Category: Joe Gresh

ExNotes Review: The Penske Racing Museum

I grew up in the South, way deep south, which means open-wheel automobile racing has always been a little suspect to me. Stock cars built in the good old USA slamming into each other every corner was auto racing. Tracks were small ovals either paved or dirt and the fence wouldn’t save you if a Chevelle climbed the wall just right. Stock car racing was total immersion. Saturday night, roasted peanuts, greasy pizza, burning rubber and beer will transport me right back to Hialeah Speedway in the late 1960s. For a young punk it was a glorious way to pass a hot Florida evening.

Yankees raced open-wheel. Yankees to me were any people that lived north of Fort Lauderdale. I couldn’t tell the difference between Indy cars and Formula One cars and truthfully, I still can’t. The open wheel cars raced far away from the crowd: almost nothing ever hit you at an Indy car race.

Roger Penske was a successful Indy car team owner before he started renting big yellow moving vans and he has a multibrand luxury car dealership with a small museum attached. I had time to kill so I wandered over to the museum with a southern-chip-on-my-shoulder, cocky, dirt oval attitude: Show me what you got, Big Daddy.

The museum is small, all on one floor with a gift shop and a lunch counter a floor above the display cars. Turns out Penske won the Indy 500 more frequently than you would assume and the 500-mile winners in the museum are the actual race cars tidied up for display.

The first engine on your left as you enter the place is Mercedes-Benz 500/265E. Right off the bat with the foreign car stuff, you know? This sweet looking 3-1/2 liter V-8 put out 1024 horsepower at the relatively low RPM of 9,800. The first time out this engine won the pole and the Indy 500 in 1994 with Al Unser behind the wheel. The Mercedes 500 was the first car to pull off this stunt so I guess they got it right the first time.

Mark Donohue won the 1972 Indy 500 in this Drake-Offenhauser powered McLaren M16B. With a 4-speed transmission the car burned through methanol 75 gallons at a time. The car averaged 191 miles an hour for the race, which is about 91 miles an hour faster than the cars on my beloved dirt ovals.

Rick Mears of off-road racing fame won the 1984 Indy 500 in a Penske-March car powered by a Cosworth-Ford. Averaging 207 miles per hour I’m guessing the Cosworth fairly sipped fuel from its 40-gallon methanol supply. Or, maybe the pit crew was really fast. When you’re circling in top gear all the time you don’t need more than the four speeds the March transmission provided.

Now we’re getting somewhere: a Chevy 2.65 liter V-8 pumping out 720 horsepower at 10,700 RPM. This engine won the 1991 Indy 500 with Rick Mears behind the wheel again. This engine went on to win 72 races.

I find it hard to believe that these tiny, multi-plate clutches can hold up for 500 miles pushing 200 miles per hour. The things aren’t much bigger than a motorcycle clutch. Maybe I’m wrong?  Is this an accessory drive?

Penske didn’t just run teams, he raced real cars like I like. This Pontiac super-duty 421 cubic-inch beast won the 1963 Riverside 250 with Penske behind the wheel. A Borg Warner T10 handled the shifts, Monroe Regal Ride absorbed the bumps and a Carter AFB mixed the fuel/air. I guarantee the bodywork was not this nice in 1963.

Joey Logano won the 2015 Daytona 500 with this Penske-chassis Ford Fusion. The 358 cubic-inch Ford put 775 horsepower to the famed Daytona high banks.

The photos above show an unusual Lola T-152, 4-wheel drive Penske car from 1969. It’s plenty potent with 850 horsepower squeezed from the Drake-Offenhauser engine at only 9000 RPM. That big hair drier on the side must have made lots of boost. This car also lugged around 75 gallons of methanol.

There are more cars and engines at the Penske museum but I’m leaving them out so you’ll have to visit the museum to see them all. Penske even built a small racetrack for Mini Coopers behind the museum but that area has been taken over as a parking lot by the dealerships. Land Rover enthusiasts have a couple of artificial hills to practice on but the lady who runs the museum said that they don’t use those hills any more.

I came away from my visit impressed by Penske’s many racing successes. He’s not just a rental truck guy. I’ll go as far as to say if Penske raced at Hialeah Speedway back in the late 1960s he would have probably banged fenders with the best of them and carried many golden trophies somewhere north of Fort Lauderdale. Where the Yankees are from.

The Penske Racing Museum is located at 7125 E Chauncey Lane in Phoenix, Arizona.

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Dream Bikes: Suzuki GT 750

My grandparents on my mother’s side owned a cabin in Cashiers, North Carolina. Built on the side of a steep hill you had to hand carry everything up to the cabin. Maybe if we had a 4-wheel drive we could have made it to the cabin, but my grandparents owned a Volkswagen van. The VW would start spinning its wheels halfway up. Mr. Price, who also lived in Cashiers, built the cabin.  It was a slow process as The Grands paid as they went, never going into debt for the place. Mr. Price was easy going and worked on the place whenever he was sent money.

After about ten years of walking to the cabin my Grandfather, Grandmother, Billy Mac and me poured a concrete driveway to the cabin. It was about ten feet wide. The concrete trucks couldn’t make it all the way to the top so we manhandled buckets and buggies to pour that section. Further down we could just dump it out of the truck into the forms.

The job was easier than it sounds because we only had to strike off the top and finish the edges. The driveway had a concave shape to funnel water down the middle like a big sluice. We left the driveway as poured to provide a high traction, rough surface. At intervals we troweled an expansion groove. All in, the driveway was probably 300 feet long. After the driveway was built a car could make it to the cabin and it was real luxury not having to carry stuff up the steep, muddy driveway.

The road to the cabin was dirt, winding past two small lakes that were full of fish. Several roads split off the main road and at the last split before Gran & Gramp’s cabin there was a house with a purple-pink, GT750 Suzuki parked out front. The GT had three, flat black expansion chambers fighting for position underneath the crankcase.

I had read about the Suzuki triple cylinder in Popular Mechanics magazine but this was the first time I saw one in real life. Popular Mechanics did a road test on the bike and loved the big Suzuki. It got fairly good fuel mileage and Suzuki’s complex CCI oiling system was stingy with the injector oil. The Suzuki 750 was regarded as a touring bike, not at all like Kawasaki’s mad, mad three-cylinder H2 750.

The air in the mountain valleys carried sound in mysterious ways and when the owner of the Suzuki started the bike those expansion chambers cackled in on me from all directions at once. Was he above me, below me? Heading away or towards me? It was surround sound of the very best kind. I had a Honda Mini Trail and would ride over to the Suzuki house just to look at the bike. Polished aluminum cases, a color-coordinated radiator, big tachometer and speedo with a water temperature gauge: it didn’t seem like a touring bike to me. It seemed like something from another planet.

In the USA GT750s haven’t reached silly H2 prices yet. Their slightly boring reputation keeps the price low-ish. The engines last quite a long time and a GT750 turning 50,000 miles without a rebuild would not be unusual. A quick Google search brings up runners from $3500 to $8000 and that’s not bad compared to the overly complex modern stuff we are faced with at the local Mega Brand Dealer.

Probably the later GT750s are better motorcycles than the early ones. Suzuki improved the front brake and bumped up the power slightly towards the end of production. The first GTs had a Buck Rodgers look that you either loved or hated. I loved it. Really, I’d be fine with any year. The double-sided, twin leading shoe front brake on the first one was a thing of beauty and I’m guessing stopped good enough.

Of all the three-cylinder Suzukis I think the 750 is best. The 380 was a dog, the 550 was almost unnoticeable on the bike scene in those days. The big, water-cooled GT 750 made a huge splash (ha) and still ranks as one of my one-day, must-have dream motorcycles.

The Suzuki GT 750 is a sensible classic that you can ride everyday and cross the country on if the mood hits you. That’s not why I want one. I want one because of the sound it made in the mountains of North Carolina. I can hear it as I type this sentence, a cross between the whining of a tornado and the keys of a mechanical typewriter slapping onto the page.

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Ho-Made Tools I Don’t Use

I’ve been cleaning out the shed on and off for about four years now. When we first moved here we stuffed everything into the shed. There was no time to sort through the junk. We had to return the Penske truck. After the junk sat there a few years the mice made a lot of decisions for us: if it was chewed up we tossed it.

I had tools at my work, tools at the house, tools at The Love Shack, three of everything. I just can’t bring myself to toss out tools. I have some home-built tools that no longer serve a purpose but I hang on to them. Because you never know when you’ll need to remove the centrifugal oil filter on a Honda 305.

This wrench was made from a cut down socket and a rear fender support from a Sportster. It fits the output flange nut on a boat V-drive. The output flange sits pretty low in the bilge and after a while the salt water splashing around in the bottom of the boat corrodes the seal. To remove the seal you have to separate the prop shaft from the V-drive. The problem is the prop shaft will only slide back a few inches before the prop-shaft flange hits the stuffing box. With this set up I could change a v-drive seal without pulling the engine. It was a stupid move on my part because at the time I was paid by the hour. The faster I went the less I earned. I still keep the wrench; maybe it will fit something else someday.

I mentioned the stuffing box and here’s the cut down pipe wrench I used to remove the packing nut and loosen the lock nut. Stuffing boxes are used where the prop shaft goes through the boat hull, a bronze casting called a shaft log. The stuffing box is a large nut that has several rows of flax packing, also called cat gut. These rows of packing are fitted into the packing nut or the shaft log depending on the design of the shaft log.

The flax packing seals the shaft log where the shaft enters so that water won’t leak into the boat…almost. In practice you want to leave a small drip, maybe a drop every 30 seconds, for a water supply to cool the stuffing box. If you crank down on the packing too much you can burn up the flax and the shaft log will leak. The pipe wrench is short because the stuffing box nut is large and it’s always hard to access between the stringers of the boat. You can buy a store bought stuffing box wrench but they are made like a flimsy adjustable wrench with a cheesy wing nut to lock the jaws into position. Trust me: the pipe wrench works better. A hammer also works but tends to damage the bronze stuffing box.

I didn’t make the dial indicator, just the Z-shaped bracket. This tool is used to set the timing on a 1971 360 Yamaha Enduro. The ’71 Enduro (and other years) has an angled sparkplug hole. The angled hole precludes measuring the piston stroke through the plug hole. With the cylinder head removed this tool bolts up and can measure the stroke. You have to know the piston position to accurately set the ignition timing. Once you’ve set the correct fire position there is a little tab inside the flywheel area that lines up with a flywheel mark. Bending the tab to line everything up will save you from measuring the piston stroke every time you want to adjust the points. It’s a use-it-once type of tool unless you disturb the timing marks. Godzilla runs so good I may never need it again.

This tool is made from Monel, a metal found around boat yards, which isn’t important to its function. There are a few other holes in the tool but I’ve forgotten what they do. The two holes marked by the red arrows will fit a Norton Lockheed front disc brake caliper. In operation you insert a couple drill bits into the tool; the bits line up with two holes drilled into the Lockheed caliper. The caliper plug this tool fits unscrews and allows removal of the caliper piston. You need this long lever because the plug gets pretty tight after 35 years. I’m hanging on to the tool because I may own another Norton one day.

At one time my dad and I owned BMW motorcycles. He had the 600cc and I had the 750. These were early 1970s models with the new, suitcase engine. In building the suitcase engine BMW relocated the cam below the crankshaft so the pushrod tubes were below the cylinder rather than above like on earlier engines. This was done to raise the cylinders higher in the bike allowing steeper lean angles in the corners. The problem was the pushrod tubes leaked oil where they contacted the crankcase. This tool slips over the pushrod tube and by tapping the base of the pushrod tube you could tighten up the seal area. It sounds crude but it was easier than pulling the heads to install new pushrod tube seals. I think you can buy a factory tool that looks much better than mine but does the same thing. I’m not adverse to owning the early GS 800cc, the ones that are clean and light and don’t have all the useless garbage BMW loads onto new motorcycles.

This tool is used to remove the nut from a Honda 305 centrifugal oil filter. I had two 305 Hondas. Those bikes had beautiful engines that were made extremely well. Early Hondas had a spinning cup type filter that oil circulated through. In the spinning motion heavy particles suspended in the oil were slung outward, clean oil flowed through the center. It was a good oil filter and if you wanted to take the engine apart like I did you needed this tool. After thousands of miles you would remove the right side cover to gain access to the filter. A wire clip held the o-ringed lid on the filter and I’d pull the thing off for cleaning. It wasn’t unusual to find 1/8-inch of compacted swarf stuck to the walls of the filter.

Back to boats. This tool is used to remove the macerator from Raritan Crown marine toilets. Working on boats isn’t the glamorous job that you see in the movies. Sometimes you had to fix toilets. The Crown was a very popular toilet back in the day. It used a large starter motor to spin a macerator and two rubber impeller pumps. One pump supplied seawater to the bowl then a macerator chewed up the poo and finally another impeller pumped the mash to a holding tank or overboard depending on how far offshore you were. After much use the seals would start leaking and the stuff leaking out wasn’t peppermint.

You had to disconnect hoses and the bowl then turn the motor (usually) to get to the end plate. Small straight slot screws held on the plastic end plate, removing the end plate allowed access to the macerator and the poo. The macerator had two pivoting chopper arms; removing these arms allowed you to screw the puller tool onto the macerator and a center bolt would pull the macerator. It was not a fun job. I wish I never made the puller tool. I could have told customers, “Sorry I don’t have the tools to fix your toilet.”

I have more homemade, or as we say in the south “ho-made” tools that I may write about on a day like today, a day when I’m sifting through the accumulated junk of my life.

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ExhaustNotes Road Test: Shoei RF SR Helmet

I finally managed to put some miles on my new Shoei RF SR helmet. I took the RD350 out for a loop of the mountains and Tularosa’s TulieFreeze Ice cream shop. I had a Sundae with hot fudge, nuts and whipped cream. TulieFreeze always puts a cherry on top.

Oh yeah…the helmet. The Shoei was quiet at highway speeds, none of my bikes have windshields so I get the air full blast and I like it that way. Turning my head side to side was comfortable and the wind didn’t over-rotate my head side on. All in all the Shoei RS cuts a pretty clean swath through the air. There was no shaking or turbulence.

The fit is perfect on the top parts of my head (your head may vary) but the cheeks are still too tight as the pads press in on my jowly visage more than is appropriate for two people who just met. Luckily the cheek pads are made to be easily removable in case you have crashed. Hopefully the EMT will know to remove the pads before trying to force the helmet off and severing your spinal cord.

I’ll probably wait a bit longer before shaving down the cheek pads. I still have hopes it will break in. I need to stop and remove my helmet to relieve the face-pressure after 50 miles. It gives me a chance to admire the RD’s metallic purple paint. The tight-ish flip shield has loosened up a bit, I gave it a squirt of Shoei oil and after 10-20 flips it’s ok.

Speaking of the shield I have Shoei’s auto-darkening face shield. That sucker cost more than any helmet I’ve ever bought. Since I now have had both cataracts removed from my eyes I can see much better at night. I’m planning to step up the after hours summer riding and the auto-tint works fabulously. From the outside it appears super dark but from inside the helmet it’s not so dark. In fact, I wouldn’t mind if it got darker. As it is I can ride in bright sunlight without squinting. It seems to keep the inside of the helmet cooler.

When the sun goes down it’s as clear as a clear shield. On thing that worries me is how resistant the coating is to gas station squeegees and bug guts. I’m going to put a heavy coat of paste wax on the shield and even that makes me nervous. What if the wax screws it up?

It was cool but not cold on my ride and I totally forgot to open the vents to see if they had any effect of the interior airflow. At 70 degrees with the vents closed it was comfortable. I’ll test the vents after the doctor gives my new eye the ok to thrash around on a motorcycle.

Another week or two and my eye should be back to full strength. That means I can lift concrete bags and ride around without a care. I’ve already planned a trip to Tina’s Mexican food in Carlsbad; they have reopened after Covid shut them down for a year. It’s good to see things returning to normal after such a trying two years.

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Coming up…more good stuff!

We’ve got a bunch of cool stuff coming your way in the next few weeks.

I’m working on a detailed tutorial on how to time a revolver…it’s my beloved Model 60.  It seems the more things go south on that old war horse, the more I love it.  This time, the revolver went out of time (that means it’s firing with the chambers misaligned with the barrel), and the way to correct that is by fitting a new hand.  That’s the piece you see in the big photo above, showing the well-worn 60-year-old original hand on the left and a new one on the right (the hand is the part that advances the cylinder for each shot).  Good times.  Did I mention I love that gun?

I’ll be on a bunch of secret missions in the next few months.  I’m visiting Janus Motorcycles in the next few weeks and I’m going to ride their new Halcyon 450.  You may remember I rode with the Janus guys in Baja three years ago (wow, those three years went by quickly).  The Janus trip was a hoot and I was blown away by the quality of these small motorcycles.

I’ll be in Gettysburg soon…four score and seven years ago, and you know the rest.  Gettysburg was the turning point, and the bloodiest battle of the Civil War.  I’m looking forward to the photo ops, and you’ll see the Nikon’s output right here.

And another:  Hershey, Pennsylvania…an entire town blanketed in the aroma of good chocolate, streetlights that look like Hershey kisses, calories galore, and tasty treats.  That will be a sweet ride!

Folks love listicles.  There are a dozen or so reasons why a Timex is as good as a Rolex.  That one will generate a few comments, and we’ll be bringing them to you here.

How about the Indianapolis Motor Speedway?  You’ll see it right here on ExNotes.  Good stuff.  Yep, we’ll be there, too.

Bill’s Bike Barn…yet another vintage moto museum.  Never heard of it?  Well, you will!

More gun stuff?  Absolutely.  Fine walnut and blue steel.  I’ve got a cool story about the most beautiful stock I’ve ever seen on an absolutely incredible .257 Weatherby Magnum Ruger No. 1.

Look for a follow up on the Shoei helmet Gresh wears these days…it’s in the mix, too.

A road trip to New Mexico, and that means a visit with Joe 1 (or is he Joe 2?) and another video or two.  Gresh has a bunch of motorcycles.  Maybe I’ll borrow one and he and I will go for a ride.  Who knows?

And more rides on my effervescent and exciting Enfield, one of the best bargains in biking (we’ll have a listicle coming up bargain bikes, too).  Now that the left-leaning evil time suck (i.e., Facebook) is in the rear view mirror, I have lots more time.  I’m doing what the Good Lord intended, and that’s riding my motorcycle and writing about it.

Stay tuned.

ExhaustNotes.us Book Review: Maus By Art Spiegelman

The main reason I read the two-part graphic novel, Maus, is because a school board in Tennessee banned the book from their curriculum due to nudity and bad language. I wanted to see what the school board found so sexy about the holocaust.

Spoiler alerts ahead.

Maus is mostly about one Jewish man’s survival of the Nazi’s effort to exterminate the Jewish people. You’ve heard the stories and the subject has been covered extensively. Maus is a different in that the hero of the book, Vladek (I call him a hero because just surviving took an incredible, heroic will to live.) seems to have an unnatural ability to thrive in any situation no matter how desperate. Vladek never loses his spirit and can find the positive slant in a horror of degradation and abuse. It takes a strong man to feel he’s lucky to be in Auschwitz instead of Birkenau.

The road to the concentration camps was not a direct line. There were many slights and inconveniences that the Jewish people tolerated because this was their home. All their friends and relatives were here. Little by little the Nazis increased the pressure, still no one could have imagined the full extent of the plan and by then it was too late. The numbers killed are staggering. Vladek’s nighttime visit to the bathroom is shocking to us now: he steps over and on dead bodies lying on the floor hoping not to slip down and become one of them.

A second story line runs parallel to the Nazi extermination; this is the son’s story of trying to come to terms with his father’s obsessive cleaning and extreme thriftiness. Vladek’s terrifying life has left him unable to stop preparing for the next holocaust even when he’s safe in America and financially well off. Vladek counts matches to avoid running out, returns half eaten boxes of cereal for credit and is perpetually on the make for a deal. These traits served him well in the concentration camps and I don’t see any downside to them after he is freed. Compared to what Vladek had been through any minor embarrassment on his son’s part was no big deal.

My Dad and grandparents were from the depression era and I saw some of the same kind of economy and scarcity mentality when I was young. For my Dad, wasting food was the biggest crime you could commit. He told me often how joining the US Navy was the best thing he ever did. He couldn’t believe the amount of food the Navy provided and didn’t understand how some of the other sailors could complain about the food. He thought it was heaven.

The comic book style of Maus might make it more accessible to younger readers and the short sentences keep the story moving along. The artwork is black and white using a brutal sort of drawing. Each panel looks like a carved linoleum print. The Jewish people are shown as mice, Polish people are pigs, Germans are cats and the American GIs look like dogs. At times the Jewish characters try to disguise themselves by wearing the mask of a pig or a cat. Sometimes it works.

There is a third storyline running in the background. This is the love story of Vladek and Anja, husband and wife. They become separated in the Nazi’s roundup of Jews. Luck plays a big part in life and by luck Vladek and Anja end up seeing each other in the concentration camps. As the war came to an end and the Allies closed in the Nazis stepped up their abuse and started shipping Jews back into Germany for killing, sometimes leaving the Jews in locked cattle cars for weeks until they were all dead. Vladek survives the rapidly worsening conditions like he always does by eating snow and horse trading for sugar.

I think schools back in the 1960s and ’70s were a bit more enlightened and less of a political/ideological battleground than they are today. The school curriculum was set by professional educators, not by angry, politically motivated parents. I know the story of the holocaust because we were taught it in school. The ovens, the gas chambers, the millions killed by clockwork death factories and the chimneys always rendering fat. The scale was unbelievable. Maus is a believable, personal story and the eyewitness account made me despair for our species.

I truly believe something like the holocaust could happen in America. Native Americans will tell you that it has happened here. Black slaves were treated only marginally better than concentration camp prisoners. I’ve seen how people in our country rose up and cheered a kid who shot protesters. One of their side had shot some people from the other side and that was praiseworthy. I’ve seen Americans fighting over toilet paper. Jewish synagogues and gravestones are routinely defaced. I see Nazi marchers parading in American cities. There is plenty of hate to go around in the American psyche and by the hour we are being indoctrinated to regard the other side as less than human. It takes so little to create a monster.

There is nudity and bad language in Maus but if you’re the type of school board that finds mountains of naked bodies being doused with gasoline and set on fire or a woman dead in a bathtub titillating or erotic there is really nothing more to be said. If your real goal is to stop people from reading Maus then you will identify with the cats in this book.

Anyway, I figure that by the time an American kid reaches 12 years old he’s seen around 50,000 murders on television or at the movies so that kid should be ok to read Maus. The story of the holocaust needs to be told over and over in as many ways as possible. It should be drilled into each student’s head until they can recognize the first sign of evil: like an American school board trying to ban a book about Nazi crimes. Instead of being banned Maus should be required reading from junior high onwards.

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Chongqing!

Other than good buddy Arjiu (that would be Joe Gresh), I’m guessing most of you have never been to Chongqing.  Chongqing is home to China’s motorcycle industry and it was the starting point for your two blogmeisters’ putt across the Ancient Kingdom.  I enjoyed that ride enormously.  Gresh and I had some fantastic times.

I first visited Chongqing and Zongshen as a consultant to CSC when we used Zongshen’s 250cc engine in our Mustang replicas.  One thing led to another, and before too long CSC was Zongshen’s exclusive North American importer, and CSC introduced the RX3 to the US.  I was blown away by Chongqing, the people, the size of the city, the photo ops, the cuisine, and more.  I’ve been there many times and I’d go back again in a heartbeat.

Good buddy Fan shared this video a few days ago, and I knew I had to share it on the blog.  Pro tip:  Hit the little button on the bottom right of the video (after you start it) to view it full screen.  It’s impressive.

You can be a China hater all you want. I know more than a few people over there I call my friends. Yeah, the world is going through some shaky times right now, but that’s not the Chinese people and it’s for sure not the guys I know. I like the place.

If you want to know more about our trip across China, pick up a copy of Riding China.   There’s a link here on the blog.  And take a look at our Epic Rides page, where we have links to posts about that ride.

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ExhaustNotes Hasty Conclusions: First look At Shoei’s RF-SR Helmet

My nephew Anthony has been bugging me for years to buy a new motorcycle helmet. He was in the business as manager at Cycle Gear in Albuquerque, so he knew his helmets. Even I had to admit my tattered lids were getting old. I have a HJC from New Zealand bought in 2014 and a Speed and Strength from The Helmet House that dates all the way back to Motorcyclist magazine’s paper era.

Most brand name helmets have gotten pretty expensive. Since I’m so cheap I don’t like to give up old helmets until they kill me, or ideally, give them up a week before they kill me. But from a fiscal standpoint who can say which day that will be? Over the years I’ve bobbed and weaved around the topic so much that Anthony offered to send me a new helmet, any helmet I wanted. I mean, the guy is tying to support a family; I can’t have him buying helmets for me. That’s what wives are for.

My A-number-one, favorite helmet of all time is the Speed and Strength. That helmet fit my head better than any other and it felt lightweight. The aerodynamics are great on the thing also: no buffeting in the wind and fairly quiet to boot. Naturally, the same model is no longer made. CT and Anthony got together and always keeping a weather eye on my thrifty nature, decided a Shoei RF-SR would be a quality helmet without costing much more than the motorcycles I habituate.

The Shoei RF-SR model must be on its way out because finding one was not an easy task. CT ordered one from Dennis Kirk and after a few weeks she checked on the order status. The helmet was out of stock and on back order. It would have been a polite thing for DK to mention this at the checkout page. As usual Amazon had the helmet but only in silly teen-age Moto GP colors, white or flat black. I chose flat black to make myself less conspicuous. Kind of a, if-they-can’t-see-you-they-can’t-hit-you, loud pipes save lives type of reasoning.

The Shoei came with a fat owner’s manual that consisted of page after page of responsibility disclaimers, warnings not to use anything but mild soap and water to clean the helmet and descriptions of all the ways the helmet could be made unsafe. I flipped through the manual and didn’t find much useful information but then I’m not a tort lawyer.

I was mostly concerned with fit, as the best helmet in the world won’t protect you if it is bouncing down the road without your head inside. Helmet brands are sized differently and with Internet purchases you can never be size-sure. Amazon’s easy return policy made the proposition a little less risky. My pea brain suits a medium helmet and the Shoei medium is a snug fit. Not painfully tight but you won’t forget you’re wearing a helmet. I think a large would be too loose.

I like a snug helmet. There’s nothing more annoying than a helmet wiggling around on your head causing double vision. I haven’t worn the helmet much but I think it will conform to my head shape after a few long rides. Or as they say on the British situation comedy Are You Being Served “It will ride up with wear.”

The Amazon shipping box felt very light and when I took the helmet out I commented how light it felt. I felt the urge to get all Cycle Magazine-y and put the thing on the scales. I was surprised to see the Shoei was heavier than both the HJC and my battered Speed And Strength.

The Shoei weighed 6 ounces more than the Speed And Strength, which seemed like a lot to me. The HJC, which always felt sort of heavy to me, split the difference. Oddly, the Shoei feels lighter when you pick it up and wear the thing. Maybe the hole it knocks in your wallet makes it seem lighter. This goes to show you I cannot be trusted when describing weights or measures.

There is a large, closeable front vent on the chin bar of the Shoei. I hit the opening with my Ryobi grass blower and the vent passed a decent quantity of air. The plastic latching bits seem fairly secure.

On the forehead area there are two small vents that also open and close. The Ryobi grass blower passed less air through these small vents but really the only way to see how all these holes work is to ride the bike.

Two back vents take advantage of a low-pressure area directly behind the helmet’s spoiler thingy to help draw cool air through the Shoei. These are fixed and cannot be closed but you really need some air exchange inside the lid to keep from falling asleep and crashing. Okay, I made that last part up. No one has fallen asleep from motorcycle helmet oxygen starvation. That I know of.

Also included inside the Shoei box was a nose guard and a chin cover. The nose guard helps direct your hot, steamy exhalations downward away from the face shield. This might help with fogging but I can’t say for sure as it rubs on my awesome beak so I leave it out. The chin cover fits along the front-bottom of the chin bar and seals that area off for cold weather riding. I don’t like the feel of the chin cover chafing against my waddle so I left that bit out also.

A pinlock anti-fog insert came in the Shoei box too, you get a lot of extras with a Shoei helmet. The pinlock fits inside your face shield creating a double pane window effect that is supposed to stop condensation and related fogging. It might do this but I’ll have to wait for conditions to worsen here in sunny, dry, New Mexico to test it out. Shoei included a couple of easily lost, pinlock posts in case your shield isn’t Pinlock ready. You’ll have to drill your shield and insert the little posts in the correct location. Right, that’s not gonna happen. Luckily for me the RF came with the posts already fitted.

Lastly, a helmet bag and a tiny jar of Shoei oil were included in the box. I’m guessing the oil is for the face shield ratchet mechanism. I should put a little oil on there because the shield is kind of hard to open. I’m hoping it will ride up with wear.

Construction projects at Tinfiny ranch have been keeping me busy so I haven’t had a chance to test the Shoei beyond wearing it to bed for a couple Star Wars nights: “I’m your father, Luke!” I’ll try to get out in the next day or so with an ExhaustNotes follow up report with an additional surprise helmet widget review.

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Flipper Nation: How To Ruin a Fun Hobby By Squeezing Every Dime That You Can Out Of It

I realize we all have to make a living. Food has gone up, gas costs more and the rent is too damn high. Look, I have nothing against businessmen, as long as they play it straight and don’t scam customers. Go for it. Make all the money you can; see if I care. No, this story is about how all of us grease monkey types have forsaken the cool and the funky to become a bunch of soulless stock fluffers: a nation of pump-and-dump Hobby-Hawkers concerned only with what they can extract from the other, equally soulless fluffers.

Take Jeep YJ’s for instance. The square-headlight YJ has been the entry-level vehicle for 4-wheel drive buffs for the last 30 years. Shunned by other Jeep owners, despised for the simple crime of having headlights that actually align with their bodywork, Jeep YJ’s were the bottom rung. You could pick up a running YJ for a couple thousand dollars and hit the trails later that day. Light weight and simple suspension made the YJ very capable off-road and easy to fix when it broke down.

I bought my ’92 YJ for $2800 about ten years ago and the thing has been running good-ish ever since. If you believe the YJ groups I habituate, YJ’s are $20,000 rigs now. I see people posting up rusty old YJ’s for $6000/$8000 dollars. The users of YJ groups love it. Just sitting on their hands their investment (note: It’s no longer a Jeep or something they enjoy; it’s just an investment, like oil futures) goes up several thousand dollars a day. When someone online asks what their YJ is worth, which is every second question after which oil to use, the shills pipe in with ridiculous amounts of money that they themselves would never pay. All in service of bumping up the YJ’s stock price.

I could understand it better if Jeep YJ’s were sort of rare, but Jeep made 685,000 of the things over a nearly 10-year production run. They are everywhere, in fields, rusting in driveways, stacked in Jeep specific junkyards. That doesn’t stop the flippers from trying to run up the price. Everyday the imagined value of a Jeep YJ goes up another few hundred dollars. We may have missed out on Bitcoin but we’re darn sure not going to sell our clapped out old Jeeps for less than the price of a 2022 model. This money grab turns a fun hobby into just another IPO stock offering, something to own for its upside potential, not because you enjoyed it.

It’s the same with old motorcycles. The prices people are asking for any minor part that fits a vintage Japanese bike are just silly. I’m not immune to fluffer-fever. Prices for old Z1 Kawasaki’s have gotten so high I’m thinking of selling mine to cash in before the bubble bursts. My funky old motorcycle has turned into a savings account. And that’s the truly sad part: I enjoyed building the Z1 but now have to worry about where I park it due to its inflated value. I was going to ride it to Mexico with Berk but what if it gets stolen? The bike is no longer fun. In my mind’s eye it has become a stack of dollar bills waiting to be blown away by the slightest wind.

I know I’m ranting here but just once I’d like to log into a vintage motorcycle forum and not be bombarded with Internet shills asking for valuations or offering Jeeps and motorcycles for sale at stratospheric numbers. Old Jeeps, motorcycles and for that matter, vintage cars should mean more to us than how much return on the investment we can get from them. They should reach back into our memories and emotions; they should recall hot-metal smells and loves lost or found; they should be valued and not commoditized.

I guess what I really want is to remember the fun we had with our old cars and bikes before it all became a race to the top. I know the air will rarify and these old clunkers will become like casino chips: traded but never loved except for their monetary properties. You know, I used to hate the way people chopped up vintage Japanese motorcycles and turned them into goofy looking Brat style bikes but now I’m having second thoughts. Maybe by so thoroughly destroying the value of their motorcycles the Brat Butchers are actually saving the old bike’s true value as a motorcycle.

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Read more about the Z1 and other projects here.

Once, I Knew One Thing: An ExhaustNotes Review

When I first started working on boats there were only two choices if you wanted a generator: Onan or Kohler. This was in the 1970s. Most all the equipment on boats was still made in the USA and China was largely an agrarian society with little industrial capacity. It seems impossible with today’s global economy and seemingly unlimited options but we got along fine with just the two manufacturers.

Onan generators were the most popular in the territory I covered which was from Balboa Island up near Los Angeles to San Diego. The company I worked for, Admiralty Marine, was on Shelter Island right off of Rosecrans Street. Admiralty Marine sold a lot of Onan generators. One year, Woody Peebles and I installed 51 new generators. That’s only one a week but you have to realize we also did engine installations, ElectroGuard corrosion control systems and repaired and serviced all those Onan generators.

To install a generator isn’t as easy as it sounds. You don’t just plop it on the deck and plug it in. The California boats were pleasure yachts and everything was varnished if it wasn’t polished or oiled. You had to cover all surfaces with cardboard and plywood before starting any work. Making things worse, the generator was usually buried in the engine room behind the main engines, batteries and a zillion other components down in the bilge.

To get the generator out might mean removing the rug, lifting heavy hatches, taking off exhaust manifolds on the mains or moving water tanks and cross beams. Then you had to brace underneath the deck to support the portable A-frame hoist used to lift the generator out of the hole.

The portable hoist was portable in name only. The thing weighed a ton. Consisting of two steel uprights, a steel crossbar, a chain-fall and a metal box full of wedges, lifting eyes and the carriage that slid on the crossbar. All in, the hoist weighed about 300 pounds. We didn’t trust aluminum. You had to carry each piece of the hoist down the dock and onto the boat without causing any damage. Except that anything the hoist touched was damaged.

There were no store-bought portable hoists; you had to make them yourself or pay someone to build a hoist for you. I made my own and still have it baking in the sun here at The Ranch in New Mexico. You never know when you’ll need to pull a boat engine 500 miles from the closest ocean. Working with the hoist all those years I became attached to the thing. We’ve been through a lot of wars, you know? So much heavy lifting, I can’t bring myself toss it out.

It took about three days for me and Woody to remove an old generator, clean up the mess and install a new generator, roughly 24 hours labor times two men. At my hourly rate I made 78 dollars for the job. Admiralty Marine charged my labor at 600 dollars for the install, clearing 522 dollars once you deduct my pay. I never knew what Woody was paid. Probably more than me as he was the brains of the operation. The cost breakdown on these jobs was a great lesson in capitalism for me.

On rare occasions we worked on gas-powered generators but they were usually old wooden boats with cash-strapped owners. The Onan generators we worked on were almost all diesel-powered. The block was modular: 1 cylinder for the 3000-watt, 2 cylinders for the 7500-watt and 4-cylinders for the 12,000-watt version. The 4-cylinder used two, two-cylinder heads.

The early models used a CT (current transformer) set up to control the field voltage, which controlled the voltage output. In a nutshell, the power output leads went through these big CT’s on the end of the generator causing an inductive current in the CT’s and the CT’s sent power to the field. It was self-regulating, always varying the field current to suit the load. I never fully understood CT generators but luckily they were fairly reliable. Newer, solid-state voltage regulators superseded the CT voltage regulators.

The new solid-state Onan generators were a mechanic’s best friend. They broke down at such a regular pace you could forecast your income years in advance. The start-stop-preheat circuits were analog. It looked kind of funny: the top of the control box where the voltage regulator lived was all space-age but underneath that were stone-age relays, big brown resistors and purple smoke.

None of the Onans had counter balancers so they shook violently when in operation. The single-cylinder was the worst; it had soft rubber mounts that insulated the boat from vibrations. Fortunately for us repairmen the relays and wiring was susceptible to vibrations and would shake to pieces. Parts were always breaking off the things.

One time I installed a single-cylinder Onan in a boat and a week later the owner called saying it had stopped running. I went to his boat and found the flange that the seawater pump bolted to had fractured. Without sea water to cool the heat exchanger the engine overheated and shut off. The flange was steel and it was sandwiched between the timing cover and the block so you had to dismantle the front of the engine to replace it. It was such a crappy design.

The “One Thing I Knew” was the control circuits for the Onan. I understood them better than the other guys at the shop and could trouble shoot a problem in no time flat. I didn’t fall into this easy knowledge; it took a few years of trial and error before I could visualize the flow of electrons on their path through the various old-fashioned relays and resistors. All the wiring was the same color. Onan printed numbers on the wires to help identify which was which. These numbers were not always intact or positioned in a way that you could see them.

We rebuilt the engines and the fuel systems as the twins and 4-cylinders had a habit of breaking crankshafts. The twin had two main bearings, the four had three mains. The cranks would often break where the alternator rotor connected. They would break in such a way that the generator would keep running until it was shut down, then the crank would bind and the owner would call us saying “I don’t understand it, the thing was running fine when I shut it off. Now it’s stuck” After a few years of rebuilding engines we discovered that Onan sold a new long block for about the same price as we could rebuild an engine. It even came with a warranty. That made turn around much faster.

The governor (that controlled the engine RPM, thus the frequency) was a ball and cup type of deal driven off the camshaft. Centrifugal force would move the balls outward pushing a cup away from the cam. The cup was connected to an arm that controlled the fuel control on the injector pump. With the balls at rest the fuel was set for full throttle. As the balls slung out it reduced fuel. This seesaw effect could be fine tuned by adjusting a governor spring. Both tension and leverage were set by the hapless mechanic moving one thing affected the other.

After a few thousand hours of steady state running the governor balls would wear a groove in the backing plate of the cam gear and no amount of tinkering could get the frequency steady. Pulling the cam gear was the only way to get the thing to run without hunting. I liked to tell the owners that they were lucky the thing ran long enough to wear out the governor.

All those things I knew are just trivia now but they seem as real as this computer I’m typing on. The old Onan generators are long gone, replaced by modern diesel engines made overseas. Nothing breaks off the new stuff. My brain is full of things no longer useful, information that has no application in today’s world. I wonder about the knowledge the old ones that came before me took to their graves and if someone in the far off future will wonder about mine.

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