if that doesnt make you want to buy something then i quit.
plus i drew this sweet pic of me and my chick. She is totally hot and rides in a dress all the time. This was how we met.
30.11.10
lapziggy
If you wanna go to the show send me 500 dollars cash and i'll give you directions and a voucher for 5 bucks off your bar tab. Or just go over to thedamnbandits.com , your choice but if i were you id send me 500 bucks.
autorama 2011 here we come...maybe... we shall see.
well fuck, both my bikes are down for the count right now. Getting them both sent out to paint hopefully in time for autorama in febuary. Gonna shoot the 69 white and red im thinkin. The 06 is a toss up right now ive been thinking about doin a rootbeer and cream for close to a year now. But i may just end up going with a super dark merlot. It came to me in a dream and i just havent been able to shake it.
Ryan quote of the week
I pay you to tie me up and whip me, not say hurtfull things about smashmouth who have some o.k. songs
peanut tank mods
cut and moved the filler cap a bit further north to help avoid gas spillage onto the testicals while riding.
machined up a steel adapter to weld to the tank so i can bolt on my wicked high flow fuel valve
mmmm stainless weld
gonna machine up a new outlet block for it also so that it will point down towards the carb and step it down to work with 5/16" line vs. the 1/2" barb thats on there
almost done. Just need to pressure check it and let ryan paint the fuck out of it.
27.11.10
death science
Tim from death science stopped by yesterday to pick an axle for his servicar project. Real cool dude with the beginnings of a super bad ass trike. Best of luck to ya man. Buy some product from these boys and help him get that fucker ready for born free. Check deathscience Here
i will also be working with him on designing up some cool bits that will be available soon. so stay tuned.
i will also be working with him on designing up some cool bits that will be available soon. so stay tuned.
26.11.10
A damn good read
I'm sure some of you if not many of you have seen this before but for those who haven't give it a read and enjoy.
Song of the Sausage Creature
by Hunter S. Thompson
There are some things nobody needs in this world, and a bright-red, hunch-back, warp-speed 900cc cafe racer is one of them - but I want one anyway, and on some days I actually believe I need one. That is why they are dangerous.
Everybody has fast motorcycles these days. Some people go 150 miles an hour on two-lane blacktop roads, but not often. There are too many oncoming trucks and too many radar cops and too many stupid animals in the way. You have to be a little crazy to ride these super-torque high-speed crotch rockets anywhere except a racetrack - and even there, they will scare the whimpering shit out of you… There is, after all, not a pig’s eye worth of difference between going head-on into a Peterbilt or sideways into the bleachers. On some days you get what you want, and on others, you get what you need.
When Cycle World called me to ask if I would road-test the new Harley Road King, I got uppity and said I’d rather have a Ducati superbike. It seemed like a chic decision at the time, and my friends on the superbike circuit got very excited. “Hot damn,” they said. “We will take it to the track and blow the bastards away.”
“Balls,” I said. “Never mind the track. The track is for punks. We are Road People. We are Cafe Racers.”
The Cafe Racer is a different breed, and we have our own situations. Pure speed in sixth gear on a 5000-foot straightaway is one thing, but pure speed in third gear on a gravel-strewn downhill ess-turn is quite another.
But we like it. A thoroughbred Cafe Racer will ride all night through a fog storm in freeway traffic to put himself into what somebody told him was the ugliest and tightest decreasing-radius turn since Genghis Khan invented the corkscrew.
But we like it. A thoroughbred Cafe Racer will ride all night through a fog storm in freeway traffic to put himself into what somebody told him was the ugliest and tightest decreasing-radius turn since Genghis Khan invented the corkscrew.
Cafe Racing is mainly a matter of taste. It is an atavistic mentality, a peculiar mix of low style, high speed, pure dumbness, and overweening commitment to the Cafe Life and all its dangerous pleasures… I am a Cafe Racer myself, on some days - and it is one of my finest addictions.
I am not without scars on my brain and my body, but I can live with them. I still feel a shudder in my spine every time I see a picture of a Vincent Black Shadow, or when I walk into a public restroom and hear crippled men whispering about the terrifying Kawasaki Triple… I have visions of compound femur-fractures and large black men in white hospital suits holding me down on a gurney while a nurse called “Bess” sews the flaps of my scalp together with a stitching drill.
Ho, ho. Thank God for these flashbacks. The brain is such a wonderful instrument (until God sinks his teeth into it). Some people hear Tiny Tim singing when they go under, and some others hear the song of the Sausage Creature.
When the Ducati turned up in my driveway, nobody knew what to do with it. I was in New York, covering a polo tournament, and people had threatened my life. My lawyer said I should give myself up and enroll in the Federal Witness Protection Program. Other people said it had something to do with the polo crowd.
The motorcycle business was the last straw. It had to be the work of my enemies, or people who wanted to hurt me. It was the vilest kind of bait, and they knew I would go for it.
Of course. You want to cripple the bastard? Send him a 130-mph cafe-racer. And include some license plates, he’ll think it’s a streetbike. He’s queer for anything fast.
Which is true. I have been a connoisseur of fast motorcycles all my life. I bought a brand-new 650 BSA Lightning when it was billed as “the fastest motorcycle ever tested by Hot Rod magazine.” I have ridden a 500-pound Vincent through traffic on the Ventura Freeway with burning oil on my legs and run the Kawa 750 Triple through Beverly Hills at night with a head full of acid… I have ridden with Sonny Barger and smoked weed in biker bars with Jack Nicholson, Grace Slick, Ron Zigler and my infamous old friend, Ken Kesey, a legendary Cafe Racer.
Some people will tell you that slow is good - and it may be, on some days - but I am here to tell you that fast is better. I’ve always believed this, in spite of the trouble it’s caused me. Being shot out of a cannon will always be better than being squeezed out of a tube. That is why God made fast motorcycles, Bubba….
So when I got back from New York and found a fiery red rocket-style bike in my garage, I realized I was back in the road-testing business.
The brand-new Ducati 900 Campione del Mundo Desmodue Supersport double-barreled magnum Cafe Racer filled me with feelings of lust every time I looked at it. Others felt the same way. My garage quickly became a magnet for drooling superbike groupies. They quarreled and bitched at each other about who would be the first to help me evaluate my new toy… And I did, of course, need a certain spectrum of opinions, besides my own, to properly judge this motorcycle. The Woody Creek Perverse Environmental Testing Facility is a long way from Daytona or even top-fuel challenge-sprints on the Pacific Coast Highway, where teams of big-bore Kawasakis and Yamahas are said to race head-on against each other in death-defying games of “chicken” at 100 miles an hour….
No. Not everybody who buys a high-dollar torque-brute yearns to go out in a ball of fire on a public street in L.A. Some of us are decent people who want to stay out of the emergency room, but still blast through neo-gridlock traffic in residential districts whenever we feel like it… For that we need Fine Machinery.
Which we had - no doubt about that. The Ducati people in New Jersey had opted, for some reasons of their own, to send me the 900ss-sp for testing - rather than their 916 crazy-fast, state-of-the-art superbike track-racer. It was far too fast, they said - and prohibitively expensive - to farm out for testing to a gang of half-mad Colorado cowboys who think they’re world-class Cafe Racers.
The Ducati 900 is a finely engineered machine. My neighbors called it beautiful and admired its racing lines. The nasty little bugger looked like it was going 90 miles an hour when it was standing still in my garage.
Taking it on the road, though, was a genuinely terrifying experience. I had no sense of speed until I was going 90 and coming up fast on a bunch of pickup trucks going into a wet curve along the river. I went for both brakes, but only the front one worked, and I almost went end over end. I was out of control staring at the tailpipe of a U.S. Mail truck, still stabbing frantically at my rear brake pedal, which I just couldn’t find… I am too tall for these new-age roadracers; they are not built for any rider taller than five-nine, and the rearset brake pedal was not where I thought it would be. Mid-size Italian pimps who like to race from one cafe to another on the boulevards of Rome in a flat-line prone position might like this, but I do not.
I was hunched over the tank like a person diving into a pool that got emptied yesterday. Whacko! Bashed on the concrete bottom, flesh ripped off, a Sausage Creature with no teeth, fucked-up for the rest of its life.
We all love Torque, and some of us have taken it straight over the high side from time to time - and there is always Pain in that… But there is also Fun, the deadly element, and Fun is what you get when you screw this monster on. BOOM! Instant take-off, no screeching or squawking around like a fool with your teeth clamping down on our tongue and your mind completely empty of everything but fear.
No. This bugger digs right in and shoots you straight down the pipe, for good or ill.
On my first take-off, I hit second gear and went through the speed limit on a two-lane blacktop highway full of ranch traffic. By the time I went up to third, I was going 75 and the tach was barely above 4000 rpm….
And that’s when it got its second wind. From 4000 to 6000 in third will take you from 75 mph to 95 in two seconds - and after that, Bubba, you still have fourth, fifth, and sixth. Ho, ho.
I never got to sixth gear, and I didn’t get deep into fifth. This is a shameful admission for a full-bore Cafe Racer, but let me tell you something, old sport: This motorcycle is simply too goddamn fast to ride at speed in any kind of normal road traffic unless you’re ready to go straight down the centerline with your nuts on fire and a silent scream in your throat.
When aimed in the right direction at high speed, though, it has unnatural capabilities. This I unwittingly discovered as I made my approach to a sharp turn across some railroad tracks, saw that I was going way too fast and that my only chance was to veer right and screw it on totally, in a desperate attempt to leapfrog the curve by going airborne.
It was a bold and reckless move, but it was necessary. And it worked: I felt like Evel Knievel as I soared across the tracks with the rain in my eyes and my jaws clamped together in fear. I tried to spit down on the tracks as I passed them, but my mouth was too dry… I landed hard on the edge of the road and lost my grip for a moment as the Ducati began fishtailing crazily into oncoming traffic. For two or three seconds I came face to face with the Sausage Creature….
But somehow the brute straightened out. I passed a schoolbus on the right and got the bike under control long enough to gear down and pull off into an abandoned gravel driveway where I stopped and turned off the engine. My hands had seized up like claws and the rest of my body was numb. I felt nauseous and I cried for my mama, but nobody heard, then I went into a trance for 30 or 40 seconds until I was finally able to light a cigarette and calm down enough to ride home. I was too hysterical to shift gears, so I went the whole way in first at 40 miles an hour.
Whoops! What am I saying? Tall stories, ho, ho… We are motorcycle people; we walk tall and we laugh at whatever’s funny. We shit on the chests of the Weird….
But when we ride very fast motorcycles, we ride with immaculate sanity. We might abuse a substance here and there, but only when it’s right. The final measure of any rider’s skill is the inverse ratio of his preferred Traveling Speed to the number of bad scars on his body. It is that simple: If you ride fast and crash, you are a bad rider. And if you are a bad rider, you should not ride motorcycles.
The emergence of the superbike has heightened this equation drastically. Motorcycle technology has made such a great leap forward. Take the Ducati. You want optimum cruising speed on this bugger? Try 90mph in fifth at 5500 rpm - and just then, you see a bull moose in the middle of the road. WHACKO. Meet the Sausage Creature.
Or maybe not: The Ducati 900 is so finely engineered and balanced and torqued that you *can* do 90 mph in fifth through a 35-mph zone and get away with it. The bike is not just fast - it is *extremely* quick and responsive, and it *will* do amazing things… It is like riding a Vincent Black Shadow, which would outrun an F-86 jet fighter on the take-off runway, but at the end, the F-86 would go airborne and the Vincent would not, and there was no point in trying to turn it. WHAMO! The Sausage Creature strikes again.
There is a fundamental difference, however, between the old Vincents and the new breed of superbikes. If you rode the Black Shadow at top speed for any length of time, you would almost certainly die. That is why there are not many life members of the Vincent Black Shadow Society. The Vincent was like a bullet that went straight; the Ducati is like the magic bullet in Dallas that went sideways and hit JFK and the Governor of Texas at the same time.
It was impossible. But so was my terrifying sideways leap across the railroad tracks on the 900sp. The bike did it easily with the grace of a fleeing tomcat. The landing was so easy I remember thinking, goddamnit, if I had screwed it on a little more I could have gone a lot farther.
Maybe this is the new Cafe Racer macho. My bike is so much faster than yours that I dare you to ride it, you lame little turd. Do you have the balls to ride this BOTTOMLESS PIT OF TORQUE?
That is the attitude of the new-age superbike freak, and I am one of them. On some days they are about the most fun you can have with your clothes on. The Vincent just killed you a lot faster than a superbike will. A fool couldn’t ride the Vincent Black Shadow more than once, but a fool can ride a Ducati 900 many times, and it will always be a bloodcurdling kind of fun. That is the Curse of Speed which has plagued me all my life. I am a slave to it. On my tombstone they will carve, “IT NEVER GOT FAST ENOUGH FOR ME.”
21.11.10
drumming up some brakes
mated a late model sporty drum to the 19" mag today. Took a lil bit of work and some bruises but it looks like it will work out. I ended up welding all the holes in the drum closed, opened up the id to clear the sealed bearing and then redrilled the holes in the proper pattern to bolt it up to the wheel. Now for the bruises part, Well the great great grandfather of the terminator A.K.A our bridgeport kicked my ass earlier today. I was tightening the spindle nut and the in my haste i accidentally hit the on switch with the swivel wrench. Oh shit brain mode kicked in and i tried to get the fuck out of the way of the projectile wrench but i still ended up with a possibly fractured left pinky a pretty good goose egg on my right forearm and a pretty solid hit to the head from the ball end of the wrench. A few minutes of cursing, walking around and a couple of cigs and i was all good to go back to drilling holes and shit. More carefully though.
19.11.10
Tank building
well this bike was finished until the tank and fender got stolen (out of the painters house while it was getting a chip fixed its long and really shitty story) anyways the fender was no problem to get again. Unfortunately independent tank company went under so we found a tank direct from arlan ness's personal stash that was really close to the original. but it needs a different tunnel setup that's deeper with more of a curve so that's what its getting. stay tuned for more progress
18.11.10
wheelies and shit
my buddies stevie-d, harlen ness, and stuntbike justin went for a cruise the other day and took this video.
16.11.10
Linkert M74-B
fuck yeah power is right.
found this old linkert in a box the other day. It looked pretty cool so i decided to reuild it wich is really easy when everything isn't rusted shut. Unfortunatley everything was rusted shut, so i sprayed it all down and let it sit. Got all the parts moving again. The only thing i need to do yet is try and get all the detent bearings out so i can replace the springs behind them. A very tiny hole saw would be prefect but i dont think i can find a 1/8" hole saw any place.
I would also like to thank the woodman brothers for the bottle of gentleman jack. Very classy boys and it tastes great. Hope you two get some serious mile in on that old ironhead before the snow falls.
cb motor
well i took apart the cb motor last week to fix the kicker. turns out you have to split the cases to fix the sucker. Oh well screw it, blast, clean, scrub, paint, rebuild. I also replaced all those stupid phillips head screws with nice stainless allens. Hopefully she wants to run all nice and happy, found some pretty sketchy shit in there but we shall see how she holds. It all comes apart real easy so if it blows up or has a massive leak its not a big deal.
4.11.10
triumph
3.11.10
Hey Ryan!
when do you want to paint my 69 sporty. I just need to do tear down and weld on one last bracket i forgot about then its all you. Im thinking either going white with gold or red stripe, kandy red with white stripes, or some really like deep shiny jade green and gold or white stripes. all i know is i want racing stripes on it. i think... shit maybe i just need to pick a color and wait for the suprise. anyways we can talk about it later when you have the bike.
1.11.10
clcb 350
today i picked up a brand new to me 72 cl 350 motor for my 72 cb350. along with the new rear fender and bad ass stocker tailight setup for my 69 xlch, Thanks Eron. The boys over at thedamnbandits.com fuckin rule.
I just need to weld up the seat mount bracket, do a lil more body work and set up the rear caliper and then she is off for paint. I might cut the fender skirt out where its marked in orange paint marker but its also a great spot to place some cool go fast artwork. At this point its gonna be up to a coin toss i think.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)