In the Beginning There Were Motorcycles - Part 2: Moving to the Big City

In 1970, Honda released their first 3-wheeler, the US90 (later changed to ATC90.) Dad was smitten. He managed to talk his way into buying a brand-new lime green one, no doubt whining and pouting to mom until he got his way. With its unusual balloon tires as its only suspension, it was quite the machine. It was a whole new way of riding and steering, too, having the rear wheels locked together as they were. You had to lean into a turn like a regular motorcycle, but you had to put all your weight on the footpeg on the opposite side.

 

It was touted by Honda as easily transportable, and their brochures showed it disassembled and actually fitted into the trunk of a small car! You would pop the seat/rear fender unit off, undo the handlebar quick-release latch to turn them as needed, and the rear axle and wheel slid completely out as one unit after removing the opposite rear tire. It was an interesting design:

 

When I finished 6th grade we moved to Auburn, the “big” city next door. By big I mean it had actual stores and sidewalks and cops and everything. During this time dad expanded our family motorcycles to include a Honda Mini Trail 50. It proved so popular in our family that a couple more were added. Now when we went camping there was no bickering about riding. Gone were the “It’s my turn, you’ve been on it long enough” gripes that always led to someone getting pissed off—usually dad.

By now dad’s little motorcycle “business” had expanded to cover all single-cylinder Honda’s, and he also occasionally did repairs for people. As a result of all his bartering, repairing, and upgrading he had accumulated quite a few parts for Honda 50, 55, 65, 70, and 90cc bikes—all their single cylinder models. Sometime during my junior high school years (9th grade?) I approached dad and asked him if he thought there were enough parts to build a motorcycle from. He gave me permission to go ahead, and I jumped in.

First, I built the engine. All I had to go on were his manuals, so I spent a lot of time comparing individual gears, snap rings, shims, and all the other stuff that goes into an engine to pictures and diagrams in his manuals. When I got it all together it ended up being 55cc. When it came time for a carburetor I was stumped because a Honda 55 engine used a “stand up” vertical carburetor, and we had none.

 

Instead, I got out his welder and built an intake manifold out of exhaust pipe and 1/8” steel for flanges, on which I mounted an S90 carburetor like this:

 

The frame was from a 55cc also, and I painted it metal flake purple, because why not? I had no idea what models the wheels were from, but the whole front end—forks and all—were from an S90. (Because his main dirt bike was still his old hot-rodded S90 he had a lot of parts.) It was quite the Frankenstein when it was all finished! I had converted the automatic clutch a manual clutch, and it operated on a toggle switch with no battery. When it came time to actually try to start it, I wasn’t savvy enough to trust that I had everything right, so I went and got my dad off his nap couch. He chuckled, like he knew it would never start. Imagine his surprise (as well as mine) when it started right up! I never did get any pictures of it, but it kicked around the family for several years, getting ridden quite a bit for fun. Dad finally ended up selling it. That was one of my proudest achievements.

Our garage was tiny and there wasn’t enough room for much more than a car, some toolboxes, and our own motorcycles. His motorcycle “shop” if you want to call it that, was our basement. He had a small room packed with all his tools and parts, but due to space he had to work on whole motorcycles in the main area of the basement. That meant he had to haul them down from the outside door that was halfway down the stairs, and back out when they were done. He (we) learned a valuable lesson one day when a bike he was working on backfired and started a fire. The fire department was there quickly, so not much damage was done, but it was truly a humbling experience. No more whole bikes in the basement!

The nicest of the Honda Mini Trails we had ended up getting an upgrade when he pulled the 50cc top end off it, transplanting a 70cc cylinder and head onto it. It was a fun bike with plenty of power for adults. Those minis ended up being carted all over the place because they were so small and portable, like this time we stuffed one into our '61 Mercury station wagon and took it on our trip the Bonneville Salt Flats:

 

Sadly, someone broke into mom & dad’s garage a few years later and stole all 3 of our beloved Mini Trails, and they were never recovered. Dad’s hot S90 and the 3-wheeler were not in the garage though, so they escaped being stolen.

 

In the Beginning There Were Motorcycles - Part 1: The Algona Years

I’ve been around motorcycles my whole life. I can’t remember them not being present in my life in some shape or form.

In the early sixties Honda was making a name for themselves in the affordable motorcycle world. I don’t think he really knew how to ride a motorcycle when he bought his first bike—a used Honda 150. I’m pretty sure he dumped it quite a few times horsing around.

 

We weren’t what you’d call “well off,” but luckily dad was pretty good at horsetrading. That 150 was eventually traded up into a bright red CB160. Actually, it wasn’t his usual trading because he bought this one new. It only took him a couple hours before he dumped it and dented the left muffler. It sure was a pretty bike though.

 

If memory serves me, he didn’t consult with mom first. He got away with it, but it caused mom to buy a new washing machine without telling him.

Back then Honda was our go-to bike brand because they were cheap(ish), plentiful, and easy to work on. Dad learned early on that he needed some way to pay for the little things he needed, like cables, levers, gaskets, etc., so he started a little business. His goal was not to make money, but just to cover all of his own part expenses. He called it Williams & Son. For some reason he didn’t make it plural (I had two brothers and two sisters), but I think he thought it sounded more professional. Who knows. Dad wasn’t real well-educated, but he was definitely a gearhead with a mechanical mind. His teenage years were filled with dreaming over the pages of those pocket-sized mid-fifties car magazines, all of which I still have. Those were the days of shoehorning Cadillac engines into old Fords or whatever else you had handy. Anyway, his little business did well because people then were always looking for parts for their Honda’s. And dad was always breaking something.

Mom also enjoyed riding motorcycles. When she was having a rough day she liked to take whatever bike dad had at the time for a ride around our little hick town of Algona, Washington for a while to clear her head.

The longer he owned the CB160 the more liberties he took with it. Snow? Time to pull the kids around the yard!

 

After a time it became apparent that dad had more interest in dirt bikes than road bikes. There was a hillclimb at the edge of town, and back then you could hear anytime someone was attempting to climb it because in the pre-freeway days sound carried a lot further. When he heard someone attempting to climb it he would hop on his bike and race over to see who and what was going on. He ended up selling his CB160 and bought a Honda S90 (not the step-thru Trail 90.) That was a turning point for him. He ended up stripping and hot-rodding it, turning it into a nicely trail-worthy machine. Straight pipe, ported head, carb from a 250, car coil, and lots of other modifications. He even sent his camshaft down to California to Dempsey Wilson Cams where they put a custom grind on it. It really was very cool bike. It was in the family for many years. Here’s yours truly getting on it in our adjoining 1/4 acre field:

 

To me the S90 was a beast. It was loud and strong. The first time I rode it I could reach the footpegs fine, but not the ground. At one point dad and I were up in the woods someplace on a fairly steep dirt road. There were lots of guys on bikes around, taking turns on seeing who could climb that steep road the fastest. Dad asked me if I wanted to try it. Hell, I didn’t know better, so I said sure. When the hill was clear, he put me on it and held me and the bike up while he gave me last-minute instructions, “Keep your foot on the gearshift so a rock doesn’t hit it and knock it into neutral. Are you ready? Okay, when you start moving just hold it wide open.” Holy shit! I went pretty well for a ways, but little by little started fishtailing. I finally lost it and crashed, scaring the shit out of me. While I lay there crying, waiting for dad to catch up, I got quite an ovation from the other riders!

Once again, dad grew restless. This time he bought a brand new Bultaco 100 Lobito. It’s engine wasn’t much bigger than his S90, but boy would that thing go! As a kid in 5th or 6th grade, it was quite the handful for me, but I did get to ride it from time to time. That was the only 2-stroke he ever owned. I think it was a little to radical for him to use as a trail bike, even though that’s what he bought it for. He ended up only keeping it for a year or so.

As I mentioned already, we weren’t rolling in money. So where did dad get the money for all these things? He was a good mechanic, with a good eye for deals. He would buy something that needed work, do the repairs, and sell it for a nice profit. That technique meant we had a lot of cars over the years.

But that’s another story.

 

Writing Yet Again

I used to blog daily. For years I blogged daily. One day I read that Google will delete inactive accounts after two years of complete disuse, which deletes emails, blogs, and everything else associated with that account. I felt kind of betrayed. I had blindly assumed that anything on the internet would be permanent!

It kind of took the wind out of me to think that my decades of pouring words onto pages will go away in a puff of smoke 2 years after I die. How’s that for a positive vibe? Would that make you want to continue? It made me think, “Did I waste all that time?

Then I read that people don't really read blogs any more. They're more into videos and quick blasts of entertainment. Nobody reads blogs any more?! That just made it worse. To make a long story short, I stepped away from blogging for quite a while.

Now, it seems I've gone and created yet another blog. I must be a glutton for punishment. This one is just a bunch of gearhead stories. 

I still enjoy writing from time to time, and being retired now, I have plenty of time, so here we go again.

 

Sometimes I Feel So Old...

You know, when you start thinking about people, generations, and the passage of time it's really amazing at how much history has taken place during our time on earth. What's kind of mind-boggling is you consider the average person lives until they're 80-ish years old, and if you count backward in increments of 80, it's only a couple lifetimes back that our country was founded! Of course, that's not quite how the timeline works. In reality, if you take one 80-year lifespan and add parents to it, you're only adding, say, 25 years for each generation because our lives overlap instead of play out end-to-end.

Still, a lot has happened in the world since I was born in 1956.

The race for space began. I remember being in grade school and getting the coolest lunch box/thermos combination in the entire world. The Vanguard rocket thermos was best thing ever! Another space memory was the time I was in a Thriftway grocery store in Auburn, Washington, buying a replacement newspaper for one of my route customers that had not received theirs. I was just walking up to the cashier with it when she jumped up after hearing her radio, screaming, "They've landed on the moon! They've landed on the moon!" I ate it all up. I bought space capsule models, I read space trivia on the backs of the boxes while I ate my breakfast cereal. I snacked on Space Food Sticks.

I lived in a time when people had houses and yards. Stay-at-home moms were the norm. There was very little juvenile delinquency because kids had hobbies, they had parents, and they had space to be kids in. Pushed out the door in any weather to "go play" was typical. We were seldom monitored until it was dinnertime or bedtime, and without worry of being preyed upon or abducted. Being an adolescent in the early sixties (who was not raised on a farm) meant learning about the birds and the bees using our peers and the public library. It was decades before internet.

I've watched the evolution of motor vehicles my whole life. I've seen the ubiquitous Chevy V8 go from  needing tune-ups every 30,000 miles and a complete rebuild at 100,000 miles to not even needing to raise the hood for 100,000 miles. Engines now easily last 300,000 miles, but people take it for granted. No longer are cars bought for engines or drivetrain specifics--now people shop for creature comforts and tech interface gadgetry.

I worked at Karl's Chevron in Auburn during the 1973 "oil crisis". The public buying frenzy got so ridiculous that we were only open for gas sales for 2 hours a day, had a $2.00 limit (yes, I said 2 bucks--gas was way cheap then), and alternated days (odd/even) based on the last digit of your car's license plate. Unbelievable. It happened though. We had no shortage really--the consumers created it. My folks knew if they wanted anything filled up they just needed to bring it down after we closed. Our family always had gas.

The variety of products that sprang forth during my lifetime is staggering. Not even counting tech! things we now take for granted, like Velcro, neon highlighter pens, water-based house paints, car tires that hardly ever puncture, the list is so long. For me, the tech end of things is my favorite I think. Now, we can order anything our hearts desire on the internet, our devices keep their own clock time, and almost everything can be made to operate wireless.

Mom Is Gone.

Mom died on June 13th. It wasn't a surprise--she had been rapidly declining in health in recent months. We could all see it. Hell, she could see it. She kept mentioning that her dad "died when he was 84 and I'll be 84 soon" whenever we would get together. In retrospect, I'm sure she knew something was failing.

We made sure to throw a big birthday bash for her 84th at our house. We had everyone there, big balloon decorations, lots of food--it was great. Mom sat in her wheelchair, looking diminutive, weary, and slightly confused. We were so glad we were able to bring it all together for her last birthday. She lived for another 3 weeks.

Mom was an only child, arriving a little later in her parents' lives than most at that time. She had to survive a hovering mother as she grew up that loved to re-live her childhood vicariously through mom as she grew up. "She went to everything," mom would say of grandma, "every practice, every birthday party, everything." It was plain that she grew to hate it as she got older. When she met my dad, he had a "bad boy" charm. He had come into to the world unwanted by his parents that were too busy nightclubbing and gambling, and so was raised by his grandparents instead. Like many boys, he was no stranger to harsh punishment, and when he challenged his grandfather's authority he received it. When he had finally come to our area to live with his real parents, he was a brooding loner, full of teen angst and resentment. Much to the dismay of mom's parents, the two teens grew close, leaning on each other as only another "only child" could.

I never felt real grief when she passed. More like relief. She had been going through a lot in recent times, and it was good she never had to worry about pain or comfort again. No, I've been feeling something else. I can't quite put a finger on. It may have to do with me being the oldest of the five siblings--a kind of "buck stops here" sort of feeling. I feel like I'm watching all the cars of a train pass, then suddenly realizing the last car just went by. I hurry to catch up, finally settling in at the end of the line. I'm suddenly aware that there is no one behind me, and no longer any reason to look back. I'm at the back.

Mom was the glue of the family. She could make dad's income cover all our bases. She kept us fed, she made us clothes, and never missed a horrible school concert we kids performed in. In later years, she worked to keep busy, landing a job across the street at the Auburn High School in their cafeteria. Years later, when dad stopped working she was able to continue, working her way up within the school district cafeteria system until her retirement.

Mom had a huge heart. She was able to take dad back during a time in the 80's when he went philandering, seduced by a female that told him what he wanted to hear. Fortunately, for mom, it didn't last long. Fortunately for dad, mom let him come home. That was mom.

Yeah, I'm somewhat disconcerted. Of course I miss her, but I also have a feeling a something else being missing. Some sort of connection or placeholder--I dunno. Our odd little iceberg of a family (no aunts, uncles) used to be connected at the top of the family tree by mom and dad. Then it was just mom, but the configuration still held. The family unit as we knew it was still intact. Now, with mom gone the whole structure feels as if it's in shambles. There is no family tree, just a few apples on the ground.

Now we siblings face the fact that mom and dad were married very young, and we were all born pretty close to each other--all five of us within a range of 7 years in age. Mortality is no longer too distant to worry about.

R.I.P. mom... I love you.

Privacy of the Back Yard Continues

After installation of our new fence this past fall, the last area I needed to address for good privacy at our house was the area between the shop and the gate. The cyclone fencing that was already there being only 4’ tall meant there wasn’t much I could do with it, then there was the problem of the trees that were planted so close to the property line and leaning my direction. The neighbor already gave me the green light to cut anything I ever needed to cut that was infringing on our property, but that didn't mean I wanted to eliminate them completely. That’s when I found these shade cloths.

Most shade cloths I found on the web were the same type and thickness of fabric, varying only in size, grommets, quality of sewing, etc. They also didn't block anything other than some of the light getting through. You could still see through them pretty easily. That's when I found out the real story on the ratings. Most of these cloths are rated at 170 GSM, even though they may say 90% blockage. What I ended up buying was by Colourtree and it's rating is 220 GSM, meaning very little of anything gets through.

To get it to lay flat against the fence and be able to anchor it I needed to do a little housekeeping with my various implements of destruction. Here’s what the area looked like after I cleaned up the fence to flatten any foliage that was trying to peek through:

The bamboo that someone next door planted at some time in the past was most of what I had to clear. With some of it poking through the fence here and there I just hit it all with hedge trimmers. Cleaning up a few branches here and there was all that was left. Then I turned my attention to this "block" of shade material I had to work with:

After spreading it all out and eyeballing what I had to do, I opted to put screw-in hooks at a measured height in all the trees that I would be using, then threaded some 3/8" poly rope through the upper grommet holes. After hanging the thing up all the way across, all I had to do was anchor the lower edge with the provided nylon zip ties.

I'm not totally enthusiastic about the finished product, but that's only due to the color. They don't make them in this size in brown, which was my first choice. It was either black, green, or tan. This just looks a bit "ghetto" to me. The reason I opted to use a fabric to begin with was because most of the trees are leaning, and I didn't want to deal with cutting them down. The varying angle of the finished install kind of adds to the cheesiness and gives it a tarp look. The good thing is, it totally works for what we wanted it to. We have great privacy over there now. We had a couple of good wind storms after I put it up and it didn't even move. It's stretched nice and tight and rock solid.

Maybe some day we'll get something better, but for now this will do nicely.

The Rise and Fall of the Motorhome

We had high hopes for our nudist palace on wheels, but truth is, it's just like the old adage: The two best days in your life might be the day you buy your [motorhome/boat/extravagance] and the day you sell your [motorhome/boat/extravagance].

We hadn't even owned it 4 years, but  Between COVID limiting people going anywhere and camping areas and nudist parks being closed, it got used very little. After it's initial summer of fun, it just sat and got older. Oddly, the only three places we ever camped in it were nudist parks! Our first outing was over near Spokane, at Kaniksu Ranch. We followed that up with a visit to Lake Bronson Nudist Park, near Sultan. Our final (though we didn't know it at the time) use of the motorhome was at our closest nudist park, Tiger Mountain Family Nudist Park, over near Issaquah. I just had to have the license plate frame made.

We looked high and low for a motorhome when we found ours, and we considered ourselves lucky to have found one the right size, with good options and good price. Like many folks are, we were overcome by the newness and overlooked things. I was excited by the plethora of good options, so other things got ignored or brushed off as not important during the buy. I made the mistake of brushing off the impact that mold traces would have on Brenda, but the truth is the longer we owned it, the older it got. Everyone knows that motorhomes seem to always seep water here and there no matter how well you tarp them. Traces of blackness around leaky areas never seem to really go away. We bought a custom-sized memory foam mattress that we never even got a chance to use before water dribbled down the wall onto it, leaving a nice water stain on one whole corner. Come to think of it, we never did use that new mattress! So, without a new roof there was little to no chance of Brenda being comfortable in it again. Who wants to breathe mold spores, right? I didn't feel justified in dumping roof money into a 20+ year-old motorhome. There were other things too, like the fabric on the seat cushions was starting to break down from age. I think I had grown to despise it without realizing it. It became nothing but a chore of ownership, and grew more worthless with each passing year of depreciation and degradation. Can you believe I actually found those mushrooms growing out of it one year?

A year or so ago I had a guy stop by out of the blue, asking me if I'd be willing to sell the motorhome. Well, like most people, I have the "right price and we'll see" attitude. We went out and looked it all over, starting it and checking things over. We arrived on a price, and the guy left to get his "money man" or relative that had funds. When he showed up with him they started in on me-attacking from two directions about why this or that should lower the price, etc. Finally, I said, "You know, I don't like where this deal is going. The deal is off. Goodbye" and sent them away. They continued trying as they left, and even contacted me a day or two later. Nope.

Maybe six months later the same thing happens. Out of the blue a gal comes to the door saying her husband wants to ask about the motorhome, motioning over towards the driveway at him sitting in his Suburban. After a bunch of song and dance, we arrive at a pretty cheap price (about half of what I could have sold it to the first guys for a year or so earlier. At this point they left to go get money. That's when I noted the similarities between all these guys--including the previous hagglers six months earlier. They could have been family. All of them were Mediterranean ancestry, all the same accents, all with the same methods of haggling and doing business. When these folks came back, they started in on fresh round of re-haggling, as if the price hadn't already been determined. When they saw I wasn't going to budge, the deal was made. Imagine my surprise--no, OUR surprise--when the same couple showed up a few days later, "Uhh, I hate to bother you, but the motorhome ended up costing us more to get repaired than we thought and we can't afford to pay the bill. We were wondering if you could lend us maybe $500 or so." Are you fucking kidding me? It was all I could keep from saying that, but I firmly sent them packing. I was flabbergasted. They even had their kids acting all lovey towards us, trying to win us over. Even the first guy that sold us the motorhome was from that family. He did all the exact same moves with the re-haggling, along with looking like they were all brothers. I don't want to step on too many ethnic toes here, but I doubt I will never again do business with someone of that group.

The good news though: the motorhome was gone. No more worrying about leaking, freezing, protecting, or storing. That was a pretty expensive motorhome when you count the depreciation and the costs--especially when you only use it three times. Then there's theft.

Oh, I didn't tell you about that?

Yes, we fell victim to the catalytic converter theft craze that swept the nation during the pandemic times. One day I took the garbage out and walked around the motorhome on the way back in, checking on the tarp after we had just had a big windstorm the previous day. The snow was patchy and frozen, with bare spots here and there. My foot caught on the edge of something on the driver's side, about halfway down. I bent down and found a rubber trunk mat-looking thing sticking out of the snow. "Hmm, that wind must have blown this thing from someone else's yard." I was just about to keep walking when something made me stop. "Wait... could it be..." I kneeled down. Sure enough, there was a sizeable gap in the 3" exhaust pipe where our low-mileage, factory catalytic converter used to reside. Sonuvabitch, they got me. Apparently, something spooked them to not get their mat when they left. Brenda is sure it was during a time Wendy was over visiting with Louie. She let the dogs out and they both barked and ran that direction, though none of us thought anything at the time. She was probably right.

 

Well, I bought a section of exhaust pipe nearby and welded it in so it was driveable, and let Bucky's down in Fife put a new one in. Our insurance paid about half of it. At least I got the adjuster gal to throw in some extra $$ for me because I appropriated and welded my own patch in instead of having it towed.

But it was fun. Yes, we kept the license plate frame.