Ekins, McQueen, Leno, Weinstein, and more…

This is a story I wrote a good 15 years ago and it has appeared online a couple of times before.  It’s about an invitation only celebration of Bud Ekin’s life at Warner Brothers Studios here in So Cal.  I first published this story on the old MotoFoto site and then again on the CSC blog about 10 years ago.  Good buddy Marty and rode our motorcycles to the event and it was awesome. It’s a good story and it was a great day.

I’ll bet everyone who reads this blog has seen Steve McQueen’s The Great Escape. Released in 1963 (about the same time as the original Mustang Motor Products folded), I believe The Great Escape is one of the greatest movies ever made. If you’re into bikes (hey, you’re reading this blog, so you gotta be!), you know about the scenes showing Steve McQueen racing away from the Nazis on a motorcycle in World War II Germany…

The purists among us recognized that the movie dudes took some liberties here…McQueen was on a 650 Triumph in the film, and the Germans didn’t use Triumphs. The movie folks modified the Triumph to make it look like a German military bike because it would have been a lot harder doing this scene on an old and underpowered BMW.  And the guy who jumped the bike over that barbed-wire fence wasn’t really Steve McQueen…it was a previously-unknown desert racer and stuntman named Bud Ekins (more on him in a bit).

The real deal: The original, actual Triumph motorcycle used in The Great Escape.

So, how did all this come about?

Bud Ekins in action.

Most of you probably know that Steve McQueen was a serious motorcycle guy. In his day, he was an avid collector, racer, and rider. McQueen got into motorcycling almost accidentally. A guy who owed McQueen money offered to give him a Triumph motorcycle to repay the debt, and McQueen agreed, but he didn’t know how to ride.  McQueen took the bike to the local Triumph guru to learn how to ride, and that guy was a racer and mechanic named Bud Ekins. The two became riding buddies and (pardon the pun) fast friends.  Fast forward a bit, and McQueen’s got this gig to star in a movie called (you guessed it) The Great Escape. There are cool motorcycle scenes in it, including the iconic jump shown in the video above. McQueen’s bosses wouldn’t let him do the jump, so McQueen turned to his buddy, Bud Ekins. It would be the first time Ekins did any stunt work, or really any work at all in the movie industry.

Ekins and McQueen met with the folks in charge of the movie and learned that the script required jumping a 15-ft fence. Ekins explained to the studio execs that the highest he had ever jumped a motorcycle was maybe 5 feet, but Ekins thought he make the higher jump.  McQueen and Ekins worked at it, building up Ekin’s ability to jump greater heights through a series of experiments with ramps, velocity, and ropes. When Ekins felt confident, they filmed the scene in the above video in a single take. That’s all it took.

Ekins negotiated what was then a whopping fee for his jump: $1000. Yep, that’s right…there aren’t any zeros missing in that number. A cool one thousand dollars. It almost seems laughable now, but at the time, it was the highest fee Hollywood had ever paid any stuntman, and it made news.

Frank Bullitt’s ride.  The two Mustangs used in filming Bullitt were on display at this event.

After Ekins made that Great Escape jump, his stuntman career took off. Just about any action scene you’ve ever seen in any movies during the last 50 years or so (if it involved a motorcycle or a car) had Ekins doing the real driving. In Bullitt, he drove both the Mustang (the green car, that is…not a Mustang motorcycle) and he rode the motorcycle that crashed during that movie’s iconic chase scene. In The Blues Brothers, that was Bud behind the wheel of Belushi’s and Akroyd’s trashed out police car. In Smokey and the Bandit, it was Ekins behind the wheel of the Firebird.  You get the idea.

Speakers at the Ekins Celebration of Life. The guy on the right needs no introduction. The guy on the left is Harvey Weinstein.

McQueen died young a long time ago. Ekins passed away in 2007, and I was lucky enough to attend the celebration of life for him at Warner Brothers Studios.  There were a lot of speakers at that event, including big wheels in the movie business (one was a guy named Harvey Weinstein).  The were McQueen family members, Ekins family members, and Jay Leno. Something that stuck in my mind was Harvey Weinstein telling us that during the ’60s and ’70s if you asked any guy who he wanted to be, the answer would be Steve McQueen.  But, Weinstein continued, if you asked Steve McQueen who he wanted to be, the answer would be Bud Ekins.

So there you have it.  Bud Ekins, Steve McQueen, The Great Escape, a famous Triumph motorcycle disguised to look like a BMW, and more.  It was a grand day.   So, we have a question for you:  What’s your favorite motorcycle movie?   Let us know with a comment or two.  We’d love to hear from you.

Obsolete Product Review: Scorpion EXO R410 Helmet

My Scorpion EX0 helmet. It’s not bad, but it’s not perfect, either. Read on, and you’ll see why.

I’ve been riding with a Scorpion EXO R410 helmet for about three years now, so I suppose it’s time for a new one.  I tried to get the latest cost for my helmet on the Scorpion website, but they’re up to the EX0 420 series now, and mine is obsolete.

This is my second Scorpion helmet.  My prior (and first) Scorpion helmet saved my life when I crashed my Triumph Speed Triple back in ’09.  I’m very grateful for that (I literally landed on the top of my head, and the top of that earlier helmet looked like a hardboiled egg that had been whacked against a counter top).   But, truth be told, I’m not all that wild about my current Scorpion.

First, the good stuff.  It’s a one-piece full face helmet, the price was reasonable, and it’s all one color (and that’s the color I like, fluorescent green).  When I bought this helmet it was difficult to find one that was all fluorescent green (and I noticed on today’s Scorpion website that they don’t offer this color as a solid color any more).   When I bought my current Scorpion three years ago, other helmets from other manufacturers had weird color combos consisting of different combinations of fluorescent green and flat black.  I didn’t care for that look. There were modular helmets in solid fluorescent green (you know, the kind that have a flip up lower section), but I don’t like that concept, either.  Weird things happen in a crash, and I could visualize that modular part heading south when impacting the pavement.   Nope, I wanted a solid safety green full face helmet, and Scorpion was the only one out there.

More good stuff:  The helmet fits snugly and it keeps me warm.  That’s important.  And it’s not too heavy (it doesn’t become onerous at the end of  a long day).  And one more:  The helmet was reasonably priced.  As I recall, it was something around $200 and change.  I paid a little less because I work in the industry.   Come to think of it, if I had worked the problem, I probably could have talked Scorpion into giving me one for free if I had featured it on the blog, but I didn’t do that.  The bottom line:  The Scorpion’s price is reasonable.

Okay, on to the bad stuff.  I wear eyeglasses, and sometimes I wear contacts.  Contacts are the way to go if you wear a full face helmet because they make pulling the helmet on and off a lot easier.  But a lot of times I wear my glasses and putting them on while wearing this helmet is a real pain in the ass.  The temples just don’t want to sneak in between the helmet liner and my ears, and it usually takes me several tries to put my glasses on once I’ve got the helmet on.  I guess you could say I make a spectacle of myself every time I put my helmet on.  (I’m sorry; I couldn’t resist sneaking that in.  You know, making a spectacle of myself.  Get it?  Eyeglasses?  Making a spectacle of myself, like the time the optometrist fell into his lens grinding machine?)

Film at 11:00. And 12:00. And…well, you get the idea. That weird film on the inside does not want to completely separate.

My next complaint:  The faceshield has some kind of film on the inside that can’t make up its mind about staying there or peeling off, and it seems to be doing both right in my line of sight.  I’ve tried scrubbing it with Windex, water, alcohol, and all kinds of other stuff.  It’s a weird one; I’ve never seen any other faceshield behave similarly.  I could just buy a replacement, but hey, it might do the same thing.  You’d think somebody at Scorpion would know about this and they would have fixed it before the faceshields got out of the factory.   Maybe they already have on the newer ones.

Another complaint, although it’s not really fair to single out Scorpion for this:  The vents don’t seem to do anything. Open or closed makes no difference in airflow around my noggin, nor do they make any difference in how cool or warm I am inside the helmet.  The vents don’t make any difference in the faceshield’s propensity to fog, either.  But, like I said, all of my helmets have been like this.  As far as I’m concerned, the manufacturers could leave these vent arrangements off altogether and sell the helmet for less.

The chinguard vent. Open or closed: Machst nicht. ( I had three years of German in high school and that’s all I remember.)
The upper vents. There are two of them. You toggle that little lever to open or close the vents. I couldn’t feel that it made any difference in airflow or fog prevention in either position.

When I need air flowing in my helmet, or if the faceshield is fogging, I just open the faceshield a scosh, and that brings me to my next complaint:  You can’t do that on the Scorpion.

The first open position on the Scorpion, which puts the lower edge of the faceshield directly in your line of sight.
Detent positions that govern faceshield elevation. The first one (denoted by the red arrow) is way too high. My guess is that it was designed by someone who never rode a motorcycle.

There’s no interim notch that allows the faceshield to crack open the quarter inch or so that my other helmets have always been able to do.  There are plenty of notches for interim faceshield positions; they’re just poorly conceived and they’re all way too high.  The first one after the full faceshield down position puts the bottom edge of the faceshield right in my line of sight.  If you look above that edge, the angle through the faceshield is severe and everything is distorted. If you look below it, you have to tilt your head at an odd angle and you get no protection from the faceshield.  The five upper positions are such that you might as well completely open the faceshield.   Whoever designed the positions probably doesn’t ride.

So there you have it.  I’ve read that you’re supposed to replace your helmet every three years, so I guess I’m about due.   The good thing for me about writing this blog is it firms up (for me) what I need to evaluate when considering my next helmet.  The above negatives notwithstanding, I’m going to give Scorpion another shot. I owe them, big time, based on the performance of my first Scorpion helmet.  It did its job.

 

Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument

A scene from the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument boonies. The cactus on the left is the star of this show.

The latest Motorcycle Classics issue has a great story in it on Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, the National Park that’s tucked in along the Mexican border, south of Ajo and Why in southern Arizona.  It was a fun visit for us, but wow, was it ever hot and desolate out there!  The two closest towns, Ajo and Why, are remote.  As in extremely remote.

Arizona has towns with unusual names.  Ajo means garlic in Spanish (I didn’t see a single garlic when I was there).   Why is name that makes you wonder, well, why anyone would put a town in that location (it’s not much more than two or three buildings out in the middle of nowhere).  The good folks in Arizona wanted to simply call the place Y, as it was built at a fork in the road (you know, like the letter Y).  But Arizona requires their towns to have at least three letters in their names (don’t ask me Why).

So, another day, another Destinations piece in Motorcycle Classics, one of the world’s great magazines.  Other motorcycle magazines are dropping like flies, but MC keeps on keeping on with the best stories and photography in print.  I’ve been writing for Motorcycle Classics for over 10 years now, to the tune of something like 64 articles.  You can get to all of them online, or you can order your very own copy of Destinations, the book with all of the travel pieces I’ve done for MC (we have both black and white and color options).  They make great gifts.  You should buy several..buy two or more and shipping is free!

Buy two or more, and shipping is free!

And speaking of stats, we’ve been publishing ExhaustNotes for a little over a year now.  In that time, we’ve posted 512 blog posts, and we’ve had 2100 comments.   We love your comments, so please, keep them coming.  Do you have anything special you want us to write about?   Hey, let us know.  Post a comment!

Regarding blog topics, one of the things we’ve tried to do is steer clear of politics.  Joe went there a little bit with the title of his recent blog (something about never getting a free gun when Obama was president).  The problem with discussing anything related to politics is nobody listens to understand; they only listen to respond.  That’s true no matter which side of the divide you live on (in my opinion, which of course is always the right one on all political issues).   Do you want us to go there?   There’s just so much to write about, but the deal is that no matter what position we take, we’ll infuriate half our readers.  But wow, the topics are so tempting, and they’ll excite so much discussion.  Get this: Illinois just imposed a tax on trade ins (they tax you on the car you’re buying, and they tax you on the car you’re trading in).  I could have fun writing about that.  But, it’s politics. And it’s Illinois (you know, Chicago, the place where stringent gun control laws are working so well). Should we go there?

Ah, let’s see, what else is going on?

Well, lots.  I received my .257 Weatherby Ruger No. 1 back from the repair center with a new stock, and we’ll be posting photos of it along with a range report in the near future.  I’ve got some good inputs on good loads from my good buddy Mississippi Dave, and we’ll put them to the test.

And things are going great guns with Gear’d (how’s that for alliteration?).

My Gear’d ZX2-1116. I am loving this watch!

I’m wearing my Gear’d watch as I write this, and the more I wear it, the more I like it.  I’ve been checking its accuracy, and it is spot on.  I’ll have an update on my Gear’d in the near future, and so will good buddy Joe Gresh.  Joe’s watch is on its way to him, and he’s got a torture test in mind similar to the one I posted recently.  Joe tells me it has something to do with concrete.

You know, we’ve done a lot of product reviews here on ExNotes, and as promised, we’re adding a Product Reviews page on the site to provide an index to all of them.  Stay tuned, and we’ll post a link in the next few days.   I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this, but we recently updated our Tales of the Gun page.  Take a look.  It’s better organized, and we’re all caught up with adding each of the gun blogs to this page.

And that’s a wrap for today, folks.  As always, there’s lots more coming your way right here on the ExNotes blog.  Keep your comments coming; we love hearing from you.

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The bike handles well when it’s out of control…

Gresh has some really honest, really funny videos, and the thing about the funny part is that the guy is not trying to be funny…he’s just telling it like it is and a lot of times, the truth is pretty funny.  This is a video Joe did 7 years ago on the Harley XR1200 Sportster, and the best line in it is the title of this blog.   Enjoy, my friends.

Baja Bound

Tuan, on one of the CSC Motorcycles Baja runs.

Good buddy Tuan asked me for a suggested 4-day itinerary for Baja, and I referred him to our Baja page and its included suggested Baja rides.  Here’s another 4-day ride that would make for a great 4-day Baja visit:  Tecate, Ensenada, San Quintin, and home again.

Tecate is one of the better best-kept secrets in Baja, and it’s one of my favorite towns.  It’s about 150 miles south of the Los Angeles area and getting there is an easy ride.  I like to stay at the El Dorado Hotel, have dinner at the Amores restaurant, and then breakfast at Malinalli’s, which is right next door to the El Dorado.

Jonathan and Pablo at Amores. It’s world class dining in downtown Tecate, and it is amazing.
Maria, one of the friendly folks who took care of us in the Malinalli Sabores Autóctonos restaurant in Tecate.

After breakfast, it’s an easy run through Tecate to Ensenada along the Ruta Del Vino, maybe with a stop at El Naranjo’s for lunch.  It’s about an 80-mile ride and it’s quite scenic.  Ensenada is touristy, but I like the place.  You can get fish tacos at any of several taco spots along the embarcadero and have breakfast at Velero’s (world-class dining; it’s where knowledgeable Ensenada business folks take their morning meal).   I’d stay in the Best Western and have dinner at Birrieria La Guadalajara.  It’s a family style place my good buddy Tim introduced me to, and it’s great.

Breakfast at Velero’s. The place is amazing.
A veritable feast at Birrieria La Guadalajara in Ensenada. Bring an appetite!

From Ensenada, it’s another easy run through northern Baja’s wine country and the agricultural region down to San Quintin.  There are two great hotels in San Quintin.  One is the more modern Mision Santa Maria.  The other is the Old Mill Hotel right on Bahia San Quintin, which is the one I prefer.  The Old Mill has a new restaurant called Eucalypto’s, and it’s world class.

The good folks at the Old Mill give you a beer when you check in. Here’s Uncle Joe, hard at work after a long day’s ride.
Watch for the sign pointing to the Old Mill Hotel in San Quintin. It’s a classic Baja stop.
Seared Tuna at the Eucalypto. Man, was it ever delicious!

After San Quintin, it’s about a 300-mile run home to get back to the Los Angeles area.  It’s a long stretch, but it’s doable in a day, and it would nicely wrap up a great 4-day run.

If you do a ride like the one I describe, or any other, don’t forget to pick up your Mexican insurance, and for that, BajaBound is the best there is.

BajaBound Insurance for travel through an enchanted land. It’s the best there is!

Want to learn more about traveling through Baja?  Check out Moto Baja!

I Never Got a Free Gun When Obama Was President

Foreigners have a hard time understanding America’s gun fetish. I admit, I have a little trouble with the craziness myself but that didn’t stop my wife from entering a local charity’s gun raffle. It’s like 50 bucks and they draw a winner once a month for a year. CT’s number came up and we are now the proud owner of a 17-round (with one in the chamber), plastic, meth-dealer’s friend, a Smith & Wesson 9mm.

The thing is a bit cheesy-looking with the plastic and all. Berk assures me it’s a good weapon and that it won’t explode in my hand. I’m a little leery of automatics as they give no easy indication of their status. Is it cocked? Loaded?  Who knows?  Give me a revolver any day.

When we picked the thing up at the Ace Hardware (they still sell guns at the hardware store in New Mexico) CT was entered into the store’s computer and in seconds the gun guy knew her entire life story. It was a bit creepy but I guess that’s the price we pay to keep tyrants at bay.

Coming from a revolver perspective the quantity of ammunition this thing holds is incredible. 16 rounds fit in the magazine, henceforth known as a clip just to piss off the gun nuts. Not only that but you can plop one in the chamber giving a total of 17 rounds! That’s nearly three reloads on my Smith revolver. It’s a lot of lead and with my aiming ability I need all the chances I can get.

We bought 50 rounds of ammo when we got the Smith and the clerk gave me a look that screamed Piker. “Is that all? Sure you don’t want more?” The S&W 9mm came with a nice plastic case that included the manuals and a second clip, meaning I can pack 33 rounds ready to go in a large jacket pocket. You won’t run out of ammo and have to throw the gun at any survivors with a Smith 9. This kind of legal firepower is what makes America the greatest country in the world. I better go pick up another couple hundred rounds of 9mm.

The Smith 9mm came with three different size grips to custom-fit the gun to your hand. The whole package is well thought out and it will be interesting to see if we can hit anything with all that ammunition. A trip to the gun range for a familiarization session is in order. CT will be taking a gun-specific class to learn about the new gun from shooting it to disassembling, cleaning and reassembly. I’d show her how to do all that stuff myself if I knew anything about it and didn’t yell all the time.

Check out our other Tales of the Gun stories!

Men of a Certain Age

Men of a certain age, like me, grew up in the ’50s and ’60s. Our values were formed in a era when honor, courage, integrity, and self-reliance were important, and I think a big part of those values were formed by what we watched on TV. Today, television shows are mostly mindless drivel centered on pop culture (an oxymoron if ever there was one) and the so-called reality genre. We were way luckier:

Good times and good TV shows. The ’50s and’60s were a good time to be a kid.

The stars of those ’50s and ’60s shows were folks who knew the difference between right and wrong, and we received a steady stream of 30-minute morality injections several times every week as a consequence of watching them. It seemed to work. It was a good time to be a kid.

The other stars in those early Westerns were the horses and guns. I never had any interest in owning a horse, but the steady emphasis on six-shooters and leverguns instilled a lasting fascination with firearms in many of us. A Colt .45 Single Action Army figured in nearly every episode (in fact, you can see this iconic firearm in several of the photos above). It’s no small wonder that sixguns still sell well in the US.

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Today, the prices of Colt Single Action Army revolvers are through the roof, but there are a number of companies that offer exact replicas built in Italy at far more reasonable prices.  A few years ago, when I saw this Taylor and Company “tuned” Single Action Army at my local gun shop, I was a goner.  To borrow a phrase, I pulled the trigger.

My Taylor .45 Single Action Army. This is a sweet-shooting sixgun.

The Taylor is an exact copy of the Colt Single Action Army, it’s chambered in .45 Colt, and Taylor’s “tuned” descriptor means the revolver has a trigger and action job to slick up the internals. The trigger is under two pounds, it’s crisp, and the gun feels perfect in every way.  There’s just something about a single action sixgun that feels right.  This one is beautiful and it has everything that floats my boat:  A brass grip frame, a color case hardened receiver, and high polish bluing everywhere else.  The .45 Colt chambering is perfect, too.   It’s a fun cartridge to reload and shoot, and it’s accurate.

The first day I went to the range with my new Single Action Army sixgun, I knew it was going to be a good morning.  On the dirt road leading to the range, I saw a bobcat. We were both surprised. He looked at me and I looked at him, and then the cat leisurely walked across the road and disappeared into the brush. It was a good sign. I’ve seen bobcats here in California three or four times in the last 30 years and seeing one on my way to the range that morning was a special treat.

Targets at 25 yards. The Taylor is an accurate handgun. Surprisingly, the sights shoot exactly to point of aim, which is unusual for a fixed-sight revolver.

My .45 Single Action Army groups well with every load I tested. It particularly likes Trail Boss propellant and cast bullets (the two groups with arrows were with this powder). The gun shoots exactly to point of aim (I used a 6:00 o’clock hold on the targets above), and the spread you see in the groups is almost certainly more the result of my old hands and eyes than the gun or the load.  If you’ve ever wondered how good the Italian replica Single Action Army handguns are, my results indicate they are fine firearms.

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More Thai Taxi Photos

I guess we struck a nerve with the blog yesterday featuring Thai moto taxis, and I received a couple of emails asking if I had more photos.  Indeed I do, folks…

The orange vest denotes a taxi rider, and I guess Thai law requires that they wear helmets (but their passengers do not have to).  So much for ATGATT in Thailand.  Another commenter said it was amazing that that female passengers never lost shoes.  I thought it was amazing that none ever seemed to fall off (it looks like a precarious perch).   I took all of the photos you see here in the space of maybe 5 minutes.

Two-Wheeled Thai Taxis…

I’ve seen a lot of interesting things in the world, and I’ve seen some really interesting things in Asia.  Mind you, all this is filtered through the mind of an East Coast boy who really didn’t get out of Dodge until he finished college, but boy oh boy, I’ve sure covered a lot of ground since then.  And I’ve covered a lot of it on two wheels.  And because of that, I’ve always been intrigued by how other people in other countries use their motorcycles.

One of the wilder things I’ve seen is how small motorcycles do duty as taxis, and in particular, how they do so in Thailand.  One night a few years ago I was wandering around in Bangkok, one of the world’s more sultry and exotic cities, and the action on a typical street corner just off Sukhumvit Road (one of the main roads through Bangkok) was both mind numbing and mesmerizing.   I recorded about 10 minutes of it.  Sit back, grab a cup of coffee, or Scotch, or whatever floats your boat, and enjoy.

One of my good buddies who lives in Bangkok owns a couple of small bikes and he invited me to tour Thailand.   I’m tempted.

The Gear’d Torture Test

So, the literature that came with my Gear’d Hardware ZX2-1116 watch said it was bulletproof.

We’ll see about that, I thought.  I’ll take the challenge…

The Gear’d came through it just fine, and I’m having fun flashing this monster around. Gresh’s watch is on its way to New Mexico, and he’s got a hot 9 and a cement mixer to test it with. But I’ll let him tell you that story.