I use Maxima Chain Wax because I like the way it smells. Period. I’ve used them all. Might as well pick the one that makes ME happy.
Hey, Johnny, my RZ never got more than 24mpg. Coupled with a just under 5 gal tank made for some … planning
I think my '76 Yamaha 250 Enduro got 35 mpg. When it comes to MPG, two-strokes are a bit thirsty.
Yeah, the RZ can pass anything but a gas station.
It’s been perfect riding weather so I commuted on my bike all last week. Today it was 45° when I left in the morning, and this afternoon it will be 80° for the ride home. Carry all the gloves, and have a removable jacket liner.
Anyway, that’s not why I’m writing.
The sole on my left boot is coming off. They’re probably 20 year old Red Wing motorcycle boots that they don’t make any more. I think it’s basically just their work boots with some extra toe protection, but they’ve served well. They’re just glued on Vibram soles, and I have a good shoe repair place, so getting them fixed won’t be a problem.
I’m at work though, and my heel is flapping around while I walk. As much as it would be convenient, I really don’t think I should ride to the shoe repair place, drop them off, and then ride home barefoot. I have the wrong bike for squid behavior.
Buy a pair of flip-flops at 7-11 for $2.99. Problem solved!
You don’t have a Pacific Coast?
I thought a squid bike was a 15 year old (or brand new) liter bike or 600 and a rider with a tank top and flip flops. Two months from now the bike will be on Marketplace with scrapes down one side.
If I had a Pacific Coast I’d probably have a second set of shoes buried somewhere in one of the trunks.
It was the left boot that broke, and that is, I’m sure, because that is the foot I always put down. On the way home I was putting down my right foot, because I didn’t want the boot to fall apart when I was stopping. Putting down my right foot is a skill I really need to practice. I felt (and probably looked) like a new rider.
Finally pulled the trigger and picked up a SV650. It’s an older carbureted naked, but I have plans. It’s been sitting for a few years, so the carbs are all gunked up, there’s bad gas in the tank, the battery is completely done for, the chain’s rusting, and the tires have flat spots. Should be able to get everything up and running for maybe 500 bucks and some elbow grease. Perfect timing, since it’s actually too cold to ride in Colorado right now.
Perfect timing indeed … as long as you have a well-heated garage. 
That’ll be a good project until the weather turns good.
What follows are my motorcycle thoughts. Somewhat lengthy. The TLDR version is:
• I’ve been without a bike since 2021
• I’ve done a lot of riding, over 30 years and 250,000 miles
• I’ve been an MSF instructor (“RiderCoach”, in the parlance)
• maybe I should slow down and get a cruiser to do some relaxing weekend rides
I still haven’t replaced my motorcycle. At this point I’m not really sure if I ever will, although I do think on it constantly. To remind, I sold my R1200RT, my only bike, back in June 2021 and have been without a bike ever since. That’s the first time I’ve been without a bike since 1985. About 36 years and 250,000 miles of riding. And no accidents.
But I’ll turn 64 in June and I have to wonder if my reflexes and eyesight have degraded significantly. My style of riding is aggressive assertive. Yeah I prefer the word assertive.
Maybe I should relax, be less assertive, and ride something like a Harley or Indian cruiser. Slow down and take it easy, and not attack the San Francisco Bay Area traffic so much. I’m retired, anyway.
I was mainly a daily commuter on my bike. Fortunately we can ride year round here in the SFBA. Rain or shine, I commuted daily to/from work on the bike for decades.
And then my next type of riding was taking trips. I’ve ridden round trip from San Francisco to St. Louis, MO, which was my longest single trip; and then another trip to Lawton, OK; another 2 trips to Phoenix, AZ and the Grand Canyon; and several trips down to Los Angeles, or over the Sierra Nevada mountain passes to Bishop, CA. I’ve ridden over every mountain pass over the Sierra Nevada from Donner Pass in the north (I-80) down to Tehachapi Pass and Mojave in the south (CA-58).
I’ve done several of the Iron Butt rides but I’ve never bothered to get the medal or license plate frame or whatever they give you. I’ve done some of those 2-up with my wife. She’s tough and takes power naps on the back. We also once did the California 24 Hour Rally, back in 2010, and we did that 2-up. We have the helmet-to-helmet intercom, and I tell her to bring her list of discussions topics for us to work through.
I’ve ridden through snow storms, extremely heavy rains, thunderstorms with nearby lightning (at night, can be briefly blinding) and through some black ice but that’s not a good situation, right?
Taking the MSF basic course was a Marine Corps requirement in order to ride onto military bases. I took my first course back in 1985 and that training has helped keep me safe and accident free for over 250,000 miles. I’m a bit focused and fervent about my rider safety and I’ve taken some advanced riding courses. I became an MSF instructor in part to give back, but also in part to keep me from becoming lax in my fervent pursuit of safety so that I can keep having fun on motorcycles.
I’m not sure what I’m going to do about motorcycling. Do I call it a career and be done with it? Or do I jump back in? Maybe I should transition into a weekend cruiser rider, with my wife on the back seat.
I’m talking with some East coast friends about flying there and renting a bike to do some riding with them later this summer or fall.
Thanks for letting me share.
I’m semi-temporarily retired from riding. Similar resume as yours, although I was never an MSF instructor even though I considered it for a while. Too much work travel at the time to make it make sense.
I badly miss my bikes on some days. In my last few years of riding, I dialed down from big sport-tourers (a Multistrada was my next-to-last bike) and went hard into the Supermoto world. And you know what? That was probably the best period of riding I ever had. Helps that I live down in the socal canyons, where the hairpins and tightly coiled road are perfect for that style of bike.
I quit riding mostly because of a persistent shoulder injury that made riding more than 30 minutes a real chore at best, and misery at worst. There are some great roads in a 30 minute riding radius of my house, but doing the same loops over and over got old.
The decision was also made a little easier because anecdotally, I experienced a severe downturn in the skill and attention level of the drivers I was sharing the road with. A lot of my riding friends say they noticed the same thing, but at least a few protesting that it had always been that bad and I finally had something to blame it on. It’s a difficult sell to convince me that cellphone use while driving is not rampant though.
Anyway, should I get back into riding, I’d go with another small, light, hooligan bike like the KTM not just because it’s stupid fun in it’s own right, it’s a lot easier to manhandle for a guy closing in on 60 and dealing with a few jacked-p joints.
Yeah @Pork_Rind , I hear you. I actually just spent an hour at my local Harley dealership getting a basic introduction to some of the bikes. I sat on several of them, and I really like them. I’ve been on BMWs for the last 31 years that I had bikes, and I’ve always been a one bike at a time guy. We’re running errands, the wife and I, and she hopped on the back seat of a couple of them. Still running errands, we stopped at the grocery store where she picked up some things and I parked right next to a nice newer Harley, with 117 CIs. The owner came out and we shot the breeze a bit.
I might be catching the bike bug again, but I’m also not in any rush and I’ll look carefully at some bikes before deciding on one, if I decide to buy at all.
Go to Italy and ride the roads in Tuscany. My wife and I went last summer and it was amazing. Best riding ever. Great roads, and cars look out for bikes and respect them. We rented a couple of new Royal Enfields from a place just south of Florence. Inexpensive and endless cool roads to ride. Can’t wait to get back. I would be happy to share more details if you want.
Now that is a sentence I never thought I’d ever read from anyone. Much less a man of your great experience and expertise.
I’ve been away from motorcycling since I was 35ish, so ~30 years. But the one thing I’m sure I know is that nothing will ever get me on one of Milwaukee’s gross piles of retro primitivity.
I agree. And I’ve owned a HD, but the best version ever made which is “the girl’s bike”: A Sportie. I’ve ridden plenty of HDs, but I still think the Sportster is the best they ever made (which version is to be debated) and I rode one for many years. However, it’s not a great 2-up bike so I moved to a Buell for riding with my spouse. When I replace it, I’ll be looking anywhere but HD, and most likely German. In everything I ride, it has to be upright.
For my one-up riding I prefer small simple thumpers. I could afford Austrian, but my DR650 has served me so well. I’ve done lots of asphalt runs with super-moto tires and I can keep up with the best on this “underpowered” lightweight machine. However, most of my 1-up is now on FS roads and it has street knobbies and again, I don’t really need more power. My bike is bombproof and I’ll probably just keep riding it.
With all that said, I need to replace fork seals on two of my 4 bikes. I hate fork seals.
While I was in high school my Dad bought what IIRC was an Harley Davidson XLCR to complement his stable of classic British bikes. At the time I had a Yamaha XS750 - Wikipedia transverse inline triple shaftie.
His bike was their top of the line Sportster. Allegedly an “American café racer”. My Japanese tourer could eat it alive all day long. Both as to performance and as to comfort. And it was not one of Yamaha’s better products.
What about an R18? I prefer the very awkward looks of BMW’s first cruiser, the R1200C, but supposedly it wasn’t very good.
That is the first place I ever rode a motorized two-wheeler of any kind—a 50cc scooter, and I had great fun zooming around the countryside with a couple of Australians I’d met the night before. No helmets, gear, or anything like that. Unfortunately none of us knew what the Italian word “mixa” (or something) meant that the rental guy kept saying, so we burned up one of the scooters by running plain gas in a 2-stroke.
We ended up having to pay 90,000 lira or so ($50, maybe?). Still a great day, except the sunburn.
I haven’t really looked at BMWs in over 10 years, so I’m not too familiar with them these days. Maybe I should take a look. The R18 looks interesting. I’ve always owned the R bikes and I like the classic boxer engines. I’ve owned exactly 3 of them in 31 years, a 1983 R80RT (bought used in 1990 in Oklahoma), a 1995 R1100GS dual sport, and a 2005 R1200RT. Those are the only BMWs I’ve owned, and the only other bike I owned was my very first bike, a 1983 Yamaha XS650 Heritage Special which I rode to Lawton, OK in 1990 then bought the used R80RT there, sold the XS650 there, and ride the R80RT back home to San Francisco.
Anyway, that’s way more details than you needed or wanted.
Yeah, I should look at BMWs. And that R1200C cruiser when it came out back in 1997 certainly had its following, to include James Bond in Tomorrow Never Dies (1997).
And @corudstr , riding the Tuscany countryside sounds like a great idea! Tuscany is gorgeous, and seeing it by motorcycle would be fabulous. A few years back when we were last in Europe we were driving a car and some friends of ours, a couple, were doing an Edelweiss tour. They were on a rented BMW R1200GS and we both were driving in Liechtenstein on the same day, but they were a few hours ahead of us and we never connected while there. The couple was riding 2-up. My wife and I worked with the wife, while her husband was mainly a Ducati guy, but they loved the GS so much that they ended up buying one when they got back home to Massachusetts. They said that the Edelweiss tour was a first class operation the whole way through. Excellent roads and scenery, excellent hotel stays, and excellent places to eat.
As for why I as a BMW guy am looking at Harleys and am also considering Indian / Victory, I’m really just at the beginning of my looking and thinking about getting back in the saddle. And while I’ve never ridden a cruiser before (although the Yamaha XS650 is somewhat of a cruiser), it’s largely because my high school friends back east ride Harleys and I may do a ride with them, and also because the cruiser riding style is more of a laid back and relaxing style, and that appeals to me now.
I may end up getting a Harley, or I may not, but I’m just at the beginning of my research and looking around.
Thanks for everyone’s helpful inputs and feedback.
Here are the pictures I took at the Harley dealership today.
I’ve owned plenty of UJMs over my years and still have a soft spot for Honda CBs (I have a CB350 in the garage awaiting my attention). My Sportster was more fun to me than pretty much any of them. And dead reliable racking up over 70K miles fairly quickly (I used to ride a lot!). My Buell is fairly similar but with more performance, particularly for 2-up riding.
There are a ton of boring UJMs. There are some exciting ones. Same for a lot of moto makers. What makes something exciting to one won’t to another. My underpowered DR650 is very exciting to me. I guarantee it will be boring to someone that rides a KTM every day. I’ve kept up with plenty of people in the twisties riding a Sportster and a DR650 and I’ve wondered why people aren’t using their controls a bit more.