Link Stuff...

• Early '00s Aston Martins were such good looking cars.


• Writing with style!


• Motorcycle roadtrip through Vietnam...

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Bobber Beemer

I really love the looks of this slightly rat bike-d old air cooled Beemer bobber.

I gotta say, though, that the rider looks like he belongs with the bike a lot more than I do. It's practically like those pictures you see where dogs and their owners grow to look like each other.

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Unicorn Sighting

Here's a thing you don't see every day: A genuine, honest-to-Rollie Vincent Black Shadow just tooling down your street.

These things were legends. The mystique surrounding them means that, depending on the particular year model or variation, prices can easily exceed a hundred grand for a nice one... and that one sure looks nice.

That dude has got to have a regular Garage-Mahal of glorious scooters.

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Rat Bikes

Of all my cameras, the Olympus E-M1X is easily the least fossil-y. It was announced in January of 2019, meaning it's barely over five years old; a spring chicken among the stringy old hens and roosters in my camera coop. They're still available new-in-the-box, although used copies are only about a third the price of a new one.

Still, although it was announced in 2019, it uses the same Sony-manufactured 20MP LiveMOS Four Thirds sensor first introduced in the 2016-vintage OM-D E-M1 Mark II, albeit backed up with dual TruePic VIII image processors, which gets it close to at least honorary fossil status.

Very Eighties

I remember seeing this commercial on the TV when I was a teen!

Part of me occasionally wants to find a nice old original Eighties 600 Hurricane or Ninja, but the other part of me realizes that most of these things have been thrashed within an inch of their lives, and also that I'm long past the days where you bounce instead of break when you hit pavement.

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Oh, hell no.

The amount of preparation that went into this one stunt is amazing, but my palms sweat just watching it.

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Anarchy in the Circle City

Things getting a little Mad Max with this Guzzi in the Half Liter BBQ parking lot on Sunday afternoon.

I'm still not used to composing with a wide angle lens. Given the 28mm equivalent lens on the Coolpix A, I should have gotten much closed, but things were kinda rushed.

The top pic is copped more heavily, with some faux grain and vignetting thrown in for effect. Below you can see it in glorious color. Click either pic for serious embiggenation.

Yes, the welded chain link flagpole is surmounted by a rusty machete blade. Safety first!

Rat Bike!

Check out this agglomeration of parts that have been bodged together into a funky neighborhood putterer...

Yes, he's rigged up a hand shift lever. No, there aren't any brakes on that front wheel, making the disc purely ceremonial. Yes, the front wheel is from a mountain bicycle.

Yes, that's a Thrush automobile muffler. The "truck nutz" really tie the whole thing together, though.

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An unusual sight...

Here's a thing you don't see every day: A 1947 Cushman 50-series turtleback done up in full hipster rat bike drag, motoring down the public thoroughfare. 

I like the vent covers, the No Parking sign for a trunk lid, and especially the Ford Model A taillight with the word "STOP" molded into the lens.

Yesterday's weather in SoBro was glorious. The afternoon high peaked at 76ºF under sunny blue skies with just enough puffy white clouds to be aesthetically pleasing.

While the actual start of astronomical spring doesn't happen until the equinox later this month, "meteorological spring" began yesterday on the first of March, and it sure lived up to the billing.

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Sex on Wheels

Oh, man, this beautiful Egli-Vincent by Godet makes my heart go pitter-pat...

That's easily the best shot I've gotten of it yet, even though the lighting was a bit tricky. Normally it's just zipping past...

Gorgeous, hand-built machinery with a pedigree. I think this might be the very one that was on Bring a Trailer a couple years ago. 

[EDIT: On closer inspection, it's not the same bike, just very similar. They're all essentially one-off customs.]

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UJM

This '74-'78 Honda CB550K, sporting a luggage rack and aftermarket exhaust, is a classic UJM, for "Universal Japanese Motorcycle". 

Nowadays, bikes are sold from the factory as tourers or sportbikes or cruisers or whatever, but that wasn't always the case.

The CB550 came in two forms: The CB550K "Custom", which had four-into-four exhausts (the four separate trumpet-shaped mufflers were quite dramatic looking) and the CB550F Sport, which had lower bars, a differently-shaped, chromeless gas tank and a factory 4-into-1 header.

From this basic platform you essentially built the kind of bike you needed. Need a commuter? Bolt on a luggage rack. Want to go touring? Add a Vetter fairing, saddlebags, and maybe a trunk. Feeling sporty? Rearsets, flatter bars (or maybe clip-ons), aftermarket racing exhaust, and maybe a little bikini fairing.

Pretty soon the factories began offering bikes with all these features from the factory, and the basic motorcycle became a lot less common, although they get revived out of nostalgia every so often.

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Supermoto

Some riders are like "Are you taking my picture?"

Others get totally into it.

Canon EOS 1D MkIII & EF 24-105mm f/4L IS.

The family that VROOOMs together...

It's the doggles on the pupper that make the photo...

click to embiggenate

Lights, Camera, Inaction

My favorite restaurant patios may be great places for spotting cool iron rolling by, but it's an intersection of a couple of flat, straight city streets, not the Esses at Road Atlanta or a gnarly turn on "The Dragon" through Deal's Gap. In other words, it's not like I'm the Killboy of Broad Ripple or anything.

Shots showing any kind of action are hard to get. This Harley rider gunned it around a car that was dawdling while making a right on 54th, so the panning shot conveys a little bit of motion.

Maybe the Yamaha pilot here felt sorry for me and decided to do some icy hot stuntin'...

On a sunny day like this I can use the little 28-200mm f/3.5-5.6G zoom on the Nikon D700 and have ample reach to shoot anywhere around the intersection. That Harley is shot from the Twenty Tap patio, diagonally across the intersection, at 200mm and didn't even require much cropping. 

I love the lens because it's so compact; not much bigger than the 85mm f/1.8 AF-D prime. Part of the reason for its compactness is that it doesn't have a built-in autofocus motor, so it focuses too slow to be ideal for action photography (and is manual-focus only on the consumer-tier D3xxx and D5xxx bodies, which lack internal focus motors), but its optics are more than adequate for the 12MP sensors in my old D700 and D3.

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Malaise

For those of you who weren't around at the time, check out the speedometer on this '82 Yamaha 750 Maxim. Notice that it only reads to 85 miles per hour, and that "55" is highlighted? 

That's because from '79 to '82, new vehicles sold in the US couldn't have speedometers calibrated any higher than 85 and had to have the National Maximum Speed Limit (55mph) highlighted. Also, oral sex, even between married couples, was still illegal in a lot of states. You can look it up. 

Stop acting like you're in some special dystopia.

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Springtime in SoBro...

A Baby Ducati and a Big Healey... 

Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby

I was sitting on the patio at Twenty Tap yesterday enjoying one of their crispy Southern chicken sandwiches and a pint of Pull My Finger from Bad Dad Brewing up in Fairmount, IN when this thing caught my ear. It droned north on College Avenue and I regretted the fact that the plastic sheeting enclosing the patio for the winter months hadn't yet come down for the season.

But then, lo! Only a few minutes later the rider came bombing back south towards us and pulled into the parking lot next door, dismounting to join his lunch companion at Twenty Tap. "Nice bike!" I blurted, passing him on my way out the door with my camera.

Nikon D2X & 18-70mm f/3.5-4.5G

I didn't look on the block for the displacement, but chain drive, teardrop tank, DOHC... I'm thinking that makes this a CB750K of '79-'82 vintage. (The bigger CB900 Custom had shaft drive and the CB750F and CB900F had the more faired-in "pistol grip" gas tanks.)

Anyway, this thing really pushed my buttons. Definitely would ride.

Duck, Duck, Duck, Goose*

A Moto Guzzi of indeterminate vintage taking advantage of the unseasonably warm and sunny weather Broad Ripple enjoyed on Saturday. We hit 76°F, only a couple degrees off the record for the date. It was glorious.

*In case you didn't get the dumb joke in the post title, the most common brand of Italian motorcycles you'll see is Ducati, sometimes referred to as a "Duc" or "Duck". A Moto Guzzi is, of course, a "Goose".

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Emotional Wreck-age

On one sunny Atlanta summer day back in June of 2000, I turned left off of Peachtree-Dunwoody Road onto Peachtree. Peachtree there is flat, straight, and six lanes wide. 

I was the only eastbound vehicle, in the center of the three lanes, when the white Camry attempted a left-hand turn out of a driveway ahead there on the right.

I don't remember much of the rest of that day, except for fragments, and all of those are pretty awful. That was the end of my motorcycle, too. The guys at my bike shop took a look at the wadded wreckage and were amazed I'd lived. It had cartwheeled down the street rather farther than I had.

I talked with one of the responding officers by chance later that year, after I was out of the wheelchair. He told me that the driver, a Jordanian immigrant who'd come over to help his brother's computer business back in the tail end of the dot-com boom, was freaking out on the side of the road. He was sure the cops were going to send him to jail or, worse, take him to Hartsfield and park him on a plane that afternoon. They had to calm him down and explain that we have traffic accidents in America, too.

He did the right thing and admitted to Failure to Yield. I don't bear him any real animus, but I do wish he'd been paying a bit more attention that day. Let y'all who ain't never screwed up cast the first aspersion.

My life would have been a lot different if he'd paid attention. 

Heck, it would have been different if I'd had change for the toll booth on GA-400 and didn't take the Medical Center exit or, for that matter, if I hadn't bought the Ruger Vaquero that day at my part time gun store gig and needed to swing by the apartment to drop it off before heading to my full time job at the Gwinnett airport.

Anyway...

There was a wreck here in the Indy metro earlier this year that drew a lot of press, because a young couple was killed on the way to prom, t-boned in their vehicle (in a stroke of horrific irony) by a classmate. The wreck happened on one of those board-flat, ruler-straight 2-lane county roads that crisscross corn country, with non-existent shoulders, 55mph speed limits, and intersected by smaller country lanes with stop signs and warnings that Cross Traffic Does Not Stop.

The police report came out and determined that the car that hit and killed the couple was likely exceeding the speed limit by as much as 25 mph. The police report also determined that the other contributing cause of the accident was the failure of the car that was struck to yield the right of way.

The kid who t-boned the vehicle isn't being charged with vehicular homicide because there's no such crime in Indiana. There's Reckless Homicide, but she wasn't doing anything that meets the statutory definition. She got a speeding ticket. The other driver should have gotten a ticket for Failure to Yield, but they're dead, like my Camry driver might have been if I'd been piloting a Suburban instead of a Suzuki.

Still, I watch these videos and I can't imagine having to explain to the grieving family and friends that we have accidents here in America, too.

Sunny Day

Yesterday's weather was glorious. Low eighties and not too humid. It must have been a great day to be out and about in a 1947 Willys Jeep!

The dude on the little Honda C70 Passport sure seemed to be enjoying the weather.