Back In The Day – Page 22 – The ExhaustNotes Blog

Movie Review: The 24 Hour War

Gresh’s review of Ford versus Ferrari had my attention, and SWMBO wanted to see the movie, so off to the theatre we went. My take on it was pretty much identical to Joe’s: Grand entertainment, lots of grimaces and Hollywood liberties with the facts, but overall, an entertaining if not entirely accurate flick.

Later that evening, we were channel surfing and we flopped over to Netflix, and what do you know, a documentary titled The 24 Hour War popped up. I know Amazon, Facebook, and others use all kinds of spyware to figure out what to pitch to us next, but wow, this was amazing. That very day, and a pop up for another movie about the great Ford versus Ferrari war and Le Mans. Hey, in for a penny, in for a pound, so we watched The 24 Hour War.

Unlike Ford v. Ferrari, The 24 Hour War took no liberties with the truth, the facts, the timelines, or the vehicles themselves. It was a damn fine bit of actual, factual reporting, and I enjoyed it more than the movie we had seen earlier that day. If you get Netflix, it’s free, and if you own a microwave and a refrigerator, you won’t have to pay $15 for popcorn and a couple of Cokes (like Gresh did).

A few more good things about The 24 Hour War: It went into much more detail about Henry Ford and Enzo Ferrari (I found that interesting), and portions of the show were narrated by A.J. Baime. Mr. Baime does a series on interesting cars people still drive in The Wall Street Journal and I love his writing. I’m just finishing up a book by Baime about our industrial mobilization prior to and during World War II, and it, too, focuses heavily on the Ford family. The guy is a great writer, and I’ll have a review here on Baime’s book, The Arsenal of Democracy, in the near future.

One more thing regarding the cars themselves: To me, it’s not really a contest and I don’t much care who won Le Mans. Given the choice between owning a Ford GT or a Ferrari, to me the answer is obvious: It’s Ferrari all day long.

But I digress. Back to the review. The bottom line? Ford versus Ferrari was an entertaining movie, but the The 24 Hour War is an absolutely outstanding documentary. I think you’ll enjoy it.

The Perfect Bike?

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

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

The Good Old Days

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

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

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

Cruisers and Adventure Bikes

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

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

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

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

Sports Bikes

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

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

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

A BMW GS versus Triumph’s Tiger

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

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

The Tiger’s Shortfalls

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

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

Kawasaki’s KLR 650

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

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

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

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

Muddy Baja

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

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

The Perfect Bike: A Specification

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

Here’s what I’d like to see:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Original Exhaust Notes

Churchill Clark in 1969. Our graduation yearbook was dedicated to him. I saw Mr. Clark again at our 20th reunion. He was one of the greats and the creator of the Exhaust Notes name. Sadly, he is no longer with us.

The year was 1968, I was a 17-year-old pup, and Churchill Clark approached me with an idea for the Viking Press. We were the Vikings (no one is quite sure how we got that name, as there were very few Scandinavians in South Brunswick), and the Viking Press, you see, was our high school newspaper. Mr. Clark was an English teacher (a great one), and he was the Viking Press faculty advisor.

A bit more background: There were several cliques in our high school (there were, are, and always will be in any high school, I guess), and I belonged to the greasers. You know, the gearheads. We lived and breathed GTOs, Camaros, Hemis, motorcycles, street racing, and anything that ingested fossil fuel. We were in the middle of the muscle car era, maybe one of the best times ever to be a teenager in America. Old Mr. Clark wanted to get our crowd reading the high school newspaper (he was a bit of a greaser himself), and as I was one of the more literate greasers, he asked me to write a column about cars.

“What do you want me to say?” I asked.

“Whatever you want,” Mr. Clark answered.

So I did, and I have to admit, it was a heady experience seeing something I wrote appear in print for the first time. My idea was to have a little fun with the war stories and poke at the ridiculousness of it all. Mr. Clark titled the column Exhaust Notes and he drew the little car that appeared at the top of every article. I liked both, and the Exhaust Notes name stuck. When Joe Gresh and I started the blog, there was no question about what it was going to be called.

A few months ago my high school class, South Brunswick’s Class of 1969, held its 50th reunion. My good buddy and friend since kindergarten, Kathy Leary, told me she had saved a few of the old Viking Press newspapers, and she scanned a couple of the articles for me.

Those were great times, folks, and great memories. I’m glad Kathy had the foresight to hang on to those old papers, and I’m grateful she scanned and sent a couple of the articles to me. And I’m glad old Mr. Clark trusted me to run with the idea.

Product Review: MY Construction Supply Rebar Caps

We never used re-bar caps back when I was doing construction. I don’t think they had been invented yet. It was a different time: You had to be tough, man and I was. If you tripped and fell onto an exposed re-bar the thing would go clean through you and out the other side. The jobsites I worked on were grisly with dead men impaled on rusting steel. I’ll never forget that smell. In the hot Florida sun the bodies bloated fast, seemingly still alive as they twitched and waved a stiff, blackened hand each time a bubble of gas escaped.

Guys getting skewered on re-bar was so prevalent we didn’t bother to pull them off until it was time to pour the concrete. Why bother, another man will just come along and land on the thing.

I never fell onto a rebar myself. I’ve come close but managed to avoid spearing the bar, because I didn’t run up a bunch of debt going to college or paying exorbitant hospital bills for puncture remedies. Back then people took responsibility for their actions, not like now. Those guys stuck on the rebar? Maybe they should have eaten less fast food or bought a cheaper car. Today you see rebar covers all over construction jobs. It’s all part of the dumbing down of America.

Back to the rebar covers, I’m reinforcing the ground surrounding The Carriage House and there are a bunch of re-bars sticking up from the retaining wall. I’m not so worried about falling onto them (because I made wise life choices) but the damn things are sharp. The bars will eventually be bent down into the formwork and covered with concrete, until then I’m getting cut to ribbons. A good-sized gash to the elbow was the final straw.

At first I was going to use empty beer cans to cap the bars. That visual might be too much for my wife to handle and anyway I’d have to drink like 75 beers to get the job done. I’ve been trying to lose weight by drinking gin and tonics as a calorie saving measure. Processing that many beers through my gastrointestinal system was a non-starter. I found the MY caps online for 50 cents apiece.

The caps fit rebar from 3/8” to ¾”, inside the cap are 4 vanes that conform to the different sizes. It’s a good set up. The bright orange color alerts you to the bar so there’s less tripping and zero cutting on my jobsite.

They’ve been out in the sun for a few weeks and the color hasn’t faded yet. Kind of funny that the packaging says “Does not protect against impalement.” Which is the main reason you buy the damn things. I suspect some cell-phone owning construction worker fell 13 floors onto the MY cap and managed to sue the company.

Go ahead and call me a nanny-state mason. I deserve it. I guess you could say I’m getting soft in my old age. Seeing all those orange caps sitting atop the rebar makes me sad. I miss the old ways. I miss personal responsibility. And, funnily enough, I miss that smell.

On being a Gym Rat, the RX3, Yoo-Hoo, and Lucas Fuel Treatment

I’ve been drinking my stash of Yoo-Hoo (the review is in the works), but wouldn’t you know it, each of those little containers is 100 calories. To a male model like myself, that means more time at the gym, and that’s what I’ve been doing. Usually I roll over there in the Subie, but today was a bit different. I rode to the gym on my old RX3.

It sounds funny to refer to the RX3 as old. Four years ago, it was the hottest thing since sliced bread, and news of an inexpensive, fully-equipped, adventure touring machine was big news indeed. The RX3 price has gone up since then, but the RX3 is still a hot smoking hot deal. Mine came in on the very first shipment from Chongqing, it has about 20,000 miles on it, and it’s still going strong. I don’t ride my RX3 much these days because I’m usually on someone else’s motorcycle for an ExNotes blog (the RX4, the Royal Enfields, the Janus bikes, the Genuine G400c), but every time I get on my bike I still feel the excitement I first felt when I rode an RX3 for the first time. That was in China. You can badmouth small bikes and Chinese bikes all you want, but I know better. The RX3 is one of the world’s great motorcycles.

I’m going to do a trip on my RX3, most likely up the Pacific Coast, in the next couple of months. I’m thinking something leisurely, around 200 miles each day, with stops at the La Purisima Mission, Jocko’s in Nipomo (best barbeque on the planet), a run up the Pacific Coast Highway to Carmel, and then a jaunt east through Hollister to Pinnacles, Highway 25, and the 198 down the center of California. I’ll probably swing further east for a Del Taco burrito in Barstow (it’s the location of the original Del Taco, and if I had to explain why that’s significant, you might not get it). Yeah, that could work. Lots of photos, lots of meeting new people, and lots of fun.

What would be particularly cool on a trip like that is the RX3’s fuel economy. We’re up around $4 per gallon here in the Peoples Republik of Kalifornia (about a dollar of that is taxes), and being on a bike that sips fuel always makes me feel like I’m getting away with something. I consistently get better than 70 mpg on my RX3. That’s a good thing. Gresh seems to have stumbled on to something on his B0nneville adventure using Lucas fuel treatment in his Husky. His fuel economy improved significantly after adding Lucas. I’ve always used Lucas fuel treatment in my bike, and I’m wondering if that’s part of the reason I’ve always had great fuel economy.

Anyway, lots more coming up, folks. Stay tuned.

Read about some of our other adventures on the ExhaustNotes Epic Rides page!

The Best Boss I Ever Had

Gresh and I have done a couple of blogs about great guys for whom we’ve worked, and in thinking about that last night I asked myself: Who’s the best boss I ever had? The answer was both immediate and easy: Captain Omer McCants. I was a young lieutenant in Korea and Captain McCants was an old man (he was a 28-year-old Captain). Captain McCants was my battery commander and he was a major influence on my approach to work, leadership, and life in general. While remembering those good old days, I did a Google search and this appeared:

Nah, can’t be, I thought. But it was. Captain McCants retired as a Lt. Colonel and went on to do other great things. Watching the video above instantly took me back 45 years, and listening to the “old man” was about as enjoyable an experience as I’ve ever had. I think you’ll enjoy it, too. There are several videos about Colonel McCants (check the link below the video when you go to the page) and my advice is to listen to them all. I did. You can thank me later.

Gresh and I have talked about adding an ExNotes page with links to our “Back in the Day” stories about the great guys we’ve known, and we’ll get around to that in the near future. I’ve been around some great leaders. Do you remember the movie Apocalypse Now and the guy Robert Duvall played, Colonel Kilgore? There actually was a Colonel Kilgore in the US Army and I reported to him (he was nothing like the guy Robert Duvall portrayed). I worked for a couple of company presidents in the aerospace business who changed the way that industry worked, and I’ll tell you about them at some point. I know Gresh has amazing stories, too. I’ve heard them. Stay tuned, folks. There’s more good stuff coming.

Sweet Home, California and New Mexico!

Wowee, it’s been nonstop travel for Gresh and me these last few weeks. As you know from reading the ExhaustNotes blog, Gresh rode his Husqvarna to the Bonneville Speed Week in Utah from his home in New Mexico. He’s a better man than I am. I don’t think I could handle riding a Naugahyde-covered 2×4 all that distance. Joe is back on the Tinfiny Ranch in New Mexico now, no doubt thinking about concrete, motorized bicycles, getting his vintage Z1 back on the road, and more.

I’ve been on the road, too. It was a scouting expedition for an upcoming hunting trip with my good buddy J, back to Soprano-land for my 50th high school reunion, and then up to Seattle for a friend’s wedding. We’re racking up the miles, but I’m home now, and let me tell you, it’s good to be home! I was supposed to be on the road this past week for the Three Flags Classic (I would have been on the way home from Canada by now), but it was getting to be too much and I bailed out on that one. Like my good buddy Dirty Harry likes to say, a man’s got to know his limits, and I hit mine.

Scouting for Deer

Out in the boonies with good buddy J, proving that beer doesn’t work well as a mosquito repellant.

Good buddy J and I snuck away to an undisclosed location to scout deer. Where we were and where we’re going is a closely-held military secret, but we saw lots of game, we’re going back heavy, and we’re looking forward to bringing home the bacon (or, I guess I should say, the venison). We camped on this trip, which is something I hadn’t done in quite a few years. J makes camping seem like staying at a 5-star hotel. It was fun. Except for the mosquitos. Those little bastards were brutal. I probably won’t be able to make it up there the same time as J (I’ve got another secret mission to Asia coming up real soon), but if I don’t make it on the trip with J, I’ll be there a few days later. Venison beckons and all that. I’ve got a .300 Weatherby load with a deer’s initials on it.

Bonneville Speed Week

Joe’s trek to Wendover for Bonneville’s Speed Week was awesome, and you can get to his posts here…

Salt 1
Salt 2
Salt 3
Salt 4
Salt 5
Salt 6
Salt 7
Salt 8

Reading Joe’s blogs was a real treat; I felt like I was riding along with Uncle Joe. You will, too…click on the above links if you haven’t seen these great stories and enjoy some of the best motorcycle story telling in the world!

Joe has another trip planned in the near term for the Yamaha Endurofest. I’m looking forward to the photos and the stories on that one. I love reading Joe’s stories!

The Big 50

Hey, what can I say? My classmates from our Class of ’69 did one hell of a job putting together an absolutely amazing 50th high school reunion. Surprisingly, I didn’t get a lot of photos…I was having way too much fun. I did get a few, though, and here they be!

Just a few of my classmates taking a tour of our old high school.

Good buddy Tad, whom I met in the 7th grade, with his Honda Gold Wing.

Good buddy Mike, reminding us there’s no talking to the driver while the bus is in motion!

At one point, we started grabbing photos of folks from the different elementary schools in our area. Here’s one of the crew who went to Deans School…my elementary school alma mater.

I’ve known everyone in this photo from kindergarten. I had crushes on every girl in this photo at one time or another. Don’t tell Sue.

We then thought it would be a good idea to take a group photo of everyone who had detention in high school…you know, where they make you stay late to wash blackboards, clean erasers, and stuff like that for cutting up in class. I’m guessing they can’t do that anymore.

The kids who had detention in high school. I was the king of detention.

I can’t remember ever having as much fun as we did at the reunion. Everyone looked great. Some of the folks there I first met in kindergarten, and most I had not seen in 50 years. One of the young ladies you see in the photos above had saved some of our high school newspapers, which had a column titled Exhaust Notes. And you can guess who wrote it more than half a century ago. That’s a story for another blog, and it’s coming your way soon.

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Ride Easy, Mr. Fonda…

All good things must come to an end, I guess, and Peter Fonda’s life was a good thing that ended earlier today. It was too soon. He reached the ripe old age of 79, which is more than most, so in one sense I guess you could say he got his money’s worth. But it would have been better if he could have stayed longer. I liked the guy.

Peter Fonda first entered my life with the release of Easy Rider, a movie that hit the silver screen when I was a goofy teenager. Choppers entered the scene through that movie for me, and Wyatt was a character I think most guys my age wanted to be at one point or another in their lives. Billy, not so much. It was Jack Nicholson’s big break, and the movie put the idea of long distance motorcycle riding in many of our minds. It spawned a cultural and seismic shift in how most folks viewed motorcycles. It launched a motorcycle magazine of the same name where my short stories would later appear (yeah, I wrote short stories for Easy Riders back in the day). Easy Rider, the movie, by any measure was a big deal.

Fast forward a year or two, and it was a 750 Honda for me. I didn’t have the panhead Harley chopper, but I bought me a Captain America helmet and I was (at least in my mind) as cool as Peter Fonda. I wore that helmet on a motorcycle ride to Montreal. It’s all about the look, and I had it.

Fast forward a lot of years, and one day I was leaving Glendale Harley Davidson after stopping there to pick up a part and Peter Fonda was walking up the sidewalk as I was leaving. I said hi and he said How’s it going, man. It was a chance encounter I remember like it happened 10 minutes ago. He would have been in his mid-50s then, and I told everyone I knew for weeks after that I had seen Peter Fonda in person. I like to think that he told everyone he knew for weeks after that he had seen Joe Berk in person, but that was before I started writing the blog so deep in my heart I knew he probably didn’t. But for one brief instant we were equals: Peter Fonda nodded at me and asked How’s it going, man, like he had known me all his life. You can’t put a price on that.

Ride easy, Mr. Fonda. Thanks for the memories. And to answer your question, it’s going well, thank you, in no small part due to the influence you’ve had on many of us.

The Rimfire Series: ¡Siluetas Metálicas!

Metallic Silhouette Origins

The sport of metallic silhouette shooting came to us from Mexico, where it started roughly 80 years ago as a part of a culture of rural village celebrations. They used live animals in those days tethered to a stake, which made it a lot harder to hit them because after the first shot the animals tended to take evasive action. I guess it was considered politically correct in those earlier times because the match would be immediately followed by a rip-roaring barbeque (at which, of course, chicken, pig, turkey, and ram were on the menu).

I learned all of this from a world-class metallic silhouette shooter named Jose Porras in the 1970s. Jose used to drive up from Mexico to shoot with us at Fort Bliss when I first got into the metallic silhouette game. He was the guy to beat, and I never did. I didn’t care. I just liked hearing his stories about the old days and the origins of the sport.

Metallic Silhouette Targets and Distances

I had last shot in a metallic silhouette match about 45 years ago. By then, the sport had morphed into shooting at metallic silhouettes, like you see in the photo at the top of this blog. There were chickens at 50 meters, pigs at 100 meters, turkeys at 150 meters, and rams at 200 meters (this was for the handgun competition). All of the silhouettes were life-sized. For high power rifle (which we always shot with a scope back then) the targets were the same, but they were located at 200 meters (chickens), 300 meters (pigs), 385 meters (turkeys), and 500 meters (rams). Those are long distances, and all of the rifle shooting was offhand (no slings or shooting jackets). You could shoot from a sitting position in the handgun matches, but the rifle competition was all a stand up affair. It was challenging, and that’s what made it interesting. The winner usually connected with only about half the targets, and you either hit them or you didn’t.

Just hitting the targets didn’t count. You had to hit them with enough energy to knock them over. In the rifle competition, that alone ruled out the light cartridges. And you couldn’t use magnums, either, because those cartridges would damage the targets. Nope, in the rifle game, it was a Goldilocks affair. The energy had to be just right. 7mm Mauser, 7mm-08, .308, and .30 06 were the favorites back then.

In the handgun competition, everyone either used a magnum cartridge (.44 Magnum was popular), .45 Colt loaded to the max, or a custom wildcat (I’ll say more about that below). .45 ACP, .38 Special, and the standards of the day didn’t have enough energy to knock the targets over, and their rainbow-like trajectories meant there wasn’t enough adjustment in the sights. 9mm? Fuhgeddaboutit. The 9mm was woefully anemic for this game.

Metallic Silhouette Handguns

In the International Handgun Metallic Silhouette Association (IHMSA) national championships in 1976 in El Paso, I tied for 5th place and then lost a shootoff. I was out of the money in 6th, but I was still pretty pleased because I was using a bone-stock Smith and Wesson Model 27 .357 Magnum with my cast bullet reloads, while all of the guys who did better than me were shooting custom XP-100 Remingtons. The XP-100 was a single-shot pistol based on a rifle action, and in those days, guys would have them custom barreled in 30×223. The 30×223 was a wildcat based on the 5.56 NATO cartridge blown out to take a .30 caliber rifle bullet. It ultimately became known as the 300 Blackout cartridge. Jose used one of these 30×223 custom handguns for culling coyotes on his estate in Mexico during the week and for winning matches in El Paso on the weekends. He was really, really good. I imagine the coyotes hated him.

.22 Rifle Metallic Silhouette Shooting

Well, to make a long story slightly less long, I had been wanting to get back into metallic silhouette shooting for the last four and a half decades, and one day a year or so ago I did. I broke the suction between my butt and the seat in front of this computer and I shot in the .22-caliber metallic silhouette rifle match at the West End Gun Club. I shot my Browning .22 A-bolt (a relatively rare and semi-collectible rifle).

I didn’t know it when I went out there, but they shoot two classes: One with scopes, and the other with open sights. The open sight targets are roughly four times the size of the scope targets, and for whatever reason, on the rams the targets for the scoped guns are set back an additional 10 yards (for the other three animals, the distances are the same). At all distances, though, the targets for the scoped guns are really, really small. Take a look.

With apologies for the lack of focus, here’s a zoomed-in shot of the turkeys. The iron sight turkey targets are on the left; the scoped-rifle turkeys are on the right…

Like I said, the scoped-rifle targets are really tiny. You can see that in the photo above. They were maybe two inches tall. Shooting at these things offhand was a challenge, but I had a blast out there. There were four guys shooting scoped rifles (I was one of them) and 14 guys (and gals) shooting iron-sighted rifles (mostly lever guns; all with expensive aftermarket aperture sights). It was a good crowd…mostly older guys (my age and up) with a few folks in their 20s and 30s. Everybody was friendly.

I could have started this blog by telling you I came in fourth in the scoped class and let it go at that, but the fact is I had the lowest score in the scoped class. I only got 14 out of 60 silhouettes, the next guy got 18, another guy got 20, and the highest guy got 22. It’s a tough game. I’m pretty happy with what I did, though. I had only zeroed my rifle at 50 yards (where I got about half the chickens). I got about a third of the pigs I shot at (these were the 65-yard targets, and every shot at them when I connected was at the low edge of the target). I only got one each of the rams and the turkeys (the turkeys are always the toughest), but like I said, I wasn’t zeroed and those were just lucky hits. Next time I’ll do better (and there will be a next time). This was all shooting offhand at teeny, tiny targets. I’d like to try the open sight class next time, too, just because the targets were a lot bigger. It all was a lot of fun.

The club also has a centerfire lever gun silhouette match, and I’m thinking I’ll try that, too. Those distances go out to about 140 yards, it’s all open sights, and it’s all lever guns. They told me they mostly shoot .357 Magnum (a handgun cartridge) and .30 30 for the centerfire metallic silhouette competition. The bug has bitten and I am enjoying being back in the game.

Good times, folks. Life is good.

More Tales of the Gun stories are here!

S&S 96 Cubic Inch Stroker Rebuild

My ’92 Softail Harley. After losing a lot of weight.

So this all got started on a trip to Baja. My beloved ’92 Softail started clanging and banging and bucking and snorting somewhere around Ensenada. I was headed south with my good buddy Paul from New Jersey (not the Paul I grew up, but another one). It was obvious something wasn’t right and we turned. It wasn’t the end of the world and the Harley did manage to get me home, but I could tell: Something major had happened. The bike was making quite a bit of noise. I had put 400 miles on it by the time I rode it back from Mexico. I parked the Harley, got on my Suzuki TL1000S, and we changed our itinerary to ride north up the PCH rather than south into Baja. That trip went well, but there was still the matter of the dead Softail.

Here’s where it started to get really interesting. My local Harley dealer wouldn’t touch the bike. See, this was around 2005 or so, and it seems my Harley was over 10 years old. Bet you didn’t know this: Many Harley dealers (maybe most of them) won’t work on a bike over 10 years old. The service manager at my dealer ‘splained this to me and I was dumbfounded. “What about all the history and heritage and nostalgia baloney you guys peddle?” I asked. The answer was a weak smile. “I remember an ad with a baby in Harley T-shirt and the caption When did it start for you?” I said. Another weak smile.

I was getting nowhere fast. I tried calling a couple of other Harley dealers and it was the same story. Over 10 years old, dealers won’t touch it. I was flabbergasted. For a company that based their entire advertising program on longevity and heritage, I thought it was outrageous. Chalk up another chapter in my book, Why I Hate Dealers.

A friend suggested I go to an independent shop. “It’s why they exist,” he said. So I did.

Here’s my internist…Victor, of the Iron Horse cycle shop. That’s my Harley in the background.

There was this little hole-in-the-wall place on Holt Boulevard in Ontario, in kind of a seedy part of town, near where the local Harley dealer used to be. The Iron Horse. You gotta love a shop with a name like that. The guy who ran it was a dude about my age named Victor. I could tell right away: I liked the shop and I liked Victor. I got my Harley over there and I stopped by a few days later to hear the verdict: The engine was toast.

“What happened here,” said Victor, “is that one of your roller lifters stopped rolling, and it turned into a solid lifter. When I did that, the cam and the lifter started shedding metal, and the filings migrated into the oil pump. When that stopped working, the engine basically ate itself….”

An Evo motor roller lifter that stopped rolling. The needle bearing in this lifter failed, and departed for points south. And north. And east and west. You get the idea.

The cam wore a path into the roller. That metal had to go somewhere, and where it went was the oil pump.

“You’ve got lots of other things not right in your motorcycle, too,” Victor explained. “The alternator is going south, your cam got chewed up, the oil pump is toast, the belt is tired, and you’ll probably want to gear it a little taller to reduce the vibration like the new Harleys do.”

Here’s what the failed lifter did to the Screaming Eagle cam. Note the surface on the right most lobe.

Victor showed me that my alternator was getting close to failing. Look at the insulation on the output lines. Yep, I would need a new one of those, too.

Here’s what happened when the metal dust and needle bearing bits got into the oil pump. Note the abrasions on the inner surface.

Another neat shot. It was kind of cool to see what was flying up and down underneath me during those 50,000 miles I put on the Harley over the last 14 years.

Victor gave me a decent price for bringing the engine back to its original condition (in other words, a rebuild to stock), but it wasn’t cheap. Then he offered an alternative.

“I can rebuild it with S&S components for about the same price,” he said, “and that’s with nearly everything new except the cases. We’ll keep the Harley cases because then the engine number stays the same, and it’s still a Harley. It would be a 96-inch motor instead of an 80-inch motor, and I think you’d like it. It would be about the same price as rebuilding it with Harley parts. You’d get new pistons, rods, flywheels, and nearly everything else. I’d have to take the cases apart and get them machined to accept the S&S stroker crank and cylinders, and we’d reassemble it with new bearings. Oversized S&S forged pistons would go in with a 10.1:1 compression ratio, and that means you’d have to run high test. Oh, yeah, there’s new S&S heads, a new manifold, and a new S&S Super carb. And an S&S cam.” Then he showed me the components in a brochure, and another chart that showed the difference in power.

All the S&S stuff that would go into my new motor. I was getting excited. This was going to be cool.

Twice the horsepower, and twice the torque. What’s not to like?

It was an easy decision. For the same money it would cost to bring the Harley back to stock, I could get it redone as a real hot rod. For me, it was a no-brainer. My days of bopping around on a 48-hp, 700-lb Harley would be over. The horsepower would double. Bring it on!

My Harley was still running on the original belt drive, and I had Victor replace that, too. And as long as the belt was being replaced, I went with Victor’s recommendation to swap to taller sprockets. That would give the bike a bit more top end and cut some of the vibration at cruising speeds.

I wrote a check and asked Victor to call me when the parts came in. I wanted to photograph the whole deal. Victor said he would, and I stopped at the Iron Horse frequently over the next several weeks.

Check out the gorgeous S&S cylinder head.

And how about this machined-from-billet piston? These would kick the Harley’s compression ratio up to 10.1:1.

I was enjoying this. The parts didn’t come in all at once, and that was fine by me. I enjoyed stopping in at the Iron Horse and taking photos. It was something I looked forward to at the end of each day. It was really fun as the motor came together. Victor asked if I wanted the cylinders and cylinder heads painted black like they originally were, or if I wanted to leave them aluminum. It was another no-brainer for me: Aluminum it would be!

My S&S motor being assembled. The cases and the valve covers were about the only Harley parts left in the motor.

Isn’t it beautiful? Another view of the S&S 96-incher coming together.

Here’s a closeup of the cam and one of the roller lifters just above it.

One day not long after the motor went together I got the call: My bike was ready. It was stunning and I rode the wheels off the thing. Here’s the finished bike…my ’92 Softail with the S&S 96-inch motor installed.

The S&S motor completely changed the personality of my Harley. I had thought it was quick when Laidlaw’s installed the Screaming Eagle stuff back at the 500-mile service, but now, at 50,000 miles with the S&S motor, I wasn’t in Kansas anymore, Toto. In the 14 years I had owned my Harley previously, I had just touched 100mph once. Now, the bike would bury the needle (somewhere north of 120mph on the Harley speedometer) nearly every time I took an entrance on to the freeway. This thing was fast! Fuel economy dropped to the mid-30-mpg range, but I didn’t care. My Harley was fast! The rear tire would wear out in 3,000 miles, but I didn’t care. The Harley was fast! It ran rich and you could smell gasoline at idle, but I didn’t care. Did I mention this thing was fast?

You might think I would have kept the Harley and put another zillion miles on it, but truth be told, my riding tastes had changed and I only kept it for another year after the rebuild. I was riding with a different crowd and I had a garage full of bikes, including the ’95 Triumph Daytona 1200 I’ve previously blogged about, my Suzuki TL1000S, a pristine bone-stock low-mileage ’82 Honda CBX, and a new KLR 650 Kawasaki. You wanna talk fast? The TL and the Daytona were scary fast. Yeah, the S&S was a runner, but fast had taken on a new definition for me.

And then one day, it happened. My wife had asked me to pick up something at the store while I was out seeking my fortune on the Harley, and when I came home, I realized I forgot to stop for whatever it was. I could have gone out on the Harley again, but for whatever reason, the KLR got the nod instead.

The bottom line: I had back to back rides on the S&S Softail and the KLR, and that’s when it hit me: I had bought the KLR new for about what I had in the S&S motor. The KLR was quicker at normal speeds, it handled way better, it was a much smoother and more comfortable, and it was more fun to ride. That was a wake-up call for me. The Harley went in the CycleTrader that day, and it sold the day after that. Regrets? None. I’d had my fun, and it was time to move on.

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