Tag: Product Review

Hasty Conclusions:  First Look at Viking Cycle’s Warlock Jacket

 Viking Cycle sent Joe Berk a new jacket to test and since I’m the loyal, half-witted sidekick, Berk made sure I got one, too. Viking Cycle was just in time with their products because the heat in New Mexico was getting a bit much for me. I was tempted to go bare on my motorcycle. The folks at Viking Cycle let me pick whichever jacket I wanted and I chose the Warlock, a mesh jacket that should flow plenty of air. I went with the high viz color because car drivers, along with Americans in general, are getting more careless in their comportment. And I look cool besides.

Viking Cycle’s prices are incredibly low. The Warlock mesh in several colors retails for just $54.99 and if you give Viking your email (or invent a new one) they will knock 15% off the already ridiculously low price. All the Viking gear is very economical (check out their website). If you’ve been paying attention to ExhaustNotes you know I’m a cheap bastard. The Warlock appeals to me in that place where my miser instinct festers.

The Warlock comes with a zip-in, vest-style liner, which I promptly removed and tossed into the growing pile of other inner liners. I don’t use them and on a mesh jacket it would defeat the purpose of the mesh. Instead I’ll toss a rain jacket over the Warlock if it gets too cool. Colder still and I’ll put a shirt on underneath the mesh. It’s all about the layers, man.

Kind of a neat feature that I’ve never seen before is the front-pocket lanyard. I guess you can clip your house keys or 9mm semi-automatic pistol to the lanyard and it will prevent them from falling onto the ground when you’re retrieving other items from the pocket. There are four front pockets and one inner pocket. The pockets are plastic so they should delay rainwater from getting inside but if it’s raining you will probably have the whole jacket covered anyway. The Warlock has back armor, elbow armor, and chest armor. The elbow armor slips into a hook-and-loop pouch and sometimes when I slide my arm into the sleeves my finger will catch on the pouch. Not a big deal but since I have not tested the jacket yet I have to come up with something.

The Warlock is made in Pakistan which should appeal to my anti-China friends (I’m talking to you, Keith). To tell you the truth I’m not sure if we are at war with Pakistan or not but it can’t hurt to outsource some of our manufacturing to a wide variety of countries just to keep the world’s economy humming.

I like the fit of my XL Warlock. The arms are slim so they shouldn’t flap around yet the middle is suitably sized for a well-fed Westerner like me. As far as quality goes, the Warlock looks like any other mesh motorcycle jacket. I mean, I’m not a seamstress, I don’t see any glaring problems. I will need to put a few thousand miles on the Warlock mesh jacket to see if anything goes pear-shaped. Unfortunately it’s been raining like mad here in New Mexico and I don’t want to get my motorcycle dirty. Keep watching this space for a full road test of the Warlock.

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Product Review: Hoford hair clippers

I don’t like barbers, and for good reason:  When I was a little kid, I was traumatized by one.  I didn’t know that’s what you call what happened to me at first (more on that in a bit), but I sure was.  Traumatized, that is.

The story kind of goes like this…I grew up in a rural part of New Jersey.  Yeah, we were only 40 miles outside of New York City, but in the 1950s central Jersey was farmland, most folks built their own houses (like my Dad did), doctors made house calls (ours did), you could shoot a gun in your backyard (we did), and several towns shared one barber.  We did, and he was Charlie the Barber.  He probably had a last name, but to us he was simply Charlie the Barber.  Usually my Dad took me to Charlie’s when he needed a haircut, but on this one day that task fell to Mom.

I was only about 4 years old, but this business of going to Charlie the Barber with Mom (instead of Dad) represented change, something I knew I didn’t like even at that tender young age, and I was already feeling a little uneasy when it was my turn in the big chair.  Charlie was a little guy who was a flurry of motion, and to be blunt, he made me nervous.  He was one of those barbers who was constantly snipping mostly air.  Snip snip snip snip snip, and maybe on the fifth or sixth snip the scissors would zoom in and get a little hair.  Scared me, Charlie did.  He wore a white jacket and had slicked-back jet black curly hair (he used way more than just a little dab of Brylcreem), he had this pencil thin mustache, and he had a voice kind of like Dudley Do-Right (you know, Bullwinkle’s buddy, of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police).  The voice, the mustache, the flashing and slashing scissors, the slick hair…the words didn’t match the music.  I didn’t know what it was, but something was off and it made me nervous.

So I’m sitting in this elevated barber chair, the scissors were swimming in front of my face and all around my head snipping furiously at nothing, and I’m thinking in my four-year-old mind this is not a good situation.  Then, what happened next was really bad.  Remember I mentioned the country doctors who made house calls?   Well, ours was Doc Bristol, who weirdly enough looked exactly like Doc on Gunsmoke (i.e., Milburn Stone).  Doc Bristol, I suppose, was a nice enough guy, but he’s another dude who made me nervous.  When Doc Bristol came around, it usually meant things like hypodermic needles weren’t far behind, and to this day, I don’t like needles.

“Ah, I see you got little Berky on the hot seat,” Doc Bristol said.

“Snip, snip, snip, snip, snip” went the silver scissors millimeters in front of my face.  Charlie was on fire.  He was in the zone.  Zip codes hadn’t been invented yet, but I didn’t like the one he was in.

“Cut one of his ears off,” Doc Bristol said, “I need the business.”

That’s all it took.  I went nuts.  All fours year of my existence went absolutely dogshit nuts.  I screamed.  I wiggled.  I slid out of the chair with a lopsided, unfinished haircut.  You don’t tug on Superman’s cape, you don’t spit into the wind, and you don’t tease a four year old. I ran out, screaming all the way home.

The bottom line?  There was no way in hell I was going back to Charlie the Barber.  My Dad bought a set of hair clippers and he cut my hair until I went in the Army 18 years later.  In the Army, I did a lot of crazy things.  I jumped out of airplanes.  I fired 106mm recoilless rifles (a weapon so loud you shake hands with God every time one lets go).  I tromped around in rice paddies and on missile sites in faraway places.  Nothing scared me worse than getting into a barber’s chair.  And I still feel that way.  I tense up every time I get in a barber’s chair.  A very attractive young lady (a hair stylist, not just a barber) once asked me if I was okay (probably because my knuckles were turning white from the death grip I had on her barber’s chair).  I get that wired when it’s time for a haircut.

Most guys worry about going bald.  Not me.  I’d be fine being completely bald, because then I wouldn’t need to see a barber.  But there’s still enough fuzzy gray stuff on my noggin that I need to get a haircut occasionally.

One time a few years ago we had a couple over for dinner, and she was a clinical psychologist.  For whatever reason, the conversation turned to haircuts, and I told the above story.  “Aw, little Joey was traumatized by his barber.”  Ah, so that was it.  That’s exactly what happened.  The word fit perfectly.  I had been traumatized by a barber.

So we’re into this shelter in place thing, you know, what with Covid 19 and all, and I needed a haircut.  Evidently, so did a lot of people, because when I tried to order a set of hair clippers online, everyone was sold out.  But last week supply caught up with demand, and thanks to Amazon.com and Fedex, I now have my very own hair clippers.

I bought Hoford hair clippers and they work great.  They are battery powered and the kit has all kinds of accessories.  There are three or four standoff combs/spacer things that are for folks with longer hair, but I didn’t need any of them.  I set the clippers at the lowest setting (a set of hair clippers is like a lawn mower…you set the blade as low as possible and you don’t have to mow the lawn very often).  I hit the ON button and the clippers came alive!  Buzzzzzzz!  I love it!  I gave myself a haircut, both my ears are still in place, and I think I look good.  I used to pay $8 for a haircut, so in four more haircuts, these new clippers will have paid for themselves.  Life is good!

Movie Review: Little Richard

When I go to the gym, I’m usually on either the treadmill or a stationary bicycle, and I like to listen to music when I’m working out.  Good tunes relieve the boredom of indoor aerobic exercise, and if I get the right tunes, it keeps me in the zone.   One of my favorites is Little Richard, and there are a bunch of his songs on YouTube.  A couple of weeks ago, one of the Little Richard YouTube videos that popped up was an hour and a half long (and that got my attention).  It wasn’t just a song…it was a movie about Little Richard’s life, and I’ll tell you, it was good.

You can watch it here, you can go to full screen on your computer, or you can watch it on your television if your TV gives you Internet access.   The Little Richard movie is a bit formulaic (it’s a typical rock hero life story kind of movie), but I enjoyed it and I think you will, too.

Book Review: The Arsenal of Democracy

We watch our Google Analytics regularly, and one of the things that impresses us is what impresses you.  You might be surprised to learn that our most frequently visited pages and blogs are the product reviews, and in particular, the book reviews.   That’s one of the reasons why I want to get the word out to our readers about one of the best books I’ve read this year:  A.J. Baime’s The Arsenal of Democracy.

I first read A.J. Baime’s work in The Wall Street Journal, where he does a weekly piece on interesting cars.  You know, cars with a story behind them.  Cars that are still driven regularly.  I’d subscribe to The Journal just for those stories, although that newspaper has much more going for it than just Mr. Baime’s car stories. (The WSJ has objective reporting, something sorely missing in The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, two papers that lean so sharply left it’s amazing they’re still standing.)  I like A.J. Baime’s WSJ articles, and when I learned he also writes books, I was in.

In a word, The Arsenal of Democracy is great.  It’s a wonderful book weaving together the stories of World War II, the Ford family, Detroit’s wholesale conversion to war production, the application of mass production to weapons manufacturing, the logistics of building major manufacturing facilities in the middle of nowhere, and Ford’s production of the B-24 Liberator.  Ford built B-24 bombers at the rate of one an hour (actually, they did slightly better than that by the end of the war), and there’s no question Ford was a major factor in our military success.  Baime made it all read like a novel, but all of it actually happened.

Folks, trust me on this:  The Arsenal of Democracy is a great book.  I think it’s one you should consider adding to your list if you haven’t read it already.  You can thank me later.

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The Gear’d Torture Test

So, the literature that came with my Gear’d Hardware ZX2-1116 watch said it was bulletproof.

We’ll see about that, I thought.  I’ll take the challenge…

The Gear’d came through it just fine, and I’m having fun flashing this monster around. Gresh’s watch is on its way to New Mexico, and he’s got a hot 9 and a cement mixer to test it with. But I’ll let him tell you that story.

Product Review: Duluth Flex Fire Hose Work Pants

Tough gear for tough jobs…the Duluth Flex Fire pants are great!

I didn’t know about Duluth’s cargo work pants 40 years ago. That’s how long I have crawled around in the bilges of boats and after many thousands of patella-miles my knees are shot. Towards the end it got so I’d have to work on my side, putting weight on my hips because my knees hurt pretty much all the time.

Sure, I tried kneepads. Every brand or style of pad cut the circulation to my legs or if they didn’t restrict blood flow they’d fall to my ankles as soon as I stood up. The best solution I could come up with was a chunk of packing foam and I kneeled on that sucker whenever I could remember to drag it into the bowels of the boat I was working on. Unfortunately, memory was the second thing to go in the boat-fixing business.

Kneepad inserts…a fabulous idea.

Duluth makes many styles of pants but the ones that caught my eye are the Ultimate Cargo Work Pants with kneepad inserts. By the simple act of sewing on a hook-and-loop-pocket large enough to hold a foam pad Duluth solved both the sore knee and the blood circulation problems in one fell stoop. The pants run $59 and you’ll need the pads (Not included? Why the hell not?) at $10. 70 bucks was a lot of money 20 years ago. Today, it’s the going rate for any heavy-duty work pants.

The things aren’t perfect. The pad pocket may slide off to one side or the other when you kneel down but it’s not a problem to re-situate them. The material is a stretchy, hot blend that will have you sweating in temps over 75 degrees. Still, it was a revelation to kneel down without pain. The pants put a spring in my knee and I had a newfound confidence in my ability to connect with floors and low-slung mechanical contraptions on a deeper, more meaningful level.

Duluth Flex Fire work pants…good for work and good for riding.

The Duluth pants would work great as knock-about motorcycle riding wear and I plan on using them for just that purpose as soon as it gets a bit cooler. If you are a tradesman or tradeswoman that must work from your knees don’t wait 40 years like I did. Let Duluth’s built-in pads cushion (and save) your knees and extend your career. If I had used these pants from the get-go I could have been one of the lucky ones who kept working on boats until their backs gave out.