A good lesson for us here (well, certainly for me). Thanks for sharing and glad it worked out to be not too serious. My 'doh!' occasion was starting the Tiger 800, getting on ready to go, then the engine stalling and refusing to do anything - dead - nothing. Decided it was serious, but I had to be somewhere, so pushed it back in, got changed and went by car. Next day, after worrying about how I'd get it to the dealer and how much it would cost to fix, I discovered I'd accidentally flicked the kill switch.
Our van runs on diesel which we use to take our four 25-litre jerry cans to be filled with petrol for the workshop and demo bikes. And you can guess the rest of the story I'm sure. I filled the van with best part of £100 of diesel then popped the same nozzle in to the first jerry can. Luckily a realised my mistake before filling the other three. It's so easily done. We had one of our long standing regular service customer leave us and head straight to Holyhead, where a few mikes short of the terminal he filled up before taking the afternoon ferry. Oops diesel. He called us just as we were closing. One of our guys took the van home for the evening, then crack of dawn drove over to Holyhead, brought the bike and customer back to Woburn (he paid) where the tank was drained, system cleansed and the customer back on the road late afternoon to catch the evening ferry.
Last update (I promise). I returned to the scene of the crime the other day - I wanted to see how I could have been so bloody stupid. Without wanting to rub my nose in it (I remembered exactly what I did) I needed to see how I made the mistake. I had wanted to fill with super unleaded, because I understand that it has less ethanol in it, and so it potentially avoids issues of tank corrosion down the line... ... anyway, here's a picture of the fuel pump. So, now I understand. At this pump there is no super-unleaded - the pump nozzle has been re-purposed as an 'ultimate diesel' supply, with a blue label. It's very easy to see how I made this mistake - I've never come across a pump with the nozzles in this order (diesel - petrol - diesel), and I've never noticed that premium diesel has a blue label. Although my car is a diesel, I never put premium fuel in it. The pumps in my local Esso garage are in blocks of 4 (diesel - diesel - petrol - petrol) and it simply didn't occur to me that if there were only three nozzles that they would be ordered like this (nor even that if there was only room for 3 nozzles, that they'd choose to supply premium diesel rather than premium unleaded). There's no new lesson here really, but I'm changing the fuel I use now. I'm just going to use regular unleaded from now on - my fuel consumption seems to be almost exactly the same on either unleaded variant. I'll fill up completely with premium if I lay the bike up for the winter, so that there's no water sitting in the tank. Also, I wouldn't have made this mistake if I'd simply gone for ordinary unleaded. Not that I'd ever, ever, make this stupid mistake again. I do wonder whether there is a higher rate of mis-fuelling at this location...
Yep can see how you could make that mistake looking at that picture. As they say the man who never made a mistake never learnt anything. Here is hoping! Wessa
