My idea of a good restoration and your idea of a good restoration may differ, but you know deep down inside that I’m always right. I am the arbiter of cool. I am the final word, I am…Omni Joe. Here are 5 common restoration mistakes that drive me crazy.
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Sin #1: Gas tank liners.
That sealer crap people pour into their motorcycle gas tanks is the worse invention of all time. Guys swear by this junk but don’t listen to those lazy bastards. When I read the words, gas tank liner and/or Caswell sealer in a motorcycle description I know an amateur’s hands have been fiddling the motorcycle. Who would pour that devil’s goop into a nice motorcycle gas tank? It makes me wonder what else they screwed up. The way to fix a leaking, rusty gas tank is to get rid of the rust and weld/braze any holes. Any other method is destined to fail. There’s no excuse for using devil’s goop, YouTube is lousy with videos explaining how to clean out a rusty gas tank and how to stop it from re-rusting.
Sin #2: Repainting serviceable original finishes.
Nothing annoys me like a guy posting up a 90% perfect, original-paint motorcycle and asking where he can get it repainted. Stop! If the paint has a few chips or is faded a tiny bit leave the damn thing alone. One of the most underused old-sayings is, “It’s only original once.” No matter how shiny and beautiful you think your topcoat turned out its still vandalism. There are many phony re-pop’s running around, don’t make your motorcycle one. By painting over your once desirable survivor you lower its historic value. Listen, I’m not against repainting really bad original body parts, lord knows my Z1 needs it but I know anything I do that covers over the factory work erases a story, and vintage motorcycles are commodities without a story.
Sin #3: Over restoration.
When the Japanese bikes that are considered classic today were first sold they had acceptable build quality. For some strange reason many motorcycle restoration experts go way overboard making the motorcycle a show bike that bears little resemblance to real motorcycles. Chrome back in the day was thin and yours should be too. Nothing depresses me as much as these tarted-up travesties. The nerve of some Johnny-Come-Lately with a fat wallet and no soul thinking he can render a better motorcycle than the factory. Keep it simple and try to match the level of finish that you remember. Otherwise, what’s the point? It’s already worth less because you damaged the original build by trying to improve the bike. Why pour money into the thing making it something it never was?
Sin #4: Giving a damn about numbers.
As people get deeper into the vintage bike hobby they grow ever more insane. It’s not enough to have the correct parts anymore: Now you must have the exact build date on the part to suit your motorcycle’s VIN number. This is madness. Nobody except lunatics and bike show judges will care that your sprocket cover was made a year or two after your bike left the factory. The only part number that matters is the one that can get your bike registered for the road. I’ve seen people on vintage groups debating a slight casting change or a vestigial nub as if it were the most important thing in the world. People like that have no business owning a motorcycle; they should go into accounting or better yet, prison.
Sin #5: Parking it.
The final and biggest sin of all is to restore a motorcycle and then park it. I can over look all the other sins, even tank sealer, if the owner rides his vintage motorcycle. Get the thing muddy. Do a burn out. Ride it to shows in the rain. Honor the motorcycle by using it. A show motorcycle that is too valuable or too clean to ride is nothing, less than worthless. The machine was built for you. It has a seat and controls for you. The engine wants to pull. Do the right thing by your motorcycle and your sins will be washed away, my brothers.
The Highwaymen, starring Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson, is not a new movie and maybe you’ve seen it already. But if you haven’t, it’s worth watching. In my case, it was worth watching again. I’d seen it twice already when it popped up on the Netflix menu last night, and I watched it a third time. It was great. There have been a few movies and a lot written about Bonnie and Clyde; in my opinion, this movie stands way above the other stories.
The real Frank Hamer was a hell of a man (as was Maney Gault), although one of the earlier Bonnie and Clyde movies portrayed him as a bumbler and a buffoon. His widow sued Warner Brothers over that and the studio settled out of court. This movie sets that record straight.
Maney Gault (left) and Frank Hamer (right).
The story is about two Texas Rangers (Frank Hamer and Maney Gault) coming out of retirement to track down and kill Bonnie and Clyde. I don’t know how close it adheres to what actually happened, but that doesn’t matter (at least to me). From what I’ve previously known and the research I did online, I think The Highwaymen stays pretty close to the truth. It’s a hell of a story and it’s extremely well done. It hits home for me, too. I’m an old guy and I can sympathize with the two geezers played well by Costner and Harrelson. Their aches and pains made me laugh. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a bad movie with Harrelson in it; I have seen one or two turkeys with Costner. But in this film both actors were superb (as was the writing) and I appreciated the attention to getting the firearm details right. There’s a gunstore scene that’s awesome. In one of the opening scenes, Hamer is shown to have a pet wild boar. I tried to find out if that was true and what popped up on Google was inconclusive. There are references to his having a pet javelina.
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Trust me on this: The Highwaymen is a wonderful flick. Watch it and you can thank me later.
That’s me, age 15, in the photo above. I’m on my Dad’s Honda Super Hawk, and no, I wasn’t getting ready to do my best impression of Rollie Free or Walt Fulton (even though I was apparently wearing the same swim trunks as ol’ Rollie). I wasn’t getting ready for a high speed run at all…it was summer, and we spent a lot of time in the water in those days. And when Dad said it was okay (and sometimes when he didn’t), I rode the Super Hawk in the fields behind our house.
We didn’t know as much about photography back in the mid-’60s. But you get the idea. That Super Hawk was a lot of fun. That’s me in the summer of 1966.Rollie Free at Bonneville in 1948, on his way to a romping 150.313 mph land speed record. Check out the swim trunks.Walt Fulton breaking 100 mph in 1952 at El Mirage, California, on a Mustang motorcycle.
The Honda fascination started with me as a 13-year-old kid. We weren’t motorcycle people. Yet. I was mesmerized by a ’64 Triumph 500cc Tiger a guy at school owned. That started a slew of snail mail requests to the motorcycle companies (snail mail was all we had back then, but we never felt communications deprived), and pretty soon I had a collection of moto sales literature. Dad started looking at it. Then we saw a Honda Dream at a McDonald’s (I wrote about that a few blogs back). A short while later, Dad’s trapshooting buddy Cliff Leutholt (one of those nicest people who rode a Honda) visited us on his Super Hawk. Jet black, chrome, silver paint, twin carbs, electric start, it was stunning. Cliff said it was good for 100 mph. Dad rode it (a first for my father) and he was hooked. The 1960s were good times.
Me, with Dad’s CB 160, in February 1966. No snow, but it was cold that time of year in New Jersey.
The bug bit hard. Dad started looking at the classifieds (remember those?), and in 1965, he bought the Baby Super Hawk, a scaled down, 160cc version of the 305. Dad owned that bike for only a few months, and then he traded it in on a Super Hawk. Sherm Cooper (of Cooper’s Cycle Ranch) offered Dad $450 for the 160 against the Super Hawk’s $730 (it was $50 more than Dad had paid for the 160), and just like that, we had a Super Hawk. Boy, that was a blast.
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The Honda Super Hawk emerged from a vibrant and dazzlingly successful Honda Motor Company. Honda first brought its motorcycles to the US in 1959, and, well, you know the rest. 1961 saw the creation of the 250cc Honda Hawk, which quickly evolved into the Super Hawk. The Super Hawk bumped displacement to 305cc, and its 180-degree parallel twin was good for 28 horsepower at 9200 rpm (unheard of engine speeds back in the early 1960s). The Hondas had 12-volt electrics, twin 26 mm Keihin carbs, a single overhead cam, a 4-speed transmission, and a wet sump lubrication system.
Like the Honda Dream in our recent blog, the Super Hawk had an electric starter, along with a kickstarter that oddly rotated forward (it was hard to look like Marlon Brando kick starting a Super Hawk, but I did my best). The instrumentation was a cool touch. Instead of the more conventional (i.e., British) separate cans for the tach and the speedo, both were contained in a single panel atop the headlight. The Super Hawk had a tubular steel frame and front forks, but no front frame downtube (the engine was a stressed member). The electric starter occupied the space where front downtube would be. It was a clever engineering solution and that electric starter made life easier, but the Super Hawk didn’t look as cool as the 305cc CL 77 Scrambler (more on the Scrambler in a future blog).
The Super Hawk was a runner. A road test in Cycle World magazine had the top speed at 104.6 mph and the bike ran a respectable 16.8-second quarter mile at 83 mph. Super Hawks had twin leading shoe front brakes (something special in the pre-disk-brake era). The motorcycle weighed 335 pounds. The Super Hawk could be had in the same blue, black, white, or red color choices as the Honda Dreams, but unlike the Dream, all the Super Hawks had silver frames, side covers, and fenders. I remember that nearly all Super Hawks were black; it was very unusual to see one in any other color unless you were an Elvis fan.
Click on the image to watch the video.
The Super Hawk had good starring roles, too, before product placement became the mega-industry it is today. There were pop songs about Hondas. Elvis Presley rode a red Honda Super Hawk in the 1964 movie Roustabout. And a fellow named Robert Pirsig rode across the US on one with his son and wrote a book about it (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance); that book has become something of a bible in the travelogue and motorcycle deep think genres. Pirsig’s Super Hawk currently resides in the Smithsonian.
So, back to my early days and my turning Dad into a rider: As awesome as the Super Hawk was, it didn’t last long. The progression back in those days was a small Honda, a bigger Honda, and then (before the advent of the Honda CB 750 Four), a jump to a Triumph or BSA. Dad had been bitten by the bug big time, and in 1966, he bought a new Triumph Bonneville. But that’s a story for another blog.
I’ve been so busy with home-nesting projects my motorcycles have succumbed to time’s crumbling embrace. I parked the ZRX1100 Kawasaki after the carburetors clogged up and it began running on three cylinders. Since it has been sitting a few years naturally the brake pistons seized. Followed by fluid leaking out of the calipers. Followed by me robbing the battery to start the generator that powers the nest. In any event, it needed tires, a chain and sprockets and the throttle cable repaired. So the big green Eddie Lawson lookalike has suffered the indignity of being dragged across the countryside on a two-hundred-dollar Harbor Freight trailer.
Even worse, the mini bike my pops built for me when I was a wee lad is on the injured reserve list. Forty-eight years idle, Mini has untold issues although the Briggs and Stratton engine still turns over. I’ve lost a few critical, hand-made parts and since the Old Man has shuffled off I’ll have to re-make the stuff myself. It’s not easy handling such a precious thing. The mini is lousy with my father’s engineering and artistic skills. The welds and frame geometry are a direct, tangible link to happy times working together in the garage.
The 1965 Honda 50cc went under water in one of Florida’s many hurricanes so I took it apart and threw everything into boxes and plastic tubs. It’s been apart so long the tubs have crystalized into the finest, most fragile parts bins in existence. The slightest touch turns them to dust. Dry, chalky plastic oxide mingles with 4mm JIC screws and yellowed wings. The sheet-metal swing arm rusted completely in half so I’ll have to rig something in aluminum to secure the rear wheel to the frame and lower shock eyes. I do have a good engine for the Honda: a fire breathing 140cc Lifan clone that clears the front fender by a quarter-inch.
The newest dead-bike I own is a Husqvarna. On the last, long-ish motorcycle ride I took to Big Bend Park way down in south Texas the Husqvarna SMR510 lost its clutch release. Bit by bit, little by little the clutch action faded away until finally pulling the clutch lever had no effect on events. The headlight also broke off but on a dirt bike that’s hardly worth mentioning. We were doing some trail riding down there and the Husky did ok shifting motocross style. Starting out was the main problem as you had to push the thing, jump on, and pop it into first. The bike would either stall or roar off on a wheelie. On the ride home I would circle the backfield waiting for traffic lights to change. Sorry, everyone in El Paso.
At least the Z1 Kawasaki never ran for me. I bought it from the owner of the property we now live on. I had to get it out of there because things were disappearing and I felt someone was going to pilfer the Z before I could. The Z needs all sorts of stuff but I get the feeling this bike will be a keeper. The lines are so clean and simple compared to modern bikes. It sits damn near perfect, doesn’t feel heavy and I know from following David Howell through the Everglades, Z’s do well in the dirt.
Which leaves us with the only motorcycle I own that works: a 360cc, 1971 Yamaha RT1B. Fondly known as Godzilla to dirt riders far and wide, the old Yamaha just keeps popping along. Analog everything, smoky, noisy, sweating petroleum from every pore, this is the bike that will not die. Even with me maintaining it.
Everything around us is constantly falling apart. Even the Great Pyramid in Egypt will be a sand dune one day. I just hope that when it finally falls to the ground replacement parts will still be available on Ebay.
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Half a lifetime ago I was a yuppie, and the symbols of being a successful yuppie included an MBA and a Rolex. The Rolex was easy (the only requirement was having more money than brains). The MBA was more difficult. It required going back to school, which I did. Getting the MBA definitely gave me a boost. My career at the munitions company was on fast forward; at one point I was the youngest vice president in the Aerojet corporation (then I got fired, but that’s a story for another time). I loved being in the bomb business (business was booming, so to speak), and being a former Army guy, I was in my element.
That could have been me in the ’80s and ’90s. I wore a jacket and tie to work every day. I had the big glasses, too.
Anyway, while I was going to night school for the MBA, one of my classes was titled Human Behavior or something like that. The guy who taught it was a Ph.D in one of the soft sciences, and I knew pretty quickly that he leaned way left. That’s okay; in my book you can lean however you want as long as you don’t expect me to agree with you on every issue.
The first night of class the prof had everyone tell the rest of their class their name and what they did. We were all yuppies, we were all young, and we all had good jobs. It made for good entertainment, but I had a feel for how things were going from the first several yuppies who told us what they did and the prof’s reactions and questions. Yep, the guy was a definite leftie. I started to wonder what his reaction would be to me…a guy firmly entrenched in the military industrial complex working for a munitions company.
“So what do you do, Joe?” Dr. WhatsHisName asked.
“Uh, I’m an engineer,” I said, hoping he would leave it at that, but knowing he wouldn’t.
“What kind of an engineer are you, and who do you work for?”
“Uh, I’m a mechanical engineer,” I said. No sense in oversharing, I figured. Maybe he wouldn’t notice I didn’t name my company.
“Who do you work for?”
“I work for an aerospace company.”
“What company, and what do you engineer?” This guy wasn’t going to give up. I liked my job and I liked what I did, but I wasn’t about to tell Jerry Rubin here I supported the Vietnam War.
“I work for Aerojet, and we make a variety of products.” It had become a contest, and I was losing.
“What are your products?” He had me. Time to ‘fess up.
“I do cluster bombs.” There. It was out. I knew the guy was going to call whoever it is you call when you find someone violating the Geneva Convention. The good doctor stared at me for several seconds. The other 30 or so yuppies in the class were dead silent. It was a pregnant pause if ever there was one and we were pretty close to the 9-month mark. Somebody’s water was about to break.
“Does your family know what you do?” he softly asked, speaking almost in a whisper.
“My wife does,” I said, mirroring his subdued tone.
“And how does she feel about how you earn a living?”
At this point, I knew I had to come clean. “Truth be told, Professor, she’s disappointed in me.” I had hoped that would end the discussion, but the guy would not let up. He was a dog and I was the bone. Then I sensed a way out, anticipating what his next question would be.
“What does she say to you?” he asked.
“Well, Doc, like I said, she’s disappointed, and she’s made that known on several occasions.” The good Professor was nodding knowingly. He was hearing my confession. I don’t recall specifically, but I’m pretty sure he was smiling. I was on a roll and I continued. “You see, Professor, my wife works for TRW’s Ballistic Missiles Division. They do nuclear intercontinental missiles and she’s always asking me why I’m wasting my time screwing around with conventional weapons. If you’re going to go, she always says, go big. Go nuclear.”
My yuppie classmates started laughing. Me, I was scared. I was running a perfect 4.00 grade point average in the MBA program up to that point, and I thought I had just blown any chance of aceing this course. The professor nodded without expression, made a note on his pad, and went on to the next yuppie. My being a wiseass had earned a good laugh, but that note he made couldn’t have been a good thing and I was afraid it would cost me.
So how did it turn out? I busted my chops in that course and I got my A. But I was sweating bullets for the rest of the term. Little, non-nuclear bullets, but bullets nonetheless. More importantly, the cluster bombs I helped engineer won the Gulf War a few years later in 1991. Most of Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard tanks were taken out with CBU-87/B cluster bombs and GAU-8/A 30mm ammo (and my company, Aerojet Ordnance, also made the ammo for those A-10 Gatlings). Sometimes when studying human behavior, the guys who know (I mean, really know) reach the only conclusion and solution possible: An adequate quantity of high explosives delivered on target. I’m not at all embarrassed about having had a hand in that. Fact is, I’m proud of it.
Like that photo you see above? Yeah, me, too. I took it on the parade grounds at Fort Knox, Kentucky, a few years ago. I used to run the Composite Structures plant that made rotor blades for the Apache helicopter. It was one of the best jobs I ever had.
We recently reposted (under the Wayback Machine banner) our blog about the Gator mine system, and in it I promised to write about the Apache main rotor blade failures. This is another defense industry failure analysis war story that crosses company lines and supplier/customer boundaries, and I’m not entirely sure that there wasn’t some nefarious behavior going on at McDonnell Douglas. I’ll tell you what happened and you tell me.
The UH-1 Huey was a Vietnam War workhorse. It was extremely susceptible to small arms fire and you could hear it coming miles away.
During the Vietnam War, the Army (my alma mater) found that the Huey helicopter had a few shortcomings. I guess that’s to be expected; it was the first time the Army used helicopters in a major way in a real war. The Huey was susceptible to small arms fire (and big arms fire, too, for that matter) and it was noisy. On a clear night, you could hear a Huey coming in from a long way out with its characteristic “wop wop wop” signature as it beat the air into submission. That “wop wop wop” sound was actually the rotor tips breaking the sound barrier on the left side of the helicopter, so the Army knew it had to do something to get the blade tip speed below the speed 0f sound on its next-gen helicopter. Another big problem was small arms fire; a single .30-caliber AK-47 bullet through a Huey rotor blade would destroy the blade’s structural integrity (and there were a lot of AK-47 rounds in the air in those days). When that happened, the helicopter and its crew were lost. There could be no autorotation (you can’t autorotate without a blade) and you couldn’t bail out. The next-gen helicopter blades would have to be impervious to small arms fire.
Fixing the blade tip speed problem was simple. Instead of having two blades like the Huey, the Apache went to four blades. That cut the rotor speed and let the blade tips go subsonic. “Wop wop wop” no more. Easy peasy.
The structural integrity issue was the more significant challenge. The engineers at McDonnell Dougas (the Apache prime contractor) designed a blade that had four spars that ran longitudinally (with the length of the blade) contructed of AM455 stainless steel (a special blend used on the Apache and, at the time, nowhere else). The spars had overlapping epoxy-bonded joints that ran the length of the blade. The idea was that a hit anywhere on the blade (up to and including a 23mm high explosive Russian anti-aircraft round, roughly the explosive equivalent of a hand grenade) would damage that spar, but the remaining three spars would hold the blade together. It worked. An Apache blade actually took a blade hit from an Iraqi ZSU-23/4 and made it back to base.
A cross section of the McDonnell Douglas Apache blade showing the four spars.
So here’s the problem: The Army specified a blade life of 2200 hours (blades on a helicopter are like tires on a car…they wear out), but our blades were only lasting about 800 hours before the blades’ bondline epoxy joints holding the spars together starting unzipping. It wasn’t a catastrophic failure (the helicopter could still fly home), but the blades had to be repaired. The Army would send the blades back to McDonnell Douglas, and McDonnell Douglas sent them back to us at Composite Structures for refurbishment. If they couldn’t be repaired, we sold McDonnell Douglas a new blade (back in the 1990s, each blade cost just north of $53,000, and McDonnell Douglas put a hefty markup on that when they sold the blade to the Army). When they could be repaired, we still charged a hefty fee.
When I entered the picture as the plant manager, I learned that both Composite Structures (my company) and McDonnell Douglas (my customer) had made half-assed efforts to fix the blade problem, but neither company was financially motivated to eliminate it. We were making good money selling and repairing blades and so was McDonnell Douglas. The Army, however, was taking it in the shorts.
This was also a major problem for me as the manufacturing guy. I didn’t like having to make two blades to get one good one. We were rejecting one of every two blades we made for spar disbonds in the factory. You read that right: We had to make two blades to get one good one. Because of this, we were in a severe past due delivery condition, and my mission was to correct that situation. So we went to work on solving the problem. We found and fixed plenty of problems (blade cure profile issues, cleanroom assembly shortfalls, epoxy shelf life and pot life issues, nonconforming components issues, and contamination issues), but the blade disbonds continued. McDonnell Douglas continued to pound us for quality issues, all the while secretly smiling all the way to the bank as they continued to sell twice as many blades as they should have been selling.
We went through everything and finally concluded that there had to be a design issue with the blades; specifically, that the bondline width where the spars were glued together had too much variability. If that glue line was small enough, we reasoned, it wouldn’t hold up and the blade would disbond. We asked McDonnell Douglas about that (McDonnell Douglas was responsible for the design; we were building it to their engineering drawings), but they kept blowing us off. The bondline width wasn’t dimensioned on the McDonnell Dougas drawings. The other parts were, and McDonnell Douglas’ idea was that if the blade parts met their drawing requirements, the bondline width would be okay. That’s what they hoped for, anyway. But you know what they say about hope. You can poop in one hand and hope in the other, and see which one fills up first.
A macro shot of the bondline joint. The scribe lines (in the blue Dykem) show the bondline area.
I asked for a meeting with our company and McDonnell Douglas on the blade failures, and they wouldn’t meet with us. So I sent out another invitation, and this time I included the Army. McDonnell Douglas was livid when the Army quickly said yes; now, the McDonnell Douglas wizards had to meet with us on this issue. That meeting started about like I expected it to, with McDonnell Douglas tearing us a new one on the blade failures, telling us our quality was terrible, and basically letting me and the rest of the world know that, in their opinion, things had gone downhill since I had taken over as plant manager (no matter that this 50%-rejection-rate blade issue had existed for a dozen years prior to my arrival). I patiently explained the issues we had found and corrected, and then emphasized that the problem with blade separations had continued unabated. I then asked the McDonnell Douglas program manager about the bondline width and the fact that this apparently critical requirement was not on their engineering drawings. He denied it was the issue and went off about our poor quality again. When he ran out of steam, I asked the question about the bondline dimension yet again, and specifically, how narrow the bondline could be and still provide an adequate joint. There were more accusations about our lousy quality (the guy only knew one tune and he loved singing it), and I again waited for him to finish. When I asked the question a third time, before McDonnell Douglas lit up about our poor quality again the Army representative asked “yeah, how narrow does it have to be before the blade fails?”
The McDonnell Douglas guy stared at me like cobra looks at a mongoose (I’ve only seen this in YouTube videos, but I’m pretty sure the analogy is a good one). He sputtered and stammered and I think I saw a little spit fly from his mouth. “If you make it to the drawing it will be okay,” he said. I mean, under the circumstances it was the only thing he could say. I almost felt sorry for him, in the same way you feel sorry for a rat when a red-tailed hawk is swooping down with talons extended. You feel bad, but you look forward to seeing the hawk doing his thing.
The Army guy sensed this was something big. “How low?” he asked again. If there is such a thing as a perfect impersonation of a deer caught in the headlights, the McDonnell Douglas dude was nailing it. It was what we in the literary world call a pregnant pause, one of those “what did the President know, and when did he know it?” moments. As I type this, I can remember the scene like it happened 10 minutes ago, but it’s been close to 30 years.
“0.375 inches,” the McDonnell Douglas dude finally answered. He actually said the zero in a half-assed attempt to add engineering gravitas to his answer. “As long as they build it to the print, they’ll be okay,” he added, with a “so there” smirk. He was answering the Army man, but the smirk was all for me.
What the McDonnell Douglas guy didn’t know was that my guys could see the bondline width in an x-ray, and we x-rayed every blade returned for repair. And I guess he didn’t realize how easy it was to do a tolerance analysis to show what the drawings allowed the bondline width to be.
What happened next was one of those moments I’ll remember for the rest of my life. I looked my engineering guy and my QA guy. They knew what I wanted. They both left the room. Fifteen minutes later they were back. My engineering guy handed me the results of his tolerance analysis. The McDonnell Douglas engineering drawings tolerance stackups allowed the bondline width to go as low as 0.337 inch. The QA guy had even better information. All the blades that had been returned to us for spars unzipping (which was the only reason we ever saw a blade returned) had bondline widths less than 0.375 inches (McDonnell Douglas’ admission for the lower limit) but above .337 inches. In other words, our quality was fine. The failed blades met the McDonnell Douglas engineering drawings but were below the value I had finally prodded McDonnell Douglas into revealing.
I could have been more diplomatic, I guess, but that wasn’t me. I shared that information with the room. The Army rep smiled. “I think you guys might want to continue the meeting without me,” he said. And then he left.
The McDonnell Douglas guy exploded as soon as the door closed. He was apoplectic (I looked that word up; it means overcome with anger and extremely indignant, and that was him). McDonnell Douglas had been screwing the Army for years with a deficient design and now it was out in the open. They were potentially exposed to defective design claims from the Army (and from us) for hundreds of millions of dollars. Think about it: 12 years of Apache blade production, a 50% failure rate in production, a blade life of only 800 hours (against the Army’s spec requirement of 2200 hours), and the fact that we and McDonnell had factored all that waste into our pricing.
Fortunately for McDonnell Douglas, the Army wasn’t interested in suing them (all they wanted was good blades). My boss wasn’t interested in pursuing a claim against McDonnell Douglas, either, as they were our bread and butter and he wanted to keep the business. We fixed the problem by holding the blade components to tighter tolerances (tighter than McDonnell Douglas had on their drawings) so the bondline width would always be above the magical 0.375 inch, and we never had a blade unzip in production again. McDonnell Douglas did not correct their drawings, as it would have been an admission of guilt on their part that would absolutely guarantee a loss if the Army ever took them to court.
So there you have it: The Apache main rotor blade failures, all caused by sloppy engineering at McDonnell Douglas. It’s hard to believe that the blades had a 50% failure rate and didn’t meet the Army’s specified blade life for a dozen years before the problem was fixed, but that’s what happened. It’s also hard to believe that nobody at McDonnell Douglas went to jail for it.
The Ruger Model 77 rifle goes back to 1968. It gave Ruger a place in the centerfire hunting rifle class, and like the Remington Model 700 and Winchester Model 70 it would compete against, it outdid both by using the lucky number 7 twice in its name. The Model 77 is a good-looking bolt action rifle based on the Mauser design, with a classic walnut stock designed by famed custom rifle builder Lenard Brownell. I’ve owned several Model 77 Rugers, including this new-in-the-box .30 06 Liberty gun. I’d like to be able to tell you how accurate it is, but I can’t. I’ve never fired it. Nor has anyone else, other than the person who test fired it before it left the factory.
Every firearm Ruger manufactured in 1976 carried this inscription.There’s no lawyer’s warning on the barrel about reading the instructions. We call these “pre-warning” guns. They were made in a time when people had more common sense.
The Liberty designation mentioned above refers to the “Made in the 200th Year of American Liberty” roll marking on the barrel, which was a feature Ruger had on all its guns made in 1976. I bought the rifle in El Paso that year (I was in the Army stationed at Fort Bliss). This one has every thing that came with the rifle (the original serial numbered box, the scope rings and their blue cloth bag, the instructions, and the warranty card). It’s a brand new, unfired, almost-50-year-old rifle.
The tang safety Model 77 is considered more desireable.The original box. The cardboard held up surprisingly well. This gun is new in the box (NIB) and this is the original box.Original documents!The box is serialized to the rifle. I obliterated the last number, which almost makes it look like the serial number matches the chambering.
You know, Rugers (and most guns, for that matter) were different 50 years ago. The bluing was deeper, the checkering was hand cut (and way better than the laser cut fuzzball checkering you see today), and the guns just felt better. This Ruger is like that. It’s immaculate, and there’s only safe ding on the stock. Other than than, there’s not a mark, dent, ding, gouge, scratch, or (Heaven forbid) spot of rust anywhere on the rifle. Even the anodized aluminum floorplate is pristine.
The Ruger Model 77 MSRP was $169.50 in 1976 and I believe I paid something like $139 for this one. I probably have the original receipt for it somewhere. A new Ruger Hawkeye in .30 06 (the rifle the Model 77 evolved into) lists for $1399 (yep, ten times what I paid in 1976), but a new one is not as cool as the one you see here.
Plain walnut, but elegant in its own way.The unmarred anodized aluminum floorplate.Early Ruger Model 77s wore this grip cap.Check out this gorgeous hand cut checkering. You don’t see that too much today!The rifle’s sole safe ding, done by yours truly. Nobody’s perfect. It will steam out. I’m leaving it like this.God’s cartridge. The .30 06 is one of the all time greats.
This rifle may be going on the block soon. It’s time to start downsizing the armory and it’s time for someone else to enjoy owning it. You’re probably wondering how much I’m going to ask for it. So am I. As I look at this magnificent example of 1970s firearm manufacturing and post these photos, I’m having second thoughts. It is a .30 06, and that’s God’s cartridge. Maybe it needs to send a few rounds downrange, and maybe I’m the guy to do it. We’ll see.
My Dad and I saw our first Honda ever in 1964 at a McDonald’s in East Brunswick, New Jersey. It was a 150cc Dream, the smaller version of the bigger CA 77 305cc Dream. I was 12 years old at the time. In those days, it was a fun family outing to drive the 20 miles to Route 18 in New Jersey and have dinner at McDonald’s (that was the closest one), where hamburgers were 15 cents and the sign out front said they had sold over 4 million of the things. And the Honda we saw that day…Dad and I were both smitten by the baby Dream, with its whitewall tires, bright red paint, and the young clean cut guy riding it. True to Honda’s tagline, he seemed to be one of the nicest people you could ever meet (although admittedly the bar wasn’t very high for nice people in New Jersey).
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Dad and I started looking into Hondas, and that included a trip to Cooper’s Cycle Ranch near Trenton. Back then, it really was a ranch, or at least a farm of some sort…the showroom was Sherm Cooper’s old barn. The little Hondas were cool, but the big ones (the 305s) were even cooler. A 305 was the biggest Honda available in the mid-1960s and Honda imported three 305cc motorcycles to America: The CA 77 Dream, the CB 77 Super Hawk, and the CL 77 Scrambler. The Dream was not designed to be an off road motorcycle (that was the CL 77 Scrambler’s domain) or a performance motorcycle (in the Honda world, that was the CB 77 Super Hawk).
Of the 305 twins, It’s probably appropriate to discuss the CA 77 Dream first. The Scrambler and the Super Hawk were intended to appeal to motorcycle enthusiasts; the Dream was a much less intimidating ticket in (into the motorcycle world, that is). The typical Dream buyer was either someone stepping up from a smaller Honda, or someone who had not previously owned a motorcycle.
Honda first used the name “Dream” on its 1949 Model D (a single cylinder, 98cc two-stroke). No one knows for sure where the Dream moniker came from, but legend has it that someone, upon first seeing the Model D, proclaimed it to look like a dream. The C-series Dreams first emerged in Japan in 1957. Pops Yoshimura built Honda engines with modified production parts that ran over 10,000 rpm for 18-hour endurance races, proving the basic design was robust. Some say Honda based the engine design on an earlier NSU engine, but Honda unquestionably carried the engineering across the finish line. Whatever. When’s the last time you saw an NSU? Another big plus was that Honda used horizontally split cases and that (along with vastly superior quality) essentially eliminated oil leaks. The other guys (and in those days, that meant Harley and the Britbikes) had vertically split cases and they all leaked. Honda motorcycles did not, and that was a big deal for a motorcycle in the 1960s.
There were several differences between the Dream and the other two Honda 305cc motorcycles. The Super Hawk and the Scrambler had tubular steel frames and forks; the Dream used pressed steel for both its frame and fork. The Dream was a single-carb motorcycle; the Super Hawk and the Scrambler had twin carbs. The Dream had large steel valanced fenders, the other Hondas had more sporting abbreviated fenders. The Dream was the only 305 that came from the Honda factory with whitewall tires. The Dream had leading link front suspension; the Scrambler and the Super Hawk had telescopic forks. The Dream used the Type II crankshaft (so did the Scrambler) with a 360-degree firing order (both pistons went up and down together, but the cylinders fired alternately). The higher performance Super Hawk had the Type I, 180-degree crankshaft. Like the Super Hawk, the Dream had electric starting (the Scrambler was kick start only). The Dream came with a kickstarter, too, but why bother? I mean, you weren’t going to be mistaken for Marlon Brando when you rode a Honda Dream.
The Dream’s 305cc engine had a single 23mm Keihin carb and it produced 23 horsepower at 7500 rpm (not that the rpm was of any interest; the Dream had no tachometer). With its four-speed transmission and according to magazine test results, the Dream was good for between 80 and 100 mph (depending on motojournalist weight, I guess). The Dream averaged around 50 mpg, although in those blissful days of $0.28/gallon gasoline, nobody really cared. Honda Dreams came in white, black, red, or blue. With 20/20 hindsight, I wish I had bought one in each color and parked them in the garage. My favorites were black or white; those colors just seemed to work with the Dream’s whitewall tires.
Honda built the Dream until 1969. The Dream retailed for $595 back in those days, but a shrewd negotiator could do better.
I had a tough time choosing a title for this blog. I went with what you see above because it reminds me of one of my favorite Dad jokes…you know, the one about how you tell the difference between a crocodile and an alligator. If you don’t see it for a while, it’s a crocodile. If you see it later, well, then it’s a gator. The other choice might have been the old United Negro College Fund pitch: A Mine is a Terrible Thing to Waste. But if I went with that one I might be called a racist, which seems to be the default response these days anytime anyone disagrees with anyone else about anything.
Gresh likes hearing my war stories. Not combat stories, but stories about the defense industry. I never thought they were all that interesting, but Gresh is easily entertained and he’s a good traveling buddy, so I indulge him on occasion. Real war stories…you know how you can tell them from fairy tales? A fairy tale starts out with “once upon a time.” A war story starts out with “this is no shit, you guys…”
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So, this is a “no shit” story. It sounds incredible, but it’s all true. I was an engineer at Aerojet Ordnance, and I made my bones analyzing cluster bomb failures. They tell me I’m pretty good at it (I wrote a book about failure analysis, I still teach industry and gubmint guys how to analyze complex systems failures, and I sometimes work as an expert witness in this area). It pays the rent and then some.
So this deal was on the Gator mine system, which was a real camel (you know, a horse designed by a committee). The Gator mine system was a Tri-Service program (three services…the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force). It was officially known as the CBU-89/B cluster munition (CBU stands for Cluster Bomb Unit). The way it worked is instead of having to go out and place the mines manually, an airplane could fly in and drop a couple of these things, the bombs would open on the way down and dispense their mines (each cluster bomb contained 94 mines), the mines would arm, and voila, you had a minefield. Just like that.
It sounds cool, but the Gator was a 20-year-old turkey that couldn’t pass the first article test (you had to build two complete systems and the Air Force would drop them…if the mines worked at a satisfactory level, you could start production). The UNCF slogan notwithstanding, the folks who had tried to take this Tri-Service camel and build it to the government’s design wasted a lot of mines. In 20 years, several defense contractors had taken Gator production contracts, and every one of them failed the first article flight test. When my boss’s boss decided we would bid it at Aerojet, I knew two things: We, too, would fail the first article flight test, and it would end up in my lap. I was right on both counts. We built the flight test units per the government design and just like every one else, we failed with a disappointing 50% mine function rate. And I got the call to investigate why.
So, let’s back up a couple of centuries. You know, we in the US get a lot of credit for pioneering mass production. Rightly so, I think, but most folks are ignorant about what made it possible. Nope, it wasn’t Henry Ford and his Model T assembly line. It was something far more subtle, and that’s the concept of parts interchangeability. Until parts interchangeability came along (which happened about a hundred years before old Henry did his thing), you couldn’t mass produce anything. And to make parts interchangeable, you had to have two numbers for every part dimension: The nominal dimension, and a tolerance around that dimension. When we say we have a 19-inch wheel, for example, that’s the nominal dimension. There’s also a ± tolerance (that’s read plus or minus) associated with that 19-inch dimension. If the wheel diameter tolerance was ±0.005 inches, the wheel might be anywhere from 18.995 to 19.005 inches. Some tolerances are a simple ± number, others are a + something and a – something if the tolerance band is not uniform (like you see in the drawing below). But everything has a tolerance because you can’t always make parts exactly to the nominal dimension.
Where companies get sloppy is they do a lousy job assigning tolerances to nominal dimensions, and they do an even worse job analyzing the effects of the tolerances when parts are built at the tolerance extremes. Analyzing these effects is called tolerance analysis. Surprisingly, most engineering schools don’t teach it, and perhaps not so surprisingly, most companies don’t do it. All this has been a very good thing for me, because I get to make a lot of money analyzing the failures this kind of engineering negligence causes. In fact, the cover photo on my failure analysis book is an x-ray of an aircraft emergency egress system that failed because of negligent tolerancing (which killed two Navy pilots when their aircraft caught fire).
I don’t think people consciously think about this and decide they don’t need to do tolerance analysis. I think they don’t do it because it is expensive and in many cases their engineers do not have the necessary skills. At least, they don’t do it initially. In production, when they have failures some companies are smart enough to return to the tolerancing issue. That’s when they do the tolerance analysis they should have done during the design phase, and they find they have tolerance accumulations that can cause a problem.
Anyway, back to the Gator mine system. The Gator system had a dispenser (a canister) designed by the Air Force, the mines were designed by the Army, and the system had an interface kit designed by the Navy. Why they did it this way, I have no idea. It was about as dumb an approach for a development program as I have ever seen. Your tax dollars at work, I guess.
The Navy’s Gator interface kit positioned the mines within the dispenser and sent an electronic pulse from the dispenser to the mines when it was time to start the mine arming sequence. This signal went from coils in the interface kit to matching coils in each mine (there was no direct connection; the electric pulse passed from the interface kit coils to the mine coils). You can see these coils in the photo below (they are the copper things).
In our first article flight test at Eglin Air Force Base, only about 50% of the mines worked. That was weird, because when we tested the mines one at a time, they always worked. I had a pretty good feeling that the mines weren’t getting the arming signal. The Army liked that concept a lot (they had design responsibility for the mines), but the Air Force and the Navy were eyeing me the way a chicken might view Colonel Sanders.
I started asking questions about the tolerancing in the Navy’s part of the design, because I thought if the coils were not centered directly adjacent to the matching coils in each mine, the arming signal wouldn’t make it to the mine. The Navy, you see, had the responsibility for the stuffing that held the mines in place and for the coils that brought the arming signal to the mines.
At a big meeting with the engineering high rollers from all three services, I floated this idea of coil misalignment due to tolerance accumulation. The Navy guy basically went berserk and told me it could never happen. His reaction was so extreme I knew I had to be on to something (in a Shakespearian methinks the lady doth protest too much sort of way). At this point, both the Army and Air Force guys were smiling. The Navy guy was staring daggers at me. You could almost see smoke coming out his ears. He was a worm, I was the hook, and we were going fishing. And we both knew it.
I asked the Navy engineer directly how much misalignment would prevent signal transmission, he kept telling me it couldn’t happen, and I kept pressing for a number: How much coil misalignment would it take? Finally, the Navy dude told me there would have to be at least a quarter of an inch misalignment between the Navy coils and those in the mine. I don’t think he really knew, but he was throwing out a number to make it look like he did. At that point, I was pretty sure I had him. I looked at my engineering design manager and he left the room. Why? To do a tolerance analysis, of course. Ten minutes later he was back with the numbers that showed the Navy’s interface kit tolerances could allow way more than a quarter inch of misalignment.
When I shared that with the guys in our Tri-Service camel committee, the Navy guy visibly deflated. His 20-year secret was out. The Army and the Air Force loved it (they both hated the Navy, and they really hated the Navy engineer).
We tightened the tolerances in our production and built two more cluster bombs. I was at the load plant to oversee the load, assemble, and pack operation, and when we flight tested my two cluster bombs with live drops from an F-16 we had a 100% mine function rate (which had never been achieved before). That allowed us to go into production and we made a ton of money on the Gator program. I’m guessing that Navy weasel still hates me.
It’s hard to believe this kind of stuff goes on, but it does. I’ve got lots of stories with similar tolerance-induced recurring failures, and maybe I’ll share another one or two here at some point. Ask me about the Apache main rotor blade failures sometime…that’s another good one and I’ll post a blog about it in the next week or so.
Sometimes the story you set out to write doesn’t want to be written. Something is wrong, there’s no ju-ju, there’s no vibe, or in this particular case, there are no decent photos. I have an expensive Canon 5D that takes beautiful racing photos and I have a pretty good 300mm zoom lens with selectable, 2-axis stabilization. It’s not a professional lens by any means but it can do a fairly good job if you’re steady enough and don’t shoot at nighttime. The problem with the 5D and 300mm lens combo is that it weighs a ton and I don’t like carrying the thing around.
Anyway, it’s foolish pride on my part to try and capture the moment because as soon as I stop to think about a camera it’s not a moment any more. It becomes staged. It seems phony and something like grasping for the shot that will make the story. I don’t want to be a photojournalist and I never was. I learned the basic operation of a camera only because photos were a necessary evil in order to sell a story to magazines.
Oh, how I envy Cameron and Egan. Man, those guys have it made. They write their columns propped up on six pillows in an overstuffed bed between 1000-count Egyptian cotton sheets while green-skinned slave girls serve wine and grapes as they type each 600-word, 10,000-dollar column. And they do it without photos. Sometimes the magazine’s art director will tack on a few squiggly line drawings for the folks that need a picture. When I read their stuff I don’t miss the photos one bit.
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Since I’ve pretty much given up on cranking out content for paper magazines, I find myself wanting to enjoy the story in real time. I want to live the story, absorb all the sounds, sights and smells, and then write about it later. Events may not be recorded exactly as they happened but they record what happened to me. At least I imagine it happened to me. Memories are funny things; each of us views the world looking out from different eyes.
Still, websites are a visual medium and photos do make the page look better. They also attract readers. For the Vado races I brought along the little Canon S100, a higher-end point and shoot camera not much bigger than a cell phone. I thought I could get a few photos good enough to use for this story but the shutter lag was hard to plan for. I’d press the release and a second later the camera would take the photo. In racing things move a long way in a second. Annoyingly, the auto focus kept locking on the barrier fence instead of the cars behind the fence. I have a bunch of really sharp shots of the fence
My first attempts were a mess. The S100 needed the shutter sped up and to do that it needed a higher ISO setting. And then the auto focus had to be disabled in the menu. All these settings required scrolling through the various menu pages or pushing buttons and turning dials, which I had forgotten how to do. Switching the S100 from regular stabilization to panning stabilization took twenty-three keystrokes to accomplish. For the same task on the Canon 5D you just flip a switch.
A man’s got to know his camera and the seductive lure of the cell phone has caused my camera skills to atrophy. While I was staring down into the S100’s tiny screen life was happening all around me. I turned off the camera, put it in my pocket and decided to watch the races.
The whole reason we were at the races in the first place was because of the Sylings. The Sylings are friends of ours who live in Alamogordo. They are forever going on fun outings then putting cheerful, Team Syling posts on Facebook. CT and I decided it would be a good thing to be more like Team Syling so we are making an effort to do fun things around New Mexico. The trip to Vado Speedway was CT’s birthday present/Team Syling adventure. I don’t want you to get the idea I’m not romantic; I also bought her a 12-gauge Mossberg pump shotgun.
Vado Speedway is a fairly new track about 15 miles south of Las Cruces, New Mexico. You can see it from Interstate 10. The track looks small but they claim it’s 3/8th of a mile. Maybe the outside is 3/8 mile. It’s a dirt track, like God intended us to race on, and the corners are banked. The straights are short but the track is wide enough to allow plenty of passing. There are two lines at Vado: the high line and the low line. Both have their advantages but late in the evening the low line became very bumpy at the apex of the corner. Cars were bouncing up on two wheels in the rough. Most of the fast guys stayed up high where it was smooth, only dropping down to block a rival. As the evening wore on cars started to use the outside wall as a contact point like a slot car dragging the rails.
Stock car racing has changed a lot since the seemingly unlimited supply of Chevelles dried up. The night we went all the classes looked like Super Modified. There were no stock bodied cars. The lowest class cars are beat up sheet metal concoctions that look like something a child of three would draw when asked to draw a car. They resemble station wagons with large panels of metal aft to act as air dams. Think of the last outlaw sprint car race you went to with those giant billboard wings on top. It’s the same idea. The front wheels ran exposed on some of the cars. I don’t remember what they were named but in my day this class would be called the Sportsman class except for the homemade bodies.
The next step up from the flapping, crashing station wagon class was more station wagons. For all I could tell it was the same class, maybe “A” to the previous “B.” This class would have been called Late Models when I was going to stock car races back in the days when the planet Mars could still support life. These cars looked like the ratty-class cars but were built much better. The sheet metal was straighter and it didn’t flap around or fall off. The paint jobs and lettering were nicer and they crashed less. Besides being uglier than old style stock cars the Late Models’ engines sounded crisper and revved faster than the other, looser station wagons.
The top-tier division, known to me as Super Modifieds, were really nice cars. You could tell the owners had a ton of money in them, probably as much or more than a NASCAR stock car. They were fast and didn’t crash very often. The Super Modified cars didn’t look like station wagons but they still had acres of sheet metal on the side to assist with corners. All the wheels were covered by bodywork. NASCAR driver Kyle Larson was racing in the Super Modifieds with a Hendricks car and he did fairly well. He got a Main Event second place finish against drivers that spend their entire career in this specialized form of competition.
The racing was very close and heats were frequent. All the classes had several heat races to determine which cars made the main event and the grids were well populated. Driver/teams from Kansas, Wyoming, Illinois, California and other states attended. The stands were another story. When CT bought our tickets she was told they were sold out of general admission so she bought reserved seats. After everyone was seated the grandstands looked about 60% full. Maybe the cold, night air kept spectators away.
When the racing was over the announcers thanked the track owner for keeping stock car racing alive. Whenever you hear that sort of talk it’s not a good sign. South-Central New Mexico used to have a stock car track in Tularosa, another a few miles away near Alamogordo, one on Highway 9 west of Sunland Park near the border with Mexico, and I think Deming might still have a track and maybe El Paso.
Stock car tracks used to be everywhere. Where I grew up there was a track in Medly and one just across the Miami River in Hialeah. Those tracks are gone now. I wonder if dirt oval tracks are disappearing all over America. I believe part of the reason for grass roots oval racing’s decline is that none of the cars racing are related in any way to the cars found in the parking lot. That is if you can find a car in the parking lot. Today everyone drives bloated SUVs or pickup trucks.
Then there’s the high bar of entry into the sport. Even those ratty station wagons require a lot of work to build. Maybe the demise of cheap, rear-wheel drive sedans is part of the problem. The class structure never adapted to new realities in the marketplace. Look how NASCAR’s rigid rules have created a situation where you can buy a box stock Dodge, Chevy or Ford off the showroom floor with more horsepower than a NASCAR contender. I know the old time stock cars shared few common parts with the cars they resembled but at least they resembled them and had engines you could check off on the dealer’s option page.
Finally, the “Car of Tomorrow” eliminated the last tentacles connecting the cars on the track and the car you drove to the track. Now all the bodywork is the same and only paint creates the illusion of several brands. The situation is probably not as bad as I’m making it sound. I’ve gotten grumpy as I got old. I liked it when stock car racing was the most exciting thing happening on a Saturday night.
I’ll be back to Vado Park Speedway. Later in the year they are hosting USRA Modifieds, which look a lot like old style stock cars. Then there are the winged and un-winged Sprint cars along with Super Trucks. We all need to do our part to keep this uniquely American form of racing alive. Hopefully a new generation will get interested in stock cars and start racing cheap, two liter, front-wheel drive sedans around those well groomed dirt ovals. I know a couple unused tracks nearb. Just add drivers.
