If God didn't want me to own a dozen motorcycles, he wouldn't give me great deals!

To be fair, I don't own a dozen bikes...only six.  In my defense, they're all incredibly different, and it's comparable to a woman having many shoes for any occasion.  At this very moment, I own a 1964 Lambretta LI 175, a 1971 Honda CL175, a 1973 Honda CL350, a 2003 Genuine Stella (Vespa PX copy), a 2008 Genuine Stella, and of course, the 1967 BSA A50. 

With the exception of the BSA, they're all running great, but being vintage, they're always needing minor maintenance. Today, I had to run out to the corner store for caffeine, and on the way back I pulled into my neighborhood hardware store to say hi.  There's an older lady and a young guy who always help me out, and are always eager to hear about the motorcycles I'm building, but they never get to see them.  Today I fixed that.

They came out to the sidewalk and were overjoyed, to say the least.  It was great to see them take pride in my little Honda 350, since I explained to them that from all their assistance at the store, they really did take an active part in helping me keep these great machines on the road.  I think it was a real high point of everyone's day.

I guess the moral of my story is that these bikes are more than just one guy in a garage.  There are tons of online message boards and resources, amazing retired mechanics and shops with endless advice.  It truly "takes a village" to keep these bikes going.

Damn you, Harbor Freight!

We all know that Harbor Freight sells crappy versions of decent tools, made by Asian children making twenty cents an hour, but they pass the savings onto YOU!  I'm in need of having some parts sand blasted, as I foresee my need over and over again in the next few months.  Each time I go in, it's at least twenty-five bucks, sometimes up to a hundred or more.  Due to a heck-of-a Memorial Day sale, I could get a bench-top sandblasting cabinet for a little over $100.  I checked on the internet and they all say the same thing:  The cabinet is great as long as you reseal it yourself, but the gun sucks.  Considering that similar cabinets are over $300, I bought the bullet and bought it.

While there, I couldn't help but pick up bungee cords for the wife's new Honda, magnetic parts dishes, organizers...  more than I should have.  I was a kid in a candy shoppe, and I got more than I should.

Specifically for the BSA, I happened to find a big bag of old-fashioned style, stainless steel wire bands, which will definitely be handy instead of silly zip-ties.

More than anything, the special machining, the late nights, the busy work schedule and doing work to the other bikes has been clogging up my fun-hose.  I guess I didn't mention that I have 2 Hondas that I've been working on as well.  Both are for the wife - a '73 CL350 and a '71 CL175.  The 350 needed the carbs redone (which is a bitch, because the scrambler exhaust has to come out to get to the carbs).  The 175 is getting all the cables replaced.  To do it right, it just takes time.

I've also been rebuilding the BSA's front forks, which I need the sandblast cabinet for...  So, it's just boring, boring, work.  Blah.

Even Stephen

My wife is the Jack Ripper of vehicles.

Well, that's mostly true.  With one exception, she has beaten, bruised, battered and befuddled every automobile she's ever owned into submission.  The sneaky survivor was a lemon of a VW Beetle that she had the good fortune to pawn off on a teenage suburbanite for the same cost she had into it.

Today, she bought her 6th car, a 2008 Honda Element with 47k miles on it.  The deal was as fair as they come, and as sneaky as used car salesmen are known to be, we found that as a power couple, we can be even sneakier.

She traded in a 2000 Merc Villager with 107k miles on it.  The suspension is shot.  The transmission is shot.  The brakes are shot.  The A/C is shot.  It's a basket case.  We were glad that it didn't catch fire when we  drove it in at an hour before the lot closed for the day.  If we had shown up earlier, they would have taken it for a test drive, but to our advantage, they didn't.  They wanted to go home and watch the series finale of House, M.D.

If I had to tell the truth, I'd say that the van's sad condition was due to 50% crappy manufacturing and 50% user abuse.  Regardless, we got about 500% of the real value on trade and peeled out of the parking lot in the new Honda like Bonnie and Clyde.

Most of all, the best thing to come out of this, is that the missus won't be borrowing my truck any time soon, and I'm good with that.

Oh yeah - this car shopping crap is part of the reason that I haven't done shit with the bike in a week or so.  The other reasons are: general laziness, a new videogame,  excessive napping and a few hangovers.

Time Travellin'

It's been a while since I've posted, since a hiatus was forced upon me due to a confusing quandary that a cavalcade of onlookers couldn't diagnose.  Therefore, a pilgrimage to the mecca of all that is Birmingham Small Arms, to the godfather of American BSA racing.  (Forgive the overzealous vocabulary, I've been driving most of the day and I haven't had much sleep.)

The day started at 5:30 am.  Up and out the door by 6:15.  Picked up Mark and his dad, and hit the road just after 7.  Breakfast at Waffle-Steak.  At around 11, we pulled into what can only be described as the last existing BSA dealership on the planet.  It's not a public place.  You have to wind down dirt roads in the middle of Nowhere, OH, and drive slowly into 1971.  You have to be a friend of a friend.  You have to know the secret handshake.

Just as Master Yoda was the Jedi who taught Obi-Wan Kenobi, Earl Bowlby is the racing legend who mentored Mark, who in turn is mentoring me.  For a solid month, we've been facing our own Darth Vader - a crank that won't turn.  We had tried everything, thought of everything, yelled at everything, but to no avail.  It became apparent that it was time to make a journey of our own to figure out how to conquer the forces against us.  (I think I'm Luke Skywalker in this analogy.)

Earl was a 10 time national title holder for hill-climb, and finished his career by winning climb racing's triple crown at the age of 51.  That was not a typo - he was FIFTY-ONE-YEARS-OLD, and not only competing with 20-somethings, but beating them all.  Today he's almost 80, and in better shape than Jack LaLane.  He sports the perfect old-guy uniform: New Balance shoes, black socks, polyester pants pulled up a little too high, a plaid, short sleeved shirt, and a pair of bifocals that went out of style in 1967, then came back into style 6 months ago.  His workspace in meticulous to the point of OCD.  Everything is labeled.  In pen.



I'd talked with Earl on the phone a few times before I met him.  He's the kind of guy that knows the size of a reamer for a 1967 A50 valve guide without having to look it up, and will explain the tolerances to the 1/1000th of an inch.  (The correct reamer is a .313, by the way.)  When explaining something, he's never talking down to you, he's wanting to share 60 years of experience.  He's straight out of 'Mad Men', an octogenarian who's quiet, patient, shy and methodical, with arms like a bear and a living room that looks like a trophy shop.

For many years, Earl owned a BSA/Suzuki shop in Ohio, and upon retirement, rather than selling off his inventory, he moved the shop closer to his home.  It now sits about 30 feet from his front door.  I'm not sure if it's an obsession gone wrong or religious devotion gone right, but Earl rebuilt his BSA dealership in an outbuilding next to his home, complete with parts counter, original dealership signage, a fully stocked shop in the back, and more original inventory than the factory in Birmingham, England.

Jesus wept.

I could extol the virtues of "he who is Earl" for many days to come, but we came to Mecca on a mission, and that was to find the answer as to why the wheel wouldn't turn.  Like the cavemen of yore, we hit it.  We applied fire.  We even prayed to the god of high octane fuel, but only found the same conclusions that we'd previously assessed.

In the end, after hundreds of measurements and tests with different bearings, cases, and even a little finger crossing, we figured it out, and it was wholly anticlimactic.  Basically, the machine shop honed the main bearing crooked.  That was it.  A slight rookie fuck-up, barely visible to the naked eye.

It's definitely taken WAY too long to assess a simple error, but we're laying new track, and great progress should be made very soon.  Looking on the bright side, I got to spend a lot of time with Mark and his Dad, and they're just as much as a font of knowledge and great stories as anyone.  I got to visit the BSA shrine.  I got some nice compliments on my truck.  All in all, it was a good day.

The word is "awe".  It wasn't until I got home that I fully comprehended the magnitude of the importance of Earl's little shop.  Not only are the bikes straight out of the 60's, the whole atmosphere, the attitude, and the mentality is no less than a time capsule.  Can anyone say that they love their job so much that they build a replica of their office cubicle in their garage?  I'm happy that we've solved our mystery, but even happier to know an 80-year-old man who's passion burns brighter than anyone I've ever met...even if he wears black socks with white sneakers.