Feel Good Stuff – Page 37 – The ExhaustNotes Blog

The Original Exhaust Notes

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

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

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

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

“Whatever you want,” Mr. Clark answered.

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

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

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

Natty Bumppo, the NY Times, and Shinya Kimura

One of my best friends from high school is a guy named Natty Bumppo. That’s not his real name, but it’s what he goes by when he’s out killing mockingbirds and I thought I’d use it here. Ol’ Natty sent a link to me for a NY Times story about what motorcycling in Manhattan has become (the story is in today’s edition). Natty has a knack for knowing what I like, and he sure hit the mark on this one. The cover photo, in particular, hit home. But there are a lot more photos in that article and they’re all good. They are in black and white, and that added to the feel of the article.

Anyway, the story reminded me of a piece I did for the CSC blog a ways back about Shinya Kimura. My photos for that piece were in color, but the nature of Kimura’s customs and the feel of his shop lent a sepia feel to the photos (even though they are in color). There are a lot of photos in this piece, folks, so it may take a minute or two to load.

When I rolled into the CSC plant yesterday, Steve Seidner asked me to come along with him to visit a shop a short distance away to meet Shinya Kimura, a man who builds custom bikes. Steve thought it might be fun to grab a few photos of Mr. Kimura’s shop, and I was all for that. Little did I know about what I would see.

From the outside, all I could see was a small shop (at least it appeared that way initially), but when I entered, I was immediately stopped dead in my tracks by one of the most beautiful custom motorcycles I had ever seen. It was a CB750 Honda (one of the very early ones) with an incredibly beautiful sculpted aluminum fuel tank. The overall effect was visually arresting. I had never seen anything like it. The lens cap came off my Nikon, I dialed the ISO up to 800, and I had started snapping away.

Steve introduced me to Shinya, and he invited to look around the shop and photograph whatever I wanted. And I did just that, not really knowing who this guy was. But the shop…wowee! It was more of a studio than a shop, and it was amazing.

Last night I went through the raw files I had captured with my little D3300 and I processed them in Photoshop. I think they are some of the best photos I’ve ever taken, but that’s not me bragging about my photography or my Photoshop skills. It was what I was shooting that made the photos what they are.

Enjoy, folks…

I was lost in the wonder of Shinya’s small slice of motorcycle Nirvana and I guess that was obvious. Shinya smiled at me and asked me what I thought about his place. “I’d like to live here,” I said. It was that cool.

I grabbed one last photo, and I think it was a good one…

Top This

I’m a big fan of electric motorcycles. I like electrical stuff in general and I spent most of my working life as an electrician with benefits. Harley’s new Livewire E-Hog is an impressive first effort but at $30,000 dollars a copy it is a lousy deal compared to E-bikes from other manufacturers. You can easily beat the Livewire in both speed and distance for half the cost but that’s not the Livewire’s major problem.

The Livewire’s problem is industry-wide. Harley and those other guys are trying to duplicate the internal combustion experience with an electric motorcycle and they are burning a lot of joules doing it. Electric motorcycles are not direct IC replacements and their riders understand this.

For motorcycles, battery technology today is not compact enough and recharges too slowly for a rider with no fixed destination in mind. Until manufacturers can agree on a standard-sized, easily swappable battery pack we are stuck waiting for the bike. The first battery operated power tools were like this: you had to plug the whole tool in and wait. No work could be done until the thing was charged.

With standard-sized batteries (within a product line) cordless power tools have nearly supplanted the old, outlet-bound stuff. It takes only a second to swap in a new battery and you are back on the job doing whatever it is that you do. No one has range anxiety because there’s always a hot battery in the charger ready to use. Tesla is working on speeding up charge wait times by swapping the huge battery in their cars and it only takes a few minutes. When an electric vehicle can pull up to a gas station and swap in a charged battery as fast as I can change my power drill battery they will have become viable transportation.

The reality is, manufacturers are not going to standardize battery sizes. The best we can hope for is a battery changeable along the lines of the power tool situation: each battery is specific to the brand. Even that will not happen soon and maybe if you move the goal posts it doesn’t need to happen for the majority of users.

That leaves commuting back and forth to work as the ideal use for an electric motorcycle. You can have a charging source at both ends of the ride and you will be busy working or puttering about the house while the bike charges so there’s no down time. Give up on the idea of e-bikes matching IC bikes in all instances. The highest and best use of electric motorcycles is a situation where you have time to kill between rides.

I know The Motor Company is not going to listen to me, but here goes: Harley, stop making expensive, high performance electric motorcycles. I’ve seen your lighter weight electric bikes and they are so far removed from the traditional Harley-Davidson customer they might as well be electric Buells.

Harley’s marketing for as long as I can remember has been based on heritage. Timeless styling and traditional products have served you well. For a successful E-bike look to your past and the Topper scooter; it’s the ideal commuter platform to modernize (not too much) and electrify. The boxy rear section can hold a huge battery bank without looking like it’s holding a huge battery bank. It’s a classic form that simply drips Harley-Davidson heritage and the youth of America will go gaga over the styling. Keep the thing below $4000 so a normal person can afford one. You’ll have to outsource most of the drivetrain components to keep the price reasonable but you can slap the parts together in an old V-Rod factory and call it made in the USA!

Seattle’s Chihuly Garden and Glass Museum

I was up in Seattle about a month ago, and while we were there, we visited the Chihuly Garden and Glass Museum. It’s just below the Seattle Space Needle. I enjoyed it, and if you are in the area and you want to experience something new, this is a place you might consider visiting. I had seen exotic blown glass in Venice (Italy, not California) a few years ago and I guess I was expecting to see more of the same, but trust me on this, the Chihuly Museum is unique. It features the blown glass artistry of Daly Chihuly, and it’s unlike anything I’d ever seen. The shapes, the colors, the size of the sculptures…all of it was amazing. Take a peek…

The Chihuly blown glass sculptures are huge, and it you look carefully at the photos, you can see people in the background and that will give you a sense of scale. The Nikon’s low light level capabilities came through for me here; these photos accurately portray what we saw in the Museum’s darkened interior.

There sure are a lot of interesting things to see here in the US, and I’m constantly amazed at how many of them I had never heard of before. The Chihuly Museum was in that category. There are other exciting destinations out there, and when Gresh and I find them, you’ll read about it here. Gresh is headed out to the Yamaha Endurofest in a couple of weeks (watch for that), and I’m headed overseas again. More good stuff coming up, folks!

The Future is YooHoo

I have seen it in my crystal ball. What the future holds. When our readers ask, we deliver. Fred, you da man. (ExNotes Disclaimer: I use that word in the non-gender-specific sense, in case any of our readers get their panties in a knot.)

No animals were harmed in crafting this blog. Please use responsibly.

Standby, Fredo. I’m going to get on my motorcycle and get me a bottle of this stuff. Our review is in the planning stages now.

Product Review: Marshalltown Grooving Trowel

We human beings spend a large percentage of our life-energy altering the Earth to better suit our desires. Take me, for instance. I’m constantly trying to rise up from Tinfiny’s mud-bound arroyo and beat Mother Nature into submission. New Mexico is no country for old men and I know I will lose in the end. We all lose in the end, our best efforts forgotten by the incurious, but that’s no reason to give up.

One of my favorite ways of taming nature is to pave it over with a layer of concrete. If it worked for Chernobyl’s smoldering, radioactive core it can work for Tinfiny Ranch. My latest attempt to delay the inevitable is the side patio. The ground on the north side of Tinfiny’s Carriage House was washing into the arroyo from heavy monsoon rains and, like the calcified bones of a long-dead Tyrannosaurus, the Carriage House’s foundation was laid bare. This is not good.

About 10-feet from the foundation I dug a footer and laid some blocks to serve as a seawall. I’ve been slowly filling it in with dirt, reburying the exposed foundation and compacting the fill in 8-inch lifts. It’s all going about as well as can be expected.

As I bring the north side up to grade I’m pouring a sloped, concrete patio to stop erosion and re-direct rain water away from the Carriage House’s foundation towards the arroyo. I love concrete as much as the next guy but even I know that great slabs of it are not the prettiest things to behold so I’m finishing the slab in smaller sections with each section grooved to resemble the cut blocks used in The Great Wall of China.

For grooving I’m using a Marshalltown trowel that I ordered online. The thing was not impressive right out of the box. It’s a flimsy looking tool that is not quite wide enough and it tends to create a border to your groove. You’ll need to practice a light hand for best results.

I thought the single direction canoe end would be a hassle, what with having to change the tool’s orientation with each stroke, but I was wrong. Grooving is much less labor intensive than edging so the back-and-forth motion used with an edger tool is replaced by a single stroke with the groover. One pass with this tool and the groove looks pretty well done. You’ll need to hit it a couple more times as the mud goes off but it’s easy as pie.

My initial reaction proved wrong: once you get the hang of it this thing really makes a nice groove. I’m free-handing the cuts just because I’m lazy and I don’t want all the lines perfectly square. The non-canoe end lets you get right up against the form. Except for making it a couple inches longer and a bit wider I am happy with how it performs. It has started to rust already but all my concrete finishing tools rust. I should probably oil them after use.

I’m so happy with the Marshalltown trowel I think I’ll keep on going around the side of The Carriage House and on into the back yard using the same method of construction. After all, you can’t let Mother Nature wash your house into the arroyo without putting up a fight.

The Three Flags Classic: I dropped out

If you’re waiting for blogs from me on the Three Flags Classic and updates on the RX4, you won’t get them. I dropped out before I even started. I don’t like to think of myself as a quitter, but that’s what I did on this one.

It came down to this: I’ve been on the road for the last two months nearly nonstop and I needed a break. I am not doing a very good job at being retired, and the travel just got to a point where it was overwhelming. I had a consulting gig with a large agricultural firm in Colorado, then it was more expert witness work (analysis and a deposition), a trip back east for my 50th high school reunion (that was a lot of fun, but it was another week of travel), a trip to Seattle for a friend’s wedding (lots of fun there, but yet another week of travel), a couple of runs up the coast to be with grandkids (more fun, but again, more travel), and on and on it goes. I don’t think I’ve been home more than two or three days in a row in the last two months.

Three Flags for me would have involved a full day on the motorcycle in 100-degree weather to get to Mexico today, a 681-mile motorcycle day tomorrow starting at 3:30 a.m. to get from San Luis Rio Colorado (in Mexico) to Cedar City (in Utah) through 110-degree weather on a holiday weekend, and another 1500 miles of riding to get to Canada over the next week. And then another 2200 miles or so to get back to southern California. It would be two more weeks on the road.

Baja John was going to ride with me, but when he considered the distances and the temperatures and the timing, he decided not to go. When Joe Gresh heard I wasn’t going, he thought about taking my place, but after an initial burst of wanting to go he came to the same conclusion as John did. Those two guys are smarter than me. What was I missing? At what point in your life do you decide you need to stop and smell the roses for a bit? At what point do you say: Hey, I made a decision that was too hasty and I need to reverse it?

For me, that point was yesterday. There’s nothing wrong with the RX4 motorcycle (in fact, it’s a great bike and the new ones are in port waiting to clear Customs now) and there’s nothing wrong with the 3FC19 ride. The timing’s just not right for me. I know I’m disappointing a few people with this decision, but I’m also pleasing a few people, and I’m one of them.

Ride Easy, Mr. Fonda…

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

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

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

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

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

Back in the saddle again…

Yep, just like that song, we’re back in the saddle again. We’ve got the email thing on the road to being fully squared away, and we’ve had a bunch of new folks sign up in the last day. Things are looking good.

Automatic Email Notifications

If you haven’t heard the word already, we’re having a limited time contest for folks who sign up for our automatic email notifications. Just add your email to the list, and for every 50 folks who sign up (even if you are already signed up), we’re going to give away a free copy of Destinations. You can sign up here:

The CSC RX4

I’m stopping by CSC Motorcycles tomorrow to get a photo of the RX4 I’ll be riding in the SCMA Three Flags Classic. Good buddy Steve asked how I wanted the bike configured and I told him what he already knew: Spotlights, the big Tourfella luggage, a phone mount, and I’m good to go. This is going to be one hell of a ride. Mexico to Canada on a CSC RX4. I’ll be the first to do this. More good times. I’m pumped and I’m eager to get on the road.

It’s going to be hot on the southern part of the ride, as the temps will be above 110 degrees. But as they say, it’s a dry heat. I’ve ridden in that kind of heat before, and I have a few strategies for dealing with it. I’ll be blogging the entire ride, so be sure to follow us right here on ExhaustNotes! And hey, if there are questions you want me to answer or things you want my opinion on related to the RX4, please post your questions here in the blog’s comments section.

The Triple Deuce

Nope, it’s not a car and it’s not a US Army truck. I’m talking about my .222 Remington Savage 340, a used rifle I picked up on the consignment gun rack at a local store 2 1/2 years ago for the whopping sum of $180. The Triple Deuce (as the .222 Remington cartridge is known) is one of those inherently accurate cartridges that just groups great without a lot of work (three others are the .308 Winchester, the .375 H&H, and the relatively new 6.5 Creedmoor). These are rounds that are just flat accurate. My .222 certainly groups way better than any $180 rifle has a right to do. I’m having a lot of fun with it.

I had the Savage out this past Sunday and it was shooting sub-minute-of-angle at 100 yards, and that’s close enough for government work. The stock has a few surface finish scratches (but no gouges that reach into the wood) and I’m going to refinish it. Before any of you get your shorts in a knot, the rifle is not an uber-collectible piece (so I’m not destroying its value with a refinish). I’m going to do my TruOil-to-perfection number on it. I may add a little stain to darken the walnut a bit. Or not. We’ll see. All the metal work on this rifle is perfect and I want the lumber to match. I’ll be posting the step-by-step project here on the ExhaustNotes blog, and you’ll be able to follow along as this labor of love progresses. And hey, if you want to read our other gun stories, take a look at our Tales of the Gun page!

Good times straight ahead, folks!

And yet more likes and dislikes…

We like seeing big numbers of folks on the ExhaustNotes site. We can tell how many people are on the site at any given time, which pages they’re viewing, and where they’re located (to the city or town level). We see folks from literally all over the world, and it’s cool seeing folks in really out of the way (for us, anyway) places.

Take a peek at the blog below about our email signup contest. You could win a free copy of Destinations just by signing up, even if you are already on the list. And yeah, we already had a healthy response, and yeah, we already randomly selected our first contest winner from the first group of 50. That’s good buddy Colorado Dan, and Dan, your copy of Destinations is going in the mail today. Sign up here, folks, and you might win a copy, too!