Category: Back In The Day

Restoring an Ugly and Broken 1968 Ruger Blackhawk

By  Joe Cota

This is my tale about restoring a very ugly and broken vintage 1968 Ruger Blackhawk that had the safety conversion done by the Ruger factory.  I think Skeeter Skelton would have approved! (Skeeter Skelton was an American lawman and prolific gunwriter well known to firearm enthusiasts.)

First, a little background on the single action revolver, or “sixgun” as they are called. In 1872 the US government was looking for a new service revolver to replace its older Colt and Remington cap-and-ball revolvers used in the Civil War.  Colt developed a sixgun that utilized the then new technology metallic cartridge. Colt was the successful contractor and their cartridge gun was adopted by the government in 1873 as the 1873 Colt Single Action Army. The 1873 Colt SAA was shortly thereafter offered to the civilian market and became very popular with ranchers, lawmen, cowboys and bad guys alike. The “Peacemaker” (as Colt’s SAA became known) was priced around $15, which was most of a drover’s wages for a month.

After WWII a new-fangled gizmo called television started to become affordable. In 1948 about 1% of American households owned a television, and by 1955, 75% of American households owned at least one television set (black and white with “rabbit ears” antenna, of course). The TV set became the center of the living room, and the entire family would gather around the “set” after dinner. Hollywood’s golden age of TV westerns from the mid-1950’s through the 1960’s produced an astounding number of instant hits with shows like Have Gun Will Travel, Rawhide, Wanted Dead or Alive, and The Rifleman. All of them featured the Colt SAA and Winchester repeating rifles, or the “lever gun.” Every red-blooded American boy and his father and his uncles and even some moms wanted to own and shoot their very own Peacemaker.  But there was a problem: The Colt sixguns were expensive and often not available.

My beautiful all original 1969 Ruger Single Six (top), the ugly vent ribbed 1968 Ruger Blackhawk “parts gun” (bottom).  The Single Six is Ruger’s .22 Long Rifle sixgun; the Blackhawk is the larger centerfire cartridge sixgun. Note the three screws on both sixguns and the square-faced, non-notched hammer on the Single Six in the half-cocked position. This Single Six was my first handgun given to me by Mom & Dad brand new for Christmas as a young man 13 years of age. It has a fair amount of holster wear from hunting, backpacking, camping, etc. over many years of honest use. I own up to evey scratch and ding on this well-used sixgun, and I’d never want to refinish or change a thing. When Ruger’s free retrofit advertising campaign first appeared in 1975 issues of Guns & Ammo magazine, I was tempted to send mine in to make it like the New Model but didn’t want to part with the gun for a few weeks. In hindsight, I’m sure glad that I didn’t fall for it.

That’s when Bill Ruger decided to give the public what they wanted. In 1953 Ruger introduced the Single Six revolver chambered in .22 Long Rifle.  It was a sixgun for every boy! Two years later in 1955 Ruger introduced its Blackhawk in .357 Magnum.  This was a sixgun for every man!  They were and still are wildly popular. About 700,000 of the pre-1973 Ruger Single Six .22 revolvers were made, and well over a million New Model Single Six .22 revolvers were made after 1973. I’ll defer the exact number manufactured to the Ruger historians.

Ruger’s Single Six and the original Blackhawk single action revolvers were patterned after Colt’s SAA. The Ruger has a similar shape, size, look and feel as the Colt on the outside. But on the inside Ruger made some improvements. Ruger’s guns used modern high-strength carbon steel. Colt’s action ran on leaf springs prone to breakage. Ruger replaced the brittle leaf springs with much tougher coil springs made from piano wire. The Ruger guns are much tougher than the Colt.

One of the infamous traits both Ruger’s initial guns and the Colts share is the first small hammer cock position called the “safety” is not safe. A gun with all six cylinders loaded, if accidently dropped, is prone to the safety failing (resulting in a negligent discharge). Therefore both the Colt and pre-1973 Rugers should only be carried with five rounds loaded and the hammer down over an empty chamber. These pre-1973 Ruger sixguns are known as the “three-screw” Rugers, as identified by the three plainly visible screws on the left side of the frame, just as the Colts have three screws.   The original Rugers are also called Old Models, for reasons that become clear in a minute.

As the story goes, someone who didn’t follow what is clearly stated in Ruger’s owner manual to carry only with the hammer over an empty chamber, dropped their Old Model Ruger, fully loaded with six rounds, and shot himself in the leg. Apparently, there were other negligent discharges and expensive lawsuits. This prompted Ruger’s engineers to develop a safer design Ruger sixgun.  This newer design is called the New Model Blackhawk.  New Model Rugers can safely be carried with all six chambers loaded. Beginning in 1973 all the New Model Rugers have what’s called the “transfer bar safety.” It basically works by making a mill cut in the front (or face) of the hammer so that in the down position the hammer face can’t possibly touch the frame-mounted firing pin. When cocked back in the shooting position, a steel bar (the transfer bar) attached to the trigger mechanism is raised. When the trigger is depressed, the transfer bar fills the gap between the milled cutout on the hammer face and the firing pin, effectively “transferring” the hammer’s impact to the firing pin.

The 1973 and later New Model Rugers are easily identified because they do not have the three screws.  They have instead two pins. Another difference is that there is no “half cock” position for loading the gun. The cylinder freely rotates for loading simply by opening the loading gate. The New Model Rugers work well enough but do not have the distinctive feel and clicking sound while cocking the hammer as do the Colts and old three screw Rugers. The New Model trigger is not quite as smooth as the older designs because of increased drag and the friction of the transfer bar as it moves into position. Some shooters claim they don’t notice the differences between the two, but I own both and I can feel the difference.

In 1975, Ruger engineers devised a method of retrofitting all of the “unsafe” pre-1973 sixguns with a makeshift transfer bar. They ran a campaign in the gun periodicals that prompted owners to ship their old guns to Ruger and they would “upgrade” the older guns to make them safe to carry with all six chambers loaded.

It remains unknown how many owners sent their guns back to Ruger, but apparently there were thousands because we see many of these retrofitted guns on the used gun market today. They are three screw guns that function similar to the New Model two pin guns, but unfortunately the trigger pull on the converted guns is absolutely terrible. The retrofit-style transfer bar scrapes up along the back side of the frame causing an awful, gritty, jerky feel. To make matters worse, the retrofit cylinder base pin is fitted with a small spring-loaded pin that also drags against the transfer bar to push it out and over the firing pin on its upward travel. If the retracting pin gets stuck, the transfer bar pushes into the firing pin, locking up the gun. The retrofitted three screw Rugers are pretty bad, taking all the smoothness from the action.

Ruger reportedly returned the retrofitted guns back to their owners with the original parts sealed a small plastic bag. Many of these plastic parts bags have been separated from the converted guns (they were either lost or thrown away). Ruger doesn’t offer any of these old parts for sale to the public, as they consider them unsafe. If an old unconverted three screw is sent in Ruger for any type of repair, they will return it to its owner with the transfer bar conversion installed, whether the owner asks for it or not. In fact, Ruger will not work on an unconverted old model gun without doing the conversion.

Unconverted three screw models (i.e., unaltered Old Model Rugers) today command premium prices among collectors. Even with the parts bag, the converted Old Models will never realize their true collector value because Ruger has permanently marked the converted guns with an “R” on the frame. The stamp is concealed underneath the grip frame to prove that the factory had done the conversion even if an owner wished to restore it back to its unaltered condition. Ruger will install the Old Model conversions but only if the owner sends the gun to them for installation, and Ruger will stamp the frame showing that they did the conversion.

Converted Old Model Rugers having the afterthought safety conversion are generally not very good shooters. However, restored back to original, these guns make very nice non-collectible shooters for those able to locate the original parts. The Old Model unconverted guns handle much better than the New Model guns, provided a most important safety rule is strictly adhered to.  That rule is to never carry the restored-to-original Old Model Ruger with the hammer over a loaded cylinder. This brings us to the point of this story.

Six years ago I stumbled upon an Old Model 1968 three-screw Blackhawk being sold as a parts gun at the Ventura Crossroads gun show. The cylinder was totally locked up due to the transfer bar conversion (as described above).  However, the asking price was so low that I won’t tell you the cost because you wouldn’t believe me.  Besides being broken it had a ventilated rib that I had never seen before on any Blackhawk. It was truly an ugly duckling Ruger Old Model Blackhawk!  But it had a great finish and the original factory grips, so I went for it without haggling over the price. Man, I’m not kidding.  This gun’s price was so low it was almost free.

The Poly Choke fake ventilated rib glued onto a Blackhawk barrel is just about the ugliest thing somebody could do to a Ruger. Trying to make it look like a Colt Python? Well, you failed!
Close up of the Poly Choke fake rib. It does absolutely NOTHING to improve the gun

After the 10-day cooling off period, I brought the ugly little Old Model sixgun home, along with a brand-new, high-quality gunsmith screwdriver set. After disassembling the Ruger, I found that the cylinder was frozen because of the factory safety conversion. After cleaning it up and freeing the cylinder, the gun had the absolute worst sandy, gritty, heavy sticky trigger I’ve ever experienced.  It now worked but it had a terrible action, and it was still the ugliest Blackhawk I had ever seen.

After more research I found that Ruger never made a Blackhawk with a ventilated rib. This gun had a phony aftermarket glued-on rib made by the Poly Choke company. I guess the owner wanted something that looked like a Colt Python and decided to dress up the Ruger for Halloween.  I managed to pull the fake ventilated rib off without causing any damage to the barrel, but it wasn’t easy.  The Poly Choke adhesive was pretty tough. After pulling the rib off, the remaining glue was removed using brake cleaner spray. By now the gun was looking pretty good again, but the action still sucked.

With the Poly Choke rib removed, the “parts gun” is beginning to look like a Blackhawk again. Note the flat hammer face. This photo was taken after the transfer bar conversion had been removed and factory original parts installed.

To smooth up the action, I removed the transfer bar conversion and replaced it with factory original parts to restore it to the original, classic “5-shooter” configuration. Unfortunately, the gun didn’t come with the old parts bag but I was determined to restore it.  Now before any of the do-gooder Ralph Nader safety types out there proclaim “how irresponsible of you,” allow me to ask if you’ve ever seen an original Colt SAA with a safety conversion? Well, no, you have not because Colt had the good sense to not ruin their guns with an ill-designed stopgap transfer bar safety.

Finding the original parts for an Old Model Ruger is very difficult. Each part had to be purchased separately. It took several months to find all the parts and there were some hiccups along the way. Upon receiving some parts advertised as original Blackhawk parts, such as the hammer, I found that they were original parts for a Single Six model and were not compatible with the Blackhawk. Eventually all the original parts were acquired. The parts included a new hammer, trigger, base pin, cylinder stop, spring, screw, and pawl. The photos and captions tell the story about what it takes to restore converted guns and illustrates the differences between the original and retrofit parts.

Factory transfer bar safety conversion parts. Note that this is not the same parts set as the transfer bar parts that come installed with New Model Blackhawks. These transfer bar safety conversion parts were specially designed to fit on the old three screw models and are not interchangeable with the two pin new models. In this photo the transfer bar appears to be connected to the trigger, but that’s not the case. The transfer bar has a hole that aligns with the trigger pivot bolt.
Original Old Model unconverted parts. This is an image that shows the contents of a returned parts bag that was offered for sale on the internet many years ago. Unfortunately, it was not available when I restored by Blackhawk and I had to locate the parts individually.
Comparison of the original flat-faced hammer (right) and the conversion hammer (left). Note that the conversion hammer has been milled on the face to create a space between the frame-mounted firing pin and hammer while the hammer is down and the transfer bar retracted. The side of the conversion hammer is also recessed for clearance of the long arm of the transfer bar. The transfer bar has friction along this part of the hammer. The front face of the transfer bar also rubs against the back of the frame. All of this creates unwanted friction that gives the converted gun a gritty feel. Also note the three notches on the original hammer for the safe, half-cock, and full-cock trigger positions. The conversion hammer lacks the three clicks that give the Old Model Ruger and Colt SAA their classic feel and sound.
When mixing and matching parts as you can find them, the trigger is not likely to be the same as the one that came with the hammer as a matched set and will likely need minor honing of the sear and hammer notches for proper fit.  This is an opportunity to make the trigger pull better.
One of the pitfalls of buying used gun parts on the internet is that the seller doesn’t always know what he is selling. The Ruger Single Six and Blackhawk trigger groups are not the same. Here’s an example of some of the Single Six parts that were sold to me as Blackhawk parts. The Single Six’s hammer and pawl are both shorter than those of the Blackhawk.

To make a long story short, all the original parts cost more than what I paid for the gun. But it was worth it. This is the smoothest Blackhawk trigger ever, and the accuracy is awesome. Only hand loaded, home cast Elmer Keith style bullets have been fired through it since acquired by me.

This Old Model Ruger has become one of my favorite .357 Magnum sixguns and I think that Skeeter would have approved of how this “parts gun” was salvaged.

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Spiders

By Joe Berk

I’ve always been afraid of (and morbidly curious about) spiders, so when Bobbie Surber posted the photo you see above of a spider in her Ecuadorean hotel room’s bathroom, it had my attention.  I don’t think I could stay in a hotel room where a spider like that put in an appearance.  I know I’m a big tough guy who rides motorcycles and made it through jump school in a prior life, but spiders creep me out.  I’m deathly afraid of the things.

Which doesn’t mean I’m going to pass up an opportunity to get a photo of one.  Baja John and I were rolling through Baja a decade and a half ago on our KLRs (I loved that motorcycle; it was one of the best I ever owned).  We were doing maybe doing 60 mph when I somehow spotted a tarantula creeping along the pavement’s edge.  I had to turn around and get a photo (it’s the one that sometimes graces the scrolling photo collection you see at the top of every ExNotes blog).  Baja John, being a curious sort, did a U-turn and parked his KLR by the side of the road, too. I had my old D200 Nikon with its first-gen 24-120 Nikon lens (not a good choice for a spider macro shot, but it did the job).

The KLRs of Baja John and yours truly stopped along the Transpeninsular Highway for an impromptu tarantula photo shoot.  Those KLRs were great bikes.
A Baja tarantula minding his (or her) own business.
Cover and concealment, tarantula-style.

Before you knew it, I was snapping away while Baja John and I were crouched down in front of the hairy thing.  The tarantula’s ostrich-like behavior was kind of funny.  It hunkered down with a weed over its six or eight (or whatever the number is) eyes, thinking because the weed covered its eyes it was concealed.  At least for a while.  Then it realized we were still there and it charged.  I’m not kidding.  The thing charged at us with startling speed.  Both of us did our best impersonation of Looney Tunes cartoon characters, our feet moving faster than we were, trying to run backwards from the crouched position, screaming like little girls.   We made it, and the spider scurried off to wherever it thought was a better spot.  Baja John and I, thoroughly adrenalized, laughed so hard I thought I was going to pee my pants.

I’m an old fart who really doesn’t give a rat’s ass about what anybody thinks of me anymore, so I’ll tell you that I am scared of spiders on some basic, fundamental, hardwired-into-my-psyche level.  That said, I know that some of you younger guys who read ExNotes probably still worry about being perceived as tough macho men (you guys who haven’t achieved my level of self-awareness and acceptance yet).  Because of that, I’ll share with you a technique I’ve used for decades.   You know the deal…your significant other spots a spider, usually in the bathtub, and the job of sending it to the promised land naturally falls to you, the man.   You’re as scared as she is, but your ego won’t let you admit it.  There’s a spider there, and militant feminism be damned, it’s your job (as the man) to “get it.”

Here’s where the story turns to my other favorite topic:  Guns.  I’m helping you out here, guys.  Here’s an excuse to pick up another firearm.  You can thank me later.

What you need is a pellet pistol.  Preferably a manually-cocked model that doesn’t require a CO2 cartridge.  My weapon of choice is the Daisy 777 air pistol.  It’s a fantastic gun and it is quite accurate (I used to compete with one in bullseye air pistol competition, but I digress…back to the story at hand).

When your lovely significant other comes to you announcing a spider in the bathtub, choke down those feelings of fear, revulsion, and inadequacy. Here’s what you do:  Grab your air pistol.  Cock it, but (and this part is very important) do not put a pellet in the chamber.  While maintaining a firm grip on the weapon, point it at the offending arachnid with the muzzle approximately one inch away from your target.  Do not stand directly under the spider (for reasons that will become clear momentarily, this is also very important).  Take a deep breath, let it halfway out, and while maintaining focus on the front sight and proper sight alignment, gently squeeze (do not jerk) the trigger.  A high-speed jet of compressed air will  exit the muzzle, strike the spider, and break it up into legs, thorax, abdomen, and other body parts.  They will float to the ground and in most cases, the separate parts will continue twitching (adding to the excitement, the thrill of the hunt, and proof of your masculinity).  Mission accomplished, as old George W liked to say.  Your job (which was to “get it”) is done.   You can now turn to your sweetheart, smile, and ask her to clean it up.

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The Wayback Machine: Chiriaco Summit and the General Patton Memorial Museum

By Joe Berk

The thought came to me easily: The Patton Museum. We’d been housebound for weeks, sheltered in place against the virus, and like many others we were suffering from an advanced case of cabin fever.   Where can we go that won’t require flying, is reasonably close, and won’t put us in contact with too many people?  Hey, I write travel articles for the best motorcycle magazine on the planet (that’s Motorcycle Classics) and I know all the good destinations around here.  The Patton Museum.  That’s the ticket.

General George S. Patton, Jr., and his faithful companion, Willie, at the General Patton Memorial Museum in Chiriaco Summit, California.

I called the Patton Museum and they were closed.  An answering machine.  The Pandemic. Please leave a message.  So I did.  And a day later I had a response from a pleasant-sounding woman.   She would let me know when they opened again and she hoped we would visit.  So I called and left another message.  Big time motojournalist here.  We’d like to do a piece on the Museum.  You know the drill.  The Press.  Throwing the weight of the not-so-mainstream media around.  Gresh and I do it all the time.

Margit and I finally connected after playing telephone tag.  Yes, the Patton Museum was closed, but I could drive out to Chiriaco Summit to get a few photos (it’s on I-10 a cool 120 miles from where I live, and 70 miles from the Arizona border).  Margit gave me her email address, and Chiriaco was part of it (you pronounce it “shuhRAYco”).

Wait a second, I thought, and I asked the question: “Is your name Chiriaco, as in Chiriaco Summit, where the Museum is located?”

“Yes, Joe Chiriaco was my father.”

This was going to be good, I instantly knew.  And it was.

The story goes like this:  Dial back the calendar nearly a century.  In the late 1920s, the path across the Colorado, Sonoran, and Mojave Deserts from Arizona through California was just a little dirt road.  It’s hard to imagine, but our mighty Interstate 10 was once a dirt road.  A young Joe Chiriaco used it when he and a friend hitchhiked from Alabama to see a football game in California’s Rose Bowl in 1927.

Chiriaco stayed in California and joined a team in the late 1920s surveying a route for the aqueduct that would carry precious agua from the mighty Colorado River to Los Angeles.  Chiriaco surveyed, he found natural springs in addition to a path for the aqueduct, and he recognized opportunity.   That dirt road (Highways 60 and 70 in those early days) would soon be carrying more people from points east to the promised land (the Los Angeles basin).  Shaver Summit (the high point along the road in the area he was surveying, now known as Chiriaco Summit) would be a good place to sell gasoline and food.  He and his soon-to-be wife Ruth bought land, started a business and a family, and did well.  It was a classic case of the right people, the right time, the right place, and the right work ethic. Read on, my friends.  This gets even better.

Fast forward a decade into the late 1930s, and we were a nation preparing for war.  A visionary US Army leader, General George S. Patton, Jr., knew from his World War I combat experience that armored vehicle warfare would define the future.  It would start in North Africa, General Patton needed a place to train his newly-formed tank units, and the desert regions Chiriaco had surveyed were just what the doctor ordered.

Picture this:  Two men who could see the future clearly.  Joe Chiriaco and George S. Patton.  Chiriaco was at the counter eating his lunch when someone tapped his shoulder to ask where he could find a guy named Joe Chiriaco.  Imagine a response along the lines of “Who wants to know?” and when Chiriaco turned around to find out, there stood General Patton.  Two legends, one local and one national, eyeball to eyeball, meeting for the first time.

A Sherman tank, the one Patton’s men would go to war with in North Africa and Europe, on display at the General Patton Memorial Museum.

Patton knew that Chiriaco knew the desert and he needed his help.  The result?  Camp Young (where Chiriaco Summit stands today), and the 18,000-square-mile Desert Training Center – California Arizona Maneuver Area (DTC-CAMA, where over one million men would learn armored warfare).  It formed the foundation for Patton defeating Rommel in North Africa, our winning World War II, and more.  It would be where thousands of Italian prisoners of war spent most of their time during the war.  It would become the largest military area in America.

General Patton and Joe Chiriaco became friends and they enjoyed a mutually-beneficial relationship: Patton needed Chiriaco’s help and Chiriaco’s business provided a welcome respite for Patton’s troops.  Patton kept Chiriaco’s gas station and lunch counter accessible to the troops, Chiriaco sold beer with Patton’s blessing, and as you can guess….well, you don’t have to guess:  We won World War II.

World War II ended, the Desert Training Center closed, and then, during the Eisenhower administration, Interstate 10 followed the path of Highways 60 and 70.  Patton’s  troops and the POWs were gone and I-10 became the major east/west freeway across the US.   We had become a nation on wheels and Chiriaco’s business continued to thrive as Americans took to the road with our newfound postwar prosperity.

Fast forward yet again: In the 1980s Margit (Joe and Ruth Chiriaco’s daughter) and Leslie Cone (the Bureau of Land Management director who oversaw the lands that had been Patton’s desert training area) had an idea:  Create a museum honoring General Patton and the region’s contributions to World War II.  Ronald Reagan heard about it and donated an M-47 Patton tank (the one you see in the large photo at the top of this blog), and things took off from there.

I first rode my motorcycle to the General Patton Memorial Museum in 2003 with my good buddy Marty.  It was a small museum then, but it has grown substantially.   When Sue and I visited a couple of weeks ago, I was shocked and surprised by what I saw.  I can only partly convey some of it through the photos and narrative you see in this blog.  We had a wonderful visit with Margit, who told us a bit about her family, the Museum, and Chiriaco Summit.  On that topic of family, it was Joe and Ruth Chiriaco, Margit and her three siblings, their children, and their grandchildren. If you are keeping track, that’s four generations of Chiriacos.

The Chiriaco Summit story is an amazing one and learning about it can be reasonably compared to peeling an onion.  There are many layers, and discovering each might bring a tear or two.  Life hasn’t always been easy for the Chiriaco family out there in the desert, but they always saw the hard times as opportunities and they instinctively knew how to use each opportunity to add to their success.  We can’t tell the entire story here, but we’ll give you a link to a book you might consider purchasing at the end of this blog.  Our focus is on the General Patton Memorial Museum, and having said that, let’s get to the photos.

The Patton Museum’s new Matzner Tank Pavilion. When we were there, one of the two M60 tanks you see in front was running. If you think a motorcycle engine at idle makes music, you will love listening to an M60’s air-cooled, horizontally-opposed, 1790-cubic-inch, 12-cylinder diesel engine.  I drove an M60 once when I was in the Army.  Yeah, I still want one.
The business end of an M60’s 105mm main gun. This one has been out of service for a long time; hence the rust. Firing one of these settles disagreements quickly.
The M4 Sherman, our main battle tank in World War II, on the right, with an M5 Stuart tank on the left.
Don’t tread on me, or so the saying goes. Everything on a tank is big. You don’t realize how big until you stand next to one.
When Patton’s men trained at the DTC-CAMA, they used mockup aggressor vehicles (jeeps fitted with frames and canvas) to simulate the bad guys.
M60 main battle tanks parked behind the Museum. This was a shot I could not resist. If Joe Gresh was into tanks, this is what Tinfiny Ranch would undoubtedly look like.  The Patton name was attached to the M47, M48, and M60 tank series.  I asked Margit about these tanks, and she told me that when the Museum raises enough money, they’ll be made operational and put on display.   For now, Margit said, “they stand as silent ghosts with General Patton at the helm.”  I like that.
The General Patton Memorial Museum outdoor chapel.  The chapel was built using desert rocks.  If someone is looking for a unique wedding venue, this is it.

When I first visited the Patton Museum nearly 20 years ago, there were only three or four tanks on display.   As you can see from the above photos, the armored vehicle display has grown dramatically.

Like the armored vehicle exhibits, the Museum interior has also expanded, and it has done so on a grand scale.  In addition to the recently-built Matzner Tank Pavilion shown above, the exhibits inside are far more extensive than when I first visited.  Sue and I had the run of the Museum, and I was able to get some great photos.  The indoor exhibits are stunning, starting with the nearly 100-year-old topo map that dominates the entrance.

The Metropolitan Water District’s scale map of southern California, Arizona, and Nevada. MWD brought this model to the US Congress in 1927 to secure funding for the California Aqueduct, then they stored and forgot about it for decades.  An MWD executive overhead Margit talking about the planned Patton Museum in the Chiriaco Summit coffee shop one day, he remembered the map, and one thing led to another.  MWD donated the map to the Patton Museum in 1988. The Big Map (as it is known) covers the area used by Patton’s Desert Training Center and the California Arizona Maneuver Area.  It’s a visually-arresting display that is truly something special.
Generals Patton and Rommel, the two key players in North Africa. If you’ve never seen the movie, Patton, you need to fix that oversight. It is a great movie.
George S. Patton: The early years. Patton attended the Virginia Military Institute and the United States Military Academy at West Point. His family was from San Marino, California.  Patton was born into wealth and could have done whatever he wanted.  He chose a career in the US Army.
One of the display rooms inside the Patton Museum. I could have spent the entire day in just this room.  That’s an A-10 Warthog model in the foreground.  It’s the airplane we used to take out Iraq’s Republican Guard tanks in Operation Desert Storm.  I worked for the company that manufactured the A-10’s 30mm Gatling Gun ammo and Combined Effects Munitions cluster bombs that did most of the heavy lifting in that war.
Another view inside the Patton Museum. A tripod, a Nikon, a wide angle lens, and having the room to myself. It was a grand day.
A model of Patton’s command vehicle. Patton lived in a trailer and moved with his troops during most of World War II, unlike other US generals who mostly stayed in hotels. Patton was an RVer before there were RVs.
The Patton Museum has an extensive World War II small arms display. I could have spent half a day just viewing this part of the Museum. I’ll be back.
The Patton Museum’s small arms display included this beautiful Model 1917 Colt .45 ACP revolver.  Most of the surviving specimens you see today (when you see them at all; they are not very common) have a Parkerized finish. This one has the original blued finish. I own a Colt 1917; mine has the original finish, too. There’s quite a story behind these revolvers.
A beautiful British Infantry Lee Enfield No. 4 rifle. I grabbed a photo of this one because it had an unusually attractive stock, something you don’t often see on infantry rifles.
A replica of General Patton’s ivory-handled Colt Single Action Army revolver. Patton carried different sidearms during World War II, including this Colt SAA and a Smith and Wesson .357 Magnum (also equipped with ivory grips). Patton’s Colt SAA had two notches carved in the left grip.  Then Lieutenant Patton was part of the Pershing expedition that chased Pancho Villa in Mexico from Fort Bliss (my old stomping grounds). Patton personally killed two men in a gunfight during that action. There’s no doubt about it: Patton was the real deal, a genuine warrior.

In addition to the General Patton Memorial Museum, there are several businesses the Chiriaco family operates at Chiriaco Summit, and the reach of this impressive family is four generations deep.  As we mentioned earlier, it’s a story that can’t be told in a single article, but Margit was kind enough to give us a copy of Chiriaco Summit, a book that tells it better than I ever could.  You should buy a copy.  It’s a great read about a great family and a great place.

I enjoyed Chiriaco Summit immensely. That’s Joe Chiriaco in the lower left photo, and Ruth Chiriaco in the upper right inset. Margit Chiriaco Rusche, their daughter, is seated in the 1928 Model A.  Fourth-generation Victor (whom we met) runs a vintage car header company at Chiriaco Summit.  Victor is the young man standing behind Margit.

So there you have it:   The General Patton Memorial Museum and Chiriaco Summit.  It’s three hours east of Los Angeles on Interstate 10 and it’s a marvelous destination.  Keep an eye on the Patton Museum website, and when the pandemic is finally in our rear view mirrors, you’ll want to visit this magnificent California desert jewel.

More great Destinations are right here!

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ZRX1100 Carburetor Cleaning: The Second Time’s The Charm

By Joe Gresh

The first time I cleaned the carburetors on the Kawasaki ZRX1100 everything went well except for the part about removing and installing the carbs back on the engine. The ZRX had sat for 9 years and it wasn’t running all that well when I parked it. The first carb cleaning saw new float needles installed and a general poking and cleaning of all jets and orifices.

The bike started up okay and ran fairly well, if a bit ragged at low RPM. This I chalked up to the four carbs needing synchronization. I didn’t have a carb sync tool so I just ran it like it was. It ran pretty good for 7000-8000 miles but became harder to start and really rough at any RPM below 2500. I put up with it because I dreaded removing the carbs again.

The old, original fuel hose started leaking where I had installed an inline fuel filter. No matter what clamp I used it leaked. Giving it a through examination I discovered the hose itself was rotten and the inner liner split. I pulled the hose off and sealed my fate. It was impossible to reach the hose connection buried between the carbs to install a new hose. Things had finally gotten so bad I had to fix the situation.

Removing the carbs was as dreadful as I remembered it to be. There’s not a lot of room between the air box and the intake rubbers so it was a bear (like an Ossa!) to remove the bank of four constant velocities.

Once on the bench the Kawasaki ZRX1100 carbs are pretty easy to work on. I ordered new carb kits and new fuel pipes that go between the carbs to supply fuel. The old pipes weren’t leaking but I didn’t want to go through this ordeal only to have them start leaking.

To install the new fuel pipes you have to un-rack the carbs and split them into individual units. The old pipes looked pretty crusty and I can see them puking fuel because I disturbed them once too often. I also wanted fresh plastic to replace the 24-year-old pipes. While I was at it I bought factory coolant hoses to replace the silicone ones that leaked when it was cold. The new hoses fit much better and should last the rest of my life. All in, I spent three hundred bucks with Dave at Southwest Suzuki/Kawasaki out on Highway 70.

Two of the pilot jets were clogged solid. I had just cleaned them a few months or 8000 miles ago. Possibly the rotten fuel line sent debris down stream and clogged the jets. In addition there are supposed to be tiny washers between the o-ring and the tension spring on the pilot jet adjusting screws. Three were missing and I must have lost them the last time I took the carbs apart. Without the little washers the tension spring digs into the o-ring shredding the thing. Any pieces of o-ring go right into the tiny idle transition holes on the floor of the venturi. So that’s on me. I swear, I never saw the things.

When I say the pilot jets were clogged I mean clogged. I soaked the pilot jets in Evaporust and tossed them into the ultrasonic cleaner: No joy. I had to use a single strand of copper from a fine strand electrical wire and work it for 20 minutes to get the things cleared.

The new Parts Unlimited carb kits came with all the stuff I needed, even those tiny idle mixture screw washers. I usually don’t use the jets out of kits because the quality is so suspect. In this case I decided to use them to be sure the pilots were clear enough. Besides, it couldn’t run any worse. I rechecked the float levels, one was a millimeter off, and assembled the entire mess.

The next day it occurred to me that I had installed the new jets without making sure they were actually drilled all the way through or that a bit of machining swarf hadn’t been left inside. So I took the float bowls off and ran copper wire through all four pilot jets and the main jets. It was good for my peace of mind. I also sprung for an OEM Kawasaki fuel line at a reasonable $12.

Because they are so hard to remove I try to be sure the carbs are not leaking by bench testing the floats and needles. This will save you a lot of work in the event something isn’t right. There’s nothing more depressing that fighting the carbs back into place only to have the things leak when you turn the petcock to On.

As you may have heard I was banned from the ZRX owner’s forum because I posted an ExhaustNotes light bulb review. It didn’t sit well with the members that were selling light bulbs. My new ZRX hangout is on Facebook called Banned ZRX members, or something like that. A lot of the same guys who were on the other site ended up there due to disagreements with the admin. Anyway, these ZRX guys suggested a thin piece of material between the air box and the rubber intakes to make replacing the carbs easier.

I had some thin sheet metal from a filing cabinet and used it to make two carb slider thingies. The sliders are held onto the engine by small bungee cords. I put a 90-degree bend in the sliders so they wouldn’t slip down in use. Those ZRX guys know their stuff, as it was a breeze to slide the carbs into position then remove the sheet metal. That’s half of a hard job made easy.

The Kawasaki ZRX1100 has a lot going for it in the maintenance department. The valves are easy to set clearances. The carbs use three simple, spring-loaded adjustment screws for synchronization, and there are no lock nuts to cause changes when tightened. The procedure is simplicity: You adjust the left set of two outside carbs, then adjust the right set of outside carbs, then adjust both sets of carbs to each other using a middle adjusting screw. It actually takes longer to write the carb sync procedure than to do it.

With all four idle circuits functioning correctly the ZRX starts up first push of the button. The bike pulls smoothly from idle all the way to redline. Having the carbs synced makes for a smooth transition coming off a stop and I don’t think the bike has ever run as good as it does now. I’ll be heading to Utah in June for the Rat Fink convention. It will be a lot more fun with the bike running like Kawasaki intended.

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The Wayback Machine: The Norton Commando

By Joe Berk

I grew up in a town small enough that our junior high school and high school were all in the same building. It was 7th through 12th grade, which meant that some of the Juniors and Seniors had cars, and one guy had a motorcycle. That one guy was Walt Skok, and the motorcycle was a ‘64 Triumph Tiger (in those days the Tiger was a 500cc single-carbed twin). It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, with big downswept chrome exhaust headers, a cool tank with a dynamite chrome rack, chrome wire wheels, and the most perfect look I had ever seen on anything. I spent every spare moment I had sneaking out into the parking lot to stare at it. Some things in the world are perfect, a precise blend of style and function (things like Weatherby rifles, 1911 handguns, C4 Corvettes, Nikon DSLRs, and 1960s Triumph motorcycles).

A ’64 Triumph Tiger, just like the one Walt Skok owned.

Back to the Triumph: One day Walt started it (I had been drooling over it for a month before I ever heard it run), and its perfection, to me, was complete. In those days, a 500cc motorcycle was enormous. When Walt fired it up, it was unlike anything I had ever heard. It wasn’t lumpy and dumpy like a Harley, it wasn’t a whiny whinny like a Honda, and it wasn’t a tinny “wing-ding-ding-ding-ding” like a Suzuki or a Yamaha (they were all two-strokes back then). Nope, the Triumph was perfect. It was deep. It was visceral. It was tough. The front wheel and forks literally throbbed back and forth with each engine piston stroke. To my 12-year-old eyes and ears it was the absolute essence of a gotta-get-me-one-of-these. It looked and sounded like a machine with a heart and a soul. I knew that someday I would own a machine like this.

Fast forward a few years, and I was old enough own and ride my own Triumphs. I’ve had a bunch of mid-‘60s and ‘70s Triumphs…Bonnevilles, Tigers, and a Daytona (which was a 500cc twin-carbed twin back then, a bike known as the Baby Bonneville). I was a young guy and those British motorcycles were perfect. They were fast, they handled well, and they sounded the way God intended a motorcycle to sound. I had a candy-red-and-gold ’78 750 Bonneville (Triumph always had the coolest colors) that would hit an indicated 109 mph on Loop 820 around Fort Worth, and I did that regularly on those hot and humid Texas nights. Life was good.

Fast forward another 50 years (and another 40 or 50 motorcycles for me). We saw the death of the British motorcycle empire, the rise and fall and rise and impending fall of Harley-Davidson, this new thing called globalization, digital engine management systems, and multi-cylinder ridiculously-porky motorcycles.

So here we are, today.  My good buddy Gerry, then the CSC service manager, owned this ultra-cool Norton Commando.  And good buddy Steve, the CSC CEO, bought the bike and put it on display in the CSC showroom. We had a lot of cool bikes on display there, including vintage Mustangs, Harleys, Beemers, RX3s, RC3s, TT250s, and more. But my eye kept returning to that Norton. I’d never ridden a Norton, but I’d heard the stories when I was younger.

A selfie, sort of. A stunning motorcycle.

Back in the day (I’m jumping back to the ‘60s and ‘70s again) guys who wanted to be cool rode Triumphs. I know because I was one of them. We knew about Nortons, but we didn’t see them very often. They had bigger engines, they were more expensive than Triumphs, and their handling was reported to be far superior to anything on two wheels. Harleys had bigger engines and cost more than Triumphs, but they were porkers.  Nortons were faster than Triumphs (and Triumphs were plenty fast).

A lot of guys who rode Triumphs really wanted to ride Nortons. Nortons were mythical bikes. Their handling and acceleration were legendary. In the ‘60s, the hardest accelerating bike on the planet was the Norton Scrambler. Norton stuffed a 750cc engine into a 500cc frame to create that model, like Carroll Shelby did with the AC Cobra. I remember guys talking about Norton Scramblers in hushed and reverential tones back in the LBJ and Nixon years. You spoke about reverential things softly back then.

Fast forward again, and here I was with Steve’s 1973 Norton Commando right in front of me (just a few feet away from where I used to write the CSC blog). Steve’s Norton was magnificent. It had not been restored and it wore its patina proudly.

“Steve,” I said, “you need to let me ride that Norton.”

“Sure,” he said. “I’ll have Gerry get it ready for you.”

Wow, I thought. I’m going to ride a Norton. I felt like the little dog who finally caught the bus and found himself with a mouthful of bus. What do you do when that happens?

I sat on the Norton that afternoon. It felt big. The pegs were set far to the rear and my hips hurt immediately from the bike’s racing ergos (and maybe a little from the femur and spine fractures I suffered in a motorcycle accident a few years before that; I don’t bend as easily as I used to). Maybe I shouldn’t have asked to ride this beautiful beast. Maybe my mouth had written a check my body couldn’t cash.

But I was committed. The Norton went back to Gerry so he could get it ready for me to ride. There could be no backing out now.  I was nervous, I was excited, and I was a little giddy. The only bikes I had ridden for the last 7 or 8 years were 150cc Mustangs and the 250cc Zongs. Lightweight bikes. Singles. Under 25 horsepower. Electric starters and all the amenities. Modern stuff.  I thought about riding the 850 Norton. It dawned on me that I had not even heard it run yet. I realized I liked electric starters. I hadn’t kick started a bike in probably 35 years. The Norton was an 850, and it was kick start only. No electric starter. Hmmm.

When I arrived at the plant, Steve pushed the Norton outside for me. We both tried to figure out where the ignition key went (it’s on the left side of the bike). We tried to guess at the ignition key’s run spot (it has four or five positions). We picked the second one and I tried kicking the engine. It was a complicated affair. You had to fold the right footpeg in, and when you kick the starter, you had to try to not hit the gear shift lever on the right side of the bike. We kicked it a couple of times. Hmmm again. Lots of compression. Then Steve had to run back into the plant to take a phone call. I tried kick starting the Norton a couple of times again.   Not even a cough from the engine.

I played with the key and clicked it over one more notch. Another kick, and the mighty 850 fired right up. Ah, success!

The Norton settled into an easy idle.  It was wonderful. It sounded just like Walt Skok’s Triumph. I was in the 7th grade again. I looked around to see if Steve had seen me start it, but no one was there. It was just me and the Norton. Okay, I thought, I’ll just ride around in the parking lot to get the feel of the clutch, the throttle, and the brakes.

Whoa, I thought, as I let the clutch out gingerly. That puppy had power! The Norton was turning over lazily and it felt incredibly powerful as I eased the clutch out. I tried the rear brake and there was nothing (oh, that’s right, the rear brake is on the other side). I tried the front brake, and it was strong. Norton had already gone to disk brakes by 1973, and the disk on Steve’s Commando was just as good as a modern bike’s brakes are today.

I rode the Norton into the shop so Gerry could fill the fuel tank for me. The Norton has a sidestand and a centerstand, but you can’t get to either one while you are on the bike. You have to hold the bike up, dismount on the left, and then put it on the centerstand. The side stand was under there somewhere, but I didn’t want to mess around trying to catch it with my boot. It was plenty scary just getting off the Norton and holding it upright. It was more than a little scary, actually. I’m riding my boss’s vintage bike, it’s bigger than anything I’ve been on in years, and I don’t want to drop it.

Gerry gave me “the talk” about kick starting the Norton. “I don’t like to do it while I’m on the bike,” he said. “If it kicks back, it will drive your knee right into the handlebars and that hurts. I always do it standing on the right side of the bike.”

Hmmmm. As if I wasn’t nervous enough already.

I tried the kickstarter two or three times (with everybody in the service area watching me) and I couldn’t start the thing, even though I had started it outside (when no one was around to witness my success). Gerry kicked the Norton once for me (after my repeated feeble attempts) and it started immediately. Okay. I got it. You have to show it who’s boss.

I strapped my camera case to the Norton’s back seat (or pillion, as they used to say in Wolverhampton), and then I had a hard time getting back on the bike. I couldn’t swing my leg over the camera bag. Yeah, I was nervous. And everybody in the shop was still watching me.

With the Norton twerking to its British twin tango, I managed to turn it around and get out onto Route 66. A quick U-turn (all the while concentrating intensely so I would remember “shift on the right, brake on the left”) and I rode through the mean streets of north Azusa toward the San Gabriels. In just a few minutes, I was on Highway 39, about to experience riding Nirvana.

This is what a motorcycle instrument cluster should be. The Enfield Interceptor Gresh and I tested in Baja was very similar.

Wow, this is sweet, I thought as I climbed into the San Gabriels. I had no idea what gear I was in, but gear selection is a somewhat abstract concept on a Norton.  Which gear didn’t seem to make any difference.  The Commando had power and torque that just wouldn’t quit.  More throttle, go faster, shifting optional. It didn’t matter what gear I was in (which was good, because all I knew was that I was somewhere north of 1st).

A photo stop along the East Fork Road. That’s East Fork, as in the East Fork of the San Gabriel River.

I looked down at the tach. It had a 7000-rpm redline and I was bouncing around somewhere in the 2500 zip code. And when I say bouncing around, I mean that literally. The tach needle oscillated ±800 rpm at anything below 3000 rpm (it settled down above 3000 rpm, a neighborhood I would visit only once that day). The Norton’s low end torque was incredible. I realized I didn’t even know how many gears the bike had, so I slowed, rowed through the gears and counted (the number was four).

A shot from the rear. I was shooting with a Nikon D3300 DSLR (an entry-level digital camera) and the Nikon 16-35 lens.

The Norton was amazing in every regard. The sound was soothing, symphonic, and sensuous (how’s that for alliteration?). It’s what God intended motorcycles to be. Highway 39 is gloriously twisty and the big Norton (which suddenly didn’t feel so big) gobbled it up. The Norton never felt cumbersome or heavy (it’s only about 20 lbs heavier than my 250cc RX3). It was extremely powerful. I was carving through the corners moderately aggressively at very tiny throttle openings. Just a little touch of my right hand and it felt like I was a cannon-launched kinetic energy weapon. Full disclosure: I’ve never been launched from a cannon, but I’m pretty sure what I experienced that day on the Norton is what it would feel like. Everything about the Norton felt (and here’s that word again) perfect.
I was having so much fun that I missed the spot where I normally would stop for the CSC glamour shots. There’s a particular place on Highway 39 where I could position a bike and get some curves in the photo (and it looked great in the CSC ads).  But I sailed right past it. I was enjoying the ride.

When I realized I missed the spot where I wanted to stop for photos, it made me think about my camera.  I reached behind to make sure it was still on the seat behind me, but my camera wasn’t there! Oh, no, I thought, I lost my camera, and God only knows where it might have fallen off. I looked down, and the camera was hanging off the left side of the bike, captured in the bungee net. Wow, I dodged a bullet there.

The view from above. It was a glorious day.

I pulled off and then I realized: I don’t want to kill the engine because then I’ll have to start it, and if I can’t, I’m going to feel mighty stupid calling Gerry to come rescue me.

Okay, I thought, here’s the drill.   Pull off to the side of the road, find a flat spot, keep the engine running, put all my weight on my bad left leg, swing my right leg over the seat, hold the Norton upright, get the bike on the centerstand, unhook the bungee net, sling the camera case over my shoulder, get back on the bike, and all the while, keep the engine running.  Oh, yeah.  No problem.

This is what a motorcycle should look like. Why can’t other manufacturers do this? Oh, wait, Enfield did…

Actually, though, it wasn’t that bad. And I was having a lot of fun.

I arrived at the East Fork bridge sooner than I thought I would (time does indeed fly when you’re having fun). I made the right turn. I would have done the complete Glendora Ridge Road loop, but the CalTrans sign told me that Glendora Ridge Road was closed. I looked for a spot to stop and grab a few photos of this magnificent beast.

That’s when I noticed that the left footpeg rubber had fallen off the bike. It’s the rubber piece that fits over the foot peg. Oh, no, I thought once again. I didn’t want to lose pieces of Steve’s bike, although I knew no ride on any vintage British vertical twin would be complete without something falling off.   I made a U-turn and rode back and forth several times along a half-mile stretch where I thought I lost the rubber footpeg cover, but I couldn’t find it. When I pulled off to turn around yet again, I stalled the bike.

Hmmm. No doubt about it now. I knew I was going to have to start the Norton on my own.

We (me and my good buddy Norton, that is) had picked a good spot to stop. I dismounted using the procedure described earlier, I pulled the black beauty onto its centerstand, and I grabbed several photos. I could tell they were going to be good. Sometimes you just know when you’re behind the camera that things are going well. And on the plus side of the ledger, all of the U-turns I had just made (along with the magnificent canyon carving on Highway 39) had built up my confidence enormously. The Norton was going to start for me because I would will it to.

And you know what? That’s exactly what happened. One kick and all was well with the world. I felt like Marlon Brando, Steve McQueen, and Peter Fonda, all rolled up into one 66-year-old teenager.  At that moment I was a 12-year-old kid staring at Walt Skok’s Triumph again. Yeah, I’m bad. A Norton will do that to you. I stared at the bike as it idled. It was a living, breathing, snorting, shaking, powerful thing. Seeing it alive like that was perfect. I suddenly remembered my Nikon camera had video. Check this out…

So there you have it. A dream bike, but this time the dream was real.  Good times, that day was.

If you like reading about vintage iron, check out our Dream Bikes page!

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ExNotes Book Review: Killers of the Flower Moon

One of my gifts this past holiday season was a great read:  Killers of the Summer Moon by David Grann.  I didn’t pick up on the author’s name initially, but Grann was already known to me by an earlier nonfiction work of his, The Lost City of Z.

Killers of the Flower Moon is about the Osage Native American murders that occurred in Oklahoma in the early part of the last century.  The story basically goes like this:  The Osage tribe lost their land but retained the mineral rights.  Oil lay under the Osage land, which made the Osage tribe members wealthy.  Through corrupt local government white people could get themselves appointed as “guardians” (which essentially allowed them to control the Osage tribe member funds), and if the person whose funds they controlled died, the money went to the white person controlling those funds.  You can imagine what this led to:  The Osage members started dying in large numbers under mysterious circumstances.  The local and state governments had little interest in addressing the issue and the murders continued.  It was a young J. Edgar Hoover’s newly-minted FBI that solved the case.  That, all by itself, made for a fascinating story, made all the more interesting by it being true.

At the end of the book, Grann found a way to make the story even more interesting.  The scale and scope of the murders were significantly greater than even the FBI realized, with Osage murders both preceding and following the years covered by the FBI investigation.  Grann’s personal research brought this latest revelation to light.

Killers of the Flower Moon is a great book and I couldn’t put it down.   I think you will enjoy it.

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Lobo

I recently posted a Wayback Machine blog on riding in the rain, and Carl Bennett (a new friend from the UK) added a comment about one of his rain rides.  Carl’s input was interesting on several levels, one of which was the included web address.  I poked around a bit on Carl’s site and found a blog post titled “Lobo.”  Well, one thing led to another, with the result being Carl’s permission to publish “Lobo” here on ExNotes.  I enjoyed reading it and I think you will, too.

– Joe Berk

By Carl Bennett

As a name for a motorcycle it’s okay. It means timber wolf, in Spanish, but maybe that means Mexican. Oooops, I meant Microsoft Spanish, for whom Spanish means Old Spanish. Obviously in global internet land, Microsoft’s 14-year-old-in-Ohio sensibilities reign supreme. Which is a whole other story. And this one is about me. Like all my others, as yours are all about you and Charles Dickens’ were about him. And especially Martin Amis’s were all about him. God, were they about him. I don’t know if he ever had a motorcycle. Hunter Thompson definitely had several, but as he wrote himself, Mister Kurz, he dead.

Lobo was the name of the band that sang A Dog Named Boo, so long ago that I can’t even admit I know the tune. I heard it during my formative years, the ones still a-forming.

Like Arlo Guthrie on his motorcycle I don’t want to die. Despite drinking kettle de-scaler yesterday morning, calling NHS 111 and having a not-great day thinking I might actually die of this, which wasn’t helped by eating a whole packet of spicy beetroot. I love that stuff, except they really ought to put a reminder on the packet of what happens when you look in the toilet bowl, to tell you that you almost certainly will live more than another three days and if you don’t, it won’t be anything to do with beetroots, unless a beetroot lorry runs you over. The gist being that I’d quite like to stay alive for the foreseeable future.

So obviously, I bought myself a motorcycle for Christmas. Unlike the song, although I’ve got my motor running, first time every time, but hey, it’s a BMW. On which I have no intention of hitting the highway like a battering ram, nor like anything else.  What did you expect? I’ve absolutely no wish to hit the highway because I know from past experience it bloody hurts. Thankfully, my off-bike excursions were few and decidedly minor, but I remember spending an afternoon in Gene Fleck’s Meadow Inn bar in Wisconsin with the road closed while an emergency crew searched against the clock to find someone’s foot. I’d seen him and his girl earlier in the day on a Harley, riding like an accident looking for somewhere to happen, which it duly did.

I wasn’t prepared for the change. And no, that wasn’t why I got a motorcycle again. I did it because life is short. I did it because I wanted to smell the grass and the trees and the fields I passed through. I did it because I wanted to do it again before I die.

Where I began the process I laughingly call growing-up, there wasn’t any public transport to speak of. There were infrequent busses, taxis weren’t a thing for a 16 or 17-year-old in a Wiltshire town and even if being chauffeured to places by my Mummy was an option the way it seems to be for kids today, I’d have died of self-loathing to ask. Probably. After I had the lift, obviously. All of which meant that at 16 I did what was the fairly normal thing and bought a Yamaha FS1-E. It wasn’t just me. Look at the sales figures. Back then, you had a moped only as long as it took to get a motorcycle, which was your 17th birthday. Thanks to some bureaucratic insanity, or more likely in England, nobody could be bothered to check the sense of the rules, or read them properly, a 17-year-old could perfectly legally if predictably briefly stick a sidecar on a Kawasaki Z1, stick L-plates on it and set off for the obituary column of their local paper, when there were such things.

Not me, baby. I bought a Honda CB 175. I had an Army surplus shiny PVC button-up coat. It felt like, it looked like, it probably was something a dustman on a motorcycle would look like, as a friend of mine thoughtfully pointed out in case it was something I’d overlooked. It had to go, even though it didn’t very fast. I put it in the Wiltshire Times. Nobody even rang the phone number. I put the price up 30% the next week and got about 20 calls. I sold it to the first one who came to see it, even though he asked for a discount. Which he didn’t get. I didn’t bother to tell him about the 30% discount he could have had the week before.

Then it was probably my favourite bike, the Triumph T25, the kind of thing that now sells for over £4,000 any day of the week and which then you felt lucky if you could raise £200 on it. It was fun, and I learned some good lessons on it. One of them being that if you ignore that little triangular sign warning you there’s a junction ahead then you’ll go about three-quarters of the way across it before the twin-shoe Triumph brake stops you. Nothing came. Nothing did on back lanes around Tellisford in those days.

The Triumph got swapped for a Norton 500 that ran for two weeks out of the two years I had it. It sent me spinning down the road like a dead fly in Cardiff one black ice night, after I’d left the electric fire warmth of some girl’s flat (nothing doing there; never was, with anybody), lost the bike out from under me at about 5 mph, came to a halt against a parked car and had some Welshman peer down at me to tell me “Duh, it’s icy mind.” I left Wales as soon as I could and bought another Triumph, a real 1970s post-Easy-Rider identity crisis machine. It was a 650cc Tiger engine, shoehorned into a chrome-plated Norton Slimline frame. Instead of the rocker clip-ons you’d expect, it had highish handlebars and cut-off exhausts. Just header pipes in fact, but with Volkswagen Beetle mufflers smacked into them in a Bath carpark, with Halford’s slash-cut trim bolted on the ends. I wasn’t a rocker, but I thought it rocked.

It took two weeks to get the petrol tank the way I wanted it, a deep, deep black you could lose your soul in, sprayed on then sanded, sprayed on then sanded, sprayed on then sanded about fifteen times in the kitchen of my definitively smelly Southampton student flat, the kind of place that gave Ian McEwan the idea for The Cement Garden, only a bit less appealing. On the first trip out on that gloriously glossy bike I rode up to Salisbury, escorted by a girlfriend whose parents purported to believe that she had her own spare room at my university halls of residence, the ones I’d left months before. We got to her parents’ newish house in the summer sunlight, said hello, put the bike in the driveway. Then decided we’d go to a local pub because a) Wiltshire, b) nothing much else to do until her parents went out, or c) that’s what people did.

I started the bike, but it didn’t fire first time, so I tickled the Amal carburetor and tried again. There was no air filter on the carb – there often wasn’t in those days – so when it backfired the spurt of flame came straight out into the open air and set light to the petrol that had trickled down the outside of the carb float bowl. I appreciate that these are words that younger readers won’t even recognise, but we had to.   I had my leather jacket on, a full-face Cromwell ACU gold-rated helmet, and long leather gloves, so I just reached down nonchalantly to switch the fuel tap to Off. No petrol, no fry, as Bob Marley didn’t sing. Except I didn’t turn the petrol off. I managed to pull the rubber petrol feed line off instead. The flames came up to chest level.

My first thought was to run for it, but my second was that I’d just put three gallons in the tank and I seriously doubted I could run faster than that. All I could think of to do was reach into the flames and turn the petrol tap off, so that’s what I did. I couldn’t see past my elbow in the flames, but it worked or I wouldn’t be telling this story. The insulation on the electrics had burned off so the horn was fused on until I got out my trusty Buck knife (something else we took entirely as normal in the West Country) and cut what was left of the wires. My girlfriend’s mother saw the whole thing from the kitchen. She waited until the flames had gone out before she came out to tell me I’d dropped oil on her driveway.

There was a break after that, for university and unhappily London then Aylesbury and Bath until luck and an unusual skillset saw me in Chicago, on a 650 Yamaha that might or might not have been technically stolen, blasting around Lakeshore Drive and the blue lights area, under half the city, overlooking some huge American river, me and an Italian buddy from summer camp on his bike, living if not the dream then certainly some kind of alternative reality. To this day I don’t know why I did that. No insurance, no clear provenance to the bike, certainly no observance of the speed limits, and only my trusty grey cardboard AA international driving licence that didn’t mention motorcycles. But nothing happened. Back then that was all that mattered.

A gap of some years and then a BMW R1000, a bike that vibrated so much that a trip from London to Wiltshire left me literally unable to make a sentence for about fifteen minutes. It felt good though, that lumpy, dumpy, so-solid bike. I traded that one for a Harley-Davidson Sportster which is what I thought was the ultimate motorcycle ought to be before I found out that I needed to spend £200 a month pretty much every month to get it the way it ought to have left the factory before their accountants had a say in the recommended retail price. It got stolen, we recovered it and instead of putting it back in showroom metal flake purple turned it jet black, bored it out to 1200, and put Brembo four-pot brakes and a fuel-injector on it before it transmogrified into a laptop and a laser printer, when laser printers were a long way from the couple of hundred a good one is now.

And somehow that was 30 years ago. This time the iron horse is a BMW F650, almost as old as when I stopped riding for a while, but with a documented 13,000 miles on it. My idea of common sense says changing the oil and the filter and swapping out the original brake lines and replacing them with stainless steel would first of all look cool but possibly more importantly, be quite a sensible way of not relying on thirty year old rubber. I mean, would you? On any Saturday night?

In the intervening coughty years I’ve either sold or given away my original Schott jacket, the gloves, the Rukka, the Ashman Metropolitan Police long boots and the Belstaff scrambler boots. The Cromwell helmet and the Bell 500 open-face are long gone. I need everything, from the toes upwards and I find that most of the names I grew up with such as Ashman or Cromwell just don’t exist any more. I bought another Bell, but a full-face ACU gold Sharp 5-rated lid this time. I got some gloves, some chain lube and a tube of Solvol Autosol to keep the chrome shiny. I found some leather jeans and my old not-Schott jacket that I bought in Spain and after only three applications of neatsfoot oil and old-fashioned dubbin and hanging it over a radiator it’s now soft enough to be wearable and looks, I think, pretty darned good, even if it doesn’t have a single CE rating to its name. I’ve skipped the red Hermetite that used to decorate every pseudo-serious biker’s jeans.

Of the kids I knew that got in Bad Trouble on a bike, one was drunk and showing off. He died. My cousin lost his job and an inch off one leg when he was swiped by a car that ignored him on a roundabout. One in Wiltshire rode his bike under a combine harvester. He died too. It wasn’t really funny and I try not to think of him looking like SpongeBob SquarePants, with his arms and legs sticking out of the straw. He’d had a 20-year break from bikes and had just picked up an early retirement pension payoff. He didn’t read the T&Cs that said you still can’t ride like an arse. The American guy I didn’t ride around Chicago with lost his foot and they didn’t find it in time to put it back on. For all I know it’s still in a field in Wisconsin.

CE-rated armour wouldn’t have helped a single one of them. I’m certainly not saying safety gear isn’t worth the effort, or I wouldn’t have specced out my new helmet so carefully. But motorcycles aren’t the safest thing. You have to watch your sides, your front and what’s underneath you, as well as your back.

Like what you read hear?  Check out (and subscribe to) Carl Bennett’s blog at Writer-Insighter.com!

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The Wayback Machine: 1200 Triumph Daytona

By Joe Berk

I guess a bike can still be a dream bike if you owned one and then sold it.  I still dream about my Triumph 1200 Daytona, so it qualifies. It was a fantastic bike. A real locomotive. Crude, strong, powerful, and fun.  And fast.  Wow, was it ever fast!

Somewhere in New Mexico on the 2005 Three Flags Rally with my ’95 Daytona 1200, a bike I still dream about.

I first saw a 1200 Daytona at a CBX Honda meet (yeah, I had one of those, too). It was at a guy’s house somewhere in Hollywood, and this dude also had a black 1200 Daytona.  Well, maybe that’s not quite right…I saw one at the Long Beach Show even before then, but I didn’t really appreciate what it was all about. This CBX guy was laughing and telling me about the Daytona’s design.

“What they did, har har har, was basically just hang an extra cylinder off the right side of the motor, har har har,” he said. “Here, har har har, take a look at this, har har har,” and with that, he walked behind the Daytona and pointed to the engine. Holy mackerel, I thought. It had been a 900cc triple. Now it was a 1200 four, and the added girth of that extra cylinder stuck out of the frame on the right.  They didn’t even re-center the engine in the frame.  Anything this crude, I thought, I had to have. Har har har, the CBX guy was right.  This was a machine worth owning.  I had to get me one.

I guess the feeling passed (they usually do), but that bike stuck in my mind.  I had pretty much forgotten all about that Daytona until one day when I received an email, way back in ’02, from my riding buddy Marty. It seemed there was a brand-new 1995 Triumph Daytona on Ebay.  7 years old, never sold, and the dealer in Wisconsin was auctioning it off on Ebay. In 2002.

Jesus, I was still on dial up Internet in those days.  I can still hear the squelching when I logged onto AOL to get to the Internet.  This can’t be right, I thought, as I studied the Ebay listing.  I called the dealer. He was a Ducati and Kawasaki guy now, somewhere in Wisconsin.  Used to be a Triumph dealer.  He got the Daytona when he was still selling Triumphs, he had put it on display (it was stunning), nobody bit, he was anxious to sell, he lost the Triumph franchise years ago, and he was finally getting around to unloading the Daytona. Yep, it’s brand new, he told me. Never registered. 0.6 miles on the clock. $12,995 back in ’95.  I already knew that.  It was beyond my reach back then.

I did the only thing I could think of. I put in a bid. Using dial up. On Ebay. My friend Marty was shocked. So was I.

Over the next several days, the price climbed. Then it was D-day. Then H-hour. Then M-minute. The bid was $7,195. For a 7-year old, brand new, originally $12,995 motorcycle. I waited until there were just a few seconds left and I put in a bid for $7,202. On dial up Internet. Nothing happened. That was dial up for you.

The auction ended, my dial up Ebay was flashing at me. I swore up a blue streak, cursing the genes that had made me a cheap SOB who wouldn’t pay extra for broadband.  I used dial up to save a few bucks, and now it had cost me big time.  I thought I had let that dream bike get away. Then Ebay announced the winner, and it was me.

Yahoo! (No, Ebay and AOL!)  I won!  Whoopee!

My dream come true, after arriving from Wisconsin by air. I had visions of flying to Wisconsin and riding back, but when I called, the dealer’s wife told me he was out front shoveling snow…
I know. Stunning. Mine. A dream come true.
Beauty like this can drive ya buggy. The aftermath of a CLASSIFIED high speed run across central California on Highway 58.

A few days later, I had the bike, and my dream came true. I put 20,000 miles on it, I rode the thing from Canada to Mexico on the 30th Anniversary Three Flags Rally with Marty (I was the only Triumph among the 400 bikes that rode the event that year), and then I sold it. A dream come true, and I sold it.  I know, I know.   What was I thinking?

I can still dream, I guess, and I often do, of that big yellow locomotive with one cylinder hanging off the right side…

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The Wayback Machine: Suzuki TL1000S

By Joe Berk

The year was 1997 and the Ducati V-twins had been dominating magazine covers for years.  Not to be outdone, two Japanese manufacturers produced similarly-configured V-twins (actually, L-twins).  Honda had the SuperHawk, and Suzuki the TL1000S.  I’ve always liked Suzuki better, so I went with the TL1000s.  Suzuki offered the TL in two colors….a forest green with red accents; and bright red with yellow accents.  For me, it had to be red.

My ’97 TL1000S, somewhere in northern Baja.

I bought my TL at Bert’s in Azusa.  If I recall correctly, I negotiated the guys down to $8700 out the door, and part of that was a Yamaha 650 twin I traded in.  I had bought the Yamaha used from a guy in a course I taught at McDonnell Douglas, thinking the Yamaha would be like my old Triumph Bonnevilles but reliable.  The Yamaha was a bust. It was too heavy, it had cheap fasteners, the Hopper/Fonda riding stance was awful, it didn’t handle, and it lacked the low-end grunt of my earlier Triumphs.

I remember riding the TL home from Bert’s.  The riding was awkward with the bike’s low bars and high footpegs, but I got used to it and I made it less punishing with a set of Heli-Bars.  The Heli-Bars were slighly taller and wider (you got about an inch more in each dimension, which made a difference).

A stop for fuel in Catavina. The guys sell gasolina from bottles along Mexico Highway 1.

The TL was the fastest and hardest accelerating motorcycle I ever owned.  It would wheelie in third gear if you weren’t paying attention, and it went from zero to 100 in a heartbeat.  The bottom end torque was ferocious.  Fuel economy was atrocious, and it had a tendency to stall at low rpm.  But wow, did it ever look good.  Did I mention it was fast?

My friend Marty had an Aprilia V-twin (a Mille, I think, or something like that), another bit of Italian exotica, that cost even more than the Ducati.  Marty’s spaghetti-bender was more than twice what I paid for my TL.  We swapped bikes once on a day ride and I came away unimpressed.  My TL was faster.

Baja a few years ago.  Younger, thinner, and hair that hadn’t turned gray yet. That motorcycle made me look good.

I wanted the look of a sport bike, but I’m not a canyon racer and the exotic look didn’t do anything for me once I had ridden the TL a few times.  Then something funny happened.  My Harley died on a Baja ride.  I nursed my Harley home, parked it, and took the TL.  Surprisingly, it did a good job as a touring platform.  And I could ride at speeds the Harley couldn’t dream about.  In those days, if there were speed limits in Baja, I didn’t know about them.

That first big trip on the TL instead of the Harley cinched it for me.  I bought sportsbike soft luggage and used the TL on many rides after that.  700-mile days in Baja became the norm (I could make Mulegé in a day; the TL wouldn’t break a sweat).  The only downside was the abominable fuel economy (the fuel light would come on after 105 miles), but a one-gallon red plastic fuel container and a bungie cord fixed that.  It was Beverly hillbillies, but it worked. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a hillbilly (somebody’s got to shoot those road signs).

TL1000S touring. The bike was a surprisingly good touring machine.

Even with the TL’s mid-30-mpg fuel economy, I only ran out of fuel twice.  Once was on the Bodfish-Caliente Road (one of California’s best kept secrets).  I didn’t have my gas can with me; Marty rode ahead and returned with a gasoline-filled water bottle he hoped wouldn’t dissolve (it didn’t).  The other time was on Baja’s long stretch headed south to Guerrero Negro.  That road runs straight as an arrow, and I ran the TL at a surprisingly comfortable 145 mph (still well below the TL’s top speed).  The TL was fuel injected and when it ran dry it was like someone shut the ignition.  I poured my extra gallon in and made it to the next Pemex station.  The guys I rode with were still far behind.

I had fun with the TL, but I dropped it a lot more than any other bike I had ever owned.  All the drops were my fault.  The low-mounted sport bars restricted steering, and once when pulling into my driveway, there wasn’t enough to keep the bike upright.  Before I realized it, the bike and I were both on the ground (my first thought was to wonder if anyone had seen me).  The next time the bike was in my driveway, facing slightly downhill.  I started it to let it warm up, and the bike rolled off the sidestand.  Again, my first thought was if anyone had seen me.  The third time was more dramatic.  The TL had a slipper clutch; you could downshift with reckless abandon.  The clutch would slip and not skid the rear tire.  It was cool, until I used it diving hard into a corner.  The curb was coming up quickly and I wasn’t slowing fast enough.  The slipper clutch was doing its thing, but when I touched the front brake, that was enough to unload the rear wheel.  It broke loose and I fishtailed into the curb.  I went over the bars, executed a very clean somersault, and came to rest in the sitting position looking straight ahead.  I had been watching the Oympics on TV the day before and I remember thinking (as I completed my dismount) I could be a competitor. A woman in a station wagon saw the whole thing.  She rolled down her window and I half expected to see a sign with a 10 on it (like they do at the Olympics).  “Are you okay?” she asked.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I answered.  “I’m a gymnast and I’m practicing.”  The window went up and she disappeared.

I loved the looks of the TL.   Yeah, the carbon fiber was faux, but I didn’t care.  In those days I was running a factory that made carbon fiber aircraft stuff and I never understood the attraction.  Even with fake carbon fiber, the TL was a motorcycle that looked fast.  And it was.

Serious miles were easy on the TL1000S.

Suzuki only made the TL for a few years.  Some guy in the UK killed himself in a speed wobble, the bike got an Internet rep as a tank slapper, and that killed sales worldwide.  Suzuki had a recall to add a steering damper, but the damage had been done.  Bert’s installed the damper on my TL, I couldn’t feel any difference , and my bike never went into a wobble (either before or after the recall).  My hypothesis is that the UK guy rolled on too much throttle exiting a corner, lifting the front wheel with the bike leaned over.  That will induce a wobble, you know.  There was another recall to fix the low speed stalling issue.  I guess it worked; my bike never had a low speed stall after that.

Suzuki offered a more radical fully-faired version called the TL1000R (I didn’t like its looks), but the TL-R didn’t survive, either.  The engine, however, proved to be a winner.  Today, 25 years later, a detuned version is still soldiering on in the ADV-styled V-Strom.  I never owned a V-Strom, but I should have.  Everybody I ever talked to who owned one loved the V-Strom.  Me, I loved my TL.

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The Legendary Fung Wah Bus

By Mike Huber

Ok, so throughout my life I have tended to do a LOT of dumb stuff.  Almost daily anyone around me is questioning how I am still alive. This is no exaggeration, but there is one activity I partook in that is by far the most reckless.  That is riding on the Fung Wah Bus.  Recently I was in a bar in Boston (yes, imagine that) and I was telling the story of the Fung Wah bus, which entertained the entire bar for close to an hour. My stories of this legendary form of transit must have been quite epic  as when cashing out I was told my entire tab had been paid.  So I thought a write up on my experiences around this hazardous mode of transportation would make for a fun read.

The Fung Wah Bus isn’t in service anymore for reasons described below.  It was a $10 bus ride from South Station in Boston to Chinatown in New York City. I was 27 years old, living just north of Boston.  A close friend was in New York City.  The bus always arrived on time, there was no hassle with airports, and it was just easy.

I was alerted to the dangers of this bus when I arrived to work on Monday.  My manager asked what I had done that weekend.  I replied I had gone to Manhattan to hang out with a friend.  He asked how the flight was.  “Flight?” I asked.  “I didn’t fly. I took the Fung Wah Bus.”  He doubled over laughing and said he paid me enough to do better, which was followed by several explicit adjectives.  I still heard him ranting about it an hour or so later.  I was a bit taken aback.

It didn’t take long for me to realize the history of this bus and the numerous safety violations and failed inspections that made taking this bus not only risky, but in hindsight, downright dangerous.  Massachusetts had even shut the service down a few times over the years.  These busses were flipping over, catching on fire, and wheels were falling off.  Outside that, though, the busses ran on time, no matter the amount of traffic or weather conditions.  They had this trip down to an art.  It was so honed that once when I was stuck in traffic on the Cross Bronx Expressway, a few cars in front of me I spotted a Fung Wah bus.  Here’s my chance!  I followed it off the expressway as it zigged and zagged through the narrow surface streets until it returned to the now less-congested expressway. I felt like a running back following a lineman as a blocker until I could see the end zone. What a rush!

With it being a 4-hour ride, the driver would always stop at a Roy Rodgers Restaurant for a few minutes to allow you to stretch, grab a bite to eat, and pray to the God of your choice for a safe remainder of the trip. To this day having driven that stretch hundreds of times in my car I never saw that restaurant unless I was on the Fung Wah.  Wherever the bus exited the highway, we all went into Narnia.

At the end of the day the Fung Wah never disappointed and although the bus was decommissioned like Old Ironsides, it provided some great stories and an economical way to get to New York City.  As I sat in a Boston bar finishing my Sam Adams, I was thankful to the mysterious patron who got my tab.  I am fortunate that this experience (riding the Legendary Fung Wah Bus) crossed my path.

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