This is why I don’t like biker parades, too much stupid in one place never comes to a happy ending.
#115 All or Nothin'
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I wonder if the "all or nothin'" attitude is an American foilble? There is no shortage of intolerant religions around the world, so I suspect we're just the devils I know rather than some original-thinking exception. This came to mind when I read my daughter's latest short biography; "A History of the Small Press" This is exactly the kind of book that would drive any Midwestern guilt-ridden parent to a hermitage. Although parenting ought to have been more than enough stimulation to get that job done.
Holly tells a teenage-angst-filled tale of how the world didn't get her and drove her to failure in high school and the radical edge of rich-and-middle-class-kid punk rock society in the tough, unforgiving world of southern California teenage drama. As Martin Mull told it in Ukulele Blues, "I woke up this afternoon . . . I felt so lowdown . . . I threw my drink across the lawn." From her perspective, she had no choice but to rebel against the oppressive "structure" provided by her hippy parents. This is exactly the kind of tyranny that spawned the American Revolution or, at least, inspires grade school children to complain that their chocolate milk was made with 2% instead of whole milk.
From my perspective, it was pretty obvious that a kid who had always been the "smartest kid" in her small Midwestern schools was overwhelmed in a 3,000 student California high school taking AP classes with 30 other "smartest kids." Rather than kick up her game, she quit playing and hung out with the dumb kids so she could feel smart without having to work for it. My wife and I tried a thousand ways to explain to her how foolish that tactic was, but while, physically, teenagers are adults, they have been mentally retarded by raging hormones and are usually less susceptible to rational argument than they were as infants. Today, Holly is on the parent side of this experience and is just as confused as my wife and I were 25 years ago.
I see that same attitude in a lot with newbie motorcyclists; and folks who ride like beginners and appear to be proud of it. Motorcycling requires the development of a lot of skills and practicing those skills often result in the rider's looking pretty foolish. Most people spend more time pretending they look cool than doing the things that actually are cool.
People buy motorcycles they can "flat foot" because they're afraid they won't be able to make a smooth stop, or start, if they can't paddle their way up to speed. For rank beginners (with less than a few hours on the saddle) there might be something to this, but anyone who rides well learns how to change velocity without using his feet as training wheels. Bicyclists learn how to deal with not being able to touch the ground from the seat pretty early on, but not all motorcyclists are competent bicyclists. Some have never ridden a bicycle, hard as that is to believe. Even more to the point, there is nothing about paddling from start to stop that looks cool to anyone but the same characters who think pirate outfits and gangster tats are hip. The rest of us just shake our heads and do whatever we can to disassociate ourselves from what the public calls "bikers."
Developing any physical skill requires only one thing; practice. Hours and hours of practice; 10,000 hours, if you want to get really good. Few of us want to put in that kind of time doing something difficult. A lot of us don't ever "practice" mastering anything. Learning how to practice is one of the necessary skills every "expert" has to acquire (except economic experts who just make up crap and call it "science" and "facts" and laugh at the rest of us when we believe them). I've been playing guitar since I was 13, but I'm still a beginner because I quit practicing once I played well enough to reproduce pop songs. Doing what you know is not practice. Doing what you suck at is practice.
I rode and raced motorcycles for forty years before I seriously began to practice riding technique. Other than working at trail riding and off-road racing techniques, after three decades of riding I had not much more real practice under my belt than I had after a few weeks of riding my brother's Harley Sprint to work. Including those hours of off-road work and what I've learned since becoming an MSF instructor, I suspect I have about 3,000 hours of actual riding practice. At this rate I won't live long enough to become half of an expert. Just being in the saddle isn't practice. I probably have logged 8,000-20,000 riding hours (depending on how you time approximately at least 350,000 miles of motorcycling). Little of that riding time lives up to the higher standard of practice.
Because motorcycling is a life-support activity, getting good at it is an all-or-nothing affair. When your skills are called for, you either have them or don't. If you don't, you may not get a second chance to decide what kind of motorcyclist you're going to be.
When I admonish other riders to practice life-saving skills, it's another case of the kettle calling the pot "black." I also need to keep practicing those skills because they are the difference between me riding jelly-side-up or skidding down the road jelly-side-down.
MMM March 2013
Book Review: Down and Out in Patagonia, Kamchatka, and Timbuktu
by Dr. Gregory W. Frazier, 2014
All Rights Reserved © 2014 Thomas W. Day
While I've met, talked to, and even sat on a discussion panel with Dr. Frazier, Down and Out introduced me to more things about him and his past and his motorcycling adventures than I knew was available to learn. For one, who knew that Dr. Frazier was a Texas hippie? Not me. If I had, we'd have had completely different post-VBR-session beer drinking events. For two, Dr. Frazier's experiences with Harleys and Indians was a complete surprise to me.
A segment of the Motobooks press release has this to say about Dr. Frazier and his motorcycle history, "The first-ever, first-hand chronicle of Dr. Gregory W. Frazier's never-ending motorcycle ride. A little over 40 years ago, a man named Gregory W. Frazier got on his motorcycle, went for a ride, and never returned. He's still out there, circumnavigating the globe: exploring the jungles of Asia in the winter, trout fishing in Alaska in the summer, and covering all points in between during the rest of the year. He's been shot at by rebels, jailed b y unfriendly authorities, bitten by snakes, run over by Pamplona bulls, and smitten by a product of Adam's rib. He's circled the globe five times and has covered well over one million miles (and counting). During those past four decades, Dr. Frazier has been chronicling and photographing his around-the-world adventures, publishing 13 books on the subject (including one previous title with Motorbooks), the majority of which have been manuals for touring specific locations or general how-to-tour-by-motorcycle books. He has also produced 9 documentary DVDs, but until now, nothing in print has encompassed the entirety of his worldwide motorcycle adventures. . ."
I don't think any readable book could hope to have "encompassed the entirety of his worldwide motorcycle adventures," but this book does a pretty good job of explaining who Dr. Frazier is and where he's been. For $35 list ($26.15 on Amazon.com and $26.25 on Motobooks.com) you can read about Dr. Frazier's early exile from his family due to his motorcycle fixation and mediocre study habits (I never did figure out where the "Dr." comes from.) all the way to his inventive methods of financing his around-the-world adventures and his trip around the world with a handicapped passenger. In between, are his adventures, his motorcycle "education," and a lot more about the man than I've gleaned from his previous books. Fraizer is a complicated combination of humble aware-of-his-Ugly-Americanism tourist and a confident, in-crowd world traveler. He's hard not to like.
In 2010, Frazier retired from round-the-world travelling, which does not mean the same thing for him as it does for mortals, "I’m not done tasting the environments, economies and cultures of the world from atop a motorcycle. There are still plans to attempt reach distance places, as well as to return to some I want to see more of, like Colombia and Brazil in South America, as well as more of Eastern Asia and Africa. I merely plan to quit this foolish squandering of travel funds to transport motorcycles over water. 75% of the earth is water and the increasing costs and bureaucratic hassles associated with transporting motorcycles to the remaining 25% have been seriously cutting into my remaining travel years and project budgets."
Down and Out provides a lot details about the cost and complication of those "projects," but it would require a whole book to fill in the blanks if you are hoping that reading this book will put you in a position to fill Fraizer's shoes. As he says, more than once, he was fortunate to have been bitten by the travel bug at a rare moment when politics, economics, accessibility, and temperament all aligned to allow him to go the places he went relatively safely and inexpensively. Many of those places are unstable and insanely violent today. Even more of those places are specially hostile to Americans (although Fraizer often identified himself as a "Canadian"). So, reading Down and Out has an aspect of a time piece and a history book. Still, brave people are riding motorcycles in remote and hostile places every day and Dr. Gregory Fraizer has been an inspiration to many world travelers. This book will be one more stone in the staircase he has built to put us all on the roads around the world.
Reliability, We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Reliability
Consumer Reports, that biker-oriented magazine, recently published an article titled “Who Makes the Most Reliable Motorcycle?” Not surprisingly, Yamaha, Suzuki, Honda, and Kawasaki topped the list with 11-17% 4-year failure rates. Equally no surprise, except to their dedicated fanbase, Can-Am, BMW, Ducati, and Triumph were at the bottom of the list with 29-42% failure rates. The whole detailed customer satisfaction report is pretty interesting.
Three wheel vehicles, especially two-in-front-one-in-back styles, are particularly trouble-prone. “Cruisers appear to require fewer repairs than other types of motorcycles, with just a 15 percent failure rate by the fourth year of ownership.” If my Craig’s List spreadsheet is any indicator of what that might be, I’d suspect the incredibly low mileage is a big part of why cruisers don’t fail much. They also aren’t ridden much.
The cost of maintenance is pretty interesting, too. “Of those that did incur out-of-pocket expenses, the average motorcycle repair bill was $342, with the cost being heavily dependent on brand and type. For those brands that we have adequate data on, median repair costs ranged from $269 for Kawasaki to $455 for BMW. Dual-sport/adventure bikes and cruisers were less expensive to repair, costing $313 and $322 on average, and sport touring models were pricier at $383.” The stuff that breaks is equally interesting, with electrical systems at 24%. So much for how installing more electronics in our bikes and cars is going to make them more reliable. Personally, I’d be the cheap and mis-applied connectors are a huge contributor to this failure mechanism.
Don’t Believe Me, Read This
[Thanks Paul]
Carmakers need to fear for their lives—and it’s not just about getting electric cars right
“When you put the two together, you get urban-dwellers tooling around in shared, autonomous vehicles, and—reckons Bill Ford, executive chairman of Ford Motor—buying far fewer cars. Ford has said the company is already having to adapt because of shared driving, and predicts that autonomous functions just short of self-driving will be installed in most vehicles within five years.”
Go for the comments, too. There is a chimp named “Topper Gunns” who appears to not only be illiterate but universally clueless. Comments sections are, apparently, where the mentally naked can go to expose themselves.
#114 Something Happened Here
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Minnesota's most famous citizen once wrote, "Something is happening here, but you don't know what it is. Do you, Mr. Jones?" After a few years of talking about why motorcycles don't get decent fuel economy, Honda went behind my back and did something about it. I didn't even notice, until a friend bought an NC700X and wrote, "Got over 2,000 miles on the bike. Last 3 fill-ups I got 77, 79, and 92mpg." Even though Honda had advertised the bike's economy at 64mpg, a lot of new owners have been surprised with significantly better mileage over a wide variety of conditions. I hope this series of new-breed-motorcycles aimed at motorcyclists in the 21st Century has the success it deserves. For decades, we've been served motorcycles that concentrate on performance and, mostly, ignore fuel economy. Even small bikes, like my Yamaha WR250X, barely improve on the 35-45mpg standard motorcycle efficiency expectation. A few years back, I did a review of Motorcycle Consumer News's bike spec wrap-up and found that fuel economy was actually declining as fuel prices increased. The best mileage bikes in their spreadsheet were mediocre performers relative to economy cars.
Reality-deniers aside, fuel is only going to become more expensive. We are on the downside slope of frantically scratching out the last bits of fossil fuel for increasingly irrational costs and vanishing energy efficiency. Oil companies are making another round of the near-empty wells throughout the Midwest, siphoning the last drops with pumps that haven't been powered up since the 70's. We're drilling two miles down and two miles across to tap into the Bakken formation's barely-accessible reserves for negative energy returns to encourage the illusion that the country is "energy independent." Economically, other industrialized nations are leading the move away from inefficiency and obsolete technologies while we pretend that shuffling over-hyped paper is actual work. With all that in mind, someday soon a liter sportbike that barely manages 20mpg will be about as Craig's-List-able as an electric typewriter or a sewing machine.
The two efficiency problems with motorcycle design are (1) the fact that "you can have power or you can have economy" and (2) motorcycle aerodynamics are, as Kevin Cameron described, "ugly . . . [compared to] cars, which can have very much better drag coefficients even though their frontal areas are greater." In the past, the majority of motorcycle engine designs have been about power and appearance, mostly neglecting economy.
So, Honda attacked the problem from the engine design direction. As one reviewer put it, "This has the potential to be the most significant motorcycle engine of recent times." The most simple explanation of the NC's motor is that Honda designers halved the four-cylinder motor used in the Jazz and the Fit and stuffed it into a motorcycle frame. It's more complicated than that, but only because the sawed-in-half motor wouldn't hold fluids. Otherwise, there are more similarities between the two vehicle power plants than differences. The NC's engine bore and stroke (73 x 80mm) are the same as the Jazz car engine; as are many of the engine components and the 6,500 rpm redline and 3,000 rpm shift-points and torque curve. A single throttle body feeds both cylinders in a 270-degree crank configuration. The pistons are coated with a low-resistance resin and the rockers are on roller bearings to reduce friction. There is a single counter-balancer to reduce weight and friction. This engine was designed, primarily, for fuel efficiency while hanging on to the fun-factor, secondarily.
While developing the NC-concept, Honda did something weird; the company's engineers studied what motorcyclists do with their motorcycles. Honda's research determined that riders spend 90% of their riding time well below 85mph and designed the NC accordingly. Honda claims the bike gets to 75mph faster than the CBR600, with the theory being that everyday riding won't feel inhibited by the high efficiency design. The motor produces 51hp, which isn't chicken feed by cruiser standards but the design's intent is to provide cage-like performance while retaining the fun of two wheels.
Based on review comments, I suspect it will take a few generations of this kind of bike before the hooligans who make up the majority of bike reviewers get it. Practically every new idea in motorcycling has met with derision from the press and this one won't be any different. With that in mind, I suggest that, if this approach appeals to you, you read as little as possible about the bike and go ride one.
For the last several years, I've expected motorcycling to slowly vanish into the buggy-whip territory of obsolete-toys-that-rich-guys-still-play-with. Smart roads don't include motorcycles in their design parameters. If the NC makes a dent in the market, Honda may have put some future into motorcycling's future.
MMM Winter 2012
Product Review: More Miles for Me
All Rights Reserved © 2012 Thomas W. Day
After my 2011 cruise around Lake Superior, my only bitch about the WR250X is the mediocre mileage. At 55mpg, the stock two gallon tank barely gets me past the 100 mile mark before the fuel injection is sucking fumes. Yamaha claims 71mpg for this bike, but I have never done better than 62 and the Lake Superior trip knocked down 55mpg for several tanks in all sorts of conditions. I installed a 3.1 gallon IMS tank, which gives me closer to 170 miles between full to drained, but 150 to reserve is pretty predictable. I need a minimum of 200 miles per tank for touring. What to do?
I looked at the IMS 4.5 gallon tank, but sticking 27 pounds, plus the tank weight that far forward on a lightweight 250 seems like a bad idea. I like the front suspension somewhat soft and that won't work if I load up the front tire with more fuel weight. Plus, I do not trust the idea of making the radiator guards into fuel storage. I've read about a few guys who have crashed off-road and gouged a hole in one of those protruding scoops, losing all of their fuel capacity. I like my "guards" to be guards.
At first, I thought about mounting the bracket on my Yamaha rear rack, but that would screw up the rack for every day use. Target sells a 9-1/2 x 15 x 1/4" black polyethylene cutting board that sells for about $10. Poly cuts easily on a table saw with a plywood or crosscut blade, so I hacked out a plate that fits on the my rear rack's frame. A little finish work, $3 worth of stainless screws and washers, and I have a solid mount for the gas can and it is narrow enough for my Giant Loop Coyote Saddlebag to fit over the tank and attach normally. Even better, with a $20 extension, I can load up two 1 gallon tanks, still use my Giant Loop gear, and get a 250 mile or better range out of the WR. Now, we're talking adventure touring!
I Am Prejudiced
So, I'm at a party last week and I get introduced to some Boomers who own motorcycles because . . . well, you know, I have a motorcycle. Nice people, but I assume they are the Hardley crowd because we're in Wisconsin and we're all old. I'm trying to politely escape and get back to my pouting ("You can't make me have fun.") grandson who has drug himself away from his video game addiction to hang out with us. After a while I'm back in the party crowd and one of the bikers starts talking about his motorcycle. Turns out it is a 1999 Suzuki SVS, one of my favorite bikes of all time. His buddies ride a BMW 800GS, an '88 Honda Hawk, and a V-Strom. All nice guys, not an asshole in the bunch, and not a Harley in the bunch. I clearly missed out on a couple of really interesting conversations earlier because of my allergy to group rides, Harley owners, and the usual biker bullshit.
Product Review: Geza Gear Elite-Plus Half-Cover
All Rights Reserved © 2014 Thomas W. Day
Pre-Geza Gear, the bicycles, the WR250X, the trailer, and everything attached was covered in slush and ice after 350 miles of miserable west Texas weather.
Not much went well for the first couple of months on our 2013-2014 attempt to play snowbirds. A day before we left home, my custom-fitted Harbor Freight trailer took a hit when a friend decided to stand on the hitch to counterbalance loading the bike and bent the frame so badly I almost decided to leave the bike at home. The VW-based RV turned out to be allergic to rain, ice, and snow. Our planned route was sacrificed to accommodate the perfect storm of failing vehicle, unseasonably cold and wet weather in practically every direction, and even our bicycles turned out to be more of a hassle than assets.
The only thing that worked as expected was my beautiful and beloved Yamaha WR250X. After 350 miles of slogging through a sudden ice storm between central Texas and Carlsbad, New Mexico, I expected to have done permanent damage to that sorely abused machine. After I slid it off of the trailer and cleaned it up, the best sound I could have imagined was when the little bike fired up instantly in 30F weather and got me into Carlsbad for much needed groceries and supplies. I immediately went on-line to find a cover that would protect my blue beauty from any more vicious weather. I found Geza Gear (www.gezagear.com) and that company's assortment of stretchy covers that are guaranteed to survive practically anything from 12 to 72 months, depending on the model.
All loaded up and ready to go exploring; sleet, snow, or rain be damned.
On the advice of Geza Gear's customer service, I went for the fairly expensive Pro-Elite version of the cover, along with the stuff sack and mirror covers for about $270 shipped. The cover arrived just in time to go through the last round of ice and wind before we left Albuquerque. Since then, the bike has been protected by that cover for 3,800 miles of, mostly, bright sun and heavy winds traveling around New Mexico and back home through Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Iowa. We did hit a little blast of rain in Missouri, but it didn't test the cover much.
The Pro Elite's #9238 material is a wonder. You can cut slits in the stuff for tie-down straps to pass through without worrying about those incursions turning into never-ending tears. The stuff is tough as leather and flexible as Spandex. Not once in all of those miles the cover even appear to make the slightest effort to blow off; and we took some buffeting from near-tornado winds in Texas and a Dust Bowl-quality storm in Roswell, New Mexico.
All of their materials are designed to "materials can take the punishing effects and monumental stresses of applied wind-forces from 55mph to over 100mph while being towed on your motorcycle on an open trailer cross-country, without shredding or buffetting." The custom designed materials are not off-the-shelf stuff you can find from any other manufacturer that I know of. With names like Elonitec, Elonitec/Antron, Duracor, Iridiex, #9238, #12373, LX88, and Iridiex/Kevlar/GoreTex, I'm not sure where you'd start to look, if you wanted to imitate Geza Gear's product line.
The rear view window look at the cover on the road at 65mph. Barely a flicker from the material and all of the important bits are protected.
There isn't much that I can add to the company's claim that their covers are "cut and sewn is determined from YOUR EXACT bike year, make and model." The Yamaha WR250X isn't exactly a common animal and it's a long ways from the kind of motorcycle on which Geza Gear's products are probably found, but they assembled a cover that was an exact fit for my motorcycle, including some cute rearview mirror covers and cutouts for the mirrors and a lift for my bike's short windshield. You can see from the included pictures how precisely the cover fits my bike and how little motion there is in transit. For someone who is going to be travelling for a while, I have found nothing comparable.
There are a lot of decisions I made that winter that I would avoid on a second pass, buying my Geeza Gear cover is not one of them. I expect to get years of service out of this terrific protection.
#113 Coffee and Motorcycles
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The two go together like politics and corruption, right? You can't ride a motorcycle for any serious distance without the assistance of the coffee bean. More importantly, I don't.
I was slow to my coffee addiction. Until I was in my late 30's, I hadn't messed with coffee (or any other stimulant) and couldn't see a reason for doing so. My argument was "I might need my adrenal gland for something real someday, like running from rabid dogs. I want adrenaline to work when I need it." Robin Williams' statement about coke ("Anything that makes you paranoid and impotent, give me more of that.") seemed to apply to me, too. That was a good argument when I was young, active, still producing snippets of testosterone, didn't have a titanium ass, and practically jumped out of bed in the morning "ready and raring" to get on with my day.
I am no longer that jackass. Today, I desperately need a service person (preferably someone young, attractive, female, and scantily clad) to administer some kind of combination of lubricant and pain reliever to most of my joints so that I can carefully ease my busted body out of bed with minimal shock and the complete opposite of awe. Once I'm mobile and wandering around the house aimlessly, I need caffeine to provide whatever focus I'm going to have for the day. And you know that I know the difference between "need" and "want."
I know. I'm kidding myself. This is another example of doing something stupid simply because it is easy, more fun than the alternatives, quick, and effective. A real man would kick himself out of bed, do fifty pushups and one-hundred setups before going to the kitchen and downing a blended concoction of organic carrots, a banana, blueberries, a raw egg from a free-range chicken, extract of Eurycoma longifolia root, and unflavored protein supplement. Screw that, I grind up some fresh Ethiopian coffee and give my adrenal system a beating it won't forget until bedtime. If the coffee washes down a couple hundred miligrams of naproxen sodium, I can ride twenty hours alertly and relatively painlessly. Double the naproxen dose and I can crisscross Alaska in two days with a broken finger, a separated shoulder, and some cracked ribs. At least I did in 2007. I'm assuming similar capabilities today, minus five years of wear-and-tear.
All that in the past, I really fell in love with coffee in Denver in the 90's. A friend's girlfriend invited a bunch of us to Saturday morning coffee at her new shop on the edge of Cherry Creek North. When I told her I drink coffee purely for the energy hit, she poured me a big cup of an Ethiopian blend. Not only was that the best tasting coffee I've ever had, but the stuff packed a punch.
A while later, we all split, some of us heading south on Colorado Boulevard on our way to Colorado Springs and a ride up Pike's Peak. I was on a friend's Honda NT650 Hawk, a bike he never rode and one I loved at least as much as my Yamaha XTZ550 Vision. As usual, the pack was slow to leave the parking lot and I was on the road a bit ahead of them. I was enjoying the caffeine buzz and the perfect morning mountain air, when a siren fired off just to my right and a fire truck jumped into my lane not more than 100 feet in front of me; probably less. I nailed the Hawk's wonderful brakes, doing a front wheel stand-up that would have made Robbie Madddison proud. At least, I wouldn't have embarrassed him. Much.
The driver had stopped in the middle of the road, when he realized he had barreled out of the garage with no warning and was about to plow into heavy north-bound traffic. I don't think he saw me, at all, until we were eyeball-to-eyeball with the Hawk's back tire three feet in the air and my full-face helmeted head staring at him, just a little pissed off. I was no more than a dozen feet from the fire truck's driver's side door when the back wheel bounced back to the ground. I have never seen bigger eyeballs than the fireman was wearing that morning. Fortunately for both of us, I had no close traffic behind me to add to the excitement.
As soon as the Hawk's suspension settled down, I pumped my right arm and hollered, "Fuck me! Let's do that again!" I was so jazzed up, I really did want to do it all over again, to see if I could stop even closer to the fire truck. I don't remember saying anything, but the guys I'd left at the coffee shop had caught up just in time to see the Hawk touch ground and to hear me. One of my friends sent me an email, with that line as the subject, on my birthday for several years afterwards.
I learned two valuable lessons from that experience: "There is no such thing as too much caffeine" and "I love the 1988 Honda Hawk's brakes." You might think there could be more to take away from an experience like that, but . . .
Nope, that's all I got.
MMM October 2012
