Riding the Savic C-Series

The Savic C-Series isn’t a rippling, muscular machine like a Ducati Streetfighter or a Yamaha MT-10. It’s more like a 1920s prize-fighter, barrel-chested, upright, and carrying quiet confidence.

You don’t get the drama of a throaty intake roar like you do with an internal combustion bike. There’s no buildup, no growl. But when you twist the throttle, it still knocks the wind out of you. That silence isn’t lacking. It’s loaded. It makes the acceleration feel even more sudden, more deliberate.

The ride, again, is solid. Despite its hefty 280 kg mass, the C-Series moves with your intentions. There's no need to fight it. Internal combustion bikes demand attention—they growl, rattle, and roar. The C-Series does none of that. It feels like you're gliding, skimming across the road surface. Not disconnected, just... clean. Like piloting a precision machine built to listen rather than shout.

What surprises you most isn't the speed, or even the silence, it's how the bike changes the way you ride.

If you love riding, you don’t want a utility. You’re not after the two-wheeled equivalent of a vacuum cleaner, even if it is a Dyson. You're chasing something more: the feeling, the connection, the moment. And that’s what people worry about losing with electric bikes: the visceral hit of noise and vibration, the feedback loop of mechanical drama.

But you don’t lose it. It just changes.

Without the engine noise barking under you, your mind settles. The road comes closer. You notice your breath, your body position, the rush of wind past your helmet. The machine fades back, and you find yourself riding with more focus, more calm.

That’s the freedom electric bikes offer—not just from petrol and gears, but from the constant noise of the world. The C-Series gives you just enough silence to hear what really matters.

Cornering and braking are precise. You look, it goes there. No drama, no hesitation. The bike just does what it’s told—quietly, confidently. There’s no need to muscle it in or coax it out. It trusts you. You trust it.

So who’s it for?

Not everyone. If you ride to be seen, if the bike is part of your image then the C-Series might not be loud enough for you. But if you ride because it clears your head, because it connects you to the road, because it gives you space to breathe, then this bike will make perfect sense.

It doesn’t shout. It doesn’t posture. It just works. And that’s more than enough.

On my first ride, I smiled, a lot. Possibly even let out a little giggle, if I’m honest.

Beyond Comfortable

Thermocline

There’s a point in every journey where the water changes.

I was swimming in a lagoon at Coffs Harbour when I was younger. The edge was warm—almost piss warm, if I'm honest. Comfortable enough that you could forget you were in water at all. Just another medium to move through.

But as I ventured further out, something changed.

There was a layer where the water went from warm to ice cold in the space of a hand's width. No gradient. No warning. Just that sudden wall between comfort and something else. The water darkened too, as if the cold had a colour. I panicked, went under, struggled to keep my head up.

Someone on the shore saw me, jumped in, and pulled me out. I don't recall thanking them properly—too embarrassed, too rattled by what had just happened. I just walked away, carrying that feeling with me.

That line — between comfort and collapse — has shown up again and again. In work. In rides. In writing. In life.

I think about that moment now, decades later, when projects shift from manageable to overwhelming in the space of a meeting. When expectations outpace resources. When what seemed like a straightforward task suddenly reveals hidden complications. No prototype, no safety margin, no time.

There's that same moment of disorientation, that same instinct to panic. Complexity, fragility, risk. You're not drowning, not yet.

The work becomes colder the deeper you go.

Flow breaks. Panic creeps in. That’s when the tools matter — not just code or solder, but clarity, breathing room, self-trust. That’s when you need someone on the shoreline. Or to be that someone.

I often swim out further than expected — in work, in creativity, in what I take on. I scan the lagoon. I try to see the risk. I push the edge, toy with it, sometimes drift a little too far. Then I swim back. Mostly.

I never properly thanked the person who pulled me from that lagoon. Sometimes I wonder if that's part of the engineering mindset—we become the ones who jump in for others, who rescue projects, systems, teams—without waiting for acknowledgment.

I walked away from that lagoon changed, even if I didn't talk about it. The experience stayed, informing choices I didn't realise I was making. Maybe that's happening again now—this time with more awareness, more clarity. Maybe this time I'm both participant and witness, feeling the change and observing it simultaneously.

The thermocline teaches us that boundaries we can't see can still be absolute. That comfort can vanish in a handspan. Knowing the physics doesn't change the shock to your system.

But it also teaches us something else: that we survive the crossing. That we adapt to new temperatures. That even in the darkest water, there are those who notice when we're struggling, who leap in without hesitation.

Every engineer, every artist, every human worth their weight has felt the thermocline. You think you’re in control, until you’re not. But you don’t build strength in the warm shallows.

And maybe next time, I'll remember to say thank you.

The Siren's Soil

𝙎𝙩𝙞𝙡𝙡 — 𝙋𝙧𝙚𝙡𝙪𝙙𝙚

Nothing moved.
The land breathed.
And for a time, that was enough.

Link to story

Reflection

In moments of reflection, it’s easy to lose sight of what’s real and what’s imagined. Perception twists the truth, leaving us questioning what’s possible. But the core remains unshaken. The way forward lies in trusting the reality behind the distortion, not in waiting for the surface to clear.
Our perception, like a reflection, may distort—but the essence, what has been and what is, remains.

"The photograph does not necessarily say what is no longer, but only and for certain what has been."
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida.

Uncertain

The way forward is often through small, deliberate steps up an uncertain path.

Movement and Transition

Movement is not always forward. Sometimes it’s the recognition of stillness that spurs progress. The transition is not just about where we go—it's about how we change along the way.
In The Photographer’s Eye, Steiglitz reminds us that photography captures both time and space, and within that frame, transition is constant.
Yet as Sun Tzu said in The Art of War, ‘The wise warrior avoids battle’—sometimes, in stillness, we make the most significant strides.

Confusion and Clarity

In the blur of the every day, where details stack upon details, it becomes harder to see the whole.
As Berger said, 'The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe.'
In confusion, even the most delicate forms can feel like walls. Robert Adams, in Why People Photograph, speaks of the photographer's role in revealing clarity, but perhaps, in this moment, clarity is elusive.
Sometimes seeing less is the key to knowing more.

Barriers and Boundaries.

We often see barriers where there are none, and yet the structures we build—both literal and imagined—keep us confined.
What keeps us from moving forward?
In Another Way of Telling, Berger reminds us that every image is a way of seeing—and perhaps the barriers we see shape how we move through the world. The lines we follow, the objects we ignore—each choice is a step toward the walls we either break or leave untouched.

A Quiet Prayer to Light

Each morning, my good friend @myinstantimages finds solace in the interplay of light and colour. It's a quiet prayer.

BMW R65

I gave the old German bike an Italian tune-up in the country, cleaning out the accumulated city km it's been doing.
Taking on a fix up project, so many things need attention. Faulty headlight wiring, bulbs not working, faulty odo, gear lever which is so sloppy it must be missing a bearing, worn and broken plastics.
And I'll learn a thing or two.

Mondia E-bike Battery

E-bikes are quite popular, becoming more so in a world that needs to find another way of getting around.  It is no secret that roads are getting more congested and air more polluted, freeing up space on roads for those in trades and drive as part of their profession benefits everyone.

Here at MI we get requests to repack many different types of battery packs and not a week goes by that we don’t get a request to repack an e-bike pack.

Fitting quality Li-Ion cells into peculiar shaped e-bike battery enclosures can often be a challenge, many are originally fitted with Lithium Polymer type cells of custom shapes and sizes. We simply cannot stock all capacities and shapes in polymer. So we do our best and dive into the challenge fitting excellent quality Panasonic cells.

Sometimes we simply cannot replace the cells in a pack; this could be because we cannot arrange the cells we use in a way that will maximise the capacity in the enclosure. Other times we find that the protection circuits required to keep Li-Ion cells in their safe operating parameters is faulty, inadequate, or not even installed!

In cases like this we have to inform the customer that unfortunately we cannot help them.

But what if we could offer an e-bike battery that has quality cells and a battery management system that will keep the cells inside safe and enjoy a long service life.

That’s what we have with the Mondia range of batteries; both 24V and 36V batteries are now available. All batteries use Panasonic cells which we choose to use for most of our repacks of batteries in all industries and design into our OEM packs.

The battery protection circuit used in these deserves a special mention. The chipset used for battery protection is from Texas Instruments, the undisputed leaders in battery protection devices and battery capacity measurement.

Most e-bike batteries on the market use voltage level measurement for indicating the state of charge of a battery, this is an inaccurate method for measuring the remaining charge in a battery. Depending upon how much load is on a battery, the voltage will dip and rise causing any readings to be false, very rough at best.

The Mondia battery uses a method called coulomb counting, essentially, it reads the power going into and out of a battery and adds it up over time. Simply put, this means there is no charge level reading that moves up and down depending upon voltage levels while riding. All readings are of actual charge in the battery; this allows the LEDs on the battery and the optional digital display to accurately show the percentage remaining in the battery.

E-bikes come with various mounting methods for batteries, this creates a problem when offering an e-bike battery replacement solution. To cover this issue Mondia have designed two mounting kits that allow you retrofit the new battery to an existing e-bike. There is one for mounting to a flat plate, another for mounting the battery to a seat tube.

The mounting options also opens up the field of modifying a standard bike to an e-bike using one of the several kits available on the market.

The Mondia battery can be fitted to practically any bike, and because we take our testing seriously at MI, we modified a stock standard Cell X-1 into an e-bike using the Bafang 250W mid drive kit and the Mondia 36V 9.0Ah e-bike kit. The modification from bike to e-bike was done in one lazy afternoon, so quick I forgot to take photos of the transformation. The battery mounting did not require any bike specific tools, retrofitting an e-bike to use the Mondia battery is an easy task.

The Mondia 24V and 36V e-bike battery and mounting kit, a highly recommended way of getting your e-bike fitted with a top quality battery that will have you back on your bike in no time.

Balcombe Heights and SoFoBoMo

There was no time.
No time to zone in, to tone gently. No time to sit with an image, to wonder where it might lead. The usual rituals—fussing with layout, lingering in edits, pausing to feel rather than press forward—they were absent. Each decision became binary: make it, move on.

Work commitments pushed the shooting window late into the month. I hit week three and realized I wasn’t halfway. That quiet voice—you’re not going to finish—grew louder. The final week became a chase, not a conversation. I wasn’t seeing. I was hunting. And hunting kills the joy of being in place.

I had to shake it off.

The guillotine arrived in week three. So did the trimmer. Paper decisions were still hovering, unmade. The layout came together in the final days. Editing? Far too rushed. Lessons landed hard and fast. But they landed. And that makes the entire exercise—messy, flawed, beautiful—worth it.

Next time won’t be easier. But it will be clearer. I’ll have a thing in my hands, something to point to when someone asks, “So, what do you photograph?”

This month of images has been one of the most rewarding I’ve had.

Without SoFoBoMo, none of these photographs would exist. Some will fade. But a few—maybe only a few—will stay with me for years.

This project is dedicated to Ben Lifson, who helped me learn how to see.

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I chose a subject close to home. Out of necessity, yes, but also intuition. Balcombe Heights—a five-minute ride away. Sixteen hectares of buildings from another era, built in 1922 as a school and now quietly reinhabited. Community radio, pottery, early childhood services, Horticultural Services, autism support, toy libraries, SES. Each space now shaped by new hands and new purposes.

The bones of the buildings remain consistent—symmetry in their design, repetition in their materials—but the details reveal the passage of time. One window draped in delicate curtain fabric. Another secured behind wire mesh. A door layered with decades of paint. Another patched in galvanized steel. The plumbing is a map of need: different fixes, different plumbers, different years.

None of it planned. All of it lived.

And maybe that’s the point. These weren’t buildings that resisted change. They absorbed it. Quietly, practically. That’s what made them worth photographing. Not because they were beautiful, but because they were becoming.

Just like this project.