It seems like I’m always working a pick and a shovel at Tinfiny Ranch. Situated at 6000 feet in the foothills of the Sacramento Mountains the place is steep with many elevation changes. An arroyo runs past the house so that when it rains (and it rains a lot in New Mexico) my driveway becomes a short-lived trout stream.
Water, being the universal solvent, plays havoc with Tinfiny Ranch and most of my time is spent trying to bend it to my will. Armed with hand tools and 50-pound bags of concrete I’ve managed to carve out a dry spot to sleep. The landforms here are fleeting, changing and slowly make their way 1500 feet down to the Tularosa Valley where huge dust storms blow the accumulated material back up onto the mountain sides. You don’t own real estate here: you trap it.
When Hunter called me to tell me he had found a Kubota tractor for me my first thoughts were about water. Like a slightly soft football a front loader tractor would give me a leg up on erosion. I was on my way to Stillwater a few days later.
Hunter is my riding buddy. We both like crappy old two-strokes and we’ve run them clear across country following the Trans-America Trail. We’ve passed some impassable routes and had bikes lay down on us in the middle of the desert. I know him as Vinnie The Snake from the dirt and only the dirt but it turns out there’s more to Hunter than a beat up old DT400 Yamaha.
We had a day to kill before I picked up the tractor so we went to Hunter’s Skybox at OSU and watched the OSU women’s basketball team dismantle a team from Kansas. The governor of Oklahoma has a suite two doors down and there was unlimited free food along with all the ice cream you could eat. The suite had a commanding view of both the football field and the indoor arena.
When we walked in the coach shook Hunter’s hand and then he shook my hand like I might also be somebody important. Then the TV and radio guys chatted up Hunter including me in the conversation. It was weird: nobody ever cares about what I have to say but my proximity to Hunter earned a listen. Everyone knew and loved Hunter and they loved me too. Nobody called him The Snake. It’s like there are two Hunters, one that lives in a world unlike any I’ve seen. I’ll remember that other, respectable Hunter when he’s tipped over in a mud hole cussing his two stroke.
The Tractor was a beauty with tires so new they still had rubber bar codes visible. Kubota’s have earned a good name in the heavy equipment arena and this L2850 sported a diesel engine that fired right up.
Underneath the driven front end you’ll find a portal-type axle to give the tractor plenty of ground clearance. Everything is leaking a bit but oil is cheap and Tinfiny can use a little dust control. The steering felt tight and Woody, the guy I bought the tractor from takes good care of his stuff.
When I worked construction in Miami it was rare to see a dashboard unbroken. Vandalism was a constant problem. Lights, tires and hoses were routinely damaged by bored kids. The L580 dash was clean and everything works except the tach needle fell off.
At the rear of the Kubota has a two-speed PTO drive that I will be using as soon as CT buys me a backhoe attachment. Amazon has some cool 3-point hoes costing around $3600. You don’t want to do a lot of side digging with a 3-point hoe because the hitch wasn’t meant for big side loads but as long as you are crabbing in a straight line they will work well.
The transmission has high and low range with low range, first gear being super slow. Top end of the tractor in high range-high gear is around 12 miles per hour. With zero suspension 12 MPH is plenty over Tinfiny’s rough grounds.
This lever engages the front wheels. This is pretty important because the front end loader combined with nothing attached to the hitch means the big rear wheels have little traction.
The Kubota’s grille was bent a bit but Woody had a new grille that he hadn’t gotten around to installing. The rest of the tractor is pretty straight. The side lights need new lenses and the back lights could use some love but all in all I’m thrilled with the tractor. How could I not be? Every boy loves a tractor.
I didn’t start out in the typing business looking for swag. I was more interested in seeing my byline on a real, printed object. Being published meant at least one person in the world thought my stuff wasn’t terrible. No, it was like more swag found me. Slowly at first, then faster as the typing game became less and less lucrative, swag has grown ever larger in importance.
CSC sent me a flat-brimmed swag cap. They didn’t need to: I love those guys and how their business plan is a fantastic experiment in mail order motorcycling. I like that the customer needs to be a bit more self sufficient to operate their motorcycles. And I like the hat. With most products becoming sealed off to us regulars, CSC bikes actually require you to dig in. Since I own mostly weird motorcycles that have no dealer support I relate to the pride a CSC owner feels when he sets his own valves or replaces the chain and sprockets on his motorcycle.
Swag works. The preceding paragraph should be all the proof you need. Swag turns customers into advocates and a scuba suit beer cooler celebrating Pandya’s 50th birthday will always come in handy. Come to think of it, Exhaustnotes.us has no swag that I’m aware of. I’ll have to get to work on that.
Unlike motorcycles, I’m not fixated on doing things the old way for electrical energy storage. I run a 
in the Husqvarna that has exceeded all my expectations. The thing never goes dead (no trickle charger needed) it has tons of cranking amps (no need to use the compression release to start the bike) and it weighs nothing. You can install the thing in any position and nothing will leak out. The only drawback to the 
Battery technology is advancing rapidly with so many new combinations of lithium with something else, molten salt or rare elements only found in war torn areas. It’s hard to know which technology will win out in the end but for now, in my solar-powered shed system, lead-acid still offers the best electron storage option.
Lead-acid batteries are easily scalable and nearly any voltage or amperage desired can be achieved with large, simple jumper cables. I’m running 4, group 31, 12-volt batteries in my 24-volt system. My future plans are for 16 batteries total but there’s no rush. I can take as long as I want to get there or 8 batteries might prove to be enough for my usage level.
Most important for me: They are cheap! The four deep cycle marine batteries in my off-grid system @100 amp/hour each give me a total of 2400 watts of storage (@ 50% capacity) for 400 dollars. If I ever get to 16 batteries I’ll have 9600 watts of storage for around 1600 dollars. Compare that to 7000 dollars for 7000 watts of storage from Tesla’s Powerwall.
I’m not a Luddite when it comes to battery technology on motorcycles or power tools but for me the new designs and materials haven’t yet made sense for large, stationary storage banks at low cost. I’ll revisit the topic if Tesla reduces the price of their Powerwall by half or some new manufacturer comes up with a wiz bang combination of chemicals that outdoes ancient lead acid technology.
Motorcycle road racing has taken quite a beating in America. The biggest stars are overseas and the entire series (whoever runs it) has become sort of a Triple A, minor league pastime. There are some really great riders in our pavement series but none of it seems to translate to The Bigs.
Would we see Mees on a factory Indian road race bike scoring a few pavement points to keep his dominant championship streak going? Would JD Beach win the #1 plate several times in a row, as he seems the most multi-talented? Would a dark horse, semi-privateer like Carver show a natural talent on the asphalt and go on to win at Moto GP? What if Shayna Texter turned out to be a beast on the twisting streets of COTA and showed a wheel to Marquez? This mixing of talent and styles gave the US years of GP dominance in the past and it will do it again.
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.
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.
The Ruger would rust if you didn’t keep it clean and the bottles weren’t shattering enough to suit me so the next gun I bought was a stainless steel Smith and Wesson .357 revolver with a 4-inch barrel. When you pulled the trigger you could see the drum turn, the hammer draw back and flames shoot out the sides of the weapon. It was like a miniature cannon. You got dirty shooting the thing. The whole process of firing the S&W revolver satisfied me on so many levels that at this point I was perilously close to becoming a gun nut.
For some reason, maybe it was God’s Hand, I didn’t become a gun nut. The trips out to Kitchen Creek became fewer. The ammunition got more expensive and the two pistols were packed away. It was only a few years ago that I dug the guns out. The Ruger was a mess. Rust had scarred its smooth gun-black finish and the mechanism was stuck. It took hours to get the thing cleaned up and the rest of the day to figure out how the various parts fit back into the handgrip. Being stainless, The Smith was fine, only needing a bit of oil to loosen things up.
This Christmas CT gave me one of those heavy steel spinner targets, the kind with a large round target on the bottom and a smaller one on the top. When you manage to hit the thing the target spins around like a kinetic lawn ornament. I guess CT enjoyed our day at the range more than I did. Now she wants a Mosberg pump shotgun and one of those scary looking assault style rifles. You know, for home protection. It seems like we might end up with a gun nut in the family after all.
I log into several online groups as a way of avoiding doing something constructive. One of the groups features photos of New Mexico. Some of the photos are spectacular, some are way over-processed. One guy started labeling his photos as “No Filter New Mexico.” This means the photo has not been doctored beyond the camera’s initial setting. A long-winded argument ensued pitting photographers (the guys who watermark their embarrassing, Willie-Wonka-colored Martin-landscape shots in an attempt to retain rights) and snap-shooters.
If I shoot a scene and then push the photo edit sliders to their limits did I create art or am I just working within an algorithm provided by the software manufacturer? Is the coder who designed the software the real artist? If I successfully dial a number on my cell phone is that art? No way! Now say I invite 500 people to a theater and I go on stage and successfully dial a phone number on that exact same phone. Is that art?
Maybe art is made when its creator declares it as art. Even bad art like those over-processed photos are art if Slider-Man says so. The watermark guys proclaim their saturated images as art, who am I to deny them their petition?
In the days of film, and before that when oil painting was the best way to record a scene, a modest-to-hard level of difficulty was involved. Cameras have become so good that nearly anyone can take a technically decent photo. Selecting the best angle and framing the photo are artistic things but they pale in comparison to carving a block of marble or tossing feces onto a canvas.
There are only a couple Ducatis that make my Dream Bike fantasy garage and the numero uno, top dog, ultimate Ducati is the springer 860. Unlike most Ducatis, this square-case, 90-degree, V-twin motorcycle eliminates the positive-closing desmodromic valve actuation system and in its place uses a conventional spring-return valve train. To some posers this change negates the whole reason for owning a Ducati. Not in my view: The ability to set valve lash with only a potato peeler on a motorcycle axle deep in cow manure plus the fact that I rarely run any motorcycle at valve floating RPMs means Desmo Ducks hold no advantage for me.
Is it wrong to love a motorcycle solely for its looks? Giorgetto Giugiaro’s Jetson-cartoon styling speaks of optimism and a bold stepping-forth into the future. It looks fabulous and slabby and never ages in my eyes. This is one of those motorcycles you can stare at for hours. Why stop there? I’ve never ridden an 860GT so I’m just extrapolating from Ducati’s past performance but I’m sure the thing will handle street riding without issue.
The bikes were available with electric start for the kicking-impaired and after 1975 Ducati exchanged the perfect angular styling for the more traditional, rounded Desmo GT look. It was an error that I may never forgive them for. The springer 860 stayed in production a few more years but Ducati decided to go all in with desmodromic to give their advertising department some thing to boast about.
The China tour story I wrote took a long, winding road to publication. I like to pre-sell any feature-ish story and since we had recently done another big CSC story at That Other Magazine I pitched the China ride to Editor in Chief, Marc Cook. He liked the idea and suggested making the story less about the CSC motorcycle and more about the ride.
The paper magazine business has taken a beating in the last few years. One magazine that seems to have their stuff together is American Iron, a book that focuses on American-made motorcycles. Somehow these guys get away with charging subscribers what it costs to produce 13 issues a year. For those of you counting that is three more issues a year than Cycle World and Motorcyclist combined!