Category: Gear

Books

That photo above?  My good buddy JBFLA posted it on the Chinariders.net forum a few years ago along with the following comments:

I finally received Moto Baja. Another good read by Joe Berk. At 116 pages of light reading with lots of photos, it can probably be read in one sitting. It took me 3 sittings, with time spent perusing the excellent photos, and my mind wandering…imagining a ride to Baja…..and being chased by wild dogs.

Seeing that comment again got me to thinking about what the next book might be.  I have the urge to write.  I just have to decide about what.

My two favorite topics?  Motorcycles and guns.  I’m thinking about a gun book, as I’m about tapped out on riding books.  Maybe a photo book featuring fancy walnut gunstocks. The problem with a photo book, though, is that it cries out for color and books printed in color get expensive fast.  And expensive books don’t sell.

Fancy walnut on a .257 Weatherby Ruger No. 1.

We’ve done a lot of stories on gun stuff here on the blog; maybe a collection of favorite stories with just a few photos might work as a gun book.  It would be easy to put together.  Another thought is a Mini 14 book.  There are a few Mini 14 books out there, but none of them look interesting to me.  When we blog about the Mini 14 blog we get a ton of hits.  There might be a market for a Mini 14 book.

My Ruger Mini 14.

I’ve been trying to talk Gresh into writing a book.  He’s got a ton of good stuff that would work well as a set of collected works.  I mean, the man can make a 50-year-old air compressor story interesting.  Joe is that rarest of human beings:  A writer who sees things most of us miss.  And Gresh can describe these things so they become visible to us (and then make us wonder how we missed what Joe makes seem obvious).

Gobi Gresh, in (of course) the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert, man!

I’ve been after Gresh to write a book for years.  Help me out here, folks.

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Bond. Titanium Bond.

A watch is a personal and emotional purchase, much like a motorcycle or a rifle.   By definition, whatever you choose is perfect and the best; what anyone else chooses is not and is somehow indicative of a deep-seated character flaw.  I get that.

Having said that, I never got the attraction of an Omega wristwatch.  I know some folks love them and if you wear an Omega, more power to you.  It’s just not me, which is why I found the attractive young lady pushing the latest Omega at me amusing.

Omega, you see, never misses a marketing opportunity, and their latest product placement achievement is the new Bond movie, No Time To Die.  In it, 007 wears a titanium Omega Seamaster. The high end watch store in Palo Alto had a couple of the titanium Bond Omegas in stock, and the young sales lady was attempting what could only be described as a hard sell.  She was new to these shores, I think, and evidently convinced that if James Bond wore a titanium Omega, every man in America would want one as well.

“Bond wears,” she kept repeating, as if that was all it would take to get me to plunk down $9800 for an Omega (it would actually take a lot more, like maybe a $9700 discount).  Before I realized it, she had unbuckled my Casio Marlin (the best deal in a dive watch ever and one I wear frequently), and she had the titanium Bond on my wrist.  She would have made a good pickpocket.

“Bond wears,” she said again.

I wondered if she realized Bond is a fictional character.

The titanium Seamaster was light, almost like a plastic watch.  I could barely detect its presence.  I didn’t care for the look of the mesh bracelet, but damn, that thing was a feather.

“NATO Bond,” she said, pushing another titanium Bond Seamaster at me, this one with a cloth NATO band.  NATO watchbands…that’s another fad I never fell for.  They look cheap.  I was in the US Army and the only special watchbands I ever saw were the velcro bands paratroopers wear (they tear away if your watch gets caught on the door when exiting an aircraft…you lose your watch but you get to keep your arm, which isn’t a bad deal if you think about it).  I’m pretty sure guys in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization don’t actually wear NATO bands, but what do I know?

I like the look of a dive watch and I own a couple of them.  My tastes run toward high quality and low cost, so my personal favorites are the Casio Marlin (a watch I’ve written about before) and a Seiko Batman I bought at Costco a few years ago.  The Marlin was $39, it keeps superb time, it looks good, and it works well (it’s the watch I wore when I rode through Colombia).  The Marlin did just fine in the Andes’ torrential rains.  I’ve never tried the Marlin in the deep blue sea, though.  I’m not a diver and I really don’t know how well it would work as a dive watch.  But I’m not a fictional British secret agent, either, so unlike Daniel Craig I don’t need the titanium Bond watch.  If I need external inspiration, I’ll take it elsewhere. Bill Gates wears a Casio Marlin and even though he doesn’t have a blog or a motorcycle, he’s real and he seems to have done okay.  But I don’t need to emulate other people.  I just wear watches I find appealing.

I asked the young sales lady where she was from and she said Cupertino.  No, originally, I asked.  “China,” she said.  I asked where and she told me (it was a city in Hebei Province), I told her I had been there, and we chatted about the ride Gresh and I did across China.  She told me I had been to more places in China than she had.  I wore a Timex on that ride, I told her, like Napoleon Solo in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (the Chinese guys called me Dàshū, which means “big uncle,” so it sort of fit).  She laughed, but I’m pretty sure she didn’t know what I was talking about. Sometimes that makes for the best conversations.

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Pandas!

That Seiko watch you see on the right, known informally as “The Panda” in watch collector circles, is perhaps the best watch I’ve ever owned.  I bought it at the Kunsan AFB Base Exchange when I was a young Army dude in 1975 for the princely sum of $76, which was a bit of a stretch for me.  Oh, I had the bucks.  The Army didn’t pay us much, but we didn’t have expenses, either, so $76 was eminently doable.  In fact, I bought Seiko stainless steel chronographs from the Base Exchange for my Dad and my grandfather, too.  Their watches were only $67, but the Panda had the day and the date on the face, and three timing features:  Seconds on the main watch face, minutes on the lower subdial, and hours on the upper subdial.  It was a beautiful thing and it was all mechanical.  I wore it for about 10 years, and then when Ebay started to get popular I auctioned it away.  I was quite pleased with the results.  The watch that originally set me back $76 went for just north of $200 on Ebay 30 years ago.  Today, though, that same watch brings around $2000. I sold too soon. Go figure.

Anyway, being the watch junkie that I am, I was more than a little intrigued by a very similar watch now being offered by Breitling.  It is also an all mechanical watch Breitling calls the “Premier.”

I’d call it a Panda, and I’d sure like to own one.  But the Breitling MSRP is a lofty $8500.  They are just over $6,000 on Amazon, but that’s still way above my pay grade.

In poking around on the Internet looking at the Breitlings, I learned that they offer several versions of their Premier.  One is a model that pays tribute to the Norton motorcycle, which has different colors, old school numbers on the face, and a band that, frankly, looks cheap to me.   The colors don’t really work for me, either, but maybe that’s because I want my Panda to look like a panda.  If I wanted a Norton motorcycle, I’d buy a Norton.

Seiko is back on the Panda wagon, too, as is Citizen and perhaps others with modern versions of this classic watch design.  Their prices are way more reasonable, too, being in the $200 to $300 range. But the new Seiko and Citizen Pandas are solar-powered quartz watches.

There’s nothing wrong with electric watches (in fact, their accuracy is astounding), but I’m a mechanical guy.  I own a few solar watches and several battery-powered watches.  I like them all.  But there’s a certain cachet (a fancy word for cool) associated with a mechanical watch, even if you give up a little accuracy. I would like to wear that Breitling just to pretend I’m still a yuppie, but it’s not gonna happen.

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Citizen Nighthawk GMT

Another favorite watch and one I highly recommend:  The Citizen Nighthawk GMT watch.  I bought mine maybe 25 years ago when this model was first offered as an exclusive through Macy’s.  Today you can find them for sale through many different outlets (sometimes below $300).  One of the best spots is Amazon.

At 43mm it’s a big watch, but unlike a lot of big watches, it wears well on my wrist and doesn’t seem to want to roll around.  The Nighthawk has a lot of features, some of which I use on a regular basis and others that I use infrequently.  I like them whether I use them or not.  Watches are grown-up boy’s toys, and this one answers the mail for me.  There’s the standard date display at 3:00, there’s the slide rule (explained in an earlier blog on my first-gen Citizen Blue Angels watch), there’s the GMT feature (more on that in a second), there’s the Eco-Drive engine, and there’s a lume to this thing that just doesn’t quit.

That photo above?  I shot it with my iPhone in the dark a night or two ago, and other than cropping, it’s not been tweaked in PhotoShop.  The lume really is that bright and legible at night.  You can’t read by it, but you almost can.  It’s the brightest lume I’ve ever seen on a watch.  It’s so bright I sometimes wonder what it might be doing to me.  Wearing this watch might be the equivalent of living in Chernobyl for a month.

The GMT feature (GMT stands for Greenwich Mean Time) is one that allows you to simultanously see the time in two time zones.   This is one I use when I’m traveling (especially overseas).  Unlike other GMT watches, the Citizen’s approach is to offer another hand and a dial printed on the watch face.  It’s that half-circle deal you see with red and white lettering on the inner left half of the dial.  The way this works is when you are in, say, China, you unscrew the watch stem, click it halfway out, and advance the hour hand so it shows the time in China (it’s usually a 13-hour difference).  To see the time back home, you use the that inner half-moon dial and the home watch hand.  The home watch hand is the small hand (with a red aircraft on one end and a white aircraft on the other end), and it continues to show the time back in California.  You read the p.m. time on the red scale with the red airplane, and the a.m. time on the white scale scale with the white airplane.  It’s all very clever.

Citizen has had this watch available in one form or another for a couple of decades now.  Mine is the original version, and it’s the one I probably wear most often.  The Eco-Drive feature works, and it works well with just about any kind of light.  When I’m not wearing this watch, it sits on a shelf in my office, and the artificial light in there is enough to keep it percolating.  I set the watch to the time.gov NIST site, and months later, it is still accurate to the second with the official US government time.

The most recent versions of this watch are a black-faced version with an OD green leather band, or an all black version with a black leather band.  I saw the OD green version in a Macy’s up north this past week, and it’s a good looking piece.

Here’s the blacked out version.

Citizen’s had a lot of mileage with their Blue Angels themed watches, and that treatment has been applied to their GMT in stainless steel and leather band versions.

The two Blue Angels versions immediately above are not in current production, but they are still available.  I like this watch so much I’m tempted to buy the Blue Angels version, too, but that would be excessive even for a watch guy like me.

In general, I prefer a steel band watch to a leather band.  I like the look of the leather band better, but leather bands wear out or get dirty within a year or two.  Then you can’t always find an exact replacement for the original leather band.  I tend to wear a watch 24-7 (including in the shower), so a leather band is not the way I typically go with a watch.

Oh, one other advantage to these watches:  I sometimes forget to take my Citizen Nighthawk off going through airport security, and for whatever reason, it doesn’t trigger the metal detector.

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ExhaustNotes Product Review: Cooper 2 Lightweight Tent

Camping on a motorcycle has never been near the top of my Fun Things To Do list. Like it or not, it seems I end up camping on a motorcycle more than is needed for strong bones and healthy fingernails. Street bike camping is tolerable because you can pile junk sky high but trail riding with a load of camping gear is a chore. Off-road, small lightweight equipment is the way to go. I’ll never admit it but it’s possible to go too small and too lightweight. My tent is an example of going overboard.

I’ve been using an old-style pup tent, like the Boy Scouts use, and when folded correctly the thing is admirably small. The pup tent reduces to the size of a bag of Batdorf & Bronson coffee and weighs next to nothing.

The problem with the pup is the ceiling height and the square footage. There’s no way to sit up in the thing, you have to crawl in and out. Once you’ve stored all your gear inside finding space for you body is a challenge. If you toss and turn throughout the night like I do your arms will be hitting the walls and roof. It’s a tight squeeze.

Unless you buy brand name equipment camping gear is really cheap, like me. I found a larger tent; the Cooper 2 (no relation to the road racing legend) for $28 on Amazon and shipping was included.

The Cooper 2 is easy to set up as it has only two fiberglass poles crossing in the middle. You fit the ends into the corners of the floor and bowing the poles raises the tent. Nearly 50-inches high at the center and with 49 square feet of floor space the Cooper 2 was huge. I could stuff all my gear inside and still have room for my sleeping bag. I could easily change into my Space Patrol pajamas with the privacy those pajamas demand. You know how it is.

The Cooper 2 is vented at the top, which kept condensation to a minimum. I didn’t get to test it in the rain but I suppose it will do as well as any other 28-dollar tent. I set up my sleeping bag towards the back of the tent and had plenty of room to throw elbows and kick out from under the covers. It was the best night’s sleep I’ve had in a tent. Which is to say I woke up cotton-mouthed, fingers bleeding and a dead raccoon next to me.

All that luxury comes at a price, however. Folded up, the Cooper 2 is nearly twice as large as the pup tent and weighs 4 pounds 9 ounces compared to the pup’s 3 pounds 4 ounces. Still, the extra tonnage is worth it to me. I’ll just have to get rid of some other gear to compensate for the Cooper 2 tent, like maybe the handlebars or the front wheel of the Husqvarna.

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How Much Milk Is Left?

A few weeks ago I read a Wall Street Journal opinion piece by Peter Funt (of the Candid Camera show).  His article was on the pandemic lockdowns and isolation inducing more folks to publish their memoirs, and Funt made the case that this was not such a good thing.  Most memoirs are God-awful boring.

That got me to thinking about the adventure touring genre.  You know, the books, blogs, videos, and endless Facebook posts and forums about adventure rides.

Adventure rides.

We used to call a motorcycle ride a motorcycle ride.  Now they are all “adventure” rides.  And we don’t tell a story or do a bike test.  Now, it’s a reveal.  Harley is going to introduce a new bike in few days.  But it’s not a new model announcement.  It’s a “reveal.”

Ten to twenty years ago, the place to go to read good riding stories was ADVRider.com and their Rides page (back then, the stories and photography were actually good) and HorizonsUnlimited.com.  Now it’s mostly videos, Facebook, and blogs.  There’s too much of this (and I say that as guy who writes a blog).  I seldom view any of it.  Which is not to say you should stop reading ExNotes.  We’re different, you know.  We’ve never had a “reveal” (other than that one unfortunate wardrobe accident in China) and we never will.

All of the above begs the question:  How much milk is left in the adventure riding cow?

Fads come in waves, and a surefire way to know that a wave is dissipating on shore is when a big company tries to surf in on the little bit of surf that’s left.  Witness the Pan America, Harley’s too much, too late entry into the ADV world.  Harley wants to compete with the BMW GS, KTM, and Ducati high end ADV bikes.

It’s hard for me to see how Harley is going to prevail.  For starters, my feeling is that most folks who ride big V-twin cruisers (folks who form the bulk of Harley’s current customer base) have little interest in adventure touring.   The premise is that Harley will attract a new crop of customers, presumably drawing the sheeple who would have bought BMWs, or KTMs, or Ducatis.  Color me skeptical, but I just don’t see it happening.

No, what’s happening is a sea change, not an opportunity to do a little surfing in a dying market.  The world moves in fads, with each fad having about a ten-to-twenty-year life, and we’re due for a new one.  I just don’t know what it is.  Consider this:

    • In the 1960s, it was British vertical twins.  Those were cool years and the Triumphs, BSAs, Nortons, and Enfields of the day were cool bikes.
    • In the 1970s and the 1980s, it was Japanese machines (the so-called UJMs).   Honda’s 750 Four had five gears, and that fifth one was for the paradigm shift that swallowed the British empire and made us wonder if maybe Japan won World War II after all.  Four cylinders across the frame, with differences between manufacturers that could only be described as trivial.  The UJMs were kind of cool, too, but not as cool as the Britbikes (at least to my way of thinking).  But the Britbikes were toast, destined to emerge two decades down the road as the darlings of a small but well published vintage motorcycle market niche (and in case you missed it, that was a plug for Motorcycle Classics magazine).
    • In the 1990s, it was Harleys and all that went with it.  You know, middle aged guys becoming pirates and bikes festooned with chrome, leather fringe, and conchos.  I was one of them for awhile and I had everything but the tattoos.  Bikes that people with more money than brains bought (often paying over MSRP) so they could don do-rags, denim, and non-DOT helmets, and look pretty much exactly like all the other beer-bellied rugged individualists.  I was one of them for a while, too.
    • Sportbikes had a good run somewhere in the middle of all this, too, with ergonomics that guaranteed significant incomes for chiropractors and physical therapists, who frequently used that money to pay well over list price for a Harley (see above).  Guilty again.  You got me.  I had a TL1000S, a Triumph Daytona, and a Speed Triple.
    • With the turn of the century, the trend migrated toward 650-pound, liter-plus bikes styled like dirt bikes and equipped with electronics rivaling Air Force One.   Denim and do-rags were replaced by Power Ranger clothing.  Everybody wanted to be Charlie and Ewen, but few could afford the chase trucks and mechanics, and even fewer could handle one of the bloated beasts off road.  Most adorned driveways and Starbuck’s parking lots.  I mean, the headlight lenses on some of these things cost $1800; no way anyone was taking those wunderbikes into the woods.  I’m sort of guilty here.  I had a Triumph Tiger.  I took it off road just once and it was terrifying.

I think we are fast approaching the last throes of the overweight off-road $25K-to-$30K wannabee adventure bikes and their thousand-dollar Aerostitch-wearing riders…you know, the guys who stand on the pegs even when riding on level asphalt.  (Sit down, guys…your “sell by” date flew by years ago and I’ll say what everyone else is thinking:  You look silly.)

So what’s next?

Electric motorcycles?  Nope, I don’t think that’s going to happen in any major way.  Alta is gone, Zero is struggling, and the Livewire may have already suffered electrocution as a consequence of Harley’s rewiring.  Electric bikes don’t sound like motorcycles, the range is not there (it’s not going to be any time soon), and I think a motorcycle without an internal combustion engine really isn’t a motorcycle at all.  So what will be the next big moto thing?

Self-driving motorcycles?  Nope.  Dead on arrival, I think.

Even more “mode complexity” on street bikes?  Probably not.  That sort of thing appeals to juvenile minds (ones susceptible to Jedi mind tricks).  I think even the easily-led characters mentioned above recognize this as too gimmicky.  I once had a pimply faced kid ask me at one of the IMS shows how many modes our imported-from-China 250cc ADV bike had, and I told him:  Two.  On, and off.  He nodded knowingly, as if I had let him in on a great secret, and wandered off toward the Ducati booth.

I think the ADV thing is going to dry up, even though we are still seeing sales upticks in the motorcycle market.  Sort of.  ADV-style bike trends have been up, but it always was a relatively small market segment and the current increase (most likely the result of the “more free stuff” crowd rocking Washington these days) appears to be big but actually is not.  Dirt bike sales are up, but that’s for off road dirt bikes only.  Street bike sales are down about 10%.  And that thing about motorcycle sales overall going up?  Yeah, it is, but it’s mostly ATVs (of the 4-wheel persuasion, which are included in the motorcycle sales figures).  One bit of actual data, and that is this:  CSC can’t keep bikes in stock.  They sell out as soon as they arrive.  But CSC delivers real value at a very reasonable price…I don’t know that I ever saw an RX-Anything with conchos and fringe.  And CSC motorcycles are definitely not $25K driveway bling.  Yeah, the big bike ADV thing is fast approaching its “sell by”date, I think.  The fat lady is singing, folks.  It’s almost over.

So, given that the ADV milk is drying up, the next big thing will be…

Hell, I don’t know.

What do you think?  You guys figure it out and let me know.  And if you think you know, leave a comment here.  Curious minds want to know.

An Enfield Oil Change

This blog is a maintenance tutorial on changing the Royal Enfield 650 Interceptor’s oil.  The Interceptor requires a motorcycle-specific 10W-50 synthetic oil.  Motorcycle-specific means that no friction reduction additives are in the oil.  If you use an automotive oil with friction reducers, the Enfield’s wet clutch will slip.

I bought Maxima oil online for this oil change (you can get it from CSC Motorcycles or from Amazon.com).  It’s the synthetic oil CSC uses in their motorcycles and it served me well in my RX3 and TT 250 (both of which are wet clutch motorcycles).

I changed the Enfield’s oil in my garage.  I usually leave the Enfield on its sidestand, but I put it on the centerstand for the oil change.

The bike should be straight and level for the oil change.  This will let the oil drain more completely and make the oil site glass reading more accurate.

I have an oil drain pan I’ve used for years, and it was put into service again for this Enfield oil change.  You can see the oil filter in the photo below; it mounts on the front center of the engine.

Removing the oil filter for the first oil change was a challenge.  It was put on way too tight at the factory.  I have an accumulation of oddball tools in my rollaround tool cabinet, and I found this oil filter wrench.  I have no idea when I bought it or where.  It’s been with me for decades.

Even with the oil filter wrench, getting the oil filter to unscrew was not easy.

The oil filter finally came off, and I allowed the oil to drain into the pan.

The oil drain plug is just to the right and below the oil filter mount (as you face the engine from the front).

I guessed it was a 13mm, and I guessed right.  It, too, had been installed way too tight.

When the plug comes out, you’ll notice it has a crush washer (which doesn’t really look like a crush washer) and a magnetic pickup that sits in the oil bath.  The intent of that oil pickup is to grab any bits of loose steel that float around in the oil during the break in process (and after that, too).

As mentioned above, the oil drain plug is way too tight from the factory.  Be careful not to screw it up taking it off.  And remember when you reinstall the oil drain plug, it’s a steel part threading into an aluminum engine case.  Don’t overtighten the drain plug when reinstalling it.

Next up is removing the oil fill cap.  Mine was installed way too tight and if you’re taking it off for the first time you probably won’t be able to remove it by hand.  I grabbed a rag to protect the plug and persuaded it a bit with an adjustable wrench to get it started.  Once it was loose, it unscrewed easily.

After the fill plug was out, I let the oil continue to drain.  Note that there is no dipstick on these bikes.

I let the oil drain about 20 minutes so it would drain completely.

After the oil drained, I installed the new oil filter.   You can order the Royal Enfield oil filter if you want to wait months for the official Royal Enfield filter or you can hit Amazon.com and get a Mobil 1 M1-104A oil filter.  You can guess the path I took.

When installing the new oil filter, hand tightening (as tight as you can go by hand) is good enough.  Tighten it more and you’re just making life miserable for yourself at the next oil change.

So, here we are.  Oil drained.  Oil plug reinstalled.  New oil filter installed.  It’s time to add the new oil.  You’ll need a funnel at this step.  My advice is to use a plastic funnel that will deform when you flex it.

Wedge the funnel outlet into the oil fill port as shown below, and it will stay in place when you add oil to the engine.

There’s an oil sight glass on the engine’s right side.  The idea is to add enough oil (about 3.2 liters) so that the oil is approximately halfway between the lower and the upper fill marks.

After you see the oil level between the sight glass upper and lower level marks, reinstall the fill port cap and then start the engine and allow it to run for a minute.  The level will go down.  Add a bit more oil to get the level where it is supposed to be.

After adding a bit more oil, install the fill port cap, hand tighten it, and you are good to go.  Take the bike for a short ride and check for leaks.  And that’s it.

In case you were wondering, I called the nearest Royal Enfield dealer and asked how much they would charge for parts and labor to do what I described in this maintenance tutorial.  There’s no rocket science here, folks, and changing the oil is one of the simpler things you can do to maintain your motorcycle.  The dealer’s price for an oil change was a cool $170.  My cost to do what you see in this blog was about $50.

Our next tutorial will be on valve adjustment.  Stay tuned.

Malibu!

1.5 liters and 117 mph.  Don’t ask me how I know.

And at that speed, the Malibu rode on rails. Flat. Smooth. Planted. Well behaved. One with the road, in perfect harmony with the universe.  It was a glorious ride.

Color me impressed.  I rented Chevy Malibus on the last two secret missions and I loved the car.  I’m no James Bond and the Malibu is no Aston Martin, but as secret mission motor vehicles go, this is a cool car.  It would cruise easily at 85 mph, and jumping up to that big number listed above (117 mph) was effortless.

At first, I could only wonder what was powering the thing…a Z06 engine?

My preliminary Internet research showed the Malibu has two engine options:  The base model 1.5L four, and an upgraded 2.0L four.  Mine must have had the 2.0-liter four banger, I thought, because it was just flat quick.  There was nothing posted on the Malibu’s exterior to tell us how many hamsters were hiding under the hood, so Big John and I took a look.   Every secret agent needs a wing man.  Big John was mine.

1.5L.

Well, I’ll be.

How the hell did Chevy get that kind of giddyup out of a measly 1500 cubic centimeters?

Turbocharging.  That’s how.  But you could have fooled me.  The car has no markings to indicate it hides a turbo, there’s no discernable turbo lag, and it just feels good.

I think it looks good, too.

Chevy’s Malibu MSRP is around $23K, and that ain’t bad.  The car is roomy and comfortable.  There are no machine guns or passenger ejection seats, but the Malibu clocked around 40 miles per gallon.  In the real world, this thing checks all the boxes.

So what did I dislike?  Nothing, really.  Well, maybe that automatic engine shutoff at stop signs that all new cars seem to have these days, but I’m getting used to that.  I’m not in the market for a new car, but if I was, the Malibu would be at the top of my list.

Here’s another shocker.  It seems Chevy is going to discontinue the Malibu in the next year or two.  Discontinuing the Chevy Malibu.  We are living in a world gone mad.  I guess they are not selling, but I can’t see why.

Chevy, your marketing weenies are flat on their overpaid butts.  There should be lines around your dealerships waiting to buy these cars.  They are that good.  You should advertise with us.

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Shoot and Scoot!

I should have won.  It was politics, I tell ya…that’s the only reason the Axis prevailed.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

That photo above?  Like I said, I should have won.  That’s my photo.  I watched the two judges, stooges of the Axis powers, deliberate for several minutes, even delaying announcement of the winner while they looked for a plausible reason to deny what was rightfully mine.

Okay, back to the beginning.  Me and the boys used to hang out at Bob Brown’s BMW dealership on Saturday mornings, and back in the day, Bob and crew were always coming up with great ideas…you know, things to do.   They outdid themselves on the Shoot and Scoot deal.  You see, one of Bob’s BMW customers owned a camera store down in Chino Hills.   Between Bob and the camera guy, they had this idea:  Combine a day-ride to the Chino Planes of Fame Museum and a photo contest.  It worked for me.  I ride (my ride was a Triumph Tiger in those days) and Lord knows I’m a photography phreak.  I was in.

The day started with photo ops and donuts at Bob’s dealership, with a very attractive young model.   Attractive, yes.  Creative or unusual?  Hardly.  But I grabbed the obligatory fashion shot…

From there, it was a quick ride to the Chino Airport’s Planes of Fame Museum.  I’ve always loved that place.  The idea was to grab an interesting photo or twenty in a place jam packed full of interesting photo ops.  Trust me on this, boys and girls…if you’ve never been to the Planes of Fame Museum, you need to go.

Anyway, these are a few of my favorite shots from that day…I was working the Nikon for all it was worth and I was having a good time.  I could win this, I thought.

My last few photos of the day were of my reflection in that big radial engine you see above, and then it hit me.  Like a politician who knows never to let a good crisis go to waste, when I have a camera that’s how I feel about reflective surfaces.  I was getting some good shots of myself in the polished prop hub, and then it hit me.

“Hey Marty,” I said.  Marty is my riding buddy.  You’ve seen him here in the ExNotes blog in many places.  Mexico.  Canada.  All over the US.  “Get in the picture right here.”

And he did.  That’s when I grabbed the photo you see at the top of this blog, and as I saw the image through the viewfinder, I knew I had a winner.  It captured what the day had been about.  Great photography.  Air cooling and internal combustion.  Riding.  Friendship.

So we rode from the Planes of Fame Museum over to the photo shop and uploaded all our shots.  We returned that evening when the winners would be announced.  I wasn’t interested in placing.  I wanted to win.  And I knew I would.  Or at least I knew I should.  The funny thing was, the two judges were the camera store owner and the local Canon sales rep.  I could see they were having a tough time.  They were down to two photos, mine was one of them, and they were struggling with the decision.  I think my photo was the clear winner.  But alas, I shot it with a Nikon.  This was a Canon contest being at least partly sponsored by a BMW dealer (and I rode a Triumph).  The Germans and the Japanese.  The Axis powers.  Still trying to make up for World War II.  Not that it bothers me.  Much.  But I should have won.

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ExNotes Product Test: TR Industrial Demolition Hammer

Whenever I’m not riding motorcycles I like to break things into smaller pieces. It makes life just that bit less tiresome and one of the best ways to break stuff is with a jackhammer. A real jackhammer weighs 90 pounds and is pneumatic, also called air-operated. I used to run one when I worked in construction. A 90-pound hammer is a wonderful tool, and the weight is not a burden since you don’t really lift the thing often. I’ve found laying the hammer on your leg and pivoting the 90 to relocate the chisel is easiest. It seems like the heavier a hammer is the less vibration is transmitted to you hands. Less vibration means fewer blisters and less hand-bleeding. Properly handled you can run a 90-pound machine all day long as your pants slowly become covered in compressor oil blown from the hammer’s exhaust port.

As fine a proposition as a 90-pound hammer is, for most homeowners the large, engine-driven compressor required to supply enough air is a deal killer. For more refined destruction and with a nod to apartment dwellers look to the many 35-pound electric jackhammers sold everywhere.

I bought this TR Industrial 35-pound jackhammer several years ago for a concrete spalling repair job. The job required a lot of work on a scaffold so I didn’t want a big, heavy hammer to lift. The TR worked great and when the job was done I put it away in the included storage case.

Fast-forward three house moves and I had forgotten all about the TR hammer. It wasn’t until I was almost finished with the shed footing project that I remembered the thing and dragged it out to break up the hard, rocky ground the shed sits on. What an improvement over the pickaxe! The TR cut my digging time and was less tiring to use. It felt like I was cheating.

The TR jackhammer came with two tool bits: a flat chisel and a pointed bit. The flat chisel is great for breaking rocks and concrete. Remember, don’t start in the middle, you have to work from the edge when breaking concrete so that the broken piece has somewhere to go. If you’ve used a 90-pound air hammer don’t expect the blows from an electric 35-pounder to have the same effect. Everything will take longer.

I haven’t used this point bit yet but then I haven’t done everything yet either. It may come in handy on extra hard or thick concrete. Maybe I’ll split logs with it.

I recently bought a clay spade for the TR hammer and it is perfect for the ground conditions at Tinfiny Ranch. You wouldn’t use a clay spade on concrete but for rocky soil it plows right through. When lightly excavating an area to be formed, say you need to remove 2 inches of fill; the wide paddle makes it easy to eyeball grade and loosen just the top layer while not unduly disturbing the ground underneath.

Not all hammer bits are the same. The TR takes this hex style but note the impact end is round. Some bits are hex all the way, some are fluted, and little ones have a mushroom shape. Bits for the TR are plentiful and easy to order online.

To change the bit you pull this little spring-loaded widget out and rotate it.  Insert the bit with the cutaway facing the widget and reverse the operation. Bit changing takes seconds and the bits stay put.

All jackhammers are oily but the electric ones are less so. There is an oil reservoir built into the TR hammer. Regular motor oil is recommended. To fill the hammer you unscrew the sight glass and dump whatever slippery stuff you have inside. If you ran the hammer for 8 hours you might need to refill the reservoir but for my sporadic use a fill lasts months. Note that oil will leak out of the machine even if you’re not using it, so plan accordingly.

One of the things I don’t like on the TR jackhammer is the side handle. It looks flimsy as hell and no amount of tightening will keep it in place. I thought about wrapping duct tape around the hammer to make the handle fit tighter but decided the tape would just wear off in a few minutes. Since you don’t really push on the hammer I leave the thing as-is with the floppy handle. The floppy handle is convenient in tight quarters, swapping sides is easy.

The TR hammer is probably cloned from a well-known brand and there are quite a few hammers that look exactly like the TR on eBay and Amazon. The design seems to be open source now and I can’t comment on the quality of those other clones. I will say that which factory a tool or motorcycle engine comes from is important. There’s a lot of variation in things that look the same.

I give the TR Industrial version high marks and can recommend it if you like to break things. My hammer is an older version no longer produced but the one in the link is an updated machine with better electrical isolation for the operator. This might be important if you work in wet areas.

See more ExNotes product reviews here!