Ah, lots of good news and a few things to catch up on. For starters, I was alerted to another top notch motorcycle site, and that’s Terry Roorda’s ScooterScribes.news site. You’ll like it.
Terry is the former Thunder Press editor, and there’s lots of cool V-Twin stuff on ScooterScribes, and you don’t have to be a Big Twin dude or dudette to appreciate it. It’s good. Trust me.
More good news…the ExNotes stickers are in, and the extensive Direct Mail arm of the ExNotes empire is busy sending them out.
We sent an email requesting your address if you signed up, so watch for it and shoot that info back to us. We promise that as soon as we get your snail mail address and confirmed that you’re on our email list, we’ll shoot them out to you as soon as we get around to it. Want to help us more? Hey, share our site and get more folks to sign up for our automatic emails, or just get them to visit www.ExhaustNotes.us. We think we’ve got a good thing going. Guns, motorcycles, scooters, opinions, dream bikes, resurrected bikes, books, articles, Baja, and lots, lots more. Let us know what you think by posting your comments here on the blog. We get all kinds of inputs. Folks want more on Harleys, they want less on Harleys, they want more political commentary (seriously?), they want less political commentary…hey, let us know. There’s no guarantee we’ll take any of it seriously, but you never know.
Yet more news…several online pubs are breaking the news that Harley is working with a Chinese company to offer a small HD.
Hey, we saw a Chinese manufacturer making parts for Harley a decade ago. But the recent news is this is going to be a complete small bike, just over 300cc. I’m surprised Harley didn’t do this several years ago, but then, Gresh and I were in the catbird’s seat on the small bike thing from the gitgo. CSC and Zongshen were way ahead of the curve on this one. Dollars to donuts says that the small Harley will find its way to the US, and that’s a good thing. I’ve seen the photos and I think it looks good. I’m waiting for the inevitable jokes and the anti-China rants to start, but Harley, if you’re reading this, ignore those folks. The only thing worse than a smartass is a dumbass, and anyone who criticizes a motorcycle based solely on its Chinese origin is most definitely in that latter category.
One last bit of news…make sure you pick up the latest issue of Motorcycle Classics magazine. It’s got my feature story on our Enfield Baja trip, and my Destinations piece on Tecate. Good stuff, Motorcycle Classics is.
Glenn sent me a few photos from the old days and one that got my attention was a shot of us building a Sportster in the living room of the shack we used to live in. Having a living room to work in was a luxury because prior to renting the shack I was homeless. I had an old Chevy truck with a bench seat that I could stretch out enough to get some sleep and I had a job that let me take a dry bath in the restroom after work. But when Admiralty Marine closed its doors for the evening I was on my own until the next morning. The boss let me know that the situation couldn’t go on forever and that I really needed to find a place to live.
It wasn’t so much lack of money. I was working a lot of hours, but I was only 19 and landlords didn’t want to rent to a greasy, punk kid. I can’t blame them. I would do the same thing myself. Finally a co-worker who was a full-fledged adult vouched for me when his landlord had a vacancy next door. I shaved, dry-bathed, put on clean clothes and did everything I could do to look like a respectable young man with a future. I’ll be dammed if it didn’t work. I was in after paying first, last and a deposit. Cash.
After waiting for the dust to settle the first thing I did was to rebuild my Sportster in the living room. When I bought the 1968 Sportster I was kind of shocked at how archaic the motorcycle felt. It was cool and all but the front end was so wobbly it felt like silly string and the front brake might as well have been deleted and an AM/FM radio installed in its place for all the stopping it would do.
The engine seemed to run well but I was going to ride across country on the thing, so a freshen-up was in order. I don’t know if it was a good idea because the 900cc V-Twin had some strange things going on inside and I was destined to do even more stupid stuff to the poor bike.
Someone had replaced the stock Harley intake valves with huge, unknown-origin valves. The valves were so big they had to cut the seat into the dome of the combustion chamber. Once the giant valves were removed the old seats were revealed along with the stock porting. The only advantage I could see to the big valves was a bump in compression ratio due to the valves occupying more space in the combustion chamber and the circumference increase giving slightly more flow when the valve first popped open. Once into the lift though the stock ports would probably be the limiting factor.
I wasn’t having any of it. I bought standard Harley valves and guides and set about putting things right. Admiralty Marine had a Sioux valve grinding kit so I could do all the work myself. After the seats were re-cut to fit the new valves the installed height was wrong so I had to trim the ends of the valves and shim the springs. The heads were a mess.
The Sportster’s high dome pistons were ok so a quick hone job and a set of rings finished off the top end. After that you’d think I’d leave the engine alone but I had to have a tin primary cover like the XR750 flat trackers ran.
Opening and consuming a whole ‘nother can of worms, I had to get rid of the crankshaft’s spring and ramp style compensating sprocket. The compensating sprocket absorbs the 45-degree V-Twin’s power pulses before sending smooth, less spikey power on to the clutch basket, gearbox and rear sprocket. This vital part stuck out way toofar for my tin primary so into the trash it went.
A solid front sprocket was fitted to the crankshaft and the tin primary would still not fit so I had to make a 3/8’ aluminum spacer the same size and shape as the primary cover gasket. The ’68 XLH was electric start but I wanted to eliminate as much weight as possible. At an independent Harley shop I swapped the starter motor, big battery box and oil tank for a kick-start shaft, gears and kick lever. You can anticipate the next problem: the electric-start primary case had a square-ish hump on the back to accommodate the starter Bendix. I had to weld a flat metal part onto the tin primary to cover the hole.
Without an XLH-style starter motor there was another gaping hole on the other side of crankcase. I blanked off the hole where the electric starter fit with a large chunk of angle aluminum that doubled as a battery box for the much smaller kick-only battery. Now the engine was ready to slot back into the frame. And that’s yet another can of worms I’ll write about later.
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In San Diego I lived across the street from a Safeway food market. Man, I never ran out of anything. That Safeway is now a West Marine boat supply store. They got nothing to eat in the whole damn place. But back then, around 1980, it was a great food source.
In my pad I had a tiny refrigerator with one of those wine-in-a-carton things inside. My buddy Mark found it in the road, not far from the house. Nobody I knew drank wine, or at least that wine. There was a perforated cardboard section that you knocked out and inside was a hose that connected to the plastic sack of wine. It was practical as hell, like a battery acid container. The hose had a shut off thingy, you kind of rolled the shut off onto a ramp until it pinched the hose closed. The wine tasted bad. Maybe it got hot in the sun out in the street. No telling how long it was there before Mark found it. Whenever anyone would drop by I’d ask if they wanted some wine, that’s what adults do. It was still in the fridge a few years later when I moved away.
I’d leave my one bedroom, one bath rental house on Point Loma’s Locust Street around 5pm. My bike was a 1968 electric-start XLH Sportster converted to kick start. Because electric kickers are for Honda riders, man. From Point Loma I’d reel onto Interstate 5 and roll the throttle on, lane splitting for 15 miles to Gene’s house in Mira Mesa. Back then every subdivision in San Diego sounded like one of the wooden sailing ships that discovered America: The Nina, The Rancho Bernardo and The Santa Antiqua. I guess they still name California things that way. Streets are Calles or Avenidas. Townhouses are called Don Coryells, after a football coach.
Gene had a 1973 Sportster, the one with the crude looking steel bar bent into a U-shape to secure the top shock absorber mounts. The result of AMF cost cutting. My older Sporty had a beautiful cast part welded into the frame tubes performing the same function. You couldn’t see either one once the seat was installed but I knew it was there. Gene knew it too. Gene was my wing man, my BFF. We used to drink in bars and shoot pool after work. It was nothing to stay up late at night, I only needed a few hours sleep. In those years Harley-Davidson motorcycles had a terrible reputation. Their riders were no prize either. We liked the way the bikes sounded and the way they looked.
California traffic was just as bad in 1980 as is today. We lane split all the way to Oceanside where the northbound traffic would thin out for 30 miles or so then lane split to the 405 and past the “Go See Cal” auto dealership. Cal’s dog Spot was a lion. He was featured in Worthington Ford television ads. It was nerve wracking bumper to bumper riding all the way til dusk and the exit for Ascot park Raceway.
I saw my first Ducati Darmah in the parking lot at Ascot. It was the most beautiful bike I’d ever seen. The squared off crankcases were works of art. Our iron-head Harleys looked like civil war relics next to the Darmah. Like Genus Rattus, man. I didn’t envy the Ducati. I was still a hard core Harley guy. Pretty don’t mean nuttin’ to us. Fast, reliable motorcycles are for the weak. I still feel that way.
I may have this wrong but Ascot held two AMA Grand National races each year. Every race I went to was advertised as the final race because the track was closing to be sold. This went on for 12 years until the track really did sell. One National was a standard flat track race and one National was a TT, which is a standard FT track with a bump and a right hand turn. Usually by the time Gene and I got up there the heat races had already started.
Ascot wore its years well. The stands were uncomfortable and crowded. AMA Nationals are big deals. The restrooms were dungeons. We would eat bad food and drink beer and watch the best racing anywhere until 11pm at night. Being part of the hundreds of motorcycles leaving Ascot was a real thrill. The riders were fired up from the racing and we rolled it on to 405 and then 5 to the El Toro Road exit and the Bob’s Big Boy restaurant. Bob’s was a tradition for AMA Nationals. The burgers were small and nearly tasteless, the little triangle salads were frozen and the fries were thin as shim stock. Bob’s was a good place to feed your Genus Rattus.
Because we were riding so late, no matter what the time of year it was always cold on the way home from Ascot. Long, empty stretches of interstate 5 stuffed each gap in your leather jacket with a chilling, low hanging fog. The cold would quiet your mind. Focus on your breathing now, keep still, those iron engines loved the cold. I could see Gene’s Sportster chuffing away in the dark, tiny glints of chrome primary case flashed in sync with my wobbling headlight. Both our Sportsters ran straight pipes and Interstate 5 sounded like the back straight of Ascot. Except we never chopped the throttle.
South of La Jolla the air temperature would rise and dropping off 5 onto Rosecrans Street wrapped sea-warmth around my body. I loved that part of the ride. The shivering was over, I could smell ocean smells. My muscles relaxed. This early in the morning Rosecrans is deserted, I have to run the red lights because the sensors in the pavement cannot pick up motorcycles. The only sound is my 900cc Sportster slowly rowing through the gearbox, rumbling home.
It was beautiful, it was something I always dreamed about owning, and I couldn’t ride a hundred miles on it without something breaking. I paid more for it than anything I had ever purchased, I sold it in disgust two years later for half that amount, and today it’s worth maybe five times the original purchase price. I wish I still had it. I’m talking about my 1979 Harley-Davidson Electra-Glide, of course. That’s the tan-and-cream motorcycle you see in the photo above, scanned from my original 1979 Harley brochure. The motorcycle is long gone. I had the foresight to hang on to the brochure.
All of the photos in this blog are from that brochure. I wasn’t into photography in those days, but I wish now that I had been. The Harley’s inability to go a hundred miles without a breakdown notwithstanding, I hit a lot of scenic spots in the Great State of Texas back in 1979. The Harley’s colors would have photographed well. The only photo I can remember now is one of me working on the Harley with the cylinder heads off. It seems that’s how the Harley liked to be seen. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
So the year was 1979, I was young and single, and I was an engineer on the F-16 at General Dynamics in Fort Worth doing the things that well-compensated, single young guys did in those days: Drinking, riding (not at the same time), chasing young women, and dreaming about motorcycles. If you had mentioned gender-neutral bathrooms, man bun hairstyles, a universal basic income, democratic socialism, sanctuary cities, the Internet, or something called email in those days (especially in Texas), no one would have had any idea what you were talking about, and if you took the time to explain such things, you would have been run out of town after being shot a few times. Texas in 1979 was a good time and a good place.
I stopped often at the Fort Worth Harley dealer, and Harley was just starting to get into the nostalgia thing. I had sold my ’78 Bonneville and I had the urge to ride again. Harley had a bike called the Café Racer and I liked it a lot, but I took a pass on that one. Then they introduced the Low Rider and I loved it, but when sitting on the showroom Low Rider I turned the handlebars and one of the handlebar risers fractured (Harleys had a few quality issues in those days). Nope, it wouldn’t be a Low Rider. Then they introduced the Electra-Glide Classic, that stunning bike you see in the photos here. It was a dagger that went straight to my heart. I was stricken.
The Electra-Glide Classic was Harley’s first big push into the nostalgia shtick and it stuck. At least for me it did. My first memory of ever being stopped dead in my tracks by a visually-arresting motorcycle was with a Harley Duo-Glide full dresser when I was a kid (it was blue and white), and the Classic brought that memory home for me. The Classic’s two-tone tan-and-cream pastels were evocative of the ‘50s, maybe a Chevy Bel Air (even though those were turquoise and white, a color Harley later adopted in the early ‘90s with its Heritage Softails). The whole thing just worked for me. I had to have it.
I sat on the Classic and it was all over for me. I fell in love. I knew at that instant that I was meant to be a Harley man. I turned the handlebars and nothing broke. There was a cool old sales guy there named Marvin, and I asked what the bike would cost out the door. He already knew the answer: $5,998.30.
Hmmm. $5,998.30. That was a lot of money. I was riding around in a new CB-equipped Ford F-150 that had cost less than that amount (hey, it was Texas; Breaker One Nine and all that). My internal struggle (extreme want versus $5,998.30) was apparent to old Marvin.
“You know you want it,” Marvin said, smiling an oily, used-car-salesman, Brylcreem smile (these guys all went to the same clothing stores and barbers, I think). “What’s holding you back?”
“I’m trying to get my head wrapped around spending $6,000 for a motorcycle,” I said.
Marvin knew the drill. He was good at what he did. He probably made a lot more money than I did.
“Are you single?” he asked.
“Yep.”
“Working?”
“Yep.”
“Got any debt?”
“Nope.”
“So what’s your problem?”
“It’s like I said, Marvin,” I answered. “I’m trying to justify spending six grand on a motorcycle.”
“You’re single, right?”
“Yep.”
“Well, who do you need to justify it to?”
And, as Tom Hanks would say 30 years later in Forrest Gump, just like that I became a Harley rider.
Yeah, the bike had a lot of quality issues, the most bothersome being a well-known (after you bought one, that is) tendency for the new 80-cubic-inch Shovelhead valves to stick. I first stuck a valve at around 4,000 miles (all of a sudden my Classic was a 40-cubic-inch single, and Harley fixed it on the warranty). I asked Marvin about that, and the answer was, “Yeah, this unleaded gas thing don’t work too good with the new motors. Put a little Marvel Mystery Oil in each of the tanks, or maybe a dime’s worth of diesel, and you’ll be okay…”
Seriously? Marvel Mystery Oil? Diesel fuel?
But I wanted to be good guy, and I did as directed. It wasn’t enough. A valve stuck again at 8,000 miles, Marvel Mystery Oil and that dime’s worth of diesel notwithstanding. Another trip to the dealer, and another valve job. I could see where this was going. The bike had a 12,000 mile warranty.
“So, Marvin,” I began, “what happens the next time a valve hangs up?”
Marvin smiled a knowing smile. “It all depends which side of that 12,000 miles you’re on.” Somehow, Marvin’s Texas accent made it not hurt as much.
Sure enough, at 12,473 miles, a valve stuck for a third time. This one was on me. I pulled the heads, brought them to the dealer, and paid for that valve job. You know, you can just about fix anything on a Harley with a 9/16 wrench and a screwdriver. It was easy to work on. But it wasn’t just the valves sticking. The rear disk brake had problems. The primary cover leaked incessantly. And a bunch of other little things. I’m not kidding. The mean time between failures on that bike was about a hundred miles, and I’d had enough. I called the bike my Optical Illusion. It looked like a motorcycle.
One other thing about the Harley sticks out. I took it with me when I moved to California, and at one of the dealers one of the many times when it was in for service, the dealer’s mascot did what I suddenly realized I had wanted to do. That mascot was a huge, slobbering St. Bernard. It sauntered over to my bike and took a leak on the rear wheel. “Oooh, better hose that down,” the service manager said. “That will eat up the aluminum wheel.” I had to laugh (hell, everyone else was) as the guy sprayed water from a garden hose all over the bike. That dog had beat me to it. He did what I had felt like doing the entire time I owned the bike. The kicker is that even though the service manager sprayed the bejesus out of the bike in a vain attempt to remove all traces of the St. Bernard’s territorial claims, it was all for naught. From that day on wherever I went if there was a dog within a hundred yards, it did the same thing. My Harley was a two-tone tan-and-cream traveling fire hydrant.
Good Lord, though, that Harley was beautiful. Park it anywhere and it would draw a crowd. Half the people who saw it wanted a ride, and if they were female I was happy to oblige. It was big and heavy and it didn’t handle worth a damn, but it sure was pretty. The only time I almost crashed I was riding through a strip mall parking lot admiring my reflection in the store windows. That’s how good-looking it was. I wish I kept it.
Check out these two men and what they did almost a century ago…folks, you couldn’t make a movie this exciting!
The monument above (The Warning, sculpted by Eric Richards) was erected in 2003 in Santa Paula, California, to mark a heroic evening in 1928. Motor Officers Thornton Edwards (on the Indian) and Stanley Baker (on the Harley) were on duty the evening of March 12, 1928, when California experienced the second worst disaster in the state’s history. The recently completed St. Francis Dam, 36 miles upstream in Santa Clarita, collapsed shortly after midnight.
The collapse released 52 billion gallons of water, and that water was headed directly toward Santa Paula. The Santa Paula Police Department learned of the impending danger shortly after the dam broke. Thornton and Baker spent the next 3 hours riding their motorcycles throughout Santa Paula, notifying residents and evacuating the town. Thornton worked for the State Highway Department, which later became the California Highway Patrol. Baker was a Santa Paula Police Department Officer. Although the records from this era are sketchy, legend holds that Thornton’s bike had to be repaired during his midnight ride when it ingested water. As a result of these two officers’ actions, the residents of Santa Paula were successfully evacuated, and few Santa Paula residents died that night.
The water released by the dam (the reservoir had just filled, and the poorly-designed dam was not strong enough to contain it) mixed with mud and debris to form a wall of slurry that advanced 54 miles to the ocean at about 12 miles per hour. The disaster killed an estimated 470 people, and to this day, it is the second worst disaster in California history. Only the San Francisco earthquake resulted in more death.
The Warning contains no mention of either motor officer’s name; rather, it is intended to honor all acts of heroism, and to honor those killed during the St. Francis Dam collapse. If you head through downtown Santa Paula, The Warning is hard to miss. It’s worth a trip to Santa Paula just to see it.
Special thanks for the above research to Peggy Kelly, a reporter for the Santa Paula Times, whom I interviewed for the above information.
I guess more financial mags are zeroing in on Harley-Davidson’s plans to introduce an electric motorcycle. You saw our post a week or so ago about The Motley Fool and their thoughts on the Livewire. Barron’s, another financial newspaper/advisory service, similarly reported on Harley’s woes but with a twist. This most recent Barron’s article strongly recommended that either Harley move into manufacturing pickup trucks, or allow itself to be acquired by Ford. Yeah, that’s right. Ford. The car company.
Ford has already produced F-150 pickups with Harley trim packages (seriously, I can’t make up stuff this good) and they are reintroducing a $100K Harley-themed truck for 2019…
Barron’s reasons that Harley’s brand recognition could help Ford (a company who’s stock price has been tanking for years). The Barron’s article actually recommends Harley as a buy (the stock, not the motorcycle), with a target price of $50 per share if such an acquisition occur (i.e., Ford buying Harley). Seeing as Harley stock (symbol HOG) is currently about $35 per share, Barron’s reasons that could be a wise investment if Ford acquires Harley (which I don’t think will ever happen).
I’m watching all of this in stunned silence. Well, nearly stunned silence, except for the tapping of my laptop’s keyboard as I whip out this blog. $35,000 electric motorcycles. Harley-badged $100,000+ Ford pickup trucks, which presumably will sell to folks whose judgement, common sense, and sobriety has to be questioned. Financial advisors recommending buying Harley stock because if Ford (a company with terrible stock performance) buys Harley (another company with terrible stock performance), the Harley stock price will go up (while Harley’s business has been tanking in a dive so steep they may not be able to pull out of it). Got it. Right.
My take on all of this? It’s hard to take it all in, let alone understand most of it. Your thoughts? Let’s hear them!
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The Motley Fool is an investment advisory service newsletter I’ve been following since the 1990s, and my take on things is they generally have good advice and make predictions that have proven to be sound. Most recently, The Motley Fool published an article (Harley-Davidson Really Misjudged the Electric Motorcycle Market) about Harley’s Livewire electric motorcycle. Their take on the new Harley is the same as ours…Harley’s marketing muscle and distribution channels will help, but the idea of a $35K+ electric motorcycle nearly guarantees a dead-on-arrival introduction. The Motley Fool piece is well reasoned and mirrors our earlier prediction. Let’s hope both we and The Motley Fool are wrong.
The rain has been nonstop here for the last several days, and for the last couple of nights it’s rained so hard that it woke me up a few times. I guess nearly all of California is getting drenched. It’s too wet to ride and it’s too wet to shoot, so I’ve been catching up on other stuff.
On that shooting bit…to get to my gun club you have to drive down a dirt road for a couple of miles, and at one point the road actually crosses a stream. Usually it’s only a couple of inches deep and sometimes it’s even dry, but that sure isn’t the case right now. The gun club sent out an email yesterday afternoon with a video warning folks not to try to drive across the stream (which is now a little river)…
So, with all this rain (and some hail) I’ve been attending to other things…catching up on writing a couple of articles, doing a bit of reloading, and I even put a new battery in my TT250.
Reloading is a good thing to do on a rainy day, and the menu today included .44 Magnum and .45 AutoRim, two of my all-time favorite cartridges.
Back to the battery for my TT250…I’ve owned my TT250 for close to three years now and the battery finally gave up the ghost. I stopped in at CSC and told Steve I wanted a new one on the warranty, and we both had a good laugh about that. Steve told me I was the only guy he knew who could get that kind of life out of a Chinese battery. I thought that was kind of funny because all the batteries are Chinese now.
Seriously, though, I think the reason my batteries last so long is that I usually keep them on a Battery Tender. Those things work gangbusters for me, the bikes run better when the batteries are kept fully charged, and the batteries seem to last a good long time. You can buy a Battery Tender most anywhere; my advice would be to get one (or more) from CSC. They come with a little pigtail you can permanently install on your battery, which makes connecting the Battery Tender a snap. I have one on both my RX3 and my TT250.
Another bit of a commercial for CSC…the mailman dropped off a box on Saturday, and it was one of the new CSC hats. I’m a hat guy. I like wearing a hat. My favorite kind of hat is a free one. The CSC hat I received was free (thanks, Steve), but unless you wrote a blog for CSC for 10 years, it’s not likely you’d get yours for free. I think they sell for $19.95, which is a bit above what hats normally go for, but this one is more than worth it. It’s got cool embossed stitching and it looks good. I like it and I think it will make me a better man. Like I said, $19.95 ain’t bad, but maybe you could get one for free as part of the deal when you buy a new CSC motorcycle. I’d at least ask the question. The worst that could happen is Steve will say no. But if he does that, ask for a free copy of 5000 Miles At 8000 RPM when you buy your new motorcycle. You never know.
Hey, here’s one more cool photo. I’ve been spending a bit of time up in northern California. I have a new grandson up there who I think is going to be a rider, a shooter, and a blog writer. On that blog writing thing, I told him it’s a great foundation for any “get rich slow” scheme, and I think he gets it. Anyway, my wife Sue is still up there, and she saw the neighborhood brood of wild turkeys this morning walking around like they own the place…
You know, there was some talk of making the turkey our national bird instead of the bald eagle when our country first formed (Ben Franklin was pushing for the turkey, but I guess the rest of the founding fathers told him to go fly a kite). As an aside, when I ride up to northern California, I take Highway 152 across from Interstate 5 to the 101, and there’s a tree where I always see one or two bald eagles. Bald eagles are majestic raptors. I can see the logic behind the turkey, though. But wow, would it ever take a rethink of a lot of marketing stuff, and in particular, it would make for a major revamp of one particular Motor Company’s marketing and branding efforts (you know, the guys from Milwaukee). Seriously, their performance parts would all have to be marketed under a new Screaming Turkey brand. You could bask in the assumed glory of your motorcycle’s heritage as you rode like, well, a real turkey. Perhaps the Company could get a patent on a new exhaust note….one that would have to change from “potato potato” to “gobble gobble.” There would have to be new logos, tattoos, T-shirts…the list just doesn’t end. But I guess I had better. You know, before I offend anyone.
Stay tuned, folks. Like always, there’s more good ExNotes stuff coming your way. Gobble gobble.
Or so sayeth Joe Gresh, soothsayer, philosopher, and observer of the human condition extraordinaire. Say what you wish, every time we post a gun blog here on ExNotes, the hits (no gun puns intended) go through the roof. We’re primarily a motorcycle site, with an emphasis on vintage bikes, restorations, destinations, Baja, and adventure riding. But our readers love gun stories. What to do?
I guess we’ve got to find a way to merge the two topics: Guns and motorcycles. Somebody did it with roses. We’ve got to be smart enough to find a way to do it with motorcycles. Here are my thoughts…
Maybe armed motorcycles. Hmmm, that might work. I’m thinking a .45 ACP Gatling mounted centerline on a big V-twin, maybe with the bike being designated the FLH-GG. Centerline mounting would prevent recoil-induced torque steer (just as was done on the A-10 Warthog), and the .45 ACP chambering would allow for increased ammo storage and shorter barrel length (plus, the .45 ACP is an incalculably cool cartridge). I’m thinking a firing rate of 1000 rounds per minute would do nicely.
That Gatling thing could work. When I was in the Army, we called our 20mm Gatlings Vulcans, and Kawasaki made a motorcycle called the Vulcan. There are branding possibilities here, folks.
Or maybe we look for bikes that have already been built. Ural had a sidecar model with a machine gun mount a few years ago. Yeah, that could work.
We could focus on police and military motorcycles. Hmmm, I know a pretty good book on that topic, and Lord knows there’s enough models of police and military bikes to support a string of blog features. But hey, we’re already planning to do that. And it will be cool. I guarantee it.
Maybe a feature or two on how to carry a gun on a motorcycle, both out in the open and maybe a concealed carry feature. The Army had some cool ideas on open carry back in the 1940s (see the above photo). For concealed carry, I’m thinking maybe something that’s integrated into the clutch lever, or a tankbag holster that looks like a map case. Or maybe a cell phone mount with a Derringer designed to look like a cell phone. Yeah, we could have a lot of fun with this one.
When I was at CSC, we sometimes ran a postal match. You know, where folks shoot at a target, send the target to us, and we’d score them to find a winner. That was a lot of fun.
While we were running the postal match, somebody actually wrote to me suggesting we have a match in which you have to shoot from a rolling motorcycle (no kidding, folks…I can’t make up stuff this good). It would be kind of like polo, I suppose, but with bikes and bullets instead of horses and mallets (or whatever they call those things they whack the ball with). Liability coverage might be tough, but it could be made to work.
We could design a gun that transforms itself into a motorcycle. You know, you carry the thing in a holster, say a few well-chosen words, and it converts itself into a motorcycle to allow for a convenient and quick exit. We could maybe call it something catchy, like the Transformer. We ‘d probably sell a few just because it sounds like an electric thingamabog (you know, it would sell to folks wanting to show they’re green). Nah, I don’t think he technology has caught up to the EPA challenges yet. But it’s fun to think about.
I’ve done a blog or two on motorcycle companies that started as firearms manufacturers. You know, BSA (which actually stands for Birmingham Small Arms), Royal Enfield (of Lee Enfield rifle fame), and well, you get the idea. That would involve a lot of research, so it may not fit in with our ExNotes labor minimization strategies. But it might be worth considering.
All of the above is food for thought, but I’m rapidly approaching a state in which I’ve been thinking so hard I may not be able to think for the next several days. Help me out here, folks. What are your ideas?
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The third day of the 2005 Three Flags Classic motorcycle rally would take us from Grand Junction, Colorado (where we stayed the second night of the tour) to Driggs, Idaho. Wowee, we were covering some miles! You can catch up on the ride by reading our prior blog posts here:
As you’ll recall, it had rained big time during parts of Day 2, and it had continued to rain that evening. The next morning, though, was a bright, crisp, Colorado day, and after a great breakfast, we pointed the bikes north and crossed over into Utah.
Utah was amazing. I continue to believe it is the most scenic of our 50 states. Although I had been to Zion and Bryce on previous trips, the Three Flags Classic was taking us to places I had never seen. We had a checkpoint in Vernal, a most interesting place in the heart of Utah’s dinosaur country.
We rode north, up to and around Flaming Gorge Reservoir. These were all magnificent destinations. The folks who planned the tour route did an amazing job.
After leaving Utah, we entered Wyoming for a brief period, and then we were into Idaho. Idaho is a beautiful state. We saw quite a few dead animals on the road, and in particular, a lot of dead skunks. We also saw a few larger roadkill carcasses that I didn’t immediately recognize. I later learned they were wolves!
We would our night in Driggs, Idaho, at the end of Day 3. It was an interesting night, with forest fires raging around us. We had a great dinner, more great conversation, and I was getting to know the guys better. Marty, as always, was an easy guy to travel with. I got to know good buddy Dave, shown in the above photo, a lot better on this trip, too. Dave was an absolute fanatic about keeping his bike clean, which was a hell of a challenge considering all of the rain we had ridden through the prior day. We had a bit of rain that night after dinner, too, and I remember talking to Dave as he was wiping down his GS, in the rain, cleaning it as the rain fell on the bike. I told him he was going to have a hard time, washing a bike in the rain, and we had a good laugh about that.
And that, my friends, wraps up Day 3 of the 2005 Three Flags Classic. The following day would take us way up north to Whitefish, Montana, just south of the Canadian border. It had been an amazing three days so far, and we still had a long way to go. But that’s coming in future blogs.