusters come with M8, so now they are fitted properly).
 |
You won't find these kind of tyres
anywhere in Australia :-) |
One more thing on the list was Smiles… the local dentist in Borås. My toothache had become worse, for some reason they usually do :-( After studying the X-ray, the verdict was root-canal… I must have the most of these bloody things done in the world already, and now needed another one. I was more in favour of pulling the culprit and get it over with but the Swedish dentist disagreed. The tooth is perfectly saveable he said, quite true but I thought more along the lines of 'rip it out and no more problem'. A second dentist arrived, he poked around a bit (as dentists do) and said firmly 'no' to pulling the tooth. When I gave in, as I became aware I had no option, he thanked me for taking the right decision :-) Funny guy. Of course the job started with taking out the filling and getting rid of the infection behind it (the black part on my X-ray). Just 5 minutes later the job was done…! Finished, he said. Finished? Root canals normally take forever, this was easy-as! He explained what he had done and had fitted a temporary filling. The next part of the treatment will have to be done in Norway, which is drill one hole and fit a plastic tube (I think) plus a permanent filling. So far my teeth have been worked on by dentists from Pakistan, Mexico, South Africa and now Sweden. Must be some kind of record as well…
 |
| The tyre changing team |
