Category: Amazon

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.
With Marty near Flaming Gorge.
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!

Dream Bike: Ducati 860GT

There are only a couple Ducatis that make my Dream Bike fantasy garage and the numero uno, top dog, ultimate Ducati is the springer 860. Unlike most Ducatis, this square-case, 90-degree, V-twin motorcycle eliminates the positive-closing desmodromic valve actuation system and in its place uses a conventional spring-return valve train. To some posers this change negates the whole reason for owning a Ducati. Not in my view: The ability to set valve lash with only a potato peeler on a motorcycle axle deep in cow manure plus the fact that I rarely run any motorcycle at valve floating RPMs means Desmo Ducks hold no advantage for me.

Is it wrong to love a motorcycle solely for its looks?  Giorgetto Giugiaro’s Jetson-cartoon styling speaks of optimism and a bold stepping-forth into the future. It looks fabulous and slabby and never ages in my eyes. This is one of those motorcycles you can stare at for hours. Why stop there? I’ve never ridden an 860GT so I’m just extrapolating from Ducati’s past performance but I’m sure the thing will handle street riding without issue.

The bikes were available with electric start for the kicking-impaired and after 1975 Ducati exchanged the perfect angular styling for the more traditional, rounded Desmo GT look. It was an error that I may never forgive them for. The springer 860 stayed in production a few more years but Ducati decided to go all in with desmodromic to give their advertising department some thing to boast about.

These 860GT Ducati’s are for riders. The seating position is humane, the gas tank big enough and I’ve read of some pretty astronomical miles racked up on the springer engine. A few years ago at an auction in Daytona I missed out on a beautiful red 860GT. The thing looked like new and sold for $5000. Damn cheap for such a rare (built only 2 years) and cool motorcycle.

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!

Sausage Making

The China tour story I wrote took a long, winding road to publication. I like to pre-sell any feature-ish story and since we had recently done another big CSC story at That Other Magazine I pitched the China ride to Editor in Chief, Marc Cook. He liked the idea and suggested making the story less about the CSC motorcycle and more about the ride.

All went swimmingly on the tour but while I was in China That Other Magazine was going through upheaval on every level. I returned to a smoking, charred magazine landscape of fewer, thinner issues and a frequently changing vision for That Other Magazine. I ran the China story past each new editor (in quick succession) they all liked it but the reformatted book had many must-print stories and little space for a long feature on China.

That Other Magazine went through another major restyle opting for a spare, photo-heavy layout, a cut back to 6 issues a year and hired a platoon of fresh, new writers. I re-re-re-pitched the thing, refusing to believe it was over but like any failed love affair the day came when I realized my blue passion for That Other Magazine had faded to grey.

Whenever I do a free-riding junket for a motorcycle manufacturer there are no preconditions. I may love or hate their motorcycle but I will write honestly about it. The only thing I can offer in return for their hard-earned money is publicity. My job was to write a story and get it published: I had failed myself, CSC, Joe Berk, my fellow China Riders and Zongshen.

At this point I pretty much gave up on the China tour and shoved the thing into a dark, dusty corner of my hard drive. I couldn’t stand looking at the story, so much effort that came to naught. Newer challenges awaited writing and I wasn’t going to let the China story drag me down. I moved on.

Enter this blog and its demanding publishing schedule. While I’m no fountain of content I’ve never written as many words a month as I have since we started ExhaustNotes. The hectic pace and all-consuming need for content has changed my opinion of writing from an art form into a trade. I make stories like I pour concrete. Instead of a failure, the China tour became just another slab. I pitched the thing to Motorcycle.com and thankfully they bit. I rewrote the story to reflect the new realities regarding That Other Magazine and the result can be found here: Kung Fu Riding.  Sorry it took so long.

Yawn…

Again?   Please…

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 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.

Where does the line form?

So the price of the new Harley Livewire has been announced, and it’s just under $30K.   With taxes, dealer setup, freight, etc., it’s a bike that will be somewhere around $35K.   Every blog, motorcycle forum, and motorcycle news outlet on the planet is carrying the story, and I have little more to add.  Everyone with an opinion is posting why this makes sense, or why it makes no sense.

When Harley came out with the V-Rod 15 or so years ago, I said it would flop, and I posted a comment to that effect on one of the forums:

Wow, a 600-lb motorcycle with 85 horsepower.   Where does the line form?

That comment ultimately was proven correct, and it somehow seems Livewire-appropriate today.  I’ll leave the Livewire pricing, marketing analysis, and deep thinking to the other online pundits.  My prediction?  It took the V-Rod more than a decade to die.  The demise of the Livewire, at $35K, will be mercifully quick.  I hope I’m wrong, but I suspect I am not.

Riding in the rain…

Wow, it has been pouring here for the last week, with little respite other than this past Sunday. Sunday was nice. Every other day this week and the tail end of last week has been nonstop rain. Big time. Buckets full. And my iPhone just started buzzing with a flash flood warning for this area. Wow again.

So I’m sitting here at the computer, enjoying a hot cup of coffee, looking out the window, and I’m thinking about what it’s like to ride in the rain. We’ve all had those rides. Those memories stick in my mind. I remember every one of those rides like they happened yesterday.

The first was the return leg of my first international motorcycle foray, when good buddy Keith Hediger and I rode up to Montreal and back. That was in the early ‘70s, and we didn’t call them adventure rides back then. They were just motorcycle rides. I was on a ’71 CB750 and Keith was on a Kawi 500cc triple. It rained the entire length of Vermont at about the same intensity you see in the video above. We had no rain gear. It wasn’t cold, but it sure was wet. We were soaked the entire day. Wouldn’t trade a minute of it. It was a great ride.

Another time was on the second ride I ever did in Baja with good buddy Baja John. It was pouring when we left at 4:00 a.m., and it didn’t let up for the entire day. I was on a Harley then, and we finally stopped somewhere around Colonet to checked into a cheap Baja hotel (a somewhat redundant term, which is becoming less redundant as Baja’s march in to the 21st century unfortunately continues). Leather, I found out on that trip, makes for lousy rain gear. I went hypothermic, and I had the shakes until 4:00 the following morning. It made for a good story, and the rest of that trip was epic. Down to Cabo, back up to La Paz, on the overnight ferry over to Mazatlan, out to Puerto Vallarta and Guadalajara, back up to Nogales, and a thousand-mile one-day dash to make it home on New Year’s Eve. Wouldn’t trade a second of it.

Riding with Marty on the ’05 Three Flags Classic, we were caught in a downpour the second day out as we rode along the Dolores River in Colorado. It was a magnificent ride, with Marty on his K1200RS and me on my 1200cc Daytona.  It wasn’t a drizzle.  It was a downpour, just like you see in the video above.  I remember it vividly, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Colombia had lots of rain, but it only hit us hard on the very first day. It was raining hard that first morning as we rode out of Medellin and into the Andes early on that fine Colombian morning, but it lightened up by breakfast. I had real rain gear and the only issues were visibility and passing 22-wheelers on blind curves, as my Colombian riders did with gleeful abandon. Exciting times. But good times, and certainly ones I remember. Colombia was an adventure for the ages. I wouldn’t trade a second of it for anything else.

I’d have to say the heaviest rains I ever rode through were in China, where it rains a lot. It probably rained 25% of the time on that trip, and the first few days were the worst. Imagine riding up into the Tibetan Plateau, in the dark, on dirt roads, in rain way heavier than what you see in the video above. That’s what it was like, and I loved every mile of that ride. I wouldn’t trade it for anything else on the planet.

You might be wondering…why no photos? Well, the simple truth is that my cameras on each trip were tightly wrapped in plastic bags, and I wasn’t about to break them out in the rain. That’s something I guess I forgot to mention in my earlier blog about what to bring on a Baja trip: Garbage bags. They take up almost no space when you’re not using them, and they work great for keeping stuff dry when you ride in the rain.

The Turnbull scars…

Doug Turnbull’s personal 1886 Winchester.  Note the color case hardening on the receiver and the ultra-high grade walnut.  These are magnificent guns.

I’m bombarded with emails and phone calls every day.  I haven’t answered a call on my home phone literally in years because of the marketing calls (anyone important calls me on my cell phone), and now I’m starting to get marketing calls on my cell phone, too.  Sorry, folks…if I don’t recognize the number, you’re going to voicemail, and just so you know in advance, I don’t need any work done on my home and I’m not in the market for solar panels.  And email, wow…delete, delete, delete, delete, and on and on it goes.  Once in a great while my inbox will have a marketing email I’ll take a look at, though, and this morning was one of those times.

The email that caught my eye this morning was from Turnbull Restorations.  A quick word about Turnbull…they are a company back east that restores firearms and they’re known for their color case hardening.  That’s a process that adds magnificent colors to selected bits of a firearm to enrichen their appearance dramatically.  It’s what you see on uber-expensive shotguns, Colt Single Action Army revolvers, and a few select lever guns.  Turnbull has mastered the process, and Mr. Turnbull makes and restores some of the world’s finest firearms.

I’m surprised color case hardening hasn’t shown up on custom bikes.  A few years ago, engraving on selected bike bits had a brief half life on custom Harleys and the like.  I thought that was kind of stupid, actually, and it never got an “oooh” or an “ah” from me.   But I could see it working with color case hardening.  Say an all black bike with color case hardened clutch covers, handlebars, and a few other pieces.  Just for accent.

Anyway, the email that caught my eye was about Doug Turnbull’s personal rifle, a restored and rechambered 1886 Winchester, and the scars it bore from the various hunts he’s taken.  It referred me to the Turnbull blog, and I just spent the last few minutes reading that story.  It’s a good one, and it’s one that hit home.   I’ve got a few nicks and dings on my favorite rifle from its outings.   You might enjoy the Turnbull story, too.  You can read it here.

That got me to thinking about some of the scars on my motorcycle.  I like a bike that has a few battle scars on it.  Not the ones induced by careless motorcycle technicians during routine maintenance (don’t get me started on those), but the ones that come from real trips to real exotic places.  Or the ones that occur naturally through aging.  I’ve got more than a few of those on my personal RX3, and each one of them tells a story.   That might be a topic for another blog.   We’ll see.  In the meantime, I’m going to poke around a bit on the Turnbull blog.  I love looking at those color case hardened Turnbull guns.

Free Bobber? That Beats The Heck Out of a Duffle Bag!

The paper magazine business has taken a beating in the last few years. One magazine that seems to have their stuff together is American Iron, a book that focuses on American-made motorcycles. Somehow these guys get away with charging subscribers what it costs to produce 13 issues a year. For those of you counting that is three more issues a year than Cycle World and Motorcyclist combined!

Nestled among the beauty, health, gun and celebrity gossip periodicals, American Iron is the only motorcycle magazine still sold in supermarkets and drug stores. Start looking around; you’ll see AIM everywhere. I don’t fully understand what happened to the other guys but they made a half-hearted grab at the Internet while letting go of the fun and exclusive part: the monthly magazine.

I subscribe to a legacy magazine and I open my mailbox expecting to see nothing and at ever-diminishing intervals I get it. No matter how good they may be, four or six issues a year cannot keep the pot on boil. I don’t even know if I have time left on my subscription. I’ve gone from anticipating a new issue to being surprised by a new issue.

American Iron’s content is not exactly in my wheelhouse: when no one is looking I’m a dirt rider. But if you throw in a free Indian Bobber I could see myself getting into asphalt. Heck, promise me a one-cent decal and I’ll bite the head off of a pigeon. Offer me a T-shirt and I’ll rob a bank for you, just do something, anything, for readers other than shrink the product to reflect the subsidized pricing subscribers have been trained to expect.

So here’s the deal: Subscribe to American Iron and ride that Indian Scout Bobber home. It’s more costly than the lose-money-on-subs-make-it-up-in-advertising books but those guys aren’t giving away a Bobber and we need paper magazines to survive in America. When you subscribe do me a favor, tell them Joe sent you, I need a place to flog content!