Author: Joe Berk

A .30 06 Mk V Weatherby…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Dream Bike: 1978 Triumph Bonneville

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

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

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

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

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

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

Riding India on an Enfield

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

Genuine’s G400c and more…

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

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

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

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

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

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

1Q19 Moto Book Winner!

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

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

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

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

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

Aerodynamics, Roman baths, and the See Ya

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A Roman bath?” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

China’s EV subsidies sharply reduced

An electric scooter in China.

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

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

Destinations!

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

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

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

The Remington Safari Grade .375 H&H

Two of the all time greats…a Safari Grade Model 700 Remington, and the .375 Holland and Holland cartridge.   Check out the walnut on this magnificent rifle!

I started playing with guns when I was a youngster and the disease progressed as I aged.  I almost said “matured” instead of “aged,” but that would be stretching things, especially when it comes to shelling out good money for fancy guns.  When I see a rifle I want, I haven’t matured at all.  I sure have aged, though.

So anyway, when I was a young guy, I read everything I could about all kinds of guns, and I especially enjoyed reading about big game rifles. Really big game, as in Peter Hathaway Capstick chasing cape buffalo, Jim Corbett chasing man-eating tigers in India, and Colonel John Henry Patterson chasing the man-eating lions of Tsavo.  It was all books and magazines back in those days. Al Gore was still a youngster and he had not invented the Internet yet, and if you wanted to read about cool things you went to a place called the library. One of the cool things to read about there, for me, was the .375 Holland and Holland cartridge, along with the rifles that chambered its Panatela of a cartridge.  The descriptions were delicious…a magnum rifle firing a 300-grain bullet 3/8ths of an inch in diameter at 2700+ fps with the trajectory of a .30 06.

The .375 H&H goes all the way back to 1912, when it was developed by the great English firm of Holland and Holland. It’s still one of the best cartridges ever for hunting big beasts that snarl, roar, bite, stomp, and gore those who would do them harm.   It was the first belted magnum cartridge. The idea is that cartridge headspaces on the belt (a stepped belt around the base), a feature that wasn’t really necessary for proper function, but from a marketing perspective it was a home run.  Nearly all dangerous game cartridges that followed the mighty .375 H&H, especially those with “magnum” aspirations, were similarly belted.   Like I said, it was a marketing home run.

As a young guy, I was convinced my life wouldn’t be complete without a .375 H&H rifle.  You see, I had more money than brains back in those days.  I spent my young working life on the F-16 development team, and my young non-working life playing with motorcycles and guns.  I was either on a motorcycle tearing up Texas, or on the range, or hanging around various gun shops between El Paso and Dallas.   In Texas, some of the shops had their own rifle range.  People in Texas get things right, I think.

One of the shops I frequented was the Alpine Range in Fort Worth, Texas. The fellow behind the counter knew that I was a sucker for any rifle with fancy walnut, and when I stopped in one Saturday he told me I had to take a look at a rifle he had ordered for a customer going to Africa. He had my interest immediately, and when he opened that bright green Remington box, what I saw took my breath away.  It was a Safari Grade Model 700 in .375 H&H. In those days, the Safari Grade designation meant the rifle had been assembled by the Remington Custom Shop, and that was about as good as it could possibly get.

The Model 700 was beautiful.  Up to that point, I’d never even seen a .375 H&H rifle other than in books and magazines. This one was perfect. In addition to being in chambered in that most mystical of magnums (the .375 H&H), the wood was stunning.  It had rosewood pistol grip and fore end accents, a low-sheen oil finish, the grain was straight from the front of the rifle through the pistol grip, and then the figure fanned, flared, flamed, and exploded as the walnut approached the recoil pad. I knew I had to own it, and I’m pretty sure the guy behind the counter knew it, too. Did I mention that the rifle was beautiful?

“How much?” I asked, trying to appear nonchalant.

“I can order you another one,” the counter guy countered, “but this one is sold. I ordered it for a guy going to Africa.  I’ll order another one for you. They all come with wood this nice.”

“Has he seen this one yet?” I asked, not believing that any rifle could be as stunning.  I knew that rifles varied considerably, and finding one with wood this nice would be a major score, Remington Custom Shop assembly or not.

“No,” the sales guy answered, “he hasn’t been in yet, but I can get another for you in a couple of days. Don’t worry; they’re all this nice.”

His advice to the contrary notwithstanding, I worried.  This was the one I had to own. “How much?” I asked again.

“$342,” he answered.

Mind you, this was in 1978. That was a lot of money then. It seems an almost trivial amount now.   The rifle you see in the photo above, especially with its fancy walnut, would sell for something more like $2,000 today.  Maybe more.

“Get another one for Bwana,” I said. “This one is mine.”

“But this is the other guy’s.”

“Not anymore it’s not. Not if you ever want to see me in here again,” I said.  Like to told you earlier, I was a young guy back then in 1978.  I thought I knew how to negotiate.  My only negotiating tool in those days was a hammer, and to me, every negotiation was a nail. You know how it is to be young and dumb, all the while believing you know everything.

“Let me see what I can do,” the sales guy said, with a knowing smile. When the phone range at 10:00 a.m. the following Monday, I knew it was the Alpine Range, and I knew the Model 700 was going to be mine. I told my boss I wasn’t feeling well.

“Another rifle?” he asked.  He didn’t need to ask.  He knew.  We were in Texas.  He had the disease, too.

In less than an hour, the rifle you see in that photograph above was mine. The guy behind the counter at the Alpine Range was good. He had already received a second Safari Grade Model 700, in .375 H&H, so the safari dude was covered. I asked to see the replacement rifle and the walnut on it was bland, straight grained, and dull…nothing at all like the exhibition grade walnut on mine.  It made me feel even better.

I’ve owned my Model 700 .375 H&H Remington for more than four decades now.  I’ve never been on safari with it and I have zero desire to shoot a cape buffalo, a lion, a tiger, or anything else, but I do love owning and shooting my .375 H&H.  I’ve never seen another with wood anywhere near as nice as mine, and that makes owning it all the more special.

Like reading about guns?  See all our Tales of the Gun stories!