Category: Joe Gresh

The 70% Rule

One of my moto buddies stopped by Tinfiny Ranch, our high desert lair in New Mexico, and in the course of showing him around the property we got to talking about how incomplete everything was. He called it the 70% rule. As in 70% is close enough and time to move on to another project.

I blame it on my upbringing because I was raised in a house that was under construction for 16 of the 19 years I lived at home. There were additions, a second floor added, Walls knocked out and relocated, wall unit air conditioners installed and all manner of improvements that never saw completion. Oh, the stuff was sort of finished. The air conditioners worked fine but were never trimmed out, leaving a jagged edge around the face. The second floor had a beautiful staircase and the roof didn’t leak but it was still bare walls and floors when I left home for good. Same for the upstairs bathroom: the plumbing was stubbed out but the fixtures never were installed. The cats loved it up there. They had the whole floor to themselves.

Finishing just doesn’t seem that important to me. I’ve got the off-grid solar panel system working in Tinfiny’s large metal shed. Except it needs more batteries to complete the storage system. I have the 3000-watt array connected to four group 31 batteries, which the solar can charge in about an hour of sunshine. The rest of the day the solar power is wasted. I need about 12 more batteries to give the solar panels something to keep them busy. And I’ve yet to run the 12-volt circuits or the 24-volt circuits but I do have some LED lights and 120-volt outlets.

I’d like to have a concrete floor in Tinfiny’s shed. I’ve been working on it. Sadly, only around 25% of the floor is concrete leaving 75% (AKA the lion’s share) dirt. It’s a solid sort of dirt though, and not much water runs under the building’s edge when it rains, unless it rains really hard. Then it gets a bit muddy. It would have been a heck of a lot easier to pour the slab first, then put the building up but that ship has sailed.

I’ve nearly finished the water system. There’s a 2500-gallon tank being fed rainwater from half of the shed roof. I plan to gutter the other half some day but first I have to finish those 24-volt circuits to get the pressure pump working. I know the pump works ok because I’ve rigged it up to an 18-volt Ryobi battery. It’s just temporary, you know? There’s a pesky leak on one of the Big Blue filters. I’ve taken the canister apart several times but it still leaks from the large o-ring recessed into the canister. I leave the Ryobi battery out of the jury-rigged power connector when I don’t need water. That slows the leak quite a bit.

When you are off-grid you need a generator as backup in case a series of cloudy days runs the battery-bank down. Of course, the generator needs its own well-ventilated, soundproofed shed to keep the generator out of the elements and not drive everyone within a 4 square mile area crazy. I have almost finished the generator shed. I’ve got the floor poured, the wiring to the solar-generator transfer switch installed and complete but for some reason the wheels came off and the project stalled.

Lately I’ve been tinkering with an old Kawasaki Z900. If I run true to form and leave it 70% finished something will have to give. I could eliminate the brakes or maybe run 3 sparkplugs instead of 4. Tinfiny Ranch has more examples of my inability to complete a project. I estimate around 30% more. Hey wait a minute, this means we are nearly 70% done with this story. I guess that’s close enough.

Loud Pipes Save Lies

A symphonic ’79 CBX with a wail as sweet as sugar…

Air-conditioning is a luxury in my world. Compressors, evaporators, electric clutches, if that junk fails I never bother to repair it because my trucks are not worth the investment. Running without AC requires open windows and I heard the 4-cylinder sport bike coming up behind me on the left. He was about three car lengths back and well up into the RPM range. You may not like that sound but it was music to my ears.

The main point is I heard him. So many motorcycle anti-noise campaigners claim that exhaust noise is one direction and useless as a safety measure. Like no one in front of you can hear your blat-blat-blat. The naysayers turn into online audio engineers describing the physics of sound and how loud pipes can’t possibly alert anyone to your presence. And they are full of crap. I heard the bike coming up behind me.

Go ahead and argue sound is annoying on a motorcycle. Push for better rider training. Explain to me how citizens shouldn’t be disturbed from their slumber as they text down the highway running over anything not traveling their same speed and trajectory. Say that loud motorcycles are causing Cagers to dislike us and that lawmakers will try and ban us. It all may be true. Those are worthwhile arguments.

But don’t tell me you can’t hear loud pipes. With your widows up and the stereo blazing away you probably can’t but there are other, less-insulated road users that can hear the outside world. Bicyclists, walkers and people without air conditioning will be alerted to your motorcycle long before you collide with them. Electric car owners report that pedestrians wander in front of their silent rides. That kind of stuff won’t happen to a drag-piped, stretched-swingarm Hayabusa spinning 9000 rpm.

Loud pipes can’t be both annoying and unheard on the road. The effect is even more pronounced in town: A straight-piped hog announces itself blocks away. The damn thing sounds like a bear rifling through garbage cans but I know it’s out there somewhere because I can hear the big V-twin stumble and fart like internal combustion is not settled science.

Sure, pipes make more noise towards the back because that’s the direction they are pointed. Would it be so bad if some Whopper-eating, stereo-adjusting, GPS-programming car driver heard you a few hundred feet before running your annoying ass over? If sound doesn’t equal safety then why are street-driven motorcycles equipped with horns? You can’t have it both ways.

The Greshqvarna….

Personally I don’t like loud pipes. They wear me down on long trips so I mostly run stock mufflers. My Husky came with an aftermarket muffler that is pretty loud but I leave it on out of inertia.

Has anyone’s life been saved by a loud exhaust system? Who knows? It’s difficult to prove a negative, something that didn’t happen. Trying to work within the system or to curry favor from others by silencing your motorcycle is a mug’s game. Run whatever exhaust system you prefer. Motorcycles, loud or quiet, are going to be annoying to the general public. Our very existence seems dangerous to them and their anger towards us isn’t noise related. It’s because we are not following the rules.

Zed’s Not Dead: Part 5

Regular readers (if anyone who reads this endless chain of Kawasaki Z1 resurrection stories can be called Regular) will recall the broken intake manifold screw problem. I tried soaking the busted screw in penetrating oil, drilling it and using an easy-out to no avail. I heated the cylinder head around the broken screw. It didn’t budge (the screw, that is). I even ground a Harbor Freight screwdriver into a straight-sided, square easy out so as to not expand the screw tighter into the hole like commercial, spiral-type easy outs. I had a really good purchase on the thing but nothing doing. The screw was well and truly stuck.

My last resort hinged on drilling a hole exactly through the center of the broken piece with a left-hand drill bit. If you’ve never used a left-hand drill bit they are exactly like a right-hand drill bit but they cut in an anti-clockwise direction.

The reason lefty bits are the nads for removing stuck or broken bolts is because of their natural tendency to unscrew whatever they are drilling into. By increasing the bit size in stages hopefully you can get the offending screw so thin that the remaining threads weaken, collapse slightly and wind out of the hole looking like a coil spring. And that’s mostly what happened except the thread came out in pieces.

After clearing out the swarf I ran a bottoming tap into the hole and tidied up the threads as much as possible. I will use a slightly longer screw to compensate for the compromised hole but I’m pretty sure it will be fine and I have avoided using a Helicoil thread repair, which is the hack mechanic’s favorite crutch.

Zed was missing a few ignition parts so my Internet buddy Skip Duke sent me a spark advancer that very nearly fit the Kawasaki. The bolt that holds the advance to the crankshaft was a size too large for the hole in the advancer. Skip and I held a web-confab and decided that the advancer was the wrong part. Skip dug around his Z1 parts horde and found another unit that will work. This is the best thing about the Internet: you meet generous people that share your old motorcycle affliction.

I haven’t forgotten about the carburetors either. I’ve been soaking them in Evapor-rust and the stuff is doing a fine job. It’s very mild so you can leave zinc carb bodies immersed for days without fear of eating away the good parts. All four of the carbs are clean and I’m waiting on a few parts before I can reassemble the rack.

Zed’s little clutch-cover, oil level window was black with sitting-bike mung. It was so black the oil level could not be determined. I removed the cover and cleaned out behind the metal back-plate. Since I had the cover off I figured it would be a good idea to check the clutch plates for wear. The fibers are within tolerance and the steels are only slightly rusty so I’ll clean all those parts up and Zed should have a functioning clutch.

When Kawasaki designed the Z1 they went all out. This was Big K’s flagship motorcycle and the robust clutch is a fine example of strength. The large, straight-cut clutch gear would not look out of place in a one-ton manual truck transmission. The fingers that locate the fiber plates are surrounded by a steel band to prevent them from spreading under load. This clutch is awe-inspiring and looks like it could handle double the Z1’s 82 (claimed) horsepower. The bike has 41,000 miles showing on the clock and the metal parts show minimal wear. I am impressed.

Don’t take my word for it, here is the author of the Z1 repair manual waxing eloquent over the Z’s clutch.

I’m making another list of parts and will be blowing more money on Zed. I really hope this engine runs without a lot of knocking and the transmission shifts like butter.

That’s Not How We Do It In China

See that gap?  That narrow space between the semi-truck hauling 20-foot long, 6-inch diameter solid aluminum rods and the BMW M6? I’m taking it, man, riding the horn button and twisting the throttle: zoom-zoom. See that intersection? The one with a whirlpool of scooters, three-wheeled single-cylinder diesel trucks and at least a hundred cars spinning left leaving eddys of pedestrians lapping at the edges? I’m a Hurricane Hunter riding straight into the maelstrom buffeted from side to side, tip-toeing around, swerving, cussing, sweating and focused, man, focused.

China’s city traffic requires all your intensity, taxes all your ability and is like nothing I have ever seen on the planet. There is no respite. There is no pause, You must lock on and track hundreds of individual trajectories from every point on the compass, constantly. Insane traffic scenarios unfold at a lightning pace, there’s no time to marvel at the stupidity. There’s only time to act.

The chaos is cultural: Chinese motorists drive like they’re riding a bicycle because they were only a few years ago. In less than one generation the Chinese have gone from pedals to 125cc Honda clones to driving millions of air-conditioned automobiles on surface streets designed for a sleepy agricultural nation. At any given moment dozens of traffic rules are being broken within 50 feet of your motorcycle. It’s a traffic cop’s dream.

Except that there aren’t any. For a Police State there are not many police in China. I’ve ridden entire days and not seen one Po-Po. My Chinese friends tell me the police show up for collisions but otherwise stay low-key. Because of this hands-off approach stop signs are ignored. Red lights mean slow down. You can make a left turn from the far right lane and no one bats an eye.

China uses the drive-on-the-right system but in reality left-side driving is popular with large trucks and speeding German sedans. Get out of the way or die, sucker. Painted lane-stripes are mere suggestions: Drive anywhere you like. Of course, sidewalks and breakdown lanes are fair game for cutting to the front of the cue.

China’s modernization process has happened so fast that the leap from two-wheeled utility vehicle to motorcycles as powersports fun never really occurred. In China there are millions of people riding motorcycles but relatively few motorcyclists.

If the cars don’t get you there are other strange rules that serve to dampen the popularity of Chinese motorcycling as a hobby. Motorcycles are banned on most major toll ways between cities. Law-abiding motorcyclists are shunted off to the old, meandering side roads. Which would be fun if they weren’t so infested with heavy, slow moving semi-trucks and near certain construction delays. In practice, since tollbooths have no ability to charge motorcyclists, Chinese riders blow through the far right lane, swerving to avoid the tollgate’s swinging arm. Ignore the bells, shouting and wild gestures of the toll-takers and roll the throttle on, brother.

Being banned from the highway is not a deal breaker, but being banned from entire cities is. In response to crimes committed by bad guys on motorcycles many cities remedied the problem by eliminating motorcycles altogether. Sales of new motorcycles in these forbidden cities is non-existent.

Rules designed to discourage motorcycling abound. Vehicles over 10 years old are not allowed to be registered, thus killing the used and vintage scene. Gasoline stations require motorcyclists to park far from the gas pumps and ferry fuel to their bikes in open-topped gas cans. Add to that the general opinion of the public that motorcycle riders are shifty losers too poor to afford a car.

So why do Chinese motorcyclists bother to ride at all? It’s not the thrill of speed; 250cc is considered a big bike in China and it’s really all you need to keep up with the slow moving traffic. I’ve spent a lot of time with Chinese riders and even with the language barrier I get that they ride for the same reasons we do: The road, the rain, the wind. After being cooped up in a high rise apartment (very few Chinese live in single-family homes) I imagine the wide-open spaces between crowded cities must seem like heaven. They did to me. Chinese motorcyclists and Low Riders ride a little slower, taking long breaks to smoke a cigarette, drink in the scenery or just nap. Every motorcyclist you meet is instantly your dear friend because we share this passion and despite all the minor regulatory hassles everybody knows love conquers all.

More epic motorcycle adventures?  You bet!

Platoon

Jack Lewis and I used to work for the same motorcycle magazine. We both started at the magazine about the same time. Our moto-journo fortunes seemed linked for 10 years and we both faded from the magazine’s pages nearly in lock step. One month on, one month off: Being platooned with Jack Lewis was like batting cleanup behind Babe Ruth. The crowd would be atwitter over the mammoth home run Jack smashed out into the parking lot, where the cigarette smoking kids would fight each other for the ball. Then it was my turn. No pressure.

I met Jack once in Seattle. He stood two heads taller than me and as much as I would have enjoyed disliking a man so much more talented than me he was the nicest guy you’d ever want to meet. We hit it off like old friends and are internet buddies today.

Jack’s writing has always been challenging, keep your dictionary handy, but the words fit together sweetly and feel like they were always meant to be. If you’ve ever gasped for breath digging a trench or had to guess at the number on a Mikuni main jet, follow the link to his latest piece titled Outcomes. The bastard has hit it out of the park again and the cigarette smoking kids are throwing haymakers.

Zed’s Not Dead: Part 4

I got tired of cleaning carburetors. The chemicals, the gunk, soaking and prodding with tiny wires, it’s flat wore me down, down, down, man. I left the worst parts to soak for a while and drifted off to try and remove a broken screw on the right side intake port. Starting with a near-center center punch I figured to drill the thing out and maybe get a remover deal to grab the threaded bit stuck in the head.

I drilled the screw in stages until I could try my handy-dandy left-hand drill/remover tool.

The broken screw is small, like a 4mm, maybe a 6mm and there’s not a lot of room for error. The little extractor tool had a good bite into the screw but the thing would not budge. One thing you don’t want to do is break off an easy out because they are super hard material. There’s no drilling the things and you are well and truly screwed if you manage to get the hole full of busted tool steel. I eased off. Sometimes you make more progress doing nothing rather than doing the wrong thing.

Admitting defeat today I decided to step away from the cylinder head and give the hole a few more days soaking with penetrating oil now that I can get to the backside of the situation. In addition to soaking I’ll heat-cycle the aluminum with a 1500-watt heat gun in the hopes of disrupting the steel screw/aluminum head interface. I guess the worse case would be to drill the thing all the way out and use a thread repair insert but I really don’t want to do that. That would be true hackery.

On a happier note the order from Z1 Enterprises showed up! I thought $39 for this right side throttle/switch was more than reasonable. The thing looks like factory (I assume as Zed was missing this part) complete with a cryptic Off-PO-On switch that will reveal its purpose once I get the beast powered up.

A complete Z1 Enterprises wiring harness (4 looms total) for $139 looks very nice and will eliminate chasing electrical issues with the madly cut and melted harness that came on the bike. Fresh multi pin plugs and wiring colors that match the original will make rigging the thing easy as pie. The purists or 100-point fanatics will probably bitch that the clear insulator over the connections is not the exact same shade as the 1975 original. Take my advice, those 100-point guys are obsessive-compulsive jerks and you don’t want to hang around them. In this photo the old harness is the one with blue tape indicating what connects to that point.

Included in the order was an O-ring for the re-sized drain plug and the washer that goes between the oil filter and the oil filter spring. With these parts I managed to get the bottom of the engine buttoned up. Progress has been fitful but Zed is getting closer. I’m really jonesing for concrete so I may have to pull off Zed and pour a yard to keep my soul on ice.

One more thing…if you’d like a handy index to all of the Zed’s Not Dead articles, we’ve started an index for this and future resurrections.  You can get to it here, or from the links on any ExhaustNotes.us page.

Default To No

After I made a particularly snarky Facebook comment regarding some newfangled electronic rider aid, a former editor sent me an email asking why I always slag off electronic controls. He asked if I had ever ridden a motorcycle equipped with traction control, wheelie control, engine power selector toggle or one built after 1971.

Usually my emails run to the “Are you still here?” variety so instead of my stock comeback (“Catterson’s hair is prettier than yours”) I played it straight. The truth is, I haven’t ridden a modern, electronic superbike. But it seems whenever new technology comes along my default mode is “No.” I have a hard time making the junky old motorcycles I habituate ignite fuel, why add complications?

There’s no sense having me ride a modern superbike because it takes skilled crashers…I mean riders to determine if the buffering of the improved, Datacom-7734 chip inside a Yamiguchi ECU has really increased corner exit speeds a hundredth of a second, or perhaps Ducatazzi’s PMS 7724 chip is more like butter?  We’ll never know because I accidently connected the battery backwards and fried the circuit board.

It’s not that I don’t like going fast, it’s just important to me how I get up to speed. I blame my Luddite ways on HO scale slot cars. Long ago, when a steady hail of meteors bombarded the earth, kids raced slot cars. The track was a two-slot, snap-together, plastic roadbed. Plated-metal rails paralleled each slot; these metal rails supplied low-voltage power to the cars via a driver-controlled rheostat.

Underneath the slot car chassis was a guide peg that fit into the track and spring-loaded contact brushes (on Aurora cars) or troublesome foil brushes pivoting on the slot assembly (on the much faster Tyco cars). These brushes conducted the rail power to a tiny electric motor. Untold hours were spent modifying the little motors and experimenting with different brands of tires. My friends and I spent many enjoyable hours racing against each other and the physical limitations of the system.

Since the rails in the track were plated steel, one of our tribe came up with the bright idea of gluing a magnet to the car’s frame to help hold it onto the track. Straight line speed suffered but cornering speed increased dramatically. Overnight, the worst driver of a magnet car could easily beat the best driver of an un-magnetized car. If one magnet was good then two had to be better. Magnets kept going lower until thin sheets of paper were used as a shim to space the magnets as close as possible to the rails.

The cars got faster. Aurora itself cut away the frame and lowered the motor magnets in their vertical-shaft HO cars to take advantage of the steel rails. The final iteration saw a dropped-motor Aurora with huge, front and rear mounted magnets nearly scraping the rails. This car could run upside down if you cared to build an upside down track. Driver skill, once the most important factor in our races, was extinct; all one had to do was hold the rheostat wide open. Soon the rheostat was unnecessary and we hard-wired the track for full power all the time.

The cars were incredibly fast. It was hard to keep them in sight as they blazed around, gripping the track so tightly the plastic corners would shift as they flew through them at top speed. The cars never jumped the slot.

It wasn’t long before we tired of racing and built ramps to jump the cars. From there things devolved into smashing the cars headlong into walls, then to pouring lighter fluid on the Auroras and setting them on fire to see how long they could circuit the track ablaze.

I loved slot car racing but making it foolproof turned it into that detestable thing: boring. In his email, my old editor told me a modern 1000cc sport bike would be nearly unrideable without the electronic aids. I believe him. So far active-electronic motorcycles still require rider skill to pilot at race speeds but the future looks grim. As for me, unless an electronic aid drastically improves my riding experience I’ll keep defaulting to “No.” I love motorcycling too much to risk losing interest.

Zed’s Not Dead: Part 3

There’s never a good time to work on carburetors. I was hoping for a quick rinse out operation on Zed’s fuel system but besides being dirty, sleeping in the rough has corroded Zed’s right-side carb. The other three carbs show less water damage, lessening towards the left side. No doubt due to Zed leaning to the right against The Carriage House (Tinfiny Ranch’s future guest quarters after Metallica, the main house, is finished).

My idealized, simple douche with carb spray has turned into a complete tear down of the 4-carb bank. I haven’t counted but there must be well over 100 parts between the set. Cleaning the white, calcareous deposit liberally coating the inside of the float chamber has kept me occupied and humble.

Certain parts of the carbs are well and truly stuck. The levers that raise the slides are age-welded to the pivot shafts. I gave them a firm shove and I’m not in the mood to break anything right now. The float bowl drain plugs have resisted my better efforts to unscrew them so I’ll be leaving those as is also. One screw has already broken off on the intake port and another one was pre-broken in the ignition area. I’ve got plenty of drilling and bit wrangling to do. I want to get the carbs clean enough to run the engine before destroying them with my ham-fisted efforts to achieve perfection.

Parts for Zed have begun to trickle into Tinfiny Ranch’s high altitude motorcycle shop. I scored four new intake rubbers for $50 off of Ebay, which seemed like a good deal to me. Not such a good Ebay deal was the ignition advancer bolt and grooved washer. I paid $19 and later found the two parts on Z1 Enterprises for $13.

Z1 Enterprises has a lot of Kawasaki Z1 parts for not unreasonable prices. I bought a complete new wiring harness for $139. The harness comes with the main wiring loom, the gauge cluster loom, the rear tail light/blinker loom and the loom underneath the battery box that the regulator, stator, main harness and some other junk I can’t remember plug into.

Also coming from Z1 Enterprises are fork seals, fork dust boots, a right-side handlebar switch and a few gaskets and o-rings. As I’ve yet to receive the stuff I can’t speak to the quality of the parts but I’ll be sure to let you know how it goes.

I’m into Zed’s resurrection for about $240 so far. I’ll be going back to carb cleaning now. The things are a mess and every time they dry out a new, white-powder film appears. I’m using mild solvents so far but I may have to step up my game to get the carbs spic and span. You know the routine; Part 4 to follow.

If you’d like to catch up on the first two “Zed’s Not Dead” installments, here are the links:

Zed’s Not Dead: Part 1

Zed’s Not Dead:  Part 2

Zed’s Not Dead: Part 2

The first thing I wanted to check on Zed was whether the oil was contaminated or if the wet sump Kawasaki engine was full of rainwater from sitting outside. This was not such an easy job as the previous owner had used a chainsaw to tighten the drain bolt. The head of the bolt was mangled into a tapered affair that resisted all vise-grip attempts to get a purchase. Finally I managed to grip the o-ring flange area and got the sad thing out of the oil pan.

Luckily for me the oil came out black, pure and dirty. I priced a drain bolt and while it was a reasonable 15 bucks for a new one I decided that there was plenty of good meat remaining on the old bolt. Using 7 dollars worth of cutting blades on my 4-inch grinder I cut a 14mm hex head into the wreckage and then smoothed the saw cuts with a 9-dollar flap wheel. After I had the bolt looking respectable I ran down to Home Depot (using 1 gallon of gas @ $2.67) and bought some $6.99 silver spray paint. The paint really made the bolt look sweet and I had the satisfaction of saving money to boot!

I have no idea what originally stopped the Zed from running but by the look of the wiring harness it was electrical. The harness is melted in several places and severed in several others. It’s like someone thought they could cut the bike back to health. Cutting is a sign of deeper psychological problems and the fact that the ignition system was in a cardboard box showed how desperate things had become.

Silicone sealant slathered on the weather cracked rubber intake manifolds was less likely to stop the bike. I have found 4 new manifolds on ebay for $50 and they are on the way. Removing the carbs and air box runners was a straightforward operation.

Until this screw broke off, it’s always worse when a screw breaks on the way out. You’ll never have as good a connection as you did when the part was one piece. I am soaking it with PB Blaster, there’s no rush. At least I can get a straight shot at the piece stuck in the head.

I removed the sparkplugs for a quick, finger-in-the-plug-hole compression test and Zed has compression on all four cylinders. The actual PSI number is not too important at this time. I was more worried about a bad valve or holed piston. The sparkplugs were fluffy-sooty and so is the piston (what I can see of it through the plug hole). The bike was running rich or maybe as the ignition died combustion became less of a sure thing.

I’ve got enough apart to have confidence Zed’s engine will run. Hopefully the gearbox will be ok and the stator will charge the battery. In Part 3 we will clean, clean, clean!

Zed’s Not Dead: Part I

I didn’t start out wanting a Kawasaki Z1. I’m more of a H2 750 triple guy. We were renting a house 10 miles south of Alamogordo, New Mexico and my job was to find a place to buy. Land is cheap in New Mexico and I wanted lots of it. 150 acres was the low-end of what I considered a decent spread.

Tinfiny Ranch’s 5 measly acres with a tiny shack was overpriced by about 50% and after checking the place out I told the real estate agent no dice. I did tell him I was interested in the old Kawasaki leaning against the side of the shack. A call was made to the daughter who inherited Tinfiny and a deal was made. Zed was mine.

Zed came with no title, two Emgo café farings (one color-matched!), three seats, a box full of parts, a repair manual and any other bits I could find digging through the little junk-filled storage area next to the bike. Zed’s chain was rusted and the bike was difficult to push. I used a come-a-long to winch the thing up into the truck and hauled the mess back to our rental place.

Then they sold the place we were renting. CT (my wife) found another rental in Tularosa, 10 miles north of Alamogordo and we hauled all the junk we had accumulated, including Zed, to the new joint.

A year had passed since I bought the Kawasaki and the bike was sitting in a storage trailer waiting for motivation on my part. The bike had no title so I wasn’t gung ho about the whole magilla. I mean, it wasn’t an H2, you know?

We were still looking for a place to call our own when the agent who had shown us Tinfiny Ranch called and said the seller was really lowering the price. CT and I went back out and looked the place over again. Tinfiny had electric service (not activated) a water well (broken), a septic system and a horrific wreck of a shack. It was only 15 miles from CT’s work. We figured what it would cost to make Tinfiny into what we wanted and worked our way back to a price. The agent said no way would the daughter take our offer and of course she did. I hauled the Kawasaki right back to where I had originally gotten the bike. Zed was back home.

Buying Tinfiny Ranch turned out to be a good thing because the rental we were living in also sold and we only had a few months to get the shack into a less distressed condition. There was no time to mess with Zed. I had the shack functioning at a first grade level in time to run off to China with Berk. CT moved all our junk and herself into the shack while I was gone. A more resilient wife you will never find.

Tinfiny has required massive amounts of sweat equity in the two years since we moved into the shack. In that time I walked Zed through New Mexico’s lost title maze and managed to get a shiny new title for a little over 150 dollars. Now the bike was mine: body and soul.

Having a title changed my relationship to Zed for the better. What was once a parts bike to be broken down and sold on the internet became a real motorcycle. I looked at the bike with a new appreciation for the classic lines and meaty, overhanging engine. The bike has stance. It is easy on the eyes with no hard edges or inorganic folds. It is a beautiful industrial product that has transcended the commercial realm and now resides in the empire of art.

Yeah, I’m gonna fix it, but not a restoration, that’s for people who can’t accept a missing eye on an old teddy bear. Life leaves scars. This will be a repair, a salvage operation to get Zed back on the road. I don’t know how long it will take but I know now is the time to start. At this point in my life I’m in no rush and it looks like Zed isn’t going anywhere either.