During the Covid-19 restrictions riding our motorcycles is not possible, except for essential trips, so most of us have a very expensive piece of metal sitting in the garage. I expect we have all been cleaning away so the bike is looking pretty good, and it is not getting dirty either so not much to do there. The next step is to look to make improvements, the Americans call this ‘farkeling’, which gets across the idea that these modifications may not be strictly necessary but hopefully that make the owner feel good at least.

I had been interested in the idea of something to cover the opening in the rear hub as it does tend to collect direct and I am too lazy to clean it under normal circumstances! With a bit of research I found the Wunderlich ‘Tornado’ rear wheel cover at Nippy Normans; there are two versions of this product one with an additional hub protector and one which is just the cover. I was hoping to fit something to my R1250RT as I use that during the winter and it gets a lot dirtier than my other bikes but the silver version of the Wunderlich Tornado was not available at the time so I decided I would get one of the black versions and fit it to the R1200GS Adventure to see what it was like.

The Tornado arrived a few days later from Nippy Normans and the instructions were contained in a simple two page leaflet:

here are some pictures of the rear hub and wheel before the Tornado was installed:

The actual fitting is very straightforward, I cleaned the inside of the hub and then lubricated it with WD40. The Tornado assembly is then inserted from the wheel side and knocked in using a rubber hammer. Once in place the Tornado is secured by tightening the Allen bolt on the hub side. In total about 5 minutes work and a small amount of time checking the instructions. What does it look like in situ? Here are the photos:

So was it worth the financial and physical effort? Well I think it looks a lot neater with the cover and the protector might come in useful as well. In terms of giving yourself something to do during lockdown it was successfully but did not involve any great effort so the feeling of satisfaction might be limited! In terms of the cost it was about 3 tanks of fuel on the GSA and I would have spent that if the bike had been moving in normal circumstances – so in conclusion I converted my petrol-pounds into bling without emitting any CO2 and you can’t say fairer than that.