Good afternoon youtube and welcome back to the channel today we're talking about
compass calibration on the Royal Enfield Himalayan stay tuned. I understand obviously from the
comments and the questions that this can be quite an issue for some people but for me personally
it's never really been anything i've had to worry about when i initially bought the bike
obviously i had to calibrate the compass and then maybe two or three times since then and only ever
when i disconnect the motorcycle battery or i'm working on the motorbike bike for whatever reason
but in all honesty it tends to sort itself out without me even need to calibrate it
anyway we'll go through that process and show you how it can be done.
If you look at the dash on the Royal Enfield Himalayan guys one of the little sort of quirky
features it's got is this little sort of digital compass here and when we initially turn the engine
on you'll see that it sort of calibrates itself essentially but sometimes it loses direction
and when that happens it will flash up with the little "CA" . Whilst i don't often need
to calibrate the compass on the motorbike here quite often i find myself having to calibrate
the compass on my gps or on my phone and you know it will tell me to rotate it or move
on two axis i find just moving in a little figure of eight is the easiest way to do it. Every time
i use my drone now this rather colourful looking drone it's usually matte grey but i keep losing
it in fields so i put loads of sticky tape on it to make it easier for me to spot it
anyway every time i turn my drone on before i fly it then i'm going to need to calibrate it so when
i'm calibrating the compass it tells me to rotate it in one direction and then rotate it you know
in another axis and that whole process takes no more than 20 seconds but of course it's worth it.
So folks needless to say the Himalayan compass is no different from any other digital compass
and that occasionally it's going to need to be recalibrated because of metal or different things
now there's a couple of methods to do that you can get yourself a little fine magnet now this one's
a little bit too thin yeah it's not strong enough you get a magnet on the end of a screwdriver and
just rotate it behind the compass here and that'll reset this my preferred method is just to ride in
a figure of eight. Now at its most basic folks if you're doing a u-turn or you're doing a figure of
eight now now i know that i'm teaching most people to suck eggs but again here in the UK before we
make any kind of motorcycle manoeuvre then you're gonna do a lifesaver check just to make sure that
you're not gonna get wiped out by anything before you make that move so you do your lifesaver check
and then you're gonna look and the idea is to look in the direction you want the motorbike to go in
yeah. Where the head goes the bike will follow essentially or where your eye goes your motorbike
will follow it's like um if you're trying to manoeuvre around something in a hurry,
a cone or a rock or whatever it happens to be. If you look at that object you're gonna hit it
okay you need to look past where you want the bike to go. Now when you're doing your figure
of 8 folks it needs to be relatively tight but you don't need to be turning on a dime here we're
not talking about lots of motorcycle counter lean and stuff like that you can if you want to
but what i would essentially do is choose maybe a car park with four parking spaces and aim to stay
within that I can't really do that in this car park because there's walkways in the middle here
but the point is you don't want it to be riding around the width of the entire car park
yeah otherwise this compass is never going to calibrate.
You also don't want to be doing it too near or too close to
lots of metal objects because remember this needs Himalayan Compass to pick up true north and when
you're moving through that figure of eight the compass finds the strongest point essentially
of course that's north and then that's how it calibrates itself but metal as we know
can interfere with these things. I always find it best to do these types of things
in an area like this where there's plenty of space and there's there's no traffic around
but maybe you want to find an area where there's obstacles or maybe even some cones
Join me next time for more adventures on my Royal Enfield Himalayan.