Dodge in the Garage

Vans used to be cool, before Americans started playing soccer.

Hey Dave

An old pal checked in here the other day, always nice to hear from random voices of the past.

He mentioned having a Honda 750, which got me thinking about the 900SuperSport I had while in Seattle.
I really liked that bike - and I left a dual seat on it.
Sure it was top heavy, had a flexy frame and all that.
It just needed some love.
I found it with the factory rearsets and race header already installed, swapped the bars for some with a lower rise and stuck a GoldWing fork on it for the adjustability and thicker legs. I trimmed all of the non-essential gimcrack off.
Oh, and I eventually hit all the tin with some black paint.

That was a fun bike.
It made me feel like a slow Freddie Spencer.
Getting that thing through corners fast was like wrestling an angry pig. Knees, elbows and ass had to be shook in just the right sequence to get from one corner to the next.

It dropped a valve on a commute home one day and broke my heart.
So, I sold it to a restorer guy...

Pike's Peak

When I was a wee bit of Scott there was a family road trip "out west." There was stop at Mount Rushmore, I think I got some cowboy boots, saw some buffalo and a visit to Pike's Peak.



I don't recall much of the visit to Pike's Peak, honestly.



I am pretty sure it wasn't anything like this though...

Instructions!?!

Dammit, somebody coulda told me.

HST pic, from his HA period

I Woke Up Today

Port O'Brian, out of O-Town

Bait and Switch

So I made it down to the Blackhawk Museum, for the Roth show. It seemed like a bait and switch, a bit. There were drawings and the surf buggy thing was there. There was also the ugly Bandit II car, I don't really count that one as a Roth car.

Anyway, the rest of the stuff at the museum made up for the lack of Fink quantity.

We, KVC and I tooled down there with Bill Selby. If you don't know who Bill is, well you probably would recognize his work but that is another story. Bill had a story to go along with our outting, but that one is extra-top-secret so you are not getting it from me.

KVC said she uploaded some pics to her photo host.
Click on KVC, over there in the links...

Hey buddy...

...yer tire looks a little low on air...

One of those mornings

One of those mornings in a good way.

These days the sun is actually up when I get to work.
So I can actually see that I am here in San Fransisco.

The golf cart sized street sweeper was making a pass down the sidewalk, mitigating the pee smell.

I could see the nifty torpedo trolley rattling up Market.

There was dramatic lighting splashed across the TransAmerica building, or whatever they call the pyramid looking building these days.

Tinkering

This linkage provides endless obsessive tinkering opportunity.
This is the sort of thing that is the very reason I am not done and driving this project.
There are kits out there, in catalogs, which I could just order. They have most all of this sorted out.
That kinda seems like cheating to me, though.
So, here is version 3.5 of the Rube Goldberg progressive carburetor and transmission kick down mousetrap linkage.
Everything seems to move in the right directions and some adjustment is built in
There is no fancy math/geometry work or detailed design drawings going on in this process, though maybe there should be. I just try to make it so it seems right.

Not your average day...

Not your average day, on the ramp here at Buchannon Field.
The Collings Foundation (or something like that) is a group that has these old warbirds.

They f'n fly them.
Aircraft, machines that won the war.
Machines which were the top of technology, in their time.
Machines that taught America the finest arts of combining technology and purpose.

The things that stoke the fires, here in the garage, were learned by farm boys on machines just like these.

No, wait, they were learned on these very machines.
What I saw was the real deal.
It was not some approximation or reinterpretation, what I saw. These machines carried life to the fight, they dealt death, they did their job and are still here to tell the tale.

The B25 is shockingly small, for the weapon that threw the first punch at Japan after Pearl Harbor. You could probably fit the whole thing in a semi trailer, if you took it apart and packed carefully.

And the B17, well, it has that bueatiful brutality that I am so fond of. Bristling with guns to shoo away German bad guys.

Both had am essence of purpose with style, remarkably truck-like. No frills or fancy gee-gaws found here. All business. No AC, no heat beyond what may soak through from engines spinning props bigger than me, not many seat cushions to be found as the 'chute to save your life hung by your ass and you could sit on that.

There was a P51 that was offering rides, too. Hearing those twelve cylinders purr on the tarmac, then roar as they pulled polished aluminum into the sky is awesome.
Not awesome in it's typically applied usage, but awesome in that you cannot help but stare and listen and soak in what you are experiencing awesome.

Keep 'em flying!