MOT today

I knew my MOT was up sometime in sept and went to find the old one out this afternoon after getting the jobs i needed at home done. It is up on monday so as i was going for a blast, I thought i would pop into the local bike shop and see about an MOT, he said it would be about 45 mins so i left the bike and went walkabouts. Came back and was ecstatic to find it had passed ( I only really took it to find what needed doing), he said it was all there ( not sure if that was a good or bad thing tbh).
Anyway with a big grin I set off for a blast and after about 5 mins, the bloody speedo packed up, the cable had snapped, would you credit it??? good timing or what??

oh the joys of biking,lol.

on another front, I bought some kevlar jeans off ebay with knee armour, very impressed, warm, roomy and comfortable. deff not designer tho.

Good job you're not in Northern Ireland, Dave.

MOTs are handled by government here. There are only a few places in the whole country you can get them done. And there is a several week waiting list. Pain in the proverbial.

Reading your post I wondered how long a speedo cable should last. Mine seem to go after about 2000 miles. Is that normal?

mine lasted about that but I have twin headlights and a small streetfighter speedo on the left and the cable has an awkward run so kind of expected it. lol I am trying to make a bracket to centralise the speedo as we speak. damned rain again.

Good news Dave! I must check when mine runs out, I'm sure it's soon.

cheers mate. hope youre lucky too. it was the first MOT since I got the bike and it is a bit of a mix n match kinda bike, not quite a rat bike but not far off,lol.

MOTs seem to creep up on you, I actually knew mine was september but thought it was a bit later.

Strangely enough, a working speedo isn't a requirement for an MOT (clicky for checklist PDF) so you wouldn't have failed anyway.

yeah my neighbour ( ex scooter fanatic) said that and to be fair I didnt think he was right. new cable fitted anyway, cheers ebay yet again.

Hi all,

As a motorcyle MOT tester myself i would say have a working speedo. Believe it or not alot of the checks that are carried out by a tester are at his/her discretion apart from the VOSA list supplied by ashcroc and to my utter amazment i have called VOSA a couple of times concerning "grey areas" and even they didnt know..!! because of this the tester is allowed to test ride your bike and if anything isnt working the failure can be listed under manual failures and advisories.

hope this helps any future MOT's for you all

very useful information kwackboy, kind of backs up what i thought originally. I am sure a mate got failed some years ago coz his speedo was broken. there may have been other reasons as well tho,

youre a useful guy to have in here mate

nice one. like the tip about the carbs too

My pleasure davetheworv. Anything i can help with feel free to give me a shout.

In my experience/opinion, in MOT testing there is a *hell* of a lot of judgement required - the 'ministry' (or VOSA as they are known now) provides the framework and a set obvious things that 'must fail'; a lot of the other stuff is (as kwakboy mentioned) a matter of discresion.