Category: Motorcycle Adventure Ride

A Distant Memory: Memphis Bike Night

By Joe Berk

This is a sort of a Wayback Machine post, one that goes way back.  It’s from June of 2012, which is way before Gresh and I started the ExhaustNotes blog.  I used to write the CSC Motorcycles blog (it’s where I started as a blogger).   I was thinking about Tennessee the other day and I remembered that I had written a blog about the Memphis bike nights, but I couldn’t find it in the ExNotes archives.  Then I realized: It predated ExNotes.  It was a CSC blog.

I have got to be the luckiest guy on the planet. I’m taking this great tour through the South, and yesterday we found ourselves in Memphis.  Memphis is a great city for many reasons, not the least of which is Graceland.  As I mentioned in the CSC blog yesterday, Susie and I took the Graceland tour and we loved it.   It was beyond awesome.  I’m a great Elvis Presley fan, and the opportunity to visit his home was not one to be missed.  Folks, if you ever get to Memphis, Graceland is a must!

Well, our good fortune did not end there.   We had an awesome dinner at the Rendezvous, a super barbeque joint my good buddy Georgia Robby recommended.  Folks, trust me on this…barbeque just doesn’t get any better than this!

The Rendezvous in Memphis…the best of the best!

After our great dinner, we moseyed on over to Beale Street.   That’s kind of like the Memphis version of New Orlean’s Bourbon Street…it’s the place to be in Memphis.  We noticed a lot of motorcycles heading that way, and then, hey, we saw that the street was shutdown…and it was nothing but motorcycles!  Turns out that Wednesday night is Motorcycle Night on Beale Street!  Check this out…

Midweek Memphis Moto Madness on Beale Street!

The Memphis moto night is one big street party, folks!  We were having a blast talking to the riders there.   They saw my California Scooter shirt and everyone wanted to know about the CSC bikes.   It was awesome.  We met a lot of people and made a lot of friends.

The photo below shows Carl and Ryan, a father and son team.  These are cool guys.  Carl was on his Gold Wing, and Ryan was on a CX500 he and Carl rebuilt.  Ryan just graduated from technical school, and when his father asked him what he’d like for a graduation present, Ryan just asked to go with Carl on his next motorcycle trip.  That’s pretty cool stuff, folks.

Wisconsin Carl and his son Ryan…riders extraordinaire!

We actually rode alongside these guys about 100 miles east of Memphis without meeting them.  Susie recognized the Gold Wing when we saw them again at the Memphis moto night.   Talk about a small world!

I grabbed a lot of photos on Beale Street.   Every body was having a good time.   I asked the fellow below if I could grab a shot, but he kept smiling for every shot and looking like too nice of a guy.  I asked him to strike a tougher pose, and wow, did he ever!

He’s really a nice guy!

We were having a lot of fun.  We noticed police officers at each intersection making sure that Beale Street allowed no one other than motorcyclists, and I asked a couple of them if I could grab their photo.   They said sure, but only if Susie was in the picture…

Susie with two of Memphis’ finest!

The police officer on the left looks like he’s having a good time…but the guy on the right looks like he wanted me to explain that traffic ticket I never paid…

Well, hey, the next day we had an absolutely awesome Memphis breakfast.  I had a French toast fluffer-nutter with whipped cream and blueberries, and hash brown sweet potatoes with marshmallow.

There’s peanut butter and bananas sandwiched between those slices of French toast!
Hash brown sweet potatoes with marshmallows!

Steve saw the above photos and told me I might need to lower the gearing on my CSC motorcycle when I returned to California.

The next night we made it to Mobile, another great southern US city.   In the morning, we toured the USS Alabama, a floating museum just outside of Mobile.  It was beyond awesome.   The ship bristled with guns.   I was amazed, and I have to tell you, it’s worth a trip to this part of the country just to see this magnificent battleship.  After seeing the USS Alabama, we followed the Alabama Scenic Byway to the Emerald Coast in Florida’s panhandle, and we had a great grilled amberjack dinner in Fort Walton Beach.  Imagine bone white sand and emerald green water, and you’ll have a pretty good handle on Florida’s Emerald Coast.

That trip was 14 years ago, and I remember it like it was yesterday.  Good times brought to life once again through the miracles of the Wayback Machine!  The blog you read above evolved into a Destinations piece for Motorcycle Classics magazine.  You can find it and more here.

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Legends Motorcycle Museum

By Joe Berk

Legends Motorcycle Museum in Springville, Utah, is not just a museum; it is a compound, consisting of three retro-industrial-themed buildings and numerous motorcycle-related shops and eateries.  And if that’s not enough good news, it’s located in one of the best riding locales on the planet:  Magnificent Utah.  Surprisingly, I had never heard of Legends.  I only found it during a Google search after my good buddy Mark at Motorcycle Classics magazine asked me to focus on motorcycle museums.

I arranged to be at the Legends Museum early so that I could photograph the motorcycles without other guests getting in the way (both for the ExNotes blog and for Motorcycle Classics magazine).  We entered through the Museum’s shop, which contains work bays and advanced CNC equipment where the place makes its own parts.  The owner, Rick Salisbury, is also an automobile enthusiast; we saw a stunning restomod 1957 Cadillac convertible (with a crate Chevy LS2 engine) being assembled.  A large and initially terrifying black pit bull welcomed us with a deep growl; when I froze, my new friend Winston approached cautiously, put his big paws on my shoulders (he stood taller than me), and gave me a friendly lick.  I realized that coffee (served in the Museum’s adjacent Sidecar Café) would not be necessary.  Thanks to Winston, I was now fully adrenalized and wide awake.

The view upon entering the Museum was visually arresting, starting with the famous Von Dutch VW-powered motorcycle (as seen in many print publications and in an episode of the American Pickers TV show).  It stood proudly on a weathered steel pedestal.  The Von Dutch motorcycle was surrounded by numerous Panheads, Knuckleheads, Indians, and other old motorcycles, machines that were built when guys like Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy lived in the White House.  None of the bikes were restored.  I had entered barnfind Heaven.  I’ve been in lots of museums that proudly display motorcycles that look better than the day they rolled off their assembly lines.  Legends is different, and I’m here to tell you it is better.

The Legends Museum second floor is comprised entirely of pre-1920 motorcycles.  A Journs Cyclone, one of only 12 known to exist, dominates the display; the Museum’s owner paid a whopping (and record) $1.3 million for it at Mecum’s last year.  There were many more exotic motorcycles.  Thor.  Henderson.  Flying Merkel.  I’ll let the photos do the talking here, folks.

One of the best things about the Legends Motorcycle Museum is its north central Utah location.  Utah is one of our most beautiful states, and it figures prominently in our collection of previous Motorcycle Classics Destinations pieces (which include Zion National Park, Bryce Canyon National Park, Cedar Breaks National Park, Utah Highways 12 and 24, Arches Canyon National Park, Golden Spike National Historic Park, and Flaming Gorge National Park).    If you’re headed to Utah, Legends should be part of your itinerary.  And if you’re not headed to Utah, you should start thinking about a visit.  It’s spectacular.

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Fly, Buy, Eye, and Say Goodbye

By Joe Berk

Cheap is good.  In a world of $20K, $30K, $40K, and $50K motorcycles, it’s especially good.

The idea of flying to another continent, buying a cheap motorcycle, riding cross country, and then selling the bike and flying home is an appealing one.  That’s why when good buddy Marty sent a link to this video, I knew I would watch it.   I enjoyed it and I think you will, too.

I like single-cylinder inexpensive motorcycles, having toured the Americas and China on RX3/RS3 motorcycles (which are Zongshen 250cc singles).  I like Enfields, too, and I wanted to learn more about the Himalayan.  When Gresh and I tested Enfields down in Baja, I liked the Enfield Interceptor so much I bought one when we returned.  We also had an Enfield Bullet on that Baja ride (it was their 500cc Bullet).  Both Gresh and I really wanted to like the Bullet, but it was a bust.   The Bullet had experienced several breakdowns (read my take on the Bullet here and here, and Gresh’s take on the same bike) and because we didn’t trust the bike, we turned around at Guerrero Negro instead of riding further south to Mulegé.

Gresh on a Bullet in Baja.

The Bullet was considerate, though.  Its last breakdown occurred just as we arrived home (it was a stripped rear sprocket at just a few thousand miles; something I had never previously encountered on any motorcycle).  In the above video, the single-cylinder Enfield Himalayans didn’t suffer that fate, so my assumption is the breed has improved.

Peter Day of Mosko Moto presenting at an ADV event, with a CSC TT 250 as a prop.

I met another guy who used the same approach for his touring.  That guy is Peter Day, CEO of Mosko Moto luggage.  I met Peter at an adventure touring event in Mariposa, California, several years ago.  Peter flies into whatever third-world country he wants to tour with no motorcycle and no firm plans, he finds and buys a used Chinese motorcycle for a couple of hundred bucks or so wherever he goes (central America, Africa, you name it), he rides for a month or two or three, and then he sells the bike before getting on an airplane home.  Peter especially likes Chinese bikes based on the Honda CG engine, like the CSC TT 250 I enjoyed owning and riding so much (the photo atop this blog is my TT 250 in Mexico).  The bikes that copy the Honda CG engine are simple, reliable, inexpensive, and designed to survive.  Flying someplace off the beaten path, buying a cheap bike, riding the wheels off it, selling it, and then flying home is a good approach.

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Big Boy And The Mother Of Intentions

By Joe Gresh

Motorcycle riding gives you a good excuse to go places and see things, not that you need an excuse. I like a steam train, I have a motorcycle, thus riding up to Ogden, Utah to see a big old steam train seemed like a sensible thing to do.

My Carrizozo Mudchuckers buddy, Mike, was all for the idea so we planned to meet Big Boy, the last of the steam locomotives, in Ogden, where the train would stop for two days. As we waited for the appointed day the normally beautiful New Mexico weather cooled and became cloudy with rising damp. Ogden, being 900 miles north of us, was experiencing the same weather degradation except much, much colder.

Just a few days before leaving there was snow and rain in Utah. A 75-car pile up in Denver, and rain and cold all along our route north, had us thinking “this ride will suck.” I kept watching the weather reports hoping for a better forecast, but it looked like miserable weather the entire trip north only starting to ease off a bit on the Monday we would start riding home from Ogden.

I have plenty of cold weather riding gear. Things like electric vests, heated grips and a plastic rain suit can keep you warm enough. I’ll use them if there is no other option. But there was another, simpler option: Don’t ride into the rain and cold.

One day before were planned to leave I called the Mudchucker and said: How about we go to Willow Springs for vintage motorcycle racing instead? Call me a fair weather rider but sunny California was an easy sell. We dumped Ogden and the Big Boy steam train faster than oil prices rose after we bombed Iran.

The Mudchucker taking a break from headwinds.

The plan worked. We left town a day later than the Big Boy run. That allowed some of the bad weather to move east. Our first day on the road was cool, cloudy but comfortable, the second day we had strong headwinds and 40-degree cold, but nothing nearly as painful as the stuff we would have experienced earlier and further north.

We mostly followed old Route 66 west jumping on and off Interstate 40 as required. It was an odd time of year I guess. The entire town of Seligman was closed: Gas stations, food markets, all shuttered. Further on we rolled into tiny reservation villages with nothing available to buy or rent. I admit, traffic was light on historic Route 66.  If a guy set up a food truck he’d starve to death.

On westward we rode, through Kingman down to Oatman. Again, every store in the tourist-friendly little donkey-town of Oatman was closed. The day ran long, we needed ice cream, it was getting dark, I couldn’t see much through the dark face shield on my helmet, and we pulled into an abandoned gas station to check out the motel situation in Needles. The Mudchucker was tired. He stopped next to me and toppled over. I tried to hold us up but the combined weight of Mike, his Moto Guzzi V7 and my ZRX1100 Kawasaki was too much.

We went down like the stock market after we instituted tariffs.  The bikes were stacked against each other much like the system is stacked against the common man. It took a bit of doing to untangle them and lift the bikes upright. Damage was light: a few dings in the right-side Guzzi jug, a busted turn signal, scratched gas tank, and bent brake levers on the ZRX1100. Amazingly, there were no dents or major issues.

Not a lot of damage for tossing one bike on top of another.

A homeless guy camped at the gas station saw the whole thing. He didn’t laugh or say anything. He must have thought we were total losers.

The tip over had us in a melancholy mood. In the motel that evening we talked about that inevitable day, our strength gone, our skeletons frail, the day when we could no longer ride. Mike felt a side car was the way to go. I favored a three cylinder, two stroke, Kawasaki-powered gurney.

But gurney-time isn’t here yet and by the third day we were riding along basking in the warm Mojave desert. Things were looking up and thoughts of our physical decay burned away. Or maybe we just forgot we were falling apart. I hear that happens but I can’t remember where I heard it. Route 66 to Amboy was closed so we had to stay on Interstate 40, only returning to Route 66 west after paying $7.50 per gallon of gas at Ludlow.

Some kind of inspection station east of Barstow on Route 66.

Out of Barstow we rode past Hinkley, the toxic-water town made famous by Julia Roberts and Erin Brockovich. We made it to Lancaster, our base camp for Willow Springs.

Lancaster is an interesting place. On the back roads we came in on there were piles of trash dumped everywhere. I guess the town doesn’t have a dump. Or maybe the dump fee is too high so people drive out of town a few miles and drop their load. It reminded me of the trash piles I used to pick through in the Florida Everglades. You can find some good metal in those piles.

I saw some nice chairs 5 miles from Lancaster.  If I had the Toyota truck, I would have grabbed them. There was a lot of broken concrete that would make excellent fill back at the ranch. Drywall was another popular item on the side of the road. Once in town things cleaned up slightly, and Lancaster looked much the same as other generic, California desert towns: New chain stores along the highway, decomposing shops, homeless people and frequent stop lights in the old sections.

The Wyndham motel on Avenue I was new and along the highway. They have a pretty good breakfast setup. There were the usual sausage paddies, scrambled eggs and pour-your-own waffles. We waddled out to the bikes and rode the 20 miles to Willow Springs racetrack.

Vintage motorcycle racing is mostly a family affair. Spectators not directly involved with the racing or supporting the racers are rare and we had the grandstands to ourselves. Multitudes of classes meant non-stop action all day long.

Lots of races and classes to keep track of at an AHRMA event. You won’t leave the track unsatisfied.

AHRMA racing covers all eras with heavy emphasis on bikes that were never actually raced back in the day, at least compared to the races I saw as a youth. Honda 160s are a popular class and an example of bikes that were never raced where I grew up.

Sloper 160 Hondas are strangely popular. I had one as a teen. In stock form they would hit 75 MPH. In race trim a bit faster.

An unusual number of Moto Gizzards circulated the Big Willow track. Maybe because they were so popular, only a few Yamaha Twins survived to race AHRMA. Most of the race bikes were 4-strokes.  In the 1970s that ratio would be flipped and 2-strokes ruled the track. I guess the point is to run what you want and have fun with it.

The RD350 went from a mainstay of road racing to a rare bird at historic events.

The Willow races were not as well attended as the Laguna Seca AHRMA events. Laguna Seca is set in soft, coastal hills and has space for vintage motocross along with a vintage trials section. The camping at Laguna Seca is better. I suppose you can camp at Willow but it’s more of a motor home type camping than a tent. I’m not sure what happened between AHRMA and Laguna Seca and it’s none of my business, but I wish they would get it sorted out and go back to Laguna.

Nice, clean, crappers at Willow. A clean crapper makes the day just that much nicer.

Willow isn’t bad, mind you. The racetrack recently sold and the new owners are fixing it up a bit. There are several tracks and the food concession was better than Laguna. You can get a decent meal at Willow.

The last time I was at Willow Springs was in the 1970s. The pit looks the same and there are added buildings along the front straight. My memories are dimming and I can’t remember why I was there in the ’70s, but it was probably motorcycle racing of some sort.

If you take away the little houses, pit row looks about the same as I remember from the 1970s.
Kawasaki built a Superbike production racer called the S2. I don’t know if this is one but it looks like one.
Suzuki big-block race bike. Although, it could be a 750. I didn’t look that close.
SR500. Great bike from Yamaha unfortunately suffering from The Slows. My XL350 could stay with them through the gears and pull away at top end.
Roper and Fulton on Italian Harley-Davidsons. About 100 years of racing experience in this photo. They are faster than you. Sorry about the cell phone photo.
Zippy Yamaha 100cc twin. I might get a stocker one of these one day.
CA110(?) I have one of these in pieces waiting for assembly. The engine is shot so I bought a clone 140cc overhead cam engine. It fits the gram and clears the front wheel by 1/4-inch.
Manx Norton. For a while these 500cc singles ruled the road racing world. Still faster than a SR500.
If you don’t like crowds you’ll love AHRMA racing.

Rosamond, the town closest to Willow has grown quite a bit and lots of housing developments are being thrown together. Eventually someone will build houses around Willow if the new owners don’t do it first.

The ride back to New Mexico was full-on warm. We took backroads from Lancaster to Victorville and sort of paralleled Interstate 10 along Yucca Valley and Twentynine Palms to Parker, Arizona. Our miles per day were shrinking and we were stopping more often. Temperatures reached 95 along the sparsely populated Highway 62.

I was smelling the barn, you know? I kind of lost it on the last day in Show Low. We woke up at 4:30 am to get an early start. I wanted to get home and the Mudchucker was leisurely watching TV and eating a bagel. By 8:30 a.m., I had been awake 4 hours and drank 16 cups of coffee waiting. I had a lot of pent-up nervous energy.

Maybe 7 days on the road rubbed my nerves raw. It doesn’t seem like an asset.

Finally underway, we burned up the highway into New Mexico, a slight frost between us, and I managed to get home at a decent time (before dark). I’m starting to wonder if 7 days on the road is too much for me. Riding motorcycles with a partner is a series of compromises strung together with miles and miles of pavement. Are the compromises worth the companionship? I’m sure I must annoy the Mudchucker at times.

Maybe I’m just getting old and cranky. At least, that’s the excuse I’m going to use.

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Six Weeks in Baja: Salt, Sand, and Open Road

By Bobbie Surber

We left Sedona on Valentine’s Day, riding through Jerome, the old mining town clinging to the cliffside, and down through Skull Valley to Yuma for the night. The next day, we crossed into Baja at Los Algodones, the desert flattening out toward the Colorado River. The landscape changed around us. It took a few days before we did, too.

Tom was on his Yamaha Tracer 900, me on Tippi, my Triumph 900 GT Pro. I’d been to Baja before and loved it the way you love a place that doesn’t make anything easy for you. What I love most is the riding itself, the exhaustion of getting from Point A to Point B while moving through a desert that feels alive.

Strange cacti rise everywhere, topped with these single blooms that look like they wandered out of a Dr. Seuss drawing. Osprey and vultures are constant companions. In the mornings, the vultures sit atop the cactus, wings spread wide, completely still, like sculptures set out in the open.

I kept watching Tom take it all in. The little pauses at stops, the way he’d look back at the Sea of Cortez like it was still talking to him.

And then there are the people. The quiet kindness you run into along the way. The way everything settles when you finally stop at night, simple places, camping on the beach where nothing is asking anything of you.

We were unprepared for the heat. Usually, this time of year, it’s mild. Not this time. It sat on everything for most of the trip. On the bikes, it was relentless with gear on, sun overhead, and asphalt radiating up. You ride early, hide in shade by midday, and eventually stop arguing with it. We talked about it every day and then just leaned into the absurdity of riding in such conditions.

My sister Debbie and her husband Jim met us a day after we landed at Pete’s Camp in San Felipe, towing their renovated 9-foot Scamp behind them. Cold drinks in hand, the Sea of Cortez was going pink as the four of us toasted the start of a good beginning.

Gonzaga Bay, two hours south, feels like the edge of something, a few palapas, a dirt airstrip, water that doesn’t look real. We took a palapa on the beach and felt pleased, until a windstorm rolled in and sand filled everything: sleeping bags, boots, food, teeth. I lay awake waiting for the palapa to go airborne, crashing around us, while Tom slept in complete peace. By morning, we were laughing about it. Baja always wins; it’s best to accept both her gifts and challenges.

Guerrero Negro is all about the whales. It was blessedly cool there, which we didn’t take for granted. Debbie, Tom, and I climbed into a panga at first light under soft sun and calm water as we headed farther towards the mouth of the bay. Then a gray whale surfaced close enough that you could hear her breath hit the air. Everything just stopped. Massive, completely unbothered. The day brought several mothers to our panga, and our excitement was palpable as the juveniles delighted everyone with spectacular displays of breaching and tail-slapping.

Afterward: Tony’s Tacos. Don’t argue!

San Ignacio has been there a long time, and it shows in the plaza, the mission walls, and the pace of everything. We stayed just outside town at a newer camp with yurts and a working garden. Walked into town for drinks, drove out to the petroglyphs, pulled vegetables from the garden for dinner. No schedule. No agenda.

From there, we rode to Mulegé for the night at Historica Casitas—a small, characterful place that’s been soaking up travelers for decades.  The morning we left Mulegé, I already knew what was waiting. My excitement was building as I pushed for an early departure.  Leaving Mulegé, the road hugs the coastline and gives you these unreal views over the bay as you drop south toward Bahía Concepción.

Three perfect nights on the beach. If you’ve been there, you already know. Warm, impossibly clear water, coves tucked into the coastline, mountains dropping straight into the sea. The days just stopped having shape, which was the whole point.

Vendors came by in cars, selling fresh seafood they’d pulled from the water that morning. We couldn’t resist the fresh shrimp and clams vendors made into a dip.

Our last night, we stayed out on the beach until the light softened and the tide crept closer, the whole coastline feeling like it might just keep us if we stayed still long enough.

We finally pulled ourselves together, loaded the bikes, and the road turned inland toward the mountains and the short ride into Loreto.

Loreto is another mission town where the mountains meet the water, and the Sea of Cortez really opens up. The square and the mission are perfect for sitting with a cold beer or an unnecessary margarita and just watching life happen.

On my last morning there, I was up before dawn and walked the malecón with my sister as the sun came up over the mountains and hit the water. The sunlight turned the water shades of pink, red, and purple. Just time with my sister and fishing boats heading out, pelicans squabbling relentlessly over scraps from the boats, street coffee with cinnamon warming your hands. A perfect start to our day. Then back on the road for the long haul to La Paz, doing our best not to lose the battle with the heat.

La Paz hit differently after all that camping, dust, and sun. Clean clothes, long dinners, fresh seafood, sunsets over the water. We stopped rushing without really deciding to — and then swam with whale sharks. Pools of krill draw them close to shore, and snorkeling next to something the size of a bus has a way of rearranging your sense of scale. Then the seals: curious teenagers bumping your fist, chasing fins into caves where the pups wrestled each other to the seafloor. We didn’t know any of that was possible.

La Ventana had a different energy, windy, alive, full of kitesurfers moving constantly across the water. Small family spots serving incredible tacos and agua chile that stopped us mid-bite. We stayed in a little hotel where the patio opened straight onto the sand and the beach, a simple palapa to your left with plenty of cold beverages calling to you ridiculously early in the day. It’s Baja time, which means sipping on a margarita at 10 AM is not just acceptable, it’s absolutely essential!

From La Ventana, we rode to El Pescadero, just below Todos Santos. Three nights in a small beach condo on the Pacific with a real kitchen, simple food, and a daybed facing straight out to the ocean. The sunsets there weren’t something I was ready for. Every evening, the sky just broke open over the water, and I sat there and let it happen.

Cabo Pulmo, we dispersed camped. No facilities, no shade—just desert, reef, and that impossible blue water. We swam until the ocean took the edge off everything and the heat stopped mattering.

The eco-farm above Santiago was a good place to end our adventure to the tip of Baja. Three nights under trees and coffee plants, cooking under a big palapa while hummingbirds worked the flowers like they were on a deadline. A river below, mountains above. Everything slowed down, a peaceful ending before the challenging ride home.

We left Baja the way you leave a place like that, not quite done exploring, and seriously planning the return trip in January to see the blue whales.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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A “How To” Howdy Do

By Joe Berk

As you may know, I’ve been writing for Motorcycle Classics magazine for about 20 years.  It’s hard to believe, I know.  I mostly write the travel-oriented Destinations pieces, with the occasional feature story on a motorcycle or an interesting business.   A new editor (good buddy Mark) suggested I start a series focused on how to do selected maintenance activities.  My first thought was that it wasn’t such a good idea, but I learned a long time ago it’s never a good idea to argue with people who buy ink by the barrel, so I took Mark’s suggestion to heart.

My second thought was that a How To series should be a fairly easy thing to do.  I wrote the shop manuals for CSC a few years ago.  There, the approach was to have one of CSC’s maintenance experts perform the maintenance activity with me snapping photos through the process.  I already had the photo approach nailed (f/8, Aperture mode, on board flash, all with my trusty D810 and Sigma 50mm macro lens).  The photos became my notes.  I processed the pics in PhotoShop, I added a bit of text to each, and the shop manuals basically wrote themselves. I knew I could use the same process for the Motorcycle Classics How To series, and I was right.

If you subscribe to Motorcycle Classics, you’ve already seen a few of these (and if you don’t subscribe to the magazine, you should).  I did a story on how to service drum brakes with Emma Booton up in Marina (she’s wonderful), another one on wheel lacing with good buddy Kenny Buchanan of Buchanan Spoke and Rim, and lately I’ve been doing a series with good buddies Moe, Steve, and Lindsay at Cycle Garden in Indio, California.  I enjoyed making friends at all these places, I enjoyed learning the processes, and I enjoyed writing the stories.

You can see the Motorcycle Classics stories I wrote here.   It’s been a hell of a ride.  You can also buy Destinations, a collection of some of my favorites.

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Tokyo Road: Part 4

By Mike Huber

As I wrap up writing about my experience motorcycling in Japan, I am starting to notice that for the most part it was a fairly uneventful 8 days.  I didn’t crash, I didn’t get arrested, and I stayed mostly on paved roads.  I prefer minimal planning on my motorcycle adventures.  This allows plenty of flexibility to adjust for roads, weather, and highlights I discover along the way. Every morning my routine was to just wake up, look for what I thought looked like a fun path on the map while having a coffee and go.  Throughout the day if I stumbled upon other riders, I would obtain current road reports from them, but otherwise it was just fire up the bike, smile, and enjoy whatever came my way.

Along my ride there were a few highlights I made it a point to hit, such as a hike to see the snow monkeys bathing in hot springs, and a short stop in Nagano to visit the home of the 1998 Winter Olympics.  Usually, I spent lunches or coffee breaks in tiny Japanese villages that few tourists are fortunate enough to experience.

Other than driving on the opposite side of the road, most of this journey felt so similar to a fall ride through New England.  Which for me was paradise with roads and tunnels that followed rivers flowing out of the Japanese mountains down to the sea.  The tunnels were quite frequent and some of them were extremely long with minimal infrastructure once I entered them.

The Hida Tunnel was close to 6 miles long and was like going through a cave as there was just the rock above with water flowing in, and it was freezing cold. Between the minimal lighting and reflection of the water at times, I lost all depth perception and it became almost impossible to tell if and when there was a corner coming up.  Upon exiting the tunnel, I pulled over to warm my hands and take a breather in the sun only to learn it was a dead end and I’d have to return through the cold dark dampness again to get back on track.

One of my favorite things about motorcycling in Japan was that no matter how cold or wet I was throughout the day each evening, I was almost always guaranteed to have an onsen (natural hot springs) in my hotel.  These onsens were the perfect way to warm up and cap off a day of riding, especially if I had a cold and wet ride that day.

Throughout the 8-day motorcycle trip I hit a plethora of topography.  This ranged from beachfront roads to mountain passes with the roads the width of a golf cart track with mirrors on every corner so I could forecast how wide I had for turns, to pine forests with sweepers that went on for hours. Although motorcycling Japan for me proved uneventful, it did not mean it wasn’t fully appreciated.  Japan is a country I fell quickly in love with and will visit again.

Read the entire Japan adventure!

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Buell Fever Part 10: Failure is an Option

By Joe Gresh

I’ve kind of lost count on which Buell installment dealt with the muffler falling off. The story was about how the muffler was held on by a T-bolt clamp on the header pipe (basically a heavy-duty hose clamp) and two vertical brackets that located the rear of the muffler. Those vertical brackets would come loose letting the muffler slide back into the wheel. In that previous story I welded the rear bracket so the muffler couldn’t slide back unless the bolt was removed. This setup no longer relied on the clamping force of fasteners alone.

I thought I had it fixed, a common misconception that I have frequently,  and both the muffler bolts of my belt-and-suspenders repair vibrated out. The muffler fell off again. Most riders would write this off as a bad design on Buell’s part, but I look at it as a challenge. Just like Lucy always pulled the football away from Charlie Brown the Buell keeps snatching success away from me.

The Buell lives and dies in real time. No waiting around for Honda-like reliability to finally fail. Each individual Buell-ride has a beginning, a middle and an end. The end being something to fix. And sometimes fix it again.

There were two of these. One is on the road a few miles ahead of the bolts that fell out.

When the muffler bolts fell out one of the two rubber bushings fell out also. These bushings fit into two holes cast into the Buell’s engine crankcases. It was a good system and I should have used Loctite or safety-wired the bolts the first time.

I wasn’t in the mood to hunt online for another bushing and the thin, molded-in tube preventing the rubber from crushing made me wary of really cranking down on the muffler bolts. I decided to take things into hand and make two new bushings since it’s as easy to make two as it is one.

I’ll need a better cut-off tool but you can see, two is as easy as one.

I have plenty of aluminum round stock and the crude bushings I spun out would shock a real toolmaker. I added a couple of grooves for o-rings to cushion the aluminum. Regardless, I now had something I could tighten a bolt against as much as I wanted. Putting the hangers back together I used nylon locknuts on fresh bolts hoping to slow down the rate of failure.

The finished bushings.
Harley cast in a couple of sturdy mounting holes on the Sportster crankcase.
The bushings are slightly longer than the mounting holes allowing for tight bolts with a bit of give for the shaky Sportster engine.

On yet another long test rides the bolts stayed tight and the muffler did not fall off. Lucy-1, Joe-1. I’m adding checking the muffler bolts to my pre-flight inspection list until this fix proves permanent.

After years of Kawasaki perfection, knowing every ride will be successful, I’m loving the Buell’s humanity. The Buell needs a steady handful of wrenches and ingenuity. Riding and tinkering with the thing brings me back to my youth of edger-powered minibikes roaring through the hot, humid Florida nights. Riding those old minibikes was a crash engineering course. You learned fast or you pushed the thing. So far, I haven’t needed to push the Buell.

Buell Parts 1 through 9 are here!

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My Vintage Bike Wish List

By Joe Berk

Like most of you, I spend a lot of time thinking about what I’d park in my garage if I had the money and the space for a motorcycle collection.  At various times in my life I’ve owned several motorcycles at the same time and I’ve sort of realized the dream I describe here (at least in terms of how many motorcycles I owned), but this blog describes something different.  The bikes I owned in the past came about as the result of having the time and the money when something cool caught my fancy.  This time, I’d start from scratch and define what would go into my ideal collection.  Gresh and I have theorized and fantasized and written about this in the past (see our Dream Bikes page).   Here, I’m starting from scratch and I’m limiting myself to six motorcycles (just because I think that should be the right number of bikes).  You might be surprised at some of my choices.

1965 Triumph Bonneville

When I was a kid in high school, one of the seniors (a fellow named Walt Skok) bought a new Triumph Bonneville.  I thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, and I wanted one.  Later in life, I bought, rode, and sold several Triumph Bonnevilles, but I never scratched that itch for a ’65 model.  Someday…

To me, everything about the 1965 Triumph Bonneville was perfect:  The colors, the exhaust system, the exhaust notes, the tank parcel grid, the design symmetry, the little decal recognizing Triumph’s world speed record, and more.  I always wanted one and I still do.

1965 Harley-Davidson Electra-Glide

I’ve owned a couple of Harley full dressers, but the one I always wanted was the 1965 Electra-Glide.  That year was the first year Harley offered electric starting and it was the last year of the panhead engine (which I think is the best-looking big twin engine Harley ever made).

The ’65 Electra-Glide is another bike that, in my opinion, was styled perfectly.  I like the tank contours, the 1965 paint design, the panhead engine’s look, the fishtail mufflers, the saddlebag contours, the potato-potato-potato exhaust note, and more.  Apparently, my thoughts about this motorcycle’s intrinsic beauty are also shared by the U.S. Post Office (see the above postage stamp).  The ’65 Electra-Glide is the bike I used to think about as a teenager when I rode around on my Schwinn bicycle, imagining that my Schwin was a Harley.

Cycle Garden 1974 Moto Guzzi El Dorado

Ah, a Cycle Garden Guzzi.  This is one I tumbled to only recently.  I’ve been writing a series of articles for Motorcycle Classics magazine, and one of the shops that’s been helping me is Moe Moore’s Cycle Garden in Indio, California.  I always thought the mid-1970s Moto Guzzi were stunning in their stock and restored configurations.  Then, during one Cycle Garden visit, I saw a custom bike that Moe and his crew had assembled for a client.

The bike was a 1974 police motorcycle, but it painted in a breathtaking battleship gray and metallic blue paint theme.  I could see myself riding it, rumbling through the open roads and magnificent landscapes of Baja.  It is a motorcycle that is firmly on my list.

1983 Harley XR-1000

I wrote a Dream Bike piece about this during the first year of  the ExhaustNotes.us blog’s existence, and the thing that struck me about it was that Joe Gresh told me I’d beat him to it…he was thinking about doing a Dream Bike piece on the same motorcycle.

I’ve never owned or ridden an XR-1000.  Come to think of it, I never heard one run.  I could have bought an XR-1000 new for around $8K when they were new, but I didn’t have a spare $8K laying around in those days.  It’s another one of those motorcycles bikes for which I think the visual and visceral appeal is perfect.  Maybe someday I’ll get to scratch that itch.

2006 Kawasaki KLR 650

To me, this is an interesting choice with which some might take issue.  I don’t care.   I loved my KLR 650.   Lifelong good buddy Baja John had one, too.  That’s Baja John and yours truly somewhere in Baja in the photo below.

The KLR 650 is one of my all time favorite motorcycles.  Mine was a first-gen KLR, and I think those are more desirable than the second gen bikes.  My KLR was perfect for exploring Baja, and I did a lot of that on it.  It had just the right amount of power, it was simple (except for the shim-and-bucket valve adjustments), it was a very comfortable motorcycle (the ergos were perfect), and it was inexpensive.  I bought it new in 2006.  It was one of the best motor vehicles (of any kind) I ever owned.   If you’re wondering why I sold it, so am I.

2015 CSC RX3

The CSC RX3 motorcycle is another bike that I thought was just perfect for me.   I covered a lot of miles in Baja and elsewhere in the world on it.

I think a 250 is the perfect size for a motorcycle (you can read why here).  I traveled through a lot of the world on one:  Through the American West, Mexico, the Andes Mountains in Colombia, and China (with Joe Gresh; Joe and I are in the photo above auditioning for a Chinese gladiator movie).  All those trips and all those miles were awesome, and the RX3 didn’t miss a beat on any of them.  I almost cried when I learned Zongshen discontinued the RX3, and if they were to bring it back (which they should), I would no doubt be riding the world and blogging the RX3’s virtues again.

There you have it.  It was fun thinking about this, writing this blog, imagining the above six motorcycles parked in my garage, and riding them in different parts of the world.  A quick mental tally tells me I could make the above wish list a reality for something around $120K in today’s dollars.  Hmmmm…I don’t have a spare $120K laying around, but maybe if a few of you hit that donate below…

What about you?  What would be the ideal collection you’d like to see in your garage?  Let us know in the comments below.

You know you want it.   Go ahead.

Antoni Gaudí

By Joe Berk

About two years ago Sue and I visited Spain and Portugal.  I posted more than a few blogs during that trip, but not enough on Antoni Gaudí.  Gaudí was a Spanish architect who lived from 1852 to 1926.  He was clearly a genius.  I wish I had known more about him before we went to Barcelona; I would have appreciated what I was seeing more.  Better late than never, and after our trip I started reading and studying his life.  This was an amazing man.

We visited three of Gaudí’s works in Barcelona:  The Park Güell, the Casa Milà apartment building, and the Sagrada Familia.

Park Güell

One of our first stops in Barcelona was the Park Güell.  Park Güell was commissioned by Eusebi Güell in 1900, a Catalonian businessman, when he enlisted Gaudí to incorporate several properties he already owned into the park.  The photo ops were everywhere we turned, from the sculpted tunnels to the paths to the buildings and the sculptures.

When wandering Park Güell, I noticed that we could overlook the city of Barcelona and see all the way to the Mediterranean.  I snapped a photo or two, without realizing that my photo included the Sagrada Familia (it’s in a photo below, identified by a large red arrow).  I’ll talk about that more in the next part of this blog.

If you look closely, you can see the Sagrada Familia from Park Güell.

Casa Milà

Casa Milà is another famous Gaudi work.  Completed in 1912, it was initially an apartment building.  Today it is a UNESCO World Heritage site.  Like Park Güell, Casa Milà suggests a Dr. Suess-like whimsiness in its design.  The structure is a giant loop, with an opening surrounded by the apartments.  The roof contains many sculptures, with some that double as chimneys.  When we visited Casa Milà, our guide asked if one reminded us of anything.  It did.  You’ll see it one of the photos below.  George Lucas saw it, and it became the inspiration for Star Wars storm troopers.  Another one of the photos below shows a model.  Gaudi preferred to design with models and use these as the basis for the larger work.

The Sagrada Familia

Talk about a long-running construction project:  Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia temple has been under construction for 140 years, and it’s not finished yet.  We heard that it would be finished in another 15 years, but who knows?

The construction schedule notwithstanding, the Sagrada Familia is an active church, and if entering it does not make you a believer, nothing ever will.  To say it is impressive would be a massive understatement.  You have to see the Sagrada Familia to understand the excitement, the grandeur, and the genius of its design.  The exterior has that same Dr. Suess/Harry Potter mystique.  Once you are inside, the feeling is not one of being in a building; it is more like being in a well-illuminated and immense living creature.  The illumination comes from the building’s stunning stained glass, designed with colors tuned to the light from Barcelona’s sunrise and sunset.

Words like those you are reading here don’t do justice to the Sagrada Familia.  It is a place that has to be personally experienced to get a feel for its magnificence.  I’ll return to Barcelona someday, and you can bet that I’ll visit the Sagrada Familia again.

Antoni Gaudí was a bit of a dandy in his younger days.  In his later years, he stopped taking care of himself and basically dressed like a homeless person.  He died as a result of being struck by a Barcelona streetcar.  When he was injured, people did not realize who he was (they thought he was a vagrant).  Antoni Gaudí’s remains are entombed in the Sagrada Familia, perhaps his greatest and certainly his most widely-known work.  The Park Güell, the Casa Milà apartment building, and the Sagrada Familia are not the only projects Antoni Gaudí created.  I’d like to search for and visit more of Gaudí’s works when I return to Spain.

When Sue and I visited Spain and Portugal, I didn’t take my Nikon D810 and  it’s 24-120mm lens (as I usually do).  The weight of that camera and lens has become too much for me to carry around.  I won’t bore you with the specifics of my age-related infirmities; I’ll simply share that I’m not what I used to be.  But I’m still kicking and typing, and for this trip, it was my much smaller and lighter Nikon D3300 and its smaller 18-55mm lens.  I also had a lightweight, non-zoom, non-metering Rokinon 8mm fisheye lens, which I used more than I expected to (it proved to be a very capable lens).  The D3300 and these two lenses (along with a bit of post-production PhotoShop tweaking) created the photos above.  The interior photos were all shot at high ISO (in the range of 800 to 3200), which accounts for the graininess in some.  Mea culpa.

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