February 2019 – Page 3 – The ExhaustNotes Blog

Rob’s project bike…

I received an interesting email from my good buddy Rob a couple of nights ago. Rob is an interesting guy…I rode with him on the 5000-mile Western America Adventure Ride described in 5000 Miles at 8000 RPM, and then again on one of the Baja trips.

Rob’s mascot on a bike he calls “Donkey Hoty.”

Here’s Rob’s note to me, along with some very interesting photos…

Hi Joe,

Hope your living life to the fullest. I really enjoy you and Gresh’s ExhaustNotes and keeping up with you.

Anyways its very cold up here and to kill time I’ve been looking at Ball and Cap pistols and wondered if you had any experience shooting, loading, etc. with them? Any further plans on an east coast RX3 trip or Alaska?

If your ever up here in the Pacific Northwest area , give me a shout. Maybe I can meet up with you somewhere.

Not sure this year where all my bikes will take me. My favorite rally in Hells Canyon is done and over with and she’s looking for another venue place to host it. I may try and get to the beater bike rally in Hood River. I’m working on a Kawasaki KZ440 that I took the motor out of and put in a Harbor Freight 212cc lawn mower motor in it with a cheap torque converter so its an centrifugal clutch auto like a big mini bike. If I can get it to go fast enough (45-55mph) I may try and ride down to rally from Walla Walla.

Hope all is well with you and yours Joe.

Take care,

Rob

Rob calls his new bike Einstein, and like Donkey Hoty, he has a hood ornament to match.

Rob, your project bike is fascinating. Please keep us posted on how it progresses. The centrifugal clutch concept on a full-figured motorcycle is interesting. Mustang (i.e., the original California-manufactured Mustang of the 1950s) offered a centrifugal clutch bike in the 1950s they named after their original offering (the Colt), and the one I saw owned by Al Simmons and later Steve Seidner was a real beauty.

A ’56 Mustang Colt. It had a centrifugal clutch. The Mustang Motor Products Corporation positioned this bike as a lower-priced Mustang, but it was a commercial flop.

Mustang’s intent was not to offer a bike with an “automatic” transmission; what they were really after was a value-engineered version of the Mustang. It had the standard Mustang 322cc flathead engine, but a centrifugal clutch replaced the Berman transmission and the bike had Earles-type forks instead of the Mustang’s telescopic forks. The factory workers didn’t like it and there was some talk of efforts to sabotage the ones leaving the plant. The one I saw was beautiful. It flopped in the market, which was unfortunate. When I worked at CSC, we’d routinely get calls from folks asking if we had any bikes that had an automatic transmission. The answer, of course, was no. But I think this sort of thing could work on a small displacement bike for folks who don’t know how to (or don’t want to) shift. I know you do and I know you are doing this just to have fun. But I think you are on to something here.

To answer your other questions….I have zero experience with black powder guns, other than to watch my good buddy Paul build custom black powder rifles and play with them. I once bought a Uberti .44 Model 1858 sixgun and it looked to be very well built, but a friend of mine wanted one and I sold it to him without ever having fired it.

I don’t have any east coast RX3 or other plans at this time. I’m too busy planning for the next Baja trip, I guess.

The beater rally you mention sounds pretty cool, and I love the Hood River area of the Columbia River Gorge. That sounds like it might be fun!

How did we miss this?

Boy oh boy am I embarrassed! Good buddy John Burns listed Moto Baja as one of the 10 Best Books for Motorcyclists for 2018 a month or so ago and it went right by me!

John, thanks very much!

Want to see all our books? Take a look right here.

Want to know a secret? Gresh and I have a couple of new books in the works. You’ll read about them right here on the ExhaustNotes blog!

Would you like to be entered in our quarterly contest for a free moto adventure book? Just sign up for our automatic email updates!

Zed’s Not Dead: Part 15

Zed’s forward progress has come to a temporary halt. Not due to any complications on the Kawasaki’s part, although the project has exceeded my initial estimate by double and I’m not done yet. No, Pitiful Man has to strike a balance between work and play. He must strive to appease the gods and their fickle ways while angering none. It’s a fine line we walk and sometimes we have to dance atop a vibrating string.

A quick trip to Florida was in order as the Love Shack, our singlewide trailer in the Ocala Forest, was showing signs of neglect. CT and I freshened the grey floor paint and installed new back porch pavers, eliminating the sad little stoop that had served us poorly for 14 years. While we were at it some new window shades, new screen doors and a lick of paint on the Lido Deck were in the cards. Another project I started 14 years ago, installing sliding closet doors, was finally brought to a conclusion. When we were finished the place looked like a hundred bucks.

Back at Tinfiny Ranch in New Mexico another, larger project had to be tackled: a twenty-foot by thirty-foot concrete floor in the tin shed. I’ve decided to tackle the shed floor in stages, like the International Six Days Trial. Stage one will be Bay Number 1 (a little confusing because an additional bay, Bay Zero, was added to the shed after the other three bays had been named). This stage consists of 16 individually poured slabs of which I have 9 complete as of this writing. After the slabs are in place a shear wall will be built to add strength to the flimsy metal shed and also divide the space into a Bay 2 and 3 dirt floor, rat-accessible side, and a Bay 1 concrete, non-rat accessible side.

Those faithful Zed’s Not Dead readers that have not deserted me will recall Part One where I describe Zed’s crooked path back and home. After we bought Tinfiny Ranch I discovered a trove of paperwork from Zed’s previous owner. Several motorcycle magazines from the era featuring Zed were in a box along with a possible explanation for the Zed’s wiring issues described elsewhere in this series.

This letter dated August 3rd 1994 from Ken Rogers representing Dyna III ignitions (I’m guessing not the singer) explains to the previous owner how they have thoroughly tested the electronic ignition he sent back and have proclaimed it fit as a fiddle. Zed’s burned-up wiring harness may have been due to a faulty Dyna ignition installation. This would also account for the wiring to the coils being cut as those short bits were spliced into the Dyna module. I never found any of the Dyna stuff in my initial clean up but I haven’t gone through all the old guy’s junk.

Along with the Dyna stuff there was a lot of Yoshimura brochures and price lists. After seeing the damage to the wiring harness on Zed I’m torn between hoping my bike has some nice performance parts installed and fearing that my bike has some nice performance parts installed. I should be able to measure the cams to see if they have additional lift but I’m not sure how to check displacement without winning an AMA national road race. I suspect the Yoshi stuff was bench dreaming because the bike runs too well to be hot rodded.

Finally here’s a nice photo from Dale-Starr of David Aldana winning the Daytona superbike race with a half-lap lead over the guy in second place. Apparently this caused protests that required Aldana’s bike to be disassembled twice! The bike was found legal and Aldana’s win stood. I met Aldana at Barberville one year. I was so excited to meet him I started doing the “We’re not worthy!” Wayne’s World bowing thing and Aldena told me to knock it off.

While no real work has been done to Zed in Part 15 I’ve enjoyed digging through Zed’s past. Reading the old magazine reviews reinforces just how spectacular the Kawasaki Z1 900 was when it came out in 1973. And how spectacular a motorcycle it still is.

Want to catch the rest of the Zed story? Hey, just click right here!

Another cool watch…

Here’s another blog I posted a couple of years ago on the CSC blog, and this one is about a watch. Yeah, I make no excuses…I’m a watch guy. This one is one of my favorites.

img_2749-650 — My self-winding Orient watch. It’s a classy dress piece, and it’s one of my favorites.

Okay, it’s time for another watch story, and this one goes like this: 40+ years ago when I was a young Army officer in Korea, some of my guys purchased Japanese Orient watches (Orient was the brand name; it had nothing to do with our location in Asia). That was in the mid-1970s, I was just a young pup, and those were the good old days when you could buy a Rolex at the Post Exchange for $300.

Rolex, Schmolex. Who in their right mind, I remember thinking back then, would spend $300 for a watch? $300 for a Rolex. Ah, if I only knew. But that’s a tangential story. Back to the main attraction…

Anyway, I never heard of the Orient brand again until somebody posted a photo of a really cool Orient diver’s watch on the ADVRider.com “Shiny Things” thread. That lit up a long-lost memory neuron or two and I looked for Orient watches on Google. I didn’t want another diver’s watch, but I saw a really cool Orient watch on the OrientUSA website. It was a moonwatch (not like the Bulova Apollo 15 watch I posted about a week or so ago, but a watch that had a complication showing whether it was day or night). I know, the whole thing is kind of silly…I mean, other than the guy who sang Love Potion No. 9, who doesn’t know if it’s day or night? It was a men’s dress watch in rose gold (that’s a kind of pink-looking gold) with a brown leather alligator band. (At least, I think it’s alligator. Maybe it’s crocodile. Never could tell those two lizards apart, except if you see one later it’s most likely an alligator, and if you don’t see one again for a while, well, it’s probably a crocodile. Or so I’ve been told.)

I liked the looks of the Orient Moon Watch. A lot. I sent an email to Orient, they responded to my question and included a discount code in case I decided to order a watch. One thing led to another, and my new Orient arrived via UPS a few days later. I really like it. It’s a self-winding mechanical watch (as a mechanical engineer, that appeals greatly to me), like I said above it’s rose gold (which I like a lot), and it’s just cool. It’s beautiful, actually. When I shot the above photo, it told me the sun was out (it’s wasn’t, because it had been raining bigly out here, but you get the idea).

So the Orient watch proved to be a great buy. It’s very accurate, and it’s completely mechanical. No batteries, no solar gizmos, no hookup to an iPhone, and it works the way it is supposed to. A year or two ago on one of the CSC Baja trips, one of the guys on that ride (good buddy Patrick) made a point of showing me his self-winding mechanical Orient watch, which he purchased after I wrote about mine on the CSC blog. I guess the old adage is true…if you have a great product (and I think Orient does), the word gets around.

Good buddy Patrick, a fellow Orient watch guy, in Guerrero Negro on the Baja 2017 ride.

So that’s it for now. I’ve got to hit up Orient for my commission on Patrick’s watch, and I’m ready for the sunshine. Yesterday was supposed to be the last day of our So Cal rainstorm saga, and I’m hoping that’s going to be the case. I want to get out and ride. My motorcycles have been sitting in the garage for too long. It’s time to get some motorcycle stuff back up on the ExNotes blog!

Precipitation, polarities, headgear, and gobble gobble…

The rain has been nonstop here for the last several days, and for the last couple of nights it’s rained so hard that it woke me up a few times. I guess nearly all of California is getting drenched. It’s too wet to ride and it’s too wet to shoot, so I’ve been catching up on other stuff.

On that shooting bit…to get to my gun club you have to drive down a dirt road for a couple of miles, and at one point the road actually crosses a stream. Usually it’s only a couple of inches deep and sometimes it’s even dry, but that sure isn’t the case right now. The gun club sent out an email yesterday afternoon with a video warning folks not to try to drive across the stream (which is now a little river)…

So, with all this rain (and some hail) I’ve been attending to other things…catching up on writing a couple of articles, doing a bit of reloading, and I even put a new battery in my TT250.

Reloading is a good thing to do on a rainy day, and the menu today included .44 Magnum and .45 AutoRim, two of my all-time favorite cartridges.

.44 Mag loads for more accuracy testing in the new Ruger Turnbull Super Blackhawk. These loads have a 240 grain cast bullet with Unique loaded at 9.0 grains, 10.0 grains, and 11.0 grains. We’ll see which load the Turnbull prefers.

.45 AutoRim ammo. This cartridge is just like the .45 ACP, except the rim allows shooting it in revolvers chambered for the .45 ACP without the use of metal clips. This is a 200 grain moly-coated cast bullet with 6.0 grains of Unique, and it is a shooter!

Shooting the .45 AutoRim cartridge in a Model 625 Smith and Wesson last week before the rains started. That’s 100 rounds at 25 yards. The two outside the black happened when a fly landed on my front sight. Or maybe it was a sudden gust of wind. Or maybe I sneezed. Yeah, that was it.

Back to the battery for my TT250…I’ve owned my TT250 for close to three years now and the battery finally gave up the ghost. I stopped in at CSC and told Steve I wanted a new one on the warranty, and we both had a good laugh about that. Steve told me I was the only guy he knew who could get that kind of life out of a Chinese battery. I thought that was kind of funny because all the batteries are Chinese now.

Seriously, though, I think the reason my batteries last so long is that I usually keep them on a Battery Tender. Those things work gangbusters for me, the bikes run better when the batteries are kept fully charged, and the batteries seem to last a good long time. You can buy a Battery Tender most anywhere; my advice would be to get one (or more) from CSC. They come with a little pigtail you can permanently install on your battery, which makes connecting the Battery Tender a snap. I have one on both my RX3 and my TT250.

I rotate the battery between my RX3 and my TT250, and the batteries seem to last a lot longer. I don’t know why anyone who owns any motorcycle wouldn’t have one of these.

The Battery Tender pigtail on my RX3. You can’t get the polarity wrong on these if you’ve connected the pigtail to the battery correctly. You get a pigtail for free when you buy a Battery Tender.

Another bit of a commercial for CSC…the mailman dropped off a box on Saturday, and it was one of the new CSC hats. I’m a hat guy. I like wearing a hat. My favorite kind of hat is a free one. The CSC hat I received was free (thanks, Steve), but unless you wrote a blog for CSC for 10 years, it’s not likely you’d get yours for free. I think they sell for $19.95, which is a bit above what hats normally go for, but this one is more than worth it. It’s got cool embossed stitching and it looks good. I like it and I think it will make me a better man. Like I said, $19.95 ain’t bad, but maybe you could get one for free as part of the deal when you buy a new CSC motorcycle. I’d at least ask the question. The worst that could happen is Steve will say no. But if he does that, ask for a free copy of 5000 Miles At 8000 RPM when you buy your new motorcycle. You never know.

I got a free hat from CSC. Gresh didn’t. At least not yet, he didn’t. Seriously, these are nice hats.

Hey, here’s one more cool photo. I’ve been spending a bit of time up in northern California. I have a new grandson up there who I think is going to be a rider, a shooter, and a blog writer. On that blog writing thing, I told him it’s a great foundation for any “get rich slow” scheme, and I think he gets it. Anyway, my wife Sue is still up there, and she saw the neighborhood brood of wild turkeys this morning walking around like they own the place…

Genuine Screaming Turkey performance parts? It could work…

You know, there was some talk of making the turkey our national bird instead of the bald eagle when our country first formed (Ben Franklin was pushing for the turkey, but I guess the rest of the founding fathers told him to go fly a kite). As an aside, when I ride up to northern California, I take Highway 152 across from Interstate 5 to the 101, and there’s a tree where I always see one or two bald eagles. Bald eagles are majestic raptors. I can see the logic behind the turkey, though. But wow, would it ever take a rethink of a lot of marketing stuff, and in particular, it would make for a major revamp of one particular Motor Company’s marketing and branding efforts (you know, the guys from Milwaukee). Seriously, their performance parts would all have to be marketed under a new Screaming Turkey brand. You could bask in the assumed glory of your motorcycle’s heritage as you rode like, well, a real turkey. Perhaps the Company could get a patent on a new exhaust note….one that would have to change from “potato potato” to “gobble gobble.” There would have to be new logos, tattoos, T-shirts…the list just doesn’t end. But I guess I had better. You know, before I offend anyone.

Stay tuned, folks. Like always, there’s more good ExNotes stuff coming your way. Gobble gobble.

Six Turning and Four Burning

It’s hard to imagine: Six gigantic piston engines and four jet engines, all on the same airplane. That’s what was on the B-36, manufactured by General Dynamics in Fort Worth, Texas. This video popped up in my YouTube feed a short while ago, and I thought I would include it here…

When I first watched that video, I thought the background looked familiar. I quickly realized it was filmed at Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth, Texas. You can see the General Dynamics plant in some of the scenes. The company was called Convair in those days, then it became General Dynamics, and still later it became Lockheed Martin (which is what it is today). There’s been a lot of consolidation in the aerospace industry. Anyway, to get back to the story, that body of water you see in the video is Lake Worth (it’s at the west end of the Carswell runway).

I worked at General Dynamics in the 1970s. GD shared the main runway with Carswell AFB. I was on the F-16 engineering team, and those were great days. It was my first job after the Army, and those days at GD were heady times for me. The F-16 was a grand engineering program, but one of the best parts about working at General Dynamics four decades ago was listening to the old timers. You know, the engineers who had cut their teeth on the B-36 program. I used to love their stories about the B-36, which was designed and manufactured in that very same General Dynamics plant. I worked for a guy named Lou Rackley. Just like I was starting my engineering career on the F-16, Lou had started on the B-36. Those fellows talked about the B-36 program like it was the grandest thing there ever was. Maybe it was.

Here’s a sampling of what I learned from Lou about that magnificent old warbird. The B-36 had a wingspan greater than a Boeing 747. The B-36 was so big it had to move down the assembly turned sideways, and our assembly line at GD/Fort Worth was the largest manufacturing facility in the non-Communist world. The B-36 tail was so tall they had to jack the nose 18 feet into the air to get the tail down far enough so the airplane would fit through the door at the end of the assembly plant. The B-36 fuselage was mostly bomb bays, and to get from the nose of the plane to the rear, you had to lay flat on your back on a rolling dolly and pull yourself along through a pressurized tube. Every once in a while someone would be in that tube, in flight, when a depressurization occurred, and that guy would be launched like a cannonball from one end of the airplane to the other. They had a few instances where folks were working in the wheel wells when the landing gear doors closed inadvertently, and that story didn’t end well.

While I was at GD, the company restored a B-36 and displayed it near the main highway that led into the plant. It was quite an airplane, and I enjoyed seeing it when I rode my Harley and later, my Triumph to work each morning. Good times indeed.

I spent 3 years in Fort Worth on the F-16 program before they transferred me to California, where my focus turned to munitions and tactical weapon systems for the next 20 years. I have a few grand stories of my own about the F-16 and the later munitions programs I worked on, but those are topics for another time.

The Three Flags Classic: Day 4

Day 4 was a grand day on our 2005 Three Flags Classic adventure! Before you get into it, and if you haven’t read the first three days, you might want to catch up by reading our prior blog posts here:

The 2005 Three Flags Classic Rally: the Intro!

The Three Flags Classic: Day 1

The Three Flags Classic: Day 2

The Three Flags Classic: Day 3

On to Day 4!

Day 4 of the 2005 Three Flags Classic. We started in Driggs, Idaho, and we stopped to spend that night in Whitefish, Montana.

I did a dumb thing on the 2005 Three Flags Classic. Well, actually, I did it about a week before. In those days, I was using my Triumph Daytona as a daily commuter, and on the way into work one day, I had picked up a nail in my rear tire. The tire didn’t go flat right away. Nope, we had to make a trip to China Lake later that morning, I rode my Daytona there from the San Bernardino area, and the tire decided to go flat in China Lake. It was a lucky break for me. There’s a lot of nothing on Highway 395 in the Mojave Desert, and the Daytona had the good manners to go flat once we were in town.

Fortunately, there was an independent motorcycle repair shop in China Lake, and he plugged the tire for me. The Daytona ran tubeless tires, and pulling the nail and plugging the tire was no big deal. That’s where I screwed up. I should have replaced the tire, but I didn’t, and it was just one week later that we were off on the Three Flags Classic.

Well, that morning in Driggs, Idaho when I mounted the Triumph and pushed it back, it wouldn’t budge. That’s when the coffee kicked in and I realized the bike wasn’t leaning as much as it should on the sidestand. Uh oh, I thought. I got off the bike, and sure enough, the rear tire was flatter than day-old beer. It was cold that morning, and I was looking forward to getting on the road and feeling the glow from my Gerbing electric vest. What was I thinking, I thought. It was at that moment that I realized that leaving home with a plugged tire had been a dumb move.

Marty had one of those little electrical compressors you attach to your motorcycle battery, so we hooked everything up. Damn, those things take a long time. I’ll bet we sat there for a good 20 minutes, before the sun came up, with Marty’s BMW idling and that very noisy little electric pump banging away. It took that long to get the tire inflated, and I pumped it up to 45 psi reckoning that I would need to either find a new tire or pump it up again most rickety scosh.

I guess I had done okay (or rather, the Triumph’s rear tire had) until I started taking some of the sweepers at high speed the day before in Idaho. A couple of Three Flags riders on FJRs passed me, and we played cat and mouse with those guys for a while. We took the turns at high speed, which probably flexed the tires more than the usual amount, and that most likely loosened the plug that had been installed in China Lake.

We were on our way after pumping up my flat in Driggs, and when we stopped at a gas station somewhere later that morning I found that the pressure had dropped to about 20 psi. So, I plugged the thing again. The new plug would hold all the way to Calgary, and that was a good thing, because I didn’t see another motorcycle shop until we reached that destination. I wised up and bought a new tire in Calgary, but that’s a story for the next blog in this series.

This is the gas station in Idaho where I re-plugged my rear tire. And it worked. While we were there, a kid pulled up in a yellow dune buggy. We had an interesting conversation and then we were back on the road.

The next day took us into Wyoming. Wyoming had magnificent scenery. We stopped at a bunch of great locations to take it all in. The best parts, for me, were the riding, the photography, and the interesting folks we met along the way who were also riding the 2005 Three Flags Classic. The oldest rider in this event was 89 years old. He received a standing ovation at the banquet a couple of nights later in Calgary. The youngest was 17 years old.

I took this picture somewhere in Wyoming. This is John and Joyce, married 45 years. They rode in from Virginia to participate, each on their own motorcycle. They won the award for the longest distance traveled to participate in the Three Flags Classic.

We stopped for lunch in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. It was touristy as hell. It had some great photo ops, but the prices were crazy and the traffic matched the prices. I’d never been there before, so I was glad to make the stop for bragging rights. But (trust me on this) Jackson Hole is not the real Wyoming.

This is Jackson Hole, a tourist town, but with good eats. We had a great Mexican dinner there. The arch is made out of real antlers, and there are four arches like this at the corners of the town square.

A door handle on one of the many art galleries in Jackson Hole.

Later that day and we rode into Montana. Montana is another beautiful state. In fact, the scenery on the entire trip was unbelievable. We also saw a lot of game. I saw an entire herd of deer in Montana.

It was getting very cold. I was glad I was riding the Triumph, and I was glad I had that Gerbing electric vest. The Triumph threw off a lot of engine heat, which is not a good thing in the summertime, but it was wonderful in the cold weather. And, that electric vest was heavenly.

Later that day, we hit the checkpoint in Missoula, Montana. It was good to stop for a while and chat with the other riders. Here are several photos from that checkpoint…

Good buddy Bob’s RT-P BMW at the checkpoint in Missoula, Montana. These are amazing machines. Bob can ride any motorcycle he chooses (he owns a BMW dealership, Brown BMW in Pomona, California), and this is his weapon of choice.

Bob’s route card. When I wrote The Complete Book of Police and Military Motorcycles a few years ago, I learned a lot about these police Beemers. They are impressive machines. Two batteries, a stronger alternator, an oil cooler, and ABS braking. Plus the normal BMW niceties, like heated handgrips.

This Gold Wing is actually one of the oldest bikes in the event. We spoke with the rider for a bit, and he told us that this bike is on its fourth engine.

Check out the mileage on this Canadian Gold Wing! 900,000 kilometers! That’s well over a half million miles!

Carl and his beautiful K1200LT BMW at the checkpoint in Missoula.

This rider and his wife flew in from the Netherlands to participate in the Three Flags Classic. He had never been to Mexico, Canada, or the United States. A friend let him borrow this yellow DL1000 Suzuki. Like all of us, he and his wife were having a grand time.

One of the FJR riders. The FJR is a very impressive machine.

That night, we stayed in Whitefish, Montana, just south of the Canadian border. We walked into town from our hotel and found a microbrewery, and we had a fabulous dinner. Whitefish is a cool town. We walked around a bit and then called it night. The next morning we would ride in Canada on Day 5 of the 2005 Three Flags Classic!

Make sure you don’t miss any of our blog entries by signing up for our automatic email notifications!

Pawn Stars, Pellet Pistols, and Bond. James Bond.

When I wrote the CSC blog, I occasionally did a gun piece on it. This is one I did about a pellet gun I still own. I like pellet guns, and you can have a lot of fun with these things. You can set up a 15-ft range in your backyard or in your garage (15 feet is the distance for competitive pellet pistol matches), and shooting a pellet gun is a good way to keep your skills honed when you can’t get to the big boy range. It’s also a good way to pick off a gopher or a bird that wants to start singing at 3:30 in the morning, but we won’t go there. So, for today’s story…my Walther is a pellet gun with a rich heritage and bunch of cool stories. Here are a couple.

I was channel surfing the other night and I briefly clicked through a rerun of Pawn Stars. You know, that’s the reality TV number about these dudes who run a pawn shop in Las Vegas. I like that show but I blitzed right past it to subsequent channels when something clicked.

Wait a second, I thought as my thumb continued clicking channels on autopilot. That can’t be!

So I reversed my path through the zillions of channels we pay for with Direct TV (but never watch). I went back to Rick and the boys in Las Vegas. They were still on the bit that had caught my attention. Son of a gun. Almost literally…son of a gun! I saw what it was that triggered (ah, there it is, the persistent pun) a neuron and made me click back to the Pawn Stars show. Look at that!

What I saw on TV was a Walther LuftPistole Model LP53. Whoa! I actually own one of those! A real Walther air pistol (that’s what “luftpistole” means in German). And there it was…my gun, on TV!

Help us publish…please click on the popup ads!

What further riveted my attention was something I had sort of noticed but never really recognized before. It became clear when the guys on the Pawn Stars show were giving their background spiel on the Walther. I suddenly realized what had captured my attention yet again. It was another thing that clicked! I’d been seeing it for decades and I had never connected the dots, even though I had owned a fine LP53 specimen for the last 50 years.

At this point, you should mentally key in the James Bond theme song. You know….da da, da dahhh, da da daaaaa. Bond. James Bond.

In all those early posters advertising Dr. No, From Russia with Love, and the early Sean Connery James Bond classics (and they were indeed classics; those early Bond movies were magnificent), the advertising had shown Sean holding an LP53. Even though I owned one and shot it extensively, and even though I am a big time James Bond fan (you know, the secret missions and all), it had just never clicked together for me. In all those early advertisements, big bad James Bond, Agent 007, with a license to kill, was posing with an air pistol. Take a hard look at that photo on the left. That’s a Walther LP53 he’s holding. Da da, da daaah, indeed.

So here’s the story. When the Bond franchise was just getting started, the movie folks scheduled a photo shoot in which Bond was supposed to pose with his iconic Walther PPk, the signature secret agent .32 ACP automatic Ian Fleming wrote about. The only problem was that whoever organized the photo shoot had all the props except, you guessed it, the Walther PPk. Whoa. The whole studio, the tux, the photographer, and James Bond himself all dressed up with nowhere to go. They forgot the gun. What to do?

As it turns out, the photographer (a lensmaster named David Hurn) was a pellet gun target shooting enthusiast (me, too, but I’ll get to that in a bit). His target pistol of choice was, you guessed it again, the Walther LP53. The LP53 is a physically large pistol, and it’s a high class, high-ticket item. Real steel, deep blueing, and all the good stuff that makes old guys like me get all dewey-eyed. Hurn ran out to his car and came back with the LP53, and the rest, as they say, is history. Much of the public is completely unaware that their hero, silver screen idol James Bond, posed with a pellet gun. Hell, I didn’t realize it until Rick told the story on Pawn Stars, and I’ve owned an LP53 for most of my life.

That actual pellet pistol, Bond’s stand-in Walther LP53, sold for a staggering $430,000 at auction a few years ago. That’s the story that Rick told while I was watching Pawn Stars. Whoa, hold the presses! $430,000, and I own one of those things!

Well, not so fast. Rick offered the guy $200. $200. Wow, I thought I would be able to retire on that one pellet gun, but not so. Maybe if James Bond had owned the one that was sitting in my closet, but mine had a less famous background. I checked around on the Internet, and $200 seems to be about the going price (as this screen capture from a recent auction shows)…

So, back to my LP53. It’s in immaculate condition. To a collector it would be cool. My Walther has everything except the owner’s manual. That includes the interchangeable sight blades, the wooden cocking plug (the big round wooden thing that fits over the end of the barrel to assist in cocking the gun), the original box, and mine even has the original factory test target. This is mine…

I guess the $200 going rate is a good thing, because I have no plans to retire any time soon and in any event, I’m hanging on to my LP53. It was given to my Dad by one of his shooting buddies (a fellow named Leo Keller, who, like my Dad, was a serious trapshooter). Dad passed it along to me when I was a kid, and I had a lot of fun with it.

One time I walked over to my cousin Bobby’s house holding that gun in my hand the entire way (Bobby lived a mile away from where I did, back in New Jersey). Imagine that…a young teenager like me walking down the road for a mile holding a pistol in his hand. If a kid in New Jersey tried that today, they’d call out half a dozen SWAT teams and maybe even the National Guard. Back then, it was a normal thing to do, and nobody got their shorts in a knot over it.

Anyway, when I got to Bobby’s house we sat on his back porch shooting the Walther, and then we got the bright idea it might make sense to have something to shoot at. Bobby looked through the trash and found an empty orange juice can. You might remember those cans…they were little (maybe an inch in diameter and about 3 inches tall). The idea was you took the frozen concentrate out and mixed it with water, and voilà, you had orange juice.

Bobby set the can out about 30 feet away and I took a shot at it. Bingo! The can went down.

“Wow, that’s pretty good,” Bobby said. Bobby was about 7 years younger than me (he still is, actually). He was easily impressed back then (today, not so much).

“You ain’t seen nothing yet,” I said. “I’m going to shoot it again and make it stand up.”

Bobby looked at me in amazement. I was his big cousin. He thought what he saw in me was supreme confidence that I could make that shot. You know, that I did this sort of thing all the time. The truth is I had no idea if I could make that shot, but it was such an outrageous thing to claim I had nothing to lose. But….if I made the shot, we’d be talking about it for years.

I took careful aim at the base of the can and gently squeezed the Walther’s trigger. The Walther spit out compressed air and the little .177 pellet connected, catching the orange juice can right at its base. The can spun around, flipped up, whirled around a few more times, and came to rest. Standing. I couldn’t believe it. It was a one-in-a-million shot, and I made it! Pure dumb luck on my part. But I acted as if it was the most natural thing in the world for me to do. That was sometime in the early 1960s. I was back in New Jersey last month and Sue and I had dinner with Bobby and his wife, Sheree. And yes, we talked about that shot.

In researching the background of this unique handgun, I tried to learn what it originally cost. I checked some vintage gun books I own. In my copy of the 1974 Gun Digest, I actually found it. The retail price in 1974 was $59. I had to go through several old books to find it, and as I did so, I was amazed at the artwork on some of them. The 1956 Shooter’s Bible, in particular, stood out. I thought I would scan the cover and include it as a nice touch in finishing this post…

Want to see our other Tales of the Gun stories? Just click here!

Want to make sure you never miss an ExNotes blog post? Sign up for our email updates in the widget you see to the right (if you’re on a laptop) or at the bottom of this post (if you’re on a smartphone). We’ll never give your email to anyone else, and you’ll automatically be entered in our quarterly moto-adventure book giveaway!

Trahlyta’s Grave

A few years back Sue and I were on a road trip through the southeastern US, visiting spots and grabbing photos for Motorcycle Classics magazine’s Destinations page. That was a grand adventure and we saw a lot of cool places (Memphis, Dahlonega, the Emerald Coast, the US Army Infantry Museum, New Orleans, and more), but the one that stands out in my mind is Trahlyta’s Grave.

We were wrapping up a visit to Dahlonega’s museum (prior to my visit, I did not know that Dahlonega was where the first US gold rush occurred) and on our way out when I asked one of the museum’s docents where the good motorcycle roads were. My perception initially was that the guy wasn’t too interested in helping us, but first impressions are frequently wrong and that one sure was. We didn’t get any good info while we were still in the museum, but he followed us out and gave two small polished stones to me. I wasn’t too sure what was happening. Then he proceeded to tell us the Tale of Trahlyta.

Trahlyta, you see, was a Cherokee princess with the key to eternal youth. She was abducted by another Cherokee with whom she desired no romantic involvement and she subsequently died, but not before asking to be buried near her home at a point where three trails came together. Legend has it that anyone who places a stone at her grave will be rewarded with eternal youth. Hmmm. The docent told us to watch for the pile of rocks. Can’t miss it, he said. You’ll see the marker.

So Sue and I headed north out of Dahlonega, eyes peeled for a rockpile. We saw several small piles perhaps a few inches high over the next few miles, each time thinking we had found Trahlyta’s grave, but none of these had a marker of any kind. Suddenly, we came to the junction of three roads, and when we saw what was there we had a good laugh. The docent was right, we couldn’t have missed it. This pile of rocks was a good 6 feet tall, and it had the historic marker he had mentioned.

The docent had explained to us that several years ago the Georgia transportation folks wanted to move the rockpile, but a member of the road crew attempting to do so was struck by a car and died. A few years after that, the high rollers in the Georgia Department of Transportation decided the earlier road crew fatality was coincidental and they sent another crew. Son of a gun, the same thing happened again! Not wanting to deplete the dues-paying membership, cooler government minds prevailed and the weenies left Trahlyta’s grave as is, where it still exists to this day.

Sue placed both small stones the docent gave to us on the pile, and I’m here to report that they seem to be working. She looks as good today as she did nearly 40 years ago when we first met. Me? I missed an opportunity. I let Sue deposit both of those stones while I was busy taking photos. And yeah, while she stays the same, in the mirror every morning when I shave I see a guy growing steadily older. I should have asked that guy in Dahlonega for more stones.

Want to see more Gresh and Berk previously-published stories? Click here for Gresh’s articles, and here for Berk’s.