Motorcycle Dreamin

This past weekend I was really longing for riding weather. Of course it's January, so there'll be none of that for at least two months in this frozen hell that I live in. While wallowing in my misery, I googled "winter motorcycle." The pictures that came up were of ice racing bikes and a couple of brave souls riding in a snowstorm. Then I saw this one.

 

I said, "Holy shit" out loud when seeing this. This bike is f@&$ing awesome! Apparently this Triumph Chepassione is a place that made this custom bike (along with others) and has a blog with the details. If you want to read it, you should brush up on your Italian, which I have not, so I cannot tell you the specifics. Then I saw that it was posted in 2009. How the hell am I just seeing this now! I've seen the dirt bikes with the track and ski conversions and that video of the street bike with spiked tires, but nothing as gorgeous as this! I’m sure all you guys who keep up with the latest stuff are thinking I’m an idiot for not already knowing about this bike.

We've been throwing around the idea of doing a KLK Cycles project bike, so maybe now it'll be a winter bike! I can guarantee it won't be as awesome as this one, but hopefully it'll still be cool. We have a line on a Honda 350 scrambler. That could be a cool ice bike, right? If we do this, it’ll probably be rolled out next winter. It seems like a pretty good way to get through the winter boredom. I would love to do the snow conversion on a dirt bike, but the ski and track kits are expensive and it wouldn’t make much sense without a fairly new dirt bike, which we don’t have (maybe someday).

With that being said, if you'd like to support this project, please go to our gofundme.com site. I'm kidding! But, have you noticed all of the stupid go fund me sites people are putting up for arbitrary reasons? But that is an entirely different rant/story.

“A lot of people like snow. I find it to be an unnecessary freezing of water.” ― Carl Reiner

 

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

 

The Cold Choice

A few years back, I worked at a company whose parent corporation was based out of Washington, near the Oregon state line. I and a few other guys had a weekly teleconference with a salesman working in the main office. A coworker mentioned that I had ridden in that morning when it was 30ish degrees F. The salesman was shocked! He rode a sport tourer (I can't remember the model) and said he only rode his bike when it was above 50.

I'm not trying to call anyone out for not being tough, but if I limited myself to riding only in 50+ degrees, my riding season would go from short, to nearly nonexistent. I wish I had the luxury to do that. The other truth is that on many days, it's less than 40 at sunrise, but becomes a beautiful day later. 

I'm not trying to say that you should force yourself to ride if you don't want to, but look at it like something you'll be happy you did later. On cold mornings, the last thing I really want to do is leave my warm bed for the cold outside. I do it and usually enjoy my ride to work even if it is a little bone chilling. I definitely am grateful when it's 70 degrees when I leave work! My rule during riding season is that I ride unless it's raining in the morning (I could ride then too if I had a proper rain suit, which I'm too cheap to invest in). This of course is barring some out of the ordinary circumstance.

I wonder if I would ride my bike on cold mornings if I lived in a warmer climate. I want to say, f&$@ yeah I'd still ride! It's hard to tell without living there. Would I become complacent with the longer riding season? I think that I'd probably sell my car and force myself to ride no matter what. I used the word "force" again, like riding is something we don't want to do. But, let's face it, sometimes the things we enjoy doing doesn't put us on the easiest path.

I guess I'll end by asking, what's the coldest temperature that you ride in?

"Nothing burns like the cold." - George R.R. Martin

Full Throttle Duck

So, I know that I've been pretty tough on people and actions that I have deemed unintelligent. To show that I'm just as guilty (if not more) than the rest of you bikers and bikettes, here's one of my infamous motorcycle moments.

My first bike was a 1977 Yamaha DT 100 enduro. My dad bought it for me when I was 11. He spent $180 on the bike and $20ish on parts it needed. Wow, did I love that bike! My friends who had newer and nicer ones poked a little fun (nicknamed it the duck for its yellow color and bill, like fender - see photo), but I didn't care.

One fine summer day, while riding home from my parents' business, I decided that it was definitely time to show off what this bike could do! I had one of my buddies on the back and I met another friend on the way, who was on his own bike. I went through all the gears and held the throttle wide open for the entire 3 mile trip home (please note that I grew up in the country and half this trip was on a dirt road). The bike topped out at around 65 mph (so the speedo said), which is fast for a kid of 13.

My friend and I pulled in to my yard, where I locked up the back brake and skidded to a stop, leaving a cool little tire strip (awesome for a 13 year old). I hopped off of the bike, ready to brag about how fast I went and then I looked down the road. Shit! My mom was pulling into the yard! In all of my glory, I never bothered to check behind me. She had been close enough for long enough to know that I was going way too fast.

So, after a long reprimand and getting my riding privileges revoked, I learned my lesson. Well, at least I learned that you should check if your mom's around before you show off!

“To be old and wise, you must first have to be young and stupid.” – Unknown

Cover Up

Lately I've been seeing a lot of pictures and video of women in bikinis and thongs riding motorcycles. Some have been passengers and others were riding the bike themselves. Now I'm all for pics and vids of girls in thongs and I'm nowhere near a gear Nazi, but am I the only one that thinks this is f&%$ing idiotic?

Like I said, I'm no gear Nazi. I ride with a t-shirt when it's hot and you'll even catch me without a helmet once in a while (gasp!!). I know I sound like a hypocrit now, but you won't catch me posting a picture online with myself riding with no shirt and no helmet (actually, I don't think I've ever ridden without a shirt and I cringe when I see some douche riding with a pair of shorts on).

As a guy who has some experience with rolling on some asphalt at decent speeds, believe me that "dat ass" ain't gonna be anything to look at when it meets the pavement with nothing but underwear covering it. It's gonna look more like dat hamburger! I wiped out wearing a hoodie and still have scars on my back proving that cotton doesn't protect skin so well in a crash. My wife also almost lost a toe because she was wearing sandals at the time (I protested this like crazy, but she didn't think it would be necessary for our "short ride").

I know I sound old and crusty now and it's about to get worse when I ask the next question. What kind of message does this send? I watched a video showing a girl in a thong's butt jiggle while riding on the back of a sportbike at high speeds. While this was entertaining, some girl watched it and said, "look how much attention this lady got. I can do that!" She'll hop on the back of some high school kid's bike wearing almost nothing and he'll try to show off and wipe out in the process.

Ok, rant over, but wouldn't it be a really cool video that showed a women posing with a bike, then putting on some real gear and riding the bike. Actually showing girls can be hot and ride their own bike!

Remember boys and girls, we aren't invinsible!

"You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else." - Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club