#106 (February 2011)

I may have mentioned my affinity for the Café Racer in past issues. Indeed, it was the factory café styling of my big brother’s friend’s Royal Enfield 250 Continental that first drew me into the “spiritual” side of biking, where I realized there was more than just two wheels and an engine to some motorcycles. Something else was there that I couldn’t put my finger on, but the sound, the style moved me in a way I had previously never experienced. Until that point, I just thought they were another method of transportation, a way to get from A to B. I’m sure most of you have had similar epiphanies.

For those of you who didn’t grow up in England in the 60’s and 70’s, the term “Café Racer” was originally a derogatory term, meaning “wannabe racer,” only good for racing from one “Transport Café” to another. The fabled Transport Café was usually just a small travel trailer, literally on the side of the road in a “lay-by,” which is an area where the road is widened enough to allow for parking without blocking the roadway out in the countryside. Frequented by truck (lorry) drivers, basically the trailer was modified to have a counter in the front and you could stop and buy a cup of tea. Young “ton up” types would also pull into these while riding their Triumphs, BSAs and Nortons around the twisties that make up the English countryside. Soon, they began customizing their bikes, taking the best of two different bikes sometimes and blending them into one. The famous “Triton” was the Norton Featherbed frame with the more reliable (and less vibey) Triumph engine transplanted, and a whole host of variations sprang up, often mimicking the style of the Isle of Man TT racers, the large “Manx” aluminum tanks, rear seat “bum stop” cowling and clip-ons.

For a while, it seemed that they have merely evolved into the “streetfighter” style. People were hacking up Japanese multi-cylinder bikes and turning them into stylized street burners, but all along there were some keeping the faith!

Recently, there seems to have been a bit of a resurgence with this style of bike, of which I am in favor, as some of us never lost the love.

In fact, I am planning to build one next winter. I am going to have to start collecting parts now, figuring out how I want the final product to look and how to achieve it. Of course it will be all chronicled in The Horse. I’m trying to set up a cover photo shoot at the Ace Café in London and intend to try and find some more nice examples for featuring here at The Horse.

No, they’re not choppers, but we’ve always had page space here for bikes that are cool, vintage bikes included, and I encourage readers to send me pictures of their café projects.

I don’t know if the roadside cafés still exist in the UK. I didn’t see any on my last trip there, replaced instead by expensive “Happy Chef” services and such. If so, it’s a shame because that cup of tea, even though it was probably pretty awful by any objective taste test, sure seemed good to warm those chilly fingers after a good blast through the English country lanes.

#105 Ego Trip. (January 2011)

This is going to be hard to write without sounding like I’m all full of myself n’ shit. But I think I’ve finally got used to people Knowing Who I Am. I still never expect it, but it’s usually not a surprise any more. When I took over the Big Chair here at The Horse way back at issue #69, it literally took me about two years to even dare to believe that it happened. I was always waiting for the ‘other shoe to drop’ and I’d have to go back to being a truck driver.
Well, that never happened, and hopefully it never will. The magazine is as strong as ever, especially when you take the economy into consideration, any kind of recovery will only help us.
We pretty much do this job in a vacuum; we sit in our palatial offices in the shimmering towers here that is World Headquarters, and work with very little feedback. Oh sure, there’s the online version of “Back Talk”, where any mistakes we make are brought up for discussion in a heartbeat, but impartial assessments of the magazine are hard to come by sometimes. When we go out into the ‘outside’ world, at Willie’s in Daytona, or the Smoke Out, we run into the REAL readers of the magazine. Ninety nine percent of the comments we hear at these events are positive, and it’s always good to hear (of course).
Nurse Nut asked me a few months back “Have you any idea what this magazine means to some of your readers? They LIVE for the next issue!”
This struck me oddly, because I can remember searching the bookstores, truck stops and 7-11’s looking for the latest issue of Iron Horse throughout the ‘90’s, and the feeling I got when I saw the latest cover as I grabbed it off the shelf and found a place to hide while I read the whole damn thing non stop. And on the other hand, now I’m the one responsible for what the magazine has in it for the most part, I have a hard time ‘getting’ that.
When we first went to the Cincinnati V-Twin expo, it was pretty much me and Hammer, we got in under some other companies name, we had some magazines to try and pass out and basically, we might as well have been invisible. Nobody knew us; nobody really wanted to talk to us once they realized we weren’t going to be placing any orders. Well, that was ten years ago and now it’s different. It seems as if everyone in the industry has at least heard of us, so that’s a good thing… I guess.
Similarly, people I’ve never met who are into motorcycles, probably know who I am. People like… I dunno... Jay Leno? Brad Pitt? They probably know who I am. What does that mean? Absolutely nothing I guess. I asked Mr. Pitt through a couple of third parties if we could maybe check out some of his bikes for the mag and we heard…. Nothing. Almost like being the guy in line to get the OCC autograph with only $24.99 in your pocket. Jay Leno has a kick-ass collection of rare vintage bikes that I’d love to go drool over, but I’m not going to annoy him with requests to do so. Who the hell am I anyway?
I know Charles Manson knows who I am, we occasionally get mail asking for back issues and stuff, whatever you may think of him, he was an interesting guy to talk to.
So what does any of this really mean? Damned if I know. Being known by a bunch of people really doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. Hell, everyone knows who George The Painter is, and look where he is! (Just kidding, George).
I don’t want to sound like I’m complaining or whining here, this job is exactly what I thought it would be when Hammer offered it to me in 2007, it’s a dream job that makes it so I love going to work every day. Some of the people I’ve met and become friends with is one of the biggest bonuses. People like Sugar Bear, Tom Johnson, Roadside Marty, Nurse Nut and a whole host more (don’t be offended if I left you off the list). I’m under no illusion that I would not have got the chance to do any of that without this gig.
And yet I still feel like I’m unworthy, I’m certainly no one special and there’s probably 100 guys that could do this job better than I. Fortunately, Hammer is the only one that can displace me, he’s a guy that likes loyalty and that’s something I can give 100% in this job. He’s also a good friend, and that sure helps.
If I sit here and try to analyze everything, it drives me crazy, so I’ll just keep showing up every day and do what I do for as long as I can. I’m on the ‘work until you die’ retirement plan anyway and if I make it that far, I’ll have a smile on my face.

#104 (December 2010)

After all the upheaval and discord of the past few months, I’ve decided to take a radical break this issue, and talk about motorcycles! Even better... MY motorcycles.
Hammer mentioned in his editorial a couple of issues ago that my 1982 Triumph T140ES managed to lock itself up solid after a ride to Detroit. The issue being; the alternator has become so hot, the insulation had turned into molten plastic. This was apparently OK as long as the engine was running, but when I shut it off and went for lunch, it had a chance to cool and the goop set up around the alternator rotor, gluing it solid! Of course I was unaware of this and thought something had come apart in the bottom end, so I dropped it off at Manx Motors in Auburn hills, and Brian (the able mechanic/owner there) called me to tell me the relatively good news. So, a new alternator and it was back on the road! The rotor having an incorrect air gap usually causes this overheating condition. Other than that, it's been really good, the rocker clearances need to be adjusted, but I keep forgetting to order the rocker cover gaskets and I KNOW they will fall part when I remove them… unless I buy new ones first, then they'll be fine.

My 1971 “Resurrected” Tiger, which graced the cover of issue #74 hasn’t quite fared as well. I was forever having problems getting it to start and run well. I cured that by getting a pair of new AMAL concentric carbs from Tyler over at Lowbrow Customs. This got me out and about on the chop, but it certainly highlighted another problem... Handling. I did a quickie measurement of the trail on the front end, and ended up with 9 ¼ inches! This makes it a real pain in the ass to turn, it’s almost like a trike at low speed, having to muscle your way around the corner, and at higher speeds it is really stable, but I find I have to make difficult corrections just to keep going in the center of my lane. Reducing the trail will make this a lot easier, but it’s easier said than done. Ideally, I need to move my front wheel axle out about six inches, but if I just make a longer rocker for the springer, the leverage will lower the front of the bike. I asked Sugar Bear what he would recommend; after all, he makes probably the best springers around for choppers. His answer was simple, dump the DNA and buy one of his. So that’s my plan. I know he pays more for chroming than a new DNA costs, but I think it will be worth it. I got to ride a bike equipped with a Sugar Bear Springer in Sturgis this year, and once I got over the initial oversteer problems I had, I was impressed how light the bike felt and how well it handled. I can’t wait to get one on the Triumph!
Also, I had to snag the magneto cap off the Triumph when the aluminum one I had on the Shovel finally shorted out. I guess it was only a matter of time, but it lasted several years at least. I went back to Tyler at Lowbrow Customs to get a clear magneto cap; they’re just so cool! Look for an update in a future issue when I receive and install the new springer!

#102 (October 2010)

Maybe I didn’t get where I am today by playing my guitar, but I like to think it had a helping hand. When I left school in the good old UK back in 1974 at the ripe old age of 16, I decided that going to college would be a waste of time for me because, after all, I was going to be a rock star within a few short years. So instead of entering the state-sponsored Polytechnic, I got a temporary job at a factory and talked my parents into financing a brand new maple neck Fender Telecaster to facilitate my meteoric rise to the top of the rock charts. “Don’t meteors go downward?” asked my naysayer older brother. I dismissed such comments from him; he was getting a degree in computer programming which as far as I could see, in the mid-70’s, would be completely useless in the real world. See, I had it all figured out, play in local bands for a while, then scan the pro ads for someone needing me to complete their line-up for their upcoming world tour.
Transportation was becoming a problem; rock stars didn’t ride the bus to work, did they?
A friend of my brothers was selling a 1968 Suzuki T200 two stroke twin, so I made a deal with him to give him a few payments and he delivered it to the factory one afternoon… and just left it there. The good thing about being 16 is; you don’t even worry about these things, a trip to the shop to buy a helmet and get some insurance, and I’ll just ride it home… how hard could it be?
Aside from the wheelie across the intersection and into the brick wall, I made it home without incident. Of course those were the days when you could ‘fix’ the damage with a handy rock to bash the footpeg straight again.
By 1977, I was playing for a living, not exactly the World Tour on the private jet yet, but a summer season on the Isle of Sheppy, located just south of Southend-on-Sea and a favorite spot for Londoners to holiday. We rotated with three other bands playing the same three clubs every night with a Sunday matinee thrown in. The music? Eh, well it was a mixture of standards and pop tunes, typical holiday fare for the time, nothing artistically pleasing, but better than working in the factory for sure.
By 1980, I had the cold, hard reality facing me that I was unlikely to ever get very far in the music business. I was probably good enough to eke out a living, but playing the same old crap over and over just didn’t cut it for me. I might as well be working in the factory again. My interest in motorcycles remained though and by the end of the year I had my first Triumph, a 1975 Triumph T160 Trident.
The next year, I moved to the USA and held a variety of jobs, the decision to not go to college seemed to be haunting me now, but I was able to supplement whatever meager income I had by playing in bands in bars on the weekends. In fact, in the mid 90’s, I bought the beginnings and consequently most of the parts for my Shovelhead with the money I made playing polkas and 50’s and 60’s songs for old drunks once a week.
When I got involved with the magazine in the later 90’s, I put the guitar down as far as playing with bands went, I couldn’t make a commitment to play gigs with the band as well as do what I wanted to do for The Horse.
And so that’s how it was until Edge had the bright idea to have some Horse staffers jump on stage at this years Smoke Out XI… on both ends of the long road. This was going to toss XsSpeed, Steve Broyles, Chuck Palumbo and myself onto stage to play a couple of tunes for a laugh.
I got hold of XsSpeed and suggested a tune I could sorta sing; “Basket Case” by Green Day. XsSpeed suggested a tune he thought he could pull off, and so we individually, in three different states, set about learning these tunes for the big debut in Santa Rosa and followed by Rockingham.
In Santa Rosa, we finally all ended up in the same room at the hotel and tried a quickie run-through. Steve and I had the advantage of being able to do a couple of rehearsals as we lived only an hour apart from each other. The run-through revealed several problems with the ‘set list’ and XsSpeed’s original selection was dumped in favor of a basic 12 bar blues “Johnny B. Good”, coz it’s easy.
Under the best of circumstances, it’s tough to plug into someone else’s amplifier and just play, the sound is always unfamiliar and there’s no time to adapt. That said, we had a blast doing it. Chuck couldn’t make the Rockingham session, so we did it three piece. I don’t think we impressed anyone but we had a great time, and despite many requests, I believe we will do it again next year.
Hey, maybe it’s not too late!

#101 (August 2010)

This column is particularly difficult to write for this issue. We only last week got back from the Smoke Out West, the Long Road 2 and the incredible Smoke Out Eleven. Add to that, my marriage ended abruptly, and so there are all the legal, financial and emotional problems associated with that clouding my mind as I try and scrape 101 together in not much time at all. The 4th of July holiday didn't help much, and add to that I don't think the readers of this fine publication want to hear a bunch of “woe is me" whining in this column. Fine! I can tell you are a bunch of heartless bastards, but maybe I can direct this to some sort of motorcycle content.

When you're in a marriage, there's always the chance something will go wrong. Who's fault it may or may not have been is irrelevant most of the time (Michigan is a “no fault” state), but that doesn't stop your prized possessions, namely your chopper(s), from becoming mere chess pieces in the legal chess game that ensues.

I'm not pretending to be some kind of legal expert by any stretch. There's always the chance that one of the parties can find an aggressive lawyer that will take someone to the cleaners and leave them on the street with just the clothes they put on at the beginning of the day. Often, the attitude of “take it all, I just want out” will prevail, although I presume most chopper jockeys would exclude their ride if they said that... or would they? It's easy to get strapped in tightly to the emotional rollercoaster, scream like a little girl and forsake everything just to get to the end of the ride. The overpowering feeling that the last however many years have been a total failure is like a dead weight on your chest. Friends and family will “take sides”, people you knew and liked suddenly become arch enemies and even your closer friends will avoid you, probably because they just don't know what to say, or if they should say anything at all.

All I'm getting at here is; don't give up the ship. Don't just sell off the bikes to finance some legal maneuvering; you'll regret it, trust me. I know sometimes there's just no choice in the matter, and that really sucks, but you need to retain the attitude that life goes on and you are who you are. There's plenty of blame and guilt to go around, but after some time, it tends to fade.

This is the second time me and my 1971 Triumph and my 1998 Shovelhead have been through this. Fortunately, the first time, the ex realized life would be way simpler for her if she just let me keep them. It's about all I got to keep from that one. This time? Well, it's still to be determined, I guess. It's too early, and the legal wrangling has not yet begun at the time of this writing. My guess is that they will not be added to the chess pawns. Yes, there are higher priorities; my thirteen year old daughter for one. She is the product of a previous marriage and will stay with me, so I have to concentrate on that. She's been staying with relatives for a couple of weeks while I was on the road, and it has worked out well. She'll be coming back to a house that is almost devoid of furniture, with no pots or pans, bowls, silverware etc., but material things like that are almost meaningless, just an inconvenience.
This kind of thing will let you know who your friends are though. Hammer, for instance, brought a pile of silverware over the other day, just stuff he had laying around, but it's good to know that not everyone hates you.

One of the big things that brought all this to light was the realization that my life is more than half over, and it's just plain stupid to waste years not being as happy as you can be. Maybe there's an afterlife, or maybe Hammer is right and this is all there is. Either way, you gotta be happy and enjoy life. If you're not, then it's up to you to change things until you are.

This isn't my first Long Road. I know things will be fine. I have great friends, the best damn job in the world, great kids and my bikes. I'm still getting attacks of feeling like a worthless bastard, but I know they will pass.

#100 (July 2010)

It’s hard to put into words exactly how momentous reaching issue #100 is, for me at least. I clearly remember picking up issue #100 of “Iron Horse” and, after reading it, resolving never to miss another issue... which I didn’t... until after David Snow left and Chris Pfouts came in, and the content went downhill faster than George’s health after the last Smoke out. #100 of the old IH featured the first encounter with Genghis, the Shovelhead-loving martial arts type, whose writings were instrumental in me acquiring my first (and only) American V-Twin powered machine. A couple of times back then, I sent in stuff for “Back Talk” and remember how cool it felt when I’d open my favorite magazine and see something I’d written in there. Never, in my wildest dreams, could I have imagined I’d be doing what I do for a living now.

Yeah, after Snow left and the infamous “Fish Bike” Triumph was featured, I figured it was the end of an era. There was no longer any point in searching the truck stops for the magazine. It felt like I’d lost part of the family. Then, one day I caught sight of the first issue that Hammer was editing.. the cutline read “The Boys are Back,” saying that JT Nesbitt, Flynch and Genghis were back on board. This was a huge relief to me. It’s like everything was okay with the world once again. As a bonus, Genghis mentioned in his column that he was frequenting internet bulletin boards...which was a strange concept at the time and prompted me to search around to see if I could find a reference to it anywhere. This led me to a message board entitled “The Seedy X-Bar and Grill” where, indeed, Scott Wong was chatting to us mere mortals on the ‘net. It was here that I first encountered other staff members of the magazine, notably Hammer and a couple of other local guys. It was cool that there was a Michigan connection, and I even got to meet a couple of them at a local swap meet. This was when I decided to try and send in my first submission, featuring the Shovelhead I had built from the ground up, mainly in my basement and a friend’s barn. It looked pretty much like a stock four speed swingarm Shovel, complete with electric start, blinkers and FatBob® tanks. To my delight, this article was published in Iron Horse #163, and even though the dummy laying it out cut the top of my head off in the picture, it certainly inspired me to do more.

I wrote a follow up piece entitled “Caveat Emptor” which detailed how much fun it was to discover that part of your new project came from a stolen vehicle, and how humorous it was to see it rolling into the impound lot. But then the unthinkable happened. Princeton Publishing went belly-up and took dozens of titles... including Iron Horse... with it. Dammit...so much for my aspiring writing career. My only comfort was the plans that Hammer and his associates had for continuing the magazine. I was lucky enough to be included in a lot of the goings on. They had Loon, some Canadian guy, set up a website for them, including the first iteration of the “Back Talk” message board. There was a lot of crossed fingers going on regarding the launch of the brand new magazine. As Hammer mentions elsewhere in this issue, the first issue of The Horse was #165 in an effort to show continuity, but that never made it to issue #2. Right about issue #3, “Loon”, the webmaster, suddenly disappeared without a trace. This led to concern about the website, as it needed to be updated with the latest issue. This led to a posting on Back Talk:
“Anyone here know HTML?”
I thought for about a nanosecond about this, and then replied “Sure, I can do that.” This was what we in the publishing world call: A Big Fat Lie. Hey, I thought, how hard could it be? They gave me the post of provisional webmaster, and I spent the next few sleepless nights researching how the HELL I was going to pull this off. Luckily, I found a “wysiwyg” (what you see is what you get) freebie program and was able to fake it until I made it.

So that, eleven years of loyalty and a lot of grunt work later, here I sit with the best job on the face of the planet. By the time you read this, you’ll know that Edge has talked me, Sean, Steve Broyles and Chuck Palumbo into playing a couple of tunes onstage at the Smoke Out XI. This has absolutely nothing to do with anything I’ve just written other than the best part of this job is getting feedback about the magazine in person from you guys, and frankly, I can’t wait.

#99 To chop… or not to chop... (June 2010)

That is the question... but should it even BE a question? I’ve mentioned before my penchant toward classic bikes. I love to see old iron out and about, and have drooled on pictures of totally stock Vincent Black Shadows enough times over the past 35 years or so. But here we are in the foremost chopper publication around, so should I not be preaching that there are no sacred cows? Whatever the bike is, should it be chopped? No mercy?

If I stumbled upon a basket case Vincent, would I chop it? Hell yes I would. It’s long been my dream to have a Vinnie chop, but if I stumbled across a basket case Vincent that had all the correct parts, matching numbers etc., I would be more inclined to pass it on to someone who would restore it, while maybe trading it for a lesser “find” to chop.

I must be getting old I guess. I’m a fan of the 1969/1970 650 Triumph Bonneville in its stock trim, and these days, my heart kinda sinks when I see a bad hack job on one. At some point, simple economics would have to come into play. These days, a matching numbers 60’s Triumph costs a fair bit more than one with a bolt on hardtail and a rusty XL gas tank. This could be the reason we are seeing a lot more small capacity Honda twins and the like being chopped. Yes, I know that restored Hondas from the 60’s are fetching more and more, but there’s so many of them around, I can’t see the supply drying up anytime soon, and they do seem to be the perfect starting point for the wannabe or just broke chopper jockey.

Case in point, I just picked up a 1982 Triumph T140ES. It has seven thousand miles on it and it is just about bog stock, turn signals and everything. This is the cool electric start 750 twin; they altered the timing cover to look like the pre unit, and added a starter motor in the old magneto position. This engine would look KICKASS in a chopper! But on the other hand, this is one of the last bikes ever produced by the “real” Triumph factory in Meriden. I’m not going to get into whether the “real” factory was in Coventry or other such boring details. Suffice to say, every Triumph I’ve owned was built there. Well, ok, maybe my Trident and my 250 single were really made at the BSA plant in Birmingham, but that’s beside the point. This bike is a true survivor and it would...well...it would be a shame to chop it up. I’m having a good time just riding it as it is, so I’ve decided to leave it alone as far as originality goes.

So, is this chopper heresy? Should I be hauled in front of the Chopper Supreme Court for judgment? Well, personally I don’t much care what anyone thinks of the decision, it’s my bike and I’ll do whatever the hell I want with it, which in this case is just ride it. Likewise, if you have a perfectly preserved Crocker in your shed and you want to slap some huge plastic bags on the back and go with a 30” front wheel, be my guest. I can’t approve of such a conversion, but that decision is not mine.

Listen, I’m never going to be one of those geeks you see at these shows, berating a bike owner because his cad plating on his restored AJS is the wrong shade or somesuch. I’m just saying I feel that some old classics deserve to be left alone and ridden as is. Of course, a beautifully done Velocette chopper will catch my eye just as quickly as a restored version, the key being a well-executed custom. Nothing is sadder than a once great classic in a bodged up hack job death trap… and fewer things cooler than someone riding a vintage, unrestored bike with original patina.