Motorcycles, Scooters, Guns, Adventures, Opinions, and More
My buddy Paul sent this to me. In our unending quest to bring our readers the latest in motorcycle technology, we are sharing it here. Check out this video of a Russian dude and his steam-powered motorcycle….a motorcycle that kind of looks like something Joe Gresh would cook up in the La Luz skunkworks.
Enjoy, my friends.
I met Charlie Wilson a couple of times when I was an engineer in the munitions business, so Charlie Wilson’s War
We made ammunition, mines, and cluster bombs in those days, and in the 1980s our business was (if you’ll pardon the pun) booming. My specialties were cluster bombs and mines; we had a sister division that designed and manufactured 30mm A-10 and 25mm Bushmaster ammo. Congressman Wilson’s interest in us was in the ammo side of the business, and as a relatively high-rolling young dude I was able to attend the meetings when he was in town. Charlie’s efforts were focused on arming the Afghan rebels trying to kick the Russians out of Afghanistan and back to the Motherland, and what they desparately needed was something that could knock down the Hind helicopter. That’s where we came in. The Hind was an armored helicopter (a flying tank, essentially), and we made 30mm ammo that could knock out Soviet tanks (which it did in droves during Operation Desert Storm, our war that would follow a decade later).
President Reagan didn’t want to give the Afghan rebels the shoulder-fired anti-aircraft Stinger missile, as he was concerned about those weapons falling into the wrong hands. But he was okay with providing purpose-built, shoulder-fired weapons that would use A-10 ammo. Now, I know what you are probably thinking: The A-10 30mm round has more muzzle energy than a World War II 75mm Howitzer round, and there’s no way anyone could fire one of those from the shoulder.
Well, hold that thought. The 30mm anti-Hind rifle was shoulder fired, but not in the sense we would ordinarily think of a shoulder-fired weapon. The deal was you backed up to a rock or a tree, put the butt of the rifle against it, and then sort of got underneath it. Like I said above, that’s where we came in. We provided the ammo.
Ultimately, the program outlined above was cancelled and President Reagan okayed selling Stingers to the Afghan rebels. Before the Russian chopper pilots could learn (but instantly and intrinsically came to understand) the words to Patsy Cline’s hit tune, Stingers were doing what they were designed to do. The Stingers were astonishingly effective, and within a few days of their arrival, the Soviets realized they were in Deep Geshitski (as they say back in Mother Russia). It wasn’t too long before they rolled back across the bridge to the Soviet Union. Come to think of it, not too long after that the entire Evil Empire collapsed. Charlie Wilson was one of the guys who made it happen.
I don’t mind telling you that I was in awe of Charlie Wilson, and when the book (Charlie Wilson’s War
The good news is that Charlie Wilson’s War
Want to see our blog on the might A-10 Warthog? You can do so here.
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Last year I wrote about the MacManus Award, a program I helped revive with the Rutgers University Reserve Officer Training Corps. Captain Colin D. MacManus was a US Army Infantry officer and an Airborne Ranger who graduated from Rutgers in 1963. Captain MacManus was killed in action in Vietnam in February 1967 and posthumously awarded the Silver Star for gallantry in action.
To commemorate Captain MacManus’ life, each year the MacManus family awarded a .45 Auto to the graduating senior who held his Rutgers Corps of Cadets assignment, and in 1973, that was me. The award was a very big deal to me in 1973, and it’s still a big deal to me today. I still shoot my MacManus .45 regularly.
The MacManus award fell away a few years after I graduated, but we were successful in restarting it in 2020. The young man who won the MacManus award last year communicates with me regularly. He’s now a US Army Infantry lieutenant going through the Ranger School at Fort Benning Georgia. Good people, these are.
My good buddy at Rutgers, Colonel Javier Cortez, selected the top cadet at Rutgers for the 2021 graduating class, and I’m happy to report that this year’s honoree will receive his 1911 from the Colt company (last year’s award was a Springfield Armory 1911, another fine handgun). This year’s Colt is the Classic Government Model just like you see in the photo at the top of this blog, and Colt is putting some special touches on it through their Custom Shop. That’s the same Colt model I was awarded in 1973, I’ve put a few tons of lead through it since then (230 grains at a time), and my Colt is still going strong.
Because of the pandemic, there was no award ceremony last year. We’re doing the award ceremony via Zoom this year, and I’m looking forward to it. If you would like to read more about MacManus award and its revival last year, you can get to it via this link:
This is good stuff, folks, and I am delighted to be associated with the effort. These are fine young men we are honoring. I’m proud of them, and I know you are, too.
Keep up with all the good ExhaustNotes stories!
I may seem like a cranky old man but I’m not that old. I admit I don’t like many of the useless widgets and features coming out on new motorcycles. As a rule they do nothing to enhance the feel of the wind or the joy of riding. Oh sure, they may make motorcycling safer and protect riders from themselves but the additional weight, more frequent breakdowns, and costly repairs (due to excessive complications) hardly seems worth it to me. I would go as far as to say a 1985 Japanese bike is more reliable than most any 2021 motorcycle.
Listen, I’m a booster for motorcycling. I know manufacturers need to sell new bikes and new bikes need to appear improved over older models. I don’t want you to think of me as a negative person and a killjoy about your fancy-pants electronic-nanny bike. If you imagine you’ve found something you like and feel happy about I’m good with it. And there have been a few improvements to motorcycles since I started messing with them. Keep in mind that I’ve been riding since the late 1960’s so some of the things I think of as new are not actually all that new.
Modern disc brakes are the biggest improvement to motorcycles. I rode for many years on bikes that would not lock the front wheel no matter how hard you squeezed the lever. Not only were the old drum brakes weak, they faded so badly going downhill that often the rider was left with no brakes at all. The first mass produced disc brakes in the 1970’s were a huge leap but nothing like the new multi-piston, multi-disc brakes on modern bikes. Motorcycle brakes became so good manufacturers had to hobble them with anti-lock systems to keep riders from crashing in a panic situation. You really can flip over frontwards on some bikes. My Husky 510 has a dinner plate sized disc that is a miracle of stopping power and it doesn’t come with a safety net. In the dirt I use one, very light finger. On pavement two fingers will stand the bike on its nose. I like having that power even though I’ll probably wipe out using it.
Fuel injection is the second best idea but you have to make compromises with complexity. Carburetors are relatively easy to adjust and owners can screw them up with just a few simple tools. Fuel injection requires some type of reader or display to tune. Aftermarket companies sell all manner of work-around black boxes and mapping programs. I’d say tune-ability is a toss up between the two fuel/air mixing systems.
At a fixed altitude, humidity, temperature and barometric pressure a carbed bike can run just as well as any injected bike. My token modern bike, the Husky 510, has FI but the rest of my bikes have carburetors and I manage to get from Point A to Point B just fine. I accept FI’s extra complexity because fuel injection works great. Over extreme altitude variations fuel injected motorcycles run so much better than carbed bikes you could almost miss their biggest advantage: less clogging. In a perfect world, a world without alcohol blended in, our gasoline carburetors do an acceptable job. The problem is modern fuel has such a short shelf life that, left to absorb moisture and drop out of suspension alcohol fuel can clog up carbs in just a few months of storage. Draining the carbs before parking the bike more than a month is mandatory.
Once past the fuel pump a fuel injection system is sealed off from oxygen and the elements, drastically improving gasoline’s shelf life. Even if the fuel does goes off in the tank the high fuel pressures of fuel injection tend to pump the crud on through. It’s still possible to gum up a fuel-injected bike sitting long periods of time but much less likely.
O-ring chains are not really new but the most recent versions are incredibly good. My early experience with O-ring chains saw the little o-rings go missing and the chain ended up no better than a plain old chain. After that I stopped using them for 30 years. Skip forward a few decades and it’s not unusual to get 20,000 miles or more out of a brand name O-ring chain. Give an O-ring chain a shot of 90–weight oil every 400 miles or so and you’ll be riding carefree minus the heavy parts of a shaft-driven motorcycle. Belt-drives are good, too, but every time I’ve taken a belt driven bike scrambling the belt starts squeaking and it takes a thousand miles for the noise to go away. On small displacement motorcycles O-ring chains do add a bit of drag but don’t trouble yourself over those things.
Tubeless, spoke rims are a recent development and they are a great new idea. Besides looking cool as hell, tubeless, spoke rims combine the easy hole patching ability of tubeless tires with the light, strong construction of spokes. I don’t know what took so long but I’m all for it, brother. One place I see a potential problem is running low pressures off-road but that has nothing to do with the wheel. If you’re trail riding at 15psi I suggest you stick a tube in your tubeless spoke wheel. I like the looks of spoke rims on a motorcycle but I also like being able to stab a tire plug in a flat tire and be on my way in 5 minutes. Tubeless spoke rims are a win-win idea. One day maybe I’ll have a bike with them fitted.
Liquid cooling has been around since gasoline engines were invented but I still think of the application in motorcycles as modern and one of the best ideas. Besides a few odd bikes like Scott and Suzuki most bikes were air-cooled until the mid 1980’s, and 1980 seems like yesterday to me. The big advantage to liquid cooling is the ability to tune the bike with one less variable to worry about: you know within a few degrees what temperature the engine will be 98% of the time. There’s also a sound deadening benefit that has become more important as we move forward into an eerily silent, clean world.
I own two liquid-cooled motorcycles and the extra complexity of the cooling system has not caused a problem on either one. I forget they are liquid cooled. My old Yamaha V-Max developed a leaky water pump at 80,000 miles but once fixed it rolled on to 112,000 miles without a hitch. Unfortunately, that bike was sunk in one of the many hurricanes that struck the Florida Keys during my time there.
These advancements in motorcycling have made bikes safer, quieter and more reliable, but not any more fun. I enjoy riding my old air-cooled, drum braked, carbureted, tube-tired, non-O-ring chained, Yamaha two-stroke best of all. It goes to show that as we move into the silent, safe, modern world the biggest and best ideas in motorcycling are still inside your mind.
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Here at ExhaustNotes.us we’ve been discussing the possibility that we may have more motorcycles than anyone actually needs. Personally, I have more motorcycles than I can afford to insure. I can’t ride them legally so the bikes sit in my shed gathering dust. Berk, who has a much smaller shed, is taking aggressive action on the issue by selling off some unused bikes. It’s inspired me to do the same. But which bikes? How many motorcycles do I need? I don’t want to end up one of those hoarders who die leaving Meacham’s auction house to pawn my junk off to the other hoarders.
For the sake of argument lets say X equals the number of motorcycles that your ability and status in life can keep maintained and running. Besides remorseless economics and mechanical talent there are the bikes that have a sentimental meaning to you that goes beyond reason and harsh reality. We’ll call that value Y. For example, you may never get that Norton put back together but if the fact that it exists in your shed brings you happiness why am I judging?
If all we had to deal with was X and Y we could plot the number of owned motorcycles on a simple two-dimensional graph but life is not lived in two dimensions. Reality demands that we consider Z, with Z being the amount of space you have to store the motorcycles. If the value of Z, Y and X were infinite you could collect all the motorcycles. I mean all of them. No one else could own one because you would have the entire world’s output of motorcycles. The problem is X, Y and Z are never infinite; even if they were and you owned them all who would you ride with? Nobody.You’d be a lonely, bitter soul. By simple logic we have determined an upper limit on motorcycle ownership: all of them minus one for your riding buddy.
Since this is a motorcycle blog I will assume the readers like motorcycles. Hence, pandering to the mob dictates that one motorcycle is the lower limit on motorcycle ownership because a story on motorcycle ownership that didn’t involve motorcycle ownership cannot exist in the intellectual vacuum of the Internet.
There are a vast number of motorcycles between one and all of the motorcycles minus one. We can narrow the field a bit by eliminating BMW motorcycles as no one likes them anyway but that still leaves a lot of bikes. I think it’s better to start from the other end, the end that starts with one.
If you can only have one motorcycle (X, Y and Z= jack-all) then that one motorcycle better be an enduro-type. A combination dirt/street motorcycle is the one to have if you only have one. As X, Y and Z grow larger a street-specific motorcycle is handy for highway rides. That makes two bikes and I really feel two is the minimum number of motorcycles regardless of your situation. You’ll just have to put your nose to the grindstone and increase your X/Y/Z, Bubba.
If we break down street bikes into touring, sport, and vintage categories and dirt bikes into enduro, motocross and vintage you could make the argument that six motorcycles are the minimum amount required. You’ll also need a mini bike for bopping around your ranch and a lightweight moped for running down to the post office. This brings the total to eight motorcycles and I feel that eight motorcycles show a good level of commitment to the motorcycle pastime.
With eight motorcycles on site visitors to your home will rightly expect you to loan them a motorcycle and take them on a little tour of your surroundings. Don’t do it. Your bikes are your bikes and if your visitor crashes one it will poison the friendship. Better to own a loaner bike, one you don’t care about for those pesky hanger-onners. An extra copy of your loaner motorcycle will make visitor rides more fun as neither rider has the upper hand in equipment. So you’ll need ten motorcycles to adequately maintain friendships. A small price to pay in the grand scheme of things.
Once you’ve got ten motorcycles you may as well go ahead and get a couple nostalgic trinkets from your youth. Maybe a nice example of the first bike you ever owned or the motorcycle your ex-spouse made you get rid of because you had kids. Maybe it’s the bike your dear old dad owned or the model of motorcycle that decapitated a school chum. There are all manner of excellent reasons to own up to sixteen motorcycles.
Moving far from town and building a large shed to house all your motorcycles is a tell tale sign that you may be overdoing things a bit. Living on canned soup, scouring the Internet for motorcycles to buy is not the healthiest lifestyle but it’s not the food choices that get you in the end. Once you start building multilevel lofts to store motorcycles in inaccessible places you are one small earth tremor away from being buried alive by motorcycles.
There’s something about walking in a shed without having to turn sideways that appeals to me. Our economy is built on over consumption. I’m at eight, maybe nine motorcycles now and I’m feeling like I should get rid of a few. So how many motorcycles are too many? What is your comfort level?
I didn’t even feel the needle as she stuck it in my arm. That’s how wired I was. Finally, light at the end of the tunnel. Another shot in 21 days, and two weeks after that I should have immunity to Covid 19.
Sue and I took the plunge yesterday in San Bernardino, although for us it wasn’t a plunge at all. I was in one of the high priority groups because of my age (I turned 70 a few days ago; Sue just squeaked in). We waited in a well-organized line for about 2 hours, which seems like a long time as I sit here typing this, but it went by very quickly. I brought along a book (Mindhunter
Some folks have told me they won’t get the vaccine because they know a guy who knows a guy who said (fill in the blanks with the tinfoil-hatspeak of your choice). I don’t know how to respond to such remarks, but my body language probably shows through the K95 mask that covers most of my face these days. Folks, this is not the time to let ill-conceived and whacko conspiracy theories interfere with reality. Save that stuff for the Kennedy assassination, election fraud, and the other things that muddle and mislead simple minds. I personally know (or I guess I should say knew) several folks who died from this disease, some of whom I’ve written about in this blog. Check your tinfoil hat at the door, get the shot, and thank your lucky stars we are living in a time when a vaccine can become available within a year of a worldwide pandemic hitting our planet. And think about the rest of the people in the world. Do you want to be someone who gets the disease and infects others?
Me? I’m looking forward to many more years of living large, exploring the world, poking around down in Baja, riding my motorcycle, and spending time on the range. I want you to be able to do the same.
Another blog title dilemma. I went with the one you see above. I almost went with “Quoted by the NY Post.”
This is a blog about a dynamite So Cal loop ride, one that I covered for Motorcycle Classics magazine a couple of years ago and one that was (as the saying goes) critically-acclaimed in the NY Post. No kidding. I’ll get to that in a second or two. First, the ride: It’s circumnavigation of the San Gabriel Mountains, with a stop at the Devil’s Punchbowl State Park. The Punchbowl was burned out during one of the recent California wildfires, but it will be back. Here’s the route:
This ride includes a stretch along the northern side of the San Gabriels, a hop over the San Andreas Fault, Mt. Emma Road to cut around the northwest corner, the magnificent Angeles Crest Highway, and more. I like to start south of the San Gabriels and head up through Cajon Pass on I-15, grab the 138, and then take a quick left on Lone Pine Road. That’s a nice long climb up into the San Gabriels, it’s desolate, and it’s scenic.
I wrote up this ride for Motorcycle Classics, and suprisingly, the NY Post newspaper had nice things to say about it. They prepped an article critiquing other motorcycle mag articles, but they liked my piece. Here’s what they had to say:
Funny how it’s Motorcycle Classics, a magazine focused more on the bike than the ride, that really revved our two-wheeled wanderlust.
Joe Berk takes us on a ride through a passage in California’s San Gabriel Mountains called “The Devil’s Punchbowl.” The piece opens with a picture of a San Andreas Fault sign. Berk only gets one page to draw us in, but he has us ready to put our keys in the ignition.
“The Nirvana-like northern segment through the San Gabriels’ scenic twisties is … where the fun begins,” Berk advises. Later he describes a “ragged and rugged canyon” created by “a misbehaving San Andreas fault.”
Having indulged in the “crisp pine-scented mountain air” and taking in views of the Mojave Desert to his right and the San Gabriel summits to his left, Berk stops to recommend the French toast at the Grizzly Cafe. “You can thank me later,” he writes.
You can read the NY Post article here (you might want to see what they said about a couple of the other moto mags) and the Motorcycle Classics Devil’s Punchbowl story here.
You probably already know this, but both the guys who write the ExNotes blog (yours truly and Joe Gresh) are well published. You can read some of Gresh’s work here, and some of mine here.
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Like the title says, the best things in life are free. I wrote about that awesome and classic Star progressive reloader a friend gave to me (you can read the story about bringing it back to life on our Resurrections page). The Star is producing high quality .38 Special ammo and I am thoroughly enjoying it.
Here’s something different…two of the best movies ever that you can watch for free on YouTube. It’s coincidental, I guess, that they both use the number 12 in their titles. They are both great movies. Classics, in my opinion.
The first one is one I just learned about on the same day I picked up the Star reloader. It’s 12 Angry Men, and I read about it in a Wall Street Journal review. There’s a recent remake of the original movie (I haven’t seen it), there’s what I thought was the original movie (the one you might have seen in which Henry Fonda plays the lead role), and there’s this one, the actual original 12 Angry Men. Having never seen it before I watched it the night I read about it in the WSJ, and I was blown away by how good it is.
12 O’Clock High is another classic movie that’s free on Youtube. It’s one that’s used in executive leadership training programs in the corporate world, and it’s one of the best movies ever for exploring management and leadership issues. It’s a wonderful movie, and I think you’ll like it.
And this blog…it’s free, too, as you know. So is an online subscription to it. You can sign up below.
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You probably don’t see me as a TV junkie who could spend 60 hours in maybe three weeks watching all 60 episodes of a telenova, yet here I sit after doing exactly that. And I’m not ashamed to admit I enjoyed it immensely. The series is Bolivar, it is currently running on Netflix, and both Sue and I were hooked on it 10 minutes into the first episode.
I think what made it special for me were my two trips to Colombia, one about 15 years ago for work, and the other 5 years ago (Good Lord, has it been that long already?) for our Zongshen-mounted circumnavigation of the Andes Mountains. Bolivar was filmed entirely on location in Colombia, and having been there myself, I recognized many of the places in the series.
When we stayed at Villa de Leyva in Colombia, Juan and Carlos explained that it was often used as a filming location. While we we were there, a crew was filming a scene one evening. Juan told me that one of the actors was well known in South America. I didn’t know who she was at the time, but in watching Bolivar, I realized the woman I had seen that evening in Villa de Leyva was, in fact, the famous Colombian actress Andrea Gomez.
The Colombia ride, as mentioned above, was not my first trip to Colombia. I had been there about 10 years before on a business trip and we spent a day in Cartagena. It was a fun trip, too. Here are a few photos from my 2006 trip.
So there you have it. Bolivar, Colombia, and more. The Netflix series hit home for me, probably because I had visited Colombia, but even if you haven’t I think you’ll enjoy it. I’m lucky because I’ve been there, and because I always travel with a Nikon
Want to see more of Colombia from the seat of a motorcycle? Check out the Colombia adventure on our Epic Rides page!
Some folks called it the Christmas Star, but it’s actually Jupiter and Saturn, two planets that came into alignment earlier this week. It won’t happen again for another 800 years, they tell us. I don’t really have the right lens for this sort of thing and I was fumbling around in the dark trying to find the right shutter speed and aperture. Yeah, I could have done better, I suppose…I would have liked to get the two planets a lot sharper. The one on the left is Jupiter, and it’s a cool 500 million miles out there (you can see all four of Jupiter’s moons). The planet on the right is Saturn; its oblong shape is due to the rings around Saturn. Saturn is 750 million miles away.
So here we are: Christmas 2020. Our best wishes to you and your families for the holidays. Christmas is different this year, and it has been a different year in many ways. The Covid 19 pandemic has dominated nearly everything in 2020, and like everyone else, we sure will be glad when this curse is in the rear view mirror. One of my daughters works in the healthcare field and she was one of the first to receive the vaccine earlier this week. We’re hoping to all get vaccinated in the next few months. Sue and I will get prioritized because we’re geezers (some of you are, too). 2021 will be a better year.
We’ve been staying home, which is what most folks here in the Peoples Republik of Kalifornia are doing these days. It’s tough being on lockdown, but there are still things worth doing. A couple of nights ago we watched a live Blind Boys of Alabama concert (that’s them above) on the computer and it was awesome. We’ve seen the Blind Boys in person a couple of times. If you ever have a chance to listen to this gospel group, don’t let it get away. Trust me on this; these guys are amazing.
I’ve been catching up with a lot of my friends the last few days…some on Facebook, some on Facetime, some on the phone, and one or two in person at the rifle range.
Baja John and I caught up via Facetime yesterday (that’s him above with his family at home in Mexico). I miss riding Baja with John; we’ve done some great rides down there.
Other than that, we’ve been homebodies for the last several weeks. I’ve been doing a little writing, a little blogging, a little reloading, and a little shooting. The Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site story just published in Motorcycle Classics (I was there in 2019); you can read it here but you would do better to subscribe to the magazine…it really is a first class publication with awesome stories and photography.
So that’s it for today. Here’s hoping Santa was good to you, and here’s another wish for a happy and healthy 2021. Merry Christmas, folks!
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