“Time’s fun when you’re having flies,” as the frogs like to say.
Susie and I were headed north in the Subie and we stopped at the In-N-Out in Gilroy. I had an Animal Style burger. We had just had a nice telephone conversation with Steve Seidner, CEO of CSC Motorcycles. The two events had me thinking about the California Scooter Steve donated to the In-N-Out foundation. I realized that had been 11 years ago. Time speeds up as we age, I think. It feels like it was yesterday.
Steve donated a custom built bike to the In-N-Out charity auction every year during the California Scooter days, each one painted with a custom theme, with all proceeds going to the In-N-Out Foundation. That year, the good folks at In-N-Out asked us to base the color theme on Melanie Troxel’s In-N-Out funny car.
Melanie Troxel’s In-N-Out Funny Car.
The 2011 In-N-Out California Scooter was simply magnificent. Chrome Lucky 13 wheels, custom paint, a painted frame, a custom seat…ah, the list went on and on. I watched Lupe and Tony put the In-N-Out bike together and it was a hoot.
That year’s In-N-Out dinner and auction was awesome. I met one of the principals in the In-N-Out founding family who took me in tow and explained what the auction was all about, the prizes, and bit of the family’s background. She is a most charming woman…bright, attractive, and articulate. The CSC bike was the major item to be auctioned that year, she explained, and it brought a good chunk of money into the In-N-Out charitable foundation. I met and chatted with Melanie Troxel, the In-N-Out funny car driver, who is bright, articulate, and attractive (are you sensing a theme?). I asked her what it was like to pilot a funny car, and with a wink, she told me it was over before you realized it.
That was quite a night. Those were good times. And those were interesting little motorcycles. We rode them all the way to Cabo San Lucas and back. Yep, we rode to Cabo and back on 150cc motorbikes (you can read that story here). And it all happened more than a decade ago. It seems like it was yesterday. Or did I mention that already?
Bill Murar, at speed, on a CSC 150 somewhere near Lake Erie.
That’s good buddy Bill Murar in the photo above, riding a CSC 150 Mustang replica a few years ago in the Lake Erie Loop (a one-day, 600-mile endurance event around the periphery of Lake Erie). That’s impressive…600 miles in a single day on a 150cc motorcycle! Bill and I have stayed in touch ever since, and a couple of weeks ago I received this note from him:
Joe, thought you might enjoy this photo of my grandmother (Estelle Dadney) standing next to my grandfather’s (William Dabney’s) early H-D motorcycle. I had his photo superimposed above the bike. He was a pilot in WWI and WWII. Somewhere, there is another photo with (I believe) the same motorcycle with a sidecar with both of them.
Enjoy!
Bill
That’s a great photo, Bill. Thanks for sharing it with us. Ride safe and stay in touch.
This is the next installment of our series on Death Valley, and it’s about the Hell’s Loop Rally organized by Alan Spears and the Motor Scooter International Land Speed Federation. We rode it in November of 2011, and while it was sunny that day, it was plenty cold. It was a scooter endurance run of 400 miles in a single day. You might be thinking that’s not too many miles. Try it on a 150cc scooter and tell me if you still feel the same way.
I was working with CSC Motorcycles at the time and the thought was we could ride the event with our 150cc Mustang replicas. The team included good buddies TK, Arlene, and yours truly. It was grand fun and CSC garnered good exposure from that event. I had a blast, and for me, it nailed three birds with one stone: A great motorcycle ride, another chance for a ride through Death Valley, and a chance to get more cool stuff to write about (and photograph) for the CSC blog.
With that as a backdrop, here’s the story.
A Cold Day In Hell
Arlene B (of Go Go Gear fame, and a California Scooter rider) and TK. TK and I both worked at CSC Motorcycles. That’s my red CSC 150 motorcycle.
Hell’s Loop, that is…the Motor Scooter International Land Speed Federation (MSILSF) and Alan Spears’ latest event. You’d think an event named after a place known for warmer temperatures would offer toasty riding, but it sure was cold!
The Death Valley Loop
This event was all about endurance riding, and Alan and the MSILSF team sure outdid themselves on this one. The route took a big round trip from Barstow, California, east on the 15, north on the 127 along the eastern edge of Death Valley (think Ronald Reagan, the old Death Valley Days television show, and 20-mule teams hauling borax), west on 190 through Death Valley, a long loop down through Death Valley’s center to a delightful little town called Trona (just kidding about that one, folks), back to the 395 south, and then Highway 58 back to Barstow.
The Hell’s Loop event was billed as an endurance rally, but in actuality it was a race. You and I both know you’re not supposed to race on public highways, but on scooters and small motorcycles, “racing” is not what it would be on bigger bikes. We ran this event with our throttles wide open a good 95% of the time. No kidding. The twist grips were pegged. That doesn’t mean we were speeding, though. Sometimes a wide open throttle meant 65 miles per hour when we were on the flats with no headwinds, and sometimes it meant 35 mph when we were climbing a long grade. Another aside at this point…the bikes performed flawlessly. This was another event in which we beat the, uh, Hell’s Loop out of our California Scooters, and they ran great.
The guy who won the event, Tom Wheeler, won it on a 49cc Kymco motor scooter. Yep, you read that right. 49 cubic centimeters! We’re sure not in the business of publicizing other brands, but hey, we’re more than happy to give credit where credit is due. Tom drove out from Arkansas for this event and he finished first on his 49cc Kymco, beating machines with nearly 10 times the engine displacement.
The Ride
The weekend started with TK and I rolling into Barstow Friday afternoon for a great lunch at Del Taco. Those of you who know Del Taco might be tempted to laugh (it’s a fast food Mexican chain not usually known for their fine food), but the Del Taco restaurants in Barstow are different. Ed Hackbarth is the entrepreneur who started Del Taco, and he did so in Barstow. Ed sold the Del Taco chain to a conglomerate after building it up into a huge business, but he kept the original three Barstow restaurants. Here in southern California, we know that if you want good Mexican food, Barstow’s Del Tacos are unlike any others. Everything is fresh, everything is bigger, and it’s not unusual to see Ed himself working in the kitchen preparing your lunch. Trust me on this one, folks….if you’re ever passing through Barstow, you need to stop for a meal at Del Taco.
Our Motel 6 room…where old Tom Bodette left the light on for us…$35 a night, and it might have been the most expensive hotel in Barstow! It was raining and we didn’t want to leave the bikes out in the cold, wet weather. A lot of the Hell’s Loop riders slept with their bikes Friday night.
On Friday we had a bitter cold rain, but the forecast was for sunny warm weather on Saturday. Well, they got half of it right. I once heard one of those radio political talking heads say that the reason economists exist is to make weather forecasters look good. I think that guy might have had it backwards. It was sunny, but wow, was it cold when we woke up on Saturday morning. I wasn’t too worried…I had my California Scooter motorcycle jacket, a pair of warm motorcycle pants, and my Haix Goretex boots (they’re made in Austria and they’re great), but it was still cold. Really cold.
After a great 6:00 a.m. breakfast at IHOP Saturday morning, we rolled out onto Interstate 15 on our California Scooters and headed north. Wow, was it ever cold!On California 127, headed into Death Valley. We rode under beautiful blue skies along Highway 127…it was a glorious day to be out on a motorcycle!
It sure was cold Saturday morning. As in maybe 40 degrees. Teeth chattering cold. I know all of our friends on the east coast would view this as something of a heat wave, but I gotta tell you, when you do 400 miles in one day through this kind of weather, it’s cold.
Before I get too much further, let me give you a warning about the photos. They’re not my best ever. We didn’t stop to smell the roses on this one, boys and girls, and most of these shots were from the saddle of my CSC motorcycle at high speed. That’s why a lot of the angles are off, and it’s why they might be a bit fuzzy. This ride was all about getting back to Barstow first. We stopped for fuel and restroom breaks, and that was it. We didn’t even eat. 400 miles on a motorcycle, in 40-degree weather, with no messing around. Riding…that’s what this run was all about. And in the cold weather, our CSC motorcycles were running strong. We thought we were gonna set the world on fire, until we heard about Tom Wheeler on that 49cc scooter. But I’ll come back to that. So after rolling along on Interstate 15 for about 60 miles, we took a left at Baker and headed toward Death Valley. The skies were clear, the riding was glorious, and we froze our tootsies off.
A 60-mph shot from the saddle…riding through the Mojave Desert!
We weren’t too sure about where we’d be able to buy gas, so we each carried a spare gallon or two. Turns out we didn’t need the extra gas, but we stopped nearly every place we saw a gas station just to make sure.
When we rolled into Shoshone, I was blown away by the gas prices. Believe it or not, these were not the highest gas prices we saw on this trip! I was sure glad I was riding a 100mpg California Scooter when I saw those prices. Ah, the glory of price gouging.
Every time I see something like what the photo above shows, I want to confront the owner and ask him if his mother knows what he does for a living, but I know it would be a futile gesture. And another 100 miles up the road, we paid prices that made what the photo above shows seem cheap.
Barney Fife
While we were topping off in Shoshone, I saw a National Park Service HumVee that I thought was pretty cool. I had never seen one of these in use by a law enforcement agency, so I snapped a quick photo of it while I was on my California Scooter. I guess the NPS ranger who was in it didn’t like that. As I kid, I always had a mental image of park rangers as pretty cool guys who took care of the bears and stuff like that. This guy was decidedly unfriendly…there’s no nice way to say it. Maybe it was a slow day for him and he wanted to harass some rough-looking bikers like me, Arlene, and TK. He wanted to know about Alan, who rolled through Shoshone earlier on his two-stroke Kymco burning “exotic fuels.” A park ranger. I chalked it up to another instance of our tax dollars at work. Go figure.
A National Park Service Hummer.
Continuing the Ride
After the fuel stop in Shoshone, we were on the road again. Here are a few more shots from the saddle.
On the floor of Death Valley, about 100 feet below sea level.After we climbed out of Death Valley’s floor, it was a fast downill run west…you can see the flare from shooting into the sunHeading west to Panamint on the western edge of Death Valley. The bikes were running just great in the cold weather. Here’s a quick shot of my speedometer as we rolled through Death Valley. Smoking right along on the Baja Blaster!Arlene’s California Scooter ticked over the 9,000-mile mark on this ride, and we stopped for a quick photo.
9000 miles, including great California Scooter rides up and down the California Coast, the Sierra Nevadas, the entire length of Baja, and Death Valley! Arlene may well be our highest mileage California Scooter rider.
Our next stop was Panamint. There’s a gas station and a convenience store out there (but not much else). This place set a new record: $5.79 per gallon! It’s the most I’ve ever paid for gasoline in my life!
$5.79 a gallon….but what a cool photo op!
Wildrose Canyon Road and Trona
While we were stopped, I pulled out an extra T-shirt and added it to the several layers of clothing I already had on under my California Scooter motorcycle jacket. To my surprise, that one extra layer did the trick. I stayed relatively warm for the next 130 miles back to Barstow. After our Panamint gas gouging, we turned the bikes east for a quick three miles back down the road to Wildrose Canyon. That was our route out of Death Valley, and here’s a shot looking east across the valley floor.
Death Valley’s floor, as seen from the saddle, looking east from Panamint
We negotiated Wildrose Canyon Road, fought the wind downhill, and then we rolled into Trona. Trona is a mining town (they mine potash or some other such chemical), and there isn’t too much else out there. And I gotta tell ya, when they built “no place” they must have centered it around Trona (because that town sure is in the middle of no place). It’s an interesting place, though…a collection of white chemicals, brown hills in the distance, blue skies, and industrial processing equipment.
A late-in-the-day, shot-from-the-saddle photo of Trona. Some day, I’d like to ride out to Trona just to take photos.
Returning to Barstow
After Trona, we cranked the bikes wide open for the run home. It was a burst out to the 395, a speed run down to Highway 58, and then a left turn for the last 32 miles back to Barstow. We pulled in to the Motel 6 parking lot just after dark. And it was even colder. Did I mention earlier that it was cold?
Alan Spears, his friend Kathleen, and Dennis did a great job organizing this event.
When we returned to the Motel 6 rally headquarters, the good folks from MSILSF had good food and drinks waiting, and that was a good thing. We hadn’t eaten all day, and I was hungry. And cold. It sure was nice to return to a warm welcome. And it sure was interesting to learn about the winning bike and rider…that would be Tom Wheeler from Arkansas.
Tom Wheeler, a Kymco dealer from Arkansas, accepting one of his trophies for the Hell’s Loop Endurance Rally.
The Winner: A 49cc Kymco!
As I mentioned earlier, Tom won the event on a 49cc Kymco. Good Lord! A 49cc Kymco! My first thought was that the bike had to have had a couple of superchargers and maybe it was running on nitro, but no, that wasn’t it at all. Tom is obviously an experienced endurance rider, and he had the problem sorted. When I asked Tom about the top speed on his 49cc sizzler, he told me that it might see 45 mph on a flat road under ideal conditions. We sure didn’t have ideal conditions, and what that meant to me is that Tom ran a lot of the day’s 400 miles at something between 30 and 40 mph. The trick is to not have to stop. Tom had an auxiliary gas tank on his Kymco, and he only had to make one stop for gas.
Alan and crew sure did an outstanding job pulling this event together, which didn’t surprise me at all. MSILSF is the same outfit that organized the November 2009 Land Speed Record trials and last year’s Salton Sea Endurance Rally, and both of those events were wonderful.
I am more than a little intrigued by all of this, and by MSILSF. You might be, too, folks. Think about it. Motor competition. Real competition. Speed trials. Endurance rallies. All with scooters. You can get into it, real motor competition, for peanuts. And a California Scooter is a great way to do so.
Here’s a shot of Tom Wheeler’s winning 49cc scooter. 400 miles in one day on a 49cc motor scooter! Can you imagine!
So that was it, folks. 400 miles in one day, we won the 150cc class, and we had a great time.
We just returned from a trek through Death Valley a few days ago, which prompted our series of blogs about prior Death Valley trips. You can read the first two Death Valley blog installments here.
And, oddly enough, the Los Angeles Times ran a story in 2017 about a trip that almost exactly described the ride you see in this blog. You can read that one here.
Back to back earthquakes in the last two days…that’s what’s been happening here in So Cal. A 6.4 and a 7.1, to be precise, and they occurred in an area I know will. Both were centered near Ridgecrest, which most folks have never heard of, but the adjoining Navy base is China Lake Naval Weapons Station, which most folks have heard of. And that area is near Death Valley, which every knows about. It’s about 150 miles from where we live.
On the road near Ridgecrest and Death Valley, California. There’s not too much out there.
About 8 years ago good buddies TK and Arlene, and I, rode in a one day scooter endurance rally, in which we racked up 400 miles on the California Scooter CSC-150s. One of the towns we passed through was Trona, the epicenter of yesterday’s 7.1 quake.
TK and Arlene out in front on the CSC-150 Mustang replicas.My old Baja Blaster CSC-150. It was a good-looking little scoot. I rode it to Cabo and back.Trona, the epicenter of yesterday’s shaker. It’s a mining town…a small, desolate spot out in the Mojave Desert.
Trona is a town in the middle of a stark landscape just outside the western edge of Death Valley. It’s a place I’ve thought of visiting again just to grab a few photos. There’s not much out there, and the desolation and jagged edges would make for interesting pictures, I think. But this is not the time to go.
I was reloading .22 Hornet ammo for an upcoming blog on a cool and very vintage Winchester Model 43 when the first quake hit two days ago. I felt dizzy and nauseated for an instant, and than I realized the world really was swaying around me. That quake, the 6.1 centered near Ridgecrest, went on for perhaps 15 seconds. I could see things moving around and that’s a weird feeling. It’s like being out in the ocean on a small boat. Dry land is not supposed to behave like this. Usually earthquakes don’t last that long, and many times, our So Cal shakers are sharp cracks (almost like a detonation) that last for but an instant. But not these recent shakers. The second one hit yesterday evening while we were watching television, and it went on for even longer. It was 7.1, which is pretty significant in the earthquake business. Again, there was no sharp crack, and again, the rocking and rolling lasted for perhaps 20 seconds.
We came through both quakes just fine, so mark us safe here in So Cal.
A Bill Murar self-portrait at 60mph while riding the Lake Erie Loop.
In the early days at CSC, when we were casting about for ways to the publicize the new CSC Mustang replicas, we heard from a guy named Bill Murar. Bill is a retired firefighter, vintage Allstate motorcycle expert, and motorcycle endurance rider, and he wrote to ask if he could ride one of the 150cc Mustangs in the Lake Erie Loop. That’s a 650-mile endurance run around the periphery of Lake Erie for small bikes and scooters. It was a godsend for us, and it was one of the things that helped put CSC on the map.
Bill Murar, at speed, on a CSC 150 riding the Lake Erie Loop.
Bill and I became good friends, and we’ve stayed in touch over the last decade. I was pleased to get this news from Bill yesterday…
Joe,
I’m pleased to let you know I’ve been named to the Board of Directors of the Antique Motorcycle Foundation. Starting a new page in the Murar chronicles. Yikes, responsibilities! If you go to their website there’s a photo of all the members of the board along with a short bio.
I helped the VP of the AMF restore his Allstate 175, mostly with hints over the phone, me sharing my personal parts source people, as well as my own stock of Allstate stuff. That and 50+ years of Sears Allstate buying and selling and collecting helped as well. He also used his own unique collection of painters, re-chromers, cable makers, foreign parts suppliers, etc., and he finally had a product good enough to grace the cover of this Spring’s edition of the Vintage Motorbike Newsletter.
With everything I had going for me with my Allstate knowlegde, coupled with almost 15 years as the north Central WERA-Vintage regional race director, and overall general knowledge of small displacement bikes, he thought I might be a good fit to fill one of the Board of Director openings.
So, I was interviewed via a phone conference call and ended up getting voted in by the Board. We’ll have out first meet and greet with the entire board at the Wauseon, Ohio meeting of the Antique Motorcycle Association on July 19th.
My new life chapter begins.
As a side note, I rode to AMF VP Roger Smith’s home north of Pontiac, Michigan where we finally met face-to-face (everything up til then was all via email, texts and old fashioned phone calls) last Thursday. He was kind enough to arrange a tour of the studio of Biker Build Off legend, Ron Finch. What a treat that was! Ron is an unbelieveable visionary with his projects. Do yourself a favor and Google his place, I’m not sure of the name of his shop, I simply entered “Ron Finch Studio Michigan.”
Bill
Bill, congratulations to you! Thanks very much for letting us know about your new spot and sharing it with us here on the ExhaustNotes blog. Ride safe, my friend, and best of luck to you in your new assignment.
Like everyone else who read the “Back in the Day” Bell Star piece, I greatly enjoyed Gresh’s blog. I never owned a Star, but I bought one of the modern Bell helmets Joe referenced about 10 years ago from my good buddy Mike over at NoHo Scooters in Hollywood. It was a lightweight, inexpensive full-face deal with artwork that made it an instant “I want” item. The Boss was with me and she gave the nod, and Mike gave me a good price, so I bought it.
Not politically correct. But cool. I liked it. Bombs Away!
The helmet had a World War II aviation motif. It’s not politically correct, so if you’re going to get your shorts in a knot over the artwork, my advice is this: You’re young. Go to your safe space and take a nap. You’ll probably get over it.
The military theme worked perfectly, I think, with a CSC motorcycle Steve Seidner (CSC’s CEO) built. He called it “The Sarge” and it was his personal bike. I liked both the motorcycle and the helmet so much that as soon as Steve’s bike came together (and he wasn’t around) I raced off to a spot I knew would make for a good photo…
The Sarge and my Bell helmet. The motif worked. For me, anyway. Cue in the music from “Off We Go, Into the Wild Blue Yonder…”
I wore that helmet all the way down to Cabo and back on the CSC 150 Baja run. It was a nice hat. I really liked it. It made me taller, thinner, and faster. Better looking, too, if I kept the visor down.
The Bell on my CSC 150. I called my bike the Baja Blaster.
They say you are supposed to replace a motorcycle helmet every three years (“they” are the guys who make helmets, of course). I don’t know if that’s really necessary, but it’s what I do. After three years the insides of my helmets get pretty funky, and in my case aromatic reasons drive the need for a new lid.
But the three-year rule wasn’t what ended my relationship with the Bell you see here. It was a different reason: The outside surface got tacky. Not in the good taste or politically correct sense (if that’s what you’re thinking), but tacky in an adhesive sense. It got sticky to the touch, like flypaper. I think it was because the adhesive bonding the wrap (the thin layer of artwork) to the helmet’s shell seeped through to the outside. Whatever. It would stick to my hands when I picked it up and I don’t like a clingy thingy. A Bell guy told me he knew of the problem and it had been fixed, but they no longer offered the helmet I had come to love.
I sure wish Bell still made that helmet. I would buy a new one and it’s what I’d be wearing today.
The trek south on our 150cc California Scooter Mustang replicas continues…
If you are coming into this adventure in the middle of the movie, you might want to take a minute or two and get caught up with our first three installments…
After the spending the night at the Desert Inn in Catavina, fueling the bikes and checking that everything was tight the next morning, we were ready to continue south. We had agreed that if the group separated (which happens on these trips), our next rally point would be Chapala. Sure enough, that’s what happened, and Arlene and I waited for John and Simon to catch up to us near Chapala. We had a soft drink and after waiting a bit, we pushed on. We’d catch John and Simon later.
Arlene and I at the only loncheria in Chapala…
We had left early that morning and the weather was tolerable, but it soon became a brutally hot. September is the hottest month of the year in Baja, and we were feeling it.
1000 Island. What else?
When we hooked up with Simon and John, they were eating a morning snack…a salad with 1000 Island dressing. We continued down Mexico’s Transpeninsular Highway, and I grabbed this shot of Simon and Arlene headed toward Guerrero Negro…
On the road, on 150cc bikes, headed south in Baja.
Guerrero Negro means “Black Warrior” in Spanish. It is the name of a ship that sank near there in the 1800s. Guerrero Negro is right on Parallelo 28 (the 28th Parallel), which separates the states of Baja California and Baja California Sur. The town is also a good spot in the winter months for whale-watching tours. There’s a Mexican Army compound on the highway, and they have this cool whale skeleton right next to the highway.
Balleno!
From Guerrero Negro, the highway cuts southeasterly across the Baja peninsula, and we moved from the Pacific side to the Sea of Cortez side of Baja.
Going across the Baja peninsula was a fun ride, especially the last few miles into Santa Rosalia. It’s a 2,000-foot descent in just a few miles, and it’s wild. The name of this stretch is La Cuesta del Infierno. There are no guard rails and nightmarish drops if you let things get away from you. I didn’t grab any photos on the way down. When we arrived on eastern shore of the peninsula, we stopped for a few photos.
Arlene Battishill, Go Go Gear riding apparel, a custom California Scooter, and the Sea of Cortez.Arlene’s CSC 150 had a custom paint job with the Go Go logo. John Esposito, who was with CSC at the time, did the painting. He is easily the most gifted custom painter I’ve ever known.The crew, and one of my favorite photos from this trip. From left to right, it’s Simon Gandolfi, Arlene Battishill, J Brandon, John Welker, and Joe Berk.
We ate in Santa Rosalia, and by now, the temperature and humidity were beyond oppressive. That didn’t kill our spirits, but it came close. We were in heavy traffic, we were fully suited up, and it was a steam bath. We were close to the Tropic of Cancer, and it was about as miserable a set of riding conditions as I’ve ever experienced. Something was going on but I didn’t know what, and then traffic stopped altogether. As we sat in our riding gear and sweltered, a heavily-armed military parade marched by, music and all. Right in front of us. Had a revolution started? We didn’t know it yet, but we soon found out that Mexico was celebrating the bicentennial of the Mexican Revolution! John and I looked at each other and starting laughing. This was perfect!
John and I have been exploring Baja on motorcycles for close to 20 years now. He’s an easy guy to travel with, and he always laughs at my jokes (so I naturally like the guy). We’ve done the cruiser thing, we’ve both owned KLR 650 Kawasakis, and we’ve both owned CSC RX3 motorcycles. John was a great guy on this (and many other) trips…he’s a guy that just doesn’t let the small stuff bother him. A flat tire in the middle of the jungle? Hey, no problemo! That’s John in a nutshell, and it’s why I like traveling with him.
My good friend John Welker.
You may recall that part of the reason we making this trek was to road test the CSC 150 Mustang replicas under harsh conditions. Our intent on this trip was to beat the heck out of our California Scooters and find issues offering improvement opportunities. Baja is a proving ground…there’s no question about that. When I was a kid, American Motors came out with a new car that they entered in the Baja 1000 (I think it was their AMX model). Their commercials had a race car driver explaining to a Bajaeno that they were entering the car in the Baja race. The Bajaeno responded with “You’re going to enter theese hunk of tin in the Baja? Ha ha!” It was an image that stuck in my mind. Our direction from Steve Seidner, the CSC CEO, was to try to break the bikes, and Baja would be the place to do it.
And try we did…the trip would be 2200 miles through Baja. Simon commented that what we were doing with these bikes was probably something no other owner would ever do with their California Scooters, and time proved him right. It’s been nearly 10 years, and no one repeated what we did. Rough asphalt. Dirt roads. Hundreds of miles a day with wide open throttles. 100+ degree temperatures. High humidity. Up and down mountain passes. Long straights through the desert. You get the idea.
So, what broke?
I expected to have lots of light bulb failures, as I’ve had those on virtually any motorcycle I’d ever taken through Baja. I bought a bunch of 1157s for the tail lights, and a half dozen headlight bulbs. As it turned out, that was massive overkill. We had one headlight failure (Arlene’s conked out just before we reached Cabo San Lucas), and I had two tail light failures on my bike. Part of what caused my tail light failures might have been my defective rear tire…it was unbalanced due to the rip I put in it (I’ll get to that later in this saga) and that made the rear end on my bike vibrate a lot. Nobody else needed a bulb replacement, and I was surprised at how few bulb failures we had.
I guess I should point out that we had two preproduction bikes and two production bikes on this trip. Part of the test was to gage CSC’s success with improvements made when the company went from the preproduction to the production configuration. We wanted to see the same failures on the preproduction bikes as we had seen earlier, and we didn’t want to see those failures on the production bikes.
One of the problems CSC had experienced on the preproduction bikes was an occasional failure of the welded frame tab to which the muffler attaches. CSC strengthened that tab and its weld joint on the production bikes. Both tabs failed on the preproduction bikes within the first two days of riding in Baja; neither of the production bike muffler mounting tabs failed during the entire trip. I found a welder somewhere south of Guerrero Negro (my new buddy Umberto). I asked Umberto to fabricate new tabs identical to those on the production bikes, and to weld the new tabs on the preproduction bikes using the same weld pattern as the production bikes. Umberto did so, and the welds on the preproduction bike held for the remainder of the trip.
My new buddy Umberto upgrading a preproduction muffler tab to the production configuration, while simultaneously demonstrating proper personal protective equipment use. Welker is pulling fire guard duty.
We had two battery failures on the entire trip, and both occurred on the preproduction bikes. Neither of the production bikes had any battery problems. There was nothing different between the preproduction bikes’ batteries or charging systems and those on the production bikes, and at first, I was a little nervous about having a similar problem on the production bikes. Then, as the miles rolled by, I realized that the preprod bikes had old batteries. The batteries in both preprod bikes had been in those bikes for at least a year and a half, and who knows how old the batteries were before that. When we got back to the CSC plant, the boys put new batteries in both preproduction bikes, and they fired right up. The lesson here: Don’t leave on a long trip through Baja with an old battery. Duh.
The weather conditions – high heat and humidity – were tough on batteries…even J’s big Dodge Power Wagon (our chase vehicle) had a dead battery one morning. One thing about this battery business that was interesting was that Simon’s preproduction bike battery failed and his bike wouldn’t start at all. John’s preproduction bike battery failed and his bike could be kick started. John rode that preproduction bike for 9 days and 2200 miles, kick starting it all the way.
I tore up a tire on the way back from Cabo (I’ll tell you more about that in a subsequent installment). I noticed one afternoon that the tire was bald in just one spot, almost as if the rear wheel had been skidded for a long distance. I know I didn’t do that; maybe someone who rode my bike did (we swapped bikes a lot on this trip). Or maybe I hit something in the road that damaged it. Whatever the cause, I opted not to change the tire until later that day, and sometime in the next 150 miles, the tread split down to the cord in that bald spot. This caused a lot of vibration, but I took a chance on reaching San Ignacio before replacing it and it worked out okay. One thing about 12-inch tires…they were out quickly. It’s a common issue on scooters of all kinds. Well, maybe not an issue. You just need to know about it. A smaller diameter tire rotates a lot more than a bigger diameter tire, and the natural result is that the tires wear faster.
We also learned which nuts and bolts you have to keep an eye on our bikes. Nothing new there…I’ve gone through this with every motorcycle I’ve ever owned. On my KLR 650 it was the lower fairing bolts, the muffler heat shield, the muffler mounts, and the steering stem. On my Triumph Tiger it was the right foot peg and the saddlebag acorn nuts. On my Harley Softail it was nearly everything. On the California Scooter I soon learned it was the two 10mm exhaust clamp bolts at the cylinder head, and the 12mm elongated bolt at the bottom of the muffler. It became part of our ritual to check these bolts on our California Scooters each morning.
And the engine? Well, as far as I’m concerned, that old CG design was bulletproof. We flogged the bikes (we ran wide open for the last 500 miles), and we didn’t have a single engine problem. The CG engines are good, solid, reliable motors.
So, I digressed a little bit to tell you about the tech issues on the bikes. Now, it’s back to the main attraction…our ride. So where were we? Oh, yeah…I left off in Santa Rosalia. After having lunch and celebrating the Mexican Revolution in that fair city, we continued south. Mulege, a city about 40 miles south of Santa Rosalia, was to be our destination that evening.
This is the next installment of our series on Death Valley, and it’s about the Hell’s Loop Rally organized by Alan Spears and the Motor Scooter International Land Speed Federation. We rode it in November of 2011, and while it was sunny that day, it was plenty cold. It was a scooter endurance run of 400 miles in a single day. You might be thinking that’s not too many miles. Try it on a 150cc scooter and tell me if you still feel the same way.
