Blog Stuff: Happy Halloween!

I suppose I'm expected to post something scary. Okay.




"President Hillary!"


Eek.

Bikes: First impressions of the Zephyr...

Once upon a time, the American motorcycle market was crowded with machines known, somewhat derisively, as "UJM's", for "Universal Japanese Motorcycle". Each of the Big Four offered them: A backbone-framed machine, invariably powered by a DOHC air-cooled inline four, available in Small (<600), Medium (750), and Large (~1000) sizes and, protestations of brand-loyal partisans notwithstanding, they were all much of a muchness.

You'd buy one of these bikes, grab an aftermarket catalog, and kit it out for the flavor of riding you liked best. Profiling on a Saturday night? Get some high bars, chrome bits, and shiny engine guards. Touring? Add saddlebags, a Vetter fairing, and highway pegs, and you were good to go. Interested in going fast? Flat bars, a four-into-one pipe, and some trick shocks turned the UJM into a "cafe racer."

Kawasaki cheated a little bit with its "Retro UJM", the Zephyr 550; the four-into-one exhaust gives away the slightly sporty pretensions, and the rest of the spec sheet would have been a box-stock racer's dream back in the day. The previous owner of my bike had made a few more modifications to enhance the bike's performance, and the end result is a fun and uncomplicated little bike to ride.

Even with the slightly wider-than-factory bars, the "sit up and beg" riding posture would be familiar to any UJM rider, although the deliberately lowered seat hight can cause the legs of taller riders to feel a little cramped. When parking, your toe won't find the sidestand where you think it would be; it's tucked up underneath next to the exhaust collector in order to gain a bit more ground clearance. This search for lean angle also means that a standard feature of the old UJM's, the centerstand, is nowhere to be found on the littlest Zephyr. The front brakes are surprisingly capable, with twin piston calipers more than powerful enough for a sub-450lb tiddler.

You'll notice I keep mentioning the longer-than-factory bars; years of sportbikes with low-mounted clip ons had gotten me into a bad habit of straight-arming the handlebars. The Zephyr cured this in about three miles of twisty pavement. With this much leverage on the front wheel, a bent elbow and a relaxed grip on the bars are called for, lest small unintentional inputs have the bike hunting for a line through a turn like a beagle puppy on a slack leash. Also, with the Yosh pipe and jetting to match, the ZR550 pulls a lot more like my RF600 than my old GPz. Crack open the throttle at 6500 in third on the GPz, and it would pull strongly but unspectacularly forward. Do the same on the Zephyr, and the bike will emit an exuberant bark through the endcan, as the bars get light and the tach needle jumps to the right. The acceleration is probably a lot closer to the RF's on paper, too; the Zephyr may give up fifteen or so horses to the newer RF, but it's a good fifty or sixty pounds lighter in the bargain.

I wouldn't pick it as my first choice for a roadtrip, but I already have a bike for that chore. All in all, it's exactly what I was looking for: simple and uncomplicated; a bike that's unafraid to display the 'motor' part of 'motorcycle'; light and tossable and equally willing to toddle around town at low revs or get wild-eyed and playful if prodded. The fact that it's dirt cheap, reliable, and gets good gas mileage is just the icing on the cake.

A jog around the blog.

Box Stock Racer plays A Perfect Game.
Zendo Deb plays with her food.
Xavier plays the best Halloween movie ever.
SayUncle plays Cassandra.

Blog Stuff: My practicality deficiency...

Many folks who love sportscars have a little roadster for sunny weather and weekends, and a truck or SUV to haul stuff or to drive when it's icky outside.

I have a motorcycle for sunny weather and weekends, and a two-seat roadster to haul stuff or to drive when it's icky outside.

Either I have some pretty lax "haul stuff" requirements, or I was born without a Practicality Gene...

Bikes: HappyHappyFunBike is dead; Long live HappyHappyFunBike.

The Interceptor now darkens my driveway, a glowering maroon reminder of the big plans I have for it; plans that will, unfortunately, occasionally leave it sidelined for repairs or modifications. The problem is that I'm one of those masochistic types who likes to ride year-round, and would therefore be annoyed beyond my ability to cope by having my wheels laid up in a shop through the winter months. What to do?

Well, Alston was getting the itch to ride a bike, much to his folks' chagrin, and my little Ninjette would make the perfect introductory set of wheels for a new rider; a complicated bit of chicanery involving a Colt CCO and crumpled wads of Ben Franklins ensued. He wound up with HappyHappyFunBike, and I was on the market for a good general purpose bike to keep me in wheels while the VF1000F was undergoing various surgeries.

A quick perusal of the EastTNriders.com want ads turned up a 1990 Kawasaki Zephyr 550. It was fairly high mileage, but the original owner had put almost all of them on it, and it had been meticulously maintained. He'd fitted it with a Yosh pipe, slightly wider bars, and had treated it to a top-end rebuild not 3,000 miles ago. For someone whose first ride, lo those many years ago, had been an '81 GPz550, the lure was irresistable (which was exactly the effect Kawasaki intended with this retro bike.) I 86'ed my stainless 1991A1 project gun to shake loose the few extra C-notes I'd need, and picked up the phone.

So, anyway, Scuderia Tamara now includes a new HappyHappyFunBike; it's light, small, has a reasonably potent, rorty-sounding motor, and feels nimble in the turns, plus it's kitted out like the trackbikes of my youth. Bonus.
A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words: Note that HappyHappyFunBike sports much larger and more capable front binders than Lardassio in the background, despite being some 150ish pounds lighter.

Ask The Gun Nut: Investment tips.

Dear Auntie Gun Nut,
I've been telling my wife that my guns are a good investment. She says they don't appreciate fast enough. Who's right?


Gentle Reader,
Few guns are going to outperform the market, but then few stock certificates will "make major" in IPSC, so it kind of balances out. There are three fairly volatile areas in the gun market where profits can be made right now, though:

1) Transferrable machine guns. Some of these things are appreciating fast enough that it's like having a part-time job sitting in your gun safe earning money. The appreciation curve is the flattest at the low and high ends, of course, with M-11's and Uzis still priced within entry-level reach, and with rarer beltfeds plateauing somewhat in the last couple of years.

2) Postwar, pre-'57 Smith and Wessons. S&W collecting has finally caught on with the masses, and the resulting explosion in pre-war Hand Ejector prices is eyewatering. This has stepped up interest in post-war 5-screw pre-model number guns tremendously. The days of the $100 M&P are in the rearview mirror for good, now.

3) American milsurps. With 1911, M1 Garand, and Springfield '03 pricing already high and climbing higher, look for prices on M1917's (both rifles and revolvers) and M1 Carbines to get sucked upwards in their wake turbulence. Between the sudden popularity of WWII with Hollywood, and the plethora of video games like Medal of Honor, expect to see the day of the $1000 M1 carbine sooner rather than later.

And that's the view from my side of the counter.

Boomsticks: Cue the calliope music...

...'cause it's time for the carnival again.

The 36th Weekly Carnival of Cordite is up over at Gullyborg's place. Bring the kids! You'll see cats with machineguns, dogs dressed as pumpkins, pumpkins acting like cannonballs, and more people playing whack-a-mole with the effete new James Bond than you can shake a stick at.

Politics: This is a surprise?

News Flash (via Zendo Deb): In a shocking study, it is reported that caring, loving parents usually raise well-adjusted kids. In other news: Sun rises in East today; some folks are stunned.

Politics: Someone needs a Reynold's Wrap yarmulke...

A "noted theologian" gives us the straight skinny on the collapse of the WTC.

*snicker*

Noted theologians are known for their architectural and structural engineering expertise in much the same way that noted actress Meryl Streep is an authority on biochemistry.

Perhaps by putting forward his "Intelligent Falling" theory, he can explain how the miles of detcord and kilos of explosives were somehow missed by all those people going about their business in the WTC prior to the events of 9/11. Maybe all of the survivors are in on the plot? Maybe the government terrorists were made invisible by angels?

Structural analyses and fireproofing problems are so prosaic compared to cloak & dagger conspiracy theories, but William of Occam finds them a touch more plausible.




"Moonbats to the left of me, moonbats to the right,
Here I am, stuck in the middle with you..."

Boomsticks: Gratuitous Gun Pr0n No. 9

S&W 640 Carry Comp and S&W PC-13, with Robbie Dalton Archangel and Walter Brend/White Wolf auto.

Boomsticks: Last of the '03A3s.

Via Les Jones, the CMP is running out of M1903A3s.

Buy one.

Now.

This is one of the best-shooting milsurps available, with good examples capable of hanging with any Swede or Finnish Mosin, and boasting much better sights than either of them. For bonus points, they're only $400. Folks, when's the last time you saw an un-sporterized '03 of any variety for sale for much under six bills? With the skyrocketing price of American milsurps, this is a safer investment than a time machine and a handful of 1930's-vintage IBM stock certificates. Ten years ago, would you have believed you'd see the day when good, original M1 carbines were trading north of $700, and any Garand was an Eight Bill proposition? No? Then take my advice; jump on one of these classic crank-cockers today.

(The truly fiscally savvy will bypass the '03A3s in favor of the Mark I's.)

Boomsticks: Are they really just 'things'?

The Gun Guy recently wrote of his trip to the Tulsa Gun Show, penning a poignant rant on how the thrill had gone for him. It seems that, after having to sell off many of his guns to stave off the lupine pest lolling at his door, he no longer views firearms as special entities, but rather as simple material commodities.

Allow me to commiserate.

Three times now in my brief life, I've been forced to sell off my guns in order to keep a roof over my head and that owie, empty, hurty feeling from my tummy. That, plus the fact that I buy, sell, and trade guns for a living probably causes me to view them with a level of mercenary detachment that is anathema to the casual collector (more correctly, "accumulator", as true collectors tend to be too neurotic to be casual.) The net result? This history, combined with the fact that I'm now collecting, rather than accumulating, makes trips through gun shows a lot faster for me. Other than an obligatory stop at the Georgia Arms table and picking up a bag of Blazin' Cajun ends 'n' pieces from the Crockett Creek jerky lady, my gun show experience consists solely of chatting up various collectors and business acquaintances to catch up on news, and a quick surf through the aisles to see if any S&W Model 58's or Mannlicher-Schoenauer rifles are lying about and available cheap.

My guns themselves? Well, except for the one on my hip, they are just commodities. I have them ranked in my head more or less constantly in order of "sellability". The Excel spreadsheet I keep on my collection has a column titled "Fast Sale Value"; ie. the price I could put on a gun of a gun show Saturday morning, and not still be holding it come Sunday afternoon. Does this mean I'm some callous, unfeeling ice queen who doesn't care about her hobby? No, it's just pragmatism.

There's a definite heirarchy of sellability. At the very top are pieces with sentimental value due to being gifts, as well as one or two earmarked for personal defense needs. These are only for sale if needed to, say, keep me out of prison or off the streets or the like. Behind that come the milsurp rifles and my S&W revolver collection; I'm saving these for a really, really rainy day. For the forseeable future, they are my own personal museum, but some black day in the far future, they'll be part of my retirement fund, too, and I harbor no illusions about that; I'd no more sell one on a whim than you would dip into your 401k for a night at the movies. At the bottom of the totem pole are practical pieces; various hunting or target rifles, some custom 1911's, and Project Housegun. These remain ranked in my head in order of replaceability; for instance, if I need to shake loose a quick grand in cash, my decked-out M4gery goes on the block. After all, another stripped lower is chump change, and, within a month or three, it'll be all built back up into another swell Housegun. With 1911's, outside of exceptions like the Springer Pro or the Delta Elite, the build is half the fun. My stainless 1991A1 could go away tomorrow and be replaced in a month, and my heart would remain untroubled.

This is a viewpoint obviously shaped by my own experiences. I'll be told constantly by folks on the various gun boards how horrible it is to sell a gun, and how they've never sold one of theirs; I try to politely refrain from explaining the differences in viewpoint of someone who owns ten guns, and someone who may have owned half a thousand, but really has no idea what her total is.

They're just guns, folks; easy come, easy go. Unless you're talking about an heirloom, historical artifact, or rare out-of-production piece, they're easy to replace. And even those are easier to replace than a kidney, or the roof over your kid's heads. Don't lose perspective.

Boomsticks: Alphecca beats the MSM bushes...

...and flushes out more anti-RKBA bias.

See the Third Anniversary Extravaganza of the Weekly Check here.

Blog Stuff: Birthdays...

Belated birthday wishes to Marko Kloos (The Munchkin Wrangler) and Jeff Soyer (Alphecca).

Many more years of confusion to our foes. :)

Bikes: Where are the good little ones?

In the good ol' U.S. of A. the lack of a structured licensing system makes a hash of sportbike demographics. In most of the rest of the world, small- and medium-displacement sportbikes are the most common of their genre, with 900-1000cc machines occupying a rarefied niche at the top of a pyramid. Not so stateside, where the big bikes are almost as common as their midsize siblings, and the small-displacement class is nearly non-existant. Now, I have nothing to say against good old-fashioned Darwinism; in the grand scheme of things, I think it's swell that the brash young squids of America are dissuaded from such girly conveyances as 100+bhp 600's, and goaded by their buddies onto blistering literbikes where they can remove themselves from the gene pool with alacrity, but the downside of this is that there's almost no market in America for smallbore sportbikes. Anywhere else in the world, the sub-600cc market is crammed with bikes that, while smaller and lighter than the >600 types, are still full to the brim with all the necessary sexy goodness of a modern crotch rocket: stiff, twin-spar alloy frames; wide, radial-shod wheels; tree-trunk-like forks; et cetera. In los Estados Unidos, however, the smallbore sportbike market is populated almost solely by low-spec machines like the EX250 and 500 from Kawasaki, or the vanished Bandit 400; bikes designed to make a buck by selling last decade's technology to beginners on a budget. The rare exception, like Yamaha's late, lamented FZR-400, dies a fast death in the marketplace, only mourned by those who judge a sportbike's qualities on factors other than how long of a top-gear wheelie it can pull two-up on the interstate.

I spent last night on the porch curled up with a couple of older issues of Performance Bikes and Bike from the UK, reading head-to-head tests of GSX-R400's, ZX-4's, and NC35's, and wishing the market here wasn't so driven by the eager-to-impress squid. Ah, well... If wishes were horses, beggars would ride...

...Aprilia RSV250's.

Politics: The Good Guys win in Brazil.

It looks like the hoplophobes have been handed a stomping in the Brazilian referendum to ban all commercial gun manufacturing and sales.

CCW reform is sweeping over the USA, the inane Scary-Looking Gun Ban of '94 sunset with nary a whimper, a legal industry was protected against state-funded extortion, and now good news from overseas. Things are looking up all over.

A jog around the blog.

Marko breaks a firing pin.
SayUncle breaks camp.
Les Jones breaks into a coughing fit.
GrampaPinhead breaks his "no blogging on weekdays" promise. Ah, well, we all know winners never quit. ;)

Boomsticks: Silk purses from sow's ears..

There's something especially rewarding about taking a complete basket case of a firearm, and making it into something useful again.

At a shop I used to work at, we received a Turkish Mauser that had pretty much reached the end of the trail. Not one of Ankara's better re-arsenaling efforts to begin with, the gun was pitted, the bore looked like a mineshaft in coal country, the stock had more dings than the lunar surface, and, to top it all off, it didn't even remotely headspace. I was about to condemn it to life as a tomato stake, when I realized that I just couldn't pass up a chance at a good Oberndorf-made Mauser 98 action for only $35. With the addition of a Lilja barrel, Timney trigger, Boyd's stock, Leupold bases & rings, a Millett illuminated reticle scope, a few other odds and sods, and lots and lots of expert work by Shannon Jennings, the old Turk became a slick new sporter in .300 Whisper, complete with threaded muzzle, just waiting on me to spring for a suppressor. Although the gun you see in the picture below is still in the white, it has since been matte blued.


Making my rounds of area gun shops once upon a time, I stumbled across a real find: a pre-Series 70 Colt that was mechanically sound but cosmetically trashed by some guy's kitchen-table customization job, and therefore available cheap. Oh, well, you can't un-ring a bell, as they say...
Both Shannon Jennings and my friend Kaylee turned wrenches on this project, while I assisted with fretting, nagging, and making unreasonable demands. The replacement parts list is as follows:
Sights: Trijicon.
Slide stop: Wilson Bulletproof. (Not pictured.)
Thumb safety: Chip McCormick.
Hammer: Dlask.
Trigger: STI.
Grip safety: Ed Brown.
Mainspring housing: Smith & Alexander.
Sear & Disconnector: Ed Brown.
Teflon finish: Predator Custom.
The Springfield cocobolo stocks in the picture have since been replaced by a set of cordia wood stocks from Ahrends.
The result is a fine, unique pistol, that fits my hand and my needs like no other, and comes with a certain pride of ownership that "off the rack" just doesn't provide.

Boosters: Have we forgotten the dream?

If you're of my generation (and my bookwormish bent) you spent your childhood pawing through the cobwebbier sections of your local library, soaking up such classics as the Oz books, as well as yellowed tomes crammed with Chesley Bonestell's gorgeous visions of our future in space.

In case you've forgotten what the future looked like, a dedicated band of geeks remembers.

Here's hoping they can bring their vision to the public to remind us all; maybe the next generation of GPS satellites will have groovy swept wings.

Boomsticks: Gratuitous Gun Pr0n No. 8

Behold, the contents of my pockets and purse (and belt holster) one winter's day last year. A S&W 296, a S&W PC627, a S&W 38, a Beretta 950BS Jetfire, a CRKT K.I.S.S., a Kershaw Blackout, a Leatherman Juice kf4, and a cheap-ass Cricket phone.