Category: Gear

Tie Back Action!

Tinfiny Ranch is a steep and rutted place. Located in the foothills of the Sacramento Mountains we get a lot of runoff. When it rains water flows through the joint with alarming speed carrying off soil as fast as I can put it back. After living here only 4 years we lost 18 inches of dirt and the house’s foundation was laid bare. The solution to handling intermittent, mass quantities of water is terracing and concrete. I built a long retaining wall and back filled it with dirt but I wanted a bit more tip resistance than just the extended foundation and concrete slab top would provide. The new grade is much gentler slowing the speed of the water and directing it away from the house.

Enter the tieback. The tieback is a belt and suspenders type of thing. In my case I bent a loop on pieces of 5/8” rebar, ground the ends as round as I could by free hand (If I only had a lathe!) and threaded the bar for 5/8 coupling nuts.

The nuts spin on to the threaded rebar until tight, but seeing as how the threads were kind of ragged on the rebar I decided to give them a lick of weld to ensure the bar won’t pull out of the nut. I used an Oxy-Acetylene welder because it’s the only type of welding I can still see.

After welding the tieback I dug a T-shaped hole for concrete. In this setup the concrete is mostly there to protect the rebar from rusting. Any tipping force on the wall tries to stretch the rebar and pull the cross piece through the dirt.

The rebar connects to a 5/8” threaded rod cast into the poured concrete columns. These poured columns tie each 8-foot section of wall together and have a L-shaped foot protruding on the fill side. The L-foot column is yet another tool to prevent tipping.

Once poured, the tie back is buried and the dirt compacted. About 6-feet long with a 24-inch cross bar, one of these tiebacks anchors each 8-foot section. The idea being the wall would have to move a lot of compacted, dry dirt to fall over.

The wall has 3/8” rebar every few cells of the block sections. This rebar is poured into the foundation of the wall and all the block cells are filled with concrete. The 3/8” rebar stands proud of the final slab elevation.

Capping all this monkey-motion, the protruding 3/8” rebar is bent over below the finished grade of the slab and tied to more steel. Another rebar runs parallel along the wall to emulate a cap. Then the slab is poured making a nice beer drinking or steak grilling patio.

Obviously if you’ve read this far you’ll realize I’m not an engineer so all this may be excessive or futile but to tip the retaining wall you’ll have to lever the foundation L-feet, pull the tie backs through the dirt and drag a 30-foot long by 10-feet wide patio across the ground. It’s not impossible given enough ground saturation but the wall is only 4-feet tall at its highest and I’m hoping the slab keeps the dirt beneath dry.

If this wall fails I’ll just leave it for fill and start another wall a few feet away from the wreckage. It’s been a fun project and I plan to extend the retaining wall another 30 feet after this year’s monsoon season is over.

Product Review: Hoford hair clippers

I don’t like barbers, and for good reason:  When I was a little kid, I was traumatized by one.  I didn’t know that’s what you call what happened to me at first (more on that in a bit), but I sure was.  Traumatized, that is.

The story kind of goes like this…I grew up in a rural part of New Jersey.  Yeah, we were only 40 miles outside of New York City, but in the 1950s central Jersey was farmland, most folks built their own houses (like my Dad did), doctors made house calls (ours did), you could shoot a gun in your backyard (we did), and several towns shared one barber.  We did, and he was Charlie the Barber.  He probably had a last name, but to us he was simply Charlie the Barber.  Usually my Dad took me to Charlie’s when he needed a haircut, but on this one day that task fell to Mom.

I was only about 4 years old, but this business of going to Charlie the Barber with Mom (instead of Dad) represented change, something I knew I didn’t like even at that tender young age, and I was already feeling a little uneasy when it was my turn in the big chair.  Charlie was a little guy who was a flurry of motion, and to be blunt, he made me nervous.  He was one of those barbers who was constantly snipping mostly air.  Snip snip snip snip snip, and maybe on the fifth or sixth snip the scissors would zoom in and get a little hair.  Scared me, Charlie did.  He wore a white jacket and had slicked-back jet black curly hair (he used way more than just a little dab of Brylcreem), he had this pencil thin mustache, and he had a voice kind of like Dudley Do-Right (you know, Bullwinkle’s buddy, of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police).  The voice, the mustache, the flashing and slashing scissors, the slick hair…the words didn’t match the music.  I didn’t know what it was, but something was off and it made me nervous.

So I’m sitting in this elevated barber chair, the scissors were swimming in front of my face and all around my head snipping furiously at nothing, and I’m thinking in my four-year-old mind this is not a good situation.  Then, what happened next was really bad.  Remember I mentioned the country doctors who made house calls?   Well, ours was Doc Bristol, who weirdly enough looked exactly like Doc on Gunsmoke (i.e., Milburn Stone).  Doc Bristol, I suppose, was a nice enough guy, but he’s another dude who made me nervous.  When Doc Bristol came around, it usually meant things like hypodermic needles weren’t far behind, and to this day, I don’t like needles.

“Ah, I see you got little Berky on the hot seat,” Doc Bristol said.

“Snip, snip, snip, snip, snip” went the silver scissors millimeters in front of my face.  Charlie was on fire.  He was in the zone.  Zip codes hadn’t been invented yet, but I didn’t like the one he was in.

“Cut one of his ears off,” Doc Bristol said, “I need the business.”

That’s all it took.  I went nuts.  All fours year of my existence went absolutely dogshit nuts.  I screamed.  I wiggled.  I slid out of the chair with a lopsided, unfinished haircut.  You don’t tug on Superman’s cape, you don’t spit into the wind, and you don’t tease a four year old. I ran out, screaming all the way home.

The bottom line?  There was no way in hell I was going back to Charlie the Barber.  My Dad bought a set of hair clippers and he cut my hair until I went in the Army 18 years later.  In the Army, I did a lot of crazy things.  I jumped out of airplanes.  I fired 106mm recoilless rifles (a weapon so loud you shake hands with God every time one lets go).  I tromped around in rice paddies and on missile sites in faraway places.  Nothing scared me worse than getting into a barber’s chair.  And I still feel that way.  I tense up every time I get in a barber’s chair.  A very attractive young lady (a hair stylist, not just a barber) once asked me if I was okay (probably because my knuckles were turning white from the death grip I had on her barber’s chair).  I get that wired when it’s time for a haircut.

Most guys worry about going bald.  Not me.  I’d be fine being completely bald, because then I wouldn’t need to see a barber.  But there’s still enough fuzzy gray stuff on my noggin that I need to get a haircut occasionally.

One time a few years ago we had a couple over for dinner, and she was a clinical psychologist.  For whatever reason, the conversation turned to haircuts, and I told the above story.  “Aw, little Joey was traumatized by his barber.”  Ah, so that was it.  That’s exactly what happened.  The word fit perfectly.  I had been traumatized by a barber.

So we’re into this shelter in place thing, you know, what with Covid 19 and all, and I needed a haircut.  Evidently, so did a lot of people, because when I tried to order a set of hair clippers online, everyone was sold out.  But last week supply caught up with demand, and thanks to Amazon.com and Fedex, I now have my very own hair clippers.

I bought Hoford hair clippers and they work great.  They are battery powered and the kit has all kinds of accessories.  There are three or four standoff combs/spacer things that are for folks with longer hair, but I didn’t need any of them.  I set the clippers at the lowest setting (a set of hair clippers is like a lawn mower…you set the blade as low as possible and you don’t have to mow the lawn very often).  I hit the ON button and the clippers came alive!  Buzzzzzzz!  I love it!  I gave myself a haircut, both my ears are still in place, and I think I look good.  I used to pay $8 for a haircut, so in four more haircuts, these new clippers will have paid for themselves.  Life is good!

South by South Bend: Part 1

As much as I enjoy concrete work I need to take a break now and then. I ran out of mud for the back patio (164 bags, missed it by 10 bags!) so I decided to get my old South Bend 6’ lathe up and running.

My Pop bought the South Bend way back in the late 1960’s. I was just a kid but I remember riding in Pop’s Chevy ¾ ton, picking up the machine and unloading it at our house. It was and still is the heaviest thing I ever want to move. We were lucky in that the South Bend came with a crap load of attachments: a full set of collets, three steady rests, a 3-jaw and 4-jaw chuck and hundreds of tool bits were thrown in with the lathe.

Pops gave me the lathe 14 years ago. He said he was never going to use it again and he needed more room. I took the lathe down to The Florida Keys, where we lived at the time, and it went under water several times due to hurricanes. The motor was mounted lower on the lathe frame so it was lost to the elements. The rest of the lathe sat higher and was ok. All I did in The Keys was work so the South Bend sat for many years and I dragged it out to New Mexico in The Big Haul Ryder truck.

With the Covid, stay-at-home orders I decided now is the time to get the old machine running again. Back when we first got the lathe I asked my dad, “What does it do?” He told me “Everything”. He said, “You can make another lathe with a lathe!” Pops was a good machinist and he showed me the basics of operation. I was cutting threads on the South Bend within a few weeks.

The South Bend came with a hokey, home-made motor/pulley setup that we were going to change 50 years ago but never got around to it. The pulley set up is ugly but it works and that’s probably why it stayed. This go-round I’m leaving it as is. The next guy can come up with a better system. Because with lathes there is always a next guy: they don’t wear out.

The old motor had a wider mounting bolt footprint and one hole of the 4 mounting holes was used for an adjuster bolt. I re-drilled the plate to suit the new motor and tapped the holes for 5/16” bolts.

For the adjusting bolt I used the existing motor mount holes but made a bar to go underneath. The new bar extends past the motor plate to line up with the adjuster bolt. It looks a little better than the previous setup. I need a few parts to finish the new motor installation so that will have to wait.

The South Bend is a 6” lathe but at some point in the past it was jacked up to an 8” lathe (swing over V-ways).  The 1” spacer blocks look so well made they may be factory parts. I’m leaving them.

One of the nice things about this lathe is that it has not been abused. The thing is probably 70 years old and V-ways are smooth and unscarred from work falling out of the chuck and smacking into them. This means that a good machinist ran the thing.

That is, it was unscarred until I got my teen-age meat hooks on it. That gouge in the carriage was put there in the early 1970s by yours truly. I was cutting threads on a shaft, or maybe it was a taper, and the carriage self-fed into the chuck making a loud banging sound. I was confused; Pops was not happy and reamed me out. I never ran the carriage into the chuck again.

The forward/reverse switch is shot so I am replacing it with a toggle. Only because I have a 4-pole, double throw, center off toggle in stock. I’ve wanted to use that oddball switch forever. I’m also relocating the switch and wiring the motor 240-volt so that the 6000-watt solar-powered inverter can start the motor easier. With the old set up you had to reach over and between the spinning belts and pulleys to access the switch. It was sure a thing to keep you on your toes. Front mounting the switch will be mildly safer.

A lathe is one of the handiest machine tools you can own. The old ones are slightly clunkier to operate and I’ve forgotten most of what I knew about operating one. I’m sure YouTube is full of how-to lathe videos so I’ll brush up before I start making scrap metal.

While I wait for parts I’ll start cleaning the beast. Part 2 will cover the motor mounting, belts and wiring.

Never miss an ExNotes blog:  Sign up here for new blog notifications:

British Motorcycle Gear: Our newest advertiser!

Our good buddy Andrew Capone has taken the reins at long-established and legendary British Motorcycle Gear.  Located in Sea Girt, New Jersey and shipping all over the world, BMG sells a variety of Belstaff, Barbour International, and other top quality moto clothing and accessories.   You may recall Joe Gresh’s review of BMG’s outstanding Rapido gloves here on the ExNotes blog a few weeks ago.

While you’re on the BMG site, visit their BMG Moto Media page, too.  With articles on T.E. Lawrence, the Isle of Man, and more, it’s muey cool.  And on that Isle of Man TT topic, Andrew started going to that event several years ago and it has become an important part of his life.  He’s an Isle of Man marshal, he has been Motorcycle.com’s correspondent on the event since 2008, and he goes every year.

British Motorcycle Gear is a family-operated business and the principals are motorcycle enthusiasts, so when you buy from these folks you’re not just pumping money into a faceless corporate Internet outlet with no appreciation for our world.  Andrew owns 14 motorcycles, ranging from a 1961 Moto Morini 175 up to a Ducati Multistrada 1260S.  There’s a 1968 Norton P11 Ranger and a Triumph Thruxton in that mix, too.   He’s the real deal, folks.

And one more bit of good news…when you order from British Motorcycle Gear, use the ExNotes discount code BMGJOES and get 10% off any purchase.  Run your order up to over $199 and you’ll get free shipping, too.

Product Test: British Motorcycle Gear Rapido Gloves

I have managed to use British Motorcycle Gear’s Rapido gloves in temperatures ranging from the low 40s to the mid-90s and they have worked well across that range. All in, I’ve done about 600 miles wearing these gloves. Despite the wide temperature variations the gloves were never uncomfortably hot on my rides around muggy, warm Daytona last month.

The Rapidos are fairly stiff when you first put them on. Normally stiff is an attribute men aspire to but getting the Rapidos on and off was a bit of a struggle the first day. By day 4 the gloves had loosened up quite a bit and I no longer thought about the process.

Another reason I had trouble getting in the Rapidos was because they come with triple hook and loop straps, two on the gauntlet and one on the wrist. I didn’t realize the wrist strap adjusted and so was forcing them on willy-nilly. Loosening all the straps made it easier.

One benefit to all those straps is security: once tightened down this glove is not going to fly off in a crash unless your hand is still inside it. More security is provided by the thick rubber finger guards on the leading edge of the glove. If you’ve done much off-roading with faster buddies you know how painful a rock tossed into your hand can be. I wish I had these on a few months ago when Mike kicked up a boulder into my finger. It felt like the thing was broken. Three of the finger guards have little vents built into them, kind of like little hood scoops. The vents don’t pass much air but if you hold your hand out fingers forward you can feel the air coming in.

Yet more security comes in the form of a carbon fiber looking knuckle plate attached to the glove. BMG calls it Carbon Leather, I think. I haven’t managed to test this bit because I don’t want to hurt myself but if your hand became pinned beneath the bike and the pavement (never let go of the bike!) I imagine it would buy a few hundred feet of abrasion before you started to lose any knuckle. Amazingly, all that armor does not restrict hand movement much and once the gloves are broken in you can make a fist easily.

The Rapidos have a fairly long gauntlet and with the straps disconnected the mouth opens wide to fit big jacket sleeves. There’s a decent range of adjustment on the gauntlet. I was able to snug them down while riding in just a T-shirt and a G-string. The Rapido’s palm area has a lot of activity going on what with extra pads and stitches but none of it seemed to cause blisters. The Rapidos are heavier duty gloves than I’m used to wearing. They feel like they might actually protect your hands in a wipeout. I usually wear long white opera gloves or Harbor freight Nitrile gloves when riding motorcycles.

My red Rapido glove’s appearance is not exactly conservative; in fact they’re downright flashy. When I put them on I get a strange urge to crash The Avengers from the Marvel movie series. If you’re an under-the-radar guy get the black Rapidos. At $79 list price the Rapidos are not cheap but my regular work gloves run 10 or 12 bucks a pair and they don’t have near as many nifty features as the Rapidos.

I’m going to use the Rapidos for the next few years and I’ll be sure to write an Exhaustnotes long term review if the world doesn’t end before the gloves do. Maybe we’ll get lucky and I’ll get to crash test the Rapidos.

Hasty Conclusions: First Test of The British Motorcycle Gear Mercury Jacket

Here at Exhaustnotes.us we don’t have to wait until we know what we are talking about to give you our impressions of new gear sent to us for review. No, we can do whatever, whenever we want and right now I want to tell you about this swell jacket. You’ll get a longer-term review after Daytona Bike week.

BMG’s Mercury jacket is warm. The thing comes with a liner made of something like plutonium or krypton. The (only) day I tried the jacket temperatures ranged from 45 degrees to 70 degrees Fahrenheit. My base layer was a cotton T-shirt, no logo. At 45 degrees I was a bit cold but nothing unbearable. As the temps got into the high 60’s low 70’s the jacket became warm. It was fine as long as your speeds were above 40-50 miles per hour.

I could have taken several steps as the weather warmed up. I could have taken the liner out. I could have opened the vents (which I did later on) but I’m lazy and just put up with the heat.

The collar on the BMG Mercury jacket is designed well. I can lock it in solid and it doesn’t chafe on my helmet when I rotate my head to preen. Some jackets catch helmet parts and make cleaning tail feathers a less rider-friendly operation.

The sleeves have both a zipper and hook-and-loop fasteners strips to seal off your wrists. This is great for me because I ride without gloves when I am operating a camera or getting on and off the bike frequently. Using the two closing methods you can achieve an airtight wrap and stop the cold from entering your arm area.

Closing the jacket is also a multi-level affair; a zipper, hook-and-loop strips then snaps should pretty much keep the coat from opening up in a crash. The jacket has light shoulder/elbow armor that doesn’t intrude on comfort. Which is fine by me, I don’t like heavily armored motorcycle gear.

There are two front and two rear vents that are not huge but when open make the jacket noticeably cooler. After getting a bit hot on slower trails I ran them open until around 5pm when New Mexico’s February temps start dropping. I closed the vents and had a snug, evening ride home, arriving back at Tinfiny Ranch around 55 degrees, the perfect temperature for using the Mercury fully deployed.

The Mercury comes with a lot of adjustable straps to control the shape of the thing. I didn’t mess with them because it was fine with the liner installed. I imagine in hot weather I’ll have to take the liner out and then those extra snaps and straps will help prevent flutter.

The British Motorcycle Gear Mercury Jacket really works well for New Mexico’s daily 40-degree temperature swings. I think if I combined it with a t-shirt and my electric vest I would be good down to the mid-30 degree range. Available from BritishMotorcycleGear.com at a list price of $250 the jacket is not outrageously expensive and appears well made. I’m taking it with me to Daytona’s Bike Week where I hope to gather more information on the Mercury’s rain proofing and function without the liner.

More great gear reviews are here!

2019: A Review and Wrap Up

This has been a fun year, and a fun year to be a blogger.  When we started ExhaustNotes 18 months ago, we had no idea we’d get the loyal following we have, the number of hits we’re getting, and the number of comments we would receive from you, our amazing readers.  In the past 18 months, we’ve published 572 blog posts (this is Blog No. 572), we’ve had something north of 200,000 page visits, and we’ve received 2,481 approved blog comments.  We actually had quite a few more comments, but the spam comments are filtered out and we’re not counting those.  And you spammers out there, thanks for all the biblical excerpts, the website optimization offers, the hairstyle stuff (seriously, you think Gresh or I need hairstyle products?), and the offers to manufacture stuff in and buy chotchkas from China.  You guys keep it coming, and our filters will keep bouncing it.  Hope springs eternal, I guess.

Our most commented upon post last year?  It was Joe Gresh’s blog on Bonnier and the demise of Motorcyclist magazine, which really raked in some zingers.  Nobody makes the written word come alive like Joe does, and that includes his opening line in that blog:  The distance from being read in the crapper and actually being in the crapper is a short one. According to Dealer News, Motorcyclist magazine crossed that span this week.

Other ExNotes blogs that drew comments big time are our blogs on what constitutes the perfect bike, what the motorcycle industry needs to do to grow the market, dream bikes, and of course, the gun stuff.  Keep your thoughts coming, folks.  It’s what we enjoy the most.

Our most frequently visited blog post last year?  Far and away, it was our piece on Mini 14 Marksmanship.  Somehow that post got picked up by a service that suggests sites to people when they open their cell phones, and we were getting in excess of 10,000 hits a day for a few days on that one.  Go figure.  There must be a lot of people out there who want to shoot their Mini 14 rifles better.  Glad to be of help, folks.

We’ve stepped on a few toes along the way.  Some folks got their noses bent out of shape because we do gun stuff.  Hey, let us know if you want your money back.  One guy went away all butthurt because Google ads popped up mentioning President Trump and mortgage deals that I guess our President helped along.   Hey, whatever.  We don’t control the popups, and the Internet’s artificial intelligence does funny things with what it reads on the blog…I mentioned using my Casio’s backlight to help find my way to the latrine at night, and since that blog I’ve been getting an unending stream (no pun intended) of prostate treatment popups.  I may click on a few of them.  When you get your artificially-inseminated Google-driven popups, we’d like you to click on them, too.  It makes money flow.  To us.  It’s what keeps us on the air, you know.

We did a lot of travel this year, but not as many motorcycle trips as we wanted.   The Royal Enfields we took through Baja were fun, and we had a great story on that ride published in Motorcycle Classics.  I really enjoyed riding and writing about the Genuine G400c.  Joe did a great series on his Yamaha EnduroFest adventure, and he’s had articles published in Motorcycle.com.  Joe did another series on motorized bicycles and it was a hoot.

Joe and I both did shorter moto trips this past year, and we both want to get more riding in next year.  Gresh and I are going to do a moto trip to Baja in 2020, and we may get to visit with Baja John in Bahia de Los Angeles (that dude likes Baja so much he moved there).  On any of the Mexico trips, we for sure will be insured with BajaBound Insurance, the best insurance there is for travel in Mexico.  More good travel stuff?  We published Destinations, a compendium of the travel stories appearing in Motorcycle Classics magazine, and it’s doing very well (thank you).

More plans?   Gresh will be pouring more concrete, and I’ll be spending more time at the West End Gun Club.  Joe is planning to maybe pick up the Zed resurrection again, and I’m pretty sure he’ll get that bike on the road within the next 12 months.   We’ve got the upcoming 9mm comparo I mentioned yesterday, and for sure more gun articles.  Good buddy Gonzo asked us to ride in the 2020 Three Flags Classic, and I’d like to make a go of that one this coming year (I was disappointed in myself for not riding that great event in 2019, but the circumstances just weren’t right).  I think I’m going to write Tales of the Gun as a book and offer it for sale here on ExNotes, and maybe Joe Gresh will do the same with his collection of moto articles (and when he does, you can bet I’ll buy the first copy).  We’ll be doing more product reviews, including movie and book reviews.  I’m going to get on my bicycle more, and we may have some info on electric bicycles, too.   You’ll read all about it right here.

So it’s a wrap for 2019.   Susie bought a bottle of Gentleman Jack for me, and I’m going to pour a shot and watch 2020 roll in later tonight.  To all of you, our best wishes for a happy and healthy 2020.  Ride safe, ride often, and keep your powder dry.

Want to subscribe to our blog for free and never miss any of our motorcycle, travel, gun, bicycle, product review, and other blogs?  We’ll never give your email address to anyone else, and you’ll never miss any of our stories!  Sign up here:

Coming Up: A 9mm Comparo

I’ve been lusting over the SIG P226 Scorpion for some time now, and after a little bit of brushing up on my negotiation tactics, I pulled the trigger (figuratively speaking) on one this morning.

I like the looks of the SIG, I like that it is an alloy-framed handgun (I’m not a big fan of the plastic guns), and I like that it is a SIG.   Good buddy TJ told me he believes these are the finest handguns available today, and he’s a guy who knows handguns.  The US Army recently made their sidearm decision and it’s SIG.  That’s a strong endorsement, I think.

I bought my SIG Scorpion at Turner’s, the gun will be in the store this Thursday, and that’s when I get to start the PRK (Peoples Republik of Kalifornia) 10-day waiting period.

My tried and trusty Model 59, the gun that got me hooked on 5.0 grains of Unique and a 125-grain cast roundnose bullet.

I’ve got a boatload of 9mm ammunition reloaded and ready to go, but that got me to thinking:  What load might work best in the new SIG?  I’d found in the past that 5.0 grains of Unique and a 125-grain cast roundnose bullet provided great accuracy in my Model 59, but then I got lazy and I stuck with that as my standard 9mm load in everything.  I’ll be the first guy to tell you that to find the best load in any gun, you need to experiment and develop a load specifically for that gun.   I have a couple of other 9mm pistols (a Springfield Armory 1911 and the Model 659 Smith and Wesson that I’ve blogged about before), and I’ve simply used my 5.0-grain Unique/125-grain cast roundnose in all of them.  Is there a better load for each of these handguns?

The 659 with my 125 grain cast roundnose reloads.
The Springfield 9mm 1911. It seems to like the 5.0 grain Unique/125-grain roundnose load, too.

So here’s what’s coming up:  I’m going to do a load development comparo for the 659, the 1911, and the P226 to see where the accuracy lives for each gun.  I’m thinking Unique, Bullseye, Power Pistol, the 147 grain Speer, the 125 gr cast RN Missouri, and maybe a 115 full metal jacket or hollowpoint bullet.  I’m looking for inputs, so if you have a favored load for your 9mm handgun, let me know and I may throw it into the mix, too.  Please add your suggestions to the Comments section here.   I’ll keep you posted.

Want to read our other Tales of the Gun stories?  You can find them here.

We’re thinking about another book, one that would include all of our Tales of the Gun stories and much more.   What do you think?  Let us know if you think you might have an interest in this new book to help us assess the market.  In the meantime, you can see our other titles here.

Product Review: Casio Carbon Core G-Shock

Good buddy King Kong in Luo Yang, central China.  Kong is a hard-riding moto maestro who wears a G-Shock wristwatch. Based on his advice, so do I.

Up until last few years, I ignored the Casio G-Shock watches. I didn’t think they were particularly good looking, and I didn’t need a watch that was protected against high g forces any more than I needed a summer cold. Then something happened. I met King Kong.  Seriously.  King Kong on a motorcycle.  Kong rode with us on the Western America Adventure Ride here in the US and he’s done several rides (some solo) across China.  On my ride across China, my good buddy King Kong wore a G-Shock and he loved the thing.

Kong’s Casio was living a tough life. The fact that Kong liked the G-Shock got my attention, and a short time later I purchased my first one. Then came another, and now, a third.

This third one is the Carbon Core Guard GA2000, which is a mouthful. It was a gift to me from my sister Eileen, which made it even more special.  It is even more resistant to shock than a regular Casio G watch as a result of its carbon fiber reinforced structure and a new design monolithic band, which further encapsulates the movement. Okay, I get it, but the regular G-Shock timepieces are already pretty tough. The added protection might be meaningless from my personal survivability perspective, considering that if it gets subjected to g forces it’s going to happen while I’m wearing it, and the old design would probably survive those kind of shocks better than yours truly. My guess is that if this one ever gets close to feeling shock levels that threaten its existence I would be toast, and if that’s the case, hey, who cares if the watch is still ticking?  No, the features that endear this one to me are much more practical, and truth be told, I don’t fully understand all of them yet. There’s more to the show than I can talk about, but I can talk about the ones that matter to me.

For starters, the Casio Carbon Core GA 2000 is a good-looking watch. I like the colors and the style, I like the analog hands and digital display, and I like the skeletonized minute and hour hands.  The yellow accents on a black watch work for me. I just think it looks good. If yellow doesn’t float your boat, though, Casio offers this watch in several other color themes.

The folks who tell you size doesn’t matter?  Don’t listen to them.  I need to be able to read the thing, and with a watch this size, that’s no problem.    The G-Shock is a big watch, but it’s not too big.

Next up is the world time capability. I travel overseas from time to time and it’s nice to be able to check the current time in Singapore or Chongqing by clicking a button on my watch without having to try to remember the time difference. To me, this is an important feature.

This G-Shock has timer and stopwatch features. These were important to me when I was a jogger and a serious bicycle rider; today, not so much.  For you younger guys, if you need these capabilities, they’re there.  My watch is also equipped with an alarm feature.  I’m sort of retired now and it doesn’t matter when I get up in the morning, but old habits die hard and I’m usually making coffee by 5:00 a.m. every day.  I don’t need an alarm to tell me to get up at that time; I just do.  For you poor guys who still work for a living, if you need an alarm, you get it with this watch.

This G-Shock is comfortable and it’s waterproof. I wear a watch 24/7, and this one is so comfortable I forget I have it on.  I wear my watch in the shower just because I don’t want to bother with taking it off. Sometimes on a motorcycle I get caught in the rain.  None of that’s a problem for this watch; it’s good to go underwater at depths way deeper than I ever will find myself.

There’s another feature that’s a very big deal to me, and that’s the light. This watch doesn’t have luminous hands, but it has a light that let’s you see the time in the dark. That light is good enough that when I need to get up in the middle of the night (you older guys will understand what I’m talking about), it’s sufficient to illuminate the path to el cuarto de baño.  (It’s funny how what’s important changes when you get older.)

Oh, and one more thing:  My watch keeps perfect time.  I checked it against the www.time.gov website (the official US timekeeping site) when I got the watch, and I checked it again several weeks later.   It’s perfect.  Right to the second.

The Casio Carbon Core Guard watch carries an MSRP of $130, but the street price is usually under a hundred bucks, and that’s a good deal.

What Really Killed The Motorcycle Industry

I don’t know if it’s true (and in today’s environment I don’t even care if it’s true) but I read somewhere that ATVs are outselling motorcycles. This makes sense as ATVs or Quads or whatever you want to call the things are low-skill devices that anyone can ride off road.

Back in the early 1970’s the big boom in motorcycling was started in the dirt. Kids like you and me bought mini bikes and enduros by the zillions. An entire industry sprang to life and that industry supported all levels of riding. Collectively, we learned the difficult art of steering a wiggling motorcycle across sand and mud and rocks. It wasn’t easy. It took a lot of talent to keep from crashing and we lost a lot of good people to concentration lapses or simple bad luck.

The first ATVs were 3-wheeled contraptions that took even more skill than motorcycles to ride in the dirt. It didn’t take long for manufacturers to figure out 4 wheels were a lot more stable than 3 and that was the beginning of the end for motorcycles in America.

Since children cannot operate motorcycles on the street, dirt bikes were like a Pop Warner league feeding well-trained riders into the Bigs: The Pavement. Harried on all sides by nearly unconscious automobile drivers our generation’s ability to ride a motorcycle in that buoyant area beyond the limits of traction became a right handy survival skill. And so a huge bubble of capable motorcycle riders surged through the land buying motorcycles at a clip never before seen.

Meanwhile, the Quads kept getting bigger and safer while dirt bikes were safety-limited by their very design: They fell over. Anyone can steer a quad. It takes no skill whatsoever to trundle along following the huge ruts made by thousands of other quads. Trails were ruined by the excessive width and sheer quantity of idiots driving their miniature cars. Dirt bikes were hard to ride and safety concerns overtook the nation’s parents. As ATV’s filled the forests the available pool of motorcycle riders dwindled. The farm system began to dry up.

Now, Quads cost $25,000 and are the size of Jeeps. Four people fit comfortably strapped into a steel cage, safe from the environment they go about destroying. ATVs can go almost anywhere their bubblegum tires will support the vehicle’s weight and the weight of their passengers. Automatic transmissions erased the last vestige of talent needed to explore off road. On the trails I ride kids on motorcycles are the exception not the rule. Sometimes I can go all day and see nothing but quads. How many kids raised in a cocoon of steel bars would be crazy enough to start riding a motorcycle on the street? We know the answer: Very few.

It’s not the cost of new motorcycles; there are plenty of cheap bikes available. It’s not Gen X, Y, or Z being too chicken or into their cell phones. It’s not branding. It’s not lack of riding areas. None of these things killed motorcycles.

A safer, easier to operate dirt machine was built and human nature did the rest. ATV’s are capturing the kids at their most impressionable age. Motorcycles are not. Nothing we can do will reverse that trend.

Want more Gresh?  It’s right here!

Never miss an ExNotes blog!