The ExhaustNotes Blog

Ray Price and the Legends of Harley Drag Racing Museum

By Joe Berk

What I knew about motorcycle drag racing up until a few weeks ago you could fit on the head of a pin and have room left over for the Gettysburg Address. After a visit to Tobacco Road Harley-Davidson in Raleigh, North Carolina, I can’t say that anymore. I’m still no expert, but I learned a little more about Ray Price and the motorcycle drag racing game.

A Top Fuel engine. They sort of look like a Harley engine, but there’s very little in the way of shared parts. These engines displace 170 cubic inches and produce about 1500 hp. They launch at about 4400 rpm and are hitting about 5500 rpm at the traps.

I was in Raleigh for a consulting gig, and while I was there Susie and I stopped by the Tobacco Road Harley dealership to visit their motorcycle drag racing museum. Tobacco Road HD is one of the world’s largest Harley dealers, and Ray Price (the guy who started it all) was a world-renown Harley drag racer.

Looking over the Tobacco Road Harley-Davidson dealership. The floor was crammed with new bikes; like most dealers today, sales have been slow for the last several months. The Museum’s drag bike displays are directly across my vantage point at mezzanine-level. There are several Harley drag racing displays around the mezzanine’s periphery.

Tobacco Road Harley Davidson is home to the Legends of Harley Drag Racing Museum. For me, it was an eye opener, with six drag bikes and a mezzanine full of drag racing memorabilia. I met with Bruce Downs, one of the key guys who worked with Ray Price. Bruce is the Museum’s curator. He’s been with Tobacco Road Harley for more than 40 years.

A top fuel Harley. The disk brakes are supplemented by a parachute.

The funny bike. This motorcycle power wheelied for the entire quarter-mile run.

In the drag racing game, funny cars are essentially AA Fuel dragsters designed to look sort of like regular cars. The same is true for funny bikes; if you don’t look too closely, they sort of look like a regular motorcycle. There’s one funny bike in the Museum; it’s the one with the Sportster gas tank. It’s the oldest of the Ray Price bikes on display.

A view of the Ray Price funny bike most competitors saw.

Top fuel and funny bikes are custom made, purpose-built machines from the ground up. Although the top fuel bikes’ engines look like they came from Harley-Davidson, they use few Harley parts. The engine and its components are mostly machined from billet (the funny bike has some Harley parts, but most of its parts are custom-machined, too). The engines use solid roller lifters (not hydraulic lifters like a street-going big twin Harley). There’s no oil circulating through the heads; the cylinder heads are lubricated with grease only. The engines use a special 50W Lucas oil that absorbs nitromethane, and the engine oil is changed after every pass. The engines have a 5-inch to 5 3/8-inch stroke. They use about two gallons of nitromethane on each run, and fuel is pumped to the engine by a cam-driven pump (bikes like these can’t rely on gravity feed to get the fuel to the carburetors). The engines are normally aspirated; there’s no supercharger. The engines produce something in the neighborhood of 1500 horsepower. (Note to self: Yikes!) The drag team sometimes rebuilds the engine after every pass; a decision is made after each run based on a compression test. The bikes are started with an external starter that has three car batteries wired in series.

Top fuel bikes don’t have a clutch lever (the left lever is the rear brake; the right lever is the front brake). The bikes have a custom-built two-speed transmission and what is essentially a centrifugal clutch. They launch at 4400 rpm and go through the traps at 5300 rpm. Wow. Think about that: There’s less than a thousand rpm increase in engine speed over the quarter mile. Shifting is accomplished pneumatically by pressing a button. Ray Price experimented with three-speed transmissions, but he decided the two-speed transmission was best. More gears weren’t necessary.

The M&H rear tires on the bikes are M&H car slicks; they are not designed as motorcycle-specific tires. The rear tire pressures can range from 4 psi up into the low teens. The guys who race drag bikes adjust tire pressure to get the hookup they want depending on track conditions and weather. The front tires are motorcycle-specific tires. Ray Price ran with tires made by Goodyear and M&H.

Monster chains and wheelie bars. The chains on a Harley drag bike are immense. They look like something you’d see on earth moving equipment.

Running the quarter mile on one of these machines must have been a very sporting proposition. I thought about that and I wondered what it would be like. I tried to see myself on it as the bike launched, accelerated, and then hit the traps. I imagined the steps I’d have to execute as I went through the traps. I asked Bruce what came first: Shutting off the fuel? Deploying the parachute? Hitting the brakes? Bruce told me that at the end of a run the drill is to roll off the throttle, deploy the parachute, apply the brakes, and shut the fuel off (all accomplished at something north of 200mph after six-seconds experiencing what an artillery round feels like during a cannon launch).

The funny bike and a top fuel bike. Ray Price is credited with inventing the motorcycle wheelie bar. All the bikes in the Museum have one. Parachutes on drag bikes became prevalent around 2020.

Ray Price’s best elapsed times were set on the white bike in the center of the Museum’s display area. It ran in the low 6.20s (once as low as 6.16), with speeds of 225 mph and sometimes 230 mph.

The Tobacco Road Museum’s funny bike, the one with the Sportster tank, is displayed with the front end off the ground. I asked about that and Bruce told me that when it ran the quarter, the front end was in the air for the length of the quarter mile run (it ran a power wheelie the entire distance). People would wait at the end of the track just to see it.

The funny bike and its quarter-mile-long wheelie had me thinking about steering. I asked Bruce about how Mr. Price did it. Ray steered the bikes with his body and by pushing on the footpegs (note that a top fuel bike weighs between 850 and 1000 pounds). I could see Bruce fondly remembering Ray explaining it all. “Ray said he had to be focused 1000 feet downrange, and that he was already correcting for direction the instant he launched,” Bruce said. It was a cool moment in what was already a very cool interview, seeing Bruce remembering Ray like that. My guess is there was a lot of respect and love there. (If my words convey to you that I enjoyed the Tobacco Road visit, I’ve done my job.)

Bruce went on to explain that Ray ran the bikes himself until he a bad crash at the end of a Las Vegas run. Ray landed hard on this shoulder, Bruce said, and he suffered a lot of nerve damage. After the Las Vegas accident, Ray couldn’t run the bikes himself. He hired riders. Bruce told me the crash wasn’t because Ray lost control; he was simply going too fast and the engine overpowered the brakes. Ray and the bike went through the first safety net together. The second safety net stopped the bike, but not Ray.

The Harley drag racing fraternity is small. There are about 20 Harley drag racers nationally and they all know each other. I asked Bruce if Harley had an official drag team, and he told me they do not. Several years, ago, you could buy a far less ferocious drag bike from any Harley dealer, complete with wheelie bar. That was a model based on the V-Rod engine called the Destroyer. It’s no longer available.

20+ years back, motorcycle top fuel quarter-mile times and speeds had already made it into the stratosphere. Elapsed times were just over 6 seconds with trap speeds exceeding 220 miles per hour. Today, motorcycle top fuel runs are typically done on a 1000-foot track instead of the earlier 1320-foot quarter mile (the times and trap speeds were just getting too wild). Times for the shorter distance runs are in the low 5-second range, and speeds are approximately 300 mph. The numbers are astounding.

A view from the left front of a top fuel Harley.

Tobacco Road Harley, the Legends of Harley Drag Racing Museum, and my visit with Bruce made for a quite a story and quite a visit. Ray Price was one hell of a man. I found a video about him on YouTube. I’ll think you’ll enjoy it.

If you ever find yourself in the Raleigh area (and you should, as Raleigh is a great town), Tobacco Road Harley is a “must-see” destination. And if you’re looking for a great dinner, Raleigh’s The Pit restaurant is the best barbeque I’ve ever had. Both times I’ve been there I had the brisket meat loaf and it was beyond superb (I’m told everything on the menu is great). In fact, I’d say a trip to Raleigh could be justified just to visit Tobacco Road Harley, see their Legends of Harley Drag Racing Museum, and have dinner at The Pit. Trust me on this; you can thank me later.

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Dos Ojos Cavern Dive – Mexico

By Mike Huber

Introductory Disclaimer: So as I have been writing these blogs the last few years it’s quite enjoyable and therapeutic to literally vomit out the stories without having pressure to place any bullshit spin or embellishments (they really don’t need any embellishing). I take pride in highlighting my successes, but also annotating my shortcomings and owning them through my writings. Enjoy!

My main purpose of traveling to Mexico was tacos, but diving was a close runner up as a reason to visit this incredible country again. Diving over the past six months has almost replaced my addiction to motorcycling, making it yet another bad decision as a hobby choice. For those of you that have read my previous diving adventures will fully understand this.

I am currently on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico and much of this land was created from a giant asteroid. That would be THE giant asteroid that created the Ice Age and killed off the dinosaurs. With this massive disruption in this area, the ocean floor was lifted in a strange way that created cenotes. These essentially are old caves that are now flooded with fresh water. There are about 5,000 of these cenotes throughout the Yucatan Peninsula and they are quite magical. Having to mark my checklist off (I’m making this list up as I go, by the way, as a month ago I couldn’t tell you what a cenote was) scuba diving in one of these seemed like it would be incredible, and it was. Sorta.

In Thailand I had done a few swim throughs. Not even caves or caverns, but about 20 meters. It wasn’t something I ever enjoyed but it wasn’t the worst experience, either, so I wasn’t quite sure how I would feel during a 52-minute, ¼-mile dive through my first cenote. Upon arriving and seeing the other divers in the crystal clear water with the sunlight mysteriously peering through the overgrowth of old forest above the cave, I instantly was put into a state of awe based on how beautiful it was. After donning our scuba gear and jumping into the cenote, the cool water was quite refreshing from the heat and humidity in the jungle above us. After a few minutes of joking around and performing a buoyancy test, the five of us were ready to begin exploring this cenote underwater.

It didn’t take long before the beautiful glowing natural light was absorbed by darkness. We had nothing but our small flashlights and a string along the bottom to guide us for the next hour. As we swam along there were stalagmites and stalactites on either side of us. Some were so old they had formed natural columns in the still crystal clear and dark water we were slowly navigating through.

We were about 30 minutes or so into the dive when I noticed my heart began beating quite rapidly. It was beating at a rather uncomfortable rate. I tried to shake it off as mentally I felt great, but it seemed to be getting worse. With my heart now beating faster, my breathing also began to increase. I knew I had plenty of air as I am religious on checking my oxygen levels (see my previous diving blogs) so I did what I could to dismiss it, but my mind wouldn’t allow me to shake it off.

With all this going on I began to float to the surface. Normally this would just be frustrating and I would have to close my eyes, exhale and I would sink back to the level I wanted. The issue now, though, is there was no surface. There was only the cavern ceiling. If I hit the cavern roof, I would probably hit my head and it would possibly be a “lights out” situation. I did not want this. We were in a semi-single-file line (although I was a bit more elevated than the others, in several ways now that I think about it). There really was nothing or no one I could reach out to for help. What were they going to do? Give me a hug? I was on my own here and as with previous situations, I had the rest of my life to determine how to resolve this mess and get my head (and more importantly, my body) under control.

It took a couple of minutes to do just that, and a short while later I was enjoying the cave, being super calm and relaxed. It felt like coming out of an intense psychedelic trip and realizing that you are on the other side of it (and a stronger person for having undergone the experience). Then, it happened again. Not quite as intense but enough for me to mentally note that this sort of diving wasn’t for me, or at least it wasn’t for me at this particular time.

As we neared the entrance of the cavern where we started from the shimmering neon green light of the sun causing the water to glow and seeing the other divers floating gently above me was a beautiful sight. My first cavern dive had been logged and as I surfaced I looked to me new friends around me and simply said “Well, that was quite a trip.” I chose not to do the second cavern dive that day (for obvious reasons) but I am looking forward to my next dive in a few days. That dive will include close encounters with bull sharks. Until then I am long overdue for a couple of cold Tecates and some much-needed tacos.

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It’s Miller Time

By Joe Berk

On our recent visit to Milwaukee, we visited the Miller brewery. It’s in the center of the city, right on West State Street, nestled in the town’s hills. Those hills will become significant in a moment when I tell you about the caves.

Our tour guide was a very energized guy. I can’t remember his name, but I can tell you he made the tour come alive for us. It was fun.

One of the first things our tour guide covered was the girl. She was present in several stained glass windows and a few other places.

Our guide, that interesting guy a few photos up, explained her history to us. The story goes like this: A.C. Paul, Miller’s advertising guy, got lost in the Wisconsin woods (as in good and lost, at night, in freezing temperatures). He had a vision of the Miller High Life girl you see above, perched on a crescent moon, pointing the way back to civilization. That vision (in various forms) has been in Miller’s advertising and branding pretty much ever since. Is it true? Hey, it’s a good story and it’s got something to do with beer, so who cares?

The Miller company goes back a long way, and in the old days, they used to store newly-made beer in the caves adjacent to the plant in the hills on West State Street. The advent of refrigeration made that unnecessary, but Miller still owns the caves. They’re part of the tour, and if you have an event (a wedding, a party, a Bar Mitzvah, whatever) they make a hell of a venue.

The photos you see here didn’t use any flash. I bumped the ISO up to 800. That, along with my 24-120’s vibration reduction capabilities and a bit of post processing in PhotoShop created the images you see here.

Miller has also has a cool party place (you can also rent this as a venue) in the main building. You can see that in the photo below.

Those glasses you see above were samples provided to us during the tour. The ones you see above were Miller’s Killian Red label. Folks, there were a lot of beer samples on this tour, starting with the very beginning of the tour in the Miller Visitor Center (it’s where I snapped that photo of the custom chopper at the top of this blog). The samples weren’t small, either. If you weren’t watching what you consumed, I imagine you could get a pretty good buzz on this tour. Me, I was watching what I drank, and I didn’t finish any of the samples. They sure were good, though. Miller beer is awesome.

After the stop above, we entered the actual beer factory. Our guide explained that folks are usually amazed when they see this part of the operation. There were hardly any people working in the plant.

I wasn’t surprised at the lack of people; in fact, I would have been surprised if there were people there. Beer production is a process-based industry, and most process-based industries are automated. The days of the LaVerne and Shirley show are long gone in the beer business (that show featured two women who worked in a Milwaukee beer factory).

Back in the LaVerne and Shirley days, they could have been employed by any of several beer companies in Milwaukee. Automation and consolidation changed all that. Today, pretty much all the Milwaukee beer companies are part of the Miller empire. Miller has something like 11 breweries across the country. There’s one not too far from me here in southern California. The regions they cover are divided geographically. Our tour guide told us that the plant we were in covers the Midwest. It produces 10 million barrels of beer annually, and 40% of the beer manufactured in the Milwaukee plant goes to just one city (and that’s Chicago). Those Chicago boys like their beer, I guess.

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The Big Dig

By Joe Gresh

One of the reasons we got such a good deal on The Ranch©️ in New Mexico is its location. Perched on the side of the Sacramento Mountains, the land is steep. Any flat areas are man-made so when you want to build a greenhouse, you’ve got to move some earth.

I’m filling the area beyond the wall. It was a steep rocky place and now you can walk around without stumbling like an old man…which I am.

Terracing is much easier than removing the mountain so that’s what we’ve been doing. The little cabin we live in is on a terraced spot down by the arroyo. The shed is higher up on another terraced spot.

There’s a great location for a greenhouse behind our shack and down closer to the arroyo. The spot gets plenty of winter sun and it’s protected in most directions from wind. It’s so low I suspect it may flood in heavy rains.

It’s a little hard to get to but the location will be better when the high winds kick up.

Unfortunately, the location is hard to get to. A while back I made a set of stairs to access the location but there’s no way to get the Kubota tractor down the stairs. I actually could get it in position via another route but it would require cutting a bunch of trees. I don’t want to cut trees.

That leaves hand digging. The ground is not too bad to dig. It’s much easier than the front of the house where I put a driveway. Down in the arroyo the ground is a combination of hard topsoil, mid-sized rocks and some whitish, proto-rock stuff that crumbles with a sharp blow from a 2-pound sledgehammer.

The land tapers from level. At the highest about three feet must be removed.

The process is: I break up the top layer with an electric, 35-pound jackhammer (powered by the Harbor Freight Tailgator generator), then I use a round point shovel to move the loosened soil into a wheel-buggy. A little work with a pick dislodges the larger rocks. Aside from a few tree roots, it’s the best digging I’ve encountered on the property.

Since the area is so steep I’m bulkheading off lower regions with some old roll-up garage doors and using the removed earth to level a larger pad. It’s like getting free land. I plan to fill about two feet deep of as large an area as I have dirt for.

This sounds like a lot of work and it is. I take it slow and steady. It’s really no worse than going to a gym to work out and you get the added benefit of a flat spot on your ranch.

The greenhouse is a cheap Vevor 10-foot x 20-foot hoop style. The hoops are 1-inch tubing that are assembled like tent posts. A through bolt holds the pieces together. The cover is a greenish plastic material reinforced with what looks like thread. I think the cover will last a couple years if we don’t get a hailstorm. It’s not a heavy-duty unit.

It’s a happy worksite. I take frequent breaks and enjoy the smell of freshly turned earth.

The foundation will be heavy duty. I’m building a two-block high pony wall to set the greenhouse on. The blocks are dry stacked, poured solid, and they sit on a 4-inch-thick footer. The footer has rebar to keep it together when it cracks. I’ve set some 1/2-inch j-bolts into the block cavities to secure the wood sill that I will screw the greenhouse tubing into.

The foundation is overkill because I’m assuming the Vevor won’t last long and I’ll be scratch building anothergreen house one day. In the meantime, I’ll practice my green thumb.

As the project progresses, I’ll post updates. There will be solar power and a water catchment system making the greenhouse off-grid. For those of you wanting to build your own greenhouse my advice is to start with level ground.

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The Wayback Machine: A Call to Alms

This is a rerun of a blog Gresh wrote a couple of years ago. Yep, we’ve got our palms out. Help if you can; we’d sure appreciate it!

By Joe Gresh

Sponsored content is a way for publications to earn money. How it works is companies pay cold hard cash for bloggers to write a story about the products they’re selling. Most reputable websites and magazines print a notice letting you know the story is paid advertising. We’ll never have to worry about that because we don’t write sponsored content.

Not writing sponsored content is not the same as not having sponsors, though. Sponsors pay money for advertising on our website but don’t have any say about what we write. Sponsors support the website because they feel the content will attract the sort of people who they want to reach. For ExhaustNotes those people will be motorcyclists, shooters, travelers (especially Baja travelers), and concrete finishers. I know, it’s an odd mix of topics, but Berk, me, Huber, and our other contributors write about what we know.

So here’s the pitch: If you have been reading ExhaustNotes and think the eclectic collection of stories we create might appeal to your customers, by all means become one of our sponsors.

Or, if you just like reading the website and want to help support us, become a site sponsor even if you have nothing to sell. Maybe we’ll make a wall of names for people who sponsor the site. We want sponsors to support ExhaustNotes.us because they think that the writing we are doing is worthwhile.

So dig down into those dusty advertising budgets and drop an email to us (info@ExhaustNotes.us). Let us know how we can help you spend your money.

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The Norge

By Joe Gresh

Winter has finally arrived here at The Ranch. This year it seems like we got a late start to winter in New Mexico. I was riding my motorcycle in 70-degree weather just a few days ago. The avocado plants have been brought in to protect them from the 20-degree nights and I have installed insulated faucet covers over the outside plumbing fixtures so that we don’t burst a pipe.

Wintertime in New Mexico is beef stew time. The best way to make beef stew is with a crockpot and I couldn’t find our crockpot. Actually that’s not true, I know where the crockpot is: it’s buried under a giant mound of Amazon cardboard boxes I’m saving for my future eBay business.

Having no traditional kitchen stove at the ranch I decided to utilize the Isiler inductive hot plate as a heat source for the stew. The isiler is a sleek looking, single burner, and inductive-heat unit. It only works with magnetic-metal cookware meaning aluminum and stainless steel pots won’t get hot. I bought a whole set of inductive, stainless steel pots to use on the thing. These pots have iron or steel cast into the base so they will work with the Isiler.

The iSiler is only a couple years old. I cooked breakfast with the hot plate two or three times before, a cast iron skillet works great on the thing. The inductive heat is really efficient as no heat is wasted heating the cooktop or surrounding atmosphere. Only the metal pot gets hot and it will boil water in a few seconds on high settings. I like to cook my beef stew slowly. I toss in all the ingredients raw, meat included, and let it stew on low heat for half a day or more.

Apparently the iSiler doesn’t like being left on for long periods of time at a low (180 degrees) setting. The thing kept shutting itself off. I would come in from the Big Dig to check the stew and the iSiler was not heating. A red H was displayed on the digital control panel. Turning the unit off then on restored the iSiler and it would start cooking the stew. The shutdowns were random. If you watched the iSiler it never shut down. It was like trying to cook on Schrodinger’s hot plate: go outside to dig a foundation for a greenhouse and the unit would die but you would never know it until you observed.

Luckily, I was in the house when smoke started pouring out of the ventilation openings of the iSiler. The whole cooktop was hot and I needed a couple paper towels to pick it up without burning my hands. I unplugged the cooktop and took the stinking wreck outside. The house reeked of burnt electrical components.

And this isn’t unusual for modern appliances. In the last few years we’ve burned up three Krieg coffee makers. The fan went out on our refrigerator. Our washing machine started leaking water and then mysteriously stopped leaking. It’s hard to find new stuff that holds up over time.

Which brings us to the Norge. In the 1970’s I bought a little house on Chamoune Avenue in East San Diego. Back then funds were tight and East San Diego was a cheap place to buy a house. The house came with no appliances; I bought a used Norge refrigerator for 50 dollars. In my tatty old neighborhood there were appliance stores that sold nothing but used or repaired equipment. At least three vacuum cleaner repair shops were within walking distance of my house along with mattress rebuilders, typewriter repair shops, TV repair shops, radiator repair shops and at least 10 Chinese restaurants. You could buy cigarettes one at a time. East San Diego in the 1970s was a hive of industry captained by small e entrepreneurs.

The Norge had a thick, heavy, single door opened by a gigantic pull handle with a ruby red emblem that looked like a royal warrant. The handle would not look out of place drawing cold, foamy Bass Ale at your local pub. Unlike new idiot proof, safety-first refers the Norge door latched closed and if you found yourself stuffed inside of the thing you would surly die because from the inside the door would not open. Even with dynamite. And no one could hear you scream. It was a solid refrigerator, man.

There was no fan to circulate air inside the Norge. The top freezer section had a small, plastic interior door and uneven distribution was accomplished by cold air falling to the bottom of the fridge. You could turn the entire interior of the Norge into a freezer by cranking the temperature knob down to its lowest setting.

I don’t know the exact year the Norge was constructed but it looked just like the ones built in the 1940’s. The only thing I could complain about is that the Norge needed to be defrosted occasionally, failing to do so would trap frozen items in the freezer compartment like woolly mammoths were trapped in Siberian ice thousands of years ago.

I used the Norge for 10 years or so and it was running fine when I sold the house with the Norge still in it. Still keeping food fresh, still cold, still deadly to small children. It was probably 40 years old last time I saw it. And I can’t get a hot plate to last more than 4 meals.

Maybe I have a skewed view of the situation. Did the Norge represent standard 1940 quality or was it a one-off, Hyperon refrigerator? So much of our industrial energy today is expended on items that are junk. It seems like a waste of resources. Worthless and uneconomically fixable items clog our landfills, where the iSiler hot plate is heading. You may note we didn’t include the regulation Amazon link to the iSiler. That’s because we don’t want ExhaustNotes readers to buy the thing and set themselves on fire.

I bought a new, analog hot plate from Amazon, the kind with the resistance coil that will heat all types of cookware. Sometimes I can fix things because it’s cheaper than buying new. But that’s almost never the case if you include your time. No, I fix things just to stick a finger in the gears of our throwaway society. Sure, it’s painful. You rarely come out ahead and you can lose a finger. I won’t be tinkering with the iSiler hot plate, though. I don’t want to know if the cat is dead or alive if it means burning down the house.

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ARX Bullets In Two 9mm Pistols

By Joe Berk

About three years ago I had dinner with good buddy Robby at a Mexican restaurant outside of Atlanta. Robby bought some sample bullets for me and one of the flavors was a 65-grain 9mm ARX bullet. It was something I had not seen or heard of before.

These are frangible lightweight bullets designed to inflict a lot of damage without penetrating walls. The bullets are called a fluted design, and they are a composite copper/polymer material. They are a very high velocity bullet. There are a number of reloading admonitions with these, including not to overcrimp because doing so will break up the bullet. I’m talking like I’m an expert on these; I am not. This is the first time I’ve played with them.

I loaded these with 5.2 grains of Winchester 231. That powder is the same as HP 38, and I found a load for HP 38. I’m thought I would get something like 1400 fps with this load based on what I saw on the Hodgdon site. Other powders provide more velocity, but I loaded with what I had on hand (and that was Winchester 231).

I loaded on Thursday and fired these the next day, testing for velocity, reliability, and accuracy in two 9mm handguns. Those were a 1911 (with a 5-inch barrel) and a Smith and Wesson Shield (with a 3.1-inch barrel). From what I had read in online reviews, the ARX bullets are supposed to be relatively accurate. I expected them to shoot way low (as lighter bullets in handguns generally do). The loaded ammo looks cool, and the ARX bullets are relatively inexpensive at $39/500.

At the range, I set up a couple of targets at 25 yards. I had only loaded 25 rounds, so I shot the first 10 in the Shield. The Shield functioned perfectly with all 10 rounds (I shot two magazines with 5 rounds each). There were no failures to feed or eject. As I had read, the load was accurate (in fact, it was more accurate than anything else I’ve shot before in the Shield). Recoil was very light. I held at 6:00 on a standard 25-yard pistol target; the rounds hit low left (but not as low as I expected). This ain’t half bad with a little belly gun like the Shield. If I needed to, I could slide the Shield’s rear sight to the right to correct for the bias you see below.

The Shield’s velocities were high, and the standard deviation was low. I am impressed. There are better results than I had previously seen in the Shield.

I next fired my remaining 15 rounds in the Springfield 1911. The load was at the top end of what Hodgdon lists for these bullets using HP38 powder (which is the same propellant as Winchester 231).

In the 1911, I had one failure to eject. You can see that below.

Also, on the last round for each of the three mags I fired in the Springfield 1911, the pistol did not hold the slide back (it functioned okay for the first four shots). This load apparently has just enough energy to cycle the 1911 slide, but not enough to drive it all the way back. I could probably address this with a lighter recoil spring. Subsequent testing proved to me that the above-described failures were related to how I was holding the 1911 during this test. I used a two-hand hold and I bench rested the pistol on a rest. When I fired with a two-hand hold without bench resting the pistol, it functioned flawlessly.

Here are the chrono results in the 1911. As expected, velocities were higher due to the 1911’s 5-inch barrel. There are other powders will give more velocity with the ARX bullets, but I loaded with what I had on hand. Like Donald Rumsfeld used to say, you go to war with the Army you have.

Like I found with the Shield, the 1911’s accuracy was similarly good at 25 yards (again, with a 6:00 hold on the target). I could probably do better. I didn’t make any sight adjustments, so I was surprised that the gun was pretty much on target.

Another pleasant finding was that the both the Shield and the 1911 dropped the brass right next to the gun. With the 1911, the brass just plopped out and came to rest on the table next to the gun. The Shield dropped most of the brass on the table; three pieces fell off the bench. Where you see the brass in the photo below is where it landed; I didn’t scoop it up and put it there.

The ARX bullets are a little trickier to reload than regular 9mm bullets. Inceptor, the manufacturer, advises against a heavy crimp as it will crush the bullet. The one time I blew up a gun two or three years ago I’m now convinced was the result of bullet setback when feeding due to a light crimp and a slippery powder coated bullet. Setback would be more of a concern here with the light crimp.

I could probably load these bullets a bit hotter to get them to hold the slide back after the last round in the 1911 (or, as mentioned above, go to a lighter spring). I don’t think I want to go above the 5.2 grains of Winchester 231. Also, as noted above, the issue disappeared when I fired normally without bench resting the pistol. This was intended to be a quick look. I learned what I wanted to. The ARX bullets are very good. I ordered a thousand of them, which should last for a while.

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Apocalypse Now

By Joe Berk

No, it’s not another movie review. It’s what’s been occurring here in the Southland since Wednesday night.

We’ve had our share of forest fires in the 50 years I’ve been living in this part of the world, but nothing like this. Apocalyptic is not too strong a word. I think everyone who lives in southern California knows someone who lost their home.

This all started on Wednesday evening with the Santa Ana winds. We get them every year. They are usually strong, but this year they were something out of a disaster movie. In southern California, our normal daily winds predictably blow from west to east starting around 2:00 p.m. and going to approximately sundown. There’s an atmospheric/geologic reason for it I won’t pretend to understand or explain. The Santa Ana winds do just the opposite; they below from east to west, and they blow hard. Throw a fire into the mix, and you get what we have been experiencing for the last few days.

I can see the smokey skies from my house. The Eaton fire (the closest one to us) is about 30 miles to the west, but other than that, we were lucky. We’ve had lots of forest fires before in the 50 years I’ve lived here and we could see the flames on many of those fires, but they were always up in the mountains. This time, the fires jumped into residential neighborhoods.

I appreciate all the texts, emails, and phone calls from people checking in on us. We’re fine. The air quality is poor, but that’s trivial compared to what the other people in southern California have suffered. I feel for them, and I hope their situations get resolved quickly.

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Green Bay’s National Rail Museum

By Joe Berk

That picture above? It’s a Big Boy steam locomotive cockpit! Look at all those valves!

Green Bay, Wisconsin. Say that name, and most people think of Vince Lombardi and the Green Bay Packers. And why not? It’s what the town is known for. But I’ll let you in on a secret: Green Bay has one of the best rail museums I’ve ever visited. I like rail museums, and if there’s one anywhere near where I’m traveling, I’ll stop. Susie and I wrapped up a trip to Georgia, Wisconsin, and Michigan, and the National Rail Museum made our list. It’s easy to find, and Green Bay is a fun little town.

The National Rail Museum has a bunch of small items on display after entering the first building (track maintenance hand tools and the like). Then it’s on to a hall where the big stuff is kept. One of the first trains is General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s European train, the one he used as the Supreme Allied Commander during World War II. It’s big, it’s impressive, and it’s fit for a 5-star general.

The Dwight D. Eisenhower train. It’s dark green and it’s imposing.

The Eisenhower train was built by the British with a number of features to keep it low key (or so some of the signage said). The name on the locomotive and the exotic paint theme indicated otherwise.

Not very subtle, I would say. General Eisenhower used this train for getting around the European Theatre of Operations.

The Eisenhower train was built by British Railways. That, my friends, is a cool logo.

A photo of General Eisenhower leaving his train.

The National Rail Museum has one of the very few surviving Big Boy locomotives. I’ve seen three (well, actually two, but I saw one of them twice). One was at the National Steam Locomotive Museum in Scranton, and another was parked at the Pomona Fairgrounds (it’s that one I saw twice). The first time was when it went from Ogden, Utah, to Pomona under its own power. It stopped in Pomona, and it was an amazing thing to see.

Big Boy No. 4017. I wish that Halloween decoration wasn’t there. I didn’t want to risk moving it.

It’s hard to put into words just how big a Big Boy is. Photos don’t really do its size justice.

Signs at the museum told us the temperature in the engineer’s compartment was typically 93 degrees even with the windows open.

A peek into the coal tender. Big Boy locomotives consumed so much coal that a man couldn’t keep up with it, so instead of shoveling coal into the engine, the tender had a worm gear that drove it in.

A locomotive that caught my attention was the Pennsylvania Railroad’s GG-1 electric locomotive. When I was a kid growing up in New Jersey, the Pennsylvania Railroad’s main tracks were only a half mile from my home. We loved watching those trains scream by, always pulled by a GG-1. They are gorgeous locomotives.

A magnificent Pennsylvania Railroad GG-1 locomotive. These are beautiful machines. The GG-1 was entirely electric. They drew power from high voltage overhead wires with their pantograph.

From the engineer’s position, the view forward is through one small window. You really can’t see much of what’s ahead. That would make me nervous.

By the 1950s, passenger rail travel was losing favor with the American public. Airplanes were faster, and with the advent of the Interstate Highway System, most people drove. The railroads wanted to turn that around. One attempt involved General Motors designing an aerodynamic locomotive and less expensive rail cars. GM designed the “Aerotrain” drawing on their styling talents, but the effort flopped. I’d seen pictures of that locomotive (there were only ever two made), but I’d never seen one in person until this visit.

The General Motors Aerotrain locomotive. It was a beautiful design but a commercial flop.

The Aerotrain story is a fascinating one. This video explains it.

There are plenty of great railroad stories and more than a few great movies. You might remember the Gene Wilder/Richard Pryor hit from the 1970s, Silver Streak. It you ever wondered where the last car of that famed train came to rest, wonder no more.

If you haven’t seen the Richard Pryor/Gene Wilder movie of the same name, you need to. You can thank me later.

I’ve been to the Steamtown National Historic Site in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento, Golden Spike National Historic Park (where the Transcontinental Railroad was completed), and now, the National Rail Museum in Green Bay. All are great stops, and all have great storyies. I once did a story on Big Boy 4014 when it was in Pomona, California. Gresh has a couple of rail blogs, too, including the Nevada Northern and the Cumbres and Toltec lines. Rail stuff is cool.

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The New Year Comes with New Adventures

By Mike Huber

Having spent 11 months abroad and successfully (I am the one gauging the definition of success, by the way) traveling through 7 countries (some multiple times) returning to my home country of the United States of America was a welcome way to round out 2024. The past month has been filled with catching up with family and friends, as well as catching 3 mice and 12 flying squirrels that seem to have filled my vacancy in my parent’s house in Maine. The break was also filled with replacing some of my gear and clothes that were “gently used” throughout my travels in Oceania and Southeast Asia. Outside the occasional waking up at 3:00 a.m. and freaking out that I am sleeping in my old bedroom at my parents’ house, homeless and unemployed (clearly, that should be my intro if I ever join a dating site), it’s been a really productive month.

With the New Year approaching my plan was to begin traveling through South America for the entire year by motorcycle. In November that plan quickly changed (imagine that) when a fellow rider I had camped with four years ago in Death Valley National Park messaged me and stated that he and another rider were about to embark on a 1-month motorcycle journey through India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, and Bangladesh in February on Royal Enfield Himalayans. I wasn’t too impressed as I figured it would be some BS tour with a guide and not really count as a motorcycle adventure. He replied stating that was not the case and it was just the two of them. It took me about 15 minutes to reply stating that I was in. He promptly let me know that he wasn’t inviting me and was just discussing the trip with me. At any rate I invited myself and they seemed okay with that. I mean, who wouldn’t be? I am an absolute joy to be around.

This will surely be one of the more challenging adventures for me in quite some time. It really began to hit me while packing my gear in freezing cold Maine. Even though this nomadic lifestyle has been my life for the past eight years, there always is some anxiety that comes when the reality of the adventure begins to sink in. After India, per my usual I have no plan and must mentally prepare to face isolation yet again for an unknown amount of time. Of course, that is until I meet 100 new beautiful friends, which is sure to happen. Another issue I am concerned with is I sold my BMW GS1250 to my friend who was babysitting it and fell in love with the bike (that’s not hard to do as it’s a great motorcycle). Well, he sold it, and with it my helmet, jacket, etc. So, riding these countries with rental gear is something I am apprehensive about. Buying new gear really isn’t an option as once this trip is wrapped up there is still no definitive plan for my next location or activities. As in the past, I place that as a problem for “Future Mike Huber,” and he is pretty good at figuring these things out.

In the meantime, there are still a few weeks to kill prior to motorcycling India. I thought scuba diving Mexico would fill that void. Mexico will also serve as a solid way to ease back into traveling and rebuilding my confidence for what is sure to be an adventurous New Year with plenty of stories to come.

Happy New Year to all.

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