Vintage Motorcycle – The ExhaustNotes Blog

It’s Always About The Motors

By Joe Berk

For me a motorcycle’s appearance, appeal, and personality are defined by its motor. I’m not a chopper guy, but I like the look of a chopper because the engine absolutely dominates the bike. I suppose to some people fully faired motorcycles are beautiful, but I’m not in that camp. The only somewhat fully faired bike I ever had was my 1995 Triumph Daytona 1200, but you could still see a lot of the engine on that machine. I once wrote a Destinations piece for Motorcycle Classics on the Solvang Vintage Motorcycle Museum and while doing so I called Virgil Elings, the wealthy entrepreneur who owned it. I asked Elings what drove his interest in collecting motorcycles. His answer? The motors. He spoke about the mechanical beauty of a motorcycle’s engine, and that prompted me to ask for his thoughts on fully faired bikes. “I suppose they’re beautiful to some,” he said, “but when you take the fairings off, they look like washing machines.” I had a good laugh. His observation was spot on.

A 1200cc Harley Panhead motor I photographed at the Rock Store in Malibu.

My earliest memory of drooling over a motorcycle occurred sometime in the 1950s when I was a little kid. My Mom was shopping with me somewhere in one of those unenclosed malls on Route 18 in New Jersey, and in those days, it was no big deal to let your kid wander off and explore while you shopped. I think it was some kind of a general store (I have no idea what Mom was looking for), and I wandered outside on the store’s sidewalk. There was a blue Harley Panhead parked out front, and it was the first time I ever had a close look at a motorcycle. It was beautiful, and the motor was especially beautiful. It had those early panhead corrugated exhaust headers, fins, cables, chrome, and more. I’ve always been fascinated by all things mechanical, and you just couldn’t find anything more mechanical than a Big Twin engine.

There have been a few Sportsters that do it for me, too, like Harley’s Cafe Racer from the late 1970s. That was a fine-looking machine dominated by its engine. I liked the Harley XR1000, too.

A 1000cc Harley Cafe Racer photographed at one of the Hansen Dam meets. When these were new, they sold for about $3,000.

I’ve previously mentioned my 7th grade fascination with Walt Skok’s Triumph Tiger. It had the same mesmerizing motorrific effect as the big twin Panhead described above. I could stare at that 500cc Triumph engine for hours (and I did). The 650 Triumphs were somehow even more appealing. The mid-’60s Triumphs are the most beautiful motorcycles in the world (you might think otherwise and that’s okay…you have my permission to be wrong).

A 1966 Triumph Bonneville and it’s 650cc twin-carb engine. My Dad rode a Bonneville just like this one.

BSA did a nice job with their engine design, too. Their 650 twins in the ’60s looked a lot like Triumph’s, and that’s a good thing. I see these bikes at the Hansen Dam Norton Owners Club meets. They photograph incredibly well, as do nearly all vintage British twins.

A late1960s BSA at Hansen Dam. These are beautiful motorcycles, too.

When we visited good buddy Andrew in New Jersey recently, he had several interesting machines, but the one that riveted my attention was his Norton P11. It’s 750cc air cooled engine is, well, just wonderful. If I owned that bike I’d probably stare at it for a few minutes every day. You know, just to keep my batteries charged.

Andrew Capone’s P-11 Norton. You can read about our visit with Andrew here.

You know, it’s kind of funny…back in the 1960s I thought Royal Enfield’s 750cc big twins were clunky looking. Then the new Royal Enfield 650 INT (aka the Interceptor to those of us unintimidated by liability issues) emerged. Its appearance was loosely based on those clunky old English Enfields, but the new twin’s Indian designers somehow made the engine look way better. It’s not clunky at all, and the boys from Mumbai made their interpretive copy of an old English twin look more British than the original. The new Enfield Interceptor is a unit construction engine, but the way the polished aluminum covers are designed it looks like a pre-unit construction engine. The guys from the subcontinent hit a home run with that one. I ought to know; after Gresh and I road tested one of these for Enfield North America on a Baja ride, I bought one.

The current iteration of Royal Enfield’s 650cc twin. I rode this bike through Baja and liked it so much I bought one when I returned from Mexico. Here’s more (a lot more) about that adventure.

Another motorcycle that let you see its glorious air-cooled magnificence was the CB750 Honda. It was awesome in every regard and presented well from any angle, including the rear (which is how most other riders saw it on the road). The engine was beyond impressive, and when it was introduced, I knew I would have one someday (I made that dream come true in 1971). I still can’t see one without taking my iPhone out to grab a photo.

A 1969 or 1970 Honda CB 750. This is the motorcycle that put the nail in the British motorcycle industry coffin. I had one just like it.

After Honda stunned the world with their 750 Four, the copycats piled on. Not to be outdone, Honda stunned the world again when they introduced their six-cylinder CBX. I had an ’82. It was awesome. It wasn’t the fastest motorcycle I ever owned, but it was one of the coolest (and what drove that coolness was its air-cooled straight six engine).

A Honda CBX engine photographed at the Del Mar fairgrounds near San Diego. The CBX was a motorcycle that added complexity where none was required. It was an impressive machine.

Like they did with the 750 Four, Kawasaki copied the Honda six cylinder, but the Kawasaki engine was water-cooled and from an aesthetics perspective, it was just a big lump. The Honda was a finely-finned work of art. I never wanted a Kawasaki Six; I still regret selling my Honda CBX. The CBX was an extremely good-looking motorcycle. It was all engine. What completed the look for me were the six chrome exhaust headers emerging from in front. I put 20,000 miles on mine and sold it for what it cost me, and now someone else is enjoying it. The CBX was stunning motorcycle, but you don’t need six cylinders to make a motorcycle beautiful. Some companies managed to do it with just two, and some with only one. Consider the engines mentioned at the start of this piece (Harley, Triumph, BSA, and Norton).

I shot this photo at Hansen Dam, too. I always wanted a mid-’60s Moto Guzzi. Never scratched that itch, though. They sound amazing. Imagine a refined Harley, and you’d have this.

Moto Guzzi’s air-cooled V-twins are in a class by themselves. I love the look and the sound of an air-cooled Guzzi V-twin. It’s classy. I like it.

Some motorcycle manufacturers made machines that were mesmerizing with but a single cylinder, so much so that they inspired modern reproductions, and then copies of those reproductions. Consider Honda’s GB500, and more than a few motorcycles from China and even here in the US that use variants of the GB500 engine.

The Honda GB500, Honda’s nod to earlier British singles. It’s another one I always wanted.

The GB500 is a water cooled bike, but Sochoiro’s boys did it right. The engine is perfect. Like I said above, variants of that engine are still made in China and Italy; one of those engines powers the new Janus 450 Halcyon.

The Janus 450 Halcyon I rode in Goshen. That resulted in a feature story in Motorcycle Classics. It’s engine is by SWM in Italy, which is a variant of the Chinese copy of the GB500 engine. I liked the Janus.

No discussion of mechanical magnificence would be complete without mentioning two of the most beautiful motorcycles ever made: The Brough Superior SS100 and the mighty Vincent. The Brits’ ability to design a visually arresting, aesthetically pleasing motorcycle engine must be a genetic trait. Take a look at these machines.

The Brough Superior SS100. Its engine had a constant loss lubrication system. This is the same motorcycle Lawrence of Arabia rode. One of my grandsons is named T.E. Lawrence.

The mighty Vincent. This and the Brough Superior above were both photographed at Hansen Dam.

Two additional bits of moto exotica are the early inline and air-cooled four-cylinder Henderson, and the Thor, one of the very first V-twin engine designs. Both of these boast American ancestry.

Jay Leno’s 1931 Henderson. He told me he bought it off a 92-year-old guy in Vegas who was getting a divorce and needed to raise cash, and I fell for it.

The Henderson you see above belongs to Jay Leno, who let me photograph it at one of the Hansen Dam Norton gatherings. Incidentally, if there’s a nicer guy than Jay Leno out there, I haven’t met him. The man is a prince. He’s always gracious, and he’s never too busy to talk motorcycles, sign autographs, or pose for photos. You can read about some of the times I’ve bumped into Jay Leno at the Rock Store or the Hansen Dam event right here on ExNotes.

A Thor V-twin photographed at the Franklin Auto Museum in Tucson, Arizona. You almost need a four-year mechanical engineering degree to start one of these. Thor made the first engines for Indian.

Very early vintage motorcycles’ mechanical complexity is almost puzzle-like…they are the Gordian knots of motorcycle mechanical engineering design. I photographed a 1913 Thor for Motorcycle Classics (that story is here), and as I was optimizing the photos I found myself wondering how guys back in the 1910s started the things. I was able to crack the code, but I had to concentrate so hard it reminded me of dear departed mentor Bob Haskell talking about the Ph.Ds and other wizards in the advanced design group when I worked in the bomb business: “Sometimes those guys think so hard they can’t think for months afterward,” Bob told me (both Bob and I thought the wizards had confused their compensation with their capability).

There’s no question in my mind that water cooling a motorcycle engine is a better way to go from an engineering perspective. Water cooling adds weight, cost, and complexity, but the fuel efficiency and power advantages of water cooling just can’t be ignored. I don’t like when manufacturers attempt to make a water-cooled engine look like an air-cooled engine with the addition of fake fins (it somehow conveys design dishonesty). But some marques make water cooled engines look good (Virgil Elings’ comments notwithstanding). My Triumph Speed Triple had a water-cooled engine. I think the Brits got it right on that one.

My 2007 Triumph Speed Triple. Good buddy Marty told me some folks called these the Speed Cripple. In my case, that turned out to be true, but that’s another story for another blog.

My 2015 CSC RX3. Before you go all nuts on me and start whining about Chinese motorcycle quality, I need to tell you I rode these across China, through the Andes Mountains in Colombia, up and down Baja a bunch of times, and all over the American west (you can read about those adventures here). It was one of the best and most comfortable bikes I ever owned.

Zongshen is another company that makes water-cooled engines look right. I thought my RX3 had a beautiful engine and I really loved that motorcycle. I sold it because I wasn’t riding it too much, but the tiny bump in my bank account that resulted from the sale, in retrospect, wasn’t worth it. I should have kept the RX3. When The Big Book Of Best Motorcycles In The History Of The World is written, I’m convinced there will be a chapter on the RX3.

The future of “motor” cycling? This is the CSC RX1E. I rode it and liked it. The silence takes some getting used to.

With the advent of electric motorcycles, I’ve ridden a few and they are okay, but I can’t see myself ever buying one. That’s because as I said at the beginning of this blog, for me a motorcycle is all about the motor. I realize that’s kind of weird, because on an electric motorcycle the power plant actually is a motor, not an internal combustion engine (like all the machines described above). What you mostly see on an electric motorcycle is the battery, which is the large featureless chingadera beneath the gas tank (which, now that I’m writing about it, isn’t a gas tank at all). I don’t like the silence of an electric motorcycle. They can be fast (the Zero I rode a few years ago accelerated so aggressively it scared the hell out of me), but I need some noise, I need to feel the power pulses and engine vibration, and I want other people to hear me. The other thing I don’t care for is that on an electric motorcycle, the power curve is upside down. They accelerate hardest off a dead stop and fade as the motor’s rpm increases; a motorcycle with an internal combustion engine accelerates harder as the revs come up.

Wow, this blog went on for longer than I thought it would. I had fun writing it and I had fun going through my photo library for the pics you see here. I hope you had fun reading it.

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A Visit With Andrew

By Joe Berk

This is another one of those blogs that almost had another title. I considered simply calling it The P11. Hey, if you know, you know. And I know. So does Andrew.

Sue and I were on the East Coast last week (as in literally on the East Coast when we stopped for lunch in Point Pleasant, New Jersey) when I gave my buddy Andrew a call. Andrew is the guy who runs British Motorcycle Gear, a company whose ads grace these pages. You’ve also read reviews by Joe Gresh on some of the top quality gear Andrew offers, including Rapido gloves, the Mercury jacket, and the BMG Adventure motorcycle pants.

Andrew is a true Anglophile (a lover of all things British), although like me, he grew up in the Garden State. We had a nice visit in Andrew’s beautiful home, and then he took us into his garage to see the toys. I was blown away, not just by the motorcycles Andrew parks in his garage, but at how closely they tracked with my list of highly desireable motorcycles.

No one has ever outdone Norton when it comes to fuel tank style. Triumph comes close. So did Harley in the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s. This tank is perfect. And those exhaust pipes!

One that caught my eye instantly was a Norton P11. That was the ultimate hot rod motorcycle in the 1960s. Norton shoehorned their 750cc engine into a 500cc Matchless desert sled frame. When I was a teenager, the word on the street was that nothing was faster than a Norton P11. Norton only made a very few of these motorcycles (I think the production total was less than 2500). Truth be told, Andrew’s P11 is the first one I’ve ever seen in person, but I knew what it was as soon as I saw it. It’s parked on the other side of the garage, and my eye skimmed over a bunch of motoexotica when I saw the P11. Man, I would love to own that motorcycle. I don’t necessarily need to ride it; I would just look at it and keep it immaculate. Which, incidentally, is the condition in which I found all of Andrew’s motorcycles.

A late ’60s Triumph Bonneville. How could these guys have been overtaken by Japan?

There was a silver and burgundy 1968 Triumph Bonneville that looks like it rolled out of the Coventry plant yesterday morning. Andrew told me that the Bonneville is sold. Not to me, unfortunately. It’s another I’ve love to own.

Andrew with a few of his rides. Check out the Honda GB500 just behind the Daytona. Just 535 miles! That’s an MV Augusta behind it.

Andrew has a Triumph Daytona, and it’s the rare one…the 900cc triple with a bunch of goodies (think triple caliper disks up front, carbon fiber front fender, and other similar go fast and stop fast bits). It is bright yellow (Triumph called it Daytona yellow), just like the Daytona 1200 I owned about a decade ago. But my Daytona was but a mere commoner’s motorcycle. Andrew’s Daytona is the limited-edition version. Like the P11 Norton mentioned above, it’s the first one I’ve ever seen. I live in southern California; I’ve been to a bunch of moto hangouts (like the Rock Store in Malibu) and numerous Britbike events (for example, the Hansen Dam Norton get-togethers). I’ve seen Jay Leno, I’ve seen pristine vintage Indians (real ones, not the current production stuff), I’ve seen four-cylinder Hendersons, and I’ve laid these eyeballs on other similar exotics. But I’ve never seen a limited-edition Daytona Super III or a P11 in person until I visited Andrew.

Another one of Andrew’s bikes that caught my eye was a near-new-old-stock Honda GB500. It has to be one of the most beautiful motorcycles ever made. Honda offered these 500cc singles in the mid 1980s. It was a modern nod to (and refined version of) the British Velocette. They flopped from a sales perspective back then, but that’s only because of our unrefined palate and our then-fascination with conchos, wide whitewalls , and beer bellies (think potato-potato-potato exhaust notes and you’ll catch my drift). Like a lot of things, I should have bought a GB500 back then. Andrew’s GB500 is literally in like new condition. It has 535 original miles on the odometer.

There was more…a modern Triumph Thruxton, another modern Triumph, even a Lotus Elise sports car. My eye, though, kept returning to the Norton P11. It really is a visually arresting motorcycle.

At the conclusion of our visit, I asked Andrew if he would consider adopting me. Everyone enjoyed a good laugh about that. They all thought I was kidding. But I wasn’t.

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ZRX1100 Carburetor Cleaning: The Second Time’s The Charm

By Joe Gresh

The first time I cleaned the carburetors on the Kawasaki ZRX1100 everything went well except for the part about removing and installing the carbs back on the engine. The ZRX had sat for 9 years and it wasn’t running all that well when I parked it. The first carb cleaning saw new float needles installed and a general poking and cleaning of all jets and orifices.

The bike started up okay and ran fairly well, if a bit ragged at low RPM. This I chalked up to the four carbs needing synchronization. I didn’t have a carb sync tool so I just ran it like it was. It ran pretty good for 7000-8000 miles but became harder to start and really rough at any RPM below 2500. I put up with it because I dreaded removing the carbs again.

The old, original fuel hose started leaking where I had installed an inline fuel filter. No matter what clamp I used it leaked. Giving it a through examination I discovered the hose itself was rotten and the inner liner split. I pulled the hose off and sealed my fate. It was impossible to reach the hose connection buried between the carbs to install a new hose. Things had finally gotten so bad I had to fix the situation.

Removing the carbs was as dreadful as I remembered it to be. There’s not a lot of room between the air box and the intake rubbers so it was a bear (like an Ossa!) to remove the bank of four constant velocities.

Once on the bench the Kawasaki ZRX1100 carbs are pretty easy to work on. I ordered new carb kits and new fuel pipes that go between the carbs to supply fuel. The old pipes weren’t leaking but I didn’t want to go through this ordeal only to have them start leaking.

To install the new fuel pipes you have to un-rack the carbs and split them into individual units. The old pipes looked pretty crusty and I can see them puking fuel because I disturbed them once too often. I also wanted fresh plastic to replace the 24-year-old pipes. While I was at it I bought factory coolant hoses to replace the silicone ones that leaked when it was cold. The new hoses fit much better and should last the rest of my life. All in, I spent three hundred bucks with Dave at Southwest Suzuki/Kawasaki out on Highway 70.

Two of the pilot jets were clogged solid. I had just cleaned them a few months or 8000 miles ago. Possibly the rotten fuel line sent debris down stream and clogged the jets. In addition there are supposed to be tiny washers between the o-ring and the tension spring on the pilot jet adjusting screws. Three were missing and I must have lost them the last time I took the carbs apart. Without the little washers the tension spring digs into the o-ring shredding the thing. Any pieces of o-ring go right into the tiny idle transition holes on the floor of the venturi. So that’s on me. I swear, I never saw the things.

When I say the pilot jets were clogged I mean clogged. I soaked the pilot jets in Evaporust and tossed them into the ultrasonic cleaner: No joy. I had to use a single strand of copper from a fine strand electrical wire and work it for 20 minutes to get the things cleared.

The new Parts Unlimited carb kits came with all the stuff I needed, even those tiny idle mixture screw washers. I usually don’t use the jets out of kits because the quality is so suspect. In this case I decided to use them to be sure the pilots were clear enough. Besides, it couldn’t run any worse. I rechecked the float levels, one was a millimeter off, and assembled the entire mess.

The next day it occurred to me that I had installed the new jets without making sure they were actually drilled all the way through or that a bit of machining swarf hadn’t been left inside. So I took the float bowls off and ran copper wire through all four pilot jets and the main jets. It was good for my peace of mind. I also sprung for an OEM Kawasaki fuel line at a reasonable $12.

Because they are so hard to remove I try to be sure the carbs are not leaking by bench testing the floats and needles. This will save you a lot of work in the event something isn’t right. There’s nothing more depressing that fighting the carbs back into place only to have the things leak when you turn the petcock to On.

As you may have heard I was banned from the ZRX owner’s forum because I posted an ExhaustNotes light bulb review. It didn’t sit well with the members that were selling light bulbs. My new ZRX hangout is on Facebook called Banned ZRX members, or something like that. A lot of the same guys who were on the other site ended up there due to disagreements with the admin. Anyway, these ZRX guys suggested a thin piece of material between the air box and the rubber intakes to make replacing the carbs easier.

I had some thin sheet metal from a filing cabinet and used it to make two carb slider thingies. The sliders are held onto the engine by small bungee cords. I put a 90-degree bend in the sliders so they wouldn’t slip down in use. Those ZRX guys know their stuff, as it was a breeze to slide the carbs into position then remove the sheet metal. That’s half of a hard job made easy.

The Kawasaki ZRX1100 has a lot going for it in the maintenance department. The valves are easy to set clearances. The carbs use three simple, spring-loaded adjustment screws for synchronization, and there are no lock nuts to cause changes when tightened. The procedure is simplicity: You adjust the left set of two outside carbs, then adjust the right set of outside carbs, then adjust both sets of carbs to each other using a middle adjusting screw. It actually takes longer to write the carb sync procedure than to do it.

With all four idle circuits functioning correctly the ZRX starts up first push of the button. The bike pulls smoothly from idle all the way to redline. Having the carbs synced makes for a smooth transition coming off a stop and I don’t think the bike has ever run as good as it does now. I’ll be heading to Utah in June for the Rat Fink convention. It will be a lot more fun with the bike running like Kawasaki intended.

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The Wayback Machine: The Norton Commando

By Joe Berk

I grew up in a town small enough that our junior high school and high school were all in the same building. It was 7th through 12th grade, which meant that some of the Juniors and Seniors had cars, and one guy had a motorcycle. That one guy was Walt Skok, and the motorcycle was a ‘64 Triumph Tiger (in those days the Tiger was a 500cc single-carbed twin). It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, with big downswept chrome exhaust headers, a cool tank with a dynamite chrome rack, chrome wire wheels, and the most perfect look I had ever seen on anything. I spent every spare moment I had sneaking out into the parking lot to stare at it. Some things in the world are perfect, a precise blend of style and function (things like Weatherby rifles, 1911 handguns, C4 Corvettes, Nikon DSLRs, and 1960s Triumph motorcycles).

A ’64 Triumph Tiger, just like the one Walt Skok owned.

Back to the Triumph: One day Walt started it (I had been drooling over it for a month before I ever heard it run), and its perfection, to me, was complete. In those days, a 500cc motorcycle was enormous. When Walt fired it up, it was unlike anything I had ever heard. It wasn’t lumpy and dumpy like a Harley, it wasn’t a whiny whinny like a Honda, and it wasn’t a tinny “wing-ding-ding-ding-ding” like a Suzuki or a Yamaha (they were all two-strokes back then). Nope, the Triumph was perfect. It was deep. It was visceral. It was tough. The front wheel and forks literally throbbed back and forth with each engine piston stroke. To my 12-year-old eyes and ears it was the absolute essence of a gotta-get-me-one-of-these. It looked and sounded like a machine with a heart and a soul. I knew that someday I would own a machine like this.

Fast forward a few years, and I was old enough own and ride my own Triumphs. I’ve had a bunch of mid-‘60s and ‘70s Triumphs…Bonnevilles, Tigers, and a Daytona (which was a 500cc twin-carbed twin back then, a bike known as the Baby Bonneville). I was a young guy and those British motorcycles were perfect. They were fast, they handled well, and they sounded the way God intended a motorcycle to sound. I had a candy-red-and-gold ’78 750 Bonneville (Triumph always had the coolest colors) that would hit an indicated 109 mph on Loop 820 around Fort Worth, and I did that regularly on those hot and humid Texas nights. Life was good.

Fast forward another 50 years (and another 40 or 50 motorcycles for me). We saw the death of the British motorcycle empire, the rise and fall and rise and impending fall of Harley-Davidson, this new thing called globalization, digital engine management systems, and multi-cylinder ridiculously-porky motorcycles.

So here we are, today. My good buddy Gerry, then the CSC service manager, owned this ultra-cool Norton Commando. And good buddy Steve, the CSC CEO, bought the bike and put it on display in the CSC showroom. We had a lot of cool bikes on display there, including vintage Mustangs, Harleys, Beemers, RX3s, RC3s, TT250s, and more. But my eye kept returning to that Norton. I’d never ridden a Norton, but I’d heard the stories when I was younger.

A selfie, sort of. A stunning motorcycle.

Back in the day (I’m jumping back to the ‘60s and ‘70s again) guys who wanted to be cool rode Triumphs. I know because I was one of them. We knew about Nortons, but we didn’t see them very often. They had bigger engines, they were more expensive than Triumphs, and their handling was reported to be far superior to anything on two wheels. Harleys had bigger engines and cost more than Triumphs, but they were porkers. Nortons were faster than Triumphs (and Triumphs were plenty fast).

A lot of guys who rode Triumphs really wanted to ride Nortons. Nortons were mythical bikes. Their handling and acceleration were legendary. In the ‘60s, the hardest accelerating bike on the planet was the Norton Scrambler. Norton stuffed a 750cc engine into a 500cc frame to create that model, like Carroll Shelby did with the AC Cobra. I remember guys talking about Norton Scramblers in hushed and reverential tones back in the LBJ and Nixon years. You spoke about reverential things softly back then.

Fast forward again, and here I was with Steve’s 1973 Norton Commando right in front of me (just a few feet away from where I used to write the CSC blog). Steve’s Norton was magnificent. It had not been restored and it wore its patina proudly.

“Steve,” I said, “you need to let me ride that Norton.”

“Sure,” he said. “I’ll have Gerry get it ready for you.”

Wow, I thought. I’m going to ride a Norton. I felt like the little dog who finally caught the bus and found himself with a mouthful of bus. What do you do when that happens?

I sat on the Norton that afternoon. It felt big. The pegs were set far to the rear and my hips hurt immediately from the bike’s racing ergos (and maybe a little from the femur and spine fractures I suffered in a motorcycle accident a few years before that; I don’t bend as easily as I used to). Maybe I shouldn’t have asked to ride this beautiful beast. Maybe my mouth had written a check my body couldn’t cash.

But I was committed. The Norton went back to Gerry so he could get it ready for me to ride. There could be no backing out now. I was nervous, I was excited, and I was a little giddy. The only bikes I had ridden for the last 7 or 8 years were 150cc Mustangs and the 250cc Zongs. Lightweight bikes. Singles. Under 25 horsepower. Electric starters and all the amenities. Modern stuff. I thought about riding the 850 Norton. It dawned on me that I had not even heard it run yet. I realized I liked electric starters. I hadn’t kick started a bike in probably 35 years. The Norton was an 850, and it was kick start only. No electric starter. Hmmm.

When I arrived at the plant, Steve pushed the Norton outside for me. We both tried to figure out where the ignition key went (it’s on the left side of the bike). We tried to guess at the ignition key’s run spot (it has four or five positions). We picked the second one and I tried kicking the engine. It was a complicated affair. You had to fold the right footpeg in, and when you kick the starter, you had to try to not hit the gear shift lever on the right side of the bike. We kicked it a couple of times. Hmmm again. Lots of compression. Then Steve had to run back into the plant to take a phone call. I tried kick starting the Norton a couple of times again. Not even a cough from the engine.

I played with the key and clicked it over one more notch. Another kick, and the mighty 850 fired right up. Ah, success!

The Norton settled into an easy idle. It was wonderful. It sounded just like Walt Skok’s Triumph. I was in the 7th grade again. I looked around to see if Steve had seen me start it, but no one was there. It was just me and the Norton. Okay, I thought, I’ll just ride around in the parking lot to get the feel of the clutch, the throttle, and the brakes.

Whoa, I thought, as I let the clutch out gingerly. That puppy had power! The Norton was turning over lazily and it felt incredibly powerful as I eased the clutch out. I tried the rear brake and there was nothing (oh, that’s right, the rear brake is on the other side). I tried the front brake, and it was strong. Norton had already gone to disk brakes by 1973, and the disk on Steve’s Commando was just as good as a modern bike’s brakes are today.

I rode the Norton into the shop so Gerry could fill the fuel tank for me. The Norton has a sidestand and a centerstand, but you can’t get to either one while you are on the bike. You have to hold the bike up, dismount on the left, and then put it on the centerstand. The side stand was under there somewhere, but I didn’t want to mess around trying to catch it with my boot. It was plenty scary just getting off the Norton and holding it upright. It was more than a little scary, actually. I’m riding my boss’s vintage bike, it’s bigger than anything I’ve been on in years, and I don’t want to drop it.

Gerry gave me “the talk” about kick starting the Norton. “I don’t like to do it while I’m on the bike,” he said. “If it kicks back, it will drive your knee right into the handlebars and that hurts. I always do it standing on the right side of the bike.”

Hmmmm. As if I wasn’t nervous enough already.

I tried the kickstarter two or three times (with everybody in the service area watching me) and I couldn’t start the thing, even though I had started it outside (when no one was around to witness my success). Gerry kicked the Norton once for me (after my repeated feeble attempts) and it started immediately. Okay. I got it. You have to show it who’s boss.

I strapped my camera case to the Norton’s back seat (or pillion, as they used to say in Wolverhampton), and then I had a hard time getting back on the bike. I couldn’t swing my leg over the camera bag. Yeah, I was nervous. And everybody in the shop was still watching me.

With the Norton twerking to its British twin tango, I managed to turn it around and get out onto Route 66. A quick U-turn (all the while concentrating intensely so I would remember “shift on the right, brake on the left”) and I rode through the mean streets of north Azusa toward the San Gabriels. In just a few minutes, I was on Highway 39, about to experience riding Nirvana.

This is what a motorcycle instrument cluster should be. The Enfield Interceptor Gresh and I tested in Baja was very similar.

Wow, this is sweet, I thought as I climbed into the San Gabriels. I had no idea what gear I was in, but gear selection is a somewhat abstract concept on a Norton. Which gear didn’t seem to make any difference. The Commando had power and torque that just wouldn’t quit. More throttle, go faster, shifting optional. It didn’t matter what gear I was in (which was good, because all I knew was that I was somewhere north of 1st).

A photo stop along the East Fork Road. That’s East Fork, as in the East Fork of the San Gabriel River.

I looked down at the tach. It had a 7000-rpm redline and I was bouncing around somewhere in the 2500 zip code. And when I say bouncing around, I mean that literally. The tach needle oscillated ±800 rpm at anything below 3000 rpm (it settled down above 3000 rpm, a neighborhood I would visit only once that day). The Norton’s low end torque was incredible. I realized I didn’t even know how many gears the bike had, so I slowed, rowed through the gears and counted (the number was four).

A shot from the rear. I was shooting with a Nikon D3300 DSLR (an entry-level digital camera) and the Nikon 16-35 lens.

The Norton was amazing in every regard. The sound was soothing, symphonic, and sensuous (how’s that for alliteration?). It’s what God intended motorcycles to be. Highway 39 is gloriously twisty and the big Norton (which suddenly didn’t feel so big) gobbled it up. The Norton never felt cumbersome or heavy (it’s only about 20 lbs heavier than my 250cc RX3). It was extremely powerful. I was carving through the corners moderately aggressively at very tiny throttle openings. Just a little touch of my right hand and it felt like I was a cannon-launched kinetic energy weapon. Full disclosure: I’ve never been launched from a cannon, but I’m pretty sure what I experienced that day on the Norton is what it would feel like. Everything about the Norton felt (and here’s that word again) perfect.
I was having so much fun that I missed the spot where I normally would stop for the CSC glamour shots. There’s a particular place on Highway 39 where I could position a bike and get some curves in the photo (and it looked great in the CSC ads). But I sailed right past it. I was enjoying the ride.

When I realized I missed the spot where I wanted to stop for photos, it made me think about my camera. I reached behind to make sure it was still on the seat behind me, but my camera wasn’t there! Oh, no, I thought, I lost my camera, and God only knows where it might have fallen off. I looked down, and the camera was hanging off the left side of the bike, captured in the bungee net. Wow, I dodged a bullet there.

The view from above. It was a glorious day.

I pulled off and then I realized: I don’t want to kill the engine because then I’ll have to start it, and if I can’t, I’m going to feel mighty stupid calling Gerry to come rescue me.

Okay, I thought, here’s the drill. Pull off to the side of the road, find a flat spot, keep the engine running, put all my weight on my bad left leg, swing my right leg over the seat, hold the Norton upright, get the bike on the centerstand, unhook the bungee net, sling the camera case over my shoulder, get back on the bike, and all the while, keep the engine running. Oh, yeah. No problem.

This is what a motorcycle should look like. Why can’t other manufacturers do this? Oh, wait, Enfield did…

Actually, though, it wasn’t that bad. And I was having a lot of fun.

I arrived at the East Fork bridge sooner than I thought I would (time does indeed fly when you’re having fun). I made the right turn. I would have done the complete Glendora Ridge Road loop, but the CalTrans sign told me that Glendora Ridge Road was closed. I looked for a spot to stop and grab a few photos of this magnificent beast.

That’s when I noticed that the left footpeg rubber had fallen off the bike. It’s the rubber piece that fits over the foot peg. Oh, no, I thought once again. I didn’t want to lose pieces of Steve’s bike, although I knew no ride on any vintage British vertical twin would be complete without something falling off. I made a U-turn and rode back and forth several times along a half-mile stretch where I thought I lost the rubber footpeg cover, but I couldn’t find it. When I pulled off to turn around yet again, I stalled the bike.

Hmmm. No doubt about it now. I knew I was going to have to start the Norton on my own.

We (me and my good buddy Norton, that is) had picked a good spot to stop. I dismounted using the procedure described earlier, I pulled the black beauty onto its centerstand, and I grabbed several photos. I could tell they were going to be good. Sometimes you just know when you’re behind the camera that things are going well. And on the plus side of the ledger, all of the U-turns I had just made (along with the magnificent canyon carving on Highway 39) had built up my confidence enormously. The Norton was going to start for me because I would will it to.

And you know what? That’s exactly what happened. One kick and all was well with the world. I felt like Marlon Brando, Steve McQueen, and Peter Fonda, all rolled up into one 66-year-old teenager. At that moment I was a 12-year-old kid staring at Walt Skok’s Triumph again. Yeah, I’m bad. A Norton will do that to you. I stared at the bike as it idled. It was a living, breathing, snorting, shaking, powerful thing. Seeing it alive like that was perfect. I suddenly remembered my Nikon camera had video. Check this out…

So there you have it. A dream bike, but this time the dream was real. Good times, that day was.

If you like reading about vintage iron, check out our Dream Bikes page!

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Lobo

I recently posted a Wayback Machine blog on riding in the rain, and Carl Bennett (a new friend from the UK) added a comment about one of his rain rides. Carl’s input was interesting on several levels, one of which was the included web address. I poked around a bit on Carl’s site and found a blog post titled “Lobo.” Well, one thing led to another, with the result being Carl’s permission to publish “Lobo” here on ExNotes. I enjoyed reading it and I think you will, too.

– Joe Berk

By Carl Bennett

As a name for a motorcycle it’s okay. It means timber wolf, in Spanish, but maybe that means Mexican. Oooops, I meant Microsoft Spanish, for whom Spanish means Old Spanish. Obviously in global internet land, Microsoft’s 14-year-old-in-Ohio sensibilities reign supreme. Which is a whole other story. And this one is about me. Like all my others, as yours are all about you and Charles Dickens’ were about him. And especially Martin Amis’s were all about him. God, were they about him. I don’t know if he ever had a motorcycle. Hunter Thompson definitely had several, but as he wrote himself, Mister Kurz, he dead.

Lobo was the name of the band that sang A Dog Named Boo, so long ago that I can’t even admit I know the tune. I heard it during my formative years, the ones still a-forming.

Like Arlo Guthrie on his motorcycle I don’t want to die. Despite drinking kettle de-scaler yesterday morning, calling NHS 111 and having a not-great day thinking I might actually die of this, which wasn’t helped by eating a whole packet of spicy beetroot. I love that stuff, except they really ought to put a reminder on the packet of what happens when you look in the toilet bowl, to tell you that you almost certainly will live more than another three days and if you don’t, it won’t be anything to do with beetroots, unless a beetroot lorry runs you over. The gist being that I’d quite like to stay alive for the foreseeable future.

So obviously, I bought myself a motorcycle for Christmas. Unlike the song, although I’ve got my motor running, first time every time, but hey, it’s a BMW. On which I have no intention of hitting the highway like a battering ram, nor like anything else. What did you expect? I’ve absolutely no wish to hit the highway because I know from past experience it bloody hurts. Thankfully, my off-bike excursions were few and decidedly minor, but I remember spending an afternoon in Gene Fleck’s Meadow Inn bar in Wisconsin with the road closed while an emergency crew searched against the clock to find someone’s foot. I’d seen him and his girl earlier in the day on a Harley, riding like an accident looking for somewhere to happen, which it duly did.

I wasn’t prepared for the change. And no, that wasn’t why I got a motorcycle again. I did it because life is short. I did it because I wanted to smell the grass and the trees and the fields I passed through. I did it because I wanted to do it again before I die.

Where I began the process I laughingly call growing-up, there wasn’t any public transport to speak of. There were infrequent busses, taxis weren’t a thing for a 16 or 17-year-old in a Wiltshire town and even if being chauffeured to places by my Mummy was an option the way it seems to be for kids today, I’d have died of self-loathing to ask. Probably. After I had the lift, obviously. All of which meant that at 16 I did what was the fairly normal thing and bought a Yamaha FS1-E. It wasn’t just me. Look at the sales figures. Back then, you had a moped only as long as it took to get a motorcycle, which was your 17th birthday. Thanks to some bureaucratic insanity, or more likely in England, nobody could be bothered to check the sense of the rules, or read them properly, a 17-year-old could perfectly legally if predictably briefly stick a sidecar on a Kawasaki Z1, stick L-plates on it and set off for the obituary column of their local paper, when there were such things.

Not me, baby. I bought a Honda CB 175. I had an Army surplus shiny PVC button-up coat. It felt like, it looked like, it probably was something a dustman on a motorcycle would look like, as a friend of mine thoughtfully pointed out in case it was something I’d overlooked. It had to go, even though it didn’t very fast. I put it in the Wiltshire Times. Nobody even rang the phone number. I put the price up 30% the next week and got about 20 calls. I sold it to the first one who came to see it, even though he asked for a discount. Which he didn’t get. I didn’t bother to tell him about the 30% discount he could have had the week before.

Then it was probably my favourite bike, the Triumph T25, the kind of thing that now sells for over £4,000 any day of the week and which then you felt lucky if you could raise £200 on it. It was fun, and I learned some good lessons on it. One of them being that if you ignore that little triangular sign warning you there’s a junction ahead then you’ll go about three-quarters of the way across it before the twin-shoe Triumph brake stops you. Nothing came. Nothing did on back lanes around Tellisford in those days.

The Triumph got swapped for a Norton 500 that ran for two weeks out of the two years I had it. It sent me spinning down the road like a dead fly in Cardiff one black ice night, after I’d left the electric fire warmth of some girl’s flat (nothing doing there; never was, with anybody), lost the bike out from under me at about 5 mph, came to a halt against a parked car and had some Welshman peer down at me to tell me “Duh, it’s icy mind.” I left Wales as soon as I could and bought another Triumph, a real 1970s post-Easy-Rider identity crisis machine. It was a 650cc Tiger engine, shoehorned into a chrome-plated Norton Slimline frame. Instead of the rocker clip-ons you’d expect, it had highish handlebars and cut-off exhausts. Just header pipes in fact, but with Volkswagen Beetle mufflers smacked into them in a Bath carpark, with Halford’s slash-cut trim bolted on the ends. I wasn’t a rocker, but I thought it rocked.

It took two weeks to get the petrol tank the way I wanted it, a deep, deep black you could lose your soul in, sprayed on then sanded, sprayed on then sanded, sprayed on then sanded about fifteen times in the kitchen of my definitively smelly Southampton student flat, the kind of place that gave Ian McEwan the idea for The Cement Garden, only a bit less appealing. On the first trip out on that gloriously glossy bike I rode up to Salisbury, escorted by a girlfriend whose parents purported to believe that she had her own spare room at my university halls of residence, the ones I’d left months before. We got to her parents’ newish house in the summer sunlight, said hello, put the bike in the driveway. Then decided we’d go to a local pub because a) Wiltshire, b) nothing much else to do until her parents went out, or c) that’s what people did.

I started the bike, but it didn’t fire first time, so I tickled the Amal carburetor and tried again. There was no air filter on the carb – there often wasn’t in those days – so when it backfired the spurt of flame came straight out into the open air and set light to the petrol that had trickled down the outside of the carb float bowl. I appreciate that these are words that younger readers won’t even recognise, but we had to. I had my leather jacket on, a full-face Cromwell ACU gold-rated helmet, and long leather gloves, so I just reached down nonchalantly to switch the fuel tap to Off. No petrol, no fry, as Bob Marley didn’t sing. Except I didn’t turn the petrol off. I managed to pull the rubber petrol feed line off instead. The flames came up to chest level.

My first thought was to run for it, but my second was that I’d just put three gallons in the tank and I seriously doubted I could run faster than that. All I could think of to do was reach into the flames and turn the petrol tap off, so that’s what I did. I couldn’t see past my elbow in the flames, but it worked or I wouldn’t be telling this story. The insulation on the electrics had burned off so the horn was fused on until I got out my trusty Buck knife (something else we took entirely as normal in the West Country) and cut what was left of the wires. My girlfriend’s mother saw the whole thing from the kitchen. She waited until the flames had gone out before she came out to tell me I’d dropped oil on her driveway.

There was a break after that, for university and unhappily London then Aylesbury and Bath until luck and an unusual skillset saw me in Chicago, on a 650 Yamaha that might or might not have been technically stolen, blasting around Lakeshore Drive and the blue lights area, under half the city, overlooking some huge American river, me and an Italian buddy from summer camp on his bike, living if not the dream then certainly some kind of alternative reality. To this day I don’t know why I did that. No insurance, no clear provenance to the bike, certainly no observance of the speed limits, and only my trusty grey cardboard AA international driving licence that didn’t mention motorcycles. But nothing happened. Back then that was all that mattered.

A gap of some years and then a BMW R1000, a bike that vibrated so much that a trip from London to Wiltshire left me literally unable to make a sentence for about fifteen minutes. It felt good though, that lumpy, dumpy, so-solid bike. I traded that one for a Harley-Davidson Sportster which is what I thought was the ultimate motorcycle ought to be before I found out that I needed to spend £200 a month pretty much every month to get it the way it ought to have left the factory before their accountants had a say in the recommended retail price. It got stolen, we recovered it and instead of putting it back in showroom metal flake purple turned it jet black, bored it out to 1200, and put Brembo four-pot brakes and a fuel-injector on it before it transmogrified into a laptop and a laser printer, when laser printers were a long way from the couple of hundred a good one is now.

And somehow that was 30 years ago. This time the iron horse is a BMW F650, almost as old as when I stopped riding for a while, but with a documented 13,000 miles on it. My idea of common sense says changing the oil and the filter and swapping out the original brake lines and replacing them with stainless steel would first of all look cool but possibly more importantly, be quite a sensible way of not relying on thirty year old rubber. I mean, would you? On any Saturday night?

In the intervening coughty years I’ve either sold or given away my original Schott jacket, the gloves, the Rukka, the Ashman Metropolitan Police long boots and the Belstaff scrambler boots. The Cromwell helmet and the Bell 500 open-face are long gone. I need everything, from the toes upwards and I find that most of the names I grew up with such as Ashman or Cromwell just don’t exist any more. I bought another Bell, but a full-face ACU gold Sharp 5-rated lid this time. I got some gloves, some chain lube and a tube of Solvol Autosol to keep the chrome shiny. I found some leather jeans and my old not-Schott jacket that I bought in Spain and after only three applications of neatsfoot oil and old-fashioned dubbin and hanging it over a radiator it’s now soft enough to be wearable and looks, I think, pretty darned good, even if it doesn’t have a single CE rating to its name. I’ve skipped the red Hermetite that used to decorate every pseudo-serious biker’s jeans.

Of the kids I knew that got in Bad Trouble on a bike, one was drunk and showing off. He died. My cousin lost his job and an inch off one leg when he was swiped by a car that ignored him on a roundabout. One in Wiltshire rode his bike under a combine harvester. He died too. It wasn’t really funny and I try not to think of him looking like SpongeBob SquarePants, with his arms and legs sticking out of the straw. He’d had a 20-year break from bikes and had just picked up an early retirement pension payoff. He didn’t read the T&Cs that said you still can’t ride like an arse. The American guy I didn’t ride around Chicago with lost his foot and they didn’t find it in time to put it back on. For all I know it’s still in a field in Wisconsin.

CE-rated armour wouldn’t have helped a single one of them. I’m certainly not saying safety gear isn’t worth the effort, or I wouldn’t have specced out my new helmet so carefully. But motorcycles aren’t the safest thing. You have to watch your sides, your front and what’s underneath you, as well as your back.

Like what you read hear? Check out (and subscribe to) Carl Bennett’s blog at Writer-Insighter.com!

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ExNotes Book Review: MC’s Street Bikes of the ’60s

By Joe Berk

Full disclosure up front: I’m a longtime contributor to Motorcycle Classics magazine, and I love reading every issue. Every time I read the latest edition I think they’ve outdone themselves (both with the writing and the photography) and I wonder how they are going to top it in the next edition. And then they do. Full color, full page, lots of pages, and high-quality paper. About the only other magazine that has managed to keep the doors open and continue to do a similar high-quality job is RoadRUNNER. I’ve written for RoadRUNNER in the past, too, and you might be wondering if maybe I am a little bit biased. I am not a little biased; I am a lot biased. I love both these magazines.

Every so often Motorcycle Classics will publish a compendium of stories from past issues on a specific topic. I’d never purchased any of these until recently, and then I picked up two of them: Classic Bikes of the ’60s, and Classic Road Trips. This review is focused on Classic Bikes of the ’60s. We’ll publish a separate review on Classic Road Trips in the near future.

About now you might be wondering: Why buy the special editions? If you have been buying the magazine all along, wouldn’t you have each of the stories in those back issues? The answer, of course, is yes. But for just a few bucks, I’ve got all the stories concentrated in one place, and I don’t have to go digging through 6 feet of shelf space and a couple of hundred issues to find a particular story.

Classic Road Bikes of the ’60s is, for me, indeed a special edition. I came of age in the ’60s, and the stories in this issue are on the bikes I lusted for when I was a teenager. Every bike is one I dreamed about, and wow, they’ve got some great stories in this edition. It has feature pieces on these motorcycles:

- 1967 BSA Spitfire (one of the most beautiful motorcycles ever made, in my opinion…like the one Tommy Smothers rode back in the day)
- 1966 Honda Dream (I recently wrote about the Dream, too, in this same magazine…Gresh owned three of them).
- Velocette Thruxton (the stuff of dreams, truly one of the world’s stunning motorcycles)
- 1969 Ducati 350 (I confess…I never quite got the fascination with Ducati, but hey, there’s no accounting so for some folks’ tastes)
- 1962 BMW R60/2 (in creamy white with black pinstripes, which is magnificent)
- 1963 Royal Enfield Interceptor (the grand-daddy of my current bike…a kid I knew in high school had one of these).
- 1961 Harley Duo Glide (the look that inspired a generation of Harley designs, and one that has never been matched)
- 1966 Honda CB450 (the black bomber; great technology, atrocious styling)
- 1967 Triumph Bonneville (absolutely the most beautiful bike in the world, with a sound to match)
- 1965 Bultaco Metralla (I once had a friend who though a Bultaco was something you eat)
- 1966 Norton P11 (also commonly referred to as the Norton Scrambler, it was the 750cc Atlas engine in a Matchless 500cc frame)
- 1969 Kawasaki 500cc Triple (ah, an awesome machine…I rode alongside a guy who had one of these on my first international motorcycle ride back in 1969)
- 1973 Moto Guzzi V700 (close enough to the ’60s to be included here…I always wanted one…they sound more like a Harley than a Harley does)
- 1968 Yamaha Big Bear Scrambler (this one is so beautiful it graces the cover of the special edition magazine)
- 1968 Triumph Trident T150 (too little too late…it couldn’t compete with Honda’s CB750, but it was nice)
- 1969 Norton Commando (a “Parting Shots” story about a ride on the famed commando)

Classic Road Bikes of the ’60s is a great read and a worthwhile reference. Like I said above, you’re getting great photos, great writing, and great entertainment. When you buy your copy, I’m certain you’ll agree.

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This just in: Janus Announces Origin Line!

By Joe Berk

This just came in: A press release from Janus Motorcycles! Janus has a special place in my heart. I rode with those guys in Baja on Janus Motorcycles and I visited the plant (and wrote about their new 450 in Motorcycle Classics magazine) a year or so ago. They’re good folks and they make great motorcycles. The latest Janus press release follows.

Happy New Year!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Janus Motorcycles announces new “Origins” line with lower entry price

We are pleased to announce the launch of a new edition of both the 250 and 450 Janus models: the Janus “Origin” model line. The basic idea of the “Origin” line is to provide a blank slate version of our existing models paired down to the essence of what defines each model. This serves to provide both a more affordable option AND the opportunity to build your own Janus just as you would like. To this end, we have removed all but the most vital elements of each model.

For example, the Halcyon 250 Origin edition includes everything that you need to be initiated into the Janus experience: a beautiful handmade motorcycle ready to ride, but without many of the options and upgrades that have always been standard on our production models such as fender pinstripe, air box graphics, and number plate (Origin edition Halcyons come with fenders pr-drilled and capped should you wish to add a number plate), a limited palette of available options for primary color, a single gold option for pinstriping, a standard seat, limited leather color options, a 1-year warranty, and no polished options.

By reducing the number of features and options, this helps us to hold appropriate stock and streamline production efficiency all of which allows us to offer the Origin line at a significantly lower entry price. Should you wish to add additional options or upgrades, these are all available for an additional cost. Add-ons will be shipped separately with instructions for installation by the customer. Get in on the Janus rambling experience and add almost any of our upgrades or extended warranties down the road! Book racks, fishtail exhausts, saddlebags, or headlight visors also make great birthday or Christmas gifts!

The details
Get the Halcyon 250 Origin for a $6995 base price. That includes choice of two colors, gold tank pinstripe, and 1 year warranty. Build one here.

Get the Gryffin 250 Origin for a $7495 base price. That includes choice of two colors, gold tank pinstripe, and 1 year warranty. Build one here.

Get the Halcyon 450 Origin for a $13,495 base price. That includes choice of two colors, gold tank pinstripe, simplified feather graphic/emblem, and 1 year warranty. Build one here.

How?
So much of what we do is hands on. By giving you control over how much of that “hands on” you start with on your bike, we can help reduce the upfront price for these packages.

The value of our main model lines and their THOUSANDS of configurations, handcrafted quality, industry-leading warranties, and show-stopping looks doesn’t change. If you still want to “choose everything” it’s still the best value to go with the fully-customizable standard build up front (you can do the math on the website).

Background

At Janus, we pride ourselves on our design, hand-craftsmanship, and hyper-local supply chain—all things that also contribute to the higher cost of our models compared to the mass-produced offerings from the mainstream motorcycle industry. Especially over the past three years material costs, and inflation have meant that our prices have had to climb to stay abreast of our costs. Our goal with the Origin line is to find a way to offer an introductory option to the Janus experience with the potential to add options and upgrades over time.

One of the highest costs we face is also one of our greatest benefits: the numerous and complex menu of potential finishes and upgrades. By reducing these and standardizing the process, we have been able to find just the right balance that allows us to offer the Origin line. We chose to offer a “line” of existing models because, although paired down, the Halcyon “Origin” is still completely a Halcyon. What it lacks in options and upgrades, it makes up for in potential! We have never offered a “kit” bike, but this might be the closest we will ever come…

We chose the name Origin for its associations with just this idea of potential and beginnings (a big theme here with Janus the god who presides over them!) and because it conveys the idea that these are not so much different from the stock models in nature as in degree.

Please contact us with any questions you may have about the new Janus “Origin” line, what is or is not included, and how you can build it out over time!

Richard discusses the Origin line:

Thanks,

Grant

Grant Longenbaugh

President
Janus Motorcycles

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ExNotes Moto-mods: Kawasaki ZRX1100 Petcock

By Joe Gresh

I should have listened to the guys who knew. They told me the vacuum operated fuel petcock on the ZRX1100 was a source of problems and that I should convert it to a standard on-off-reserve manually operated type. In my defense the new vacuum petcock lasted six months or so before the ZRX became hard to start after sitting idle for longish periods of time.

The vacuum petcock stopped sealing and the ZRX’s last line of defense was the float needle in the carburetors. In an ideal world these needles should stop the flow of gas and you wouldn’t even need a fuel shut off valve. We don’t live in an ideal world, however.

I tested my bad-petcock theory by removing the fuel line. A steady stream of fuel poured out of the hose. There is no “Off” position on the standard Kawasaki petcock so I drained the gas tank and set about converting the petcock to manual.

In practical terms the bike was starting hard because it was flooded. Constant velocity carbs, like the ones fitted to the ZRX, are a little harder to clear a flooded condition. Normally you’d hold the throttle wide open to get a lot of air flowing through the cylinder, thus blowing out the excess fuel. With CV type carbs opening the throttle only opens a set of butterfly valves. The actual throttle slides are independent of the twist grip and require engine vacuum to operate. Add low-vacuum cranking speed that struggles to raise the throttle slides and a flooded engine that doesn’t want to start and you’ve got a sticky wicket.

I bought this generic fuel petcock on Amazon for around $10 and figured if it didn’t work I wasn’t out much money. The hole centers lined up and the valve bolted into the Kawasaki tank without issue.

The new petcock came with these tiny plastic fuel filters fitted to the main tank standpipe and the reserve opening at the bottom of the tank. I got rid of these as they looked sort of restrictive and I planned on installing an inline filter on the bike to simplify the hose connections.

The original style vacuum petcock had a 3/8” hose barb that mated to a 5/16” barb on the carburetors. This mismatch required the factory to specify an unusual molded hose that was 3/8” on one end and 5/16” on the other. The new, manual petcock had a ¼” hose barb. These universal inline filters have both ¼” and 5/16” barbs to fit a wider range of machines. I trimmed off the 1/4″ barb on one side of the filter and had a nifty filter that fit both the petcock size and the carburetor size.

I know what you’re thinking, which is that the new petcock at ¼” won’t pass enough fuel. Maybe you’d be right if I drag raced or rode extended periods at high speed. At 50 miles per gallon the thrifty ZRX1100 gets plenty of fuel through the smaller line. I did a few full-throttle passes at an undisclosed test location and the bike did not want for fuel.

The new petcock hose barb exited 90 degrees rearward compared to the stock petcock, which exited down. This orientation required the fuel hose to run straight back and over the carburetor before turning down and routing under the bank of four carbs. The extra length made for kind of a loose hose so I used a couple rubber-covered clamps to secure the hose and tuck it in out of the way.

The new petcock makes starting easier but the Kawasaki ZRX is still reluctant to cold start. Which is odd because the bike always started on the first push. Maybe it’s just the fact that winter is here at the ranch and I’m starting the ex-Florida bike colder than usual. This is the first New Mexico winter for the ZRX and it takes three or four pushes on the button to get the bike to light off, a great improvement over the 25 or so with the old, leaky petcock. I never got around to adjusting the ZRX carbs; I just cleaned them and stuck them back on the bike as I had a long trip planned and wanted to get some shakedown miles on the bike. Maybe a carb sync is in order.

I’ll try adjusting my starting ritual to see if I can come up with a protocol that will save some wear and tear on the Kawasaki starter motor. Keep your eyes glued to ExhaustNotes.us for important updates as they become available.

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The Motorado Vintage Motorcycle Meet, Santa Fe, New Mexico

By Joe Gresh

We were flying low and slow, like vatos do, heading north from Mountainair, New Mexico. The Mud Chuckers, one on a Buell 1000, one on a Kawasaki Vulcan 750 and me on the 1974 Yamaha RD350. It had been a few years since the last Motorado event and we decided to ride up as a group. Covid and inertia combined to equal a 4-year gap since the last Motorado event. Last year in 2022 we held an unofficial Motorado rump-meet at the traditional location. About 15 old bikes showed up and no one drank beer because the pub was closed. There was a swap meet going on and we drew some interested lookie-loos. It was better than nothing for sure and I was prepared to go do it again this year but the real Motorado got on the pipe.

Saturday’s weather was warm and sunny and none of us felt in the mood to go very fast so we burbled along at 50 miles per hour enjoying the beautiful, two-lane New Mexico scenery. Traffic was typically light. Three cars passed us. At this stately pace the old two-cycle, twin cylinder Yamaha RD350 progressed 58 miles for each gallon of gas. That number would be a lot more impressive except the ancient, 1950’s era Sportster motor powering Mike’s Buell did 68 miles per gallon. Long stoke, four stroke, no poke, no joke.

The unofficial, official motel for Motorado 2023 was the Sunset Motel in Moriarity, New Mexico. The Sunset is laid back and low slung just like us. You don’t get breakfast at the Sunset but you do get a monster homemade muffin, which is almost the same thing. After getting settled in our rooms we rode off to get dinner at Shorty’s BBQ joint.

Shorty’s has the best BBQ brisket in Moriarity but the place is always in kind of an identity crisis. The first time I ate at Shorty’s the walls were covered with Jesus stuff, bible quotes and crosses. A few years later I stopped by and the entire restaurant was a shrine to Donald Trump. The Mud Chucker’s are about as far from liberal as you can get, but are also not too fond of The Donald so I feared the worse going in, but the décor had changed again. Now the place was Jesus-lite® without a single reference to our 45th President and a marked reduction in Christian symbolism. You get to experience Shorty’s political and spiritual evolution through the walls of his establishment and eat a great brisket sandwich to boot.

Late September in New Mexico is prime motorcycle riding season. The mornings are cool, gradually warming to hot afternoons. Elevation changes and drifting clouds create a seesawing temperature landscape. The Mud Chuckers were moving slowly on Sunday morning and I’m of that certain age where I no longer care whether I arrive anywhere at any particular time, so we managed to pull out of the motel around 11 a.m. From the Sunset, it’s a straightish shot up Highway 41, through Galisteo to Highway 285 and then north a few miles to the Motorado.

There was a good crowd at the 2023 Motorado. It looked to me as though they had not lost any attendance despite the 4-year layoff. All brands of old bikes were represented and several shops had booths selling whatever it is they sold. I hit the Motorado T-shirt booth first but they weren’t set up to take credit cards and I had a limited amount of cash on hand. Once again it was no T-shirt for me. This whole T-shirt thing is out of control.

One of my dream bikes, a Kawasaki Avenger 350. These disc valve two strokes were pretty fast back then and still fast today.

High pipes on a Norton P-11. This is pre-isolastic mounting so you get to feel every vibration the parallel twin puts out.

Every Motorado I see a bike I never knew existed. Here’s a Taurus diesel that looks a lot like Royal Enfield running gear strapped to a diesel engine.

This over restored but still beautiful Ariel Square Four was a stunner. I hung around to hear it run but got tired of waiting.

The oldest bike at the event, a 1906 Fairy opposed twin. Not sure of the horsepower but they made 2-1/2 to 8 horsepower models. I bet the 8 was a real screamer.

This bike is the great grand-daddy to the RD350. Two generations behind the RD it’s still a sweet looking bike.

After a few passes we had seen pretty much all the bikes in the show and the swap meet. The Chuckers and I took the long way home on the Turquoise Trail through Madrid, New Mexico and got back to the Sunset motel at Sunset. Moriarity rolls up the sidewalks on Sunday night and all the regular places were closed so we retreated to a 24-7 truck stop that had the worse spaghetti ever made, and then we called it a night. It’s tough eating night-spaghetti.

The morning ride from Moriarity was brisk bordering on cold and our rag-tag group made the 200-mile rode low and at our now standard slowpoke speed. I’m very happy the Motorado is back in business and barring another world-stopping pandemic I hope they stage many more years of vintage shows. As long they hold the meet I’ll be riding an old bike up to Santa Fe to check out the hardware. I’ll see you there next year. Swing by the Sunset Motel and we can ride the last 50 miles together.

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Adventures on Borrowed Time

By Joe Berk

I guess a good way to start a blog is to grab the reader’s attention, and I can do that here: How many people do you know who ride a Panther?

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog about Nick Adams, an interesting man, fellow motojournalist, and author. Nick is about the same age as me and he enjoys exploring the world on his different motorcycles. In other words, he is our kind of guy.

In my prior blog about Mr. Adams, I mentioned that I planned to purchase one of his books. I did, and a few days after ordering Adventures on Borrowed Time, it arrived.

Adventures on Borrowed Time is well written and well organized. It’s 191 pages long and it has lots of pictures. Nick’s writing style is conversational and easy to follow (it feels more like listening to a good friend’s stories than reading). The first chapter is about Nick’s ’72 Guzzi Eldorado (the one you see in the photos above). The following chapters take you through Canada, mostly on gravel roads, in good weather and bad. There are instances in which Nick’s Guzzi didn’t feel like starting, and Nick takes us through the steps he took to coax the old V-twin back to life. There are parts where Nick switches to his ’86 Suzuki Cavalcade (Suzuki’s attempt to cash in the Gold Wing craze), that monster of a bike’s surprisingly good handling, and the repairs Nick made to it. Parts of Adventures on Borrowed Time describe exploring Canada on Nick’s 650cc Suzuki Burgman scooter. And then, returning to my attention grabber at the start of this blog, Adventures on Borrowed Time describes Nick riding Canada on his 62-year-old Panther.

Never heard of the Panther? Don’t feel bad. The Panther is a 600cc single English bike made from 1900 to 1968, and most folks have never heard of it. They are fairly primitive, I think. I say “I think” because I’ve never even seen a Panther. And here’s Nick, describing what it’s like to take major trips through Canada on one. A long-distance moto adventure ride through the Canadian wilderness on a 62-year-old British motorcycle…what could go wrong?

The writing is superb, the photos are great, and the character development all make Adventures on Borrowed Time a book you need to read (the characters being Nick, his wife, the people he meets, and the bikes). You can purchase your copy of Adventures on Borrowed Time here. Trust me on this: You’ll enjoy it. You can thank me later.