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…
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!
Winging it to Wendover, Gresh was…
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.
Don’t miss a single ExhaustNotes blog! Sign up here for automatic notifications…
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 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.
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.
The S&S manifold for my new engine.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.And here’s the S&S cam.
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.
It’s beautiful, don’t you think?
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.
So I had my new Harley, a gorgeous blue ’92 Heritage Softail, and it was a shockingly beautiful motorcycle. Yeah, some of the styling touches were a little hokey, but in a good way. I never even knew what a concho was before I bought the Softail, but I knew after I owned it. I became a Harley-riding cowboy. The conchos made the bike complete. How I ever made it to 40 without conchos I’ll never know. I had them now, though, and they just looked right. My Softail was a fashion statement. It made me look good and it made me feel good. I loved that bike.
My ’92 Softail on a Baja ride to San Felipe. Good buddies Baja John and Marty rode with me on that one. Those gangster whitewalls? That’s a story for another blog.
There was only one problem, and it was a big one: The Softail was a dawg. It was a 700-lb lump that couldn’t get out of its own way. I’ve already spoken about how unreliable my ’79 Electra-Glide was, but that old clunker would get up and choogy, and it would have walked away from my new ’92 Softail in a drag race. I mean, the thing was slow. When I gave it more throttle going up a hill, it seemed like the only result was a deeper moan. It sure didn’t go any faster.
I worked in El Monte in those days and the nearby dealer was a famous one in southern California, Laidlaw’s, and I felt comfortable with them. I knew Bob Laidlaw, their founder, and I knew his son Jerry, and I knew both to be straight shooters. When it was time for the Softail’s first service at 500 miles, that’s where I went. Laidlaw’s has since moved to a larger, more modern facility in a better neighborhood, I’m guessing at Harley-Davidson’s insistence, and it’s still a great place. But I liked the old location better. Like I described for Dale’s in the last blog about buying my ’92, the old Laidlaw’s facility had that crusty old motorcycle shop schtick, and I liked that. You know, grease on the floor, a funky shop area, and guys who looked like their lives revolved around motorcycles and tattoos. Guys with calibrated arms who knew how much torque to apply to a 9/16 by feel alone.
I went to Laidlaw’s on an overcast Saturday morning for that first service, and Jerry wrote the service order. After completing it, he looked at me and asked: Anything else?
“Yeah,” I said. “The thing’s a dog.”
Jerry smiled. He knew. This wasn’t his first rodeo.
“They lean them out pretty good from the factory,” he said.
“So what do guys do?” I asked.
Another Jerry smile. “Well, most guys get a new cam, punch out the pipes, rejet the carb, and put the Screaming Eagle air filter in.”
“How much is that?” I asked. I could see this smoking past another $1500 without stopping to look back.
“It’s about $500,” Jerry answered. Hmmm, that wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.
“So how much would everything be,” I said. “You know, the 500-mile service and the cam and carb and pipes and all the rest?”
“It’s $500 for everything,” Jerry answered, “including the 500-mile service.”
I could hardly believe what I was hearing.
“Let’s do it,” I said. I mean, I know a good deal when I see one. I hung around, as Jerry told me the whole thing would be a couple of hours. In the meantime, it had started raining, and I had no raingear. I walked across the street to some sort of an Army-Navy-99-cent store and bought a $3 rain suit.
In those days, it was no big deal to hang around in the service area and watch the techs work on your bike. The guy who was working on mine was a long-haired dude with lots of tattoos and a friendly smile. He held this giant steel toothpick-looking sort of tool that was essentially a ¾-inch-diameter rod sharpened to a point in one hand, and in his other hand he had a sledge hammer. He stuck the persuader into the end of one of my fishtail mufflers and whacked it with the sledge hammer. Then he repeated the process on the other fishtail. With a big grin, he said, “Adios, baffles!”
Then it was the carb work and the air cleaner replacement. And then it was the Screaming Eagle cam, which actually was pretty easy to install in the chrome cone on the right side of the engine. Then he buttoned it all up.
I finished my cup of coffee, donned my el cheapo raingear, paid my bill, and fired up the Harley.
Good Lord!
It was a completely different motorcycle. It sounded way better than it had before the Screaming Eagle cam work and exhaustectomy. It had been transformed from a smothered, anemic, pathetic, wheezing sort of thing into living, breathing, fire-snorting, spirited motorcycle. It reeked raw power and it had attitude. The idle was lopey and assertive, like a small block Chevy with an Isky cam and Hooker headers. My Harley rocked back and forth on its axles with each engine rotation. It was telling me: Let’s go! I think I’m pretty good at turning a phrase and I’m doing my best here, folks, but trust me on this: It’s hard to put into words how complete and total my Harley’s transformation was. It kind of reminded me of the first time I ever threw a leg over a Triumph Bonneville (I was 14 when that happened, and when Laidlaw’s tuned my Softail I was 14 all over again).
So I rolled out into the rain for my 30-mile ride home and I was afraid to whack the throttle open. I thought the rear wheel would break loose on the wet pavement; it felt that powerful. The rain and the clouds, I think, made the Harley’s Exhaust Notes (love that phrase) sound way mo better. I was there, man.
The year was 1991, and the last thing in the world I was thinking about was buying another motorcycle, and within the confines of that thought, the very, very last thought I would have ever had was buying a Harley-Davidson. I had previously owned a ’79 Electra-Glide I bought new in Texas, and that bike was a beautiful disaster. I called it my optical illusion (it looked like a motorcycle). I wrote about the bad taste it left in an earlier blog. Nope, I’d never own another Harley, or so I thought when I sold it in 1981.
My ’79 Electra-Glide Classic, as shown in the 1979 Harley catalog. It was the most unreliable and most beautiful motorcycle I ever owned. I wish I still had it.
But like the title of that James Bond movie, you should never say never again. I was a big wheel at an aerospace company in 1991 and I was interviewing engineers when good buddy Dick Scott waltzed in as one of the applicants. I had worked with Dick in another aerospace company (in those days in the So Cal aerospace industry, everybody worked everywhere at one time or another). Dick had the job as soon as he I saw he was applying, but I went through the motions interviewing him and I learned he had a Harley. DIck said they were a lot better than they used to be and he gave me the keys to his ’89 Electra-Glide. I rode it and he was right. It felt solid and handled way better than my old Shovelhead.
Dick Scott on his ’89 Electra-Glide. The day after I took this photo in Baja, Dick died when he crashed his motorcycle.
That set me on a quest. I started looking, and after considering the current slate of Harleys in 1991, I decided that what I needed was a Heritage Softail. I liked the look and I thought I wanted the two-tone turquoise-and-white version. The problem, though, was that none of the Harley dealers had motorcycles. They were all sold before they arrived at the dealers, and the dealers were doing their gouging in those days with a “market adjustment” uptick ranging from $2000 to sometimes $4000 (today, most non-Harley dealers sort of do the same thing with freight and setup). There was no way in hell I was going to pay over list price, but even had I wanted to, it would have been a long wait to get a new Harley.
One day while driving to work, a guy passed me on the freeway riding a sapphire blue Heritage softail, and I was smitten. Those colors worked even better for me than did the turquoise-and-white color combo. The turquoise-and-white had a nice ‘50s nostalgia buzz (it reminded me of a ’55 Chevy Bel Air), but that sapphire blue number was slick. Even early in the morning on Interstate 10, I could see the orange and gray factory pinstriping, and man, it just worked for me. It had kind of a blue jeans look to it (you know, denim with orange stitching). That was my new want and I wanted the thing bad. But it didn’t make any difference. Nobody had any new Harleys, and nobody had them at list price. I might as well have wanted a date with Michelle Pfeiffer. In those days, a new Harley at list price or less in the colors I wanted (or in any colors, actually) was pure unobtanium.
The Harley Softail I bought at Dale’s Modern Harley. I negotiated a hell of a deal. I kept that Harley for 12 years and rode the wheels off the thing. I’ve since learned how to pack a little better.
So one Saturday morning about a month later, I took a drive out to the Harley dealer in San Bernardino. In those days, that dealer was Dale’s Modern Harley (an oxymoronic name for a Harley dealer if ever there was one). Dale’s is no more, but when it was there, it was the last of the real motorcycle shops. You know the drill…it was in a bad part of town, it was small, everything had grease and oil stains, and the only thing “modern” was the name on the sign. That’s what motorcycle dealers were like when I was growing up. I liked it that way, and truth be told, I miss it. Dealerships are too clean today.
Anyway, a surprise awaited. I walked in the front door (which was at the rear of the building because the door facing the street was chained shut because, you know, it was a bad part of town). And wow, there it was: A brand new 1992 Heritage Softail in sapphire blue. Just like I wanted.
Dale’s had a sales guy who came out of Central Casting for old Harley guys. His name was Bob (I never met Dale and I have no idea who he was). Bob. You know the type and if you’re old enough you know the look. Old, a beer belly, a dirty white t-shirt, jeans, engineer boots, a blue denim vest, and one of those boat captain hats motorcycle riders wore in the ‘40s and ‘50s. An unlit cigarette dangled from one corner of his mouth. His belt was a chromed motorcycle chain. I’d been to Dale’s several times before, and I’d never seen Bob attired in anything but what I just described. And I’d never seen him without that unlit cigarette. Straight out of Central Casting, like I said.
“What’s this?” I asked Bob, pointing at the blue Softail.
“Deal fell through,” Bob answered. “Guy ordered it, we couldn’t get him financing, and he couldn’t get a loan anywhere else.”
“So it’s available?” I asked.
“Yep.”
Hmmm. This was interesting.
“How much?” I asked.
“$12,995, plus tax and doc fees,” Bob answered, walking back to his desk at the edge of Dale’s very small showroom floor.
$12,995 was MSRP for a new Heritage Softail back in 1992. That would be a hell of a deal. Nobody else in So Cal was selling Harleys at list price.
I followed Bob to his desk and sat down. I was facing Bob and the Harley was behind me. Bob was screwing around with some papers on his desk and not paying any particular attention to me.
“I’ll go $11,500 for it,” I said.
Bob looked up from his paperwork and smiled.
“Son,” he said (and yeah, he actually called me “son,” even though I was 40 years old at the time) “I’m going to sell that motorsickle this morning. Not this afternoon, not next week, but this morning. The only question is: Am I going to sell it to you or am I going to sell it to him?”
Bob actually said “motorsickle,” I thought, and then I wondered who “him” was. Bob sensed my befuddlement. He pointed behind me and I looked. Somebody was already sitting on what I had started regarding as my motorsickle. That guy was thinking the same thing I was.
“Bob,” I began, “you gotta help me out here. I never paid retail for anything in my life.”
“That’s because you never bought a new ’92 Harley, son, but I’ll tell you what. I’ll throw in a free Harley T-shirt.” I couldn’t tell if he was joking or if he was trying to insult me, but I didn’t care.
I looked at the Harley again and that other dude was still sitting on it. On my motorcycle. And that’s when I made up my mind. $12,995 later (plus another thousand dollars in taxes and doc fees) I rolled out of Dale’s with a brand-new sapphire blue Harley Heritage Softail. And one new Harley T-shirt.
It was a day on the range with three classic and regal rifles: A .22 Hornet Winchester Model 43, a Winchester Model 70 chambered in .300 Weatherby Magnum, and a .416 Rigby Ruger Model 77 RSM Express. These are rifles that can handle everything from rabbits to rhinos, although my only intent was to punch holes in paper, preferably with the holes as close to each other as possible. It’s always fun doing so, and it’s even more fun when the rifles have an elegance rooted in fine walnut, hand-cut checkering, and deeply polished blue steel. To me, these things are art. Art you can take to the range and enjoy. I’m going to tell you more about the load data for each of these rifles in subsequent blogs; today, it’s a bit of history about the guns and their cartridges, and how I came to own each of these fine rifles.
A study in extremes: From top to bottom, it’s the .416 Rigby, the .300 Weatherby Magnum, and the diminutive .22 Hornet. All three are reloaded cartridges.
The rifles? I’ve mentioned at least two of these in ExNotes blogs before, but for those of you who haven’t read those posts, let me bring you up to speed. The first is a Winchester Model 43 Deluxe manufactured in 1949.
The Winchester Model 43 Deluxe, a .22 Hornet rifle that looks like it shipped from the factory last week.
The next is an early 1980s Winchester Model 70 XTR. It’s one of a very small number of rifles Winchester chambered in .300 Weatherby that year.
Another magnificent Winchester, this time a Model 70 chambered in .300 Weatherby Magnum. Check out the walnut!
And the last is a Ruger Model 77 RSM Express. It’s a monstrous rifle, chambered for a cartridge designed to slay monsters. Rhinos, elephants, and more. It’s a beautiful firearm.
The .416 Rigby Ruger RSM Express, a rifle so costly to produce Ruger had to stop making it.
As I wrote this blog, I realized that I purchased all three rifles from the same store: Turner’s in West Covina, California. Turner’s is the major hunting and fishing sporting goods chain here in California. I’m usually not a fan of big chain stores, but I’ve found some good deals at Turner’s and I’ll give credit where credit is due: Turner’s did good by me. All three of these rifles were fantastic deals.
People ask how I find guns with great wood. Part of it is I’m picky and I’m patient. Another factor is that today’s firearms market is dominated by folks who want black plastic rifles and pistols. That’s the market Turner’s serves and that’s good for me, because when collectible firearms with blue steel and walnut come into Turner’s they tend to sit for awhile. Most guys who focus on ARs tend to ignore what, to me, is the good stuff.
The Winchester Model 43 was on the consignment rack at Turner’s several years ago. It was the first Model 43 I had ever seen and I liked the look and feel. I like the cartridge, too. Turner’s had the rifle priced at $1000 and after doing my research, I thought that was fair. But I’m not interested in a fair deal. I want an exceptional deal. I visited that store every week or so for a good month and a half, and that little Model 43 had not moved. You see, in that neighborhood, there isn’t much of a market for a collectible Winchester. Like I said above, it’s just not what sells around here.
Winchester only made the Model 43 from May 1948 through 1953, and as mentioned above, mine was manufactured in 1949. When I bring my Model 43 to the range, folks who know what they’re seeing are all “ooohs” and “ahhhs,” as the crowd I run with consists mostly of guys who started driving when Eisenhower was in the White House. These guys get it.
Name one modern rifle that includes a checkered steel butt plate. You can’t. They don’t exist. You have to turn back the clock 50 years or more to fnd this.Hand checkering, too! Not laser cut, not pressed in, not machine cut, and not a rubber insert…but real hand-cut checkering. Somebody at the Winchester factory probably took the better part of a day 70 years ago to do this, and it was all done with hand tools. Checkering is one of the things that makes this Model 43 a Deluxe model.Nobody has better rollmarks than Winchester, and these say it all: America, Model 43, Winchester, and .22 Hornet!I pointed this out in an earlier blog, but it’s so cool I’ll mention it again. That front sight is not a separate part grafted on to the Model 43’s barrel; it and the barrel are machined from one piece of steel. Think lots of machine time and big production expense. Check out the stippling on the sight ramp (it cuts the sun’s glare). That would have all been done by hand.
So, back to my pining over the Model 43. I stopped in at Turner’s for maybe the sixth time to look at the Hornet again. I mean, the thing was on my mind. I was thinking about it at night when I went to sleep, it kept me up, and then when I finally dozed off, I was still thinking about it the next morning. To be a complete human being, I realized, I needed that Model 43. I suspect that if you’re reading this blog, you understand.
If the Hornet was still on the rack at Turner’s, I reasoned, the guy who had it on consignment might be willing to negotiate. I was going to offer $950. The rifle was easily worth the $1000 they were asking for it; $950 would be a killer deal. So I stopped in on the way home one day and asked to look at the Hornet again. I sensed that the guy behind the counter (the Turner’s gun department manager) was a little hesitant to show it to me, but he handed it over after opening the bolt.
I looked at the attached tag. The price had been reduced to $850.
I’ll take it, I said. The gunstore guy sighed. He told me he had wanted to buy the rifle (he was an older guy, like me), but that wasn’t my problem. I filled out all the paperwork, and 10 days later, I took my 1949 Hornet home. I was a complete human being. I could sleep now. All was well with the world.
I have no idea why Winchester stopped making these rifles, but I suspect it was because they were expensive to manufacture and the Winchester Model 70 was selling better. Whatever. And the cartridge itself? The .22 Hornet was first fielded in the early 1930s and when it hit the market, it was a sensation. It was a wildcat cartridge designed at the Springfield Arsenal and its focus was high speed (in those days, the 2400 fps Hornet was fast). The Hornet’s low recoil, relatively flat (for the day) trajectory, and accuracy made it the hot ticket for sending critters to the Great Beyond. I’ve been with Hornet-armed guys chasing jackrabbits and coyotes in west Texas; there is no better cartridge for this kind of hunting in the desert surrounding El Paso. There are more powerful .22 centerfires available today, but the Hornet is the one that started it all. It’s one of the world’s all-time great designs.
Winchester offered the Model 43 in two flavors – the Standard and the Deluxe. My 1951 Stoeger catalog shows that a new Deluxe sold for $66.95 that year; the Standard was $12 less expensive. Mine is a Deluxe, with checkering and a deep blue highly polished finish. And wow, it does its job well. It has iron sights, and I shot some amazing groups with it at 50 yards. I’ll share the load data with you in a subsequent blog.
50 yards, the right load, open sights, and a well-mannered Model 43 all came together on this fine day. Any time I can get under an inch at 50 yards with open sights, I’m calling it a good day.But wait, there’s more! This old Model 43 gets the job done!
I bought the Model 70 .300 Weatherby rifle in the 1980s. I was an aerospace engineer working at Honeywell in Covina (we did naval gunfire control systems for one of the first cannon-launched laser-guided munitions), I met my wife Sue when I worked at Honewell, and I hung out with my good buddy Ralph. Ralph, as it turns out, had the same affliction as me: He was a gun nut. Ralph told me about Turner’s. I was new to California, and I had never heard of Turner’s.
You can guess where this story is going. I went to Turner’s on my lunch break and I saw the Model 70. I knew enough back then to know that a factory Model 70 chambered for a Weatherby round was an unusual rifle, and I also had a taste for fancy walnut (my Dad made custom gunstocks, so I guess the walnut thing is genetic). The rifle was marked for something like $429 or $439 if I recall correctly (I might be off a little, but it was somewhere in the just-north-of-$400 range). I knew that it was tough to lose money on a gun (not that I had any plans to sell it), but it was the wood on that Model 70 that cinched the deal for me. I paid what they were asking because I wasn’t much of a negotiator back then. Today, I know that gun shops always put the rifles with the most beautiful wood on display. By definition, that’s the one I want and I’ll work hard to get it. But now I always ask for a discount no matter how stunning the stock is, because, you know, it’s the display model. Don’t laugh. It almost always works.
Sweet. The Model 70 in .300 Weatherby Magnum. The time to buy a gun like this is when you see it. They don’t come along too often, and I’ve never seen another one like it.
Winchester introduced the Model 70 in 1936. They value engineered the Model 70 in 1964 (that’s a nice way of saying they cheapened its looks and feel), and the pre-64s used to be far more desirable. But that’s all changed. I’ve owned pre-64s and modern Model 70 Winchesters, and I can tell you from personal experience the current production Model 70s are better guns. You can argue the point, but like I’ve said, I’ve owned both, and you won’t convince me. I’ve got the targets to prove it.
The funny thing about this particular Model 70 is that after I bought it, I didn’t shoot it but once or twice over the next 35 years. I was happy just knowing I owned it, and truth be told, I was a little intimidated by the .300 Weatherby cartridge. Yeah, I know, real men don’t flinch, but let me tell you, those .300 Weatherby rifles kick. I started getting serious about mastering this cartridge recently, though, and that’s what led to my Three 300s blog a couple of weeks ago. I guess I’m getting used to the recoil (a .300 Weatherby will rattle your fillings), because on this most recent range visit, the Model 70 graced me with a couple of 100-yard groups I found astonishing. I can’t do this with a .300 Weatherby all the time, but when I do, I’ll brag a bit. And I did. And I’m bragging a bit.
100 yards, a Weaver T-10 scope, and flinch-free trigger time all came together for a half-minute-of-angle 100-yard group. I shoot 3-shot groups when developing a hunting load. I’ve never been a fan of 5-shot groups, as I’ve found it’s very hard to get an animal to stand still for five shots.Maybe that 0.519-inch group isn’t good enough? Hey, the very next one measured 0.371. This is from a .300 Weatherby, mind you, at 100 yards. I’m good to go!
The Model 70 Winchester has been called the Rifleman’s Rifle, and for good reason. Model 70s have the right look and they are just flat accurate. I guess you could go wrong with a Model 70, but I never have, and I’ve owned a few over the years. And the .300 Weatherby cartridge? There’s no question: It’s a bruiser. Developed by Roy Weatherby in 1944, it’s still one of the fastest 30-caliber rounds ever and as you can see above, it can be very accurate.
All right, on to the last one, and that’s the .416 Rigby. Wow, what a cartridge that monster is. It was the third rifle I brought to the range with me. I was about five bays away from the rangemaster when I fired the first round. He immediately came over to ask what I was shooting. I thought he was intrigued by the thump (something that might have registered on a Richter scale somewhere), and I guess in a way he was. I proudly answered that it was a .416 Rigby. Then he asked me to move further away from his observation post. The further the better, he said.
The rhino thumper. Big bullets, big bore, big rifle, big muzzle blast, and big recoil! One box of unprimed brass (that’s just 20 pieces) costs $43!It just looks cool, doesn’t it?
The .416 Rigby is a cartridge with an interesting pedigree. It was first developed in 1911 by John Rigby and Company, the folks in England who made safari rifles for folks who liked to throw money around. The cartridge was designed for dangerous game…big things that can bite you, stomp you, gore you, and maybe even eat you. Over the years, Rigby built approximately 500 rifles chambered for its mighty .416 cartridge, and then it fell out of favor after the .458 Winchester Magnum entered the market. The .416 Rigby probably would have died a graceful death had Ruger not stepped in with their .416 Rigby Model 77 RSM (the rifle you see here) nearly 30 years ago. All told, Ruger built about a thousand of these rifles from 1991 to 2001. Then, presumably because of the manufacturing expense and fewer guys going to Africa to chase the things that bite back, Ruger discontinued the rifle.
I bought the Ruger at Turner’s, and it was a repeat of the Hornet story. The Rigby was on consignment (at the very same Turner’s in West Covina), and it was marked $1400. That was not a bad price, and these Ruger Express Magnums are an investment (you see them now for numbers approaching $2000, sometimes even more). I keep telling my wife that (you know, the line about collectible guns being investments and all). She keeps asking me when I’m going to sell.
Like the Model 43, the barrel and sight are machined from one blank (it’s the rear sight on the Ruger rifle). That means Ruger had to hog the whole mess out of a single piece of steel. Think excessive machine time, and think high manufacturing cost.
The rear sight ramp is the same piece of steel as the barrel, similar to the approach Winchester used for the Model 43’s front sight ramp. The three leaves are for close, mid-range, and long-range game. This is an expensive way to go, but it makes for fast adjustments for someone pursuing dangerous game. It was a common approach on high-dollar safari rifles back in the day. It’s elegant.
This .416 Rigby Ruger had an exceptionally well-figured Circassian walnut stock. All of the Ruger RSM Express rifles had Circassian walnut, but I’ve only seen a few as fancy as this one, and when I saw this one, I knew I had to own it (it’s a disease, I know). And this is another rifle in as-new condition. I can guess what happened…somebody bought it dreaming of Africa, the trip never materialized, the prior owner found out what .416 Rigby ammo costs (north of $200 for 20 rounds of factory ammo), the guy fired one or two rounds and felt the wrath of Rigby recoil, and shortly thereafter the rifle found its way to the consignment rack. It happens more often than you might imagine.
Stunning Circassian Walnut. As supplied by Ruger, Circassian has an almost orange hue to it. This one is beautiful.
I offered the Turner’s dude $1200, and he said he couldn’t do that without talking to the person who had the rifle on consignment. I looked at him and he looked back at me for several seconds. I guess it was a standoff. Finally, I spoke: Give the guy a call, I said.
He did, and yep, 10 days later the big Ruger came home with me. It’s a monster. It weighs more than any rifle I own, and a big part of what drives the weight is that monstrous hogged out .416 barrel. But when you light one off, that weight is your friend. It soaks up the recoil, of which there is plenty.
The Ruger was not nearly as accurate as the other two rifles I had on the range that day, but it still wasn’t too bad. I was shooting at 50 yards initially, and this is the best group I could get…
.416-inch holes at 50 yards. This rifle will do better. I just didn’t have it in me that day.
After shooting five 3-shot groups at 50 yards, I had five rounds left in the box of 20. I wanted to see where the bullets would hit at 100 yards, and I used a pistol silhouette target to make that assessment.
Meh, I could do better. With other rifles, I have on occasion shot groups under an inch at 100 yards with open sights, but it wasn’t going to happen that day (for me or the .416 Rigby).
I held at 6:00 on the target’s orange center, and I used that larger target because I didn’t know where the rounds would land at that distance (I wanted lots of paper around the point of aim so I could see what was going on). I put all five shots on paper, but the group size was a disappointing 6.6 inches. Oddly enough, the rifle was printing very slightly to the left at 50 yards, but it clearly grouped to the right at 100 yards. I need to think about that a little bit. Maybe it was the way the sun was hitting the front sight (that can make a significant difference), as I shot the 100-yard group later in the day. I found the v-notch on the Rigby’s rear sight to be a bit difficult to use (I could not form a consistent sight picture). I guess it’s okay for a charging rhino, but it’s not conducive to the accuracy I sought. I’m not done with the Ruger Express rifle yet, and truth be told, I ‘m kind of glad the results weren’t stellar. Half the fun with these things is searching for the perfect load. Once you find it, for me at least, a lot of the excitement goes away. I figure there’s still plenty of excitement left in the Rigby.
Do you enjoy our gun stories and photos? Check out our other Tales of the Gun. And don’t be bashful about adding your name to our blog update list. You can do so here:
That was my reaction when the photos you see below popped up on my Facebook feed, telling me it had been four years since I posted them. Yep, it was in July of 2015 that yours truly, Joe Gresh, and riders from China and Colombia descended on CSC Motorcycles to christen the RX3 with a ride through the great American West. So Cal to Sturgis, due west to Washington and Oregon, and then a run down the coast home, hitting every National Park and site worth seeing along the way. It was an amazing adventure, and truth be told, I was shocked that it has been four years already. That meant it was about four years ago that CSC brought the RX3 to America, it was four years ago that I first met Joe Gresh in person (a living legend, in my mind), and it was four years ago that we took a ride that made the entire motorcycle world sit up and take notice. A dozen guys, a dozen 250cc motorcycles fresh off the boat from China, 5000 miles, and not a single breakdown. Tell me again about Chinese motorcycles are no good? Nah, don’t waste your breath. I know better.
It was a hell of a ride, and good buddy John Welker did a hell of a job as our very own Ferdinand Magellan, defining the route, making all of the hotel reservations, keeping us entertained with great stories, and more. These are the same photos (I took them all) that popped up on Facebook. They represent only a small portion of the ride, but they give you an idea of what it was like. It was grand.
Somewhere along Highway 89 in Arizona. The guy in the foreground is our very own Baja John Welker. That’s Joe Gresh way at the other end of this row of motorcycles.Same location, with Hugo out front. Hugo is the Zongshen factory rep. He’s a great guy who kept us constantly entertained.Mr. Tso, posing for me in Zion National Park. This guy makes for a great photograph. He rode with us in China, too!We stayed in Panguitch, Utah, the night before we visited Bryce Canyon National Park. Dinner that evening was at the Cowboy’s Smoke House. I liked it so much I later returned with my wife just to have dinner there.Tony and his mascot inside Cowboy’s. Great times.Bryce Canyon National Park. Everyone was captivated by this place. It was awesome.Kyle, one of the Chinese riders, and Big John, our chase vehicle driver. Good guys both.Tony and Kyle, posing at Bryce.The crew when we returned to So Cal. From left to right, it’s Juan from Colombia, Joe Gresh, Tony from China, Mr. Tso from China, John Welker, Lester from China, Kong from China, Big John Gallardo, Hugo Liu, Gabriel from Colombia, and Kyle from China.The obligatory photo at Roy’s in Amboy, somewhere in the Mojave Desert. God Almighty it was hot that day.The guys at the Grand Canyon…Lester, Kong, Tso, and Hugo.In Capitol Reef National Park in Utah, at an impromptu photo stop.I grabbed this photo of Joe Gresh along the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. It looks like he’s Photoshopped into the picture, but he’s not.Same spot, different guys: Gabriel and Juan from Colombia. Juan later invited me to ride with him in Colombia, and I went. That, too, was an incredible ride.
So there you have it, or at least snippets of what was one of the greatest rides I’ve ever done. I’m hoping Facebook has more of these anniversary photos pop up for me, as the ride lasted 19 days and I know I posted more on that ride. Good times. Great riders. Superior camaraderie.
As always, there’s more good stuff coming your way. Stay tuned!
Hey, the whole story of that ride is here. You can get the whole nine yards by buying your own copy of 5000 Miles At 8000 RPM. There’s a lot more good information in there, too, like CSC’s no-dealer approach to market, how we dealt with the Internet trolls who tried to hurt the company, the first CSC Baja trip, the RX3’s strengths and weaknesses, and much, much more!
I must have been around 15 years old the first time I saw an Ossa Pioneer. It was at Haines City motocross track. Mike Mills’ mom was divorced and her boyfriend gave us a ride way out to Chrome Avenue in his boat tail Buick Riviera . What a car! The Riviera smelled great inside not only because it was new, but because the boyfriend wore cologne. This was the first time I had been around a grown man that used cologne. All the other adult men I had known up to that point smelled like dirty socks. I smell like dirty socks right now.
You know what to do: Click on the popup ads!
“Burn the tires, c’mon!” we pleaded. It was a strange experience sitting in the plush, perfumed Riviera as the big V-8 engine effortlessly spun the tires into clouds of cotton candy. “Want to stop at the hobby store to pick up some sniffing glue, boys?” Damn we laughed and had fun with that guy. He treated us like equals, like he cared what we had to say. I wish I could remember his name. It was like going to the motocross races with Hugh Heffner.
He drove 90 miles per hour every chance he got and it wasn’t long before he was dropping us at the motocross track. He spun the Buick around and said, “I’ll be back at five.” And then lit the tires up again on Chrome Avenue. He was exactly what we wanted to be when we grew up.
Mostly Bultacos and Maicos were racing in Haines City back then but one guy had an Ossa Pioneer with the lights removed. The rider was good. He would get crossed up over the jumps and finished in the top 5 against real race bikes. I loved how the rear fender blended into the bike. That fiberglass rear section had a small storage area inside. One of the bike magazines of the era tossed a loose spark plug in the storage and went scrambling. The plug beat a hole in the rear fender and they had the nerve to bitch about it. Hell, I knew at 10 that you have to wrap stuff in rags on a motorcycle.
It rains most everyday in Florida and it started pouring. The races kept going for a while but finally had to be called because it was a deluge. You could hardly see to walk. There was no cover so we huddled in the leeward side of the ticket stand out by the entrance. It rained harder, the wind was howling. Wearing only shorts and T-shirts we were getting colder and colder. My lips were turning blue, man.
It was like Niagara Falls, a solid sheet of water that the Riviera emerged from. Man, I was so glad to see that car. “How were the races, boys?” Soaking wet and shivering we piled into the Riviera’s soft leather seats. I thought he’d get mad but boyfriend just laughed. You got the feeling he could go buy another Riviera if he wanted to.
As you may know, Joe Gresh started a Facebook group he called COMA. That’s an acronym for Crappy Old Motorcycle Association, and the intent is for folks to post photos of old and crappy motorcycles. That’s all fine and dandy, but it presents me with a dilemma: What do you do with photos of a motorcycle that’s old but most definitely not crappy?
Behold: The 1982 Yamaha Seca. This particular motorcycle is nearly 40 years old, and it’s just barely broken in. Sweet!
That surely is how anyone would describe Steve Seidner’s 1982 Yamaha Seca. When Steve bought it almost a year ago, it had a scant 1700 miles and change on the clock. I tried to buy it from Steve when he bought it, but it was no dice. Steve knows what he has: A motorcycle manufactured when Ronald Reagan resided at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a nearly-40-year-old motorcycle in absolutely pristine condition. This is what I would call a New Old Stock motorcycle. It’s not been restored, and it’s essentially in as new condition.
The cockpit. Tach, speedo, and more. Check the odo reading. I’m the guy who bumped it over 1800 miles. Sweet!
Okay, I can take no for an answer. Steve didn’t want to sell, and sometimes you have to just suck it up and move on. But Steve wasn’t riding the thing, and a slippery 4-cylinder, fire engine red, 550cc motorcycle is a machine that cries out for abuse in the San Gabriel Mountains. I explained all of this to Steve, I threatened to expose some of his darkest secrets on the ExNotes blog, and a couple of days go, Steve gave me the keys to the kingdom. The kingdom being, of course, one 1982 Yamaha Seca with just over 1700 miles on the odometer.
Starboard. That means the right side. Of course, on this bike there really is no wrong side.
Well, the odo now reads over 1800 miles. Who done that? Me? Guilty as charged. It was a blast. I grabbed a few photos and I’ll share them with you here. I’m doing a more in depth road report on the Seca that will be in print somewhere down the road, and you’ll have to read that to get the full story. For now, enjoy these teasers.
The radical Left. As in the left side of a motorcycle that, in 1982, was a radical departure from the norm. This bike is beautiful.
So what was it like riding this blast from the past? Truth be told, it could have been a modern motorcycle. It handled flawlessly, it made good power, and it has good brakes. I loved it. I had the San Gabriels all to myself when I was up there on Steve’s Seca. It was a glorious day.
Yeah, this is a tough job. If not me, who would do this sort of thing?
There are some things on the Seca that were cutting edge in ’82, and others that we might regard as quaint today. But it all worked. A single disk up front and a drum (gasp!) in the rear (nobody told that drum brake it wasn’t supposed to work as well as it did). And what was the state of the art in 82…a four-cylinder engine with four carbs and a fancy cross induction system that was supposed to increase combustion chamber swirl for more power. I guess it worked, because the bike felt fantastic. It matched its looks, which are, well, fantastic.
Cast aluminum wheels, and a single disk up front…And a drum in the rear. It worked just fine.Bright, bright red, silver and black accents, and a state of the art 550 YICS engine. More on that YICS business later…
The view from the saddle was glorious, the Seca had a marvelous ExhaustNote (I love that word), and I was in my element up in the San Gabriels. I enjoyed the ride tremendously.
The view from Command Central. If it looks like it was a great day for a motorcycle ride, I’ll let you in on a little secret: They’re all great days!
It’s not often you see low-mileage, 4-decade-old-bike in as new condition. Steve’s Seca takes that description up a notch. How about a bike that has the original owner’s manual and tool kit?
The original tool kit. The original owner’s manual. It doesn’t get any better than this. A Yamaha time capsule, circa 1982.
When I returned to the CSC plant, Steve wanted to know all about the ride and how the bike felt. “It started missing a bit at around 110 mph,” I said, and Steve just smiled. He knew. I never took the Seca above 55 mph, partly because all my riding was in the San Gabriel’s tight twisties, and partly out of respect (both for the bike and for the man who allowed me to experience it). Good times.
The Man, The Machine, the Legend…Steve Seidner, the CSC Founder and CEO, and the Seca’s owner. Steve, thanks very much!
You know, it really is amazing how much technology has changed in the last 40 years. To be perfectly honest, the Seca’s performance below 55 mph (which is the only region I rode it in) was good, but it was not too much different than my trusty 250cc RX3, and at low speeds, I think the RX3 actually has a bit more grunt. That’s understandable, I suppose, as the RX3 is a single and the Seca is a four. I imagine the Seca has more top end and probably a bit more of a rush accelerating at freeway speeds, but the time-capsule Seca ride reminded me just how good a motorcycle the RX3 is. If you want to buy a Seca like the one featured in this blog from Steve, you’re out of luck (believe me, I tried). If you want to buy a new RX3, though, I hear Steve can help you make that dream come true!
Steve has some cool toys. Some time ago he let me swing a leg over his Norton Commando for a similar ride. You can read that story here. Steve has a pretty cool mid-60’s Mopar, too. I’m still working on getting the keys to that one.
That’s it for now, folks. I’ve got some more photos to process for another blog in a day or two on yet another toy, one that is a cool 101 years old. Stay tuned!
Adios, my friends. Stay tuned for another Prancing Pony tale!
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.
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 must have been around 15 years old the first time I saw an Ossa Pioneer. It was at Haines City motocross track. Mike Mills’ mom was divorced and her boyfriend gave us a ride way out to Chrome Avenue in his boat tail Buick Riviera . What a car! The Riviera smelled great inside not only because it was new, but because the boyfriend wore cologne. This was the first time I had been around a grown man that used cologne. All the other adult men I had known up to that point smelled like dirty socks. I smell like dirty socks right now.
Mostly Bultacos and Maicos were racing in Haines City back then but one guy had an Ossa Pioneer with the lights removed. The rider was good. He would get crossed up over the jumps and finished in the top 5 against real race bikes. I loved how the rear fender blended into the bike. That fiberglass rear section had a small storage area inside. One of the bike magazines of the era tossed a loose spark plug in the storage and went scrambling. The plug beat a hole in the rear fender and they had the nerve to bitch about it. Hell, I knew at 10 that you have to wrap stuff in rags on a motorcycle.
It rains most everyday in Florida and it started pouring. The races kept going for a while but finally had to be called because it was a deluge. You could hardly see to walk. There was no cover so we huddled in the leeward side of the ticket stand out by the entrance. It rained harder, the wind was howling. Wearing only shorts and T-shirts we were getting colder and colder. My lips were turning blue, man.
