Hope everyone is enjoying their holiday!
Today’s video Tuesday is not motorcycle inspired at all, but the opening scene from one of my all-time favorite Christmas specials: Pee Wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special!
I’ve decided to take a bit of a break and I will be back online after the New Year! See ya in 2008!
‘Twas the night before Christmas, And not until Spring
Would a motor be running, not even a Wing.
The bikes are all sleeping, they’re covered and warm,
Batteries are tended, nylon covers their form.
My bros were all nestled down snug in their beds,
While visions of new chrome danced in their heads.
And I in my do-rag, bike jacket and boots
Out shoveling snow and dreaming of scoots.
Then from the horizon there came such a clatter
My shovel I dropped, what could be the matter?
Away up the hill, I slogged through the snow
Looked up at the sky; where’d all that noise go?
Then a throb from the heavens, like straight pipes so hearty
Gave summer’s good thoughts, a loud bikers’ party.
When what to my wondering eyes should appear?
But a Hog Ultra Classic-red trailer in rear!
With a little old rider, so lively and quick,
I knew in a moment it must be St. Nick.
More rapid than a V-Rod his Ultra came on,
And he whistled and shouted and sang out this song;
“Now, Springer! Now, Dyna! On Ultra and Softail!
Now Vulcan! Now Injun! On Vict’ry and Triumph!
To the top of the porch! To the top of the wall!
Now RIDE away! RIDE away! RIDE away all!”
As small bikes that from the semis do fly,
When they meet with the air blast, mount to the sky,
So up to the house-top that Ultra it flew.
With a trailer of goodies, and ole’ St. Nick, too.
And then in a twinkling, I heard on the roof
The rumble and thunder of pipes that gave proof.
I ran in the house, boots thumping around.
And in came St. Nick, all bearded and round.
Dressed all in black leather, from do-rag to boot
His chaps were all tarnished with road grime and soot.
A t-bag of goodies he’d flung on his back
And he looked like a peddler, just opening his pack.
His shades - how they twinkled! His do-rag; how scary!
With chains intertwined through skulls that were cherry!
His droll little mouth had done many a row,
So the beard of his chin was as white as the snow.
The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,
The smoke had a strange smell; it gave him relief.
He had a broad face and a large fat beer belly
That shook when he laughed like a bowlful of jelly.
He was tattooed and plump, a right jolly old rider,
So I offered a cold brew, thought what could be righter?
A wink of his eye as he downed that cold beer,
Gave me to know I had nothing to fear.
He spoke not a word, but went straight to my ride
And fixed it with Chrome, Horsepower and Pride.
And giving the peace sign with bikers’ good cheer
Strode off to his Ultra rumbling near.
He sprang on the saddle, his gloves on the bars
A wheelie he threw; then off towards the stars.
I heard him exclaim, as my chest swelled with pride,
“Merry CHRISTMAS TO ALL, AND TO ALL A GOOD RIDE!”
This past weekend I had the opportunity to watch the 2-disc dvd of “Long Way Round” that featured actor Ewen McGregor and his friend, Charley Boorman (also an actor). It was shown on the Discovery Channel back in 2004 but I never got a chance to watch it. Boy, did I miss out.
Here’s the background: Ewen and Charley decide they want to go on a motorcycle adventure together (on BMW R 1150 GS duel-sports) from London to New York: by going the “long way ’round.”
Their trip would take them from London to France, Belgium, Germany, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Siberia, Alaska, Canada before arriving 115 days later at their final destination, New York City. Their trip that often took them through some of the most beautiful countries, also took them through some of the most treacherous and unrideable terrains.
I was exhausted after watching all seven episodes in a row! The most extensive road trip I’ve done was almost 1,000 miles in two days-and that made me a little cranky. I can’t imagine doing it for almost 4 months, although I’m sure the longer you’re on the road the more acclimated you become to it.
But what an adventure they had! And, I never had much of an opinion about Ewen McGregor before but he is the cutest!
Well, we got hit with massive amounts of snow last Thursday and again yesterday. Last night the weather dude said we got more snow in the past two storms than we did all last year.
Here’s a few pics from around town:
I’ve been hearing rumblings about a Tarantino-produced motorcycle movie for most of this year. I had heard that it was given the green-light, which doesn’t always mean it will get made but, lo and behold, this one is a GO.
I absolutely love Tarantino movies and the cast of this movie looks really interesting. I’m excited!
Exerpt from the Hell Ride wiki:
“Hell Ride is a feature film from Larry Bishop being released under the “Quentin Tarantino Presents” banner. The film promises to be a blood and sex-soaked tale of motorcycle revenge and retribution.
Larry Bishop will star as bad-ass biker Pistolero, (named after the original title for Robert Rodriguez’s Desperado) who along with The Gent (Michael Madsen RK: who wouldn’t really have a career if it weren’t for Tarantino) and Comanche (Eric Balfour RK: one of my favorite young actors from Six Feet Under and 24), hit the road to avenge the death of Pistolero’s old lady Cherokee Kisum (Julia Jones), by the 666ers a rival motorcycle gang.
Vinnie Jones (RK: a great character actor recognizable from Guy Ritchie’s movies “Lock, Stock & 2 Smoking Barrels” and “Snatch”) and the ultimate bike riding legend Dennis Hopper to star as members of the satanic biker gang the 666ers. (RK: of course they’re satanic!)”
Photos courtesy of Shock Til You Drop and Ironhorse Magazine.
From Santiago Chopper Specialties:
Description: This bad ass looking helmet will scare the crap out of any onlooker while your enjoying you mid day cruise. Not only is it light weight, but it’s very comfortable inside, and has a lot of breathing space. You might even want to buy one for your buddy
Price on this bad-boy is $149.99 and it is not DOT approved. But it’s frickin’ cool so who cares, right?
I’ve been wanting to post this video for a few weeks now and unfortunately a couple of other blogs have beaten me to it! But that’s not going to stop me from posting today!
No doubt you’ve probably seen this Harley Davidson Christmas ad on tv. I just love the Evil Santa!
You can also read this article by Dirk Smillie at Forbes.com.
Celebrities and corporate moguls are fueling the boom in custom motorcycles–and creating a new subculture of fierce collectibles.
Jesse James and Kid Rock
Jesse James, a distant relative of the outlaw from the 1880s, nervously scans his e-mail on a recent afternoon from a tiny office inside his 250,000-square-foot motorcycle shop in Long Beach, Calif. He’s searching for a reaction from a customer: Robert Wheeler, chief executive of Airstream, who is paying $300,000 for one of the most elaborate masterpieces James’ shop had ever produced–a gleaming silver motorcycle-with-sidecar to commemorate Airstream’s 75th anniversary. James and his welders machined, riveted and hammered 18-gauge steel and razor-thin aluminum into a space-age-looking vehicle, applying some of the same construction methods Airstream uses in its shiny luxury trailers. “I can’t wait for Wheeler to see it,” James says.
Word soon came. “It’s an absolute work of art,” says Wheeler.
Custom bikes inspire certain passions. Lauren Hutton was a 20-year-old nightclub waitress when she had her first encounter with one. Riding to work on her clunky Vespa, she heard the roar of a motorcycle that pulled alongside her at a stoplight. The guy astride a customized Indian Motorcycle bike, Steve McQueen, exchanged glances with her. “Hey, sweetheart!” he yelled. “You want to see how a movie is made?” Hutton nodded, flashing her gap-toothed grin, and followed him to the set of The Cincinnati Kid. It was her entrée into the world of cycling, a four-decade adventure that has vastly enlarged her circle of famous friends (see box)–and which nearly killed her in a 2000 accident.
What makes a handmade bike different from, say, a $120,000 MV Agusta F4CC with a 200hp engine? Custom-builts approach the power and speed of racers, but, as one-of-a-kinds, they also reflect the distinctiveness and eccentricities of the builder and the owner. They confer status and satisfy a basic need for exhibitionism. Typically they cost $25,000 to $150,000, depending on the degree of customization. At James’ garage bikes are built from the ground up and can take 800 hours to fabricate. They look and feel dangerous: “ape hanger” handlebars force the rider to reach for their grips; engines are set to growl as loudly as thunder; the guts of the bike–carburetors and transmissions–are purposefully exposed as menacing visual lures.
Perhaps 100 custom builders ply this trade in the U.S. Jesse James’ garage, West Coast Choppers, is a sprawl of warehouses in a rundown neighborhood of wrecking yards and auto body shops. He has recently opened a diner next door called Cisco (nasdaq: CSCO - news - people ) Burger, named for his one-toothed pit bull, whose portraits adorn the walls of the restaurant. Inside James’ compound is a metalworker’s dream. Steel is stretched and shrunk using planishing hammers, jig mills and Yoder roll-forming machines. There are nine power hammers operated by foot pedals, including a 1940s model once used by the Nazis to make wing sections for Messerschmitt fighter planes. Like many builders, James reels in 60% of his estimated $5 million in annual sales from his line of 200 parts, which he manufactures, from black organ exhaust pipes to Maltese Cross axle covers. He calls his hand-hammered fenders “rollers” (slang for a police car) and has used Civil War cavalry swords as suicide shifters.
James has hand-built bikes for trial lawyers, investment bankers and celebrities like Kid Rock and Keanu Reeves. The custom builder has clocked 110mph on motorcycle trips with Wal-Mart (nyse: WMT - news - people ) executives. He says his backlog is three years deep and includes a bike for Robert Nardelli, Chrysler’s new chief, who has to wait in line like everyone else. “I won’t make a bike for someone I don’t like,” says James, who is married to actress Sandra Bullock. “My hands won’t do it.”
Kid Rock owns three of James’ handmade models. “When I dump out the clutch on one of Jesse’s bikes,” he says, “it’s like being on a rocket.” Brad Pitt prefers work by Paul Cox and Keino Sasaki, a pair of builders who churn out a mere six bikes a year in a former wine warehouse near the Brooklyn, N.Y. waterfront. Inside the cluttered shop a sign reads: “Visitors will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.” Pitt’s bikes, nicknamed “Bone Crusher” and “When Push Comes to Shove,” are outfitted with features that come in handy when fleeing paparazzi. Most builders like to stretch a bike’s frame dramatically. Cox kept the extension of the frame of Pitt’s bikes to a mere 2 inches and put a modest 30-degree rake in the neck of the bike. He installed a horizontal piston that rides along the fork as a steering damper. All this adds stability at high speeds. The bike also delivers Pitt a smooth ride along L.A.’s potholed streets. His bikes are equipped with a Rigidaire pneumatic seat suspension system developed by Cox that absorbs vibrations using a small compressor and two air shocks under the seat.
Owners are fiercely protective of their machines. Chris Cornell, lead singer for Audioslave and vocalist on the title track for the last James Bond movie, demonstrated his loyalty at a stoplight in North Hollywood last year. One moment he was straddling his jet-black $55,000 custom Exile cycle. The next, he found himself flying through the air, having been walloped from behind by a speeding truck. Dazed but without any broken bones, Cornell flipped open his cell phone and madly dialed for help–not for himself, but for his Exile cycle. Minutes later a tattooed Englishman with a blond mohawk arrived. It was Russell Mitchell, the man who’d made the bike. He retrieved the smoking, crushed two-wheeler and brought it back to his shop for repair. With just a few cuts and scrapes, Cornell was back in the studio that afternoon.
Custom jobs are prized by lesser mortals, too. Andrew (A.J.) Herold, a Manhattan hedge fund consultant, has had two machines built at $25,000 to $50,000 apiece. “These bikes are assets I can enjoy now,” he says. His builder is Farmingdale, N.J. customizer William Dodge, who created one bike for Herold using a 1947 Harley flathead engine and another using a 1966 shovelhead engine (that is, with a domed combustion chamber). Herold has called Dodge in the middle of the night and on weekends for road assistance. He once dialed his savior while Dodge was in bed with his girlfriend. “Bill, I’m losing compression!” yelled Herold as he gunned his engine in neutral. Dodge determined the problem was a blown gasket; the bike was out for months. Herold was crushed. Motorcycles are his ticket to bike shows and block parties thrown by custom builders. He has also struck up friendships on scenic bike tours along the East Coast.
Collector Frank Cotroneo, a real estate developer and restaurateur in Bernardsville, N.J, owns 22 bikes–15 of them custom, which set him back $1.2 million. Why so many? “You need three kinds of custom bikes,” he says. “One for long hauls, one for looking cool and one as a sport bike for flying around curves.” Reason number two often predominates. Says Cotroneo: “I love pulling up to a stoplight and having a hard-core biker give me a nod of respect, then ask how I installed my suicide clutch.” He refers to a vertical shifter requiring a dicey maneuver to change gears–gripping the shaft with his left hand as he depresses the clutch pedal with his left foot, steering with one hand. Cotroneo has no patience for stock Harleys, with their cushy hand-clutch transmissions and factory paint jobs. “There’s nothing worse than pulling into a motorcycle rally and discovering that 20 people bought the same bike that you did.”
Never discount the bad-boy appeal. On a recent afternoon at the shop, Kid Rock, formerly married to Pamela Anderson, showed up at James’ shop and recounted what happened at a White House reception he attended recently. “I was drinking a Jim Beam with Donald Rumsfeld, talking about Iraq,” says Rock. “Then I heard this voice behind me, ‘Roooock, you’re a good man.’ It was the President. He slapped me a high five,” recalls Rock, guffawing as he puffs on a cigar. Rock’s visit to Washington went more smoothly than his trip to Atlanta in November. After a performance with his band he was arrested for punching a fellow diner at a Waffle House. The victim apparently wasn’t a biker.
Like Nascar, custom biking is sneaking into middle America. There are now a handful of reality shows on cable TV devoted to the subject. The longest running, the Discovery Channel’s American Chopper, is about the Teutuls, a family of feuding custom- motorcycle mechanics. They’re not arguing over money: Since the series launched, the Teutuls have done ads for Hewlett-Packard (nyse: HPQ - news - people ), AOL, Lugz Boots and the Wall Street Journal.
One slight hurdle for this collecting sport: the frequency of mishaps. Last summer custom builder Billy Lane plowed his pickup head-on into a biker, killing the man instantly (he now faces manslaughter charges). Indian Larry, a motorcycle stuntman and builder, died three years ago after tumbling off his cycle from a standing position at a bike show. Lauren Hutton barely survived her 2000 accident. “I landed like an arrow, head first, then my body rolled for 170 feet across 4-foot boulders,” she recalls. A crushed sternum, multiple fractures to her right leg and a collapsed lung resulted in a long hospital stay. And yet, she keeps the pieces of her destroyed BMW 650 in her New York City apartment. “Someday I’ll have someone reassemble it,” she says–perhaps a custom builder.
Lately I’ve had a bit of an obsession with the Steampunk movement. What the heck is that? you may be wondering.
:Steampunk:
Definition: a genre of science fiction set in Victorian times when steam was the main source of machine power. (You can learn more at wikipedia.)
Artists have been experimenting with steampunk art for a while and it’s gaining in popularity. It incorporates a lot of brass, copper and the use of gears and cogs and has a high-tech, yet vintage look. One of the most recent creations that has spread online is the steampunk LCD monitor and keyboard modification (which can be found at the Steampunk Workshop if you’re interested in modifying your own set up).
I began to wonder if anyone had created steampunk style motorcycles and with the help of Google, a blog called Dark Roasted Blend and The Kneeslider (both sites posted about steampunk style motorcycles back in July, you can read them by following the appropriate links) I found some examples.
While these motorcycles might not have specifically been created to reflect the steampunk sensibility, they come pretty close and I think they’re really fantastic.
This is the Bobster trike from Zeel Design.
This bike was initially created for a motorcycle comic and the artist’s brother decided to make it real.
You can see more images of this bike on this German site.
Now this bike, the Hubbard Steamcycle actually has a steam-powered engine. Read more about it.
This is the B120 Wraith which was made by the Confederate Motor Company.
And lastly is this beast: the Aero Bike by none other than Mr. Jesse James.
Cycle World has an article about Jesse and this bike.
There’s no doubt that these motorcycle are really fricking amazing, but I hope one day someone builds one with steampunk specifically in mind.
If you watch the Tonight Show with Jay Leno then no doubt you’ve seen the segments featuring one of our favorite bike builders, Jesse James and intern Ross, who also has his own blog. The first two minutes of the clip is about Ross’ experience at National Dine with Your Dog Day, but the rest is with Jesse at Cisco Burger. The juxtaposition of Jesse’s deadpan, gearhead mentality vs. Ross’ dainty, ultra-feminine persona is a formula for hilarity.
