Music and Motorcycles

Years ago, I sold my 1979 Honda CX500 to a good friend who used the bike to move from LA back home to Idaho. At the time, I thought I was doing him a favor because good old LA was killing him and he needed to cut free of all of the crap that held him in place. Moving by motorcycle is one of the best ways to give up crap that you don’t need. He made it to Idaho, restarted his music career there, cut some records, toured with some big name acts, and quit riding the motorcycle because he was afraid he’d fuck up and damage his hands. After one winter in storage, mice chewed through the bike’s wiring and started a fire that burned down his garage, turned the CX and a car into ashes and scrap metal, and convinced my friend that motorcycles were in his past. 

My wife saw James Taylor on Late Night with Seth Myers and we had an argument about Taylor’s age. (I thought he is my age. She thought he is 5-8 years older.) I looked up his stats on Wikipedia and I was right, he is three months older than me. However, while I was browsing his history, I hit this bit, “On July 20, he performed at the Newport Folk Festival as the last act and was cheered by thousands of fans who stayed in the rain to hear him. Shortly thereafter, he broke both hands and both feet in a motorcycle accident on Martha's Vineyard and was forced to stop playing for several months.” I did not know that Taylor lost six months of his career between his first Apple Records release and his first Warner Brothers record, Sweet Baby James. 

A more well-known motorcycle career alteration was Bob Dylan’s 1966 motorcycle crash that occurred the month Blonde on Blonde was released. When Dylan reappeared, he was dramatically lower energy, with the country-music-influenced John Westly Hardin in ‘67 and Nashville Skyline in ‘69. By all accounts, Dylan’s crash was more of an ego bruising than a serious injury, since he mostly moped around in a neck brace for a few weeks and was never hospitalized for injuries. Dylan was a notoriously awful motorcyclist. As Joan Baez recalled in her biography, “He used to hang on that thing like a sack of flour. I always had the feeling it was driving him, and if we were lucky we'd lean the right way and the motorcycle would turn the corner. If not, it would be the end of both of us.” Lucky for Bob and his Nobel Prize future, he quit riding motorcycles before they finished him. Although I recently read an interview with Mark Howard, a record producer, who claims to sell an occasional cobbled-up cruiser to Dylan. Hopefully, Bobby just collects them. 

Piano Man Billy Joel got whacked on his Harley in ‘82 by a cager running a red light and, for a time, had concerns that he might not play piano again. Billy still rides and even has a Leno-style collection of motorcycles. Mostly, he’s a Moto Guzzi fan, but he owns 70’s and modern Japanese bikes, Harley collector bikes, and some customs. He still rides, although not particularly well. 

Duane Allman famously ended his career and life crashing into a stopped flatbed truck hauling a crane; hardly a hard-to-see or avoid obstacle. Allman was, like Dylan, a notoriously mediocre rider and, worse, he had a fondness for disabled, strung-out choppers which played a prominent part in his demise. Berry Oakley, the Allman’s bass player, rode his Triumph into a bus 14 months later. The trajectory of that fabled rock and blues band was forever altered and mangled by the loss of those two key members. 

A more typical Rock and Roll motorcyclist even was Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler’s 1981 crash, mostly caused by his drugged-to-oblivion state of mind when a tree jumped in front of him. Lucky he crashed on the way to pick up his daughter from a babysitting gig, rather than afterwards with her on the bike. 

Billy Idol, a classic rock nitwit, wandered through a stop sign in 1990 and met a car at moderate hippobike speeds. He broke an arm and a leg badly enough doctors almost had to amputate. In 2010, Idol crashed again. Big surprise. 

Some of the rest of rock and roll’s biker mistakes are Dire Straights’ Mark Knopfler, the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Anthony Kiedis and Chad Smith, Richard Fariña, and, of course, Bono managed to mangle himself (fractured shoulder blade, humerus, eye socket, (orbit), and pinky finger on a bicycle. Waiting in the wings is Justin Beiber. If you’ve seen him demonstrate his “skills” on YouTube, you know that goofball is going to tear up a bunch of tattoos any day now. 

As best I can tell, music and motorcycles are a bad mix. But motorcycles and most things don’t mix well, so that’s not news either.

More Evidence

Humans are clearly not smart enough to play with 200mph motorcycles off of the race track. Here is one more example of a dumbass in a world of dumbasses. This one appears to be proud of the fact that he almost killed a friend and himself. More evidence that dogs should not breed with monkeys. This kind of stuff is why I can't get too worked up about 400ppm CO2. Humans are clearly not intended to become a sentient animal.

Ragheads on Wheels

A while back, one of the local MSF coaches told me I should check out the Parts Unlimited catalog for do-rags. More recently, Paul Young pointed me at Iron Horse Helmets (a mis-named website if there ever was one) to look at the neoprene face masks. Considering that the children who wear this crap are about as rabid anti-helmeters as douchebags get, you have to wonder why they want to cover their ugly faces and bald heads with napkins and wet-suit material. I've worn a wet suit in the ocean, but I can't imagine the up-side to wearing one on my face on a hot summer day. 


However, having looked at images like the one at left, I get it. This is a "truth in advertising" thing. A clown mask for a clown. Makes perfect sense. We all know what's under the mask and this is clearly an improvement. If Lady Bird Johnson were alive, she'd call this "highway beautification." If you click on the clown mask, you can see the whole collection, all 182 of them, of Iron Horse's neoprene face bags. Maybe you can find one that is just right for your next convenience store hold-up. In fact, I'd sort of like to know why cops don't fire a few warning shots into these things just to get the morons' attention? Seems like a reasonable response to someone wearing a mask in public. 

The napkin craze is totally over the top. There are at least eight pages of these girlyman things in the Parts Unlimited catalog (click the the nancyboy's picture at right and feast your eyes on the douchebaggery). Amazing. You'd think the napkin pages would be followed by a selection of pancake premixes and griddles. If I'm gonna look like a fool, I at least want to be cooking something edible while I do it. (Damn that kid has a lame "biker stare." He looks about as badass as Bill Clinton after a two day intern-boinking binge.)

Crap! I bet I know what the next non-helmet biker hat craze will be: a chef's hat. Everything the dochebags love is wrapped up on one stupid looking hat: uselessness, clownish appearance, a way to hide a bald head, and head wear that makes a Harley look like it's moving faster than a crawl. Freakin' awesome. Right now, the typical chef's hat costs about $3. We should corner the market and wait for the biker clowns to catch up to us, then sell hats for $10 each (the going price for biker napkins). Tell me that the fruitcake on the left doesn't look like he belongs on a Harley. 

Puttin' Off Order

Last winter, too many things happened at once and I missed the moment; the garage cleaning moment. Since then, nothing has gone right in my favorite room of the house. Work stuff, personal stuff, family stuff, hoarding tendencies, and general laziness kept me from performing a ritual that has kept my life semi-ordered for decades; scrubbing the garage before winter. Once I missed that window, everything has gone downhill. Finally, this weekend, I have no MSF classes to teach (looks like the rest of the summer's schedule might cancel out on me) and no freelance deadlines to meet. So, I'm out of excuses.

The problem is I've lived here too long. My natural hoarding instincts are overwhelming my disciplined mid-tech transient practicality. All of my life, I've moved every 2-5 years. Before moving into my current home, the longest I'd ever lived anywhere was the 7 years my family lived in a dinky Huntington Beach apartment. Since I was working 80-90 hour weeks, going to school nights and weekends, and managing two small businesses during that period, it's hard for me to consider the actual time spent in that California beach apartment as being more than a blip in my life. But I've lived in my current home for 14 years and the collected crap is starting to become overwhelming. My wife collects girl-stuff and most of the house is crammed with that crap. I collect guy stuff and the garage and my basement shop and the attic studio are stuffed with that crap. In the garage, I have squirreled away parts for all of the cars and motorcycles I've owned in the last decade, service manuals for the same vehicles, tools for a wood shop, toys and kid-projects that my grandson started and gave up on, acetylene welding stuff, bicycles and assorted maintenance bits for bikes, an idiotic collection of electronic components for audio products I will probably never design, mountains of acoustic treatment materials for recording studios I will probably never build, construction materials that may (or may not) end up being used on the house, and dozens of yard and gardening tools for a yard that could suck up my whole life.

It's a really big garage, but it can shrink up dramatically if I can't find the guts to toss out the stuff I will never get around to using. When I bought the house, the previous owner had stuffed the garage front-to-back and eight feet high with all sorts of crap. He had a tunnel carved in the junk to allow access to his huge television dish antenna. Most of the residue of his existence is gone from the garage now.

I used to love moving because moving forced me to make those kinds of decisions. I don't mess around when I move, either. In the last four decades, I've moved from Kansas to south Texas to Kansas to west Texas (again) to Nebraska to California to Indiana to Colorado to Minnesota. My moving motto is "when in doubt, throw it out." I don't, however, apply that philosophy to cleaning up my crap-filled garage. I use more of a "when in doubt, stuff it in the rafters" policy. The rafters are about to collapse and crush me flat. Some decisions will have to be made.

The first things to go are the kid stuff. My grandson has progressed from a sweet, energetic, fun little guy who used to direct me in building everything from robots to rockets to the usual sort of sullen teenager who is pissed off at everything I do. That makes emptying out the unfinished kid projects an easy assignment. I set the kid stuff on the curb with a "FREE!" sign and it all vanished in a few hours. It's not like I'd ever mess with model rockets or stop-motion animation on my own time and having that rocket stuff in the garage is a fire hazard.

Next goes the unfinished construction project materials. I will probably never roof a house, so all the scrap roofing materials hits the curb and instantly vanishes. I'm not adding a door to another room in this house, so the interior door that's been sitting in the rafters since we bought this house hits the curb and disappears. Likewise, the louvered closet doors, the baseboard electric heating elements, and the unused wall-to-wall carpeting left by the previous owner. All set out on the curb and all claimed in less than an hour. I'm on a roll.

Electronic parts and project cases hit the trash. I disassembled my wooden saw horses and chopped them up for materials. I have cool folding metal ones and don't ever use the old style horsies. Flammable construction materials practically fling themselves into the burn box for the wood stove. I can almost see my metal work bench and the wooden bench has been cleared since morning.

As I toss crap, I inventory the non-crap possessions and put them up on Craig's List and eBay while I organize. By 5PM Saturday, I've sold almost $200 worth of idle crap. I also have the Kawasaki Sherpa up on the jack ready to strip down to the frame and rebuild with the original stock parts. By Sunday night, the KL250 will also be on Craig's List. Once, I'd thought Wolfe and I would be doing some off-road riding together this summer, but he's made it clear that isn't in the works so I'm clearing the garage space for something useful (or just for the luxury of free space). I can always find another dirt bike if it turns out I need one. That's another transient motto of mine, "if I ever need it again, I can buy it again." Two spare helmets are on Craig's List and so is the cruise control I never installed on the V-Strom because I couldn't convince myself I could tolerate the control's added clutter under the tank.

While I'm tossing stuff and selling stuff, I'm fixing stuff, too. That's why cleaning the garage takes so long. If I find a repair part I've been looking for, I stop cleaning and do the repair so I won't lose the part again. Tomorrow, I'm installing the throttle for the electric scooter and, if it works, that damn thing hits Craig's List, too. Another dumb idea that got a lot of playtime, initially, and ended up taking up space afterwards.

Ten hours later, the garage is clean and civilized. Both work tables are clear, the work area is wide open, the kid stuff gone, a giant curb-load of stuff has been claimed by the neighborhood collectors, and a bunch of boxes are going to be part of our Fourth of July celebration as starter material in the fire pit.  Mission accomplished. Now I'm afraid to start anything in the garage because I'll mess up my new order.

Buying Time, but No Sellers

Winter isn't over yet, so I'm not counting myself out but it's not looking good. I'm on the hunt for a cheap, low mileage Yamaha WR250X. They were out there last winter, but I hadn't yet committed myself to the idea. Now, I'm there but the bikes aren't.

It's not that there are no WR250X's available, it's that they've all been gaywadded-up by idiot kids. Take, for example, this Craig's List mess:

"Yamaha WR250X supermoto!!!

"2008 wr250x has about 3750miles. really fun to ride all street legal from factory. FMF exhaust, FMF power commander, has digital camo decals! willing to trade towards polaris iqr or skidoo rev"

The price is ok, $3500. But a new WR250X liists for $6,490 and I've found 2009 models at dealers for as low as $5500. Deducting the usual 30-50% for a used bike, that means I am expecting to pay $3850 tops.

Look at that bike. Loud pipe, half-assed aftermarket electronics, and the gayest paint job since Liberace's rhinestone piano. Of course, the kid owner didn't keep the stock pipe and isn't sure he can find the Yamaha electronics. So, taking off $500 to clean up the body work, $250 for the electronics, $250 for the pipe, at least $500 to have to fix all that crap, and $500 for the 3750 kid no-maintenance, high-abuse miles, My opening offer was $1850 and that wasn't even enough to make it worth calling the fruitloop. Come on, if you're going to trash a bike, at least have the common sense to total it into a wall and save yourself the embarrassment of putting it up for sale and displaying your bad taste to the world. Putting pictures like that on the web is like bragging about your skid marked shorts on Facebook.

I have a line on a bone stock WR with 300 miles in Iowa. I haven't seen pictures yet, but the price is right and the distance isn't too awful. Maybe this weekend, with a little luck.

Couldn't Catch a Break

All Rights Reserved © 2010 Thomas W. Day

Scotty couldn't catch a break. He got tangled up in office politics and ended up laid off during of one of the worst economic periods in seventy years. Out of work and with the usual expenses knocking on the door, he still wanted to take a long motorcycle trip in 2008. It wasn't looking good for him, one week from the day we were planning to leave town. It would get worse.

In 2007, after I got back from Alaska, Scotty got the bike bug. He asked what I thought would be a good bike for commuting from Hudson to downtown St. Paul and I gave him a short list of my recommendations. He started shopping and found what looked like a good deal from an old biker in Wabasha. It was a 1992 Yamaha TDM, one of my all time favorite motorcycles, with low miles and in mediocre condition. We drove down to look at the bike and found it was moderately beat up, but ran, and seemed to be in neglected but reasonable condition for the asking price. Scott bought it and rode it home, struggling with carburetor problems that caused the bike to run insanely lean below 3,000 rpm and worrying about brittle and bald tires.

He cleaned it up and started working on the carb problems right away. After taking the bike apart a dozen times, wrestling with the overly complicated carburetion that was always a hassle on that generation of motorcycles, Scotty gave up and took the bike to a "reputable" Minneapolis independent repair shop to get the last of the tuning problems tweaked into shape. The three-day turn around he'd been promised by the shop turned into three weeks. When he got the bike back, the original $300 estimate had turned into an $800 repair bill, but the bike ran and he was happy.

At least, he was happy until he tried to do some minor work on the bike and discovered the shop had stripped the mounting bolts to his fuel petcock, lost some fairing screws, and done assorted damage that took him a few more hours to sort out. When he called the shop to complain, they admitted to having set a rookie tech loose on Scotty's bike, apologized, offered to "make it right," and asked him to submit a copy of the invoices he'd collected in fixing the stuff they'd screwed up. When he arrived with the list, he was blown off by the shop owner and ended up with a reimbursement offer that was more insult than compensation. A few hundred miles later, the bike was back running as badly as ever. The shop's "fix" was expensive and temporary.

Scotty kept plugging away at the obstacles to his making the trip, though. He found freelance work and filed for unemployment to make up for the lost job. He got involved in starting an on-line school teaching the stuff he'd been teaching at the college. He kept working on the bike and his travel gear, fine tuning both into something he felt confident in traveling with into the "wilderness" of eastern Canada.

Three weeks before the launch date, we made a backroad trip to Duluth where Scotty picked up some extra gear at RiderWearhouse and we put on a few hundred miles finding out how we'd travel together. On the way back, we took a side trip through Jay Cooke State Park and Scotty lost control of the TDM in the first of a pair of quick turns. He crashed, softly, in the gravel beside the road, avoiding a trip into a gully but doing some minor damage to the bike. He put on such a good demonstration going down in his riding gear that a lid-less cruiser rider traveling in the opposite direction vowed he'd be buying a helmet as soon as he got home. Scotty was in pretty good shape, until he swung back on the bike and hyper-extended his left knee. All the way home, he worried about the knee and he was right to worry. By the time he got home, his knee was swollen, painful, and barely mobile. He set to work in a home-schooled physical therapy program and was pretty mobile about a week before we were planning to leave.

Due to his time pressures and a little reluctance to take on a new mechanical task, he decided to have a Hudson shop replace his chain and sprockets. A few hours after dropping the bike off, he got a call from the repair tech asking him to come back to the shop. When he got there, the tech showed him that the previous owner had screwed up the countershaft retaining nut and, in a moronic attempt to repair his mistake, had welded the nut to the countershaft. The sprocket was worn out and moved freely on the shaft spline, behind the weld. The repair estimate was a dozen hours and nearly $2,000. Scott called me, hoping for some miracle, but I could only think of one possibility that didn't involve partial transmission disassembly; carefully grinding the weld away and using a wheel puller to break the sprocket away from the shaft. He had given up on riding the TDM east and didn't want to test my theory. The bike went to a Bayfield, Minnesota repair shop and Scott had his fingers crossed, hoping for a happy outcome. Three weeks later, the shop was still waiting for Yamaha to deliver some key parts. The repair costs were more affordable, but the time estimate for the repair was beyond the point of no return.

When he hung up, Scotty was done in. He'd been working for almost a year, getting himself and his gear and his bike ready for this trip and, short of buying a new bike, he was stuck. At every turn, something happened to keep Scotty off of the road. He couldn't catch a break on a used bike, on a repair shop, or on his own body and skill. He went on a little of the trip in his Toyota, but it wasn't the same.

When we got back from the East Coast, the second shop delivered the bike with parts missing. Important parts. The bike was leaking oil from a missing oil filler gasket. The chain had been installed with no slack. They'd installed the wrong front sprocket, gearing the bike down radically. They tried again and brought the bike back with even more problems. After several passes at repairing the problems they'd created, they started howling "What did you expect?" And even became downright threatening when he asked them to fix the problems they'd caused. Scott had to pull the whole bike apart to figure out what the shop had screwed up. A year later and dozens of hours of labor, Scott finally figured out the fuel delivery problems and the TDM is running like a TDM. He still hadn't taken a decent trip on the bike.

Sometimes, instead of calling for you, the open road does exactly the opposite. If you believe in omens and signs, it's probably best to listen. If you are of a more practical bent, you just tell yourself "the best laid plans of mice and men" and write off all that work and frustration as preparation for life's next event. Sometimes, you are just beaten by events and if there is a lesson in there, somewhere, you try to find it and learn from it.

UPDATE: This fall, Scotty moved to New Mexico on his TDM without incident or mechanical interruption. After a couple of years sorting out the booby traps left by the previous owner and a collection of MN mechanics, the TDM appears to be a real motorcycle again. He's enjoying spectacular rides in the NM mountains and is even getting into riding the 850 off-pavement. Sometimes the break just takes a while to catch up to you. 

Loud Pipes Are Powerful Fun

All Rights Reserved © 2009 Thomas W. Day

People who worry about the future of motorcycling are particularly concerned that the statement being made by a blasting motorcycle exhaust is going to be the death of the industry and the activity on public roads. Proponents of this noise pollution like to claim that "loud pipes save lives," but the evidence for that claim is weak to non-existent. Obviously, if it's true for motorcycles it should be true for small cars, medium sized-cars, buses, and every other highway user and, if one motor vehicle gets to claim that "safe ground," everybody will want a piece of the action. The trend is going the other way. Most industrialized societies have had more than enough of noise pollution and the public is not going to take much more of it. Noisy motorcyclists may claim discrimination, but it's easy to argue that, outside of emergency vehicles, motorcycles are consistently the loudest vehicles on the highway and the least useful.

Anyone familiar with manufacturing and quality systems knows that you don't go after all of your problems at once. Even the federal government doesn't have unlimited resources. One tactic is to use the Pareto Effect, which states "80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes." When it comes to peak traffic noise, improperly and illegally muffled motorcycles top the 20% list. We can whine about being picked on, but logic would dictate we get hammered first. Since evidence points out the fallacy in the connection between loud pipes and safety, the only reason left for making that kind of noise is recreational.

If safety isn't a useful reason to be noisy, why are so many motorcyclists so damn loud? I think the most likely reason is, "Loud pipes are power." Jimmy Page once argued that electric guitar was the coolest musical instrument because "with a flick of a pick, you can drive 100,000 fans deaf." That's power. Similarly, with the twist of a wrist an untalented, uninteresting working class man or woman can nearly deafen everyone within a few dozen yards. At the least, you can irritate people for a mile in every direction of your exhaust. For people who are powerless in their everyday lives, this kind of clout isn't something to sneeze at.

Loud pipes are a statement of freedom. Again, flaunting the law, good manners, and the opinions of people who otherwise might be able to control your life, a noisy motorcycle is a way to "stick it to the man," even if "the man" is your neighbors, your community, and the rest of society. Loud pipes are a giant middle finger held high above the din of a boring life. It's hard to argue someone out of their "right" to make that kind of statement. Hard, but not impossible. When the statement is made so broadly, hitting the people you want to offend and everyone else, it's not hard to imagine a rapid succession of legal events that could shut down a lot more than just loud motorcycles.

A while back, a trio of Canadian goofballs were fined $16,000 for filming themselves shooting ducks from their car. The Canuck boneheads posted a video of themselves on YouTube "laughing and firing at least 42 rounds from a high-powered rifle into a large pond filled with ducks and grebes." One of the three compounded the stupidity by saying. "We thought we were just having fun — really immature, stupid fun, you know?"

Same story, different device. Blasting the highway with omnidirectional, illegal, unnecessary noise is "really immature, stupid fun." I know. Tolerance for immature, stupid fun is vanishing in our overcrowded world. When that noise produces absolutely no value for anyone, even the dumbest biker ought to know how this is going to work out. One of the goofy duck-blasting Canucks apologized by saying, "“We should have known better but we didn’t, and for that I am sorry.” All motorcyclists are going to be apologizing for the actions of a few who didn't know better and aren't bright enough to quit their destructive behavior. Like ignorance, stupidity is a poor legal defense.

Your Opinion, My Opinion

All Rights Reserved © 2009 Thomas W. Day

On a web mail list, I stumbled into a discussion about air filters and it quickly turned into a pissing match between a guy who hated everything about the brand of filter that I've used for almost 30 years and he was pretty unimpressed with all other filtration options. I was a little put off by the dude's venom, so I bailed out of the discussion and fired up my word-processing software to write this column.

In my life, I have been rightly described as someone who is overly-dependent on personal experience and practical application. I'm all for science and theory, as long as it doesn't get between me and getting something done, but I'm not dependent on the advise of sanctioned experts or popular opinion. I've personally known quite a few of the folks the media uses for expert opinions and I'm not particularly impressed. They are all good men and women, but just like you and me they have opinions and their opinions are no more founded in fact than yours or mine. Sometimes, less so. In the end, if something I've been doing has worked for me, I'll keep doing it even when the experts claim it doesn't work. I'd rather spend my time fixing the things that are broke and the things that aren't will get my attention in my next life; the life where I will be born rich and with lots of idle time on my hands.

Sometimes, even well-intentioned scientifically conducted studies don't impress me. Of course, some scientific studies don't live up to the name, either. (I wasted a decade in medical device manufacturing and saw more of that kind of science than I want to think about.) Often, the constraints of a study limit the value of the study to rare conditions. For example, if a rat has a forced daily diet of one-fourth of his body weight in a given substance, he will get fat. Therefore, said given substance is fattening. Yeah, I'll keep that in mind the next time I sit down to a 50pound dinner.

In the case of the aforementioned air filter discussion, the one and only test I found on the subject assumed the user would improperly clean and prepare the filter and, therefore, the filter would be ineffective. On the other hand, I have subjected my bikes to above average dirt road and trail exposure and have seen no signs that my applications of this same filter are allowing above factory filter contamination into the engine. In fact, I have seen signs of contamination on the intakes of other bikes using stock or aftermarket paper filters that I never seen in my bikes. I was told that a poorly functioning filter won't necessarily leave signs on the intake manifold. 2-strokes, especially, tend to produce dust accumulation on the manifold, since the fuel-oil mixture provides a little glue for the contamination. Obviously, engine wear would increase with poor filtration, too. I see those signs of air filter failure on others' bikes when I maintain them, I don't see it on mine, for what it's worth.

I do not know what it's worth. I only know that I'm likely to change my behavior when I see evidence that what I'm doing doesn't work. The older I get, the less inclined I am to experiment with things that seem to work for me.

On the practical side, when I go on a long, backroads trip I don't worry about being able to find a clean filter after a couple thousand miles of dirt roads. All I need is a little soap, warm water, and a small can of filter oil. I don't need a Suzuki dealer, of which there seems to be a short supply in Canada or Alaska or North Dakota, for example.

In the mid-70s, when I first started using this brand of filter, a cross country race in western Nebraska provided a pretty severe test. About twenty miles into 120, the racers got hammered with a dust storm so thick that it was hard to see twenty feet ahead. In the dusty valleys, visibility dropped to less than ten feet. It was a Dust Bowl quality storm, a huge black cloud of sand and dirt that rose out of the southwest horizon and swept over the land like some kind of Hollywood supernatural evil. On top of the dust, the terrain was difficult and dry and the race would have been dusty, even without the storm. With the storm, bikes fell to the side of the road --sputtering and dying--like diseased animals in a plague. When I finished the first lap, I stopped to replace my choked up goggles and my wife and daughters got a kick out of my racoon-eye'd appearance. My mouth and nose were full of dirt, and I spit out the first half-gallon of water I tried to drink as it turned to mud in my mouth.

I took of for the second lap as the storm really turned ugly. About halfway through that lap, the event organizers threw in the red flag and called the event. Out of the original 50-or-so bikes, there were about a dozen of us still running. We cut across the course in a blizzard of dirt and fumbled out way back to our cars and trailers.

Some racers headed for Ogallala, where they planned to hide out in a bar or motel until the storm passed. I had to be back at work on Monday, so I pointed my car east and hit the freeway trying to out run the storm. A few miles later, my car's hydraulic clutch died. Both the master cylinder and the slave were seriously leaking fluid. Without a clutch and towing a trailer, getting back on the road was a hassle, but I had enough fuel to get home and planned to run every stop sign and light that didn't cooperate with my objective. Fifty miles later, my brakes became suspiciously soggy, but they still worked and I escaped the storm and made it home without any additional problems.

After repairing the clutch and brakes on the car and hauling a bucket of sand and dust out of the interior, I started getting the bike ready for the following Sunday. When I pulled the top off of the bike's filter box, I was amazed to see how much dust surrounded the filter. It was nearly buried. To keep from pouring crud into the cylinder, I pulled the whole air box off and dumped it out before removing the air cleaner for service. Still, not a speck of dust to be found in the intake manifold. I raced the bike for another year, sold it to a friend, and it lasted one more year off road before it died. The little Rickman ended up in the old motorcycles graveyard because the new owner tossed the air filter when it became so packed with river sand that the bike stalled. He almost made it back home before the motor seized. I don't know what that proves.

I've been using the same brand of air filters for exactly the opposite reason on my cars (older cars, anyway) and dirt bikes since the 1970s and I'm always amazed at how clean my intakes have been after some really nasty events and LD rides. Maybe it's the preparation and maintenance that bothers others? I put 380k miles on a 1973 Toyota HiLux pickup over 20 years and it was running strong when I sold it. Its whole life was spent with a the same filter. My CX500 gave me 130k miles with only a timing chain problem all with the same filter. All of my dirt bikes, from an OSSA Phantom to a Yamaha XT350 to my current 250 Super Sherpa breathe through that brand. So does my current bike, a Suzuki DL-650. I just have no motivation to change, so until some catastrophe inspires me to amend my opinion I'm sticking with what has worked for me.

I'm not trying to convince you to go with my brand. I'm not trying to convince you of anything except that the old adage "don't fix what ain't broke" isn't a bad way to go. It's not rocket science, but that's not all it's cut out to be either.

Highway Blues

All Rights Reserved © 2010 Thomas W. Day

A while back I spent a flu-infested weekend watching European motorcycle travel videos. For several minutes a critical aspect of the first film, the smooth on-bike camera work, made absolutely no sense to me. Eventually I decided that European roads must actually be paved competently. Any attempt I've made at Minnesota on-bike camera footage has been marred by massive vibration. One incident cost me a few hundred dollars in camera repair bills when the trip vibrated the guts loose in a supposedly "indestructible mini-cam." Over the years, I've had a few videos submitted for my Motorcycling Minnesota show that were interesting, but too regularly interrupted by camera glitches and sync dropouts to be used without hours of frame-by-frame editing. I did that once and decided to never be tempted again, no matter how interesting the footage. I've been trying to do a helmet noise test for the last year, but my solid-state sound gear keeps shaking to pieces while I try to gather road data. Highway construction is simply not a skill belonging to the citizens of this state.

For example, MNDOT built an extravaganza of weird highway engineering in my backyard. Some government genius decided that the five minute traffic jam that occurs every weekday rush hour was justification to build an LA-style multi-lane freeway mousetrap that will filter two lanes of 35E into two lanes of I694. Esher would be proud of MNDOT's assortment of swooping overpasses, but I think they created one of the nation's last monuments to mindless urban sprawl. After two years, the construction is still on-going and I figure MNDOT will finish this shrine a few minutes before gas hits $10/gallon and everything north of White Bear Lake and south of the Humphrey Airport becomes a collection of tele-commuter ghost towns.[1] When the asphalt mousetrap is finished, I give it about three weeks before it all decays into the rubble Minnesota calls "pavement." The crap that passes for asphalt here wouldn't be used for patching rural driveways in other parts of the world. Minnesota and other eastern states build the world's only water-soluble highways.

For the most part, the United States (and, especially, in the east) are incapable of building highways worth traveling. Moments after we pave a section of road, it begins to crumble into disconnected chunks of asphalt, strip-mine-sized potholes, and mini-canyons. It's probably a nasty combination of corrupt bureaucrats and incompetent contractors, but the result is that roads last a few seconds before they begin disintegrate. There is a section of I35 just a bit north of Albert Lee that is so freakin' awful that I once stopped to see if I had a flat front tire or a disintegrating wheel. Heading west on I90, the right lane of the freeway was so trashed that my back was practically pounded into dust. These two pitiful excuses for roads typical of Minnesota's attempts at the art of road building. At the local level, most of St. Paul's residential streets would make a respectable motocross course and Minneapolis is no improvement. Many of our two lane roads are simply a waste of tar and paint.

Before I condemn all of American highways, I have to admit that Colorado actually manages to put a surface on a roadway that approaches a decent paved standard, although they often take a decade to build a mile or two. New Mexico is astoundingly un-American in its ability to manage asphalt and cement. However, Rust Belt highway engineering is a national embarrassment. Chicago's freeways and toll roads are unattended bomb craters. It's hard to tell Cleveland and Detroit pavement from volcano rubble. My limited experience with east coast freeways and highways always makes me appreciate the fact that I'm only partially responsible for the condition of rental cars. Face it, from the western edge of Nebraska heading east, "highway engineering" is an oxymoron.

So here's my suggestion: Give It Up. As a nation, we can't manage construction, so we should admit failure and quit trying. The rural dirt and gravel roads we have are actually pretty drivable, in comparison to the paved disasters. Even if our dirt roads weren't better road surfaces than our freeways, I'm happier knowing that traction and road surface will be consistently poor; rather than inconsistently mediocre.

One should always go with the talents one has, rather than waste effort on unobtainable skills. Since we can't manage pavement, I advise that we give up the whole idea. We're simply not smart enough to deal with it. I recommend that we plow up the highways, freeways, and streets and give back most of the land to the homeowners to whom that property originally belonged. We can leave just enough asphalt for paved bicycle trails, because if MNDOT can't manage pavement, it appears that the folks who design the DNR's bicycle trails are almost competent. A little of the roadway could also be left "undeveloped," for off-road vehicles. I don't mean four-wheel blimps because that's just a waste of space. I mean vehicles like . . . dirtbikes. Good old fashioned, real motorcycles; not girly-man whimp-bikes that require impossible-to-build smooth-as-a-baby's-butt roadways, but real motorcycles that can negotiate any terrain nature coughs up. This brilliant solution would inspire mass transit design, getting the idiots out of their SUVs, and reduce hydrocarbon emissions.

And it would be a lot more fun to ride to work.

[1] A depressing, but complete site for all sorts of links to information about the coming energy crisis is http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/.

Minnesota, Still Not the Place to Buy a Bike

Way back in 2005, I was hunting for a dual purpose commuter bike and I wrote about the weird Minnesota used bike seller's market. I'm not really in the hunt this winter, but I'm interested in a couple of possible upgrades to my garage candy. So, I've been watching Craig's List and that got me into a couple of email conversations with sellers. While the country is mired in what is likely to be called the New Great Depression, motorcycle prices are just as idiotic as always in Minnesota. As I write this it is 3 degrees outside and we're not likely to see anything dramatically warmer for at least a month. Why anyone would buy a motorcycle in Minnesota in February is a mystery that leads the investigator into the realm of insanity and irrational behavior.

The longest conversation I had with a seller this winter was with a guy who was selling a Suzuki 2006 DRZ400SM. The bike was a ways from my ideal, so I was mostly curious as to why he thought he could get $5000 for a used motorcycle that sells for $6300 list and is usually discounted another $500-1000 because dealers can't move them fast enough at list price. His explanation was that he was "underwater on the bike" and couldn't sell it for less without having to come up with cash to pay off the loan. He was also desperate for cash, since he was buying a home. Obviously, his banker didn't learn anything from the last year of sub-prime mortgage lending fiasco.

Like all certifiable Minnesota motorcyclists, this guy was convinced that he would get his price and that I was trying to cheat him by quoting the Kelly Blue Book price or any other reference. He was particularly incensed by my suggestion that his Two Brothers pipe, the carb kit, and the resultant "tuning" he'd done had devalued the bike below the Blue Book price. As if paying lots of money for wreaking the performance and multiplying the irritation factor of the bike makes it less valuable? What kind of crazy person would even suggest such a thing?

Me.

After 14 years in the frozen north, there are two things I firmly believe Minnesotans are incapable of accomplishing: any aspect of competent highway design and all areas of motorcycle tuning. I would pay extra for a used motorcycle that has had every adjustment factory sealed so there is evidence that not a single screw has been turned, a jet replaced, or a needle moved by a resident of this state. Every motorcycle I have purchased in Minnesota (and a couple of other places near here) that has been "tuned" by a past owner has required hours of repair to get the bike back to something resembling the original factory-issued performance. Bike after bike has been hacked, piped, and mangled until the poor things can barely get out of their own way. Which is what led the previous owners to give up and sell their precious motorcycles for the outrageous pittance that I'm willing to spend.

As to the pricing issue, I regularly remind myself of what motorcycles are actually worth by referring to Craig's List in Denver, San Diego, and Los Angeles; places where people actually ride motorcycles regularly and year-around. That used and abused 2006 DRZ400 would be priced from $1600 to $3400 in Denver, no more than $3000 in San Diego (with useful add-ons instead of noisy ones), and rarely more than $2500 in LA/Orange County. There are lots of bikes to choose from, too. The price will go up a little in Denver during the summer, but prices are year-around-constant in southern California. Even crazier, once you get to California or Colorado, you can find better deals than those on Craig's List or the city newspapers.

You could argue that driving from Minnesota to any of those places and riding back would wipe out any savings you might get. True. That doesn't explain the completely unrealistic Minnesota and Midwest prices, but that is true. On the other hand, since you're buying the bike to take a trip why not take a trip, buy a bike, and take another trip back home on the bike? I've done that, twice, in the last 10 years and both trips and bikes were well worth the train ride to the bike. I like train trips almost as much as motorcycle trips, so it has been a double-win. I have some friends in southern California I haven't seen for a couple of decades, maybe I need to plan a spring trip to the coast to buy a bike?

As usual, "just looking" is turning into something more focused. I don't need a new motorcycle. I don't even really want one. Ok, that's a lie but not much of one. If I could get the damn Sherpa to quit dribbling oil I'd be happy with it as my commuter bike. I am happy with the V-Strom and don't expect to replace it for years to come. I think looking at idiot Minnesota used bike prices challenges me to get a better deal, just to show that I can.

Economically, none of this (including my end of the deal) makes any sense. A smart guy would, at least, sell the bike for a Minnesota price and show some kind of profit. I still don't have the Minnesota hoarding gene. When I'm ready to sell, I look at the Blue Book trade-in price and advertise my bikes in that territory. I deal, too. Make me an offer anywhere near my asking price and I want the damn thing out of the garage to make room for whatever new thing I'm occupied with at the moment. That goes for everything I own, not just motorcycles. For 40 years, my idea of living right was to be able to pack everything I own into a VW bug. My motto was "when in doubt, throw it out." I'm old, settled, and married so that's been modified a bunch over the years, but it's still an ideal. If I don't "get my price," I'm as likely to give it away as I am to find a place to store stuff until I can sell it. I take "use it or lose it" seriously.

I guess that explains why I will never be a real Minnesotan.

The Roar of the Marching Morons

This is a freaky funny video. Some of you may desperately want to own a SoundRacer V8. Some of you will recognize the juvenile symptom demonstrated in popular motorcycle magazines when editors and reviewers say "the bike needs a little boost from a less restricted pipe." Some of you will want to apply for a grant to study human perceptions and mental deficiencies demonstrated with the SoundRacer V8 and the usual "performance" gained by wasting money on loud pipes on slow bikes.

Whatever your reaction, it's obvious that this dude is actually deluded into believing his kidmobile can carry on like a sportscar because of the noise made by his car's stereo system. Louder is faster. Damn, humans are dumb. What kind of parent names their kid "Shonky?" Is that a merger of s**t and donkey?

It's Our Turn

Tonight, Comedy Central airs "The F Word," South Park's take on motorcycle bozos. The story synopsis is "The boys fight back against the loud and obnoxious Motorcycle Riders that are disrupting everyone in South Park." In a couple of days, you'll be able to see it here: http://www.southparkstudios.com/episodes/.

Eric Cartman is my all time favorite comedy character and I am really looking forward to seeing my little buddy take on the Hardley crowd.

What is the difference between a Harley and a Hoover?

Sadly, I did not write this, but I found it on Craig's List and was overcome with an irresistable urge to make sure as much of the world as possible has the opportunity to read it. Whoever the author is, I salute you:

What is the difference between a Harley and a Hoover? (Minneapolis)
Date: 2009-04-19, 9:54AM CDT

ANSWER: On a Hoover, the dirt bag goes on the INSIDE!

(Sorry, Craig's List removed the rant. Probably some loser HD fans in CL's admin. Nuts, it would have been cool to have copied and pasted the whole rant, but I didn't realize CL would be so wimpy.) I must have received a dozen accusations that this was my rant and I was too gutless to sign it. If I could write that well, I'd have signed it.

A Cool Idea?

I'll admit it, I'm a sucker for video. In the last year, I've been sent at least a half-dozen YouTube clips that turned out to be phony; and I fell for all of them. This could be the same kind of scam, but it makes some sort of sense; at least, to me. It's a hell of an idea for those field repairs that require more time, tools, and patience than some of us have.