How Bespoke is Too Bespoke?

Owning a Fireblade checked a box, taught me
many things and was a zero cost experience!

I always try to balance out bike projects so that I land in the black on them.  I've gotten pretty good at this.  The Fireblade Project cost me about $2300 all in and then I got to ride it for a season before selling it for $2500, which I then put towards the Concours14.  Even with fancy seats, windshields and other gubbins, the Connie only owes me about $7000.  Older model, double the mileage bikes are going for eight grand, so I'm still ahead there too.

People who throw big money down on customization that they like seem to think other people will pay extra to adopt their choices and tastes, which never made a lot of sense to me.  This goes for houses or in vehicles - just because you're willing to pay a premium to get a certain look, doesn't mean anyone else is, and expecting them to shell out for your choices is a bit naive.

The Concours was a cagey purchase that
still has me well in the black.

What does always sell is functionality.  As much as I'd like to get all romantic and throw money at the old Triumph I'm restoring, I'm more interested in making it work, and then riding it.  To that end, I'm not interested in creating a perfect replica of a 1971 Triumph Bonneville to put in shows, so modern touches (especially when they're more cost effective than stock-at-all-cost options) are something I have no trouble with.  A bike that starts easily and runs sweetly sells itself much more quickly than a cantankerous but period correct trailer queen.  One's a motorcycle, the other is art, and art is notoriously in the eye of the beholder.

One of the reasons I've always gravitated toward cheap and cheerful 80s and 90s Japanese restos was because the parts are usually easy to find, including hard parts from a breaker if needed, and they're as cheap as chips to buy because people tended to use them rather than put them up on a pedestal.

My first brush with 'vintage' (I think a 51 year old air-cooled Triumph from before the collapse of the British bike industry qualifies as vintage) has me wondering if my approach still works.  The cost of parts is much higher than more recent Japanese bikes and this particular Bonneville was half taken apart by a muppet who wanted to be in Easy Rider, so I'm constantly finding parts missing or incorrect.  I'm also struggling with missing non-metric tools after having owned metric bikes my entire life.

When I'm reading Practical Sportbikes I enjoy the articles on DIY and the stories of scratchers who got a machine put together with their own hands.  When they run one of the 'specials' articles where it's a rich guy with clean hands throwing money at a project, I lose interest quickly.  Classic Bike Magazine is similar.  When they're talking about an owner keeping an old machine running on ingenuity and guile, I'm all in, but the minute it's a millionaire adding to his collection with another bespoke machine put together by someone else, I've lost interest.

I just finished Guy Martin's new book, Dead Men Don't Tell Tales, and Guy ends the latest one talking about trying to find what makes him happy.  This requires a fair bit of self awareness - something that most people don't have.  Guy's particularly difficult in that he will often act on an urge that turns out to be incorrect, but, as he says in the book, he's evolving.

There's a scene in Guy's Garage where Cammy, his professional race mechanic mate, knows how to fix the car they're working on but Guy has his own ideas and keeps bashing away at it wrong.  Rather than push the point, Cammy backs off and waits for Guy to realize he's using the wrong tool for the job.

Guy is critical of Cammy for being slack in his approach to work in the book, but I'm left wondering if the truth isn't somewhere in between:  what looks like a lack of effort from Guy's point of view is actually a better use of his energy from the professional race mechanic's point of view.  There's more to all this than just jumping in to the physical labour, you need to be exercising the grey matter too.

What I'm taking from this latest round of Guy Martin media is that you're more likely to stay engaged with and finish big projects if they make sense to you.  To that end, I spent yesterday working out why the kickstarter on the Bonneville wasn't working (the muppet had put it in backwards).

The goal is still to have gone through the whole bike and have it back in working order without breaking the bank.  The amount spent on it matters less than whether or not the project is in the black.  If a functional '71 Bonneville is worth about five grand, then that's what I'll work to on the budget, while keeping an eye on what engages me most about all this:  putting a sidelined bike back into service again... and then riding it!

This morning I'm looking at Motogadget's mo.Unit Blue and considering how to best tackle a 51 year old wiring loom that looks to be in good shape but should probably get rebuilt if dependability is the goal.  An ignition powered by bluetooth on a smartphone is just the kind of steampunk anachronism that a riding focused buyer would dig.  That it's also invisible means it won't hurt the look of the bike (the only change is the ignition key isn't there).

Got into rebuilding the Amal carbs only to discover the muppet who took them apart before didn't install any of the air slider hardware for the choke, so now I'm hunting for hard parts for 51 year old carbs... in a pandemic.  Note my anemic imperial socket wrench set.

Ready to go and then stopped - neither carb has the air slider or hardware in it.  I'd normally call around to the local breakers, find a donor set of carbs and then keep them handy for situations like this.  That isn't an option with a 51 year old British bike.

It's coming along - slower than I'd like, but it's coming along.  When it seems too much I remind myself why I'm doing it: one day soon that engine will turn over for the first time in decades and shortly after that I'll be out riding the thing!

Motorcycling For Sport On a Budget

LOGISTICS

The trickiest part about trying to arrange your motorcycling to provide you with a sporting outlet are the logistics.  You can't ride a track/trials/dirt bike to where you're going to ride it in a sporting fashion, so you need transportation options that'll get you and your gear to where you intend to use it.

The obvious choice (if you're looking for a budget choice) is to look at cargo vans - or so I thought.  Thanks to COVID, the market for these (like many other things) has gone bonkers as every unemployed rocket scientist in the world rushes out to grab a used van to deliver for Amazon.

Here are some current online choices:

My favourite is the fuggly Transit Connect that isn't even big enough to hold a single bike and is almost a decade old with over two-hundred thousand kilometres on it for $10,500, $8,500.  Eight and half grand for a heavily used POS.  Both my current on-road bikes, an '03 Triumph Tiger and an '10 Kawasaki Concours together cost me less than that, and they're both a joy to look at and operate, though carrying a dirt bike on them isn't likely.

If I want to get my Guy Martin on, New Transits start at thirty-five grand and can easily option up to over fifty.  The bigger Ram Promasters start at thirty-seven grand and can option to over twice that.  The wee Promaster City starts at thirty-four grand and can be optioned well into the forties.  Vans only really do the cargo thing and make any other usage tedious, and they're expensive!

The used car lot down Highway 6 has a 2015 Jeep Wrangler with 90k kms on it that they're asking $35k for it.  It isn't cheap but it seems in good nick and comes with the tow package.  We rented a Wrangler last year and I was impressed with its ability to carry weight and it's utility - it was also surprisingly fun to drive... and in the summer it'd get the doors and roof off and be able to do the Zoolander thing too.

A trailer goes for about a grand, this one comes with a ramp and he's asking $1300.  With a bit of bartering I could sort out a tow capable Wrangler with a useful trailer for under forty grand.  The Jeep isn't new, but it's only 6 years old and with a big v6 in it, 90k isn't too much of a stressful life - it actually works out to only fifteen thousand kilometres a year.

What's galling is that you're thirty-five grand into a years old almost 100k kms vehicle but the new ones run fifty-three grand - I guess you've got to have a lot of cash on hand to buy anything these days.

What'd be really nice is a state-ot-the-art Wrangler 4xe.  They tow, use very little gasoline and when things get sorted out with in-car fusion generators, I'd be able to take the gas engine out and go fully electric with it.  In the meantime, it'd carry all my bike clobber, would be a bulletproof winter vehicle and when the sun arrives I can pop the doors and roof off and enjoy it in an entirely different way; they really are Swiss Army knives!

SPORTS RIDING OPTIONS: Trials

Once I've got the moto-logistics worked out I could then focus on some sporting motorbiking.  This ain't cheap either, but some sport motorcycling is cheaper than others.  Trials riding is probably at the cheaper end of things with used bikes starting at about two grand and new, high-end performance models going up to about nine grand, though you can get a new, modern, Chinese made machine for under five grand.

I'm partial to older machines as I don't have to deal with dealer servicing and can do the work myself.  This mid-80s Yamaha TY350 comes with lots of spares and is in ready-to-go shape for about $2600.  Since I'm not looking to take on Dougie Lampkin, this'd more than get me started in trials.

The Amateur Trials Riding Association of Ontario offers regular weekend events throughout the summer and fall and would make for a great target to aim for.  I'd be a rookie, but I'm not in it to win it, I'm in it to improve my moto-craft and trials offer a unique focus on balance and control in that regard.

I'm disinclined to exercise for the sake of it, though I've never had trouble exercising in order to compete in sports, it's just hard to find any when you're a fifty-two year old guy in Southwestern Ontario.  Having trials events to prepare for would be just the thing to get me into motion.

There is also the Southwestern Ontario Classic Trials group, who also offer a number of events and categories and seem very newbie friendly.  That old Yamaha would fit right in with classic trials and would let me do my own spannering.

Our backyard has everything you'd need to practice trials, though tire tracks all over the lawn might not endear me to my better half.  Even with all that in mind, trials riding would be the cheapest moto-sport to get going in.

SPORT RIDING OPTIONS:  enduro/off-road riding

What's nice about the dirt-bike thing is that I could do it with my son, Max.  He got handy with dirt biking last summer at SMART Adventures so if we got into trail riding we could do it together.

Used dirt-bikes start at about $2500 and creep up quickly.  Most seem quite abused but appear to hold their value regardless.  For about six grand I could get us into two 21st Century machines that should be pretty dependable on the trails, the problem is there aren't any around here.  We'd have to drive for hours to get to the few that are left in Central Ontario.

The Ontario Federation of Trail Riders would be a good place to start in terms of working out trails and connecting with others interested in the sport.  Off Road Ontario offers access to enduro and motocross racing, but I'm not really into the yee-haw MX thing, though long distance enduro gets my attention (every January I'm glued to the Dakar Rally).  I also watch a lot of British television and I've seen a number of endurance off-road events on there that are appealing, so I wouldn't wave off enduro without looking into it a bit more.

SPORT RIDING OPTIONS:  track racing

There are motorcycle track days around Ontario from May to October.  The Vintage Road Racing Association seems like the best way in for someone not interested in becoming the next Marc Marquez but who is looking for some time on a bike working at the extreme ends of two-wheeled dynamics without having to worry about traffic.  The VRRA also offers a racing school to get people up to speed (so to speak).  I can't say that having a racing licence wouldn't be a cool thing to have.

The challenge with racing on pavement is that everything gets more expensive, from membership and training fees to the cost of equipment and bikes, and of course what it costs to fix them when you chuck them down the road.  Road racing offers a degree of speed and has obvious connections to road riding that are appealing, it's only the costs that make it seem like a step too far.

Sport motorcycling is tricky to get into.  You need the equipment to transport yourself and your bike and gear to where you're competing and then you also need the specialist motorbike itself, but there are options that can make it possible on not to extreme of a budget.  I'm hoping to find a way into this over the next few years.

A British Appreciation for Industrial History & Hands-On Restoration

There is an element of British television that revels in the industrial history that many generations of us lot lived through, and I'm hooked on it.  My favourite is Henry Cole & Sam Lovegrove's Shed & Buried which follows the two as they dig up hidden treasures found in some of the more eccentric sheds in the U.K., including a lot of older motorbikes:

They find all sorts of old machines in people's sheds which often leads to impromtu history lessons on brands I've never heard of or hidden bits of industrial history I hadn't heard of before.  From seed fiddles to motor memorabilia to the esoteric history of British motorbike production, it's never dull and usually enlightening.

They don't just rummage around in other people's sheds.  The show also casts a light on the 'car boot sale' and the used sales trade in the UK.  This culture of reverance for past technology is completely foreign in Canada.

It's tough to find anything motorbikey in Ontario to begin with let alone anything old and interesting, yet Henry & Sam seem to be able to find any number of interesting old bikes for around £1000 ($1700CAD).  In a country like Canada that prefers to hide its history under a modern marketing blanket, throwing stuff away is a cultural imperative.  This (very colonial) approach means there simply isn't an ecosystem of old machinery to explore.  This is exacerbated by Canada's history as a resource extractor rather than an industrially focused manufacturer; we don't make much here so there is no home-grown pride in any vehicle.

These cultural differences in background prompt media and awareness that is distinctly different in both countries.  The British produce a plethora of programs that explore industrial history and mechanics.  Shows like this would never fly in consumerist focused Canada.

Here's a case in point:  Shed & Buried started out with a '69 Triumph Daytona project, sorta like the one below described as 'an excellent buy' in Ottawa right now for $4650 Canadian .  Henry paid £600 ($1000CAD) for his old Daytona in similar condition.

If they exist at all, older bikes in Canada are prohibitively expensive.

What got me thinking about this was someone else on FB Marketplace offering disorganized boxes of old Triumph parts for $3600 without even a clear idea of what's in there.  Henry and Sam picked up a 1950s BSA for £400 they found in pieces in a caravan.  Canada's disinterest in and lack of history around industrial manufacturing make it a very difficult place to find old project bikes - unless you want to go into massive debt for an incomplete box of shit.

If, like me, you find living in this vacuous, consumerist wasteland frustrating, there are a lot of British TV programs that will remind you that finding old things and getting your hands dirty restoring them is a viable thing to do.  Here's a list of what to watch if you're looking for some proof that you're not crazy:

Find It, Fix It, Drive It: if you're crafty with VPNs you can stream this on Channel4.

Guy Martin's How Britain Worked:  Guy's background as a mechanic comes up in most of his shows

Car SOS: one of my favourites - restoration leading to catharsis

Wheeler Dealers: started in the UK, went to the US and lost its way, now back to UK

Even Top Gear makes a point of mechanics, though often in jest:

Finding Meaning on Two Wheels: a philosophy of motorcycling

My professional life is kicking the shit out of me this year, so when the never ending winter of COVID finally ended and the roads cleared so that I could ride again it felt like coming up for air after a winter underwater.  It isn't too far a reach to say that riding feels like breathing to me.

I'm in the process of buying another bike, one big enough for my son and I to go on rides again with, and the current owner said he'd never ride again.  I can't imagine a situation where I'd ever say that.  You sometimes hear stories of elderly senior citizens who still ride.  That'll be me, or I won't be a senior citizen.

In the professional reflections blog I've been thinking about full commitment and how a job that encourages it can make you your best self.  It's a lasting sadness that so many people see work as purgatory rather than an opportunity to find their better selves.

The Japanese are much better at this than westerners are.  They don't wish each other good luck when doing something difficult, they simply say, "gambate!" or 'do your best!'  And that effort is what is respected regardless of outcome.  They make effort a socially appreciated thing where western cultures tend to fixate on winning.  There is a great scene in the Tokyo Ghoul anime where the bad guy is dying after a vicious fight.  He's an evil, cannibal ghoul so there aren't many redeeming features there, but everyone stops to listen respectfully to his last words because he put up such an epic fight.  We're all too busy trying to win to care about anything like that.  We'd vilify and belittle him rather than respect the effort.  This makes us remarkably unhappy because the problem with competition is that there is always a loser.

When you're approaching an activity that makes full use of your facilities you get lost in it.  It doesn't limit you, it expands you, makes you better.  Motorcycling is a technically complex, physically and mentally demanding activity that asks a lot of you, but the rewards are worth the risks.

If you're Simon Pavey or Guy Martin or Valentino Rossi, you race because that's where you have to get to in order to find the edge of your skills and give you that sense of complete immersion.  The leading edge of my own motorcycling has also moved on.  Where I'd once be happy with commuting on a small bike, I'm now working my way through ownership of different kinds of bikes and wish to expand further.  The limits I'm seeking in motorcycling aren't just in riding, but also in mechanics.  It's for that reason that I find events like the Dakar, especially when someone like Lyndon Poskitt does it in the malle moto class, so fascinating.  They're combining that technical skill with riding ability in a way that most racers can't or won't.

My work is usually able to give me enough latitude to fully immerse myself, but this year COVID has made it a broken thing unable to do anything well.  It has changed from an opportunity to seek excellence to never ending triage in mediocrity.  This has me asking hard questions about what I'd do if I didn't need the money it provides.  These are questions you should ask yourself before retirement, but they're also questions you should ask yourself when you're in danger of getting mired in work that doesn't let you find your best self.

Watching Ride With Norman Reedus last week, he was on the South Island of New Zealand where he had a chat with a young man from Canada who had opened up a business there.  One of his reasons for living where he does was that there had to be good riding roads easily accessible nearby.  This means he can explore riding in challenging circumstances, which seems like enlightenment to me.

In my final years of teaching I hope I can rediscover that sense of energizing peak performance that improves rather than limits me, and if not there then in another job that gives me the latitude I need to chase excellence while supporting my family.  Should I ever get to the point where I don't need to spend my days working for someone else, then it'll be time to move to a place where I can explore riding more fully.

That somewhere would have easy to access track days that let me explore riding dynamics at the edge of road riding, complex local roads that make me a better rider and off road opportunities that let me explore riding in a variety of unpaved situations.  Where I am now offers none of these things.  I'd also have the means to develop my mechanical skills to the limit.  I'm fortunate in that I have such a rich hobby and sport to explore.  I feel sorry for those that don't.

Norfolk Wisdom on BBC's Speed Dreams

I just finished watching BBC 2's Speed Dreams: The Fastest Place On Earth, a documentary about a group of British motorcyclists who travel to Bonneville to see how fast their folk-engineered motorcycles can go.  It's a great watch and one of the best motorcycle focused things I've seen about Bonneville, and there have been many.

One of my favourite bits about this one is that it isn't one of those (insert celebrity name here) explorations of extreme motorbiking.  Those can get thin pretty quickly when they lean mainly on the twist of watching a footballer or actor doing something that hundreds of others have done with less while the poor celebrity laments their fame and finds ways to make the trip as expensive as they possibly can.  It might be time to shelve that formula.  Motorcycling is inherently egalitarian.  Millionaire problems while doing it just aren't that interesting. Meanwhile, Speed Dreams covers the gamut from build-it-in-your-shed eccentrics to bank funded high end amateur riders, but I find the ones who do it with less far more interesting.  Money makes people tedious and shallow.  It's not their fault, they can't help it, it's just what money does  They end up with an audience because people like to watch wealth.  The characters underneath it are nearly always atrophied by it.

Speaking of interesting, my favourite bit of Speed Dreams is when the Scottish lead engineer of the high end team comes out and waxes poetic about the shear size of the place...

Then the old fella from Norfolk who picks up the litter on the beach after he had a nervous breakdown and built an old Indian bike in his shed with recycled parts walks out and does us all Norfolk proud:

'ha''s Norfook for yow.  It made me miss home.

You can catch this one on Motortrend TV with a free trail, or on BBC if you're somewhere they'll let you stream it.  Amazon also looks like they add it in occasionally.  Back in the day Top Gear (with the old guys) liked it too.

Other Bonneville Motorcycle Media:

Guy Martin and the world's fastest motorbike.  I usually like Guy's stuff, but this isn't one of my favourites, probably because it comes off as a Triumph ad, he never gets his hands dirty.  Even the Triumph bit is outsourced to another engineering group making it look even more like a marketing exercise.  They don't manage to break any records either.  You can stream this one on Channel 4 UK, though there are other Guy motorbike themed things I prefer (his run at Pike's Peak on a custom hand made machine is fantastic).

Henry Cole's Worlds' Greatest Motorcycle Rides is a good series to get you through long Canadian winters and his run at Bonneville is a genuine tear jerker.  That he's trying to do it on a Brough Superior is English eccentricity at its best.  First time he met Sam Lovegrove too, so there is a good bit of engineering/technical to it as well.

Odin, Thor's dad (Anthony Hopkins), plays Burt Munro in The World's Fastest Indian, a well put together film telling the story of one of Bonneville's heroes from down under.

Out of Nothing is another shed-built Bonneville attempt from an American North West perspective.  It sometimes wanders dangerously near to hipster philosophical - Americans tend to take themselves very seriously when doing manly things.  I prefer the UK self deprecating humour rather than the chest thumping, but it's still a good film.

Motorbike Research from the 1920s, 30s and 40s for Under Dark Skies

I'm eighty-thousand words into writing a novel loosely based on my granddad's experience in World War Two.  He was in France in 1939 and 1940 during the Blitzkrieg and the Battle of France.  Weeks after Dunkirk he was still trying to make his way back to Britain from occupied France as continental Europe fell to the Nazis.

I've always found that period of the war interesting.  Germany had the initiative and everyone else was struggling to understand what armed conflict had evolved into after two decades of incredible industrial progress following the trenches of WW1.  The allies weren't proud of their losses early on and it has since become an embarrassing and forgotten period in history.  If you don't believe me, just look up how many movies and books came out of the final year of the war when the allies were winning.

The novel, tentatively called Under Dark Skies (though I'm not married to that title), tells the tale of my granddad's service in a Royal Air Force Hurricane squadron sent with the British Expeditionary Force to France to stop the inevitable German invasion.

I've tried to keep it as accurate as possible, but in the absence of any specific details (my grandfather was never vocal about his war experience), I'm taking some other influences and mixing them in, Quentin Tarantino style.  Inglorious Basterds is one of my favourite World War Two films and I love the liberties he took with history, so much so that it's tempting me to do the same.

Bill was a member of the RAF White Helmets and a handy gymnast back in the day.  I've taken his
hidden-to-me, life-long affection for motorcycling, mixed in a bit of Guy Martin and Steve McQueen, though I don't know that Bill's history needed it, but it's just how I like to write.  Back in university I got into a difficult to get into creative writing course.  Leon Rooke came in a few times to help us with our writing process and commented on my ability to convey action effectively.  I like flowing, scripted action and that is the backbone of this book.

The fictional Bill's war experience was also influenced by this news article I found in a 1941 newspaper about motorcycle based 'suicide squads' who wreaked havoc inside Nazi occupied Europe.

That's out of the Spokane Daily Chronical on Saturday, January 4th, 1941!

I've had a tough year at work and needed to find a way to work off frustration, so when I can't sleep at 5am in the morning I get up and escape into 1940 France, it's been a life saver.

One of the enjoyable side effects of writing an historical novel is that you end up doing a lot of research in order to look like you know what you're talking about.  I have an equivalent of a minor degree in history, but the digging you do when writing in a time period is much more nuanced, and this case, very motorbike focused.  Here are some of my favourite motorcycle specific research bits from writing this thing:

Motorcycle Focused Research from Under Dark Skies

1938 Triumph Speed Twin:  I was looking for a state-of the-art fast bike to use in France that would outrun a supercharged German Mercedes staff car (that was a good scene to write).  Triumph's Twin was a massive step toward modern motorcycles and an early candidate for the job, though not what I eventually settled on.

1930s supercharger speed record bike from Italy (I was looking up ideas for a customized 'uncatchable' suicide squad bike...

History of military motorcycles. 

https://www.thrillist.com/cars/history-of-u-s-military-motorcycles

Triumph 3HW, Triumph's WW2 bike has a history closely tied to company and Coventry's brutal experience in the war:  

https://cybermotorcycle.com/marques/triumph/triumph-3hw.htm

Triumph History overall:

http://www.ianchadwick.com/motorcycles/triumph/time02.html

Norton 16H: Norton's WW2 motorcycle contribution:

https://silodrome.com/norton-16h-history/

https://www.wdnorton.nl/Contents_page.htm

Inge Stoll: Bavarian motorcycle racer and sportswoman - I'm looking to diversify the cast a bit towards the end. It's hard to do in the British military of 1940:

https://www.carolenash.com/news/bike-news/detail/female-motorcycle-racers-inge-stoll

https://www.technischesmuseum.at/language/en-us/home/sammlung-forschung/motorsport-in-%C3%B6sterreich/bestandssuche/personen/person-detail/articleid/1949

Peugeot used to make motorcycles!  They were quite common in France in 1940 where I'm spending my time.  I needed a bike that a local would have, so I had a look at the Peugeot listings:
http://www.motorbike-search-engine.co.uk/classic_bikes/peugeot-classic-motorcycles.php

Peugeot motorcycle history: https://peugeot-motocycles.com/en/success-story/

NSU was a German moto manufacturer.  German bikes have a very distinct style back then that was quite divergent from the lighter more handling focused British machines, though the NSU 351 OSL is a pretty little thing:  https://bikez.com/motorcycles/nsu_351_osl_1939.php

The operating manual for a T-100 Triumph Tiger!  I'm partial to Tigers and a chance to bring the T-100 that started the breed into the novel was too good to miss:

https://web.archive.org/web/20120420015718/http://www.klassiekrijden.nu/techniek/triumph-1939-tiger-speedtwin-deluxe-manual.pdf  The original instruction manual is really handy when I'm writing about details on the bike, like where the controls are.  I could just make it up, but then I might as well have just written a book about moon nazis in rocket-ships.

RAF bikes of WW2 (some good photos in there):

http://hmvf.co.uk/topic/20156-ww2-raf-bikes/

BMW bikes in WW2:

https://www.dday-overlord.com/en/material/vehicles/bmw-r12

https://bikez.com/motorcycles/bmw_r17_1935.php

... and sometimes you want to know how they sound:

... which is just like Jeff's tractor!  I'm sure there's a BMW that doesn't sound like a tractor, but I've yet to find it.

1930s vintage motorbikes riding across France:

https://www.rideapart.com/articles/356572/1930s-motorcycles-across-france-video/

This one was handy from a bike and a geography angle.  A nicely nostalgic thing too.

Motorcycling in 1936:

https://motorcycletimeline.com/1936-2/

http://www.vintagenorton.com/

Scottish Six Days Trial ended up playing a part in Bill's backstory (so there is a bit of Ross Noble inspiration in there too).  I liked the idea of Bill's amateur riding background somehow elevating him from lorry driving but didn't want the flash of road racing.  I get the sense that Bill's motorcycling was frowned upon by family and was never recognized as something that might improve his lot.  SSDT seemed like a good amateur-accessible option that demonstrated not just exceptional bike craft but also a toughness of spirit:

https://trialsguru.net/scottish-six-days-trial-the-sporting-holiday-in-the-highlands/  Back in the day it wasn't the gymnastic insanity that the sport has become now.

German women in the 1930s seem quite sports driven.  Ilse Thouret was another Bavarian motorbike racer who looked like a real tough nut:

https://motoress.com/motoressence/woman-rider-motoressence/ilse-thouret-woman-motorcycle-racer/

Bill was a freemason so I'm thinking about bringing on of these women in as a daughter of one (freemasons were killed in death camps as jewish sympathizers).  If the Craft gives you the willies maybe you can take some consolation in knowing that Nazis hated it.

I was looking for a retired French moto-racer who could help Bill sort out a modified 'uncatchable' bike.  Louis Jeannin was one of few French winners, having won the 350cc championship in 1932, but I was reduced to wikipedia for the only mention of him:    

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Grand_Prix_motorcycle_racing_European_champions

I ended up giving him a shop at 16/18 Rue de la République, 57240 Knutange, France where Bill goes to pick up a modified T-100.  Jeanin raced Jonghis, which I'd never heard of, though they have an interesting history:

 http://www.woiweb.com/index.php/Jonghi#:~:text=Jonghi%20is%20a%20Italian%2DFrench,%2DJonghi%20and%20Motos%20Jonghi%22.

1939 Tiger T100 for sale at Bonhams!  If the book does well and Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, Ewan McGregor and Orlando Bloom all pick up the movie rights (they're all big bike nerds) then I'll get myself that T-100:

https://www.bonhams.com/auctions/24885/lot/421/?category=list

Looking for a cheap bike a lower class Cockney kid would ride and came across the BSA Blue Star thumper:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSA_Blue_Star

Banger’s bike at home:

https://www.motorcycleclassics.com/classic-british-motorcycles/classic-bsa-motorcycles/1934-bsa-blue-star-zmsz19jazhur (est.) top speed 75mph.  Good nick name for a kid who rides a single cylinder banger.

1946 Triumph repair manual!  At the end of the war production lines were restarted with little updated because things were so exhausted.  This was a brilliant find as it details all sorts of bits and pieces that help me detail mechanical happenings accurately:

https://partsbooks.britishonly.com/partsbooks/20-10250C.pdf

A Belgian sniper makes his way into the story and has become central to it.  I wanted him on something that spoke to Belgian industrial arts and came across the Gillet Herstal 720 AF - a state of the art machine that never saw wide production due to Belgium's invasion:

https://autowise.com/ww2-motorcycle-sidecar-bikes/

Gillet Herstal 720 AF motorcycle and sidecar (Belgian)

https://motos-of-war.ru/en/motorcycles/gillet-herstal-720-ab/ a great Russian resource on motos of war!

A fantastically named French combination option: The Moto Gnome Rhone with Dragon Porte sidecar!

https://www.lesmaquettistes.com/t4819-sidecar-bernardet-2-modele-1938-dragon-porte-rm-1-35-scrath-fin

I was looking for an alternate German Sidecar combo since everything has been very BMW focused on
the German side, then I came across the Zündapp KS 750, a combination so good that the German government asked BMW to build it instead of its iconic boxer (BMW refused):

http://www.wehrmachtsgespann.de/zuendappenglisch/ze1.htm

https://www.motorcycleclassics.com/classic-german-motorcycles/1942-zundapp-ks750

http://www.zundapps.com/models/ks750

With sidecar removed: https://www.coys.co.uk/cars/1944-zundapp-ks-750

A fine example of German modernist design.  They're big and heavy though (over 30% heavier than the svelt Belgian Gillet Herstal combination).

***

Those are just the bike related links.  I have more than a dozen pages of links and notes on all
sorts of mad details.  At one point I got lost in WW2 vintage brass blowtorches (they're paraffin fueled!):

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/WW2-T-C-Military-Extra-Large-Blow-torch-Lamp-1942-/362977608876

When I wasn't looking up details on British warplanes that simply didn't work well, like the Fairey Battle that I'd never heard of before, I was digging deep into fasteners used during WW2 (Germany was metric which is a problem if you're working on a German vehicle in a British hangar).

Writing UDS has been a great trip at a time when I'm frustrated by people's response to a crisis and can't go on any other trips anyway.  Thematically this erupts out of the text with regularity.  This weekend we're off to try and take out Luftwaffe high command at the HQ of Fliegerkorps VIII in Roumont Château, near Libramont in southern Belgium (check out May 26th).  At this point the story is writing itself and I'm often surprised at the direction it takes.  In my best moments I'm reading it as I write it, lost in time.

Tiger Brains

The other day I was once again going over the details on the Tiger after taking the tank of for the billionth time.  Even though the stock pipes for the vacuum controlled idle system for the electronic fuel injection hold vacuum when I test them, I can't test that when they're on the bike, so they might be leaking where they join.  I happened to have some fuel line in the right size, so I've taken out the Triumph hoses and put these clear ones on instead to isolate another possible point of failure.

Once I got them in I fired up the TUNEBOY software and figured I'd run the idle control system test since it would move the plunger up and down and with everything off I could check to see that it's all working as it should,  except the ECU wouldn't connect to the computer.  I've done dozens of TUNEBOY adjustments now and know how the bike syncs with the PC over the serial port, but it wasn't connecting.  While trying some variations I turned the ignition on on the bike and the ECU made unfamiliar popping noise, and then none of the dash lights would come on (the running lights still do though).  The ECU no longer clicks off when the ignition is switched off either, which suggests it's not coming on either.

The intermittent nature of this failure always made my ass twitch in terms of it being electronic rather than mechanical.  Mechanical failures tend to be more consistent and easier to diagnose, and I've replaced everything around the idle control system now, so unless Triumph sold me a dickey idle control motor, which seems unlikely since the first one lasted 17 years and did over seventy-six thousand hard, Canadian kilometres and survived seventeen -40°C Canadian winters.  Assuming all the new parts are working as they should, an ECU that was losing the plot is as likely a culprit as anything else I've been chasing, and now it seems to have popped entirely.

So what do you do when your old Triumph's bike brain loses the plot?  Get another, I guess.  Used ones seems to be extraordinarily expensive and look to be in rough shape out of US used parts suppliers on eBay.  And for some reason they're charging twice what European suppliers are for shipping.  With that and the fact that The States seem like they're on the edge of a civil war, I think I'll be looking to the dependable Germans who have COVID19 well managed for a replacement Tiger brain.  If I'm thinking that, I wonder how many other people are avoiding business with the US right now.

But before I go that far, I'm a G.D. computer engineering teacher, so I'm hardly going to let an ECU go in the bin without having a go at it first.  If this is a short or something simple, I can solve that easily enough.  If nothing else I can see how the ECU is set up architecturally, but more often than not I'm able to get electronics I have to open up working again.  Time to flex my soldering prowess.

The most frustrating part about this is that I may well have solved the idle problem with replacement hoses, or maybe I didn't.  Maybe I chased down all of these hoses and parts for nothing and it was the ECU losing the plot all along.  Electronic Fuel Injection (EFI) is a wonderful thing, but the early systems were fragile.  There a lots of posts online about early Triumph EFI headaches, and I've added to them.

Guy Martin does a good special called The Last Flight of the Vulcan Bomber.  They grounded the last of these nuclear bombers in 2015 because they no longer had the expertise and technology too keep them safely air worthy.  In the show Guy talks about why there are plenty of older planes like Spitfires still flying when the Vulcan has to be grounded.  He says the Spitfire was made from bicycle parts you could fabricate in a shed, so they're relatively easy to maintain.  The Vulcan was an industrial machine with early electrical and electronic systems that were many times more complicated.  He goes on to talk about how the Vulcan looked like it came from another planet when only seven years earlier an Avro Lancaster was the state of the art.  There are performance advantages in these leaps forward, but there are also maintenance headaches that mean these early jets will never fly again.

Early fuel injected bikes are a lot like that Vulcan - they can do things earlier bikes can't like get better mileage, not need parts changed to ride at altitude and generally require less maintenance.  I just fixed up one of the last carbureted bikes, a 1997 Honda Fireblade, over the winter.  EFI was around then, but Honda wisely went for highly evolved carburettors rather than new, fragile and poor performing EFI systems.  I rebuilt the carbs, which are a complex but highly evolved four-carb set, and the bike runs like a Swiss (or rather Japanese) watch.  The EFI on the Tiger did the job without any attention for 17 years and seventy-six thousand kilometres including two rides into the Rockies - something no carburetor could do, but when it finally broke, boy did it break.  It's things like this that will make these first generation EFI bikes rare in the future.  Like the Vulcan, they're so complicated and difficult to maintain when they go wrong that they'll get retired from service where an older, simpler bike might still be fixable.



RESOURCES FOR CHASING DOWN ECU PROBLEMS ON A TRIUMPH 955i MOTORBIKE:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Triumph-Speed-Triple-955-2000-2004-ECU-Steuergerat-CDI-S1000T3/324154967093?hash=item4b79244435:g:BCEAAOSwZrteryUL

There are early Triumph EFI issues aplenty online:
https://www.triumphrat.net/threads/ecu-repair-refurbishing.525873/
https://www.triumphrat.net/threads/bad-ecu-on-my-2006-speed-triple.159082/
https://www.triumphrat.net/threads/955i-idle-hesitation-porblem.971699/#post-2004081361
https://www.triumphrat.net/threads/ecu-unit.80778/
https://www.thetriumphforum.com/threads/s1000t3-ecu.22000/
https://www.triumphrat.net/threads/1999-955i-ecu-needed.93566/#post-1107942

Used Parts, not of the vintage I'm looking for though:
http://www.rubbersideup.com/triumph/tiger?p=2

https://www.bikebandit.com/oem-parts/detail/triumph/t1291000/b1389042?m=121594&sch=565828
Wahay!  A new ECU is two-grand, AMERICAN!  That's over $2500 Canadian!  The whole bike cost me three grand.  See what I mean about the costs of keeping emerging, fragile old tech active?