Joe Berk

Pawn Stars, Pellet Pistols, and Bond. James Bond.

When I wrote the CSC blog, I occasionally did a gun piece on it. This is one I did about a pellet gun I still own. I like pellet guns, and you can have a lot of fun with these things. You can set up a 15-ft range in your backyard or in your garage (15 feet is the distance for competitive pellet pistol matches), and shooting a pellet gun is a good way to keep your skills honed when you can’t get to the big boy range. It’s also a good way to pick off a gopher or a bird that wants to start singing at 3:30 in the morning, but we won’t go there. So, for today’s story…my Walther is a pellet gun with a rich heritage and bunch of cool stories. Here are a couple.

I was channel surfing the other night and I briefly clicked through a rerun of Pawn Stars. You know, that’s the reality TV number about these dudes who run a pawn shop in Las Vegas. I like that show but I blitzed right past it to subsequent channels when something clicked.

Wait a second, I thought as my thumb continued clicking channels on autopilot. That can’t be!

So I reversed my path through the zillions of channels we pay for with Direct TV (but never watch). I went back to Rick and the boys in Las Vegas. They were still on the bit that had caught my attention. Son of a gun. Almost literally…son of a gun! I saw what it was that triggered (ah, there it is, the persistent pun) a neuron and made me click back to the Pawn Stars show. Look at that!

What I saw on TV was a Walther LuftPistole Model LP53. Whoa! I actually own one of those! A real Walther air pistol (that’s what “luftpistole” means in German). And there it was…my gun, on TV!

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What further riveted my attention was something I had sort of noticed but never really recognized before. It became clear when the guys on the Pawn Stars show were giving their background spiel on the Walther. I suddenly realized what had captured my attention yet again. It was another thing that clicked! I’d been seeing it for decades and I had never connected the dots, even though I had owned a fine LP53 specimen for the last 50 years.

At this point, you should mentally key in the James Bond theme song. You know….da da, da dahhh, da da daaaaa. Bond. James Bond.

In all those early posters advertising Dr. No, From Russia with Love, and the early Sean Connery James Bond classics (and they were indeed classics; those early Bond movies were magnificent), the advertising had shown Sean holding an LP53. Even though I owned one and shot it extensively, and even though I am a big time James Bond fan (you know, the secret missions and all), it had just never clicked together for me. In all those early advertisements, big bad James Bond, Agent 007, with a license to kill, was posing with an air pistol. Take a hard look at that photo on the left. That’s a Walther LP53 he’s holding. Da da, da daaah, indeed.

So here’s the story. When the Bond franchise was just getting started, the movie folks scheduled a photo shoot in which Bond was supposed to pose with his iconic Walther PPk, the signature secret agent .32 ACP automatic Ian Fleming wrote about. The only problem was that whoever organized the photo shoot had all the props except, you guessed it, the Walther PPk. Whoa. The whole studio, the tux, the photographer, and James Bond himself all dressed up with nowhere to go. They forgot the gun. What to do?

As it turns out, the photographer (a lensmaster named David Hurn) was a pellet gun target shooting enthusiast (me, too, but I’ll get to that in a bit). His target pistol of choice was, you guessed it again, the Walther LP53. The LP53 is a physically large pistol, and it’s a high class, high-ticket item. Real steel, deep blueing, and all the good stuff that makes old guys like me get all dewey-eyed. Hurn ran out to his car and came back with the LP53, and the rest, as they say, is history. Much of the public is completely unaware that their hero, silver screen idol James Bond, posed with a pellet gun. Hell, I didn’t realize it until Rick told the story on Pawn Stars, and I’ve owned an LP53 for most of my life.

That actual pellet pistol, Bond’s stand-in Walther LP53, sold for a staggering $430,000 at auction a few years ago. That’s the story that Rick told while I was watching Pawn Stars. Whoa, hold the presses! $430,000, and I own one of those things!

Well, not so fast. Rick offered the guy $200. $200. Wow, I thought I would be able to retire on that one pellet gun, but not so. Maybe if James Bond had owned the one that was sitting in my closet, but mine had a less famous background. I checked around on the Internet, and $200 seems to be about the going price (as this screen capture from a recent auction shows)…

So, back to my LP53. It’s in immaculate condition. To a collector it would be cool. My Walther has everything except the owner’s manual. That includes the interchangeable sight blades, the wooden cocking plug (the big round wooden thing that fits over the end of the barrel to assist in cocking the gun), the original box, and mine even has the original factory test target. This is mine…

I guess the $200 going rate is a good thing, because I have no plans to retire any time soon and in any event, I’m hanging on to my LP53. It was given to my Dad by one of his shooting buddies (a fellow named Leo Keller, who, like my Dad, was a serious trapshooter). Dad passed it along to me when I was a kid, and I had a lot of fun with it.

One time I walked over to my cousin Bobby’s house holding that gun in my hand the entire way (Bobby lived a mile away from where I did, back in New Jersey). Imagine that…a young teenager like me walking down the road for a mile holding a pistol in his hand. If a kid in New Jersey tried that today, they’d call out half a dozen SWAT teams and maybe even the National Guard. Back then, it was a normal thing to do, and nobody got their shorts in a knot over it.

Anyway, when I got to Bobby’s house we sat on his back porch shooting the Walther, and then we got the bright idea it might make sense to have something to shoot at. Bobby looked through the trash and found an empty orange juice can. You might remember those cans…they were little (maybe an inch in diameter and about 3 inches tall). The idea was you took the frozen concentrate out and mixed it with water, and voilà, you had orange juice.

Bobby set the can out about 30 feet away and I took a shot at it. Bingo! The can went down.

“Wow, that’s pretty good,” Bobby said. Bobby was about 7 years younger than me (he still is, actually). He was easily impressed back then (today, not so much).

“You ain’t seen nothing yet,” I said. “I’m going to shoot it again and make it stand up.”

Bobby looked at me in amazement. I was his big cousin. He thought what he saw in me was supreme confidence that I could make that shot. You know, that I did this sort of thing all the time. The truth is I had no idea if I could make that shot, but it was such an outrageous thing to claim I had nothing to lose. But….if I made the shot, we’d be talking about it for years.

I took careful aim at the base of the can and gently squeezed the Walther’s trigger. The Walther spit out compressed air and the little .177 pellet connected, catching the orange juice can right at its base. The can spun around, flipped up, whirled around a few more times, and came to rest. Standing. I couldn’t believe it. It was a one-in-a-million shot, and I made it! Pure dumb luck on my part. But I acted as if it was the most natural thing in the world for me to do. That was sometime in the early 1960s. I was back in New Jersey last month and Sue and I had dinner with Bobby and his wife, Sheree. And yes, we talked about that shot.

In researching the background of this unique handgun, I tried to learn what it originally cost. I checked some vintage gun books I own. In my copy of the 1974 Gun Digest, I actually found it. The retail price in 1974 was $59. I had to go through several old books to find it, and as I did so, I was amazed at the artwork on some of them. The 1956 Shooter’s Bible, in particular, stood out. I thought I would scan the cover and include it as a nice touch in finishing this post…

Want to see our other Tales of the Gun stories? Just click here!

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Trahlyta’s Grave

A few years back Sue and I were on a road trip through the southeastern US, visiting spots and grabbing photos for Motorcycle Classics magazine’s Destinations page. That was a grand adventure and we saw a lot of cool places (Memphis, Dahlonega, the Emerald Coast, the US Army Infantry Museum, New Orleans, and more), but the one that stands out in my mind is Trahlyta’s Grave.

We were wrapping up a visit to Dahlonega’s museum (prior to my visit, I did not know that Dahlonega was where the first US gold rush occurred) and on our way out when I asked one of the museum’s docents where the good motorcycle roads were. My perception initially was that the guy wasn’t too interested in helping us, but first impressions are frequently wrong and that one sure was. We didn’t get any good info while we were still in the museum, but he followed us out and gave two small polished stones to me. I wasn’t too sure what was happening. Then he proceeded to tell us the Tale of Trahlyta.

Trahlyta, you see, was a Cherokee princess with the key to eternal youth. She was abducted by another Cherokee with whom she desired no romantic involvement and she subsequently died, but not before asking to be buried near her home at a point where three trails came together. Legend has it that anyone who places a stone at her grave will be rewarded with eternal youth. Hmmm. The docent told us to watch for the pile of rocks. Can’t miss it, he said. You’ll see the marker.

So Sue and I headed north out of Dahlonega, eyes peeled for a rockpile. We saw several small piles perhaps a few inches high over the next few miles, each time thinking we had found Trahlyta’s grave, but none of these had a marker of any kind. Suddenly, we came to the junction of three roads, and when we saw what was there we had a good laugh. The docent was right, we couldn’t have missed it. This pile of rocks was a good 6 feet tall, and it had the historic marker he had mentioned.

The docent had explained to us that several years ago the Georgia transportation folks wanted to move the rockpile, but a member of the road crew attempting to do so was struck by a car and died. A few years after that, the high rollers in the Georgia Department of Transportation decided the earlier road crew fatality was coincidental and they sent another crew. Son of a gun, the same thing happened again! Not wanting to deplete the dues-paying membership, cooler government minds prevailed and the weenies left Trahlyta’s grave as is, where it still exists to this day.

Sue placed both small stones the docent gave to us on the pile, and I’m here to report that they seem to be working. She looks as good today as she did nearly 40 years ago when we first met. Me? I missed an opportunity. I let Sue deposit both of those stones while I was busy taking photos. And yeah, while she stays the same, in the mirror every morning when I shave I see a guy growing steadily older. I should have asked that guy in Dahlonega for more stones.

Want to see more Gresh and Berk previously-published stories? Click here for Gresh’s articles, and here for Berk’s.

Baja Gasolina!

The Catavina gas station (photo by Baja John).

A question I sometimes hear about traveling in Baja is: What about gasoline?

Getting fuel in Mexico is pretty much about the same as getting fuel in the US. There are a few things you should know, but concerns about fuel shouldn’t hinder your plans to ride south of the border. Let’s take a look at what folks planning a Baja expedition might worry about.

Availability

Baja has gas stations distributed about like we do here in the US. There are lots of them in and around the cities, one or two in each of the smaller towns, and they are farther apart in the deserts (all similar to the situation here in America).

The only stretch where it can be concern is the long stretch through the Valle de Los Cirios between El Rosario and Guerrero Negro, where it’s a cool 200 miles (that’s miles, not kilometers) between Pemex stations. That’s beyond the range of many motorcycles’ fuel tanks, but don’t worry about it. In Catavina, which is very roughly at the midway point between these two spots, you’ll a bunch of enterprising Mexicans selling fuel in plastic jugs or pumping it out of a 55-gallon drum. Capitalism rules, folks!

Refueling in Catavina. It’s all part of the adventure!

There’s another plus to stopping for fuel in Catavina and buying gasolina from the guys selling it out of bottles: It makes for a great photograph!

Price

I live in California, the land of exorbitant taxation and left-wing loonies run amuck. What that means is that our gasoline prices are usually about 50% higher than what people in the more-sensibly-governed parts of the US pay. The advantage here, for me, is that the fuel prices in Baja are about the same as what I pay for gas in the Peoples Republik of Kalifornia. As of this writing, we pay somewhere around $3.25/gallon for regular, and something closer to $4.00/gallon for high test. Another thing to consider here is that you don’t buy fuel by the gallon in Baja; you buy it in liters. And the price is not in dollars; it’s in pesos. Today, it’s about 17 pesos per liter, which is about $3.39 (US) per gallon. See what I mean? The prices are roughly equivalent to California.

One more minor point: Mexico uses the dollar sign for pesos, so when you see a fuel price of, say, $17.85, that’s 17.85 pesos per liter. Use of the dollar sign for pesos is a little unnerving at first, but you’ll soon get used to it.

Paying for Fuel

Most places in the US require that you pump your own gas, and most of us pay with credit cards at the pump. You can forget about that in Baja. The way it works in Mexico is that every gas station has attendants, and they’ll do the pumping for you. They all seem to know that you’ll want to handle the nozzle when you’re on a motorcycle, but they’ll take the nozzle out of the pump, hand it to you, and then you can do the pumping.

You pay the attendants directly, too, so then the question becomes: Do you pay in dollars or pesos? I always have enough pesos that I pay directly in their currency. I’d go nuts trying to the convert the pesos to dollars in my head, and I don’t like to try screwing around with a calculator when I’m filling up, so I just pay directly in pesos. The attendants will take the cash from you and run up to the cashier if you have change coming; you don’t pay the cashiers directly.

Roselda, the prettiest pump attendant in Baja!

I’ve never used a credit card at a Baja gas station. Some of them may take credit cards, but I don’t like the idea of giving my credit to somebody who’s going to run into an office to use it. I always pay in cash.

One more thing: Tipping is a good idea. Yeah, you’ll probably never see the attendant again, but it’s peanuts to us and a livelihood to them. Do the right thing, and give a few extra pesos to the person who helped you.

Fuel Brands

Until relatively recently, the government-run Pemex brand was the only fuel station in Mexico (other than the guys selling it out of bottles in places like Catavina). The story was that the government subsidized the price of fuel but did no exploration, so ultimately their fields played out. That’s when the Mexican government realized that Margaret Thatcher was right: Socialism works until you run out of other people’s money. Within the last year, Mexico started allowing Arco, Mobil, British Petroleum, and others to sell gas in Mexico, with the understanding that they had access to larger reserves and these companies would pour a portion of the profits back into exploration.

Regular or Premium?

Some stations will offer both regular and premium fuel; in the more remote parts of Baja it’s regular fuel only. I always run regular, and I’ve done so even on bikes that required premium. I’ve never had a problem doing this.

Fuel Quality

We’ve all heard the stories about bad gas in Baja. Folks, it’s all Internet rubbish. I’ve never had a problem with fuel quality in Mexico, even when buying it from the guys selling out of bottles. That said, I do sometimes carry a small container of Sea Foam just in case I get fuel with water in it, but it’s never happened. I think the last time I used the Sea Foam was when I rode my Triumph Tiger in Baja. It started running a little rough somewhere north of Santa Rosalia, so I put a little Sea Foam in the fuel tank and maybe the roughness went away. Or maybe I imagined it. The bottom line here is you can forget about fuel quality issues in Baja. It just doesn’t happen.

Restroom Availability and Cleanliness

We often stop at gas stations to use the restrooms. You might have visions of filthy, disease-laden banos, but that’s another thing that just isn’t true. Most bathrooms in Baja fuel stops are relatively clean, about the equivalent of what you might see at any gas station in the US. What is different, though, is toilet paper. There’s usually none in a Mexican gas station rest room, so it’s a good idea to bring toilet paper with you. You may or may not see a sign asking that you not flush toilet paper, but to instead deposit it in a waste basket in the stall. I guess the deal is that the sewage systems are not set up to process toilet paper. It’s counter to our custom, but it’s what they do.

So there you have it. Fuel is not an issue in Baja, and it’s certainly not a reason for being apprehensive about an adventure ride in an area that arguably offers the best riding on the planet. The cost is reasonable, it’s available about like it is in the US, the quality is good, and the photo ops are awesome.

Like what you read here about riding in Baja? Hey, there’s lots more where that came from! Take a look at our ExNotes Baja page!

Gun stuff is da bomb!

Or so sayeth Joe Gresh, soothsayer, philosopher, and observer of the human condition extraordinaire. Say what you wish, every time we post a gun blog here on ExNotes, the hits (no gun puns intended) go through the roof. We’re primarily a motorcycle site, with an emphasis on vintage bikes, restorations, destinations, Baja, and adventure riding. But our readers love gun stories. What to do?

I guess we’ve got to find a way to merge the two topics: Guns and motorcycles. Somebody did it with roses. We’ve got to be smart enough to find a way to do it with motorcycles. Here are my thoughts…

Maybe armed motorcycles. Hmmm, that might work. I’m thinking a .45 ACP Gatling mounted centerline on a big V-twin, maybe with the bike being designated the FLH-GG. Centerline mounting would prevent recoil-induced torque steer (just as was done on the A-10 Warthog), and the .45 ACP chambering would allow for increased ammo storage and shorter barrel length (plus, the .45 ACP is an incalculably cool cartridge). I’m thinking a firing rate of 1000 rounds per minute would do nicely.

I’d go with a single Gatling mounted in the headlight, chambered in .45 ACP. You get the idea. If you need to know more about Gatling guns, take a look here.

That Gatling thing could work. When I was in the Army, we called our 20mm Gatlings Vulcans, and Kawasaki made a motorcycle called the Vulcan. There are branding possibilities here, folks.

Or maybe we look for bikes that have already been built. Ural had a sidecar model with a machine gun mount a few years ago. Yeah, that could work.

Ural’s Gear Up model, complete with machine gun mount. Machine gun sold separately. From The Complete Book of Police and Military Motorcycles, by You Know Who.

We could focus on police and military motorcycles. Hmmm, I know a pretty good book on that topic, and Lord knows there’s enough models of police and military bikes to support a string of blog features. But hey, we’re already planning to do that. And it will be cool. I guarantee it.

A Harley WLA, complete with a Thompson submachine gun scabbard. Thompson submachine gun sold separately. This is another photo from Police and Military Motorcycles.

Maybe a feature or two on how to carry a gun on a motorcycle, both out in the open and maybe a concealed carry feature. The Army had some cool ideas on open carry back in the 1940s (see the above photo). For concealed carry, I’m thinking maybe something that’s integrated into the clutch lever, or a tankbag holster that looks like a map case. Or maybe a cell phone mount with a Derringer designed to look like a cell phone. Yeah, we could have a lot of fun with this one.

When I was at CSC, we sometimes ran a postal match. You know, where folks shoot at a target, send the target to us, and we’d score them to find a winner. That was a lot of fun.

Drive By Bike GIF from Driveby GIFs

While we were running the postal match, somebody actually wrote to me suggesting we have a match in which you have to shoot from a rolling motorcycle (no kidding, folks…I can’t make up stuff this good). It would be kind of like polo, I suppose, but with bikes and bullets instead of horses and mallets (or whatever they call those things they whack the ball with). Liability coverage might be tough, but it could be made to work.

We could design a gun that transforms itself into a motorcycle. You know, you carry the thing in a holster, say a few well-chosen words, and it converts itself into a motorcycle to allow for a convenient and quick exit. We could maybe call it something catchy, like the Transformer. We ‘d probably sell a few just because it sounds like an electric thingamabog (you know, it would sell to folks wanting to show they’re green). Nah, I don’t think he technology has caught up to the EPA challenges yet. But it’s fun to think about.

The Transformer, a motorcycle that changes into a gun. We’d sell a lot of T-shirts.

I’ve done a blog or two on motorcycle companies that started as firearms manufacturers. You know, BSA (which actually stands for Birmingham Small Arms), Royal Enfield (of Lee Enfield rifle fame), and well, you get the idea. That would involve a lot of research, so it may not fit in with our ExNotes labor minimization strategies. But it might be worth considering.

All of the above is food for thought, but I’m rapidly approaching a state in which I’ve been thinking so hard I may not be able to think for the next several days. Help me out here, folks. What are your ideas?

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Such a deal!

Every once in a while we see deals that are noteworthy enough to get the word out to our ExNotes blog readers, and right now, the word is this: CSC is offering big savings on the TT250 (a $200 price drop to $1995) and the RX3 (a whopping $700 price drop to $3495). Both are great bikes. I know because I rode the TT250 through Baja, and I rode the RX3 across America, Baja, Colombia, and China. If you’ve been on the fence, folks, these are deals you’ll want to jump on. But hey, don’t take my word…watch Joe Gresh’s video on the RX3, and Each Adventure’s video on the TT250…

Pigs and Poison Oak

A stunning, Turnbull color case hardened Ruger Super Blackhawk in .44 Magnum.

Another beautiful .44 Magnum…this one is a 1970s Marlin Model 1894 with a Williams aperture rear sight.

Friday was a good day, as is any day spent on the range, and for me, Friday last week meant a visit to the West End Gun Club. Hey, I’m retired. Ride the motorcycle, or head to the range? Life is good either way. This past Friday, the range got the nod.

I took two guns with me. One was a new Ruger Turnbull Super Blackhawk I recently picked up from a Gunbroker auction at a decent price. The other was Marlin 1894 lever action rifle that I’ve owned too long and shot too little. Both are chambered in .44 Magnum. The idea here is that you have two guns both chambered for the same cartridge, and it makes for a good combination to carry afield. Mind you, I’m not too sure where “afield” is actually located, but I kind of get the idea…it’s a place that frequently appears in gun ads and Western novels, a place where manly men hang out. The thought is that you only have to carry one cartridge, so you can save your manliness for other endeavors.

My take on the concept? I think it’s a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. I had opportunities to carry both a rifle and a handgun at the same time when I was in the Army, but I thought doing so was just dumb. I didn’t want the added weight, so I always went for either an M-16 or a 1911 (but never both) depending on what I was doing that day. On a hunting trip, I think it’s an absolute bust. When I was a lot younger, one time chasing hogs I carried a 9mm handgun and a .300 H&H Mag custom Weatherby rifle (I know, .300 H&H was massive overkill for hogs). The first day of that adventure was enough to convince me that carrying both a handgun and a rifle was silly, and I left the handgun home after that (I spent that entire first day walking through the woods trying to not scratch the rifle on the handgun). And in case you were wondering, the only thing I came home with on that trip was the worst case of poison oak I ever had.

That said, the idea of a lever gun and a sixgun both chambered for the same cartridge maybe made sense when the .44-40 was winning the West. In those days, you could get a Colt six-shooter and a Winchester lever gun that both used the .44-40 cartridge. Or maybe I’ve just been reading too many Zane Grey novels. But the idea has had a following stimulated by rifle and handgun marketing types for years. Like I said, unless you are transported back in time and you get around on a horse, I think carrying a rifle and a handgun is wacky. But I own a rifle and a handgun that shoot the same cartridge (the two firearms you see in the above photos), and just for grins I wanted to see if I could find a load that is superbly accurate in both.

To cut to the chase, the answer so far is no. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I’ve been shooting .44 Mag since shortly after Dirty Harry adorned the silver screen, and I’ve been reloading the round for about that long, too. I haven’t shot .44 Mag in a handgun much in the last few years (the recoil can only be described as brutal and Lord knows I’m no spring chicken), and I had not shot the .44 Mag Marlin rifle hardly at all. It was time to address both character deficiencies, I thought, and last Friday was as good a day as any to do so.

I’m a sucker for lever actions with pretty wood, and the Marlin checked all the boxes for me.

See what I mean? It’s not bad. Not exceptional, but above average, and the price was right.

The Williams aftermarket aperture sight on the 1894 Marlin. The theory is that an aperture sight is more accurate than a simple notch rear sight. I prefer the plain notch sight.

I bought the Marlin when Reagan was in the White House. I’m not sure why. It was one of those guns you buy and then just never shoot much. I felt guilty about that. And the Turnbull was one I wanted to use. Yeah, it’s almost too pretty to shoot. Almost. Like I said, I hit the Gunbroker “bid again” button a sufficient number of times to take it home. It’s beautiful, and like you’ve read on these pages before, I am a big fan of Turnbull-finished firearms.

Turnbull color case hardening. Gresh talked about what constitutes art in his most recent blog. To me, this is it.

The starboard side of the Turnbull Ruger. Pretty, huh?

Even though I had not shot much .44 Magnum in recent years, I had a half-dozen different loads in .44 Mag squirreled away in my ammo locker: One box of factory ammo that’s been there for a decade or more (I can’t remember where I picked it up, one I reloaded with Hornady jacketed bullets, and the rest I had reloaded with various cast or swaged lead bullets. My intent was to find the magic load that shot well in both the Marlin 1894 rifle and the Ruger revolver. There was nothing scientific in any of this; I just had a bunch of different loads and I thought I would try them all.

So, back to the range. It was a beautiful day, but it was windy as hell out at the West End Gun Club last Friday and I’m sure that affected my results. But, sometimes it’s windy. What are you going to do? I shoot when I can. And I just wanted to get an idea what my six different loads would do in the rifle and the handgun.

So, here’s the bottom line…

Revolver and rifle load testing results with the Ruger Super Blackhawk and the Marlin 1894. These are my loads only; you should start lower and develop your own to make sure any load is safe in your gun.

None of my cast or swaged loads had acceptable accuracy in the rifle. That’s probably because of the Marlin microgroove bore and the diameter to which my cast bullets had been sized. I don’t think Marlin uses microgroove rifling any more in their .44 Magnum lever guns. Microgroove rifling is a very shallow rifling technique; current Marlins use more conventional (and deeper) Ballard-type rifling. I’d read online that to get a .44 Magnum cast bullet to shoot in the Marlin microgroove barrel, you had to size the bullets to 0.433 inch. All of my cast stuff is sized smaller than that around the standard 0.429 or 0.430 inch (yep, that’s right, a .44 Mag is actually not 0.44 inch in diameter; it’s only 0.429 inch…not that it would matter to anything struck by one of these monstrous high velocity slugs). Oh, and that factory ammo? My box of old HSM factory .44 Magnum was terrible in the Marlin.

It wasn’t all bad news with the Marlin, though. The load with Hornady jacketed flatpoint bullets and Winchester’s 296 propellant shot well in the rifle, as you can see in the chart above. That’s good to know. Interestingly, those bullets are 0.429 inch in diameter. But they shot well. Go figure.

With the Turnbull revolver results varied, but they were generally way better than with the Marlin rifle. All of my cast loads shot reasonably well, although the recoil was horrendous with all of them (except for the one light Bullseye load). The Hornady jacketed bullet load with 296 powder shot well. I’ve always had good luck with 296 powder in both the .357 and .44 Magnum. The HSM factory load? It shot the same in the Ruger as it did in the Marlin, which is to say it was terrible.

Chasing a load that shoots well in both a rifle and a handgun may be a fool’s errand (like I said ealier, I may be reading too much Zane Grey), but it was something I wanted to play around with. The Marlin liked those Hornady jacketed bullets with 296 and they did well in the Ruger, too, so I think the next round of testing will involve using just those bullets with different levels of 296. It may be I need a different loads for the Marlin and the Ruger, but that’s okay. The next time I go “afield” I’ll only be carrying one gun, and you can bet I’ll be keeping a sharp eye out for pigs and poison oak.

Want to see our other Tales of the Gun stories? Just click here!

The Three Flags Classic: Day 3

The third day of the 2005 Three Flags Classic motorcycle rally would take us from Grand Junction, Colorado (where we stayed the second night of the tour) to Driggs, Idaho. Wowee, we were covering some miles! You can catch up on the ride by reading our prior blog posts here:

The 2005 Three Flags Classic Rally: the Intro!

The Three Flags Classic: Day 1

The Three Flags Classic: Day 2

And with that, let’s get to Day 3!

Day 3 of the 2005 Three Flags Rally. Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Idaho…it was magnificent.

As you’ll recall, it had rained big time during parts of Day 2, and it had continued to rain that evening. The next morning, though, was a bright, crisp, Colorado day, and after a great breakfast, we pointed the bikes north and crossed over into Utah.

The Gold Wing (shown here in Utah) was the most popular bike on this trip. They sure looked comfortable compared to my Daytona!

Utah was amazing. I continue to believe it is the most scenic of our 50 states. Although I had been to Zion and Bryce on previous trips, the Three Flags Classic was taking us to places I had never seen. We had a checkpoint in Vernal, a most interesting place in the heart of Utah’s dinosaur country.

Check out the way this guy has his Harley packed at the Vernal checkpoint. Think he might be dragging a bit in the corners? Harleys and Gold Wings were the most popular bikes in the 2005 Three Flags Classic.

We rode north, up to and around Flaming Gorge Reservoir. These were all magnificent destinations. The folks who planned the tour route did an amazing job.

Looking down into Flaming Gorge Reservoir in Utah. The colors, the brightness, it was all amazing. All of these photos were on film, captured with a Nikon N70 camera.

Marty and his Beemer, with Utah as a backdrop. Marty is the guy who invited me on this ride. He’s another serious long-distance rider, having put nearly 100,000 miles on this BMW. The machine looks as if it is brand new. Today in 2019, it’s still parked in his garage.

Marty and the motorcycles, with Flaming Gorge Reservoir in the background. The photo ops on this ride were amazing.

After leaving Utah, we entered Wyoming for a brief period, and then we were into Idaho. Idaho is a beautiful state. We saw quite a few dead animals on the road, and in particular, a lot of dead skunks. We also saw a few larger roadkill carcasses that I didn’t immediately recognize. I later learned they were wolves!

My friend Dave on his BMW in Driggs. This is a beautiful R1150GS. Check out the custom lighting (just below the turn signals) and the custom wheels. Dave’s bike was always spotless. He cleaned it every night.

We would our night in Driggs, Idaho, at the end of Day 3. It was an interesting night, with forest fires raging around us. We had a great dinner, more great conversation, and I was getting to know the guys better. Marty, as always, was an easy guy to travel with. I got to know good buddy Dave, shown in the above photo, a lot better on this trip, too. Dave was an absolute fanatic about keeping his bike clean, which was a hell of a challenge considering all of the rain we had ridden through the prior day. We had a bit of rain that night after dinner, too, and I remember talking to Dave as he was wiping down his GS, in the rain, cleaning it as the rain fell on the bike. I told him he was going to have a hard time, washing a bike in the rain, and we had a good laugh about that.

Looking due west after dinner in Driggs, Idaho. Smoke filled the skies from fires raging all around us.

And that, my friends, wraps up Day 3 of the 2005 Three Flags Classic. The following day would take us way up north to Whitefish, Montana, just south of the Canadian border. It had been an amazing three days so far, and we still had a long way to go. But that’s coming in future blogs.

Stay tuned!

Marking Time

The real deal: Apollo 15 Astronaut Dave Scott’s Bulova, which sold for a cool $1.625 million at auction.

I’ve always been a watch guy. It probably started when my parents surprised me with a Timex when I was a kid. The thought of having my own wristwatch was heady stuff for a boy back on the east coast (or anywhere else, I imagine). To make a long story short, I’ve been a watch collector ever since. I don’t specialize, and many times I won’t keep a watch forever. If I like the way a watch looks and it’s not crazy expensive, I’ll wear it for a while, with the duration of “a while” usually determined by the time it takes for the next interesting thing to catch my eye.

I make no excuses: I like watches, and I always wonder about guys who don’t wear them. Not wearing a watch is a common thing with young guys today. When I taught in Cal Poly’s College of Engineering, one of my topics focused on how to do well in an interview. My guidance was simple. Dress sharply, be early, look the interviewer right in the eye, speak up, don’t use the word “like” incessantly when you speak, and wear a watch. A lot of kids today don’t wear watches. If they have any interest in knowing what time it is, they look at their iPhone. That’s a no go, I’d tell my students. If you don’t wear a watch, the person interviewing you will conclude you have no sense of time-based urgency. It’s what I always concluded when someone showed up not wearing a watch.

Anyway, to get to the subject of this blog, I want to tell you about the Bulova moon watch. It’s a cool piece with an interesting story that goes like this: With the advent of the Apollo lunar exploration program (the NASA endeavor to put men on the moon), the US government decided we needed an official space watch. Omega won the competition with their Speedmaster watch, and for the next 14 missions, that’s what astronauts wore.

Here’s where it gets complicated and where the story gets Internet-fuzzy. Depending on which source you believe, Astronaut Dave Scott wore a Bulova watch on the Apollo 15 mission for one of the following reasons:

He wore the Bulova watch because his Omega broke.
He wore the Bulova watch because he felt like it.
He wore the Bulova watch because Bulova was trying to replace Omega as the official NASA watch.
He wore the watch because the US government, Bulova, or other parties wanted the official watch to be something made in America.

Whatever the reason (and you can find stories supporting each of the above floating around in that most authoritative of all sources, the Internet), Dave Scott wore the Bulova on the Apollo 15 mission, and Omega went from being “the only watch worn on the moon” to “the first watch worn on the moon.” It could not have gone over well at the Omega factory.

Dave Scott’s original Bulova, the one he wore on the moon, sold at auction a few years ago. The predicted auction price was $50,000. As predictions go, it wasn’t a very good one. When the gavel came down and the dust cleared, Scott’s Bulova sold for a cool $1.3 million. Throw in the auction commission and other fees, and you’re talking about a $1.625-million wristwatch. Wowee!

Bulova, today no longer an American watch company (they were bought by Citizen a few years ago) recognized a marketing opportunity when it fell into their laps, and they re-issued an internally updated version of Scott’s watch as the Bulova Moonwatch, complete with a 262 kHz Accutron movement. I have no idea what a 262 kHz movement is, except that the Bulova marketing hype tells me it means it’s super accurate.

The not-so-real deal, but a hell of a deal nonetheless: The Bulova replica Moonwatch, purchased for just under $300. Yep, as I type this, I’m wearing my Bulova.

The increased accuracy really didn’t matter to me when I saw the watch (I’m retired now and I seldom need 262 kHz accuracy when I decide I feel like going somewhere), so that’s not what prompted me to pull the trigger. I just like the way it looks, I like the swirl of stories around the original Bulova moon watch, and my Dad wore a Bulova when I was a kid.

Oh, one other thing helped…a trick that has prompted me to pull the trigger on other discretionary purposes. You know how the Internet spies on us, right? I mean, folks complain all the time about looking at something on Amazon or whatever and then it starts showing up in their Facebook feed. That’s not always a bad thing. When I first looked at the Bulova Moonwatch it was a $600 bauble. I wasn’t going to pay that kind of money, and I guess the spymasters/Internet marketeers figured that one out. They and I knew it was a waiting game to see who would blink first. Because I had looked for the watch on Amazon, I started getting emails from different retailers to buy the watch for less, and I let those roll in. Delete, delete, delete, and then one day, an offer floated into my inbox for $299. Hmmm. Delete. And sure enough, a day or two later and that $299 offer came with a coupon for $20 off and free shipping on my first order. Ka ching!

Yawn…

So I guess Charley and Ewan are planning another ride. I suppose that’s a good thing, even though I thought the first ones were kind of contrived. I mean, really, you have two rich kids riding around the world on their own with corporate sponsorship, followed by a caravan of chase vehicles, spare parts, tool chests, mechanics, and camera crews. Two dilettantes confusing their income with their abilities, making a movie, complete with photos like the one above vaguely suggesting a combat mission somewhere in the mountains of Afghanistan. Give me a break. Maybe I’m being hypocritical; after all, I sort of did the same thing on the Western America Adventure Tour and the China ride. We even had a chase vehicle on both of those rides, too, although I managed to convince myself that chase vehicles are a net negative and I never used them again.

You want to read a real adventure story? Turn to my all-time favorite…the story of Dave Barr’s solo ride around the world.

Dave Barr in the hills above Lake Isabella, photographed by yours truly.

Dave Barr is a guy who lost both legs to a landmine while fighting in Africa. Undeterred and unbroken, after a lengthy recovery he finished out his enlistment, came home, put an electric starter on his beat up old ’72 Harley (which already had a hundred thousand miles on the clock), and with no sponsorship, no chase vehicle, no film crew, and nothing other than a strong will, Barr spent the next four years riding around the world. He’d ride a bit, run out of money, find a job wherever he was, work a bit more, and get back on the bike. That, my friends, is a real adventure, and you can read about it in Riding the Edge. Trust me on this: Riding the Edge is infinitely better than the long way whatever.

Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to Harbor Freight I go…

It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it’s an easy fix. You know the drill…you open your fuel petcock on a carbureted bike, and a few seconds later you smell gasoline. And then a few seconds after that you see fuel on the ground, dripping from your bike. Most of the time, the culprit is a stuck fuel float valve in the carb’s float bowl.

In the old days, before there where vacuum lines and multiple cylinders and all kinds of complications, getting to the offending valve was a relatively easy fix. There would typically be three Phillips-head screws holding the float bowl to the carb, they came out, you gently pulled the pin holding the float to the carb, and the valve mechanism dropped out into your hand. You might see a bit of debris that held the valve open, or you might not.

The carb on a TT250. Getting to the three screws securing the float bowl to the carb body was a bit of a bitch.

Weirdly, in our world of fuel injected, multi-cylindered motorcycles, this happened to me twice in just the last few weeks. Once was at the very beginning of a Baja trip, and the other was just a day or two ago on my TT250. The fix was easy both times, except for access. Even on our simple single cylinder carbureted machines, the manufacturers have made getting to the float valve challenging. On my TT250, I had to loosen the clamp securing the rubber passageway from the carb to the airbox, pull that passageway away, and then remove the two nuts securing the intake manifold to the cylinder head. All this was just to get the carburetor away from the engine a bit so I could turn it enough to get access to those three little Phillips head screws on the float bowl. After I did that and I pulled the float (which works exactly like the one in your toilet bowl, which works exactly like the one in a wing-mounted F-16 drop tank, but that’s a story for another blog), the float valve dropped out. Sure enough, there was a bit of rubber debris (or was it detritus?) on the valve. I flicked it away, reassembled the thing, and oila, no more fuel leak.

The trick is betting to those three little Phillips head screws with the carb still on the bike. I need a screwdriver like the one you see in this photo, but a lot littler. It’s out there. I’ll find it or make it.

The trick for me on a go-forward basis is to find a very tiny, very short Phillips head screwdriver that will allow me to get the thing under the float bowl with the carb still on the bike. That will turn a 20-minute job into a 20-second job the next time this happens. It’s off to Harbor Freight for me. I’ll keep you posted.

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