Month: April 2019

The real deal…a Genuine motorcycle!

Yours truly and the Genuine G400c, patrolling the mean streets of San Francisco!

This is one of those blogs for which I could have used any of several titles.   The Real Deal got the nod, as this is indeed the real deal…a genuine (pardon the pun) motorcycle.   Another contender was The Streets of San Francisco, like that Karl Malden and Michael Douglas show 30 years ago.  And yet another was We Are Living In Interesting Times (read on, and you’ll see what I mean).

Anyway, enough of the trip down memory lane and alternative blog titles. I made a few memories of my own yesterday, riding around downtown San Francisco around good buddy Lunchbox’s San Francisco Scooter Centre.   Barry is the guy who owns and runs the dealership, but Lunchbox is the guy in charge.   He’s about a year old now (I’ve known him since he was a pup), and he’s a cool 82 lbs.    After checking in with Lunchbox, I visited with Barry for a bit.  I always like coming up here.  I like Lunchbox, I like the city, I like the San Francisco Scooter Centre, and I like Barry.

Lunchbox, the man in charge. He’s cool. He lets Barry think he’s the guy running the San Francisco Scooter Centre, but Lunchbox is the one really calling the shots.
Good buddy Barry and the Genuine G400c motorcycle.

Barry and I had a great taco lunch downtown, we talked about the motorcycle market, and we swapped stories about a couple of our other common interests.  Then it was time to get on the G400c.  Barry tossed me the keys and the bike’s registration, and told me to have fun.   Being a guy who aims to please, I did as I was told.  It was easy on the Genuine.

So let me tell you about the Genuine G400c. The first thing I noticed was that it’s a motorcycle.  A real motorcycle.  Tear drop gas tank (where the gas actually goes), a tach and speedo that look like a tach and speedo should, and a long, low, flat seat (good for moving around on when necessary, carrying a passenger, and strapping on soft luggage for longer trips).  Wire wheels.  Chrome fenders.    Chrome handlebars that put the controls in comfortable reach.   It all came together the way it should.   Yessiree, this is a motorcycle that is visually appealing.  None of that Ricky Racer, low bar face on the tank, angry Ninja insect, or giraffesque ADV wannabe silliness or styling.  This is a motorcycle that looks like a motorcycle should.

The next thing I noticed was that the G400c was easy to throw a leg over.  It’s been a while since I’ve been on a bike where I could say that.   I’ll say more on this in a bit.

And another thing I noticed was that the bike sounds like a motorcycle. A real motorcycle.   A Genuine motorcycle.  I like that, too.  I had my big Nikon with me (the D810) and I grabbed a video of the startup sequence…

This bike sounds good.  It has a nice, deep, throaty rumble.   The skyscrapers I darted between in downtown San Francisco amplified the exhaust note, and the reverberations were intoxicating.  There’s something undeniably cool about riding a nimble, throaty motorcycle in a city.  It would have been cool to grab more video of myself riding around San Francisco, but I’m not as talented as Joe Gresh in that regard and besides, I was having too much fun.  You can have a great ride or you can make a great video.  Unless you’re Joe Gresh, you can’t do both at the same time.

So back to that nimble thing.  You’re reading something written by a guy who thinks that somewhere in the 1970s and the 1980s the wheels came off the wagon here in the US with regard to motorcycle size and complexity, and until very recently, things have continued to get nuttier as the years have gone by and advertising guys (who are supposed to be creative people) kept defaulting to bigger has to be better.  My thoughts are in synch with most of the rest of the motorcycle world (not the aforementioned advertising gurus) in that I think a 250cc is the perfect size.   A 400cc single is even better, especially if it comes in a 250cc-sized package, and that’s what the G400c is.

I don’t know the Genuine’s weight.  I could find it in a few seconds with a Google search, but I don’t need to.  I know what I need to know from my ride, and that’s this: The G400c is light and it’s nimble, and that’s all the spec I need.   Hell, you can’t trust what most of the manufacturers tell you about their bikes’ weights, anyway.  And even if you could believe their numbers, what really matters is where a bike’s center of gravity is located.   Make it too high, and a motorcycle will feel unwieldy regardless of its weight.  Make it low, though, and a bike becomes flickable, agile, nimble, and just plain fun to ride.   That’s what this machine is.   I had fun splitting lanes and braaapping around downtown San Francisco.  The G400c is perfect for that, but that’s not the only arena in which I see it excelling.  I think the G400c would be a great bike for a Baja ride, too.  Someday.  We’ll see.

Next up:  Seat height.  It’s the same story here, folks.  Like I said earlier, I could throw my leg over the seat without having to take a yoga class or do any stretching exercises, and you know what?  That’s a good feeling.  The saddle is low enough to make getting on and off the bike easy, and that’s decidedly not the case for a lot of motorcycles these days.

You might ask about suspension travel.  When I was younger and dumber, I used to pour over the spec sheets you’d see in the motorcycle magazines, and then I realized that unless you plan to ride motocross, the only thing a ton of suspension travel does for a street bike is make thing way too tall.   The G400c seat height was just where I needed it to be.   And on that suspension travel topic, I’ll let you in on a little secret:  Even though our taxes in California (and San Francisco in particular) are among the highest in the world, we still have lousy streets with lots of potholes and rough sections.  The G400c was fine being flung around in the city, sloppy streets and road surfaces notwithstanding.  It soaked it all up without a whimper.  I’d like to buttonhole our politicians someday and ask them:  Exactly where does all that tax money go?  In the meantime, though, I know the suspension on the G400c gets the job done.

Mean streets? Bring ’em on. The G400c was just plain fun riding around San Francisco.  It’s a comfortable, right-sized motorcycle.

I didn’t take the G400c on the freeway, although Barry invited me to do so.  Nope, the freeways are typically a mess in San Francisco, and I figured (correctly, as I experienced on the drive out of San Francisco later in the day) I could actually get more miles in and reach higher top speeds on the city streets.  And I did.  Until this guy you see in the photo caught up with me, lit me up, and started casting dirty looks my way.  Then he got in front of me.  Point taken, Officer.  I rode a bit more like a normal person after that.

Another view from the cockpit. I like the instrument layout. It’s what a motorcycle is supposed to look like.

Okay, let’s not ignore the 800-lb gorilla in the room:  The G400c is manufactured in China.   As many of you know, I know a little bit about Chinese motorcycles and I played a tangential role in making the case for Chinese quality when CSC Motorcycles started importing the Zongshen RX3 back in 2015.   You might have trepidations about buying a Chinese motorcycle, and it’s almost a certainty you know people who badmouth Chinese products.   My advice when you hear the inevitable anti-China mush is to remember that God loves stupid people (because He sure made a lot of them).   Yeah, they’ve got their stories about their buddy who worked at a dealer 10 years ago and he told them…well, you get the idea.  Folks, these people just don’t know.

I know a little bit about this topic, I think.  Maybe more than most of the weenies posting opinions on Facebook and the motorcycle forums.

My advice is to blow these weenies off, get yourself to a dealer, and see for yourself.  I know a little bit about quality and manufacturing, I’ve been in several Chinese manufacturing plants, and I’m here to tell you that Chinese motorcycle quality is as good as or better than anything that’s out there.   Consider this:  Automobile and motorcycle companies like BMW, Vespa, Honda, Suzuki, and many others have components, major subassemblies, engines, and complete motorcycles manufactured in China.  These world-class companies wouldn’t be doing that if the quality was low.

You might have a concern about the G400c being a new bike, that is to say, one that doesn’t have a track record.  Actually, that’s not the case.  This motorcycle has been rolling around China for a good three years now (I saw them when I rode across China on the RX3 a few years ago).  The G400c is manufactured for Genuine by Shineray (it’s pronounced Shin-yu-way), and in China, they have been selling two versions of the bike for several years (a street version and an adventure-touring-styled version).   The riding in China is way tougher than it is here.   We tend to use our motorcycles as toys.  In China, motorcycles are work horses.  They are ridden hard and put away wet.

Another thing that’s nice about the G400c motor is that it’s a Honda clone.  The concept (but not the engine) here is the same as the Honda CG clone motors that power the CSC and Janus bikes…an engine based on a Honda design built for an environment where folks don’t take care of their bikes.  It’s a different Honda motor design, but it’s a proven design.  It’s a strong, torquey, fuel injected single.

The G400c’s braking is good.  It’s a single disk in front, and a drum in the rear.   A lot of folks will be grasping their chest and convulsing at the thought of a drum brake in back, but it works, and it works for me.   Again, don’t let some kid writing a magazine article (or worse, someone posting an opinion on Facebook) tell you that you have to have a disk brake in back.   Drum brakes have worked fine for decades.  It’s one of the things keeping the cost down on this bike, and it’s a reasonable tradeoff.  Like it said, it works for me.

What I don’t know yet is the parts availability question, nor do I know about the availability of a shop manual.   Those are fair questions to ask a dealer.  I didn’t, mostly because I was focused on the riding.

Genuine states the top speed is over 80 mph.  I’ve ridden bikes with the same engine in China and I saw indicated speeds on city streets over 90 mph and the bike still had more left (and at that point I thought to myself “Whoa, Bucko…what am I doing here?”).   I think the top end is more than adequate for any real world needs.  And on that note, this is another area in which you hear the keyboard commandos espouse things like “Ah need a bike made in ‘Merica that can do at least a hunnert twenty miles per hour or I’ll get run over…”   You do, huh?  Hey, I rode across China, I’ve been up and down Baja a bunch of times, I circumnavigated the Andes Mountains in Colombia, and I’ve ridden all over the US.  And I did all of this on 250cc motorcycles.  Motorcycles made in China, to be specific.   But what do I know?

You might ask:  Are there any negatives?  I guess to play magazine road test writer I have to find something, and on the G400c it might be that some of the details could be more finely finished.  Maybe the handlebar switchgear castings could be polished a little more, things like that.   Barry told me the bike I rode is one of the very earliest ones to arrive in America, and that Genuine is sweating the cosmetic details like this.  But these are minor points.   The next question would be:   Would I recommend buying this bike?  To that question, the answer is yes.  They retail at about $4600, and with all the fees they go out the door at a notch above $5700.  Barry is one of the few honest dealers I know in that he doesn’t treat setup and freight as a major profit center.  Here’s how he has the bikes priced…

The G400c pricing sheet at the San Francisco Scooter Centre. Freight and setup are honest numbers here, which isn’t the case at many other dealers.

We are living in interesting times.  Just a few years ago the small motorcycle landscape in the US was pretty barren, and what few bikes were out there carried stupid-high prices and obscene dealer freight and setup fees.  Our choices in recent decades have been outrageously tall, fat, and heavy motorcycles with prices in the stratosphere.  Today, the moto menu before us is interesting and intriguing, and it’s rooted in the real world.   There’s the CSC Motorcycles line with several 250cc selections and soon, the 450cc RX4.   There the Janus line of magnificently-handcrafted contemporary classics.   There’s Royal Enfield, with their 400cc Himalayan, 500cc Classic, and soon-to-be-released 650cc Interceptor (at an incredible $5795).   I’ve ridden nearly all of these motorcycles (I haven’t caught a ride on the Himalayan yet, but that’s coming up), and I’ve ridden many of them through Baja (you can read about our Enfield Baja trip, the Janus Baja trip, and any of several CSC Baja trips).  And now, there’s another great bike in the mix:   The Genuine 400c.   For the first time in a long time, we have choices.  Good choices that won’t break the bank.  Life is good, folks.

Check out our related Genuine G400c and San Francisco Scooter Centre posts!

Genuine’s G400c
The San Francisco Scooter Centre

A .30 06 Mk V Weatherby…

After a couple of months of not being able to shoot because the creek was too high, good buddy Greg and I were finally able to get out to the range this weekend. It was sorely-needed range time, and I brought along two rifles. One was the .375 H&H Safari Grade Remington you read about a few blogs down; the other was a very nice Weatherby Mk V you haven’t heard about yet.  It’s the one you see in the photo above.

This particular rifle is a bit unusual. It’s a Mk V Weatherby (Weatherby’s top of the line bolt action rifle), but it’s not chambered in a Weatherby magnum cartridge. This is one of the very few rifles Weatherby has offered over the years in a standard chambering, and in this instance, it’s the mighty .30 06 Springfield. You’ve read about the .30 06 on these pages in earlier Tales of the Gun blogs.  It’s one of the all-time great cartridges and it’s my personal all-time favorite.

So, back to the Weatherby.  There were four things that made this rifle particularly attractive to me when I first spotted it on the rack in a local Turner’s gun store: The stock was finished in their satin oil finish (not the typical Weatherby high gloss urethane finish), the rifle had an original 3×9 Weatherby scope, the .30 06 chambering, and the price.  It checked all the boxes for me.   Those early Weatherby scopes are collectible in their own right.  I like an oil finished stock.  And the price…wow.

The Weatherby was something I knew I had to have the instant I saw it, and (get this) it was priced at only $750. This is a rig that today, new, would sell for somewhere around $2500.

The shop had this Weatherby on consignment at $750. It would have been a steal at that price; I got it for $650.
Pretty walnut on both sides. Weatherby builds a fine rifle.

Back in 2008, when the Great Recession was going full tilt and still gaining steam, there were fabulous firearms deals to be had if you knew what you wanted and you weren’t addicted to black plastic guns.  Nope, none of that black plastic silliness here. For me, it’s all about elegant walnut and blue steel.  I carried a black plastic rifle for a living a few decades ago. Been there, done that, don’t need any more of it.

When I spotted the Weatherby I asked the store manager about it. She told me it was a consignment gun, and when I asked if there was any room in the price (it’s a habit; I would have paid what they were asking), she asked me to make an offer. So I did. $650 had a nice ring to it, I thought.

“Let me call the owner,” the manager said. She disappeared and returned a few minutes later. “$650 is good.” Wow. I couldn’t believe I scored like this. I felt a bit guilty and asked her if I was taking advantage of the guy who had put it on consignment, and she told me not to worry. He needed the money, I needed the rifle, and the price was good for both of us.

The Weatherby had a few minor dings in the stock and the finish was a bit worn in a few places, but the metal was perfect. Because it was an oil finished stock, it was a simple matter to steel wool it down and add a few coats of TruOil, and the Weatherby was a brand new rifle again.

TruOil and fine walnut…a marriage made in Heaven. TruOil really brings out the grain. You can leave it glossy, or knock it down to a luxurious subdued satin finish with 0000 steel wool (which is what I did on this rifle).

I’ve shot this rifle quite a bit over the last 10 years and I knew it shot well, but I hadn’t recorded which load shot best. I had several loads I’ve developed for other .30 06 rifles over the last few decades (like I said above, it’s my favorite), and I grabbed three that have worked well in other rifles.  The good news is the Weatherby isn’t fussy. It shot all three well.  The bad news is…well, there isn’t any bad news.  It’s all good.

A few favorite 30 06 loads developed for other rifles.  They all worked well in the Weatherby, too, as you can see below.
The Weatherby did well with all three loads.  All were fired at 100 yards.  If you’re going to develop loads for your rifle, start lower than these and work up.   These loads worked well in my rifle; you need to roll your own to learn what works well in your rifle.

The first load is one with a lighter bullet that has worked well on Texas jackrabbits in a single-shot Ruger No. 1.  I found that load back in the 1970s when I spent entirely too much time chasing rabbits in the desert east of El Paso.  It’s the 130 grain jacketed soft point Hornady with a max load (52.0 grains) of IMR 4320 powder.   Yeah, the first two groups were larger than I would have liked, but don’t forget that I had not been on the rifle range for a couple of months.   Folks think that shooting off a rest eliminates the human element, but it does not.  I was getting my sea legs back with those first two groups.  It’s the third group that tells the story here, and that one was a tiny 0.680 inches.  If I worked on this load a bit and shot a bit more, this is a sub-minute-of-angle rifle.

The next load is the hog load I used in a Winchester Model 70 on our Arizona boar hunt last year. That one uses a 150 grain Hornady jacketed soft point with 48.0 grains of IMR 4320 powder. It shot well in the Model 70 and it shoots well in the Weatherby, too. The Weatherby averaged 1.401 inches at 100 yards with this load.  The point of impact was about 3 inches lower than the 130 grain load described above.

The third and final load I tried this weekend was with a heavier 180 grain Remington jacketed soft point bullet. I had originally developed this as the accuracy load for an older Browning B-78 single shot rifle (I’ll have to do a blog on that one of these days; it, too, has stunning wood).  This is a near max load (48.0 grains of IMR 4064 propellant) and with those heavier 180 grain bullets, recoil was attention-getting. But it was still tolerable, and the average group size hung right in there with the 150 gr load.   It averaged 1.456 3-shot groups at 100 yards.  Like they say, that’s close enough for government work.  Another cool thing…the 180 grain load point of impact was the same height above point of aim as the 130 grain load, but the group centers were about three inches to the left of center.

There’s one last thing I wanted to share with you before signing off today.  Good buddy Greg is an accuracy chaser like me.  He was out there with his rifles this weekend trying a few of his loads.   When I measure group size, I always use a caliper.  Greg has an app on his iPhone (it’s called SubMOA and it’s free) that allows him to simply take a photo of the target and it computes group size and a bunch of other good data.  I always wondered if the results from Greg’s iPhone app were as good as the real thing, so I asked him to take photos of two of my targets and tell me what the iPhone app felt the group sizes were.  He did.

I measured this group size with a caliper and found it to be 0.680 inches; the SubMOA iPhone app clocked it at 0.640 inches. That’s a 0.04 inch difference, or 5.8%. That’s pretty close, I think.
I measured this group size to be 1.245 inches; SubMOA found it to be 1.200 inches. That’s a 0.045 inch difference, or 3.6%. In both cases, the SubMOA program found the group size to be smaller than my measurements.

So there you have it.   If you’d like to read more of our Tales of the Gun Stories, you will find them here.

More good stuff:

Order targets from Amazon.

Buy RCBS reloading equipment here!

Get ammo boxes here!

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Dream Bike: 1978 Triumph Bonneville

This is a blog I did for CSC a year or so ago, and it’s one I thought I would run again here.   We haven’t done a Dream Bikes blog in a while, and it’s time.

It’s raining, it’s cold here in southern California, and those two conditions are enough to keep me indoors today. I’ve been straightening things up here in the home office, and I came across a Triumph brochure from 1978. I bought a new Bonneville that year and as I type this, I realize that was a cool 40 years ago. Wowee. Surprisingly, the brochure scanned well, so much so that even the fine print is still readable…

Triumph had two 750 twins back then. One was the twin-carb Bonneville, and the other was the single-carb model (I think they called it the Tiger). The Bonneville came in brown or black and the Tiger came in blue or red (you can see the color palette in the third photo above). I liked the red and my dealer (in Fort Worth) swapped the tank from a Tiger onto my Bonneville. I loved that bike, and I covered a lot of miles in Texas on it. I used to ride with a friend and fellow engineer at General Dynamics named Sam back in the F-16 days (he had a Yamaha 500cc TT model, which was another outstanding bike back in the day). I wish I still had that Bonneville.

After I sold the Bonneville, I turned right around and bought a ’79 Electra-Glide Classic. There’s a brochure buried around here somewhere on that one, and if I come across it I’ll see how it scans. The Harley had a lot of issues, but it’s another one I enjoyed owning and riding, and it’s another I wish I still owned.

So there you have it.   That ’78 Bonneville is a bike I still have dreams about, and they were made all the more poignant by the Royal Enfield Interceptor I rode in Baja last month.  You can read about the Enfield Interceptor and our Baja adventures here.

Want to read more pieces like this?  Check out our other Dream Bikes here!

Riding India on an Enfield

I came across my new good buddy Chris Alves’ photo essay about a ride across India on a Royal Enfield a day or two ago and I was impressed.   Imagine that…a 3,000-mile ride across India on a Royal Enfield.  That’s a bucket list ride for me.  You can get to Chris’ photo essay by clicking here.  Folks, this one is worth your time.

Genuine’s G400c and more…

I was up in San Francisco a week or so ago and I stopped by good buddy Barry’s San Francisco Scooter Centre for two reasons:  To say hello to Barry, and to check out the new Genuine G400c motorcycle.   It’s the bike manufactured by Shineray (in Chongqing, China), and I had seen two versions of it when I rode across China on an RX3 nearly three years go.

Brand new Genuine G400c motorcycles in good buddy Barry’s San Francisco Scooter Centre.
The new Genuine’s pricing in the San Francisco Scooter Centre. Like other Asian and Indian bikes from Royal Enfield, CSC, and BMW, the price is seriously lower than others on the market from the Big 4 and Europe. Unlike many other dealers, the San Francisco Scooter Centre’s setup, documentation, and freight charges are honest and reasonable.

I didn’t have the time or the gear to ride the Genuine G400c last week, but Barry said he wants me to try the new machine and he offered a ride.   I’m going to do that later this month, and I’ll tell you more about the bike when I do.

The products available to us as motorcyclists sure are changing, and there’s no doubt the imports from China and India are rocking our world.   Gresh and I have a bit of experience on Zongshen’s RX3, RX4, and TT250 (made in China and imported by CSC).   I’ve had some seat time on the new BMW 310 made in India.   Joe and I recently completed a week-long adventure in Baja riding the Royal Enfield 500cc Bullet and their new 650cc Interceptor (both made in India).  I don’t have any time yet on Harley’s 500cc and 750cc v-twin cruisers (also made in India), but I’m working on correcting that character flaw.   There’s an old proverb that says “may you live in interesting times.”  We certainly are.

Hey, more good news:  I finally received my printed copies of Destinations, and my story on Kitt Peak National Observatory is in the next issue of Motorcycle Classics magazine.   You can see all of the Destinations pieces (and get your very own copy) right here.  Good buddy Mike did.  Mike and I graduated junior high school and high school together back in the day (as in 50 years ago), and we still talk to each other a couple of times each month.  Good friends and good times!

Good buddy Mike, who knows a good thing when he sees it!

1Q19 Moto Book Winner!

Good buddy Bob, our most recent adventure moto book contest winner!

It’s that time again, and our first quarter 2019 adventure motorcycle book contest winner is good buddy Bob.   Bob became eligible when he signed up for our automatic email blog updates, and you can, too!   We’re giving away another book at the end of this quarter, and all you have to do is sign up for our automatic email updates.

When we notified Bob of his win, he wrote to us…

I like your approach with the Zongshens…1200cc is not required for touring. My touring machine is shown in the photo: A 2002 Honda Silverwing scooter. I sold it with 35K showing on the odometer and later bought another.

Bob, your copy of Destinations, our latest moto adventure book, will be going out to you in the next few days.  Congratulations to you and thanks for being an ExhaustNotes reader!

Aerodynamics, Roman baths, and the See Ya

Shortly after we passed this Alfa See Ya motorhome, we stopped at a rest area along Interstate 5. The coach pulled in behind us.

I was driving south on Interstate 5 this weekend, enjoying the Subaru and the wildflowers, and feeling good about the zillions of bugs splattering on the Subie’s windshield instead of me (as they had been doing with a vengeance when Gresh and I were in Baja on the Enfields the prior week). Various thoughts floated through my mind, one of them being that we had not done a “Back in the Day” blog in a while.  That concept was Gresh’s…a series of blogs about past jobs, experiences, and…well, you get the idea. That thought drifted around in my noggin while we passed a long string of trucks and motorhomes, and Susie suddenly said “Look, Joe, an Alfa!”

Sure enough, it was an Alfa Leisure 36-foot, diesel pusher motorhome…the See Ya model, to be exact. If you’re wondering why this was a source of wonderment for both Susie and yours truly, it’s because I used to run the plant that manufactured that magnificent RV.  That was almost 20 years ago.

Yep, I was the Operations Director for Alfa Leisure. It was one of the best jobs I ever had, and I worked for one of the smartest guys I’ve ever known. That would be Johnnie Crean, and I’ll get to him in a minute. Well, maybe less than a minute, because I’ll tell you about the motorhome first, and I can’t do that without touching on Johnnie’s genius.

The See Ya was a watershed product, and that was because it was one hell of a deal. Let me start by putting it this way…the See Ya’s MSRP was $184,600, but the thing was so good and demand was so high the dealers were tacking on more than $20K over list price and we still couldn’t build them fast enough.  That’s because the See Ya was way better than the competition.

Johnnie did a lot of cool things. He put the air conditioner underneath the chassis, which allowed a higher ceiling inside the coach while still meeting Big Gubmint’s max height requirement for road vehicles. That may not sound significant, but that one feature alone sold a lot of motorhomes for Alfa. On any dealer’s lot you could go into any other motorhome and with their low ceilings they always felt cramped. You see, they all had their air conditioners on the roof, which forced them to make the ceiling lower. Walk into an Alfa, though, and it felt like you were in your house. The difference was immediate and obvious, and it was all Johnnie.  And just to rub salt in that marketing wound, Johnnie put a ceiling fan in the See Ya.  You know, a Casa Blanca, like you might have in your family room.

Next up was the color palette. For the exterior, you could have any color you wanted, as long as it was white. Johnnie realized that folks spend their time inside the motorhome, and they really didn’t care what the exterior color was. That little deal right there was a $10,000 price advantage.  Another cool color advantage: Alfa only offered two interior carpeting colors (light tan and dark blue) and two cabinet color choices (light oak and dark walnut).  We built the light tan carpeteted, light oak configuration almost exclusively. Johnnie knew that women preferred those colors (men preferred the darker colors), but the purchase decision was almost always made by wives, not by husbands.

One morning, Johnnie popped into my office early in the morning.  “Put a spoiler on the coach,” he said, and with that, he turned to leave.

“A spoiler?” I asked. Johnnie always drove either a Porsche or a Bentley, but mostly the Porsche, and he owned a couple of race cars. I kind of assumed he was talking about a whale tail spoiler like his Turbo 911 had, but I didn’t know.

“A chin spoiler,” he said, showing through body language and tone that he was thinking I wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer.

“A chin spoiler?” I asked. “That will take a few weeks, you know, to talk to the guy who makes the front fiberglass for us…”

“No, no, no…” Johnnie answered, frustrated by my inability to visualize what he had in mind. “Just cut a spoiler out of plywood and mount it under the nose with angle iron.  Make it stick out about a foot.” He was drawing pictures in the air with his hands, tracing an imaginary arc in front of an imaginary coach. “Just tell your guys what I want. They’ll understand.”

So I went to our R&D shop, told the guys what I thought I wanted (Johnnie was right; they got it immediately), and 90 minutes later they were bolting a chin spoiler to the lower front face of a 36-ft diesel pusher motorhome. I thought it was an absurd idea, until I took that coach out on the freeway moments later. It felt like it was glued to the highway. Planted. Solid. Where before being passed by an 18-wheeler turned the See Ya into an E-ticket Disney ride, the coach now felt stable and absolutely unfazed when passing (or being passed by) a semi. I took it on the overpass from the northbound I-15 to the westbound I-10 (one of those high-in-the-sky elevated roadways where the winds were always severe) as an acid test, and I was convinced: The guy was a genius. The See Ya’s handling was dramatically better.

Another time, Johnnie came into my office and without sitting down, he told me he had just read a book about ancient Roman baths and he wanted to do the same in the See Ya.

“A Roman bath?” I said.

“No, no, no,” he answered. I didn’t know what Johnnie was talking about, but I knew it would be revealed soon. The trick was to dope out what the guy had in mind without appearing to be too slow. Sometimes I succeeded. This wasn’t going to be one of them.

“They heated their marble floors with hot springs, you know, geothermal stuff. It kept the floors warm so they didn’t get cold feet,” Johnnie explained, and again, the body language and tonality hinted that he felt like he was talking to a 5-year-old.

“You want me to park the coach over a hot spring?” (I can be kind of slow at times, people tell me.)

Johnnie just looked at me. Then he started drawing pictures in the air with his hands. “There’s hot water coming out of the engine, going to the radiator. Route that hot water through a zig zag pipe under the tile floors down the main hallway in the coach. Like a coil.” He was making zig zag motions in the air, that big gold Breitling watch flashing in front of me as he did so. I got it, finally.  Son of a gun, the Roman bath idea worked. My guys had a prototype mocked up in a day, and the tile floor was satisfyingly toasty. Maybe it doesn’t seem like a big deal to you, but trust me on this, it was. Try walking down the aisle of a motorhome with a tile floor in the winter in your bare feet. There isn’t much under that tile. It gets pretty cold. But not in an Alfa. It was a brilliant idea.

I could go on and on because I have lots of Johnnie stories like that. Those were some of the best days of my working life. Yeah, Johnnie’s a character, but damn, he came up with some amazing things.  I think I learned more working there then I learned anywhere else, and building motorhomes was a lot of fun.  They were like the Battlestar Galactica, huge moving things with features galore.   When I started at Alfa, at the start of the See Ya production run, we were building one coach a week.  When I left a couple of years later, we were building 10 coaches a week.  Good times those were, back in the day.

China’s EV subsidies sharply reduced

An electric scooter in China.

I read an article a couple of days ago in the Wall Street Journal about electric vehicle subsidies being sharply cut back in China.   It seems there are an incredible number of EV manufacturers in China.  487 electric vehicle manufacturers, to be exact.  And if you build EVs over there, there are rich Chinese government subsidies (from both the local and central Chinese governments).  China is scaling these back significantly.  All of the local subsidies are being eliminated, and the central (what we would call federal) government subsidies are only being provided for vehicles with a range of 155 miles or more on a single charge.

You may remember my observations in Riding China about the preponderance of electric motorcycles and scooters over there.  It turns out that the subsidies are not provided on motorcycles and scooters, so they are not affected.  Interesting times.

Destinations!

Our latest book, Destinations, went live on Saturday and it’s now available in a color print version ($29.95), a black and white print version ($12.95), and a Kindle version ($4.95).

Destinations is a collection of motorcycle rides and destinations culled from the pages of Motorcycle Classics magazine.  I’m a regular contributor to Motorcycle Classics, and this book encompasses travel stories going back as far as 2006.  My good buddy and editor Landon Hall (who found a few Rock Store photos I put on the Internet in 2005) is the guy who first got me started in the travel writing business, and he wrote the foreword to this book for me.

Destinations has 56 chapters and 150 photographs (many of which have never before been published).  Great motorcycle hangouts, mountain roads, national parks, motorcycle museums, best kept secrets, how to get there, things to avoid, the best restaurants,  and more for great rides both in the United States and Baja…it’s all here, inviting you to ride the best roads and the most exciting destinations in North America!