Faster than a Speeding Helmet

My second bike was a 1970's (not sure of the exact year) Yamaha TX500. I guess it was technically my third, but my second was a Honda 350 that I sold within a week to buy an electric guitar, but that's an entirely different story. It had been around a year since I was caught speeding by my mom (see "Full Throttle Duck") and as this story shows, my lesson learned was pretty short lived. My mom will probably read this, so I'd like to apologize to her in advance. I'm going to discuss one of many adventures I had on this bike. I think I only rode it for one summer, but it was an interesting one!

So, for a fourteen year old who is used to riding dirt bikes, a street bike is a huge leap in top speed! Going from a bike that topped out around 60mph to a bike that could go 100+ was crazy (this bike probably did not go that fast, but the speedometer said it did).

One of my best friends at the time (actually he's still one of my best friends) had an open faced helmet from the sixties. It was like the retro helmets that are popular today (Biltwell has some great ones). The color was metallic green. Now, keep in mind that back then, these helmets were not seen as cool (nowadays you'd have a line of hipsters a mile long waiting to buy it). As a matter of fact, it looked hilarious to the rest of us. To make it better, he cut up a piece of a brass shelf to make a spike, which he glued to the top of the helmet. Of course safety was at the forefront of his mind!

So, of course he wanted to see how fast this bike was. The problem was he really didn't have much experience on a bike (he rode a Polaris quad, which I believe uses a centrifugal clutch, like a snowmobile), so I wasn't about to let him just ride the bike. This decision was also supported by the fact that this guy was a bit crazy when it came to riding stuff to its limit.

So picture this...two teenage boys cruising on an old Yamaha at about a hundred miles an hour. The one on the back has that sweet spiked helmet and is throwing his fist in the air and screaming "wooooo" the entire time. I wish I was a guy on the side of the road watching that happen. I'm actually surprised that no one noticed, or at least no one mentioned it. Another story of my moronic adolescence!

"I have one speed, I have one gear: go!" - Charlie Sheen