You’ve read here on the ExNotes blog about good buddy Mike and me having an adventure or two. I’ve known Mike since junior high school, which means he’s pretty old. So am I, now that I think about it. Anyway, Mike and I still talk every week or so (it’s a bicoastal relationship), and he most recently told me about the NY Auto Show. I suggested a guest blog, and what you see here is the result. It’s well done and well photographed. Enjoy, my friends.
After a two-year absence due to the pandemic, the New York International Auto Show returned to the Jacob Javits Convention Center in Midtown Manhattan. The NY Auto Show has been in existence since 1900. I can remember attending the show during the ’60s with my father at the New York Coliseum off Columbus Circle. In 1988 it was moved to the Jacob Javits Center.
The NY Auto Show always featured the latest models of all makes as well as the experimental prototypes designed by the best auto designers in the world. If you wanted to see the latest and greatest, this was the show to attend in the Northeast. A highlight of all the shows has always been the beautiful models on stage with the cars.
Probably the most memorable show, for me, was in 1979 when a close friend of mine decided to sell his 1978 Corvette Indy Pace Car at the show. We had the car transported to the show on a flatbed and after numerous inspections and paperwork we had it on display. Besides the excitement of showing a car at this prestigious event, the most exciting part was having my then girlfriend (and now wife) Carol model the car. Needless to say, the display drew a lot of attention, not because of the car but because of her presence. She wore a black jumpsuit and silver blouse. Great attention, but no sale.
I always attend on the first day of the show and this year was no exception. Upon entering, I was greeted by Ford’s full display. The centerpiece was an original Ford GT and the newest Ford GT.
After going through the various displays (including Mopar, Chevrolet, Nissan, and more), I soon realized the focus was on electric vehicles. Performance was there (with the new Z06 Corvette and convertible), but the primary focus was electric. In my opinion, it was very boring and a waste of my time.
The international marques were also present, including Rolls Royce, Bentley, Lamborghini, Porsche, Volvo, and Alfa Romeo, along with the usual Japanese. The largest displays were by Toyota and Subaru. Mercedes, BMW, Jaguar, Ferrari, and not even Cadillac were present. What a disappointment! I recently ordered a 2022 Cadillac CT5 and was looking forward to a close examination of that car. After walking for miles up and down the center I finally found an information booth where I learned Cadillac was not attending. Unbelievable, but true.
The 2022 NY International Auto Show was a waste of my time. No prototypes, no customs, no major performance cars, along with the inability to see all the cars made and speak with the representatives, this may be last for me. Did I mention, no beautiful models either? Nope, none. The highlight of the day was having a hot dog, pretzel, and a beer.
Awesome, Mike, and thanks very much. You have a way with a keyboard, and we appreciate hearing about the legendary NY Auto Show.
Hey, anybody else out there have a topic you want to cover? Imagine the prestige in telling your amigos you’ve been published. It can happen, and it can happen right here. Let us know!
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I’ve been cleaning out the shed on and off for about four years now. When we first moved here we stuffed everything into the shed. There was no time to sort through the junk. We had to return the Penske truck. After the junk sat there a few years the mice made a lot of decisions for us: if it was chewed up we tossed it.
I had tools at my work, tools at the house, tools at The Love Shack, three of everything. I just can’t bring myself to toss out tools. I have some home-built tools that no longer serve a purpose but I hang on to them. Because you never know when you’ll need to remove the centrifugal oil filter on a Honda 305.
This wrench was made from a cut down socket and a rear fender support from a Sportster. It fits the output flange nut on a boat V-drive. The output flange sits pretty low in the bilge and after a while the salt water splashing around in the bottom of the boat corrodes the seal. To remove the seal you have to separate the prop shaft from the V-drive. The problem is the prop shaft will only slide back a few inches before the prop-shaft flange hits the stuffing box. With this set up I could change a v-drive seal without pulling the engine. It was a stupid move on my part because at the time I was paid by the hour. The faster I went the less I earned. I still keep the wrench; maybe it will fit something else someday.
I mentioned the stuffing box and here’s the cut down pipe wrench I used to remove the packing nut and loosen the lock nut. Stuffing boxes are used where the prop shaft goes through the boat hull, a bronze casting called a shaft log. The stuffing box is a large nut that has several rows of flax packing, also called cat gut. These rows of packing are fitted into the packing nut or the shaft log depending on the design of the shaft log.
The flax packing seals the shaft log where the shaft enters so that water won’t leak into the boat…almost. In practice you want to leave a small drip, maybe a drop every 30 seconds, for a water supply to cool the stuffing box. If you crank down on the packing too much you can burn up the flax and the shaft log will leak. The pipe wrench is short because the stuffing box nut is large and it’s always hard to access between the stringers of the boat. You can buy a store bought stuffing box wrench but they are made like a flimsy adjustable wrench with a cheesy wing nut to lock the jaws into position. Trust me: the pipe wrench works better. A hammer also works but tends to damage the bronze stuffing box.
I didn’t make the dial indicator, just the Z-shaped bracket. This tool is used to set the timing on a 1971 360 Yamaha Enduro. The ’71 Enduro (and other years) has an angled sparkplug hole. The angled hole precludes measuring the piston stroke through the plug hole. With the cylinder head removed this tool bolts up and can measure the stroke. You have to know the piston position to accurately set the ignition timing. Once you’ve set the correct fire position there is a little tab inside the flywheel area that lines up with a flywheel mark. Bending the tab to line everything up will save you from measuring the piston stroke every time you want to adjust the points. It’s a use-it-once type of tool unless you disturb the timing marks. Godzilla runs so good I may never need it again.
This tool is made from Monel, a metal found around boat yards, which isn’t important to its function. There are a few other holes in the tool but I’ve forgotten what they do. The two holes marked by the red arrows will fit a Norton Lockheed front disc brake caliper. In operation you insert a couple drill bits into the tool; the bits line up with two holes drilled into the Lockheed caliper. The caliper plug this tool fits unscrews and allows removal of the caliper piston. You need this long lever because the plug gets pretty tight after 35 years. I’m hanging on to the tool because I may own another Norton one day.
At one time my dad and I owned BMW motorcycles. He had the 600cc and I had the 750. These were early 1970s models with the new, suitcase engine. In building the suitcase engine BMW relocated the cam below the crankshaft so the pushrod tubes were below the cylinder rather than above like on earlier engines. This was done to raise the cylinders higher in the bike allowing steeper lean angles in the corners. The problem was the pushrod tubes leaked oil where they contacted the crankcase. This tool slips over the pushrod tube and by tapping the base of the pushrod tube you could tighten up the seal area. It sounds crude but it was easier than pulling the heads to install new pushrod tube seals. I think you can buy a factory tool that looks much better than mine but does the same thing. I’m not adverse to owning the early GS 800cc, the ones that are clean and light and don’t have all the useless garbage BMW loads onto new motorcycles.
This tool is used to remove the nut from a Honda 305 centrifugal oil filter. I had two 305 Hondas. Those bikes had beautiful engines that were made extremely well. Early Hondas had a spinning cup type filter that oil circulated through. In the spinning motion heavy particles suspended in the oil were slung outward, clean oil flowed through the center. It was a good oil filter and if you wanted to take the engine apart like I did you needed this tool. After thousands of miles you would remove the right side cover to gain access to the filter. A wire clip held the o-ringed lid on the filter and I’d pull the thing off for cleaning. It wasn’t unusual to find 1/8-inch of compacted swarf stuck to the walls of the filter.
Back to boats. This tool is used to remove the macerator from Raritan Crown marine toilets. Working on boats isn’t the glamorous job that you see in the movies. Sometimes you had to fix toilets. The Crown was a very popular toilet back in the day. It used a large starter motor to spin a macerator and two rubber impeller pumps. One pump supplied seawater to the bowl then a macerator chewed up the poo and finally another impeller pumped the mash to a holding tank or overboard depending on how far offshore you were. After much use the seals would start leaking and the stuff leaking out wasn’t peppermint.
You had to disconnect hoses and the bowl then turn the motor (usually) to get to the end plate. Small straight slot screws held on the plastic end plate, removing the end plate allowed access to the macerator and the poo. The macerator had two pivoting chopper arms; removing these arms allowed you to screw the puller tool onto the macerator and a center bolt would pull the macerator. It was not a fun job. I wish I never made the puller tool. I could have told customers, “Sorry I don’t have the tools to fix your toilet.”
I have more homemade, or as we say in the south “ho-made” tools that I may write about on a day like today, a day when I’m sifting through the accumulated junk of my life.
I finally managed to put some miles on my new Shoei RF SR helmet. I took the RD350 out for a loop of the mountains and Tularosa’s TulieFreeze Ice cream shop. I had a Sundae with hot fudge, nuts and whipped cream. TulieFreeze always puts a cherry on top.
Oh yeah…the helmet. The Shoei was quiet at highway speeds, none of my bikes have windshields so I get the air full blast and I like it that way. Turning my head side to side was comfortable and the wind didn’t over-rotate my head side on. All in all the Shoei RS cuts a pretty clean swath through the air. There was no shaking or turbulence.
The fit is perfect on the top parts of my head (your head may vary) but the cheeks are still too tight as the pads press in on my jowly visage more than is appropriate for two people who just met. Luckily the cheek pads are made to be easily removable in case you have crashed. Hopefully the EMT will know to remove the pads before trying to force the helmet off and severing your spinal cord.
I’ll probably wait a bit longer before shaving down the cheek pads. I still have hopes it will break in. I need to stop and remove my helmet to relieve the face-pressure after 50 miles. It gives me a chance to admire the RD’s metallic purple paint. The tight-ish flip shield has loosened up a bit, I gave it a squirt of Shoei oil and after 10-20 flips it’s ok.
Speaking of the shield I have Shoei’s auto-darkening face shield. That sucker cost more than any helmet I’ve ever bought. Since I now have had both cataracts removed from my eyes I can see much better at night. I’m planning to step up the after hours summer riding and the auto-tint works fabulously. From the outside it appears super dark but from inside the helmet it’s not so dark. In fact, I wouldn’t mind if it got darker. As it is I can ride in bright sunlight without squinting. It seems to keep the inside of the helmet cooler.
When the sun goes down it’s as clear as a clear shield. On thing that worries me is how resistant the coating is to gas station squeegees and bug guts. I’m going to put a heavy coat of paste wax on the shield and even that makes me nervous. What if the wax screws it up?
It was cool but not cold on my ride and I totally forgot to open the vents to see if they had any effect of the interior airflow. At 70 degrees with the vents closed it was comfortable. I’ll test the vents after the doctor gives my new eye the ok to thrash around on a motorcycle.
Another week or two and my eye should be back to full strength. That means I can lift concrete bags and ride around without a care. I’ve already planned a trip to Tina’s Mexican food in Carlsbad; they have reopened after Covid shut them down for a year. It’s good to see things returning to normal after such a trying two years.
We’ve got a bunch of cool stuff coming your way in the next few weeks.
I’m working on a detailed tutorial on how to time a revolver…it’s my beloved Model 60. It seems the more things go south on that old war horse, the more I love it. This time, the revolver went out of time (that means it’s firing with the chambers misaligned with the barrel), and the way to correct that is by fitting a new hand. That’s the piece you see in the big photo above, showing the well-worn 60-year-old original hand on the left and a new one on the right (the hand is the part that advances the cylinder for each shot). Good times. Did I mention I love that gun?
I’ll be on a bunch of secret missions in the next few months. I’m visiting Janus Motorcycles in the next few weeks and I’m going to ride their new Halcyon 450. You may remember I rode with the Janus guys in Baja three years ago (wow, those three years went by quickly). The Janus trip was a hoot and I was blown away by the quality of these small motorcycles.
I’ll be in Gettysburg soon…four score and seven years ago, and you know the rest. Gettysburg was the turning point, and the bloodiest battle of the Civil War. I’m looking forward to the photo ops, and you’ll see the Nikon’s output right here.
And another: Hershey, Pennsylvania…an entire town blanketed in the aroma of good chocolate, streetlights that look like Hershey kisses, calories galore, and tasty treats. That will be a sweet ride!
Folks love listicles. There are a dozen or so reasons why a Timex is as good as a Rolex. That one will generate a few comments, and we’ll be bringing them to you here.
How about the Indianapolis Motor Speedway? You’ll see it right here on ExNotes. Good stuff. Yep, we’ll be there, too.
Bill’s Bike Barn…yet another vintage moto museum. Never heard of it? Well, you will!
More gun stuff? Absolutely. Fine walnut and blue steel. I’ve got a cool story about the most beautiful stock I’ve ever seen on an absolutely incredible .257 Weatherby Magnum Ruger No. 1.
Look for a follow up on the Shoei helmet Gresh wears these days…it’s in the mix, too.
A road trip to New Mexico, and that means a visit with Joe 1 (or is he Joe 2?) and another video or two. Gresh has a bunch of motorcycles. Maybe I’ll borrow one and he and I will go for a ride. Who knows?
And more rides on my effervescent and exciting Enfield, one of the best bargains in biking (we’ll have a listicle coming up bargain bikes, too). Now that the left-leaning evil time suck (i.e., Facebook) is in the rear view mirror, I have lots more time. I’m doing what the Good Lord intended, and that’s riding my motorcycle and writing about it.
The main reason I read the two-part graphic novel, Maus, is because a school board in Tennessee banned the book from their curriculum due to nudity and bad language. I wanted to see what the school board found so sexy about the holocaust.
Spoiler alerts ahead.
Maus is mostly about one Jewish man’s survival of the Nazi’s effort to exterminate the Jewish people. You’ve heard the stories and the subject has been covered extensively. Maus is a different in that the hero of the book, Vladek (I call him a hero because just surviving took an incredible, heroic will to live.) seems to have an unnatural ability to thrive in any situation no matter how desperate. Vladek never loses his spirit and can find the positive slant in a horror of degradation and abuse. It takes a strong man to feel he’s lucky to be in Auschwitz instead of Birkenau.
The road to the concentration camps was not a direct line. There were many slights and inconveniences that the Jewish people tolerated because this was their home. All their friends and relatives were here. Little by little the Nazis increased the pressure, still no one could have imagined the full extent of the plan and by then it was too late. The numbers killed are staggering. Vladek’s nighttime visit to the bathroom is shocking to us now: he steps over and on dead bodies lying on the floor hoping not to slip down and become one of them.
A second story line runs parallel to the Nazi extermination; this is the son’s story of trying to come to terms with his father’s obsessive cleaning and extreme thriftiness. Vladek’s terrifying life has left him unable to stop preparing for the next holocaust even when he’s safe in America and financially well off. Vladek counts matches to avoid running out, returns half eaten boxes of cereal for credit and is perpetually on the make for a deal. These traits served him well in the concentration camps and I don’t see any downside to them after he is freed. Compared to what Vladek had been through any minor embarrassment on his son’s part was no big deal.
My Dad and grandparents were from the depression era and I saw some of the same kind of economy and scarcity mentality when I was young. For my Dad, wasting food was the biggest crime you could commit. He told me often how joining the US Navy was the best thing he ever did. He couldn’t believe the amount of food the Navy provided and didn’t understand how some of the other sailors could complain about the food. He thought it was heaven.
The comic book style of Maus might make it more accessible to younger readers and the short sentences keep the story moving along. The artwork is black and white using a brutal sort of drawing. Each panel looks like a carved linoleum print. The Jewish people are shown as mice, Polish people are pigs, Germans are cats and the American GIs look like dogs. At times the Jewish characters try to disguise themselves by wearing the mask of a pig or a cat. Sometimes it works.
There is a third storyline running in the background. This is the love story of Vladek and Anja, husband and wife. They become separated in the Nazi’s roundup of Jews. Luck plays a big part in life and by luck Vladek and Anja end up seeing each other in the concentration camps. As the war came to an end and the Allies closed in the Nazis stepped up their abuse and started shipping Jews back into Germany for killing, sometimes leaving the Jews in locked cattle cars for weeks until they were all dead. Vladek survives the rapidly worsening conditions like he always does by eating snow and horse trading for sugar.
I think schools back in the 1960s and ’70s were a bit more enlightened and less of a political/ideological battleground than they are today. The school curriculum was set by professional educators, not by angry, politically motivated parents. I know the story of the holocaust because we were taught it in school. The ovens, the gas chambers, the millions killed by clockwork death factories and the chimneys always rendering fat. The scale was unbelievable. Maus is a believable, personal story and the eyewitness account made me despair for our species.
I truly believe something like the holocaust could happen in America. Native Americans will tell you that it has happened here. Black slaves were treated only marginally better than concentration camp prisoners. I’ve seen how people in our country rose up and cheered a kid who shot protesters. One of their side had shot some people from the other side and that was praiseworthy. I’ve seen Americans fighting over toilet paper. Jewish synagogues and gravestones are routinely defaced. I see Nazi marchers parading in American cities. There is plenty of hate to go around in the American psyche and by the hour we are being indoctrinated to regard the other side as less than human. It takes so little to create a monster.
There is nudity and bad language in Maus but if you’re the type of school board that finds mountains of naked bodies being doused with gasoline and set on fire or a woman dead in a bathtub titillating or erotic there is really nothing more to be said. If your real goal is to stop people from reading Maus then you will identify with the cats in this book.
Anyway, I figure that by the time an American kid reaches 12 years old he’s seen around 50,000 murders on television or at the movies so that kid should be ok to read Maus. The story of the holocaust needs to be told over and over in as many ways as possible. It should be drilled into each student’s head until they can recognize the first sign of evil: like an American school board trying to ban a book about Nazi crimes. Instead of being banned Maus should be required reading from junior high onwards.
More product reviews (including book reviews) are here.
Other than good buddy Arjiu (that would be Joe Gresh), I’m guessing most of you have never been to Chongqing. Chongqing is home to China’s motorcycle industry and it was the starting point for your two blogmeisters’ putt across the Ancient Kingdom. I enjoyed that ride enormously. Gresh and I had some fantastic times.
I first visited Chongqing and Zongshen as a consultant to CSC when we used Zongshen’s 250cc engine in our Mustang replicas. One thing led to another, and before too long CSC was Zongshen’s exclusive North American importer, and CSC introduced the RX3 to the US. I was blown away by Chongqing, the people, the size of the city, the photo ops, the cuisine, and more. I’ve been there many times and I’d go back again in a heartbeat.
Good buddy Fan shared this video a few days ago, and I knew I had to share it on the blog. Pro tip: Hit the little button on the bottom right of the video (after you start it) to view it full screen. It’s impressive.
You can be a China hater all you want. I know more than a few people over there I call my friends. Yeah, the world is going through some shaky times right now, but that’s not the Chinese people and it’s for sure not the guys I know. I like the place.
If you want to know more about our trip across China, pick up a copy of Riding China. There’s a link here on the blog. And take a look at our Epic Rides page, where we have links to posts about that ride.
Life is full of tiny, traumatic incidents. Each day we are met with hundreds of micro-decisions that demand little of our attention yet matter enough to require a few seconds of our time. New Boot Day is not one of these decisions.
I was going to the Harbor Freight in Alamogordo to pick up one of their welding carts that was on sale for $34. Or maybe was it a closeout? Inventory reduction? Anyway, I try not to leave the house in my bathrobe and slippers so I put on my day clothes and boots for the excursion. That’s when it hit me. My boots were looking pretty bad.
I’ve been wearing Rossi boots for about 8 years now. They are super comfortable right out of the box. Style-wise the Rossi boots are no great shakes but who wears boots for style? If the Rossi’s can be said to have a flaw that flaw is that they last forever. The damn things simply never wear out. Since they still work as boots you never know when to call them done.
Today though, the Rossi’s looked pretty tattered. The soles were still firmly attached and the uppers were all in one piece, it’s just that the overall boot looked like something you’d see worn by the unfortunate men in one of those grainy photos of a depression-era food line. I began to be self-conscious about my foot wear: will the clerk at Harbor Freight take a look at my beat up boots and decide to call security?
I’m hard on boots. My shuffling pace, the lazy-feet constantly tripping over rocks and thresholds and my need to crawl around on the ground to do the things I like to do all tend to shorten the life of boots qua Gresh. Popular, well-known brands of leather work-boots will last about 6 months on me.
Conversely, I hate to get rid of a pair of boots unless they are utterly destroyed. Part of it is my natural thriftiness and part of is my deep-seated feeling that I don’t really deserve a new pair of boots. What have I done to warrant new boots? There are many, many people who work much harder than me and these people do not get new boots…ever. I feel like such a fraud wearing new boots. Who do I think I’m fooling?
Then there’s the distress caused by having to witness my brand new boots get scuffed up. One time I had new boots on and the first day I tripped over a sharp piece of rebar, the rebar put a 1-inch long slice on the toe of my new boot. It nearly killed me. Not the trip: the slice. I find my movements inhibited with new boots on. I can’t do my thing and worry about the finish on my boots at the same time.
After much anxiety and teeth gnashing new boots become old boots and my world can settle down. Everything is in order, I can pull on my boots and go about my daily business, be it motorcycle riding or concrete placement, without a second thought. I’m free and loose with old boots.
But not today. Today I have on new boots and every step I take in them is a toxic cocktail of fear and self-loathing. I will step high, always watching for obstacles that could mar the beautiful ebony leather of my new boots. I will bend at the knees. I will stand soles down and I will wish I could leave my new boots safe in their shoebox forever.
I deleted my Facebook account this morning. It feels good. These are the reasons why:
Facebook told me one my recent posts about a handgun violated their community standards (it’s the blog immediately below this one). What a patronizing, insulting, idiotic thing to do. Folks, “Facebook community standards” is an oxymoronic expression.
I didn’t like the constant stream of moronic comments and arguments.
I’d post a link to one of our blog articles and I’d get questions on Facebook that were answered in the blog. Facebook members were too lazy or too stupid to realize the link would provide the information.
Too many people add comments to Facebook that are just plain wrong.
There are persistent Facebook comments that are racist. I realize there are a lot of racists out there. I don’t need to see it.
Facebook’s so-called “fact checkers” routinely post “This statement is partially false” when it wasn’t. In fact, that ridiculous comment essentially agreed that it was true. Who are these “fact checkers,” anyway? My inference is that they are 22-year-old Bernie-Sanders-supporting Silicon-Valley software types making $200K/year who routinely confuse their income with their intelligence.
I grew tired of the anti-gun crowd on Facebook. If you don’t like guns, don’t own one. Do you really think your views are going to alter mine? Do you really think your insipid comments on Facebook are going to change my views?
What is Facebook, really? It’s not a product. It adds nothing of value to the human experience. It’s nothing, really.
I don’t like Mark Zuckerberg. I know someone who knows him, and the feedback isn’t good.
I was spending too much time on Facebook. Life is short. I’m not wasting another second of it glued to my laptop or my cell phone reading stupid stuff on Facebook.
Old Zuckerhead doesn’t make quitting Facebook easy. It took me about half an hour to finally find a way to do it. I’m pretty sure that’s not accidental. If it was such a good thing, you’d think they’d make it difficult to join, not difficult to quit.
It’s Sunday. I think I’m either going to the gym, or a motorcycle ride, or the range. Maybe I’ll do all three. I feel good.
As concealed carry powerhouses go, it doesn’t get much better than the CZ 25 Rami. One of my good buddies owns one and I had an opportunity to play with it. I was impressed. On the plus side, it is an all-metal gun with a flat black finish, a hammer (greatly preferred by yours truly over a striker-fired pistol), great sights, and a marvelous trigger. My bud had a trigger job on his, and it was awesome (light and crisp, with zero creep, just like it should be).
The three-dot sights on the CZ are crisp and non-gimmicky. There’s no glow-in-the-dark nonsense and they stand out. In the photo below, the sight picture is just the opposite of what it’s supposed to be (you want the front sight to be in sharp focus, and the rear sight to be a bit fuzzy, but I couldn’t get my iPhone camera to cooperate when I shot these photos).
I liked the feel of the CZ. I didn’t get to fire it, but I think I might have an opportunity at some point. The one you see here is chambered in 9mm. The Rami was also available in .40 S&W, which I think might be a bit much for a gun this small.
The Rami was discontinued in 202o with the introduction of newer CZ models. I haven’t seen the new handguns, but I can’t see how they can be any better than the CZ 2075. This pistol just feels right.
I’ve ridden motorcycles through Baja probably 30 times or more over the last 30 years, and it’s unquestionably the best place to ride a motorcycle I’ve ever experienced. Many people are afraid to venture into the peninsula for fear of a breakdown. Hey, it happens, but it’s not the end of the world and it doesn’t happen often. They don’t call it adventure riding because it’s like calling for an Uber.
Not all “breakdowns” result in your motorcycle being nonoperational. Some are just mere annoyances and you truck on. A few breakdowns result in the bike not running, but there are usually ways to get around that. When it happens, you improvise, adapt, and overcome. Here are a few of mine.
Heritage Indeed
The first time I had a motorcycle act up was on my beloved ’92 Harley Softail. It started clanging and banging and bucking and snorting somewhere around Ensenada. I was headed south with my good buddy Paul from New Jersey. It was obvious something wasn’t right and we turned around to head back to the US. The Harley got me home, but I could tell: Something major had happened. The bike was making quite a bit of noise. I had put about 300 miles on it by the time I rode it back from Mexico.
A roller lifter that converted to a solid lifter.
One of the Harley’s roller lifters stopped rolling, and that turned it into a solid lifter. And when that happened, the little wheel that was supposed to rotate along the cam profile started wearing a path through the cam. And when that happened, the metal filings migrated their way to the oil pump. And when that happened….well, you get the idea. My 80-cubic-inch V-Twin Evo motor decided to call it quits after roughly 53,000 miles. It happens I guess. Nothing lasts forever.
Potato, potato, potato.
Here’s where it started to get really interesting. My local Harley dealer wouldn’t touch the bike. See, this was around 2005 or so, and it seems my Harley was over 10 years old. Bet you didn’t know this: Many Harley dealers (maybe most of them) won’t work on a bike over 10 years old. The service manager at my dealer explained this to me and I was dumbfounded. “What about all the history and heritage and nostalgia baloney you guys peddle?” I asked. The answer was a weak smile. “I remember an ad with a baby in Harley T-shirt and the caption When did it start for you?” I said. Another weak smile.
An S&S engine in my ’92 Softail. It let me ride a slow bike fast.
I was getting nowhere fast. I tried calling a couple of other Harley dealers and it was the same story. Over 10 years old, dealers won’t touch it. I was flabbergasted. I tried as hard as I could, but there was no getting around it…the Harley dealer would not work on my engine. It was over 10 years old. That’s that; rules is rules. For a company that based their entire advertising program on longevity and heritage, I thought it was outrageous. A friend suggested I go to an independent shop. “It’s why they exist,” he said. So I did.
So, I went with Plan B. I took the Harley to a local independent shop, and they were more than happy to work on my bike. I could have the Harley engine completely rebuilt (which it needed, because those metal bits had migrated everywhere), or I could have it rebuilt with an S&S motor. I went with the S&S motor (the cost was the same as rebuilding the Harley engine), doubling the horsepower, halving the rear tire life, and cutting my fuel economy from 42 to 33 mpg.
Justin’s Countershaft Sprocket
On the very first CSC Baja trip, I was nervous as hell. The CSC bikes had received a lot of press and the word was out: CSC was importing the real deal, a genuine adventure touring motorcycle for about one sixth of what a GS 1200 BMW sold for in those days. The naysayers and keyboard commandos were out in force, badmouthing the Chinese RX3 in ways that demonstrated unbridled ignorance and no small amount of bias. And here we were, taking 14 or 15 guys (and one gal) who had bought new RX3 motorcycles that had literally arrived in the US just a few days before our departure. There was one thought in my mind as we headed south from Azusa that morning: What was I thinking? If the bikes started falling out on this first trip, it would probably kill the RX3 in America.
Hey, it worked. Adapt, overcome, improvise. The adventure doesn’t start until something goes wrong.
I need not have worried. None of the engines failed. We had a few headlights go out, but that’s not really a breakdown. And then, when we were about halfway down the Baja peninsula, I took a smaller group of riders to see the cave paintings at Sierra San Francisco. That trip involved a 140-mile round trip from Guerrero Negro into the boonies, with maybe 20 miles of that on a very gnarly dirt road. As we were returning, good buddy Justin’s RX3 lost its countershaft sprocket. We found it and Justin did a good enough MacGuyver job securing it to the transmission output shaft to get us back to Guerrero Negro, but finding a replacement was a challenge. We finally paid a machinist at the Mitsubishi salt mining company to make a custom nut, and that got us home.
On every Baja trip after that, I took a spare countershaft sprocket nut, but I never needed any of them after that one incident on Justin’s bike. Good buddy Duane had a similar failure, but that was on a local ride and it was easily rectified.
Jim’s Gearbox
Four or five Baja trips later, after we had ridden all the way down to Mulege and back up to the border, good buddy Jim’s transmission wouldn’t shift.
Good buddy Jim in the Mulege mission.
That’s the only breakdown I ever experienced anywhere on an RX3 that wouldn’t get us home, and that includes multiple multi-bike Baja trips, the multi-bike 5000-mile Western America adventure ride, the multi-bike 6000-mile ride across China, the 3000-mile circumnavigation around the Andes Mountains in Colombia, and quite a few CSC local company rides. One of the guys on that Baja ride lived in the San Diego area and he owned a pickup truck, so he took the bike back up to Azusa for us.
Biting the Bullet
A couple of years ago Joe Gresh and I did a Baja road test with Royal Enfield press bikes. One was the new 650 Interceptor twin (a bike I liked so much I bought one when I got home); the other was a 500 Bullet. The Bullet was a disaster, but it really wasn’t the bike’s fault. The dealer who maintained the press fleet for Royal Enfield (I won’t mention them by name, but they’re in Glendale and they’re known for their Italian bikes) did a half-assed job maintaining the bike. Actually, that’s not fair to people who do half-assed work (and Lord knows there a lot of them). No, the maintenance on this bike was about one-tenth-assed. It was very low on oil, it had almost no gas in it, the chain was loose and rusty, and on and on the writeup could go. The bike kept stalling and missing, and it finally gave up the ghost for good at the Pemex station just north of Guerrero Negro.
Joe Gresh, inflight missile mechanic extraordinaire, getting intimate with the Bullet in Baja. “The Bullet needs me,” he said.
Fortunately for me, Gresh had one of those portable battery thingamabobbers (you know, the deals that are good for about 10 battery jumps) and it allowed us to start the bike. We bought a new battery that didn’t quite fit the bike in Guerrero Negro (big hammers solve a lot of problems), but the entire episode left a bad taste in my mouth for the Bullet and for the Glendale Ducatimeister.
Big hammers fix all kinds of problems.
That bike had other problems as well. The kickstand run switch failed on the ride home, and Gresh did an inflight missile mechanic bypass on it. Then, just before we made it back to my house in So Cal, the rear sprocket stripped. Literally. All the teeth were gone. That was another one I had never experienced before. The Bullet was sort of a fun bike, but this particular one was a disaster. We joked about it. The Bullet needs me, Gresh said.
John’s Silver Wing Leak
Ah this is another motofailure that tried but didn’t stop the show. On one of my earlier Baja forays, Baja John had a Honda Silver Wing. That’s a bike that was also known as the baby Gold Wing (it had all the touring goodies the Gold Wing had). It was only a 500 or a 650 (I can’t remember which) and it had no problem keeping up with the Harleys (but then, it doesn’t take much to keep up with a Harley).
Baja John and the mighty Silver Wing, somewhere well south of the border.
The Silver Wing was a pretty slick motorcycle…it had a transversely-aligned v-twin like a Moto Guzzi and it had plenty of power. Unlike the Guzzi, the Silver Wing was water cooled and that’s where our problem occurred. John’s bike developed a coolant leak. I was a little nervous about that. We were more than halfway down the peninsula and headed further south when the bike started drooling, but John had the right attitude (which was not to worry and simply ignore the problem). The little Silver Wing was like a Timex…it took the licking and kept on ticking, and to my great surprise, it simply stopped leaking after another hundred miles or so. I guess it doesn’t really count as a breakdown.
John’s KLR 650 OPEC Bike
Baja John had another bike, a KLR 650, that developed a fuel petcock leak on another one of our Baja trips. As I recall, it started leaking on the return run somewhere around El Rosario. I get nervous around fuel leaks for the obvious reasons, but John stuck to his policy: Don’t worry, be happy.
Baja John: The man, the legend.
We stayed in a hotel in Ensenada that night. The hotel had an attached enclosed parking structure, which immediately started to smell like the inside of a gas tank. Not that I’ve ever been inside a gas tank, but that parking garage pretty much had the aroma I imagine exists in such places.
John’s luck continued to hold, and we made it home without John becoming a human torch.
The Bottom Line
The bottom line is you basically need four things when headed into Baja:
A tool kit.
A good attitude that includes a sense of adventure.
A well maintained motorcycle.
Maybe some spare parts.
So there you have it. If you’d like to know more about riding in Baja, please visit our Baja page and maybe pickup a copy of Moto Baja.
If you’re headed into Baja, don’t leave home without BajaBound Insurance. They are the best there is. If you are nice, they might even fix you up with a cool BajaBound coffee mug!
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