Beautiful post, with absolutely beautiful pictures! I swear, it should always have been a requirement (as no doubt it has become in our over-documented digital-camera 21st century) that people should always take pictures of their cars and the places they’ve taken them. To many people like us, they’re milestones of life, like pets and boyfriends and girlfriends and the various crappy roommate situations of our misspent twenties. I wish I had actual pictures of my actual cars (though the ones in my post turned out to be surprisingly close approximations of reality), but up until my thirties, I had a weirdly unphotographed life.
This makes me sad. I wish this thread could keep going indefinitely, and that more people in this wonderful far-flung community could document the cars/trucks/bikes/boats/velocipedes of their lives. It’s an enthralling and fun form of autobiography, sez I.
More! More! Come on all you BB motorists… tell us about that POS you tried (and failed) to pick up dates in back in high school! Vent about the 3:00 AM roadside catastrophic transmission fluid leak you fixed with a spare section of fuel line from the bottom of your trunk and half a quart of used Dexron II you’d been planning to recycle. Let’s hear it!
And Clymers diagrams change revision by revision. I have spent a LOT of time with a test light, hating those diagrams. There are several drafts of stories about me struggling for weeks to solve odd shorts, like why did the brake light start to blink when I signed a turn?
Airhead wiring reminds me of the VWs. Horns honking every time I went over a bump…
Thank you–much appreciated. An old friend, motorhead and mosdef Motorhead (ala Lemmy), would sometimes lead a three-man m/c ride around middle Georgia, and he introduced me to the “Product Shot” for vehicles. We’d get all three bikes lined up in an interesting fashion, and then pose with thumbs up or holding arbitrary vehicle fluid or component or bag of chips we had at hand. The cheesier, the better, naturally, and that lead me to continue the practice. Besides, dirty or clean, running or not, those were MY vehicles, my babies! As you mention, the milestones of our lives! (Cue theme song here).
Ha! My buddy’s RTP had similar issues due to the crazy electrics for the radios, dual batteries, light kits, etc. At one point the bike engine would die every time he took a left turn, which is a bad thing in a car, but on a bike…oh dear no.
I recently solved, hopefully for the last time, a mysterious and monstrous tendency of Old Buzz to dive right. First it was a throttle cable routing issue causing turns to the right to increase throttle on the right side only. Then it was an over tightened steering head nut, then the adjuster nut under it, then the brake was dragging to much. On and on.
It is amazing how well these bikes run, even put together upside down and backward. And I have made that mistake…
One of the problems that always seemed to get me with the Airheads was the stuff that had to be pressed on, and by the same token, pulled off with a press (or a torch). As for the Oilheads, getting the valves adjusted juust right, only to torque down the locknut on the assembly and find everything was off again.
I remember watching a friend putting a newly rebuilt carb back on to his truck. All he had left was to tighten the jamnut down on the brass gas supply line coming into the carb, and I watched him tighten it, and then some more, while I watched and thought that’s probably too much…but since he was easily as mechanically inclined as me, if not more, I didn’t say anything as I heard that terrible slight whine of metal under extreme tension. At the very moment when I figured I should tell him to back it off and restart, he snapped the line off the carb and began a very funny (to me) dance of air-punching and cajun-curseword generation. It was a beautiful thing to watch someone else go through, having done it enough myself.
All BMW R bikes as well as old 50s-70s VWs, current Subarus, and 50s era to god knows when Porsche were boxer engines.
The cylinders fire and punch towards the center like a boxer smacking his fists together.
BMW R’s have been in production since the 1920s. Much like the Porsche 911 or the Rolleiflex TLR, this design has been so refined that it should approach perfection. In both Porsche and Rollei’s cases this has happened. BMW is still trying.
“Between two explanations, choose the clearest; between two forms,
the most elementary; between two expressions, the shortest.”
Eugeni d’ Ors (1881-1954)
I was having the opposite reaction to the photo - look at that lovely landscape with the weather brewing! I’m a bit biased having grown up in South Dakota (eastern part, not as flat).
Thank you–that was somewhere deep in West Texas and the whole day was dreary. ~40 degrees with a light, irregular rain falling, and having driven both SD and TX from one end to the next, I’d go with SD since you’ve got the Black Hills on one side, the badlands in the…middleish…and Wall Drug…east of there? And a woman behind every tree, as they say
It’s too bad this post is closing shortly, as the same day I took that shot, the weather cleared up that evening and offered an absolutely gorgeous sunset. While I was contemplating how to get a good shot of it, I crossed the apex of a small hill to see an airplane hangar with its doors open and a cropduster of some kind sitting pretty in the light, surrounded by a stunning firmament of deep blue. So I guess every Texas dog has his day, some even have two.
Black Hills in the West, the badlands just east of them, and Wall Drug somewhere in that vicinity. And all of that about 6-8 hours west of where I grew up, 30 mi from the MN border.
Drank my first [too much] Everclear in Rapid City, and drove everyone home that night in my first blizzard. Then, in summer, 90+ degrees and absolutely sweltering. Coming from the deep south, I was utterly confused by the weather in that state. However, take any road off the Interstate and fire off as many fireworks as you feel necessary with no repercussions whatsoever (b/c nobody will hear or see it happen).
Montana lays claim to the title of “Big Sky Country”, but SD’s heat lightning storms and sunsets over rolling hills, it’s really a beautiful place.
