Third Motorcycle

During my next to last year of college, my buddy Gene and I were driving thru downtown Austin when a fellow on a motorcycle passed us, with its engine singing the most delicious, high-pitched scream. Since both of us were motorheads, and enamored with high-rpm engines, we naturally followed the bike until the rider stopped for a light, so we could pull up beside him and ask "What in the world kind of bike is that, and how many rpm's does it turn!?" It was a Honda CB92R - a 125cc, sort of factory-racer-privateer street bike. And it was red-lined at 14,000 rpm - an astounding figure for the time.

Next day: I am at Honda of Austin, down on West 1st Street, drooling over a 1965 Honda CB-72 250 Hawk. A short while later, after hanging around the Honda shop a lot, and persuading my Uncle Jim (who lived in Austin) to co-sign a loan for me (very much against his will, but he felt sorry for me), I rode home on my brand new blue Honda Hawk.

This is Gene sitting on my bike, in front of The Campus Guild - the men's coop where we lived in college.

This is a view of the cockpit.

What a sweet bike! About 25 horsepower, redlined at 10,200 rpm, huge dual-leading shoe front brake, racy riding position... It came with a complete tool kit that even included a small pair of scissors for trimming tire patches to size. I still have most of the tools. But, alas, not the bike. More on that, later.

After I bought the bike, I got to know the owners of Honda of Austin - Fred and Alta Mae Kretchmar. Eventually, I was hired to work in the shop as a mechanic. Another mechanic, Mike Bonell, was an aspiring road racer, so I began to get interested in racing. I stripped the Hawk down, bought a racing cam, aluminum wheel rims and a Dunlop racing rear tire.

I actually went to three races. The first was at an abandoned airport in San Angelo. Mike won first and I placed third but didn't get a trophy because there were too few riders to award a third place trophy. The second race was again at San Angelo. This time, I had replaced the stock steel gas tank and bench seat with a fiberglass tank and solo racing seat which I built from scratch. When my race came up, I wasn't ready and started about half a minute after the beginning of the race. I was doing well, moving up to second place (behind Mike, of course) when my engine suddenly made an awful rattling noise and quit running. When I pushed the bike back to the pits, I found that a valve had floated, hit the piston and bent. No more racing that day. My final racing attempt was at the AMA nationals in Chicago. I crashed in practice, got a concussion and bent my fork, and didn't get to race. Mike won the novice class.

The Hawk was my main mode of transportation for my last two years of college, during which I met and married an extremely cute and vivacious young lady from Houston. Her parents expressed some concern about the husband of their daughter riding a motorcycle, so I sold it to my brother-in-law, who then resold it.

If anybody knows where it is, please let me know. I'd like to buy it back!

Second Motorcycle

In the summer after my third year at UT Austin (sidebar: I went to UT for four years, following two years of junior college. Can you spell "wrong major"?) I decided I needed a motorcycle, and found a likely candidate in the local classified ads. (This was 1965 - classifieds like Craigslist were printed on paper then!) It was a 1957 Zundapp 250 Super Saber (I think) that had been stripped down to the bare essentials. That is, no front fender, no working ignition, a burned piston, and torn seat cover. However, it had been bored out to about 300 cc and the seller threw in a magneto off some other kind of motor. $45 bucks.

My buddy Gene helped me tow it back to the coop where I lived, and I set to work. We fabricated a mounting plate and little chain drive setup for the magneto, recovered the seat, and replaced the piston - with a Volvo car piston, following a tip the seller had given me. I made a head gasket from an aluminum beer can (which, as it turned out, was a big mistake.) Oh, and I recovered the seat, spray painted the tank and frame and adapted a new rear sprocket.

After a few weeks of fairly intensive work, it came time to fire it up... and by golly, it ran! In fact, it was really pretty quick for that size motor. No muffler (of course), as loud and abrasive as only a two stroke single can be. I ran it up and down the street in front of the coop a few times, then set off towards the countryside. About 5 miles from home, as I was cruising along the highway, it suddenly stopped running. No compression. When I pulled the head, there was a big hole melted in the top of the piston.

I couldn't afford another new piston, so I took that one to a welding shop and had it welded up. Much hand labor later, spent filing and smoothing the globbly aluminum weld, I reassembled it and got it running again. A short ride later... same thing. A nice hole in the middle of the piston.

The bike sat around in the basement of the coop for a few months. By this time, I had a job as a motorcycle mechanic, and I towed the Zundapp down to the shop and stored it with all the other derelict motorcycles in the back room. When I left Austin, I forgot to collect it (just married, you know...). A couple of years later, I stopped by the shop, but the bike was gone.

Years later (like, last year), I finally realized that the beer can head gasket I made was too thin, which raised the compression ratio to some astronomic value. This made terrific power, but when the piston got hot, the pressure was just too much and blew a hole in the weakened metal. Wish I had known that then!

This is a picture of a 1956 Super Saber, with all of its parts. If you removed the front fender, it would look a lot like mine.

New Boots!

My First Motorcycle

It must have been when I was 16 or 17. My friend, John Ike, got a Triumph Thunderbird 650 twin, an awsome bike - very much like the one Marlon Brando rode in "The Wild One". So I wanted a bike, too. After browsing the Triumph brochures, I quickly realize there was no way I could afford even a used 350. About this time, I spotted a small bike for sale at a garage near downtown Kerrville. After a little dickering, I took it home for the grand sum of $25.

My first bike was - a Harley Davidson. But not just any Harley big-twin cruiser. No, this was a Harley HUMMER. One Hundred Twenty Five cc's of two-stroke single power-lessness. It had lost its muffler, leaving just a straight exhaust pipe. I fabricated something that looked a little like a muffler, by wiring two beer cans together and making a hole in each end. It was still just about as loud, and the psuedo-muffler vibrated to pieces in short order. I ran a straight pipe after that.

I remember that first gear was very low - it would go about 5 mph wound out in first. Three gears total. Solid rear suspension, fat tires, tractor style seat with springs, and a sickly metallic green color - no wonder not many of them were sold. Prior to my ownership, it had lost its headlight, tail light, speedometer and front fender.

The front fork was a "girder fork" design, meaning solid legs with a pair of linkages and a spring at the top. But the spring was a pair of large rubber bands! One of the pivot bars was broken, so after a while I welded on the stem and fork scavanged from an old BSA frame I bought for $5. Now my Harley actually had a telescopic fork. The fork probably weighed as much as the rest of the frame. Of course, I didn't know you were supposed to put oil in the forks, so the front end was pretty bouncy.

I rode this frankenbike most of the summer, around the campus of the boarding school where we lived. I can't imagine how much the other residents must have hated the loud, annoying blatting of an open two-stroke motor blasting around our otherwise pleasant neighborhood.

When the fall semester began, I sold the bike to some poor soul - probably for about the same amount I paid for it. It would be eight years before the bug bit again and I got my second bike.

Photo courtesy of www.HarleyHummer.com

(Muddy) Water Under the Bridge

Heading home yesterday, my route took me down a road where a bridge was being replaced. It wasn't complete to the point that I could ride across (do you suppose that's what the 'Bridge Closed Do Not Enter' signs meant?).

Of course, there was no way I could turn back and retrace my path. So the only choice left was to ride down and across the creek. (That red thing is a porta-potty on its side.) The creek was flowing nicely at the narrow part just under the bridge, so I reasoned "the current looks fast enough to scour the dirt away, so it should be a rocky bottom... right?"

Just as I made it to the far edge of the creek, my front wheel went down into the mud, about halfway to the axle. So much for the rocky bottom. After a little struggle, the bike and I got up onto solid dirt again, and up the bank on the far side. It was steeper than I reckoned.

They had stored the old bridge next to the road.

Just in case the new one didn't work right, I suppose.

It reminded me of the old bridge at Camp El Har.

Turkeys Galore

Yesterday, I rode out to Rocky Ridge Motorsport Ranch to do some off-road riding, and to meet up with another rider to do some gravel roads around the area.








After riding for a while, we passed by a grassy field and Brad stopped: "Did you see the turkeys?"
Me: "What turkeys?"
"Back there - must have been 20 of them."

This I had to see, so we rode back a hundred yards, and sure enough, there was a flock of wild turkeys meandering through the grass.


It looked more like 40 of them to me.

Since it is fairly rare to see two or three turkeys in the wild, I was amazed at the size of the group, and the fact that they didn't seem to care we were standing there watching them. Usually, they will scurry under the grass and disappear in the blink of an eye.

Very unusual.