Author: Joe Berk

The Perfect Bike?

This was a blog I wrote for CSC about 6 years ago, and it’s still relevant.  Earlier this year I posted a photo showing my Harley in Baja and Gresh made a good comment:  Any motorcycle you take a trip on is an adventure motorcycle.  I agree with that.  The earlier blogs on my Harley Softail had me thinking about this question again:  What is the perfect motorcycle?

Cruisers. Standards. Sports bikes. Dirt bikes. Dual sports. Big bikes. Small bikes. Whoa, I’m getting dizzy just listing these.

The Good Old Days

In the old days, it was simple. There were motorcycles. Just plain motorcycles. You wanted to ride, you bought a motorcycle. And they were small, mostly. I started on a 90cc Honda (that’s me in that photo to the right). We’d call it a standard today, if such a thing still existed.

Then it got confusing. Bikes got bigger. Stupidly so, in my opinion. In my youth, a 650 was a huge motorcycle, and the streets were ruled by bikes like the Triumph Bonneville and the BSA Lightning. Today, a 650 would be considered small. The biggest Triumph today has a 2300cc engine. I don’t follow the Harley thing anymore, but I think their engines are nearly that big, too. The bikes weigh close to half a ton. Half a ton!

I’ve gone through an evolution of sorts on this topic. Started on standards, migrated into cruisers after a long lapse, went to the rice rockets, then morphed into dual sports.

Cruisers and Adventure Bikes

The ADV bug hit me hard about 15 years ago. I’d been riding in Baja a lot and my forays occasionally took me off road. Like many folks who drifted back into motorcycles in the early 1990s, the uptick in Harley quality bit me. As many of us did, I bought my obligatory yuppie bike (the Heritage Softail) and the accompanying zillion t-shirts (one from every Harley dealer along the path of every trip I ever took). I had everything that went along with this kind of riding except the tattoo (my wife and a modicum of clear thinking on my part drew the line there). Leather fringe, the beanie helmet, complimentary HOG membership, and the pot belly. I was fully engaged.

Unlike a lot of yuppie riders of that era, though, I wasn’t content to squander my bucks on chrome, leather fringe, and the “ride to live, live to ride” schlock. I wanted to ride, and ride I did. All over the southwestern US and deep into Mexico. Those rides were what convinced me that maybe an 800+ lb cruiser was not the best bike in the world for serious riding…

The Harley had a low center of gravity, and I liked that. It was low to the ground, and I didn’t like that. And it was heavy. When that puppy started to drift in the sand, I just hung on and hoped for the best. Someone was looking out for me, because in all of that offroading down there in Baja, I never once dropped it. As I sit here typing this, enjoying a nice hot cup of coffee that Susie just made for me, I realize that’s kind of amazing.

The other thing I didn’t like about the Harley was that I couldn’t carry too much stuff on it without converting that bike into a sort of rolling bungee cord advertisement. The bike’s leather bags didn’t hold very much, the Harley’s vibration required that I constantly watch and tighten their mounting hardware, and the whole arrangement really wasn’t a good setup for what I was doing. The leather bags looked cool, but that was it. It was bungee cords and spare bags to the rescue on those trips…

Sports Bikes

The next phase for me involved sports bikes. They were all the rage in the early 90s and beyond, but to me they basically represent the triumph of marketing hoopla over common sense. I bought a Suzuki TL1000S (fastest bike I ever owned), and I toured Baja with it. It would be hard to find a worse bike for that kind of riding. The whole sports bike thing, in my opinion, was and is stupid. You sit in this ridiculous crouched over, head down position, and if you do any kind of riding at all, by the end of the day your wrists, shoulders, and neck are on fire. My luggage carrying capacity was restricted to a small tankbag and a ridiculous-looking tailbag.

I was pretty hooked on the look, though, and I went through a succession of sports bikes, including the TL1000S, a really racy Triumph Daytona 1200 (rode that one from Mexico to Canada), and a Triumph Speed Triple. Fast, but really dumb as touring solutions, and even dumber for any kind of off road excursion.

Phase III for me, after going through the Harley “ride to live” hoopla and the Ricky Racer phases, was ADV riding and dual sport bikes. The idea here is that the bike is equally at home on the street or in the dirt. Dual purpose…dual sport. I liked the idea, and I thought it would be a winner for my kind of riding.

A BMW GS versus Triumph’s Tiger

The flavor of the month back then was the BMW GS. I could never see myself on a Beemer, but I liked the concept. I was a Triumph man back in those days, and the Triumph Tiger really had my attention. A couple of my friends were riding the big BMW GS, but I knew I didn’t want a Beemer. In my opinion, those bikes are overpriced. The Beemers are heavy (over 600 lbs on the road), they have a terrible reputation for reliability, and I think they looked goofy. The Tiger seemed to be a better deal than the Beemer, and it sure had the right offroad look. Tall, an upright seating position (I had enough of that sports bike nonsense), and integrated luggage. So, I bit the bullet and shelled out something north of $10K back in ’06 for this beauty…

The Triumph had a few things going for it…I liked the detachable luggage, it was fast, it got good gas mileage (I could go 200+ miles between gas stations), and did I mention it was fast?

The Tiger’s Shortfalls

Looks can be deceiving, though, and that Tiger was anything but an off-road bike. It was still well over 600 lbs on the road with a full tank of gas, and in the soft stuff, it was terrifying. I never dropped the Triumph, but I sure came close one time. On a ride out to the Old Mill in Baja (a really cool old hotel right on the coast a couple hundred miles south of the border), the soft sand was bad. Really bad. Getting to the Old Mill involved riding through about 5 miles of soft sand, and it scared the stuffing out of me. I literally tossed and turned all night worrying about the ride out the next morning. It’s not supposed to be like that, folks.

And the Tiger was tall. Too tall, in my opinion. I think all of the current dual sport bikes are too tall. I guess the manufacturers do that because their marketing studies show a lot of basketball players buy dual sports. Me? I don’t play basketball and I never cared for a seat that high. Just getting on the Tiger was scary. After throwing my leg over the seat, I’d fight to lean the bike upright, and not being able to touch the ground on the right side until I had the thing upright was downright unnerving. I never got over that initial “getting on the bike” uneasiness. What were those engineers thinking?
The other thing that surprised me about the Tiger was that it was uncomfortable. The seat was hard (not comfortably hard, like a well designed seat should be, but more like sitting on small beer keg), and the foot pegs were way too high. I think they did that foot peg thing to make the bike lean over more, but all it did for me was make me feel like I was squatting all day. Not a good idea.

Kawasaki’s KLR 650

I rode the Tiger for a few years and then sold it. Even before I sold it, though, I had bought a new KLR 650 Kawasaki. It was a big step down in the power department (I think it has something like 34 or 38 horsepower), but I had been looking at the KLR for years. It seemed to be right…something that was smaller, had a comfortable riding position, and was reasonably priced (back then, anyway).

I had wanted a KLR for a long time, but nobody was willing to let me ride one. That’s a common problem with Japanese motorcycle dealers. And folks, this boy ain’t shelling out anything without a test ride first. I understand why they do it (they probably see 10,000 squids who want a test ride for every serious buyer who walks into a showroom), but I’m old fashioned and crotchety. I won’t buy anything without a test ride. This no-test-ride thing kept me from pulling the trigger on a KLR for years. When I finally found a dealer who was willing to let me ride one (thank you, Art Wood), I wrote the check and got on the road…and the off road…

My buddy John and I have covered a lot of miles on our KLRs through Baja and elsewhere. I still have my KLR, but truth be told, I only fire it up three or four times a year. It’s a big bike. Kawi says the KLR is under 400 lbs, but with a full tank of gas on a certified scale, that thing is actually north of 500 lbs. I was shocked when I saw that on the digital readout. And, like all of the dual sports, the KLR is tall. It still gives me the same tip-over anxiety as the Tiger did when I get on it. And I know if I ever dropped it, I’d need a crew to get it back on its feet.

That thing about dropping a bike is a real consideration. I’ve been lucky and I haven’t dropped a bike very often. But it can happen, and when it does, it would be nice to just be able to pick the bike up.

Muddy Baja

On one of our Baja trips, we had to ride through a puddle that looked more like a small version of Lake Michigan. I got through it, but it was luck, not talent. My buddy Dave was not so lucky…he dropped his pristine Yamaha mid-puddle…

The fall broke the windshield and was probably a bit humiliating for Dave, but the worst part was trying to lift the Yamaha after it went down. Slippery, muddy, wet…knee deep in a Mexican mudbath. Yecchh! It took three of us to get the thing upright and we fell down several times while doing so. Thinking back on it now, we probably looked pretty funny. If we had made a video of it, it probably would have gone viral.

The Perfect Bike:  A Specification

So, where is this going…and what would my definition of the perfect touring/dual sport/ADV bike be?

Here’s what I’d like to see:

Something with a 250cc to 500cc single-cylinder engine. My experience with small bikes as a teenager and my more recent experience has convinced me that this is probably the perfect engine size. Big engines mean big bikes, and that kind of gets away from what a motorcycle should be all about. Water cooled would be even better. The Kawi KLR is water cooled, and I like that.

A dual sport style, with a comfortable riding position. No more silly road racing stuff. I’m a grown man, and when I ride, I like to ride hundreds of miles a day. I want my bike to have a riding position that will let me do that.

A windshield. It doesn’t have to be big…just something that will flip the wind over my helmet. The Kawi and the Triumph got it right in that department.

Integrated luggage. The Triumph Tiger got that part right. The KLR, not so much.

Light weight. Folks, it’s a motorcycle…not half a car. Something under 400 lbs works for me. If it gets stuck, I want to be able to pull it out of a puddle. If it drops, I want to be able to pick it up without a hoist or a road crew. None of the current crop of big road bikes meets this requirement.

Something that looks right and is comfortable. I liked the Triumph’s looks. But I want it to be comfortable.

Something under $5K. Again, it’s a motorcycle, not a car. My days of dropping $10K or so on a motorcycle are over. I’ve got the money, but I’ve also got the life experiences that tell me I don’t need to spend stupidly to have fun.

It was maybe a year after that blog that the RX3 came on the scene, and it answered the mail nicely.  A year or two after the RX3 hit the scene, BMW, Kawasaki, and one or two others introduced smaller ADV motorcycles.  I commented that these guys were copying Zongshen.  One snotty newspaper writer told me I was delusional if I thought BMW, Kawi, and others copied Zongshen.   I think that’s exactly what happened, but I don’t think they did as good a job as Zongshen did.

If you’ve got an opinion, please leave a comment.  We’d love to hear from you!

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Singapore

I like Singapore and I fly there a couple of times a year on business.  I know, I’m supposed to be retired, but I’m finding I’m not very good at it.  And I don’t need much of an excuse to fly to Singapore.  The flight is a bruiser (it’s 16 1/2 hours from LAX to Singapore on a nonstop, and it usually goes over 24 hours if you can’t get a nonstop), but I don’t mind doing it.  Singapore is worth the trek.  I say I go there on business, but my visits are more like vacations than work.  I like the place.

Orchard Road:  Singapore’s Rodeo Drive

Orchard Road is Singapore’s upscale shopping area, and the architecture, the night scenes, and feel of the place is amazing.  These are scenes from a walk along Orchard Road with an 8mm fisheye lens on my Nikon.  It had just rained the evening I took these, and it made for dramatic photography.

You see two kinds of buildings in this area, and I captured both in the photos above. Old Singapore consists primarily of shop houses…two-story structures where folks have a business on the first floor and live on the second floor. And there are the modern skyscrapers. The mix of both makes for interesting scenes.

See those trees along the sidewalks?  They’re quiet during the day, but at night, the zillions of birds roosting in those trees are deafening. You literally have to shout to carry on a conversation because the birds drown everything out. It gets interesting when there’s a thunderstorm (very common in this part of the world).  When the skies thunder, the birds all fall silent for a second. Then, after a brief pause, they start chirping again. It’s all very cool.

Little India in Singapore

On another visit, I poked around Singapore’s Little India section. There are four major ethnic groups in Singapore, and folks from India comprise one of them.

Singapore Industries

Singapore has a rich maritime heritage (the four major industries in Singapore are shipping, oil refining, finance, and tourism). The shipping industry came about as a result of Singapore’s central location between India and China (the Chinese are another major ethnic group here).  There are all kinds of interesting things to see in Singapore, and it’s a walker’s paradise if you like to explore on foot.

You can see all kinds of things in Singapore you won’t see anywhere else in the world.   Check this out:

The structure you see above is a shopping, apartment, office, and entertainment complex comprised of three huge buildings capped by a roof styled like a ship (complete with gardens and a swimming pool).  The buildings are supposed to be waves, with the ship riding along top.  I’ve never seen anything like this.  You might have seen it on television when President Trump was in Singapore meeting with the North Korean guy.  But that’s Singapore. It has a lot of things you won’t see anywhere else.

Singapore Museums

To me, all of Singapore is a museum with architecture, dining, street sculpture, automobiles, and more that makes getting out and walking around a hell of an experience.  There are many museums, including one focused on Singapore’s World War II history I found particularly interesting.   Here are a few photos I grabbed in it.

Exploring Singapore on a Motorcycle?

Nope, I haven’t done that (not yet, anyway).  But I’m tempted to spend an extra day or two over there on the next trip and see if I can find somebody to rent me a motorcycle.  I’ve seen RX3s in Singapore.   That would be fun, and I think the RX3 would be a perfect bike to poke around on in this tropical urban paradise.  The entire country is only about 24 miles long, and most (maybe all) of it is city.  It seems to be very safe, too, so I don’t think I could find myself in any dangerous areas.  The only problem is they drive on the wrong side of the road over there, and that would take some getting used to.

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Lunch with Marty and the boys

Marty and his 145,000-mile BMW K1200RS.  That’s my RX3 in the background.

I’ve been riding with good buddy Marty since the early 2000s (it’s been close to 20 years now), and we’ve covered miles all over the US, Mexico, and Canada.  Marty has owned the BMW K1200RS you see in the above photo since it was new.  He owns and has owned a bunch of exotic bikes (Ducatis, Aprilias, Triumphs, other BMWs, and more), but he prefers the K1200RS and he told me he’s keeping it forever.

I’ve got a bunch of good friends I ride and socialize with, and I know all of them through Marty.   We all get together for coffee at the Brown’s BMW dealership on Saturday morning.  That’s followed by lunch, and maybe we’ll talk about the next big ride.  We frequently talk about rides we’ve done in the past.  Sometimes the conversation turns to politics, and we all have strong opinions.  Some of the guys are right (the ones who agree with me), and some of them are wrong (the ones who don’t), but it doesn’t matter.   Every once in a while I inject the thought that the problem in America is that the guys who really know how to run the country are screwing around drinking coffee at Brown’s and riding their motorcycles.  It usually gets a laugh, even though the guys have heard that line about 800 times.

I like the get-togethers at Brown’s, although sometimes I’ll go months without getting over there.   I don’t know why, because I always enjoy it when I go.  And I like riding my RX3 to our Saturday morning meetings.  It’s an excuse to get out on my favorite motorcycle (not that anyone needs an excuse to go for a motorcycle ride).  Sometimes folks ask about my motorcycle; more than a few motorcycle riders have never seen an RX3.  Some folks think it’s a BMW, even though BMW has their own competitor in the small adventure touring motorcycle category (that’s the BMW G 310 GS and you can read our road test of it here).  Whatever.  My RX3 is slathered with decals denoting some of the big rides I’ve done, and I guess that gets it some credibility in a crowd known for high mileage.

While I’m at the Brown BMW dealership, I like to check out the vintage and new motorcycles.  The old bikes are beautiful, and some of the new ones are, too…

A mid-’60s 600cc BMW. Those old bikes are drop dead gorgeous.
A new old stock (that is to say, a leftover) 2017 Boxer café bike. It’s stunning. It’s a hell of a deal, but there’s no package deal for a chiropractor, and I’d need one if I rode this bike. I can dream, though. The styling on this bike really makes it for me.
I tried to show the difference in size between a brand new GS 1250 and the mid-’60s BMW, and I failed. The photo doesn’t do the bikes justice. Side-by-side, the difference in size is shocking. The GS is outrageously huge. The older BMW seems to be the perfect size for me.

So that’s it for today, folks, except to ask a quick question:  Do you have a riding buddy like Marty in your life?  Hey, we’d love to hear about it, so drop us a comment or two and let us know!

Consumer Reports

Well, not quite, but maybe a little like the famous magazine, Consumer Reports:  We’ve added a Product Reviews page to the ExhaustNotes.us website.  You can get to it from the link here or by clicking the Product Reviews link at the top of any of our site pages.  Motorcycles, motorcycle accessories, cameras and related equipment, watches, apparel, and more.  Take a look and let us know how do you think.

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Motorcycle Travel Photo Gear

Photography is a big part of a motorcycle trip for me. I’ve been riding motorcycles on long rides for a long time, and capturing the memories adds immensely to the enjoyment.  I relive and remember each of my adventures though the photos.  The photo quality standards for online stuff are not that high (it’s all 72 dpi and small photos); the requirements for print publication are significantly more stringent (that’s all 300 dpi and big picture stuff).  The gear I carry meets both standards well.  From time to time people ask me about the camera gear I use on my motorcycle adventures, so I thought I would take a few minutes to describe the toys I bring along.

Motorcycle Travel Photography Gear

Here’s the photo gear I bring on a motorcycle trip:

Nikon D3300 digital single lens reflex (DSLR) camera.
Nikon 18-55mm VR general duty lens.
Nikon 70-300mm VR telephoto lens.
Tokina 12-24mm wide angle lens.
Circular polarizers for all of the above lenses.
Extra camera battery.
Battery charger.
Extra SD card.
Tamrac Velocity 7X camera bag.

I know that sounds like a lot, but it’s really not that much, it gives great capability on the road, and it all fits into my CSC RX3 motorcycle’s topcase.

My camera gear, including the Nikon D3300 DSLR, the 18-55mm lens (mounted on the camera in this photo), the 12-24mm Tokina wide-angle lens, the 70-300mm Nikon telephoto lens, and polarizers for all three lenses. It all fits in the Tamrac Velocity 7X camera bag.

I’m a Nikon guy, but any of the current crop of DSLR cameras has capabilities way beyond the abilities of most photographers (including me).  Gresh prefers Canon.  Here’s your shovel, take you pick.  Six to one, half a dozen to the other.  All the manufacturers offer good cameras. My D3300 is a 24-megapixel camera, which means I can crop the photo significantly and still have sufficient resolution.   It’s a good size for a digital image.

DSLR Advantages

I use a DSLR camera because when I press the shutter button, I want the shutter to trip instantly.  The point-and-shoot cameras usually have ½-second or so lag after depressing the shutter button, and that’s unnerving if you’re shooting anything other than landscapes.  Maybe the technology has advanced to where that’s no longer a point-and-shoot issue, but I’ll still stick with my DSLR because a DSLR gives me creative control. I usually shoot in the Program Mode, but if I’m not happy with that, or I want greater depth of field, I can make the camera do pretty much anything I want it to.

One of the things that is so appealing to me about the D3300 is its light weight. I often ride with the camera hanging from my neck so I can snap shots from the saddle while on the move, and the D3300’s light weight makes this easy. Several of the photographs I’ve had published were taken while I was riding the motorcycle. It’s way better than the standard motorcycle-parked-by-the-side-of-the-road stuff you see most of the time.  I think shots from the saddle bring readers into the ride.  One thought I want to interject about this shooting-from-the-saddle business: When I take photos while riding my motorcycle, I never use the camera’s viewfinder or rear LCD screen. Trying to look at the camera (or worse, trying to look through the viewfinder) while riding is dangerous and I don’t do it. I use the camera’s 18-55mm lens and I leave it at about the 24mm mark. I’ll point the camera in the general direction of what I want to photograph, and I take a lot of photos knowing that one or more of them will be good. Digital film is cheap.

The last thing I’ll mention is the histogram.  It’s the display you can see on the camera back that tells you instantly if the exposure is correct.  All DSLRs have a histogram capability.  This x-y plot lets you know if the photo is under or over exposed, allowing you to dial in exposure compensation to adjust for it.

The D3300’s histogram. The histogram, to me, is one of digital photography’s major advantages.

DSLR Cost

The D3300 used to be Nikon’s lowest-cost DSLR camera.  I think they’re up to the D3500 now.  I like the D3300 for the motorcycle and overseas trips because it’s light, it’s small, it’s capabilities are amazing, and it’s inexpensive.  I think I paid $499 for my D3300 a few years ago; I’ve recently seen the current D3500 on sale for something like $399, including the 18-55mm lens.  Sometimes Costco has a package deal on the camera, two lenses, a carrying case, the SD card, and more.  It’s a phenomenal deal.

Making Movies

The D3300 also has a video mode. I thought that was kind of silly at first, but I changed my mind the first time I used the video feature. The video is superb, and Nikon’s vibration reduction (VR) feature makes the video rock steady.  On our second day in Mexico on the first CSC Baja ride, I rode ahead of the group and filmed all of the riders as they came around a bend. When I viewed the video on my laptop later that night, I was blown away by how good it was.  The video looked as if the camera had been tripod mounted.  When I saw the video, I knew I had purchased the right camera.

Moto Photography Travel Lenses

Moving on to the lenses for the D3300, I travel with three. I use the camera’s 18-55mm lens for the majority of my photos, I use the Tokina 12-24mm lens for the wide-angle panoramic shots, and I use the Nikon 70-300mm telephoto for the long-distance stuff.  The 18-55mm is my default lens, and it stays on the camera most of the time. It used to be that the standard low-cost zoom lenses that camera manufacturers provided with their low-end cameras were mediocre. That’s not the case with Nikon’s 18-55mm lens. It does an excellent job, returning high contrast and sharp images.  The other thing I like about the 18-55mm Nikon lens is that it has Nikon’s VR feature. It works and I like it. It delivers significantly sharper hand-held photos.

Sometimes you see something that screams out for a wide angle lens, and on the Colombia trip I brought my Tokina 12-24mm lens with me for those occasions. I like that lens a lot because of its sharpness, high contrast, and overall construction quality. The photo magazines rated the Tokina 12-24mm as sharper than Nikon’s 12-24mm lens, which costs more than twice the Tokina lens.  I’ve had a lot of photos published using this lens in the “Destinations” pieces I write for Motorcycle Classics.

Two RS3 motorcycles (the carbureted version of the CSC RX3) at the edge of a Colombian cliff.  I used a manually-focused Tokina 12-24 lens, a circular polarizer, and the Nikon D3300 camera.

I shot the photo on the cover of Moto Colombia with the Tokina wide angle lens at the edge of a cliff in Barichara. It was great place and a great moment, and I preserved it with a great photo.

I brought my 70-300mm Nikon lens with me on the Colombia trip, too. It’s a big, heavy, and clunky lens and it goes against what I always tell people, and that is to travel light.  I only used the 70-300mm on the camera twice while I was in Colombia, and on one of those two occasions, my subject got away before I could get a good photo. That was when I tried to photograph an iguana while having lunch in Magangué. On the other occasion, though, I was quicker (actually, my subjects were slower). That’s when I photographed the vultures outside of Guane.  I captured some amazing shots of those big old Colombian vultures.

Hey, you talking to me? A shot of a Colombian vulture with the Nikon 70-300mm telephoto lens, handheld, showcasing Nikon’s vibration reduction technology.

I had circular polarizers with me for all three lenses. A circular polarizer filters out the white light and that makes the colors much more vibrant in outdoor shots. I left the polarizers on the lens, and I would remove them when I shot indoors, or at night, or when I used flash. They don’t take up much room, and they make a real difference on outdoor shots.

A Good Camera Bag

I carried all of the above in a Tamrac Velocity 7X camera bag. The Tamrac bag has a sling that makes it easy to carry, but I didn’t carry the bag much. I’d just throw the whole enchilada (the Tamrac bag with the camera, the lenses, a spare battery, and the battery charger) in the topcase.

And folks, that’s it.  If you have any thoughts on moto photography travel gear, we’d love to hear them.   Just leave a comment below and share your thoughts with us.

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A Ruger No. 1 in .300 Weatherby Magnum

A No. 1 in .300 Weatherby:  The Best of Both Worlds

I’m a big fan of the .300 Weatherby cartridge, and an even bigger fan of the Ruger No. 1 rifle.    You’ve seen several blogs about these fine single-shot firearms here on ExhaustNotes, and I thought I’d add another combining the best of both worlds:  A Ruger No. 1 chambered in .300 Weatherby Magnum.

Ruger didn’t make too many No. 1 rifles in .300 Weatherby.

Finding a Rifle with Fancy Walnut

When Ruger announced the .300 Weatherby No. 1 nearly 30 years ago, I wanted one, but I couldn’t find one with fancy wood.   Then my interest waned and I was on to other things.  I remember seeing one at a gun store in Oregon (it was the first one I’d seen in person), but the wood was plain and I didn’t want to go through the hassle of buying one and having it shipped FFL-to-FFL back to California.  Then I saw one with better-than-average wood on Gunbroker and I had it shipped to a dealer here in California, but that rifle was a disappointment.  It had an aftermarket recoil pad that didn’t appear in the photos on Gunbroker, so back it went.  Then a few years later I saw one that had even better wood (exhibition grade, actually) and I pulled the trigger.  When it arrived, I was blown away by the wood.

The wood looks good from the right, but it looks even better from the left.
See what I mean? Those are my .300 Weatherby Magnum reloads, and they shot very well in this rifle.

Ruger No. 1 Accuracy

My .300 Weatherby No. 1 is essentially a new gun, and it may have been unfired when I bought it.  Sometimes guys buy these big bore magnums, keep them for several years, and then sell them without ever taking them to the range.  Even when folks do shoot their .300 magnum rifles, it’s more often than not the case that very few rounds are fired.  Sometimes the folks who buy these things don’t realize just how severe the recoil is, and after one or two shots, they conclude the rifle is not for them.

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I held off firing this rifle for a long time.  It wasn’t because I was afraid of the recoil (although it is significant).  I guess on some level what I feared was that the rifle would be inaccurate.  I didn’t want to not like it, so I didn’t shoot it.  I owned this rifle a good 10 years before I got around to mounting a scope on it and to see how it performed.  That happened just a couple of weeks ago.

In a word, the rifle performed magnificently.  I put a Redfield variable scope on it and did my normal sighting-in routine at the range.  That consisted of loosely mounting the scope, taking it to the range to move it back and forth to get the eye relief where I want it to be, and then setting up the rifle on a rest.  The drill there is to look through the bore at a target at 50 yards (centering the target in the bore) and then, without disturbing the rifle, dialing in the windage and elevation turrets so that the scope’s crosshairs are centered on the target.  I did that, and my first shot went exactly where it was supposed to go.

The next step was to move the target out to 100 yards and adjust the scope at that range.   It took only three groups to get the rifle zeroed.

The target on the left is the first one fired at 100 yards (the bullets were hitting high and to the left). I dropped the elevation about 12 clicks (each click is a quarter inch at 100 yards) for the second group, and then 8 clicks on the windage to move the point of impact to the right for the third target. I’m there.

The load I used was one that performs well in my bolt action .300 Weatherby bolt action rifles, and that’s an upper-range dose of IMR 7828 SSC propellant with the 180-grain Remington jacketed soft point bullet and CCI magnum rifle primers.  What’s satisfying is that this is a minute-of-angle load (it shoots into an inch at 100 yards), and I haven’t really done any load development with this rifle yet.  It’s almost kind of disappointing when they shoot this well immediately (half the fun is experimenting to find the right load), but hey, it is what it is.

I’ve found that the .300 Weatherby Magnum is an inherently accurate cartridge when loaded with heavier bullets and maximum or near-maximum propellant charges.  I have a few boxes left of the 180-grain Remington bullets, and that’s what I’ll be using for a bit.  I can’t hunt with those bullets in California (we have to use copper solids here in the Peoples’ Republik), but the Remington pills are legal on the rifle range in our gloriously-progressive state, and they’re good for hunting in other states with more normal hunting rules.

Finding a Ruger’s Age

Ruger has a spot on their website where you can punch in the serial number to find out when the rifle shipped.  I did, and mine left the factory in 1993.  Yep, it’s 26 years old, and it’s in as-new condition.

The Bottom Line

The bottom line:  I like this rifle.  It’s chambered for a great cartridge, it has outstanding wood, it’s accurate, and it’s a single shot.  There’s just something cool about single-shot rifles, especially when they have wood like this one.

Read more ExNotes gun stories here!

Ekins, McQueen, Leno, Weinstein, and more…

This is a story I wrote a good 15 years ago and it has appeared online a couple of times before.  It’s about an invitation only celebration of Bud Ekin’s life at Warner Brothers Studios here in So Cal.  I first published this story on the old MotoFoto site and then again on the CSC blog about 10 years ago.  Good buddy Marty and rode our motorcycles to the event and it was awesome. It’s a good story and it was a great day.

I’ll bet everyone who reads this blog has seen Steve McQueen’s The Great Escape. Released in 1963 (about the same time as the original Mustang Motor Products folded), I believe The Great Escape is one of the greatest movies ever made. If you’re into bikes (hey, you’re reading this blog, so you gotta be!), you know about the scenes showing Steve McQueen racing away from the Nazis on a motorcycle in World War II Germany…

The purists among us recognized that the movie dudes took some liberties here…McQueen was on a 650 Triumph in the film, and the Germans didn’t use Triumphs. The movie folks modified the Triumph to make it look like a German military bike because it would have been a lot harder doing this scene on an old and underpowered BMW.  And the guy who jumped the bike over that barbed-wire fence wasn’t really Steve McQueen…it was a previously-unknown desert racer and stuntman named Bud Ekins (more on him in a bit).

The real deal: The original, actual Triumph motorcycle used in The Great Escape.

So, how did all this come about?

Bud Ekins in action.

Most of you probably know that Steve McQueen was a serious motorcycle guy. In his day, he was an avid collector, racer, and rider. McQueen got into motorcycling almost accidentally. A guy who owed McQueen money offered to give him a Triumph motorcycle to repay the debt, and McQueen agreed, but he didn’t know how to ride.  McQueen took the bike to the local Triumph guru to learn how to ride, and that guy was a racer and mechanic named Bud Ekins. The two became riding buddies and (pardon the pun) fast friends.  Fast forward a bit, and McQueen’s got this gig to star in a movie called (you guessed it) The Great Escape. There are cool motorcycle scenes in it, including the iconic jump shown in the video above. McQueen’s bosses wouldn’t let him do the jump, so McQueen turned to his buddy, Bud Ekins. It would be the first time Ekins did any stunt work, or really any work at all in the movie industry.

Ekins and McQueen met with the folks in charge of the movie and learned that the script required jumping a 15-ft fence. Ekins explained to the studio execs that the highest he had ever jumped a motorcycle was maybe 5 feet, but Ekins thought he make the higher jump.  McQueen and Ekins worked at it, building up Ekin’s ability to jump greater heights through a series of experiments with ramps, velocity, and ropes. When Ekins felt confident, they filmed the scene in the above video in a single take. That’s all it took.

Ekins negotiated what was then a whopping fee for his jump: $1000. Yep, that’s right…there aren’t any zeros missing in that number. A cool one thousand dollars. It almost seems laughable now, but at the time, it was the highest fee Hollywood had ever paid any stuntman, and it made news.

Frank Bullitt’s ride.  The two Mustangs used in filming Bullitt were on display at this event.

After Ekins made that Great Escape jump, his stuntman career took off. Just about any action scene you’ve ever seen in any movies during the last 50 years or so (if it involved a motorcycle or a car) had Ekins doing the real driving. In Bullitt, he drove both the Mustang (the green car, that is…not a Mustang motorcycle) and he rode the motorcycle that crashed during that movie’s iconic chase scene. In The Blues Brothers, that was Bud behind the wheel of Belushi’s and Akroyd’s trashed out police car. In Smokey and the Bandit, it was Ekins behind the wheel of the Firebird.  You get the idea.

Speakers at the Ekins Celebration of Life. The guy on the right needs no introduction. The guy on the left is Harvey Weinstein.

McQueen died young a long time ago. Ekins passed away in 2007, and I was lucky enough to attend the celebration of life for him at Warner Brothers Studios.  There were a lot of speakers at that event, including big wheels in the movie business (one was a guy named Harvey Weinstein).  The were McQueen family members, Ekins family members, and Jay Leno. Something that stuck in my mind was Harvey Weinstein telling us that during the ’60s and ’70s if you asked any guy who he wanted to be, the answer would be Steve McQueen.  But, Weinstein continued, if you asked Steve McQueen who he wanted to be, the answer would be Bud Ekins.

So there you have it.  Bud Ekins, Steve McQueen, The Great Escape, a famous Triumph motorcycle disguised to look like a BMW, and more.  It was a grand day.   So, we have a question for you:  What’s your favorite motorcycle movie?   Let us know with a comment or two.  We’d love to hear from you.

Obsolete Product Review: Scorpion EXO R410 Helmet

My Scorpion EX0 helmet. It’s not bad, but it’s not perfect, either. Read on, and you’ll see why.

I’ve been riding with a Scorpion EXO R410 helmet for about three years now, so I suppose it’s time for a new one.  I tried to get the latest cost for my helmet on the Scorpion website, but they’re up to the EX0 420 series now, and mine is obsolete.

This is my second Scorpion helmet.  My prior (and first) Scorpion helmet saved my life when I crashed my Triumph Speed Triple back in ’09.  I’m very grateful for that (I literally landed on the top of my head, and the top of that earlier helmet looked like a hardboiled egg that had been whacked against a counter top).   But, truth be told, I’m not all that wild about my current Scorpion.

First, the good stuff.  It’s a one-piece full face helmet, the price was reasonable, and it’s all one color (and that’s the color I like, fluorescent green).  When I bought this helmet it was difficult to find one that was all fluorescent green (and I noticed on today’s Scorpion website that they don’t offer this color as a solid color any more).   When I bought my current Scorpion three years ago, other helmets from other manufacturers had weird color combos consisting of different combinations of fluorescent green and flat black.  I didn’t care for that look. There were modular helmets in solid fluorescent green (you know, the kind that have a flip up lower section), but I don’t like that concept, either.  Weird things happen in a crash, and I could visualize that modular part heading south when impacting the pavement.   Nope, I wanted a solid safety green full face helmet, and Scorpion was the only one out there.

More good stuff:  The helmet fits snugly and it keeps me warm.  That’s important.  And it’s not too heavy (it doesn’t become onerous at the end of  a long day).  And one more:  The helmet was reasonably priced.  As I recall, it was something around $200 and change.  I paid a little less because I work in the industry.   Come to think of it, if I had worked the problem, I probably could have talked Scorpion into giving me one for free if I had featured it on the blog, but I didn’t do that.  The bottom line:  The Scorpion’s price is reasonable.

Okay, on to the bad stuff.  I wear eyeglasses, and sometimes I wear contacts.  Contacts are the way to go if you wear a full face helmet because they make pulling the helmet on and off a lot easier.  But a lot of times I wear my glasses and putting them on while wearing this helmet is a real pain in the ass.  The temples just don’t want to sneak in between the helmet liner and my ears, and it usually takes me several tries to put my glasses on once I’ve got the helmet on.  I guess you could say I make a spectacle of myself every time I put my helmet on.  (I’m sorry; I couldn’t resist sneaking that in.  You know, making a spectacle of myself.  Get it?  Eyeglasses?  Making a spectacle of myself, like the time the optometrist fell into his lens grinding machine?)

Film at 11:00. And 12:00. And…well, you get the idea. That weird film on the inside does not want to completely separate.

My next complaint:  The faceshield has some kind of film on the inside that can’t make up its mind about staying there or peeling off, and it seems to be doing both right in my line of sight.  I’ve tried scrubbing it with Windex, water, alcohol, and all kinds of other stuff.  It’s a weird one; I’ve never seen any other faceshield behave similarly.  I could just buy a replacement, but hey, it might do the same thing.  You’d think somebody at Scorpion would know about this and they would have fixed it before the faceshields got out of the factory.   Maybe they already have on the newer ones.

Another complaint, although it’s not really fair to single out Scorpion for this:  The vents don’t seem to do anything. Open or closed makes no difference in airflow around my noggin, nor do they make any difference in how cool or warm I am inside the helmet.  The vents don’t make any difference in the faceshield’s propensity to fog, either.  But, like I said, all of my helmets have been like this.  As far as I’m concerned, the manufacturers could leave these vent arrangements off altogether and sell the helmet for less.

The chinguard vent. Open or closed: Machst nicht. ( I had three years of German in high school and that’s all I remember.)
The upper vents. There are two of them. You toggle that little lever to open or close the vents. I couldn’t feel that it made any difference in airflow or fog prevention in either position.

When I need air flowing in my helmet, or if the faceshield is fogging, I just open the faceshield a scosh, and that brings me to my next complaint:  You can’t do that on the Scorpion.

The first open position on the Scorpion, which puts the lower edge of the faceshield directly in your line of sight.
Detent positions that govern faceshield elevation. The first one (denoted by the red arrow) is way too high. My guess is that it was designed by someone who never rode a motorcycle.

There’s no interim notch that allows the faceshield to crack open the quarter inch or so that my other helmets have always been able to do.  There are plenty of notches for interim faceshield positions; they’re just poorly conceived and they’re all way too high.  The first one after the full faceshield down position puts the bottom edge of the faceshield right in my line of sight.  If you look above that edge, the angle through the faceshield is severe and everything is distorted. If you look below it, you have to tilt your head at an odd angle and you get no protection from the faceshield.  The five upper positions are such that you might as well completely open the faceshield.   Whoever designed the positions probably doesn’t ride.

So there you have it.  I’ve read that you’re supposed to replace your helmet every three years, so I guess I’m about due.   The good thing for me about writing this blog is it firms up (for me) what I need to evaluate when considering my next helmet.  The above negatives notwithstanding, I’m going to give Scorpion another shot. I owe them, big time, based on the performance of my first Scorpion helmet.  It did its job.

 

Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument

A scene from the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument boonies. The cactus on the left is the star of this show.

The latest Motorcycle Classics issue has a great story in it on Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, the National Park that’s tucked in along the Mexican border, south of Ajo and Why in southern Arizona.  It was a fun visit for us, but wow, was it ever hot and desolate out there!  The two closest towns, Ajo and Why, are remote.  As in extremely remote.

Arizona has towns with unusual names.  Ajo means garlic in Spanish (I didn’t see a single garlic when I was there).   Why is name that makes you wonder, well, why anyone would put a town in that location (it’s not much more than two or three buildings out in the middle of nowhere).  The good folks in Arizona wanted to simply call the place Y, as it was built at a fork in the road (you know, like the letter Y).  But Arizona requires their towns to have at least three letters in their names (don’t ask me Why).

So, another day, another Destinations piece in Motorcycle Classics, one of the world’s great magazines.  Other motorcycle magazines are dropping like flies, but MC keeps on keeping on with the best stories and photography in print.  I’ve been writing for Motorcycle Classics for over 10 years now, to the tune of something like 64 articles.  You can get to all of them online, or you can order your very own copy of Destinations, the book with all of the travel pieces I’ve done for MC (we have both black and white and color options).  They make great gifts.  You should buy several..buy two or more and shipping is free!

Buy two or more, and shipping is free!

And speaking of stats, we’ve been publishing ExhaustNotes for a little over a year now.  In that time, we’ve posted 512 blog posts, and we’ve had 2100 comments.   We love your comments, so please, keep them coming.  Do you have anything special you want us to write about?   Hey, let us know.  Post a comment!

Regarding blog topics, one of the things we’ve tried to do is steer clear of politics.  Joe went there a little bit with the title of his recent blog (something about never getting a free gun when Obama was president).  The problem with discussing anything related to politics is nobody listens to understand; they only listen to respond.  That’s true no matter which side of the divide you live on (in my opinion, which of course is always the right one on all political issues).   Do you want us to go there?   There’s just so much to write about, but the deal is that no matter what position we take, we’ll infuriate half our readers.  But wow, the topics are so tempting, and they’ll excite so much discussion.  Get this: Illinois just imposed a tax on trade ins (they tax you on the car you’re buying, and they tax you on the car you’re trading in).  I could have fun writing about that.  But, it’s politics. And it’s Illinois (you know, Chicago, the place where stringent gun control laws are working so well). Should we go there?

Ah, let’s see, what else is going on?

Well, lots.  I received my .257 Weatherby Ruger No. 1 back from the repair center with a new stock, and we’ll be posting photos of it along with a range report in the near future.  I’ve got some good inputs on good loads from my good buddy Mississippi Dave, and we’ll put them to the test.

And things are going great guns with Gear’d (how’s that for alliteration?).

My Gear’d ZX2-1116. I am loving this watch!

I’m wearing my Gear’d watch as I write this, and the more I wear it, the more I like it.  I’ve been checking its accuracy, and it is spot on.  I’ll have an update on my Gear’d in the near future, and so will good buddy Joe Gresh.  Joe’s watch is on its way to him, and he’s got a torture test in mind similar to the one I posted recently.  Joe tells me it has something to do with concrete.

You know, we’ve done a lot of product reviews here on ExNotes, and as promised, we’re adding a Product Reviews page on the site to provide an index to all of them.  Stay tuned, and we’ll post a link in the next few days.   I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this, but we recently updated our Tales of the Gun page.  Take a look.  It’s better organized, and we’re all caught up with adding each of the gun blogs to this page.

And that’s a wrap for today, folks.  As always, there’s lots more coming your way right here on the ExNotes blog.  Keep your comments coming; we love hearing from you.

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The bike handles well when it’s out of control…

Gresh has some really honest, really funny videos, and the thing about the funny part is that the guy is not trying to be funny…he’s just telling it like it is and a lot of times, the truth is pretty funny.  This is a video Joe did 7 years ago on the Harley XR1200 Sportster, and the best line in it is the title of this blog.   Enjoy, my friends.