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.

Cloud Appreciation Day

A most delightful book arrived with today's mail.

It's like a story book about... clouds.

The author is the founder of the Cloud Appreciation Society.

Haven't heard of them, eh? Well, check it out at
www.CloudAppreciationSociety.org
- before you get left in the dust. Or, fog.

I've read about a third already, and skimmed most of the rest. It's a lot of fun. The author gives the expected factual information about cloud types, cloud formation, cloud history, cloud names, cloud relationships, cloud shapes, ... you get the idea. But, along with all the interesting facts, he intersperses whimsical cloud culture, poetry and anecdotes. The Air Force pilot who flamed out and ejected over the middle of a thunderstorm - and survived. Or the Aborigine lady who performed the Glory Cloud Dance so some fanatic glider pilots could enjoy soaring along this most rare type of cloud. It's fun to read.

The Manifesto of the Cloud Appreciaton Society

WE BELIEVE that clouds are unjustly maligned
and that life would be immeasurably poorer without them.

We think that they are Nature’s poetry,
and the most egalitarian of her displays, since
everyone can have a fantastic view of them.

We pledge to fight ‘blue-sky thinking’ wherever we find it.
Life would be dull if we had to look up at
cloudless monotony day after day.

We seek to remind people that clouds are expressions of the
atmosphere’s moods, and can be read like those of
a person’s countenance.

Clouds are so commonplace that their beauty is often overlooked.
They are for dreamers and their contemplation benefits the soul.
Indeed, all who consider the shapes they see in them will save
on psychoanalysis bills.

And so we say to all who’ll listen:
Look up, marvel at the ephemeral beauty, and live life with your head in the clouds!

Exactly what I needed!! Thanks, Jessica & Mark!

Hold the Wire!

Another thing we did along with mud tacks was 'hold the wire'. This was much more daring, since the main characters were in plain view.

Two of us would stand on opposite sides of the street. Just as a car approached, the two would pantomime tugging on an invisible rope between them, while the rest of us would chant "Hold the wire! Hold the wire!". If everything worked just right, the car would screech to a stop to avoid yanking the arms off two dumb kids and dragging them under the car.

Of course, everyone would run off into the dark, scoot around houses and fences and rendezvous in Uncle Bud's back yard to exchange the 50's version of 'high fives' (which hadn't been invented yet.)

Usually, though, the car would only slow down a little, until it was clear there was no "wire".

Now and then, the car would actually speed up as it approached!!

Mud Tacks

Every month or so my family would drive across town to visit my Aunt Dorothy and Uncle Bud Love and our three cousins Tommy, Larry and David. Tommy was about my older sister's age, and I was between Larry and David.

One of the things we would do for entertainment after dark was "make mud tacks". This was a highly exciting and (we thought) risky endeavor.

We started by going out in the back yard and loosening up some dirt in a little hole - Uncle Bud's back yard had lots of interesting things, but no grass. We'd add water, and mix up a batch of stiff mud. A lot of the artistry was in getting the mud to just the right consistency - kind of like modeling clay.

Next, we would scoop up the mud and proceed to the street in front of the house. Essex Street was an ordinary neighborhood street, with normal neighborhood traffic. There were no street lights near Uncle Bud's house. We would wait until there were no cars in sight, then dash out and place the mud tacks. These were little globs of mud stuck on the asphalt and then shaped up into a sort of point, hopefully resembling large tacks sitting point up in the street.

We would continue making tacks until headlights were spotted, at which point someone would shout "car!!" (sort of stating the obvious, I see now.) Everyone would madly dash for hiding places around the front of the house - hidden, but able to see the mine field of mud tacks. We would wait with anticipation to see what the driver would do.

If the car slowed down, we had succeeded! If the car drove right by without slowing, we had failed. But failing had no emotional impact - it was still exciting, and we attributed the lack of slowing to a dull driver who didn't notice our dangerous looking obstacles.

The penultimate victory was the very few times the driver actually stopped and got out to see what these things in the road were. Then we would all run wildly around to the back of the house to avoid the possible wrath of an adult driver - filled with giggling and self-congratulations at our triumph.

Hide n' Seek

When I was about 10 or 12 years old we often played Hide n' Seek in the evenings. Here's how it worked.

There would be a gathering of cousins, when our parents would get together, usually at Uncle Bud & Aunt Dorothy's house in south San Antonio, or at our house on the northwest side. Or it could be a group of neighborhood kids. A normal crowd would be 5 or 6 kids.

An "it" would be chosen, by counting one-potato, two-potato, or by argument. Also, Home Base was designated - usually a tree somewhere in the yard. Whoever was It would then hide their eyes and count to an agreed-on number (50 or 100 typically; if It was a fast counter, he would be required to count to a higher number). While It was counting, everyone else would run off and find a place to hide.

When It reached the appointed number, he/she would shout "One two three, here I come", and commence to Seek (search) for the Hiders. Upon spotting a Hider, It would shout "One two three on Jimmy" (or whatever the Hider's name was). At that point Jimmy (or whoever) was "out", and then became an ally of It, and became an additional Seeker. If a Hider could sneak up and touch Home Base without being called out, he/she was then Safe. At some point, It would decide enough was enough, and would shout "All-ee all-ee in free", at which point the remaining Hiders would reassemble at Home Base to begin another round. (I don't remember the basis for deciding the round was over.) The next It was then designated - I think by being the first to be found.

I learned that the best strategy for hiding was to find a shaded spot (for example, under a bush or the corner of a porch step) and to be very still. Our eyes are good at detecting movement, even in low light, but not so good at seeing shapes hidden in random backgrounds. Of course, this plan worked better after dark.

I was never very good at sneaking in to Home Base - I always seemed to get spotted as I made the final desperate dash to the tree.

Sometimes I hid so well that the game ended without my realizing it, and everyone would go home or start playing some other game. It was exciting to be hunkered down in a shadowy spot and have a Seeker walk by not more than 3 feet away without being detected.

But it was kind of disappointing to find I'd been overlooked in the final count.

Dumb phone system!!

Here in Texas (maybe elsewhere - I don't know) the phone system requires you to enter local numbers as 10 digits - area code + 7. But IntraLATA and Long Distance calls must be entered as 11 digits - 1 + area code + 7.

What chaps me is that if you get it wrong, you get a smirky female voice that says either "you must enter a 1 before dialing this number" OR "this number cannot be reached, please check your number and try again" (if you put a 1 in when you shouldn't.)

Point is: If they can tell that you entered it wrong, why the heck don't they just go ahead and put the 1 in or take it out, and connect your call???!!!

I don't like monopolies. Especially phone companies.

Clouds

Around noon today, this cloud pattern formed.



I thought it was rather striking, in the regular shape and spacing of the blobs (though not their sizes.) They were very high altitude clouds - altosomethingorother.

I like clouds. If I were an inanimate object, I think I'd like to be a cloud.

DVD-R deal

Whooee... Office Depot has their store-brand DVD-R/DVD+R's on sale for $10 for 50. That's 20 cents each!

I bought one of each.

Some days are really great.

Setting a fraud alert

I've just started looking into this. I think I will at least set a fraud alert, if not a credit freeze.

Only problem is, I will have to remember to renew it every 90 days. I barely can remember to renew my medications...

http://www.fightidentitytheft.com/flag.html

Does England have credit bureaus like the 3 we have in the US?

We've finished decorating for Christmas

Naomi night

Thanksgiving