Author: Joe Gresh

My Big, Fat, BMW Obsession: A Cautionary Tale

Unlike today, when I tend to mercilessly ridicule BMW motorcycles and their insufferable owners there was a time when I ended up owning several of the damn things. Only one, a 1973 R75/5, was actually bought on purpose. When I got the R75/5 it was in almost new condition and just 2 years old. I was living in Florida and traded a small-window 1957 Volkswagen van and $1300 dollars for the bike to a guy who lived in Fort Lauderdale. That van would be worth a wad of money now but who has time to wait around for the zeitgeist? Certainly not me, I’m a man on the go.

The R75/5 was a great bike. It wasn’t as fast as the Japanese 750’s but it weighed 100 pounds less than those bikes. Weight has always been important to me. The 750 was pretty good off road and I used to take it scrambling over at the Florida East Coast railway yards. The FEC had thousands of unused acres where my pals and I could ride motorcycles, set things on fire and strip down stolen cars.

The biggest problem with the Toaster Tank 750/5 was a really bad high-speed weave. I never got it past 100mph because it was so scary. BMW put a steering damper knob on the top triple clamp but you had to crank it down so tight to stop the weave you could hardly turn. This weave was somewhat cured by a 2” longer swing arm on the /6 models. The next biggest problem on the 750 was a weak charging system. If you ran the headlight too long the piss-poor alternator couldn’t keep the battery hot enough to use the electric start. I rode that BMW all over the USA in 1975 and had to kick start it most of the way.

My next BMW came along when I was living in San Diego, California. It was a R60/5 with a faded pink, 6-gallon gas tank. It was one of those cheap deals that you buy just because it’s so cheap. I think I paid around $100 for the bike because the engine didn’t run. The R60/5 model was 600cc. On R60s the final drive was re-geared to reflect the lower horsepower. The only one I ever rode was dramatically slower than the 750. It was a lot slower than the 150cc difference would have you believe and wouldn’t go fast enough to weave. I never liked the 600cc BMW because it was such a dog. I ended up with one anyway.

I unstuck the pistons and took the $100 R60/5 engine apart. It wasn’t in bad shape inside so I decided to lightly hone the cylinders and put new piston rings in the thing. My buddy Glenn and I rode my 550 Honda 4-banger up to a Los Angeles BMW dealer to get parts. That’s how it was, if you were going to LA for parts your buddy might tag along just for something to do. We didn’t have cell phones. I don’t remember if there was a BMW dealer in San Diego back then. It was kind of a one-horse town and you had to go north to LA for a lot of reasons. I’ve also forgotten the name of the dealer I went to but I think it was off the 405 somewhere, maybe Long beach.

Amazingly the BMW dealer had the rings in stock but wanted $35 per piston for each set of 3 rings or $70 plus tax. I was stunned at the cost. I was earning $3.25 an hour back then. You could get 8 pistons, 8 wristpins and 8 sets of rings for a Chevy small-block for $100. You could buy 2 brand new Volkswagen jugs and 4 pistons plus rings for $100. I owned cars that cost less than $70.

I remember getting pissed off at the BMW parts guy and yelling at him, “I’ll make my own damn rings!” and storming out of the place. Outside the dealership Glenn tried to talk some sense into me. “Where else are you going to get rings?” He said. I was kind of stubborn, “Screw it I’ll make them.” I said again, but not as loudly as before. We rode back to San Diego without any BMW parts.

Turns out, making piston rings is not so easy. I tried to find an engine that used a piston the same size as the R60 but time passed and the R60/5 just sat there in pieces. I ended up selling the R60/5 to Glenn for the same amount of money as I paid for it. Glenn rode back alone to the same BMW dealer and bought the rings. He eventually got the bike running but it was so boring to ride he sold it shortly thereafter.

I was done with BMWs for 25 years or so until my buddy Roger gave me his basket case R60/5 when I was living in the Florida Keys. Roger had taken the bike apart after another guy had crashed it and bent the frame. Roger said to me “I’m never going to get that bike running, do you want it?” And like the idiot I am I said “Yes I do.”

Those old, oval-tube BMW frames are some tough cookies. It took a lot of heat and hammering to get it fairly straight again. I discovered Bob’s mail order BMW store and finally purchased that set of rings. They were still $35 a side but I was making a bit more money so it didn’t seen so bad. Plus, I had calmed down over the years.

I freshened up the R60’s engine, cleaned the carbs, and painted the now kinda-straight-ish frame. I bought a new exhaust system to replace the smashed original ones, got new tires and tubes, took a kink out of the front wheel and had myself a roller. I pulled dents out of the 6-gallon tank and bonded it up a bit, then painted the tank and started assembling the motorcycle. I had it a few days from running when the hurricane hit.

Four feet of storm surge flooded the shed where the R60/5 was parked. The engine and gas tank were full of salt water. Our house was wrecked. Our other vehicles were submerged and ruined. It was a disaster. All I had time to do was to drain the salt water out of the Beemer’s engine and flush it with gasoline. As you can imagine, new, more urgent projects sprung up and I finally gave the BMW to another buddy, Charlie.

Charlie tinkered with the bike for a few months but the engine finally seized up and he sold it for $200 to some other poor sucker. So you can see why I’m a bit shirty when it comes to BMWs. I mock them to cover my pain. We have had a long, tortured history, BMW and I, and in that long history I nearly always come out on the losing end.

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ExNotes Review: Site Advertising

In the good old days of paper magazines a writer could break even or make a little money from a story. That money was paid upon publication. Those days are mostly gone. There are only a few motorcycle magazines left. For a reader, that’s a good thing: Only the best writers are still being published in a condensed, paper format. There is no need to buy a dozen magazines as all your favorite authors are paddling in one of three lifeboats: Rider, Roadrunner or Motorcycle Classics. For the rest of us the modern Internet format requires a scramble for revenue. It’s a battle of pennies, clicks and views.

The ExhaustNotes.us website is truly a labor of love. It began when Joe Berk and I found ourselves at loose ends. Berk retired from his job of promoting CSC Motorcycles and I was dumped (along with everyone else) from Motorcyclist magazine when they re-styled the magazine in a futile attempt to save the sinking publication. Berk still has his gig at Motorcycle Classics but the man writes zillions of words a day. He needed another outlet for his creative juices. I had given up writing and was standing around watching concrete cure. I tried to get on at Motorcycle.com and had a few stories published there, but budgets are tight in the Internet motorcycle content business. From this journalistic crossroads the ExhaustNotes.us website was born.

If you factor in our time, ExhaustNotes.us doesn’t really pay. Berk handles all the mechanics of the site and we have a web guy that does some magic behind the scenes stuff. Then there’s a cost to host the website. On the plus side, the site earns money from the advertisers and gets a fraction of a penny when you purchase an item from Amazon links in our stories. We don’t do a lot of Amazon linking as it’s such a small amount of revenue it’s hardly worth the bother.

The big bucks come from the Google ads you see sprinkled around ExhaustNotes.us stories. We have no control over these ads. Google places them according to some algorithm that uses words in the story to determine what type of ad is shown. For example, one of Berk’s gun stories will cause gun ads to appear. Jeep stories will attract Jeep ads. If I do a story on the Yamaha RD350, Asian foot-fetish ads or penis-enlargement ads will pop up. Come to think of it, maybe that’s only on my screen view. We even had to delete an ExhaustNotes.us give-away story because Google flooded the story with fake contest-entry forms. We didn’t want readers to be scammed.

This is where you, the reader, comes in. ExhaustNotes.us gets paid from Google each time you click on one of their ads. You don’t have to buy anything like Amazon links. Usually the revenue from Google ads varies from $1 to $10 on a good day. That’s not a lot but over a month it could add up, you know? Anyway, Berk has a pretty good idea of how much money comes in and ExhaustNotes.us would like you all to participate in a money-grabbing experiment.

Here’s the deal: After you read an ExhaustNotes.us story, click on the ads that are inserted in the story or above the story. It doesn’t have to be a current story; one from the archives works just as well. Each time you click on a Google ad we get a fraction of a penny or 35 Dodge coins, whichever is more. Share the ExhaustNotes.us story to your social media. You never know when something will go viral and ExhaustNotes.us will earn $25 in a single day. The more people that view a story mean more clicks and more ad revenue.

As I edit this story it sounds like I am complaining about the writing business. That’s not the impression I want to leave you with. I’m fine with not making money from writing but being fine with it is not the same as accepting it. I’m looking for a steady revenue stream, man. Berk says we have written over 1000 stories on ExhaustNotes.us and that’s a lot of writing. Even if Berk did 80% of it that’s still 200 more stories than I would have written if ExhaustNotes.us didn’t exist. When Berk first started ExhaustNotes.us I asked him why we should go through all the hassle. Berk told me:  Writers gotta write.  And so we do.

Keep on clicking those Google ads, my brothers.

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ExNotes Review: Berk’s Jeep Wrangler Review

You know you’re scraping the bottom of the content barrel when you start reviewing the reviews on your own website. It’s lame, I know, but Berk’s recent Jeep review, while mostly positive, lacked the context that a long time Jeep owner can bring to the table. In short, Berk felt the Jeep was fun but several flaws kept it from being a car he would actually buy. I use the word car on purpose because if you compare the Jeep Wrangler to a car it will lose every time.

One of Berk’s observations was that the two-door Wrangler lacked interior space for normal day-to-day operations. Specifically, that the Jeep didn’t have enough room to carry his gear to the shooting range. It’s a valid complaint but that didn’t stop those guys on TV’s Rat Patrol show from harassing Rommel’s Africa Corps. There is a 4-door Wrangler version that provides a bit more room for gear but for this review-review we will stick to the 2-door.

Berk mentioned the ride quality of the Wrangler as being less than ideal. The Jeep Wrangler, like Harley Davidson, is trapped by its own success. Jeep customers want a Wrangler to be a Wrangler regardless of modern advancements. Wrangler 4×4 protocol requires straight axles front and rear and body-on-frame construction. These rules are inviolate and will remain as long as there is a Jeep Wrangler. If Jeep came out with a unibody, independently sprung Wrangler the true believers would be jumping out of 5th story windows. Continuity is more important than comfort.

Add up the short wheelbase, heavy unsprung axle weight, relatively light sprung weight and you get a choppy, rough ride. Jeep has steadily improved the ride of the Wrangler through the years. The difference between my 1992 Wrangler and a new Wrangler is shocking. The difference between a new Wrangler and any other new car is just as shocking. My 1992 can be painful on rough roads.  Sometimes you have to stop and walk.

Berk mentioned that the Wrangler felt a bit loose at speed. He was running 80 miles per hour! That kind of speed is unbelievable to me. The brick-shape of a Wrangler is the worse aerodynamic shape you could devise. The Wrangler would be more aerodynamic if you flipped it around and made the back the front. This horrible shape causes massive separations in the laminar flow around the Jeep body. Huge sections of air break away from the body buffeting the Jeep to and fro. If you managed to get a Wrangler going fast enough its paint would peel off from cavitation. All this turbulence causes noise and vibration; the Jeep is actually much quieter when driven in a perfect vacuum.

Berk noted the poor fit and finish of his rental car. The gas cap bezel was really ill-fitting which shouldn’t happen on a car with such a long production run. I’ll give him this one. Jeeps are put together sort of sloppily but you have to realize the abuse they will be put to. Once your Jeep has been rolled over on its side you will appreciate the fact that it looks no worse than before. Underneath the Jeep, where it matters, you’ll find tough running gear that can take a fair bit of abuse. Jeep owners regularly screw up their Wranglers with huge tires and massive suspension alterations then they try to break them over rocks. The Jeep running gear stoically put up with the stupidity. You can’t do this kind of stuff with a real car.

Berk felt that 16 miles to a gallon for a 4-cylinder Jeep was not great fuel economy. Remember, he was cruising 80 miles per hour. My 4-cylinder Wrangler gets around 15 miles to a gallon at 60 miles per hour. It doesn’t take a math teacher to figure out the fuel economy on the Wrangler has been greatly improved through the years. Unfortunately I can’t give you the gas mileage for my Jeep at 80 miles per hour because my 1992 won’t do 80 miles per hour.

Like a Harley owner, a Jeep owner becomes adept at making excuses for their Jeep. Also like a Harley you don’t get a normal consumer experience in a Jeep Wrangler. The car is a throwback; a living dinosaur that you can use to ply the dirt trails of America. The Wrangler is constructed like cars were in the 1940s with only the electronics modernized.

Buying a Wrangler for commuting is silly for all the reasons Berk mentioned in his review. However, if you live on a steep dirt road that gets snow in the winter a Wrangler makes sense. In 4-wheel low you’ll be amazed at the hills you can climb and the places you can get stuck. I think Berk summed it up nicely when he said the Wrangler is a fun car to drive but he wouldn’t want to own one. I agree with that sentiment, except I own one.

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5 Things I Don’t Like About The Custom Motorcycle Scene

The Quail motorcycle show Facebook page posted up photos of the bike that won Best In Show. The bike was a Vincent V-twin engine slung into a banana style frame. The front wheel was almost all brake drum with the levers and pivots inside the polished backing plate/dust cover. The foot pegs were forward mounted and the handlebars were very low attached near the top triple clamp, the control levers were internal cable type to leave a clean tube.

To ride the bike, if it was even rideable, your body would be bent into a severe “C” shape. For me, the bike would be unusable and I don’t think anyone ever really planned on riding it more than a mile or two. I don’t want to pick on this particular machine.  There is no denying the skill that went into the build, but the bike reminded me why I’ve gone sour on custom, show bike stuff. Here’s my list of 5 reasons I don’t like custom bikes.

Reason Number One: Professional Builders

I understand that people have to make a living. If you are good at building custom bikes you should get paid for it. However, from the customer standpoint hiring others to build a custom bike for you ultimately means nothing. Well, not nothing…I guess it means you have the money to hire a builder. Yea you.

Motorcycles are tools to build your personal experience.  They are the means, not the end. The rides you take in the stinging rain, switching to reserve on a lonely highway or cold ice cream from a glass-top freezer are the true artistry of the motorcycle. Making the mundane exceptional is the reason motorcycles exist. Having a custom bike won’t make that experience better any more than a gold-plated paintbrush will make you a better artist. Throwing tons of money at a professional builder to win a bike show hollows out the win. What was it for? You didn’t paint that picture.

Reason Number Two: Regressive Engineering

I’ve built custom bikes in the past. They would be considered Tracker-Style today but back when I built them the goal was lighter weight, improved handling, better braking and more speed. I wasn’t averse to making the bikes look cool as long as it didn’t get in the way of a better motorcycle. The modern custom bike scene sees master engineers and amazing craftsmen devoted to making fantastically intricate clockwork movements that cannot tell the time of day. Look Ma, no hands! Useless quality, while nice to look at, is still useless. The custom-built bike turns out to be a worse motorcycle for all the effort. The handling is worse, the practicality is much worse, the braking is worse.

We see beautifully designed, narrow tube chrome forks that work as if they have no suspension. We see swoopy frames connected with buttery welds but poor in every factual way. They scrape the ground rounding a mild corner and flex under the slightest load. Think of the misallocation of skills: we have our best and brightest motorcycle engineers and craftsmen wasting their time building non-functional wall hangings. We are squandering talent and treasure and there isn’t that much around here to squander.

Reason Number Three: Art for Art’s Sake

I hear you. These are rolling art projects. Custom bikes aren’t supposed to be sensible. I learned a long time ago that art is defined by the artist: If you say it’s art then it’s art, dammit. My problem is that there’s nothing particularly new or innovative going on in the custom bike scene…oops… I mean art world. The motorcycles are all derivatives of each other with the few new-ish ideas getting beat to death over and over. Is it really art if we are just coloring between the same lines? Is bolting on a tiny fireman’s ladder art? How low can we set the bar?

I’m going to cause hurt feelings here but the custom bike scene is no more artistic than making a different length lanyard in your grade school arts and crafts class. In fact, it is craft, something that can be taught and through repetition honed to perfection.

Reason Number Four: Stupidity is the New Cool

Up until the 1980s most custom bikes were rideable. A little rake, a bit of extension to get the stance right, funky pipes, and maybe a cool seat, but the bike could still get around without causing too much pain. Those days are gone, replaced by the excess, the decorative, and the soulless. Now custom bikes must tick all the stupid boxes. Hubless wheels? Check. Horribly ugly bagger with giant front tire? Check. Cookie cutter, store-bought choppers that look exactly the same as every other cookie-cutter chopper? Check. If you’re going to remove the burden of function and place a motorcycle in the art world then that world demands better than what we see now. How many Mona Lisa copies does it take before someone builds a melting landscape? The custom scene is boring crap and deep in your heart you know it.

Reason Number Five: I’m Getting Too Old For This

When we were kids we used to cut up good running motorcycles thinking we were doing something worthwhile. My dad would tell us to leave it alone, that we were just going to make it worse and he was right. We did make the bikes worse. There are a million Harleys out there so go ahead and butcher them if you must, but when I see a nice classic bike tore up to make look it look like a child’s toy I say, “I’m getting too old for this.” I realize that everything I cherish will disappear eventually. I know that it’s your bike and you can do what you want to it. I know it’s none of my business, but if destroying nice bikes to make boring customs is your thing I don’t have to like it. Skill and craftsmanship do not absolve you from responsibility and I will not go quietly into the night.

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ExNotes Review: The Penske Racing Museum

I grew up in the South, way deep south, which means open-wheel automobile racing has always been a little suspect to me. Stock cars built in the good old USA slamming into each other every corner was auto racing. Tracks were small ovals either paved or dirt and the fence wouldn’t save you if a Chevelle climbed the wall just right. Stock car racing was total immersion. Saturday night, roasted peanuts, greasy pizza, burning rubber and beer will transport me right back to Hialeah Speedway in the late 1960s. For a young punk it was a glorious way to pass a hot Florida evening.

Yankees raced open-wheel. Yankees to me were any people that lived north of Fort Lauderdale. I couldn’t tell the difference between Indy cars and Formula One cars and truthfully, I still can’t. The open wheel cars raced far away from the crowd: almost nothing ever hit you at an Indy car race.

Roger Penske was a successful Indy car team owner before he started renting big yellow moving vans and he has a multibrand luxury car dealership with a small museum attached. I had time to kill so I wandered over to the museum with a southern-chip-on-my-shoulder, cocky, dirt oval attitude: Show me what you got, Big Daddy.

The museum is small, all on one floor with a gift shop and a lunch counter a floor above the display cars. Turns out Penske won the Indy 500 more frequently than you would assume and the 500-mile winners in the museum are the actual race cars tidied up for display.

The first engine on your left as you enter the place is Mercedes-Benz 500/265E. Right off the bat with the foreign car stuff, you know? This sweet looking 3-1/2 liter V-8 put out 1024 horsepower at the relatively low RPM of 9,800. The first time out this engine won the pole and the Indy 500 in 1994 with Al Unser behind the wheel. The Mercedes 500 was the first car to pull off this stunt so I guess they got it right the first time.

Mark Donohue won the 1972 Indy 500 in this Drake-Offenhauser powered McLaren M16B. With a 4-speed transmission the car burned through methanol 75 gallons at a time. The car averaged 191 miles an hour for the race, which is about 91 miles an hour faster than the cars on my beloved dirt ovals.

Rick Mears of off-road racing fame won the 1984 Indy 500 in a Penske-March car powered by a Cosworth-Ford. Averaging 207 miles per hour I’m guessing the Cosworth fairly sipped fuel from its 40-gallon methanol supply. Or, maybe the pit crew was really fast. When you’re circling in top gear all the time you don’t need more than the four speeds the March transmission provided.

Now we’re getting somewhere: a Chevy 2.65 liter V-8 pumping out 720 horsepower at 10,700 RPM. This engine won the 1991 Indy 500 with Rick Mears behind the wheel again. This engine went on to win 72 races.

I find it hard to believe that these tiny, multi-plate clutches can hold up for 500 miles pushing 200 miles per hour. The things aren’t much bigger than a motorcycle clutch. Maybe I’m wrong?  Is this an accessory drive?

Penske didn’t just run teams, he raced real cars like I like. This Pontiac super-duty 421 cubic-inch beast won the 1963 Riverside 250 with Penske behind the wheel. A Borg Warner T10 handled the shifts, Monroe Regal Ride absorbed the bumps and a Carter AFB mixed the fuel/air. I guarantee the bodywork was not this nice in 1963.

Joey Logano won the 2015 Daytona 500 with this Penske-chassis Ford Fusion. The 358 cubic-inch Ford put 775 horsepower to the famed Daytona high banks.

The photos above show an unusual Lola T-152, 4-wheel drive Penske car from 1969. It’s plenty potent with 850 horsepower squeezed from the Drake-Offenhauser engine at only 9000 RPM. That big hair drier on the side must have made lots of boost. This car also lugged around 75 gallons of methanol.

There are more cars and engines at the Penske museum but I’m leaving them out so you’ll have to visit the museum to see them all. Penske even built a small racetrack for Mini Coopers behind the museum but that area has been taken over as a parking lot by the dealerships. Land Rover enthusiasts have a couple of artificial hills to practice on but the lady who runs the museum said that they don’t use those hills any more.

I came away from my visit impressed by Penske’s many racing successes. He’s not just a rental truck guy. I’ll go as far as to say if Penske raced at Hialeah Speedway back in the late 1960s he would have probably banged fenders with the best of them and carried many golden trophies somewhere north of Fort Lauderdale. Where the Yankees are from.

The Penske Racing Museum is located at 7125 E Chauncey Lane in Phoenix, Arizona.

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Dream Bikes: Suzuki GT 750

My grandparents on my mother’s side owned a cabin in Cashiers, North Carolina. Built on the side of a steep hill you had to hand carry everything up to the cabin. Maybe if we had a 4-wheel drive we could have made it to the cabin, but my grandparents owned a Volkswagen van. The VW would start spinning its wheels halfway up. Mr. Price, who also lived in Cashiers, built the cabin.  It was a slow process as The Grands paid as they went, never going into debt for the place. Mr. Price was easy going and worked on the place whenever he was sent money.

After about ten years of walking to the cabin my Grandfather, Grandmother, Billy Mac and me poured a concrete driveway to the cabin. It was about ten feet wide. The concrete trucks couldn’t make it all the way to the top so we manhandled buckets and buggies to pour that section. Further down we could just dump it out of the truck into the forms.

The job was easier than it sounds because we only had to strike off the top and finish the edges. The driveway had a concave shape to funnel water down the middle like a big sluice. We left the driveway as poured to provide a high traction, rough surface. At intervals we troweled an expansion groove. All in, the driveway was probably 300 feet long. After the driveway was built a car could make it to the cabin and it was real luxury not having to carry stuff up the steep, muddy driveway.

The road to the cabin was dirt, winding past two small lakes that were full of fish. Several roads split off the main road and at the last split before Gran & Gramp’s cabin there was a house with a purple-pink, GT750 Suzuki parked out front. The GT had three, flat black expansion chambers fighting for position underneath the crankcase.

I had read about the Suzuki triple cylinder in Popular Mechanics magazine but this was the first time I saw one in real life. Popular Mechanics did a road test on the bike and loved the big Suzuki. It got fairly good fuel mileage and Suzuki’s complex CCI oiling system was stingy with the injector oil. The Suzuki 750 was regarded as a touring bike, not at all like Kawasaki’s mad, mad three-cylinder H2 750.

The air in the mountain valleys carried sound in mysterious ways and when the owner of the Suzuki started the bike those expansion chambers cackled in on me from all directions at once. Was he above me, below me? Heading away or towards me? It was surround sound of the very best kind. I had a Honda Mini Trail and would ride over to the Suzuki house just to look at the bike. Polished aluminum cases, a color-coordinated radiator, big tachometer and speedo with a water temperature gauge: it didn’t seem like a touring bike to me. It seemed like something from another planet.

In the USA GT750s haven’t reached silly H2 prices yet. Their slightly boring reputation keeps the price low-ish. The engines last quite a long time and a GT750 turning 50,000 miles without a rebuild would not be unusual. A quick Google search brings up runners from $3500 to $8000 and that’s not bad compared to the overly complex modern stuff we are faced with at the local Mega Brand Dealer.

Probably the later GT750s are better motorcycles than the early ones. Suzuki improved the front brake and bumped up the power slightly towards the end of production. The first GTs had a Buck Rodgers look that you either loved or hated. I loved it. Really, I’d be fine with any year. The double-sided, twin leading shoe front brake on the first one was a thing of beauty and I’m guessing stopped good enough.

Of all the three-cylinder Suzukis I think the 750 is best. The 380 was a dog, the 550 was almost unnoticeable on the bike scene in those days. The big, water-cooled GT 750 made a huge splash (ha) and still ranks as one of my one-day, must-have dream motorcycles.

The Suzuki GT 750 is a sensible classic that you can ride everyday and cross the country on if the mood hits you. That’s not why I want one. I want one because of the sound it made in the mountains of North Carolina. I can hear it as I type this sentence, a cross between the whining of a tornado and the keys of a mechanical typewriter slapping onto the page.

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Ho-Made Tools I Don’t Use

I’ve been cleaning out the shed on and off for about four years now. When we first moved here we stuffed everything into the shed. There was no time to sort through the junk. We had to return the Penske truck. After the junk sat there a few years the mice made a lot of decisions for us: if it was chewed up we tossed it.

I had tools at my work, tools at the house, tools at The Love Shack, three of everything. I just can’t bring myself to toss out tools. I have some home-built tools that no longer serve a purpose but I hang on to them. Because you never know when you’ll need to remove the centrifugal oil filter on a Honda 305.

This wrench was made from a cut down socket and a rear fender support from a Sportster. It fits the output flange nut on a boat V-drive. The output flange sits pretty low in the bilge and after a while the salt water splashing around in the bottom of the boat corrodes the seal. To remove the seal you have to separate the prop shaft from the V-drive. The problem is the prop shaft will only slide back a few inches before the prop-shaft flange hits the stuffing box. With this set up I could change a v-drive seal without pulling the engine. It was a stupid move on my part because at the time I was paid by the hour. The faster I went the less I earned. I still keep the wrench; maybe it will fit something else someday.

I mentioned the stuffing box and here’s the cut down pipe wrench I used to remove the packing nut and loosen the lock nut. Stuffing boxes are used where the prop shaft goes through the boat hull, a bronze casting called a shaft log. The stuffing box is a large nut that has several rows of flax packing, also called cat gut. These rows of packing are fitted into the packing nut or the shaft log depending on the design of the shaft log.

The flax packing seals the shaft log where the shaft enters so that water won’t leak into the boat…almost. In practice you want to leave a small drip, maybe a drop every 30 seconds, for a water supply to cool the stuffing box. If you crank down on the packing too much you can burn up the flax and the shaft log will leak. The pipe wrench is short because the stuffing box nut is large and it’s always hard to access between the stringers of the boat. You can buy a store bought stuffing box wrench but they are made like a flimsy adjustable wrench with a cheesy wing nut to lock the jaws into position. Trust me: the pipe wrench works better. A hammer also works but tends to damage the bronze stuffing box.

I didn’t make the dial indicator, just the Z-shaped bracket. This tool is used to set the timing on a 1971 360 Yamaha Enduro. The ’71 Enduro (and other years) has an angled sparkplug hole. The angled hole precludes measuring the piston stroke through the plug hole. With the cylinder head removed this tool bolts up and can measure the stroke. You have to know the piston position to accurately set the ignition timing. Once you’ve set the correct fire position there is a little tab inside the flywheel area that lines up with a flywheel mark. Bending the tab to line everything up will save you from measuring the piston stroke every time you want to adjust the points. It’s a use-it-once type of tool unless you disturb the timing marks. Godzilla runs so good I may never need it again.

This tool is made from Monel, a metal found around boat yards, which isn’t important to its function. There are a few other holes in the tool but I’ve forgotten what they do. The two holes marked by the red arrows will fit a Norton Lockheed front disc brake caliper. In operation you insert a couple drill bits into the tool; the bits line up with two holes drilled into the Lockheed caliper. The caliper plug this tool fits unscrews and allows removal of the caliper piston. You need this long lever because the plug gets pretty tight after 35 years. I’m hanging on to the tool because I may own another Norton one day.

At one time my dad and I owned BMW motorcycles. He had the 600cc and I had the 750. These were early 1970s models with the new, suitcase engine. In building the suitcase engine BMW relocated the cam below the crankshaft so the pushrod tubes were below the cylinder rather than above like on earlier engines. This was done to raise the cylinders higher in the bike allowing steeper lean angles in the corners. The problem was the pushrod tubes leaked oil where they contacted the crankcase. This tool slips over the pushrod tube and by tapping the base of the pushrod tube you could tighten up the seal area. It sounds crude but it was easier than pulling the heads to install new pushrod tube seals. I think you can buy a factory tool that looks much better than mine but does the same thing. I’m not adverse to owning the early GS 800cc, the ones that are clean and light and don’t have all the useless garbage BMW loads onto new motorcycles.

This tool is used to remove the nut from a Honda 305 centrifugal oil filter. I had two 305 Hondas. Those bikes had beautiful engines that were made extremely well. Early Hondas had a spinning cup type filter that oil circulated through. In the spinning motion heavy particles suspended in the oil were slung outward, clean oil flowed through the center. It was a good oil filter and if you wanted to take the engine apart like I did you needed this tool. After thousands of miles you would remove the right side cover to gain access to the filter. A wire clip held the o-ringed lid on the filter and I’d pull the thing off for cleaning. It wasn’t unusual to find 1/8-inch of compacted swarf stuck to the walls of the filter.

Back to boats. This tool is used to remove the macerator from Raritan Crown marine toilets. Working on boats isn’t the glamorous job that you see in the movies. Sometimes you had to fix toilets. The Crown was a very popular toilet back in the day. It used a large starter motor to spin a macerator and two rubber impeller pumps. One pump supplied seawater to the bowl then a macerator chewed up the poo and finally another impeller pumped the mash to a holding tank or overboard depending on how far offshore you were. After much use the seals would start leaking and the stuff leaking out wasn’t peppermint.

You had to disconnect hoses and the bowl then turn the motor (usually) to get to the end plate. Small straight slot screws held on the plastic end plate, removing the end plate allowed access to the macerator and the poo. The macerator had two pivoting chopper arms; removing these arms allowed you to screw the puller tool onto the macerator and a center bolt would pull the macerator. It was not a fun job. I wish I never made the puller tool. I could have told customers, “Sorry I don’t have the tools to fix your toilet.”

I have more homemade, or as we say in the south “ho-made” tools that I may write about on a day like today, a day when I’m sifting through the accumulated junk of my life.

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ExhaustNotes Road Test: Shoei RF SR Helmet

I finally managed to put some miles on my new Shoei RF SR helmet. I took the RD350 out for a loop of the mountains and Tularosa’s TulieFreeze Ice cream shop. I had a Sundae with hot fudge, nuts and whipped cream. TulieFreeze always puts a cherry on top.

Oh yeah…the helmet. The Shoei was quiet at highway speeds, none of my bikes have windshields so I get the air full blast and I like it that way. Turning my head side to side was comfortable and the wind didn’t over-rotate my head side on. All in all the Shoei RS cuts a pretty clean swath through the air. There was no shaking or turbulence.

The fit is perfect on the top parts of my head (your head may vary) but the cheeks are still too tight as the pads press in on my jowly visage more than is appropriate for two people who just met. Luckily the cheek pads are made to be easily removable in case you have crashed. Hopefully the EMT will know to remove the pads before trying to force the helmet off and severing your spinal cord.

I’ll probably wait a bit longer before shaving down the cheek pads. I still have hopes it will break in. I need to stop and remove my helmet to relieve the face-pressure after 50 miles. It gives me a chance to admire the RD’s metallic purple paint. The tight-ish flip shield has loosened up a bit, I gave it a squirt of Shoei oil and after 10-20 flips it’s ok.

Speaking of the shield I have Shoei’s auto-darkening face shield. That sucker cost more than any helmet I’ve ever bought. Since I now have had both cataracts removed from my eyes I can see much better at night. I’m planning to step up the after hours summer riding and the auto-tint works fabulously. From the outside it appears super dark but from inside the helmet it’s not so dark. In fact, I wouldn’t mind if it got darker. As it is I can ride in bright sunlight without squinting. It seems to keep the inside of the helmet cooler.

When the sun goes down it’s as clear as a clear shield. On thing that worries me is how resistant the coating is to gas station squeegees and bug guts. I’m going to put a heavy coat of paste wax on the shield and even that makes me nervous. What if the wax screws it up?

It was cool but not cold on my ride and I totally forgot to open the vents to see if they had any effect of the interior airflow. At 70 degrees with the vents closed it was comfortable. I’ll test the vents after the doctor gives my new eye the ok to thrash around on a motorcycle.

Another week or two and my eye should be back to full strength. That means I can lift concrete bags and ride around without a care. I’ve already planned a trip to Tina’s Mexican food in Carlsbad; they have reopened after Covid shut them down for a year. It’s good to see things returning to normal after such a trying two years.

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ExhaustNotes.us Book Review: Maus By Art Spiegelman

The main reason I read the two-part graphic novel, Maus, is because a school board in Tennessee banned the book from their curriculum due to nudity and bad language. I wanted to see what the school board found so sexy about the holocaust.

Spoiler alerts ahead.

Maus is mostly about one Jewish man’s survival of the Nazi’s effort to exterminate the Jewish people. You’ve heard the stories and the subject has been covered extensively. Maus is a different in that the hero of the book, Vladek (I call him a hero because just surviving took an incredible, heroic will to live.) seems to have an unnatural ability to thrive in any situation no matter how desperate. Vladek never loses his spirit and can find the positive slant in a horror of degradation and abuse. It takes a strong man to feel he’s lucky to be in Auschwitz instead of Birkenau.

The road to the concentration camps was not a direct line. There were many slights and inconveniences that the Jewish people tolerated because this was their home. All their friends and relatives were here. Little by little the Nazis increased the pressure, still no one could have imagined the full extent of the plan and by then it was too late. The numbers killed are staggering. Vladek’s nighttime visit to the bathroom is shocking to us now: he steps over and on dead bodies lying on the floor hoping not to slip down and become one of them.

A second story line runs parallel to the Nazi extermination; this is the son’s story of trying to come to terms with his father’s obsessive cleaning and extreme thriftiness. Vladek’s terrifying life has left him unable to stop preparing for the next holocaust even when he’s safe in America and financially well off. Vladek counts matches to avoid running out, returns half eaten boxes of cereal for credit and is perpetually on the make for a deal. These traits served him well in the concentration camps and I don’t see any downside to them after he is freed. Compared to what Vladek had been through any minor embarrassment on his son’s part was no big deal.

My Dad and grandparents were from the depression era and I saw some of the same kind of economy and scarcity mentality when I was young. For my Dad, wasting food was the biggest crime you could commit. He told me often how joining the US Navy was the best thing he ever did. He couldn’t believe the amount of food the Navy provided and didn’t understand how some of the other sailors could complain about the food. He thought it was heaven.

The comic book style of Maus might make it more accessible to younger readers and the short sentences keep the story moving along. The artwork is black and white using a brutal sort of drawing. Each panel looks like a carved linoleum print. The Jewish people are shown as mice, Polish people are pigs, Germans are cats and the American GIs look like dogs. At times the Jewish characters try to disguise themselves by wearing the mask of a pig or a cat. Sometimes it works.

There is a third storyline running in the background. This is the love story of Vladek and Anja, husband and wife. They become separated in the Nazi’s roundup of Jews. Luck plays a big part in life and by luck Vladek and Anja end up seeing each other in the concentration camps. As the war came to an end and the Allies closed in the Nazis stepped up their abuse and started shipping Jews back into Germany for killing, sometimes leaving the Jews in locked cattle cars for weeks until they were all dead. Vladek survives the rapidly worsening conditions like he always does by eating snow and horse trading for sugar.

I think schools back in the 1960s and ’70s were a bit more enlightened and less of a political/ideological battleground than they are today. The school curriculum was set by professional educators, not by angry, politically motivated parents. I know the story of the holocaust because we were taught it in school. The ovens, the gas chambers, the millions killed by clockwork death factories and the chimneys always rendering fat. The scale was unbelievable. Maus is a believable, personal story and the eyewitness account made me despair for our species.

I truly believe something like the holocaust could happen in America. Native Americans will tell you that it has happened here. Black slaves were treated only marginally better than concentration camp prisoners. I’ve seen how people in our country rose up and cheered a kid who shot protesters. One of their side had shot some people from the other side and that was praiseworthy. I’ve seen Americans fighting over toilet paper. Jewish synagogues and gravestones are routinely defaced. I see Nazi marchers parading in American cities. There is plenty of hate to go around in the American psyche and by the hour we are being indoctrinated to regard the other side as less than human. It takes so little to create a monster.

There is nudity and bad language in Maus but if you’re the type of school board that finds mountains of naked bodies being doused with gasoline and set on fire or a woman dead in a bathtub titillating or erotic there is really nothing more to be said. If your real goal is to stop people from reading Maus then you will identify with the cats in this book.

Anyway, I figure that by the time an American kid reaches 12 years old he’s seen around 50,000 murders on television or at the movies so that kid should be ok to read Maus. The story of the holocaust needs to be told over and over in as many ways as possible. It should be drilled into each student’s head until they can recognize the first sign of evil: like an American school board trying to ban a book about Nazi crimes. Instead of being banned Maus should be required reading from junior high onwards.

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New Boot Day

Life is full of tiny, traumatic incidents. Each day we are met with hundreds of micro-decisions that demand little of our attention yet matter enough to require a few seconds of our time. New Boot Day is not one of these decisions.

I was going to the Harbor Freight in Alamogordo to pick up one of their welding carts that was on sale for $34. Or maybe was it a closeout? Inventory reduction? Anyway, I try not to leave the house in my bathrobe and slippers so I put on my day clothes and boots for the excursion. That’s when it hit me. My boots were looking pretty bad.

I’ve been wearing Rossi boots for about 8 years now. They are super comfortable right out of the box. Style-wise the Rossi boots are no great shakes but who wears boots for style? If the Rossi’s can be said to have a flaw that flaw is that they last forever. The damn things simply never wear out. Since they still work as boots you never know when to call them done.

Today though, the Rossi’s looked pretty tattered. The soles were still firmly attached and the uppers were all in one piece, it’s just that the overall boot looked like something you’d see worn by the unfortunate men in one of those grainy photos of a depression-era food line. I began to be self-conscious about my foot wear: will the clerk at Harbor Freight take a look at my beat up boots and decide to call security?

I’m hard on boots. My shuffling pace, the lazy-feet constantly tripping over rocks and thresholds and my need to crawl around on the ground to do the things I like to do all tend to shorten the life of boots qua Gresh. Popular, well-known brands of leather work-boots will last about 6 months on me.

Conversely, I hate to get rid of a pair of boots unless they are utterly destroyed. Part of it is my natural thriftiness and part of is my deep-seated feeling that I don’t really deserve a new pair of boots. What have I done to warrant new boots? There are many, many people who work much harder than me and these people do not get new boots…ever. I feel like such a fraud wearing new boots. Who do I think I’m fooling?

Then there’s the distress caused by having to witness my brand new boots get scuffed up. One time I had new boots on and the first day I tripped over a sharp piece of rebar, the rebar put a 1-inch long slice on the toe of my new boot. It nearly killed me. Not the trip: the slice. I find my movements inhibited with new boots on. I can’t do my thing and worry about the finish on my boots at the same time.

After much anxiety and teeth gnashing new boots become old boots and my world can settle down. Everything is in order, I can pull on my boots and go about my daily business, be it motorcycle riding or concrete placement, without a second thought. I’m free and loose with old boots.

But not today. Today I have on new boots and every step I take in them is a toxic cocktail of fear and self-loathing. I will step high, always watching for obstacles that could mar the beautiful ebony leather of my new boots. I will bend at the knees. I will stand soles down and I will wish I could leave my new boots safe in their shoebox forever.