German Military and Police Motors: Part I

As you know, I wrote The Complete Book of Police and Military Motorcycles a few years ago.  One of the things I found interesting was how these motorcycles categorized along national lines.   Three nations stood out: The United States, Japan, and Germany.   This blog (one of two or three) focuses exclusively on the German bikes and their derivatives.

Here’s a World War II German 350 DKW motorcycle. The Wehrmacht used these two-stroke 350 cc motorcycles for dispatch duty. I grabbed this photo at the World War II Museum in New Orleans.

One of the more interesting military motorcycle applications occurred in the German Wehrmacht during World War II. In most other military motorcycle applications, the motorcycle has been used primarily as an escort or messenger vehicle. The Germans actually used motorcycles as infantry weapons. Each motorcycle in a German motorcycle battalion (that’s right, the Germans organized motorcycle units up to the battalion level!) carried three soldiers: A driver, a rifleman on the back seat, and a machine gunner in the sidecar. The Germans used these motorcycle units when they invaded Russia. By the time the Russian winter rolled around, they figured out this was not such a bright idea.

This is a BMW with a sidecar.  This picture came from HP-Hommes in Germany.

A World War II Wehrmacht Motorcycle.

The Russians, realizing a war was coming in the late 1930s, purchased a handful of BMWs from a dealer in Sweden and secretly reverse-engineered the German machines in Moscow. The Russians actually fielded a copy of the BMW military motorcycle during World War II, so troops in Russia on both sides of the front lines were fighting atop essentially the same motorcycle.

After the war, the Russians continued to build these machines. The Russians shifted production to the Ural mountains, and the Russian BMW copies became known as Urals.  The Russians continued to improve the machines, and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the motorcycles were offered for sale to the public. Prior to that time, Russia sold Urals to eastern European and other third world communist nations.

You can buy these machines today in the United States, without the machine gun, and own a brand new World War II-era motorcycle. The Russians also make a civilian version. The civilian versions are available with whitewall tires and with or without the sidecar.

This picture came from the Ural brochure.

In the past, Ural has not been hesitant in showing their motorcycles in extreme applications. This is another photo from the Ural brochure. Ural has also showed motorcycles with rocket launchers, grenade launchers, and the 7.62mm PK machine gun.

Just the thing for LA traffic!

I grabbed the next shot on a trip to China in 2001. Note the OHV BMW-clone engine.  In 2001, China had several companies making clones of the older BMW-boxer engine bikes, including some with early-1930s-design flathead engines!

A LongTech-mounted police officer in rural China.

I travel to China on business regularly, and I noticed that you don’t see the Chinese BMW clones any more.  The companies that manufactured them stopped offering them many years ago or went out of business, but I thought I would still some Chinese boxers plying the streets and alleys Shanghai, Guangzhou, and other spots.  Nope.  They’re gone.

In China, you can’t register a motor vehicle more than 10 years old, and if you have one and don’t turn it in to the government for destruction, they will come and take it from you.  There are, I suppose, advantages and disadvantages to this approach.  The disadvantage, obviously, is that there are no classic vehicle collectors or collections in China.  The advantages are that it gets vehicles that don’t have the latest emissions control equipment off the street, and it stimulates the economy.

How about the country where the boxers originated?  BMW is still going strong, and BMW police bikes (in many variants) are in service in both Germany and other parts of the world.   The photos that follow show both vintage and current (in 2001) Beemers.

Back in the early 2000s, German police BMWs were green and white (they may still be; I haven’t been to Germany in a while).  The BMW factory provides the bikes in a range of standard colors, and for an additional $400 per motorcycle (early 2000 pricing) they will paint the motorcycle any color already in the BMW system (for either their cars or motorcycles). Based on the research I did for Military and Police Motorcycles, I believed the then-current BMW R1100 RT-P to be the most advanced police motorcycle in the world.  It had a range of officer comfort features, a torquey 1100 cc twin cylinder engine, and unlike all other manufacturers’ police motorcycles, an antiskid braking system. Every motor officer I interviewed for Military and Police Motorcycles spoke highly of this machine.

This is the BMW R1100 RT-P, on duty at night somewhere in Germany.  Photograph courtesy of Willi Nagel at BMW in Germany.
The photo above shows the BMW R1100 RT-P, but this time in the CHP colors. I photographed this motorcycle with a film Nikon N70 and the 24-120 Nikon lens while visiting CHP headquarters in Sacramento, California.
A couple of CHP officers checking out the classic bikes at the 2004 Hansen Dam Norton Rally. Note that the lead bike has LED strobe lights, while the trail bike is equipped with conventional police lighting. These are BMW R1150RT-P motorcycles.

In the early 2000s, the BMW R1100 RT-P, in black and white, was used by the California Highway Patrol and many other U.S. police departments. If Harley-Davidson wasn’t nervous, they should have been. The BMW was a wonderful police motorcycle.   BMW later upgraded this motorcycle to the R1150RT-P (with the 1150cc engine), and then the R1200RT-P (with the 1200cc hex head engine).

Here are more early BMW police motor photos…

It’s not too hard to guess who these French motor officers are escorting.

The photograph above, which came from BMW in Germany, shows the Pope in France a few years ago, accompanied by a group of earlier BMW police twins. BMW has been the dominant police motorcycle in Europe and many other parts of the world.

My friend Ben sent this next photo to me from Paris, France. This is a vintage photo showing the Gendarmerie from the presidential escort group.

Wow.

This is Ben’s personal bike, a former French police BMW. It’s a 1977 R60/7, in a configuration never made available to civilians.

Good buddy Ben’s personal motorcycle. The French police ordered these with a 600cc engine, the RS fairing, spoked wheels, and leather saddlebags. These were the first bikes the French police ordered in blue; before that they were all black. This is pretty cool stuff.

And folks, that’s a wrap for today.  Watch for more in another day or two.   This blog is already getting long, and we have enough vintage BMW police motors stuff for another blog or two.

Don’t forget to visit our Police Motors page and check out our other police motorcycle posts!

Fort Stanton

East of Ruidoso, I steered the Husqvarna off of Highway 70 onto Devils Canyon Road and followed the twisting, smoothly-graded dirt until it dead-ended at Highway 220. Back on asphalt I turned right, rode past the airport and pulled into Fort Stanton, New Mexico.

Fort Stanton dates back to the 1850’s and has been used for everything from subduing Native Americans to a tuberculosis hospital and a German prisoner of war camp. The fort changed hands in the Civil War from Union to Confederate and back to Union where it has remained ever since. It stands today in fairly good shape. The parade grounds are well kept a few buildings are showing signs of neglect. Repairs are ongoing and purchasing a gee-gaw at the gift shop/museum helps with the effort.

The Officers Quarters played host to Lieutenant John Pershing, who made good later on in life as General Black Jack Pershing. The OQ is divided into two story apartments with thick stone walls between. One section of the wall was damaged showing the rubble-filled core of the finished walls. This type of construction took a lot of manpower to build.

New Mexico’s clean dry air was the ideal spot to treat tuberculosis and in the 1930’s a modern hospital was built to care for easterners suffering from the unsanitary conditions prevailing at that time. The hospital sported New Mexico’s very first elevator along with dental facilities and entertainment. The patients however had to sleep outside in a tent city as it was believed plenty of fresh air and good food was the cure. It worked pretty well too.

It’s ok to ride your motorcycle on the paved roads in the fort. On a back street there are more recent buildings and a nice stone church. I’m not into religion but I love to check out the buildings religious people have constructed. The little church at Fort Stanton is a jewel. It was open the day I was there and the place was clean and neat. For all I know believers may still worship here. You’re not allowed to tramp through the brush but behind the church a couple hundred yards are the remains of a swimming pool German prisoners of war built to stave off boredom and have a place to cool off in the summertime.

Right next door to the Officer’s Quarters is the Nurse’s quarters. I don’t know if the two uses ran concurrently but if they did this little corner of Fort Stanton must have been a happening spot. The Nurse’s quarters were in sad shape except for the main entrance, which had beautiful beams holding up the roof.

Fort Stanton isn’t overrun with tourists. Even though it was part of a war machine, wandering around inside the buildings gives you a sense of peace. Sit on one of the benches in the bright New Mexico sun and you can imagine the soldiers marching the grounds in formation; the gentle coughing of the slowly recovering patients and the laughter and splashing of lucky Germans who were spared death in World War 2.

Dream Bike: Norton Commando

I was going to do a Dream Bike bit about the Norton Commando, and then I realized that not only had I sort of done that in an earlier CSC blog, but I actually rode a vintage Norton for that piece.  Without further ado, here you go…

Walt Berkuta on his Knucklehead.

For me, it started when I was 12 years old in the 7th grade, and it started with British bikes. Triumphs, to be specific. Oh, I’d seen other motorcycles before that, and my good buddy Pauly’s father Walt had owned a Knucklehead after the war. But everything changed when the motorcycle bug bit.  It bit hard, and it did so when I was 12 years old. I remember it like it happened last week.

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 (here’s that word again) 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, multi-cylinder ridiculously-porky motorcycles, and, well, me writing a blog extolling the virtues of whatever.

So here we are, today.

My good buddy Jerry, the CSC service manager at the time, 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, and 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 and 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, too, but they were porkers.  Nortons were faster than Triumphs (and Triumphs were plenty fast).

But 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 years. You spoke about reverential things softly back then.

Fast forward again, and there I was, with Steve’s 1973 Norton Commando right in front of me (just a few feet away from where I wrote the CSC blog). Steve’s Norton is magnificent. It’s not been restored and it wears 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. I had 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 is 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!

Obsolete Product Review: VX-6

I had a 1954, small-window Dodge truck back in the 1970’s. It’s funny how a 20 year-old truck seemed so much older when I was younger. My 1990 Suburban is the same age now as the old Dodge was then but the Suburban seems modern to me. I can remember new Suburban’s rolling off the dealer lots that looked exactly like mine. I wasn’t even alive when the ’54 dodge was built.

The Dodge had a flathead 6-cylinder engine that sucked gas at an alarming rate. 10 miles per gallon was as good as it got. The truck had a three on the tree and was geared very low. Top speed was 70 miles per hour. On top of the cylinder head was a ball valve tapped into one of the cylinders. The valve had a quick-release air chuck fitting. The idea was to supply compressed air (with a bit of gasoline mixed in) for tire filling or bomb making. I never used that feature.

Besides the clutch, brake and throttle the Dodge had a floor switch for high beams and a fourth pedal that engaged the starter motor when it was depressed. The starter had no solenoid; the floor pedal did it all. You could turn the key off and the starter would still spin the engine. I thought that was a great idea. In 1954 Dodge gave you a horn and brake lights but no turn indicators. I used arm signals like on a motorcycle. It’s a hard habit to break so I still signal the old way in a panic situation.

Underneath the driver’s side floor was a battery compartment. The electrical system on the Dodge was 6-volt but a standard modification back then was to install an 8-volt battery. You didn’t have to tweak the voltage regulator and the lights were much brighter. Starting was a breeze with the extra couple volts. The 8-volt battery in my Dodge was shot. It was weak, even after a night on the charger the engine would slowly crank.

The obvious solution would be to buy a new battery but I didn’t have a lot of money to blow as I was trying to get out to California. A battery was expensive. We lived behind a gas station so I went over there looking for a used battery. The service guy handed me a couple packages of VX-6 battery additive stuff and said, “Try this first, it works good.”

What the heck, Lee Petty endorsed VX-6, he said he’d rather run without tires than his VX-6. That was good enough for me. Lee Petty does not bullshit. So I dumped the stuff in the nearly dead 8-volt battery and let it sit overnight. The next morning I tried the starter and the engine started like it had a new battery.

I was stunned. I mean, that hocus-pocus additive junk has never worked for me. Not only that but the battery worked perfectly from then on. I drove the truck to California and all over San Diego for years. The VX-6 battery was still in the truck when I traded it for a Yamaha 125 Enduro.

Recently I looked around for VX-6 and can only find old stock on Amazon and Ebay. It figures, the Battery Illuminati must have gotten to VX-6’s manufacturers. Maybe they threatened VX-6 employees or their families. Battery sales were suffering. Their stuff was too good. It’s no coincidence that you can’t even access the cells on most new batteries.

Bill Murar appointed to Board of Directors, Antique Motorcycle Foundation

A Bill Murar self-portrait at 60mph while riding the Lake Erie Loop.

In the early days at CSC, when we were casting about for ways to the publicize the new CSC Mustang replicas, we heard from a guy named Bill Murar.  Bill is a retired firefighter, vintage Allstate motorcycle expert, and motorcycle endurance rider, and he wrote to ask if he could ride one of the 150cc Mustangs in the Lake Erie Loop.   That’s a 650-mile endurance run around the periphery of Lake Erie for small bikes and scooters.  It was a godsend for us, and it was one of the things that helped put CSC on the map.

Bill Murar, at speed, on a CSC 150 riding the Lake Erie Loop.

Bill and I became good friends, and we’ve stayed in touch over the last decade.  I was pleased to get this news from Bill yesterday…

Joe,

I’m pleased to let you know I’ve been named to the Board of Directors of the Antique Motorcycle Foundation. Starting a new page in the Murar chronicles.  Yikes, responsibilities!  If you go to their website there’s a photo of all the members of the board along with a short bio.

I helped the VP of the AMF restore his Allstate 175, mostly with hints over the phone, me sharing my personal parts source people, as well as my own stock of Allstate stuff. That and 50+ years of Sears Allstate buying and selling and collecting helped as well. He also used his own unique collection of painters, re-chromers, cable makers, foreign parts suppliers, etc., and he finally had a product good enough to grace the cover of this Spring’s edition of the Vintage Motorbike Newsletter.

With everything I had going for me with my Allstate knowlegde, coupled with almost 15 years as the north Central WERA-Vintage regional race director, and overall general knowledge of small displacement bikes, he thought I might be a good fit to fill one of the Board of Director openings.

So, I was interviewed via a phone conference call and ended up getting voted in by the Board. We’ll have out first meet and greet with the entire board at the Wauseon, Ohio meeting of the Antique Motorcycle Association on July 19th.

My new life chapter begins.

As a side note, I rode to AMF VP Roger Smith’s home north of Pontiac, Michigan where we finally met face-to-face (everything up til then was all via email, texts and old fashioned phone calls) last Thursday. He was kind enough to arrange a tour of the studio of Biker Build Off legend, Ron Finch. What a treat that was! Ron is an unbelieveable visionary with his projects. Do yourself a favor and Google his place, I’m not sure of the name of his shop, I simply entered “Ron Finch Studio Michigan.”

Bill

Bill, congratulations to you!  Thanks very much for letting us know about your new spot and sharing it with us here on the ExhaustNotes blog.  Ride safe, my friend, and best of luck to you in your new assignment.

Home Page Updates, and more…

We updated the ExNotes home page to make it easier to find our blogs on Baja, Epic Rides, Berk’s magazine articles, Gresh’s magazine articles, our YouTube videos, the new CSC RX4, motorcycle resurrections, Dream Bikes, Tales of the Gun, electric motorcycles, police motorcycles, and how to advertise on the ExNotes site.   Here are the home page links and the stories behind the photos…

This is the first image on the ExhaustNotes home page, and it provides a link to the ExNotes blog. This is the Gobi Desert in northwestern China, and that’s the real deal…a camel caravan. Gresh and I rode there on our motorcycles.
The link to articles by Joe Gresh previously published in a variety of magazines. There’s good reading here! The photo? That’s Gresh entering the Gobi Desert on a Zongshen RX3.
This is at the entrance to the Forbidden City in Beijing, and it’s your link to magazine articles by Berk.
Want to know what the ExNotes site is all about? You can get the story here. That photo? Hey, Gresh and I like gladiator movies. We were actors in one filmed in central China, near the city of Liqian.
Trust me on this: You need to advertise on ExhaustNotes.us. Here’s the link to get that process started. This photo was up on the Tibetan Plateau, with the city of Aba in the background.
The best riding on the planet, and it starts just across the border! Click this link to get our stories, our guidance, our suggested itineraries, and more on this magical place.  I took this photo while riding my CSC Mustang through Baja’s Catavina boulder fields.
Yep, we’re a motorcycle site, but this is one of the busiest places in all of the ExhaustNotes empire. Click this link for our Tales of the Gun stories.  That’s me firing the mighty M1 Garand.  My daughter shot the above photo on her iPhone, capturing the cartridge case in midair!
The only thing better than our Epic Motorcycle Rides page is actually getting out and creating the adventure yourself! Enjoy our tales of the adventure riding trails here!  Oh, and that photo?  It’s Gresh on an Enfield in Mexico!
Gresh doesn’t do 100-point restorations. Nope, his deal is rustorations, not restorations. A bike is only original once. The photo is Gobi Gresh’s mighty Z1 Kawasaki at the Tinfiny Ranch. It runs now, and you can read about how Joe brought it back to life here.
The stuff of dreams, the ones that got away, and more. You can peek into our dreams here. That’s my old 1200 Triumph Daytona after a 120-mph sprint across Highway 58 in California.
Who you calling Tubby? Here’s a cool collection of our videos. The photo was taken in Qufu, the birthplace of Confucius. Gresh and others are grabbing videos during a changing of the guard ceremony.
Motors, the best job on the force. I believe it, and you should, too. We’ve recently added a page indexing our police motorcycle stuff, and you can get to it here. The photo is good buddy Jim Watson on a Honda ST1300P police motorcycle.
The RX3 is a great bike, but folks wanted more displacement. Zongshen responded with the RX4, and upsized version of their iconic RX3, and CSC is taking orders now. You can read all about the RX4 and how it compares to the RX3 and the KLR 650 here. We rode the one above in the San Gabriel Mountains, which is where we shot this photo.
It’s a new world out there, folks, and electric motorcycles are part of it. You can catch up on what’s happening here. That’s a CSC City Slicker, a phenomenal buy at just $2495!
Writers write. Hey, it’s what we do. With something north of 20 titles under our belt, yeah, we’re gonna brag a bit. Read all about it here, and get links to buy our books on this page!
Want the e-ticket ride back to the ExhaustNotes home page? It’s right here. And that photo? It’s the Bridge of the Gods, spanning the mighty Columbia River from Washington to Oregon. When I’m there, it feels like it’s a place where I belong. What could possibly be a more fitting home page link?

There you have it, my friends.   You’ll see all of the above when you open our home page, and it’s your nav system to the rest of the site.

Hey, there’s more good stuff coming your way.  We do our best to blog every day, and we’ve got great stories lined up for you:

Good buddy Steve’s Norton Commando
More vintage police motors
The continuation of our .45 ACP ammo series
The Indiana Jones aspects of riding in China

And much, much more.   Don’t miss any of it…sign up for our automatic email updates (add your name to our email list), and you’ll stay up to date!

Motorcycle Classics: Tecate!

Tecate, Mexico. On Royal Enfields. Good times.

Hey, Motorcycle Classics magazine is running my story on Tecate in the next issue!  You can read it here.   More good news:  I have another story in that same issue.   Buy a copy if you’re not already a subscriber!

Reloading Part II: The first steps

Reloaded .45 ACP ammunition. Bright, shiny, and far more accurate than factory ammunition in my Colt and Rock Island 1911 pistols.  I’ve got the targets to prove it.

In our first post on this topic, we talked about the equipment and components needed for reloading the .45 ACP cartridge.   In this blog, we talk about the reloading process.  We won’t cover all of it here (we’ll get about halfway through), and we’ll cover the rest of the process in a subsequent blog or two.  In our first blog, we discussed the basic equipment.  In this blog, we’ll talk about a few more bits of equipment that I use, but they are not essential.  You can get by without them.

If you want to catch up with the first blog on this topic, you can do so here.

Let’s say you’ve been to the range, you’ve made .45-caliber holes in your targets, and you’ve collected your spent brass.   That’s the only part of the reloading process I don’t like…at my age, bending over and picking up all that brass is a pain-in-the-you-know-what.   But I still do it.  In fact, if I see somebody leaving brass on the ground, I’ll collect it.  I grew up collecting brass to reload, and leaving brass at the range feels to me like a crime against nature.

So we’re home, and you’ve got your fired brass…

Fired .45 ACP brass.  I just can’t leave brass at the range.  To me, it’s like leaving cash on the ground.

This next step I’m going to show you is an optional one, and that’s cleaning the brass.   You don’t need to do this, and I reloaded .45 ammo for a lot of years without ever cleaning my brass.  I always do it now, though, and I do it for two reasons:  Cosmetics and accuracy

Here’s how I go about doing it.   I dump the brass into my vibratory tumbler and let it rock for a couple of hours.

My Frankford Arsenal vibratory cleaner. I call it a tumbler. It has corn cob media. You unscrew the butterfly nut on top, remove the cover, and dump the fired brass into the media.
Here’s the tumbler with the cover removed and the brass placed on the media. The cover goes back on and I let the thing vibrate for a couple of hours.

Like I said above, I tumble my brass.  One of the reasons is that I like bright, shiny ammo (it just looks cool).  But a far more important reason is that it makes the ammo more accurate.   When you tumble the brass, you’re cleaning it on the inside and the outside.  The outside is cosmetic.  The inside affects the grip the brass case has on the bullet.  We’re not interested in making it shiny on the inside; we’re interested in making that grip consistent.   I’ve found over the years that a consistent inside case surface (where the case interfaces with the bullet) makes for a more accurate cartridge.   It’s extremely significant in a rifle (I’ve seen 100-yard groups shrink from 3 inches to a quarter of an inch in my .30 06 Model 70 Winchester just by tumbling the brass).  The accuracy improvement in a handgun is not that significant, but it’s still there.   You don’t have to do this (you can reload the brass without tumbling it), but it’s something I do.

Here’s what the brass looks like after it’s been tumbled….

Squeaky clean and shiny. Fired, cleaned brass.

Now we’re ready to start the resizing operations.   We’ll want to get our ammo trays ready…

Reloading trays. Each tray holds 60 rounds, but I only load 50 in each one.

The next step is to install the first of our reloading dies (the resizing die) in the press.  We’re going to use this die to squeeze the cartridge case back to its unfired case diameter and simultaneously knock out the fired primer.

The resizing die. Note the protruding pin; it’s what pushes the old primer out of the brass case.
The resizing die, threaded into the reloading press.  Note the large locknut at the base.
With the shell holder installed on the press ram, we fully elevate the ram, thread the resizing die down to contact the shellholder, withdraw the ram slightly, turn the die in just a bit more, run the ram up, and then lock the die in place with its locknut.  What we want is to feel a slight “knuckle over” when the ram is fully elevated.

At this point, we’re ready to start resizing and depriming cases.  Here’s what that looks like.

A case in the shellholder.  When we raise the ram, it will be resized and the old primer will be pushed out.
The ram is raised all the way to the top of its stroke. Here we see the case just starting to enter the resizing die. You don’t want to get your finger caught between the die and the fired case (don’t ask me how I know). The ram will go up until the shellholder contacts the bottom of the sizing die.  As that occurs, the case is resized to its original diameter, and the primer is pushed out of the case.

This is what the case looks like after it has been resized.   Note that the primer is no longer in the case.  Also, note how funky the primer pocket is.  It’s gunked up with combustion residue.

A resized, deprimed case. Note the combustion reside remaining in the case’s primer pocket.  And yes, I’ve been reloading this case since 1984.  I’ve got some that are even older.  .45 ACP brass lasts a long time.

As each case comes out, I’ll place it in the reloading tray, like you see below.

Resized and deprimed cases in the reloading tray.

When I reload, I’ll generally do between 20 and 200 rounds in a batch.   I reloaded 150 rounds in this batch.

150 resized and deprimed cases.  Note that there are 10 empty spaces in each tray.

I use reloading trays that hold 60 rounds, and the reason I like these is that for a group of 50 cases I can track which case I’ve performed an operation on and which ones remain.   Each time a case undergoes a reloading step, I move it over such that I always have 1o open spots between the cases that have undergone a reloading step and those that have yet to undergo the step.

Ah, but those primer pockets.  Remember how dirty they were after we pushed the primers out?  Well, this is another optional step.  I clean the primer pockets.  I do each case manually, one at a time, using a primer pocket cleaning tool.

The primer pocket cleaning tool. It’s a primer-pocket-sized wire brush, and it removes the primer pocket combustion residue.
A cleaned primer pocket.  It doesn’t need to be bright and shiny; we just want to remove the clumps of combustion residue so the new primer can fully seat.

Like I said, primer pocket cleaning is optional.  I reloaded for a lot of years and won more than a few matches without primer pocket cleaning, but these days I do it on every case.  The reason we want the residue gone is that the residue can interfere with the new primer seating fully in the case (we’ll talk more about that in the next .45 ACP reloading blog).   Having the primers all seated to the same depth will theoretically make for more accurate ammunition (less variability always equals more accuracy).  It won’t effect functioning if the primers are at slightly different depths in a 1911, but if you’re reloading ammo for a revolver, a primer that is seated above flush (one that sticks out beyond the cartridge case base) can interfere with the cylinder turning.

At this point, we’ve got cleaned, resized, and deprimed cases.  We’re ready to bellmouth the cases, install the primers, charge the cases with propellant, and seat the new bullets.

So that’s it for now.  Stay tuned; this series will continue right here on the ExNotes blog!

A cool T-shirt, a cool review, and the Wizard of Oz…

A quick few updates today, folks…

Good buddy Chris sent this photo to us a yesterday wearing a T-shirt he said was made with ExhaustNotes in mind.  I think I agree…

More good news…you can now buy Destinations through Motorcycle Classics magazine.   They gave a nice review, and if you click on the photo below, it will take you to the MC store.

Things are hopping in Colorado.  I got caught in a hail storm yesterday on a drive through the eastern part of the state, and the weather was ominous.   They tell me a tornado touched down about 6 miles from where I was.  The weather is similarly imposing today…here’s a photo showing the skies a few minutes ago…

Fun times.    There’s a joke in that photo somewhere about not being in Kansas anymore.

Sand Creek National Historic Site

The entrance to Sand Creek National Historic Site.

I’m on a secret mission in eastern Colorado, and when I saw the sign for the Sand Creek National Historic Site yesterday, I knew I had to exit the highway and visit it.  Sand Creek is one of our newest national historic sites. It’s about 180 miles east of Denver and let me tell you, it is remote. The last 13 miles were on a county highway, but don’t that descriptor fool you. It was a dirt road.

An eastern Colorado county highway.

The short story (and I hate to do a short story on something this significant and this tragic) goes like this: On November 29, 1864, a group of volunteer US Cavalry militia soldiers led by Colonel John Chivington of the US Army attacked a peaceful village of Arapaho and Cheyenne Native Americans early in the morning. There were 675 US Cavalry soldiers, and a somewhat smaller number of Native Americans. The Native Americans thought the Army came in peace, and they came out to greet the Army.  The Army attacked.   The Cheyenne and Arapaho fled; the soldiers ran them down and slaughtered approximately 230 women, children, and old people. The Indians were mutilated and soldiers kept body parts as souvenirs. It was unquestionably one of the darkest moments in US history.

The view looking north over Big Sandy Creek (it’s dry now). The Cheyenne and Arapaho had made their camp among the trees. When the Army attacked, the Indians fled to the north and the west.
Body parts kept as souvenirs from the 1864 tragedy are still being recovered. When found, they are interred here.

I visited with the US Park Ranger at the Sand Creek National Historic Site and he told me a bit more about the place.  I was the only person out there yesterday afternoon, so I had the run of the site without having to worry about other people crowding my photographs.  The Ranger told me to watch out for rattlesnakes (they’re out in force this time of year) and sure enough, I saw one, but it slithered away before I could get a photo.  I wasn’t going to follow it into the weeds.

If you’re out this way, it’s a good place to stop and think.  I had not heard about the Sand Creek Massacre story until I saw the sign pointing to the National Historic Site and I took the trip out there.   Most people have never heard of Sand Creek and the events that occurred here.