Tag: Buell

The Motorado Vintage Motorcycle Meet, Santa Fe, New Mexico

By Joe Gresh

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

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

A Vulcan 750, an RD350, and a Buell.

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

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

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

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

One of my dream bikes, a Kawasaki Avenger 350. These disc valve two strokes were pretty fast back then and still fast today.
High pipes on a Norton P-11.  This is pre-isolastic mounting so you get to feel every vibration the parallel twin puts out.
Every Motorado I see a bike I never knew existed. Here’s a Taurus diesel that looks a lot like Royal Enfield running gear strapped to a diesel engine.
This over restored but still beautiful Ariel Square Four was a stunner. I hung around to hear it run but got tired of waiting.
The oldest bike at the event, a 1906 Fairy opposed twin. Not sure of the horsepower but they made 2-1/2 to 8 horsepower models. I bet the 8 was a real screamer.
This bike is the great grand-daddy to the RD350. Two generations behind the RD it’s still a sweet looking bike.

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

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

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Dream Bike: Buell XB12s

Joe Gresh posted a Dream Bike blog the other day about the Buells and I think he was spot on.  A confession:  I’ve always wanted a Buell, too.  Given the choice, I’d probably go for the XB12s like you see in the photo above.  I didn’t much care for the ones at the end of the run with the Rotax engines (apparently, neither did Harley-Davidson), and I didn’t like the ones with the lower bars and the bigger (yet still small) front fairing (the lines just didn’t look right to me).  But that XB12s:  Wow.  I think Buell nailed what a hooligan bike should look like, and Bike Looks Matter (I could start a movement under that name, I think).

Buell had versions of the XB12 with translucent body work (the fairing and the tank) in orange, red, and smoky gray, and those are muey cool, too.  I particularly liked the orange one.  Orange has always worked for me on a motorcycle.  Orange bikes are faster, you know.

I went as far as riding out to Victorville Harley about 15 years ago to test ride a new Buell, and that’s what scotched the deal for me.  I had the money and I was ready to buy.  The bike was beautiful, but it was slow compared to my Speed Triple and the wheelbase was so short it felt twitchy to me.  Maybe it was the steering geometry.  Whatever it was, the bike just didn’t feel stable.

The handling wasn’t what killed the deal, though.  It was summer when I test rode that Buell and when we were stuck in traffic along Bear Valley Road, I suddenly heard this horrific whine from beneath the seat.  The noise startled me.  I thought something broke, but it was the rear cylinder fan (something I didn’t even know the bike had).  Evidently the Buells ran hot (as did the Big Twin Harleys) and they had a problem with rear cylinder overheating.  The answer was a thermostat-activated rear cylinder fan.  Nope, that was too Mickey Mouse for me, and I kept the $12,000 in my wallet that day.

But the looks!  Wow, those Buell boys nailed what I thought were fine aesthetics for a motorcycle.  And the Exhaust Note was perfect.  Nothing sounds better than a Buell at idle.  It was locomotive like:  Big, powerful, industrial, all business.  I liked that, too.

As a mechanical engineer, I appreciated Buell’s concepts…the oil in the swingarm, the fuel in the frame, the oversized single disk front brake, and the whole mass centralization thing.  These were ideas that made sense and were ahead of their time.  Maybe that’s why Buell didn’t make it.  There were other reasons, but sometimes you can be too far ahead of the curve, and Buells were out there.

Gresh said he liked the earlier Buells better, and even though I’d like to someday own a later model Buell, I agree with Joe that the earlier ones were also beautiful.   Buell had an earlier gray and orange color combo that I thought was especially stunning…

I think the earlier Buells didn’t have the rear cylinder cooling fan and I like that.  The fact that Buells were slow compared to Triumphs doesn’t bother me these days.  I think I could put up with the noisy cooling fan silliness.  Or maybe I’d just ride on cooler days, or stay out of traffic.  I’ve found myself poking around a lot on CycleTrader and the Facebook sales pages recently.   Who knows what the future holds.

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Dream Bikes: Buell M2 Cyclone

I like all the Buell models and the Buell M2 Cyclone is my favorite Buell of the bunch. I mean to have one before I shuffle off this mortal torsion. Unlike most of the motorcycles I want to own, this is one Dream Bike that is very affordable. Even an Internet blogger wannabe can pick up a running, low mileage copy for a couple thousand bucks. And if I ever get a couple thousand bucks ahead I’ll get one.

The M2 was manufactured in that brief window of history before Erik Buell went totally crazy. After the M2 Buell started mixing up all the traditional systems on a motorcycle just to show you that he could. Yeah, it worked but the motorcycling public wasn’t ready for inside-out brakes and aluminum frames full of gasoline.

The frame on the M2 is plain old steel tubing with a sturdy rear sub-frame that can support a passenger or luggage. The value of a sturdy sub-frame was made apparent to me on a recent trip to Bonneville, Utah. The swaying luggage on my pencil-necked Husqvarna 500 frame was nerve wracking. Similar to an old Norton, the M2 frame isolates all the motorcycle parts a rider comes in contact with from the shaking, quaking Sportster engine. That feature comes in handy on a long trip.

Steel is relatively easy to bend and weld. Even the most basic repair shop will have a set of 0xy-acetylene torches that can fix anything on the M2’s frame. I also like the standard gas tank position and conventional forks. I don’t road race on the street so the added stiffness of a cool, upside-down front end is wasted on a peon like me.

The engine on the M2 is a hot-rodded 1200cc Sportster putting out around 90 horsepower. 90 horsepower is a lot of go-go from a half-century-old design that puttered along at 50 horsepower for decades. Just getting a new 883 Sportster engine up to the 90 horsepower level would cost more than an entire Buell! Later, crazier Buells had even more power and more Buell-specific engine parts while still being based on the Sportster. Buell even used, God forbid, Rotax engines! I can see parts for those engines becoming scarce within the 100-year time frame I like to operate. No such problems with the M2 engine as it’s mostly plain-old-plain-old and parts for the Harley-Davidson Sportster engine will be available on into the next millennia.

The M2’s styling has hints of Buell’s Blast but it looks good to me. I like a standard-style motorcycle, one that can go from touring bike to trail machine with only the removal of a few bungee cords. It’s a model I keep a weather eye on in case a steal of a deal pops up on one of the Internet for-sale sites. And yellow is the fastest color.