Seriously? A 1931 Excelsior-Henderson? That’s my dream bike? Well, sort of. This was a bike that had its day well before I was born, and you might wonder: How did it come to be my dream bike?
The story goes like this: In April of 2006, my good buddy Marty and I rode to the Hansen Dam British Bike Meet here in southern California. It’s a cool event that happens once of twice a year (the next one is this weekend, as a matter of fact). The Hansen Dam meet is a photo op on steroids, as the classic British and other bikes that show up are incredibly beautiful. I’ve been going for years and I have a lot of photos to show for it.
Anyway, the events run like this: The bikes all gather (typically around 400 or so show up), and after everybody socializes and oogles the bikes for a couple of hours (that’s oogles, not Googles), most of the bikes leave for a big ride through the mountains. On advice of counsel (that would be Marty), I never went on the ride. To hear Marty explain it, these are old British bikes, and riding in that parade involves a lot of dodging and weaving to avoid oil spills and, you know, pieces of old British motorcycles. We always wait for the mass exodus to leave, and then Marty and I bail.
That’s what we had done on that April morning back in 2006. Most of the older classics had left and Marty and I were just about to saddle up and go home when this really classy old bike rode in. I was intrigued by the bike, it looked to be all original, and I snapped a quick photo when it rolled to a stop…
Most of the other classics had already left, and this old masterpiece arrived…it was magnificent!
I was totally focused on the bike and I was snapping away with my little Sony Mavica (those early digital cameras were awesome). I hardly noticed the rider…even after he took his helmet off. But then…wowee!
You know, you always think of the great things to say after the fact. I should have asked, “Can I have your autograph, Mr. Letterman?”
Yep, it was Jay Leno. At first, I was the only guy there taking pictures. I asked what the bike was and he told me: A ’31 Henderson. Where’d you find it, I asked. “I just got it. This 92-year-old guy called me from Vegas, said he was getting a divorce, and he needed cash fast…”
I thought old Jay was pulling my leg, and then I saw the video I’ve included below. I guess that was a true story. Go figure.
Jay was pretty pumped up about the bike. I think it might have been the first time he had it out. He told me the bike was running 70 mph on the way over, and he pointed out the speedo telltale to prove it (Mr. Leno talks about that in the YouTube below, too).
Hey, but that’s enough of my yapping and keyboard tapping…check out the photos!
A thing of beauty. Look at this inline four and its cooling fins.What a cool dash! Look at the speedometer’s telltale.The view from the left. Today’s faired motorcycles just don’t get it. You’re supposed to be able to see the motor on a motorcycle! Modern faired bikes look kind of like a washing machine when you take the fairings off. This is a motorcycle!That’s not shaft drive, my friends. Those giant gears drive the speedo cable. That’s how they rolled in the early 1930s. And how about that rear brake!The illustrated choke!The horn, the headlight, and the front suspension. We don’t need no stinkin’ fork seals!With a crowd watching, it took Jay two or three kicks to get the Henderson fired up. In the video below, he does it with a single kick. The badge on Jay’s jacket is from the California Highway Patrol. I’ll bet there’s a cool story behind that, too.
I sort of remembered Jay telling me the bike was a ’36, but I guess my memory is fuzzy. I found a video online and it’s a 1931 model. The video is cool, and I’m including it here for you to enjoy…
I’ve seen Jay Leno a half dozen times or so at motorcycle gatherings here in southern California. He really is a nice guy. There’s no pretentiousness or arrogance at all, and no security entourage. It’s just Jay, a fellow gearhead. I remember talking to this nice elderly woman at the Rock Store souvenir shop and she told me Jay was a nice guy. She went on to tell me that most of the other celebs who show up at the Rock Store were (to use her words) “real assholes.”
When Jay arrives at an event, he is swamped with folks wanting photos and autographs as soon as he takes his helmet off, and he always goes along with the requests. The pattern I’ve observed is that the attention lasts 15 or 20 minutes, folks get their photos and autographs, and then the King of Late Night Comedy is just another one of the guys wandering around checking out the other bikes. I’ve got a few photos of Jay over the years, and it’s always a treat to see him. I came home and told everybody I knew about seeing Jay Leno the first time it happened, and hey, maybe he went home and told everybody he knew about seeing me. I’ve seen Jay Leno at the Rock Store, at Newcomb’s, and at the Hansen Dam events. I even bumped into him once at Warner Brothers, but that’s a story for another time and another blog.
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As you’ll recall from our last installment of the CSC Mustang Baja saga, we left Ciudad Constitucion the next morning and we continued south. We wanted to make Cabo San Lucas that evening. That would be the turnaround point for our journey from southern California to the tip of the Baja peninsula, and we rode the entire distance on our little single-cylinder, 150cc, hardtail Mustang replicas.
Our intent was to bypass La Paz, as it is a large city and we didn’t want to get bogged down getting through it. The map showed a bypass road, and that’s what we intended to grab. But, our plans meant nothing. We missed the bypass road, and we found ourselves in downtown La Paz. Like I said, it’s a big town, and the temperature was over 100 degrees again. We were getting goofy from the heat. It’s almost hard to describe how oppressive the heat was. We were literally in the tropics, having descended past the Tropic of Cancer. High heat, high humidity, the hottest month of the year in Baja, fully suited in our riding gear…it was tough sledding. Simon had the best idea…he started shedding the heavy riding gear.
Simon, with red suspenders flying…all the gear, all the time!John and Arlene, suited up and sweating.
Simon wrote an entry on his blog that said it all…
La Paz is a hot sweaty city on the Sea of Cortez. We are hot and sweaty (other than J. who travels in air-conditioned splendour). We miss the bypass and are lost. I ask a lady for directions. She begins describing the route. I understand individual words, even entire sentences. The whole becomes a jumble. My eyes betray a fatalistic acceptance of inadequacy. The woman halts her instructions. Her smile is familiar. It is the generous female’s smile of understanding when faced by male incompetence. Men are men. They have their uses. However, rational thought is not the male’s strong point (expect even vaguely mature thought and you will be disappointed). Humour them. Lead them by the hand. Such is the Latin way…
In brief, she stops giving directions and says, “It will be best if you follow me…”
A very patient woman and her daughter in La Paz, who guided us out of downtown…
Once we were out of La Paz, we were on the open road again and it was much better. Even when it’s hot, you can still stay cool on a motorcycle if you are moving. When you stop, though, it gets warm and it does so immediately. So, we kept moving. We were approaching the Pacific Ocean on the other side of Baja, and the temperature dropped a couple of degrees.
After La Paz on the eastern side of Baja, it was about 70 miles directly across the peninsula to Todos Santos on the Pacific side. It was a nice ride.
We stopped in Todos Santos for lunch. I grabbed this shot of my bike and I want you to notice the BajaBound.com decal.
Taking a lunch break in Todos Santos. BajaBound!
BajaBound was one of our sponsors on the CSC 150 run, and they are one of our advertisers now. We were very grateful to Geoff and the good folks at BajaBound for their help on this adventure.
I wish I could remember the name of the place we had lunch in when we stopped in Todos Santos. It was great.
John and J enjoying lunch in Todos Santos.Our Todos Santos waitress, Erica.
After lunch, we were on the road again…headed to our next stop and our destination for the evening, Cabo San Lucas!
Simon taking a break just north of Cabo San Lucas. He was 77 years old when I took that photo. I really admire him.Curva Peligrosa means “dangerous curve.” I don’t know how you say “watch out for the goats.”Just north of Cabo. This guy pulled out right in front of us…anybody who would do this has to be a real ass…
We encountered a lot of construction during our trip, which gave the CSC Mustangs a real workout. I would guess that we probably did about 50 miles or so on dirt roads where the main highway was under repair.
We didn’t intend to do any dirt riding on this trip, but we sure rolled through a lot of dirt. One of the things that surprised me was how well the little Mustangs handled in the dirt, and in particular, in soft sand. Soft sand has always scared me on a motorcycle. At the time, I also owned a KLR 650 and a monstrous 955cc Triumph Tiger. With their narrow tires, these bikes would just sink into soft sand and do their best to toss me. The Mustangs didn’t do that. They had wide tires (almost balloon tires) and they were very light. They handled the soft stuff just fine. I’m not advocating using a CSC 150 as a dirt bike, but if you find yourself on a dirt road with soft sand, these bikes handled it with grace.
And finally, the California Scooter contingent arrived in Cabo after 1100 tortuous, hot, and beautiful miles through Baja! This was the perspective from our guest villa.
Cabo San Lucas! That’s the Sea of Cortez on the left, and the Pacific Ocean on the right.
Yep, some of the toughest riding in the world…and we did it! We ran the entire length of the Baja peninsula! I will tell you that I was absolutely beat when we finally made it to Cabo. The heat was bothering all of us, my leg was giving me a lot of grief from a prior injury, and we were all feeling the burn of a long ride. But we made it.
More good Baja trips on all different kinds of motorcycles…check out the ExhaustNotes Baja page!
If you would like to get up to speed on the prior installments of our CSC 150 Mustang replica ride to Cabo San Lucas, you can do so at this link: The CSC 150 Cabo Run
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Purchased used in the early ’80s for $125, this super-clean 200th Year Ruger .22 semi-auto has sent a lot of lead downrange. A comparable Ruger today costs more than $400.
The story goes something like this: William Batterman Ruger (we all knew him as Bill) was a government engineer in the late 1940s who had a good idea for an inexpensive semi-automatic .22 handgun. Ruger’s design featured a grip frame constructed of two steel stampings (left and right sides) welded together, a tubular receiver, and a reciprocating bolt. Most folks think it looks like a Luger (the famed German semi-auto handgun of both world wars), and the name Ruger sounds a lot like Luger, but the new Ruger operation was nothing like the old P-08 Luger. Ruger’s new semi-auto was actually based on the World War II Japanese Nambu pistol. It’s where the idea of a simple back-and-forth bolt in a tubular receiver came from.
The profile is thought by most to be of the more widely-known German Luger, but the design is actually based on the Japanese Nambu.
Ruger left the government, hung out a shingle on a barn in Connecticut, and built 2500 of the things in 1949. They cost under $40 and they sold quickly. Ruger tweaked the design a bit and called the updated version the Mk I, and that version remained in production from 1950 to 1981 in both fixed-sight and adjustable-sight versions. The new Ruger was wildly popular, and for good reason: It was accurate, it was well built, it was nicely finished, and it was inexpensive. In 1976, every gun Ruger produced had a cool roll stamp: Made in the 200th Year of American Liberty. 1976 was the year I came back from an overseas US Army stint, and I started collecting Rugers with the 200th year stamp. One is the Ruger you see here.
Every Ruger manufactured in 1976 carried a 200th Year of American Liberty roll mark. They’re kind of cool, I think.
I picked up the Ruger you see here in the early 1980s, used, for $125 from a small gun shop in Pomona, California. The gun shop is no longer there, and it’s been so long I can’t even remember the name of the place now. You don’t see many small gun shops anywhere in the US anymore (the regulatory hurdles are just too burdensome for most small businesses) and these days, you don’t see too many gun shops of any size in California. Some think that’s a good thing. As you’ve no doubt guessed, I’m not one of those people.
This old Ruger is one of my all-time favorite guns, and I was out on the range with it yesterday. It’s fun to shoot. It was windy as hell out there (so much so, that ultimately the wind peeled the cardboard target board completely off the posts it was nailed to), but I managed to squirt through four boxes of ammo first (that’s 200 rounds). Even with winds gusting somewhere north of 50mph, this 40+ year old beauty (the handgun, not me)gave a good accounting of what a well-built American pistol can do.
Not too shabby for an old guy and an old gun on a windy day. That’s 50 rounds at 50 feet with up to 50 mph gusts. I think maybe I sneezed for that one lower left shot (the only one that didn’t break the 10-ring).
The Ruger 22 semi-auto is now in its fifth design iteration. There were the originals (the first 2500 referenced above). The Mark I followed. Then the Mark II in 1981. The Mark II had the bolt stay open after firing the last round (on mine, it closes on an empty chamber, so you have to keep track of how many shots you’ve fired). The Mark III arrived in 2004, and it featured a magazine release on the side of the grip frame, unlike the prior models’ latch release on the grip bottom (the Mark III’s mag release was more like a 1911’s). Ruger introduced the Mark IV a couple of years ago, and its claim to fame was a tilt-up receiver that made disassembly and reassembly a lot easier. Disassembly has always been easy on these guns; it’s the reassembly part that some folks find challenging.
The Ruger grip frame, formed from two welded steel stampings. The magazine latch is at the bottom of the grip frame.
I love my Ruger. That said, I really wanted a Mark IV when I found out a limited number were available with Turnbull’s color case hardening (which is a beautiful thing to behold). But alas, the Ruger Mark IV is not on the California list of approved handguns. Like I’ve said many times before, we have our share of nutty gun laws here in the Peoples’ Republik, eclipsed only by our healthy dose of nutty politicians.
A Turnbull color case hardened Ruger Mk IV. This is a beautiful handgun. It’s not available in California, unfortunately, or I would own one.
There are some collectors who focus exclusively on Ruger’s extensive array of .22 auto handguns. Lord knows there’s been a bunch of them, from the original through the Mark IV, in blued steel and stainless steel, some with plastic frames, different barrel lengths, bull barrels and tapered barrels, fixed sights, adjustable sights, one with a 1911-style grip frame, and many more. My fixed-sight 200th Year Ruger, the one you see in this blog, is one of the simpler ones and it has served me well. I’ve put a ton of .22 ammo through it in the last 40 years, and I aim to send another ton downrange over the next 40 years.
Good old .22 ammo. Check out the price on this box!
This is a continuation of the preceding blog comparing the new CSC RX4 to the RX3 motorcycle. I probably should have waited until I had taken all of the photos and organized the comparison into discrete areas (like wheels, tires, brakes, and so on), but you’re going to have to deal with the ramblings of a disorganized mind (and that would be mine). With apologies in advance, my ramblings will ramble on in no particular order.
With that as a preface, let’s take a look at the fuel tanks. First up is the RX4 tank, and the big news is that it holds 5.3 gallons instead of the RX3’s 4.2 gallons. Here’s the RX4 tank…
The RX4 fuel tank. The colors are stunning. It holds 5.3 gallons.
You can’t help but notice the paint on this motorcycle. CSC received three bikes for the U.S. certification effort…one in silver, one in red, and one in orange. My bike has the metalflake orange color and it’s visually arresting (it will stop you in your tracks when you see it). Here’s a close up…
Metalflake orange. It’s beautiful. It’s the new fastest color.
There are really three or four colors going on here. One is the metalflake orange. Another is the metallic silver on the tank’s side panels. A third is the even darker metallic gray on yet another side panel (you’ll see that in another photo below). And the fourth is the black of the frame and the molded plastic body bits. It all comes together nicely.
You can compare that to the orange on my 2015 RX3…
My orange RX3. This is the 2015 model, which is little bit different than the later CSC orange on newer RX3 motorcycles.
I mentioned the RX4’s 5.3 gallon capacity. Okay, let me explain a bit more. I haven’t attempted to actually run the thing dry and put 5.3 gallons of gasolina in the tank. 5.3 gallons is the figure Zongshen provided. The RX3’s spec is 4.2 gallons, but that’s not the right number. The RX3’s tank would hold 4.2 gallons if there was nothing else in it, but the tank is also occupied by the float for the sending unit and the fuel pump, and they both take up space. Gerry and I once took a bone dry RX3 tank with the fuel pump and sending unit in it to a gas station, and after really finessing the gas station pump, we were able to coax 3.9 gallons into the RX3 tank. I don’t know if the same situation applies to the RX4 tank. Maybe that 5.3 gallon statistic is really 5.o gallons.
The other thing going on in the RX3 is that the fuel gage and the fuel warning light indicate you are out of fuel when there’s still something close to a gallon left in the tank. As it was explained to me by the guys in Chongqing, that’s to make sure the fuel pump is always surrounded by fuel (it’s how the fuel pump is cooled). I don’t know if the same situation applies to the RX4 fuel tank. I have to get more miles on the bike to let you know.
So, let me do what I have a bad habit of doing, and that’s go tangential for a bit to tell you a little bit more about the RX3 tank, and in particular, the tank on my RX3. You’ll notice that my tank has a panel with a decal that says “Speed” on it. That was the first year of the RX3, and I guess it was Zongshen’s idea of making the motorcycle convey a fast image. The Internet weenies had a lot of fun with that. When they cornered me on it, I told them that CSC originally asked that the bike’s name be “Methamphetamine,” but we would have had to make the font so small you couldn’t read it. That got a laugh and the Speed teasing ended. Mercifully, CSC changed the name to “Adventure” the following year. There’s no such name label or decal on the RX4. I think that’s a good thing.
You probably notice all of the other decals on my RX3’s fuel tank. I like to think of them as campaign ribbons. We put one on their for each of the Baja runs, the 5000-mile Western America Adventure Run, and the Destinations Deal tour. I like them.
Moving right along, here’s a side view of the RX4 showing the engine and fuel tank, and then a similar photo of the RX3…
Right side engine and fuel tank view of the RX4. Note the four colors, the engine guards, the engine cylinder head casting, the crank position windows (on the cylinder head), and the oil accoutrements.The RX3 fuel tank and engine viewed from the right side of the motorcycle.
There’s a lot to take in on those two right side views. Here we go, folks.
I guess the first thing to notice are the engine guards. In the old days, we used to call them crash guards, but these days it’s more correct to say engine guards. Whatever. Anyway, on the RX3, the engine guards extend all the way to the bottom of the engine. On the RX4, they only cover the upper portion of the bike. I don’t know why that is. It might be that if you drop the RX4 on its side, the upper portion is enough. But I don’t know this, and I’m not going to drop both bikes on their sides to find out.
On the RX4, the crank position windows are on the right side of the engine. You can see them just behind the spark plug on the cylinder on the right side. On the RX3, those viewing ports are on the left side of the engine.
The crank position viewing windows. On the RX3, they are on the left side of the engine. One the RX4, they are on the right side of the engine.
The RX3 has an upswept exhaust pipe; on the RX4, the exhaust pipe heads south to run underneath the engine, and then heads north again to an upswept exhaust pipe (you can’t see that in the above photo). While some might view the RX4 exhaust routing as less than desirable from an offroad perspective, I’m okay with it. The RX4 has a steel engine skid plate, and the RX4’s exhaust routing makes getting to the oil fill port a lot easier (it’s just aft of the water pump).
You’ll notice that the cylinder, cylinder head, and upper engine mount castings are all much heftier than are those on the RX3. If you look at the cylinder head casting just aft of the cylinder head, you’ll see a weird-looking ribbed triangular extension with a threaded hole in it. It’s on both sides of the engine.
A fixturing attach point, or perhaps to mount the engine in another bike?
With that threaded hole, it looks like Zongshen left a part off the bike (there’s nothing there). My guess is that this feature is either used to support the engine when it is moving down the assembly line, or that it is there for mounting the engine in another frame (perhaps one of the Dakar rally bikes). I’d like to see Zongshen remove that part of the casting on the RX4 engine; it serves no purpose on the RX4 other than to add weight to a bike that doesn’t need to take on ballast.
The RX4 appears to have the same arrangement for the oil filter and the oil strainers as does the RX3. One strainer is accessible via a threaded cover on both sides of the crankcase; the oil filter is located beneath a cover on the right side of the engine.
Clockwise from 10:00: Small oil filler access hole and large oil filler access hole (just like the RX3), oil strainer cap (just like the RX3; there’s another on the other side of the engine), oil filter cover (just like the RX3), and oil view port (just like the RX3).
That’s enough for today, my friends. We’ll have another RX3 and RX4 micro-comparison posted tomorrow. I’m going to take a break and get out and ride the RX4 for awhile…
Wow, where to begin? I thought I would do this in a single blog, but I quickly realized it’s going to take more than a few.
Joe Gresh thought it would be a good idea to do a comparison between the RX3 and the RX4, and since he’s the brains in this outfit (I’m the good looks), I started the photos for the comparo earlier today. There’s a lot to discuss, and I don’t want to try to cram it all into a “Gone With The Wind” single blog.
So, here we go with the first set of comparisons, and I guess as good a place to get started as any is with a shot from the rear of both bikes…
My RX3 on the left, and the new RX4 on the right. The RX4 has a 19-inch front wheel (the RX3 has an 18-inch front wheel). As a result, the RX4 leans a little bit more to the left than does the RX3 when on the sidestand.
You’ll notice that my RX3 has the stock plastic luggage and the RX4 has the optional Tourfella aluminum luggage. The RX4 will come stock with the same plastic panniers as the RX3, but it will have a taller tailbox than the current RX3 design. The current RX3 tailbox won’t close with a full face helmet, but the taller stock plastic tailbox to be provided on the RX4 will. I’m hoping the 2019 RX3 will have the taller tailbox, too.
The Tourfella luggage is a great option. Both sets of luggage are lockable; the stock plastic bags use the bike’s ignition key. The Tourfella luggage has a separate key. The Tourfella bags have considerably more capacity than the stock plastic bags, and when I rode in Colombia with good buddies Juan and Carlos, my AKT RS3 (a carbureted RX3) had the Tourfella bags. You get a huge increase in capacity (which is nice), but the aluminum bags are wider and I’m guessing they are heavier. You’ll see a slight decrease in fuel economy and top speed with the larger bags on an RX3; I don’t know what they’ll do to both stats on an RX4.
I like the looks of both sets of luggage. I’m a guy who travels light, so the stock bags have been good enough for me on my adventure tours. One other minor disadvantage of the Tourfellas is they are wide. I scraped a taxi splitting lanes when debarking from a ferry ride down the Magdalena River in Colombia. Joe Gresh’s RX3 had the Tourfellas in China, and I watched him have the same problem a couple of times when splitting traffic there. But those big aluminum Tourfellas sure are nice. They are a high quality bit of kit, too. And like I said, you can carry a lot of stuff in those aluminum boxes.
Here are photos shot from the rear of each bike, starting with the new RX4…
The Tourfella luggage on the RX4. It’s 34-inches across those two aluminum panniers. That’s wider than the bike’s handlebars.
And here’s my RX3. It’s one of the very first delivered to the United States, and I’ve done some serious traveling with this motorcycle. It has the stock plastic luggage.
A dirty bike that’s seen a lot of miles…my kind of machine. The width across the stock RX3 panniers is 29 inches (they are 5 inches narrower than the Tourfellas in the above photo, and they are 2 inches narrower than the RX3’s handlebars). I don’t know what the width of the stock luggage will be on the RX4.
Next up are two photos of the exhaust outlets. On the RX4, the muffler has two openings, suggesting the bike is a twin (it’s not; it’s a single like the RX3).
The RX4 muffler. It’s stainless steel, and it contains the bike’s catalytic converter. Two openings aside, the bike is a single. The exhaust note is sweet. I’ll do a video in a future blog.The RX3 muffler, with its single outlet. It’s also a stainless steel muffler, and it has an awesome exhaust note.
As I mentioned in my earlier blog on the RX4, the new bike sounds like the RX3, but you can tell it has a bigger and stronger engine. Both bikes sound almost as if they have a custom pipe. They are both actually a little bit louder than I’d like, but the sound is great. Good ExhaustNotes, I’d say.
Moving to the other end of both motorcycles, let’s take a look at the front brakes. The RX4 has twin-piston calipers and dual disks…
Dual discs on the RX4. The braking is a bit stronger than an RX3 with the CSC larger single disk.
The RX3 has a single disk with a twin-piston caliper up front. My bike has the CSC larger diameter brake rotor. I think this is a worthwhile addition to the RX3, but I also think the stock RX3 brake is sufficient.
The larger diameter front disk rotor on my RX3. It works well.
If you look closely at both of the above photos, you’ll see the two front wheels are different. I’ve already mentioned the RX4’s 19-inch front wheel (the RX3 has a standard 18-inch diameter front wheel, with a 19-inch wheel available as an accessory from CSC). What is also shown (but maybe is not so obvious) is that the RX4 has aluminum rims, while the RX3 has steel rims. I think that might be what makes the RX4 handle so well. Aluminum wheels mean less unsprung weight, and they also make a motorcycle handle more crisply.
The production RX4 motorcycles will have anti-skid braking, and unlike the the 2018 RX3 ABS, you’ll be able to turn the ABS off on the RX4. That’s something you dirt denizens asked for, and your voices have been heard. The RX4 will come standard with wire wheels (like you see in these photos), and cast aluminum wheels with tubeless tires will be an option. The RX4 wire wheels require tubes.
Here are couple of tangential thoughts intended for the wizards at Zongshen (they read ExhaustNotes, too, you know). I’d like you guys to consider adding the dual discs, the aluminum-rimmed wire wheels, and the switchable anti-skid braking on the 2019 RX3. That would make an already great motorcycle even better, I think.
Both the RX3 and the RX4 have Cheng Shin (CST) tires. They’re bigger on the RX4 (more on that in the next blog). These are good tires. They hook up well and they last a long time. I get about 6,000 miles out of a rear tire on my RX3, and as is the case with most motorcycles, the front tires last about twice as long as the rear tires.
Staying at the front of the motorcycle, let’s now take a look at the face of both bikes. This is my RX3…
The iconic look of the RX3 motorcycle.
CSC changed the windshield and headlight design on the RX4. During my trips to Chongqing, I saw that Zongshen evaluated using the same RX3 windshield and headlight on the RX4. I thought keeping the windshield would have been a good idea, but hey, what do I know? The RX3 windshield has been universally praised by everyone who has ridden an RX3, including every magazine that tested the bike. It is a good design. It just works…there’s no turbulence, and it’s well below your line of sight. But like I said, who am I? I don’t make a million motorcycles a year. Zongshen does.
The RX3 headlight…well, that’s not the RX3’s strong point. Being charitable, I’d say it’s anemic. I don’t ride at night if I can avoid it, but I recognize that the stock headlight doesn’t light up the world the way I’d like it to. The spotlights you see on my bike are from AKT Motos in Colombia. I had them on the RS3 I rode there, and I liked them so much that my good buddy Enrique Vargas gave a pair to me when I left his beautiful country. CSC sells accessory spotlights, too, but I kept the AKT Motos lamps on my bike. I use the spotlights as headlights on my RX3 when I ride at night. Many folks who buy an RX3 put a brighter bulb in the headlight, and that works well. I have one that my good buddy TK gave to me, but I haven’t put it on my bike yet.
You’ll also notice the very cool headlight guard on my bike. That was another gift from Enrique in Colombia. CSC now sells a similar headlight guard. Mine is Colombian, and I’ve kept it instead of the CSC headlight guard because it was a gift and I like it.
Onward and upward…here’s the front end of the new RX4…
A clean, modern look: The RX4 front end.
The RX4 headlight and windshield design are much changed from the RX3. Like I said above, CSC could have gone with a front end look identical to the RX4, but they opted instead for the new look. It’s grown on me. I would be okay with either one, and at first I recommended staying with the RX3 look because I feel it is an iconic Zongshen motorcycle face, but I like the new look, too. The new RX4 windshield is adjustable (the RX3 one is not). The headlight is a completely different design, and later tonight, I’m going to move both bikes onto the street to see how the headlight illumination patterns compare. I’ll try to get some photos so you can see the difference.
I’ll write more comparing the two bikes in the next several blogs. This blog is already longer than I intended, and there’s a lot more to cover in these comparisons.
You know it’s coming, folks. Like I always say: Stay tuned.
I get four motorcycle magazines: Motorcycle Classics, RoadRUNNER, American Iron, and Motorcyclist. Every once in a while, a story comes along that goes way beyond simply being good. The current issue of Motorcycle Classics has such a story: Tempting Fate: Around the World on Ducati 175 Tourismos. Landon Hall is the Motorcycle Classics Managing Editor, and he (along with Richard Backus, the head honcho) have a winning formula: A great team of writers and photographers, an eye for a great story, a focus on vintage bikes, and the ability to pull it all together in every issue. I once told Landon that each time I get the latest copy of Motorcycle Classics, I get concerned because it is so good I don’t know how they’ll be able to do better in the next issue. And then they do. Every time.
World travelers from the 1950s…two well-worn Ducati 175s.
The story, Tempting Fate: Around the World on Ducati 175 Tourismos , is about two young Italians (Leopoldo Tartarini and Giorgio Monetti) who went around the world on Ducati 175cc motorcycles in the early 1950s. The tale appealed to me immediately because it involved a long journey on small displacement motorcycles, and the writing and the photography sealed the deal (Hamish Cooper penned the story and Phil Aynsley did the photography). The details made it come alive, like this one: Ducati actually issued these guys handguns as part of their kit (Steve Seidner, are you getting my drift here?). And more. Lots more. Trust me on this: You’ll enjoy this article.
More good info…the index page for our ExhaustNotes gun stories is up, and you can get to it here:
A thing of great beauty…10 hand-rubbed coats of TruOil, glass bedding, a trigger job, and a consistent 10-ring shooter. My Mosin is 75 years old.
I’ve written before about the Mosin-Nagant rifle, and I thought I would return to that topic to tell you a little bit about how I got into playing with these fine old Russian infantry rifles.
I had seen Mosin-Nagants on the discount racks at what I had always considered low end gun outlets (Big 5 Sporting Goods and other general purpose stores), but I never considered purchasing one. The Mosins on the rack were filthy, caked in cosmoline with dinged-up stocks. They initially sold for $59 here in the US a few years ago, and they looked like $59 rifles to me. Cheap. Not up to my standards. I was and still am a gun snob. I thought the Mosins were too dirty to even handle, let alone purchase. Nope, not my speed, I thought. Any rifle that Big 5 was selling for $59 was not worth my time or consideration. Ah, if only I knew where prices were headed, and just how good these rifles are.
Fast forward a bit, and I was teaching a class on engineering creativity at Cal Poly Pomona. One of the techniques engineers can use to inspire their creativity is called TRIZ. It’s a technique that came to us from the old Soviet Union, and it involves looking at older designs in different product areas for ideas. A classic example is Paul Mauser’s bolt action rifle, which is said to have been based on a common gate latch (in fact, I used of photo illustrating this as the cover shot for Unleashing Engineering Creativity).
One of my young students approached me after class to tell me about the Mosin-Nagant he and his father had purchased (at Big 5) for under a hundred bucks, and how much fun they were having with it. That planted a seed, and when I stopped in for my weekly gun-gazing fix at a local gun shop later that week, I bought a Mosin they had on the rack for $129. The kid who showed it to me put it in the box when I started my 10-day waiting period (here in the Peoples Republik of Kalifornia we have a lot of goofy gun laws). What neither that young man nor I knew was that there was a bayonet in the Mosin-Nagant’s cardboard box, and when he slid the rifle into it, the bayonet scratched the hell out of the stock.
Live and learn, I guess. I wasn’t upset. In fact, I was glad. The rifle was inexpensive enough that I saw the bayonet scar as an opportunity to completely strip the rifle down, do a trigger job, glass bed the action, and refinish the stock. I did, and the rifle went from being a banged-up, gouged-up, cosmoline-encrusted derelict to…well, a thing of great beauty. I kid you not, as the saying goes. Every time I take my Mosin to the range, I get compliments. It’s the rifle you see in the photo at the top of this blog.
Russians like cosmoline, I guess. The cosmonauts apply it liberally.
But that’s not the whole story. The rest of this story is that the thing can shoot. I only shoot my own reloads, and the results are phenomenal. I have a jacketed bullet load I use and another load for cast bullets . Both are extremely accurate. My $139 Mosin is the most accurate open-sighted rifle I’ve ever shot. Who knew?
That accuracy thing is not unique to my rifle. My good buddy Paul bought a Mosin after listening to me rave about my Russky rifle (in fact, several of my friends bought their own Russian war horses after listening to me babble on and on about mine). Paul found out his rifle was a former sniper weapon, and he asked me to try it. I did. I put three of my reloads through it, and after firing the first shot, I thought I missed on the second two (the target was 50 yards downrange, and all I could see at that distance was one hole). When I looked through the spotting scope, though, it told a different story.
Paul’s sniper, after I put three rounds downrange. I offered to buy Paul’s rifle and start the 10-day People’s Republik waiting period immediately. “Nyet,” was his only reply.
The Mosin sniper rifles are amazingly accurate. When the U.S. military equips snipers, our armorers build the rifles from the ground up to assure extreme accuracy. The Russians did it differently. The Russians built approximately 17 million Mosin-Nagants from 1891 on, and they range fired every one of them. When they found a rifle that was particularly accurate, it was designated as a sniper weapon. It was one of those rifles you see in the photo above.
The price on Mosin rifles is climbing. Today they go for something north of $300. But trust me on this: They are still a bargain at that price. And wow, can they ever shoot. If you’ve ever thought about buying one, there’s no time like right now. I think prices are going to continue to climb.
We include gun stories here on the ExNotes blog because we like to shoot and we like to write about shooting. The feedback we get from you, our motorcycle blog followers, tells us you enjoy reading about gun stuff. The collection of ExNotes gun stories continues to grow, and we want to make it easy for you to find it. So, another bit of news…we’ve added a Tales of the Gun index page on the ExNotes site!
A stunning RX4 in the San Gabriel Mountains. The paint is pearlescent metalflake orange, the new fastest color.
I rode my TT 250 to the CSC plant early today and picked up a new RX4. Steve asked me to ride the RX4, make observations, and write about the new bike on the ExhaustNotes and CSC blogs. I’ll be preparing several blogs on the RX4; this is the first of many.
I rode my favorite Azusa Canyon, East Fork Road, Glendora Mountain Road, and Glendora Ridge Road route. It’s one of my favorite rides, it’s just under 50 miles of the best riding on the planet, and I knew it would give me a good chance to wring out the bike’s handling. The RX4’s handling was my biggest concern going into this review, as the RX4 I first rode in China two years ago left a bad taste. That early bike was porky and it handled poorly.
First significant observation: The RX4’s handling is phenomenal. It’s really, really good. I’ll get to that in more detail, but I wanted to mention that first.
Tourfella bags…lots of capacity.
Next, let me tackle the weight issue. That was another one of my earlier concerns, but not anymore. The RX3 has a published weight of 386 lbs. The RX4 has a published weight of 450 lbs. I never put much stock in any published weight figures, because I know how the manufacturers calculate weight. They do it the same way we did it in the defense industry: Mass properties analysis. Some engineering weenie tucked away in a cubicle looks at the dimensions of every part, calculates each part’s volume, identifies the part’s material and its density, and puts it all together in a spreadsheet to calculate total weight. It’s a scientific guess. They’re always low compared to reality.
Me? I go by what the bike feels like and how it handles. Sometimes if there’s a scale handy I’ll do something old-fashioned and actually weigh the thing. My KLR 650, for example, had a published weight of something in the low-400-lb range. We had a scale when I worked at Layne, and I rode the KLR onto it one night and saw that my Kawasaki actually tipped the scales at well over 560 lbs. So much for published weights.
So, the RX4 is heavier than the RX3. No, I didn’t have a scale available, so I didn’t weigh it today and I don’t know if that 450 lb number is accurate or not. The weight concerned me big time in China two years ago, and then again when I first sat on the new RX4 last week. Last week, it was mostly because the bike felt heavy when I tipped it off the sidestand. Last week, the RX4 had the CSC tall seat on it. And, the RX4 has a 19-inch front wheel (the RX3 has an 18-inch front wheel). The bigger wheel and the tall seat make the bike taller, and that 19-inch front wheel means the bike leans at a perceptibly steeper angle on the sidestand, so tipping it to vertical (off the sidestand) made for a noticeable increase in effort compared to my RX3. First order of business was to have the boys put the stock seat on the new RX4 (it takes the same seat as the RX3). That alone made it easier to get off the sidestand. But yeah, it’s heavier than the RX3. Is it a problem? Read on, my friends.
It was on to my ride, where I would soon learn if the RX4’s added weight adversely impacts handling.
Let me get to the good stuff. I was soon on Highway 39 and in the twisties. The bottom line? The bike handles phenomenally well. It feels more planted than the RX3 and handled the twisties just fine. Actually, it was great. The bike handles better than the RX3, and the RX3 is a sweet handling ride.
I wanted to stop for photos on 39 (I have a few favorite photo op spots), but truth be told, I was having too much fun riding the thing. The RX4 sounds a lot like the RX3, but the exhaust note (love that phrase) is a bit deeper and a bit louder. Not objectionably so, but it’s noticeable.
I stopped for a few photos on the East Fork Road, and then I was on Glendora Mountain Road. I had the road to myself and it was a glorious morning. Cool, crisp, California mountain air. Life is good.
Glendora Moutain Road is all tight uphill twisties. This stretch climbs sharply and it literally has no straights; it’s curve city all the way to the top. To cut to the chase here, it was on this stretch that I could feel the RX4’s huge improvement over the RX3. In the lower rev ranges, the RX4 has more grunt than the RX3, but it’s not a dramatic difference. It just has more oomph in the 3500-5000 rpm range.
Then I noticed a couple of things: I was getting through this stretch way faster than I would on my RX3, and I wasn’t rowing up and down through the gears like I would on my RX3. I just left the RX4 in 3rd and throttled up and down as needed. The bike wasn’t in its power band yet (and it’s not broken in yet), but it liked being in 3rd powering up into the San Gabriels. Then I noticed something else: This bike handles. It’s rock solid and it doesn’t seem to have any lean angle limits. Oh, I know it does and at some point something would have to scrape, but let me tell you, I was surprised at how good I must have looked carving my way up there this morning. I kind of wished somebody had been there to YouTube the thing. I was cooking. I’m not normally a guy who cooks, but I sure was cooking this morning.
The run east on Glendora Ridge Road was similarly exciting (I mean that in a good way). From the time I left Highway 39, all the way up on Glendora Mountain Road, and then all the way to Mt. Baldy Village on Glendora Ridge Road, I had the road to myself. I didn’t see a single other car or motorcycle. That doesn’t happen too often. Like I said, it was a glorious morning.
Up on Glendora Ridge Road. I was the only guy up there this morning.
A quick check on my GPS shows the RX4 speedo to have the characteristic Zongshen 10-12% optimism built in. The speedo reads faster than you are actually going, just like it does on my RX3. I don’t know why these guys won’t correct this. I tried. Hey, it is what it is.
More impressions: The peg to seat distance felt very slightly cramped for me with the stock seat. It wasn’t a big deal. I guess I need to find something negative to say to be like one of the magazine guys, and so far, this and the speedo error are it. I have the tall seat on my RX3 (which is a better deal from a comfort perspective). I may have Steve put the tall seat back on the RX4. There may be an opportunity down the road for CSC to offer a footpeg lowering kit. But it’s not a deal breaker. I guess I’d say the RX4 felt about like my Triumph Tiger used to feel.
A lot of guys want to know about the brakes. They’re a significant step up from the RX3’s stock brakes. The RX4 has dual disks up front. I have the large diameter aftermarket front brake on my RX3, and the RX4 subjectively felt maybe a little bit better than that. On that subject, though, I will tell you that I think the whole issue of the RX3 standard front brake has been overblown. I made a comment about the magazine guys having to find something to bitch about to prove they are objective and not unduly influenced by advertising dollars. On the RX3 it was the front brake. I never quite got that, though. I had a Harley Softail and a KLR 650 before I got my RX3, and the stock RX3 front brake was better than either of those bikes.
I like the headlight on the RX4. I have no idea how good it is at night (that will come later); my comment is based on the looks of the thing. The way it works it has a trace light around the headlight (that’s the daytime light). You can either switch the headlight on, or leave the lights on auto and when it gets dark, the lights will come on automatically. When I first saw this headlight in China, I thought it looked too much like BMW’s GS headlight design, but it’s grown on me. You can bet some Internet weenie will make a snarky comment about Zongshen copying BMW. Throw ’em a bone, boys. They gotta bitch about something.
The RX4 headlight. I don’t yet know how it does at night. I sure like the look!
The bike I’m riding has a pearlescent metalflake orange and silver paint theme. It’s beautiful. I don’t know what colors CSC will specify for their production order, but I hope this one makes it to our shores. It’s way nicer, I think, than the standard RX3 orange. I know that orange bikes are faster, too. It’s a win-win.
My RX4 has the optional Tourfella aluminum bags and top case. I rode with these through the Andes in Colombia (I like being able to say that). The Tourfella luggage capacity is amazing. They are huge, though, and I know on an RX3 I can feel the difference in handling between the stock bags and the Tourfella bags (on an RX3, the stock bags are faster). I didn’t have an RX4 with stock bags to make a similar comparison. It’s a tough question; I don’t what I would do on a new RX4. I do like those big aluminum boxes, though.
So, my first impression is that the RX4 is an awesome motorcycle. The handling is great. It just seems to find its way through the corners and the added power makes the bike feel more planted and more stable, if that makes sense to you. I would say it’s the bike’s strongest point.
Steve told me the RX4 is going to sell for $5,895. That’s $2,000 more than an RX3. Is it worth it? In my opinion, yes (assuming you’ve got the shekels). But I will also say this: The RX3 is one hell of a motorcycle, and I like the idea of a 250 for serious adventure touring in less developed countries. We’re a freeway country. In other parts of the world, freeways are rare or non-existent. Don’t get me wrong; I’ve done a lot of freeway miles on my RX3 and it’s quite capable in that environment. But the RX4 would probably be better on the freeway. I say that having ridden no freeways on the RX4. Yet. All in good time.
There’s a lot more coming on this bike, folks. I’m just getting started. Top end, high speed long distance touring, fuel economy, freeway handling, and more…I’ll get into all of that. I’ve got a lot going on back at the ranch right now, but I may see a quick two-day ride through Baja on this bike. Hey, I gotta probe for weaknesses, or this wouldn’t be a complete report.
One last thing…somebody asked the spoke diameter. Before I forget, Joey measured that for me before my ride this morning. It’s 3.5mm up front, and 4.0mm in the rear.
I first rode the first prototype RX4 in June 2015, which is really quite a ways back if you think about it. I was in Chongqing to discuss things we were doing on the RX3 and the new RC3 model, a sports bike based on the RX3 engine. The RC3 bike was stunning, but it suffered from a bad case of “me, too” (Honda, Kawasaki, and Yamaha all had credible 300cc sports bikes here in the US) and the RC3 just didn’t sell well when it reached our shores. The RX3 was going great guns, though, and there was a cry for a similar bike with more beans.
Enter the RX4.
That first one was wild. I remember standing out in the heat and humidity with the Zongshen folks snapping photos of the RC3 when a Zongshen engineer rode into our midst on what appeared to be a hacked-up RX3, smartly executing a stoppee that lofted the rear wheel 3 feet in the air, and coming to rest right in front of us. This guy can ride, I thought. In my younger days I had done stoppees like that, but not by design and they didn’t end the same way.
The bike was rough. It was an RX3, but somehow the Zongsters had shoehorned a prototype 450cc motor into the frame. The engine was made of castings and machinings, and it looked (and sounded) very rough. Telling me that they hadn’t worked out the mapping, my hosts asked if I wanted to ride the prototype. Is a bear Catholic? Does the Pope poop in the woods? Hell, yeah, I wanted to ride it. I couldn’t talk about the bike in the CSC blog at the time, and that was probably a good thing. It didn’t run well, and the handling was, well, let me put it this way: Imagine you’re drunk as a skunk and you’re wearing stiletto heels, and you’ve got to walk across a rocky stream bed through swiftly-flowing water. In my checkered past, I’ve done two of those three things, and I don’t need to try the stiletto heels thing to imagine what the combination would be like because I rode that first prototype RX4. It was that bad, and I told the Zong folks what I thought. They smiled politely. They knew.
Passport in pocket, standing in the rain with an RX4 in Chongqing about a year or so ago. The GS decals had to go, I told Zongshen…others can advertise their “Go Slow” ADV bikes with big GS decals. Thankfully, they’re gone.
A year or two later I was in Chongqing again, and I rode an RX4 that was closer to what the production bike would be. It was a much more refined machine. Heavier than an RX3, most definitely. Faster? I really couldn’t tell. It was raining and I was on the Zongshen test track, which is a tightly wound affair with topes and no straights tucked away on the Chongqing manufacturing campus. It felt a lot better than that first prototype, but I really couldn’t let ‘er rip because there wasn’t enough room. I also saw a clay mockup of the RX3S (the 380cc twin) in the Zongshen R&D center, a bike I just couldn’t understand. Again, no photos allowed, but it made no matter to me because the RX3S was a solution to a marketing problem that didn’t exist.
Singing in the rain on Zongshen’s tight test track.
That brings us to today and the production configuration RX4 I am picking up later this afternoon. Or maybe tomorrow. It depends on when Joey has it ready. It’s going to be interesting. I’m flattered that CSC wants my take on the bike, and that they want me to write about it with no preconditions on what I can and cannot say.
The dictionary tells us it means existing or being everywhere, especially at the same time, and folks, that pretty much summarizes the Honda CG clone engine. I first heard the term used by a Harley dealer when he was describing that little thumper, and did he ever get it right. You see these engines everywhere. I know. To quote Mr. Cash, I’ve been everywhere, man, and I’ve seen these engines there. Everywhere, that is.
When I first hooked up with CSC 10 years ago, the CSC Mustang replicas used a CG clone motor. I didn’t know anything about it at the time, although I am a well-traveled fellow with the frequent flier miles to prove it. I’d seen the engine everywhere; I just didn’t know (at the time) what I was looking at. Then I had my first trip to Zongshen, and I saw that they were using variations of the CG clone in many different motorcycles. You want a 110, no problem. A 125? No problem. A 150? Same answer. How about a 250? Yeah, we got those, too. You want 4 speeds or 5 speeds? Counterbalancer, or no counterbalance? Black? Silver? Some other color? No problem. Whatever, there’s a CG clone to fit your needs and wants and the budgets of your intended markets. And it isn’t just Zongshen making these engines. There are companies all over Asia (and elsewhere) doing it. It is an engine that is, in a word, ubiquitous.
Take, for example, the CSC TT250. That bike came about as the result of my being in an RX3 meeting, in Chongqing, in one of the Zong’s many conference rooms. It was hard for me to pay attention in that meeting because Zongshen had a white scrambler on display outside the conference room, and my gaze kept turning to it. I told the Zongsters it would be cool if we (i.e., CSC at that time) could get the bike as a 250. No problem, they said, and the rest is history. Same story on the CSC San Gabriel…it was presented to CSC as a 150, we asked to get it as a 250, and, well, you know the rest. I’d say they were selling like hot cakes, but hot cakes couldn’t keep up with the San Gabriel’s sales pace.
So I travel a lot, and after my exposure to the Mustang replicas, I started noticing bikes in China, Thailand, Singapore, the Middle East, Mexico, Colombia, and elsewhere, and the overwhelmingly dominant engine was (you guessed it) the CG clone.
I’ve written about the CG engine when I used to write the CSC blog, and you might want to look at a couple of those stories, too. They are here and here.
So you might be wondering…what’s the story behind this engine and why is it so reliable? The Reader’s Digest version goes like this: Honda was building bikes in Brazil a few years ago, and those Brazilians just wouldn’t take care of their motorcycles. Honda was getting clobbered with maintenance issues and folks badmouthing their bikes. You might be thinking hey, how can you blame Honda if the people buying their bikes weren’t maintaining them, but if you have that thought, maybe you don’t know as much about the motorcycle business as you thought you did. When folks bitch, it doesn’t have to be rational, and the most of the time the bitcher doesn’t care if the bitchee is at fault. If you’re the manufacturer, you can’t afford to have people bitching for any reason, and Honda realized this.
Honda recognized this well before the Internet came along. The CG engine development happened back in the 1970s, when Honda set about designing an engine that could, like the old Timex ad used to say, take a licking and keep on ticking. That’s what the CG engine was all about…it was designed to be an engine that could survive with little maintenance. Like I said, that’s the Reader’s Digest version. If you want the straight skinny, this article does as good a job as I’ve ever seen on this subject. You should read it.
You might be wondering: Who all makes these engines, where do they go, and how is it the other companies can make an engine originally designed by Honda? The answers, as best I can tell, are everyone, everywhere, and beats me. Zongshen is but one company in one country that makes the CG engine, and to put this into perspective, Zongshen manufactures 4,000 engines a day. They’re not all CG motors, but a lot of them are. The Zong motors are used in their bikes, and they ship a whole bunch to other motorcycle manufacturers. Every day. All over the world.
So are the engines reliable? In a word, yes. If you are following the CSC 150 Cabo story here on the ExNotes blog, you know my friends and I rode the little 150s to Cabo and back, in super oppressive heat, and we absolutely flogged the things. They just kept on going. The TT250 is wonderfully reliable. Are they super fast? Nope. But they just keep on keeping on. It’s a tortoise and the hare story. You’ll get there, while the hypersports are waiting for desmodromic shims.
CG motors are also made by several other manufacturers in China, at least one in South America, another one in Taiwan, and who knows where else. Maybe it’s easier to say who isn’t making them. That would be us, here in the USA. It sure would be nice to see someone set up a plant here to do so. It’s a simple engine. We could do it.
And there’s that last question: How can other companies build a Honda design? As near as I can tell, I don’t know. When I ask the folks in China about this, they just sort of smile. I imagine whatever patents there are must have expired, or maybe Honda just feels okay with other people doing this. The short answer is that I don’t know. But it’s a worldwide phenomenon, and I imagine if it was illegal, Big Red would have done something about it a long time ago.
So there you have it: The CG clone engine story. The ultimate ubiquitous motorcycle engine.
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