The Ride Report

I’ve been riding for about 25 years now and I like to think I’m a good rider - skilled, smart, experienced, safe(ish), etc. But there’s a saying about riders like me with years of experience under their belt, that those years don’t necessarily mean you’re a better rider. Are you a rider with 25 years of experience spent learning and improving — or are you a rider with the same one year of experience repeated 25 times? I hope I’m the former. I’d like to think I am. But I learned something new recently.

I’ve always taken it as an immutable fact of motorcycling that you don’t use your rear brake in corners. Ever. Braking in a turn is bad in the first place, but braking with the rear brake in a turn is the worst.  You’ll low-side yourself right off the road if you lock up the rear tire, so you’re tempting fate if you even think about touching the rear brake pedal while cornering.  I’ve always “known” that if you absolutely, positively have to brake in a turn, then you use the front brake. That’s how I ride, and I’ve taken it so far that I intentionally developed the habit of riding the twisties with my right foot on my highway peg to remove the temptation to brake with the rear brake. If I come into a corner too hot, then I counter-steer like I mean it and grab a handful of front brake if that’s not enough.

That’s been working for me so far, but I recently got into a debate about braking with the rear in corners with Steve of Motorcycle Philosophy and Joker of Harley-Davidson “Mystique”.  I was adamant that rear-braking is dead wrong, they were equally adamant that I had my head up my ass.  (Well, okay, to be honest, they were adamant that rear-braking is a legitimate technique, but I’m sure they were thinking I had my head up my ass.)

This was our second go-round on this topic, so I started considering the impossible: What if I was wrong?  (My wife would never believe I’m capable of such introspection.)

So I started out by Googling about it, confident that I would find dozens of articles by motorcycling authorities that I could cite to prove to these guys that they had it wrong.  Because, you know, everybody knows you don’t use your rear brake in a turn.

Only…  Not so much.

The more I read, the more I found that my head was in fact planted firmly in my colon and that rear-braking was an accepted — even popular — cornering technique.  I asked a couple of my riding buddies about it and they said they used it too.  One guy even started raving about it, saying he learned it from a motor cop a few years back and that it changed his riding style.

Well, hmmm…

So I’ve been trying it.  And you know what?  It works.  Really well, actually.  And now that I’m using the rear brake, I think I prefer it.  The rear helps settle the bike into the turn more, rather than trying to twist the handlebars out of your hands and the wheel out of the turn like the front does.  It actually feels safer to me, something I argued adamantly against just a few weeks ago.

So has my 25 years of experience been just the same year over and over again?  I don’t think so, but you’d think this little trick should have crept into my consciousness at some point before now.  Maybe I’ve been repeating the same two years 12.5 times…

Me and two of my club brothers made a run down to San Diego today to do a poker run one of our MC’s chapters was throwing. We’ve made the run down to San Diego together quite a few times before but I don’t think I’ve ever done it faster. It’s 140 miles each way and we hauled ass today — we left Burbank at 7:30 and got to San Diego at 9:30. That’s two hours from start to finish, with a gas stop and cigarette break along the way. We were balls to the wall, boy, lemme tell ya. I don’t know how we didn’t get a speeding ticket.

Traffic was pretty light for the ride down. We left Burbank early enough that we beat a lot of the weekend traffic, so we didn’t have to deal with much lanesplitting. Instead, we just pegged the throttle and slalomed around what little traffic there was and we beat feet. We held it around 90-95 mph for most of the way, but I clocked 105 for a quick minute near Camp Pendleton when I was trying to chase down E.E., who got a wild hair and kicked his up to 120 for a little bit.

E.E. and I left C.T. in San Diego and rode back together in the afternoon, and traffic had gotten heavier by then. It was still light, but there were enough cars clogging the road that we couldn’t ride in our standard side-by-side formation and keep a good speed, so we played follow-the-leader as we split lanes and leapfrogged each other for the lead. We had agreed to keep the speed down before we left because we knew the cops would be out in force for the holiday weekend, but that plan was history five minutes after we hit the freeway because we were running 90-95 again most of the way home. My favorite part of the run was lanesplitting side-by-side at 95 miles an hour on opposite sides of the same lane, so we were bracketing cars as we blew by them. I think maybe we scared the crap out of a few suburban families out for a Sunday drive that way. It was a blast.

By the time I got home I had ridden about 330 miles on the day, most of it at speeds and in conditions my wife would not want to know about. But hey, what she doesn’t know (and hopefully won’t read) won’t hurt her.

I just can’t seem to ride slow, especially when I’m riding with my brothers. It’s too much fun to go fast.

I happened to glance at my rear tire today and realized I was down to nothing on it. Some tread was left on the chicken strips but the middle of the tire was a slick. Since the forecast calls for possible rain and I’m riding down to San Diego tomorrow to do a poker run with one of my MC’s chapters down there, I figured I’d better get some new meat back there.

I was a little pissed off that this tire had worn down so quickly. It seems like I put it on just a few months ago and that it should have lasted longer. But then I checked my maintenance records and got a surprise: I put this tire on back in September and I’ve put a little over 9,000 miles on it since then. Time and miles fly when you’re having fun, I guess. So I’ve changed my attitude toward this tire: I give the Kenda Kruz two thumbs up. It was cheap, it handled great, and I got a lot of riding out of it. That works for me.

The tire I had on before this one sucked. It was a Pirelli and it was a piece of shit. I hated it from the minute I mounted it — it wanted to track in the rain grooves on the freeway and felt really squirrely in the turns — but I rode it anyway because I’m a cheap bastard. So I rode the snot out of it just to wear it out faster so I could replace it sooner, and it definitely cooperated. I forget the exact numbers on that one, but I’m pretty sure I only got about 6,000 miles out of it, and at least 3,000 of that was interstate highway during my trip to Colorado last summer. So it was a shitty tire, it wasn’t cheap, and it didn’t last long. Buh-bye Pirelli.

Before that I was running a Metzeler Marathon, which I like quite a bit. They’re a soft, sticky tire, so they handle really well, but they don’t last long because they’re a soft, sticky tire. Plus, they’re pretty pricey. Expensive tires + require frequent replacement = Chuck doesn’t buy them anymore.

But Kenda… Kenda is the right formula. Cheap + long life + good handling = Chuck just bought a new one. That’s two in a row from Kenda. I guess I like them.

“Gross” is grabbing your helmet and putting your thumb firmly into a glob of some kind of glue or resin that’s really sticky, licking your thumb so you can wipe the glue off on your jeans, and then looking at the helmet and realizing that the glue is actually the juicy remains of a large insect that literally exploded all across the front of the helmet and all that’s left are the innards that have been drying in the sun long enough to thicken and congeal. Innards that were on your thumb, until you licked them off.

Can you say “gag reflex”?

I almost killed myself and crashed my motorcycle last night, and the engine wasn’t even running.

I’ve been working in the transportation department on a low budget movie the last couple of days, towing the wardrobe trailer and the honeywagon to and from the shooting locations. This show is so low budget they don’t have overnight permits for the trailers, so we’ve been towing them back to the producer’s house and leaving them on the street there overnight, then picking them up in the morning to go back to set for the next day of shooting. Pain in the ass. So today we finally browbeat them into paying the extra $$$ to get permits to leave the trailers at the West L.A. location we’ll be at for the next three days so we wouldn’t have to start and end each day with setting up/breaking down everything and towing to/from Northridge.

The only problem with this solution is that me and the other driver’s vehicles were still back at the producer’s house in Northridge, so we took off to get them and bring them back to set. Why we didn’t have a PA drive us so we could each drive our own vehicle, I don’t know. That’s what we had talked about, but when we finally hit the road it was just me and the other guy in one of the show’s stakebed trucks. Long story short: this meant only one of us could get his vehicle because someone was going to have to drive the stakebed back.

The other guy got the great idea to load my bike into the back of the stakebed and I’d drive it back to set while he followed in his van. That way we’d have both our vehicles and the stakebed back at set. I didn’t love the plan, but the other guy happened to be my boss and I want him to call me for work again in the future, so I went along with it.

Getting the bike on the stakebed was a pain in the ass. The truck had a liftgate that the bike barely fit on, and then to maneuver it into the bed we had to remove one of the wooden side-rails and sort of slide the bike on an inch at a time with half my front tire hanging off the side of the truck. I thought for sure we were going to drop it then.

(That’s called “foreshadowing.”)

So I drove back to the set while he followed in his van, and the whole way back I was watching my bike in the mirror and thinking Is it moving? It isn’t moving, is it? Naaaah, it’s not moving. Holy shit, it’s moving! No, wait, maybe it’s not. When I got off the freeway 15 miles further, I took a good hard look during a red light and saw I had been right: the damn thing was moving. One of the tie-downs — the one my boss had rigged — had totally come off. My tie-down and a kickstand was the only thing keeping my bike on the truck. I re-strapped it down and we continued on to the set.

Getting the bike off was going to be a challenge. As hard as it had been getting it from the liftgate and into the bed of the truck, it was going to be even worse getting it off. It was just too dangerous and maybe even impossible to do it the same way. We needed a different solution. An abandoned loading dock would have been perfect. My boss’ idea of “we’ll back it up to a hill or steep driveway” would have been fine if we used a ramp, but had a liftgate. So I came up with the bright idea of using the liftgate on the grip truck since it was bigger.

Now, what transpired from there was partly my fault because using the grip truck liftgate was my idea. But it was mostly my boss’ fault for rushing it and trying to do it fast and risky instead of slow and safe. But it was ultimately my fault because I went along with it against my better judgement. I had my eye on getting work from him down the road and didn’t want to contradict him, even though I didn’t like the way we were doing it.

Long story short: We backed the stakebed up to the grip truck at an angle instead of straight in, and when I was straddling my bike and backing it up onto the grip truck, I ended up at an angle at the edge of where the two trucks’ liftgates met. I was walking it back, I pushed with the left foot, pushed with the right foot, pushed with the le– When I put my left foot down to push, I put it down into air. I had gone too close to the edge.

The bike started tipping and I couldn’t hold it. In my mind I did that fast-forward thing I’ve talked about before and I mentally played the scenario out to its painful, dead-Chuck ending, with me on the ground and the bike landing on top of me. Fuck that — I jumped.

It was a beautiful move, that jump. The timing was perfect, the form was excellent, it was graceful, it was an aerial ballet — right up to the part where my foot got hung up during the dismount. After that it turned into an ungainly belly-flop onto concrete from 4 feet up. There was a small crowd of people watching all this go down, and I remember hearing a horrified collective “Ooooh!” from them when I hit the ground.

On the ground, my first instinct was to get the fuck out of the way, because I knew the bike was coming down right behind me. Thing is, I couldn’t move. The bellyflop knocked the wind out of me and all I could do was lay there, croaking like a toad and waiting to get crushed by 750 pounds of plummeting Road Glide.

Fortunately, the bike didn’t fall. The one bright spot of this whole carnival of stupidity was that the bike got hung up in the side-rail and the other guys on the liftgate were able to grab it and stop it before it went over.

When I was finally able to breathe and move again — I came out of it with just a scraped elbow — I climbed back up on the gate and finished the job and got the bike safely down on the ground. I felt like an ass when all was said and done. I got lucky on that one. It could have gone a completely different way and ended really ugly for me.

…and that’s the whole story. It’s not really about riding per se, but it involved a motorcycle and it is what I’ve said this blog is about: tales of and from the road. And perhaps above the road…

I took Topanga Canyon over to PCH during my ride up to Camarillo yesterday, and along the way I came across a “biker” broken down on the side of the road. “Biker” because he was on a scooter, but two wheels are two wheels so technically he’s a biker. But whatever, the point is that I stopped to help him.

His air filter was acting up– it was gone, actually; he’d been using a crumpled-up napkin that either fell off or got eaten by the engine — and he was trying to jury-rig a fix for it with a piece of nylon stocking. I cut a few inches off one of the leather laces on my jacket so he could use it to tie the nylon in place, and then he was down the road again.

I post this only to point out to Dom that both times I’ve stopped recently it’s been for Honda riders. That’s gotta do something to offset my contributing to “the stream of stories of parts falling off Harleys,” right?

Lemme tell ya, that was one broke-ass Honda he was on.  I was surprised it ran at all…

I went for a putt along the coast yesterday. I was heading up to Camarillo to go to a party and decided to take the scenic route through Malibu instead of the freeway.

As I rode along, enjoying the sun and the sea air and the ocean view and the bikini-clad hotties dodging traffic on Pacific Coast Highway, I wondered what the riding was like in “safer” places where they don’t have earthquakes and wildfires and mudslides.

I thought about Chicago, but then I remembered it’s not “safe” there anymore — they just had a 5.2 earthquake last week. I sure hope they’re riding again soon…

I was feeling pretty smug about riding while others were freezing because I thought I remembered reading headlines saying winter was lingering in the snow zone. Weather.com, however, says different.

Xenia, Ohio, for example, got up to 65 degrees yesterday. Lebanon, Kansas, geographic center of the United States, hit 57.

Hell, even Milwaukee, Wisconsin, my Harley’s birthplace, scored a high of 49, which I’d say is definitely rideable if you’re wearing long underwear.

So maybe it’s not as bad as I thought, living in the snow zone. Maybe they’re not giving up as much riding time as I thought. And maybe I’m too defensive when people say it’s dangerous to live here with all the earthquakes and mudslides and wildfires.

I mean, maybe they have a point. After all, as I took these pictures there was a wildfire raging 50 miles away in the hills outside Pasadena. There is a price to pay for living here.

But there are benefits too. These pictures could have been taken any time.

Like this one, taken at sunset on New Year’s Eve a few months ago. It was T-shirt weather that day, and not a snowflake in sight. Weather is simply not an issue out here.

All things considered, I think it’s worth it.

I was lanesplitting my way up the 101 freeway yesterday through unusually heavy traffic when I caught up to a tow truck angling over to the inside lane where there was a car stopped. That explained the back-up — I figured it was either broken down or an accident. Then I did a double-take when I saw a motorcycle down and a guy sitting on the ground next to it. Accident.

I flipped my helmet up as I went by and yelled “Are you okay? Need some help?” to the biker. No response, he just looked at me, looking kind of out of it. So I followed Rule #1 of Biker Code: stop for fellow bikers. The tow truck, car, and downed bike were blocking two lanes of traffic, so I did a U-turn and rode back against traffic and parked my bike in the fast lane in front of the stopped car.

The cager was standing next to his car and looking pretty freaked out when I approached. Maybe he was afraid I was going to thump him — and the thought did cross my mind, because he had obviously clipped the bike and put him down — but I think it was more his adrenaline pumping from the accident. I asked him what happened. “I never saw him. I was changing lanes and he came out of nowhere!” The usual. Because, you know, motorcycles are invisible.

The biker was squatting against the center divider behind the car and looked a little loopy. He was pretty much intact; nothing appeared broken and he looked okay for the most part, but he did have a nasty gash on one forearm and he was bleeding pretty good. I asked him what had happened and he had no idea. He didn’t remember the accident and he wasn’t very oriented as to where he was at that moment. One glance at the scuffs and scratches on his helmet lying on the ground explained why.

The motorcycle — I think it was an old Honda, maybe a Nighthawk or a CB750 — was lying on its side at the end of a trail of assorted bits of broken turn signals and plastics. The seat had somehow come off and was lying on the ground, so I kicked it over to the center divider and told the downed biker to sit on it and relax while I got the other driver’s info for him.

At about this point a guy in a pickup stopped and said he was a fellow rider too. He had a First Aid kit and medic training, so he took care of the biker while I talked to the cager and wrote down his insurance information, then I decided to be fair about it and got the biker’s info for the cager too.

The ambulance and the CHP showed up at about the same time and things moved pretty fast from there. Both the EMTs and the cops came to me first asking “Are you okay?” and I kept pointing to the bloody guy sitting on the ground and saying “Not me. Him.” They got the biker on a gurney and threw him in the back of the ambulance, and the cops got everyone’s information and story on what happened — which wasn’t much: me and the other guy who stopped hadn’t seen a thing, so the only witnesses were the people involved. Once the biker was in the ambulance it was all over but the shouting, so I jumped on my bike and took off.

I don’t know that I really helped all that much other than giving moral support to a fellow rider, but I know I would have appreciated someone stopping for me. It is part of the code, after all.

I learned a valuable lesson today: When riding in parking lots, take care when cutting across the empty spaces.

I was riding through a nearly empty parking lot this morning, riding diagonally across several rows of empty spaces, and I started leaning/turning to the left to set up my entry into my intended parking space. Suddenly my rear wheel slid out and the bike was kicking out sideways as though I had locked up the rear wheel and was skidding to a stop the way we used to do as kids on our dirt bikes. Only thing is, I’m not a kid, this wasn’t a dirt bike, and I wasn’t anywhere near ready to stop.

Instant thought: Oh shit.

It’s funny how fast your mind works in a situation like this and how time seems to slow down. In my head, I was playing out where the bike was going to go while my body was reacting in slow motion. In my mind I saw the bike going down on a low-side to the left, but somehow I managed to ride it out until the tire caught traction and stopped the skid.

Unfortunately, that’s a recipe for a high-side to the right, and the bike whipped upright and tried to throw me that way. So my mind played that out too, seeing the bike toppling over and the fairing crunching across the pavement while I shoulder-rolled over the windshield. Somehow I managed to ride that out too, however, and I was able to get it under control without dumping it.

I have no idea how I did it because I truly was just along for the ride. I thought for sure I was going down. I remember noticing that I had pulled the clutch in, but I don’t remember doing it. Instinct, I guess. I dunno if it was a good instinct, but it worked out in the end. I think I grabbed some front brake too but I’m not sure. All I know is that I ended up in the parking space I was originally aiming for after making a wild, giant zig-zag across the parking lot to get there.

When the bike stopped I jumped off it like a rodeo rider, laughing and going “Woo-hoo!!!” It was a wild ride and it was an adrenaline rush when it was over. It must have looked pretty damned funny to anyone who was watching.

And then, because I’m a big old geek and I usually carry a camera in my jacket, I took a couple pictures of the skid marks.

Call me Captain Obvious if you want, but the red dashed line shows my path through my little adventure. The skid from the rear tire is obvious, but if you look carefully you’ll see the oil tracks from the front tire too to the left of the red line.

Looking at the first skid from the other direction. You can see here just how much and how far the wheel slid.

I only wish there had been some judges watching my performance. I rode it for the full 8 seconds and think I earned a good score. I want my rodeo belt buckle.

Me and some of the guys went for a little putt up to the Poppy Preserve up in Antelope Valley yesterday to see the flowers since they’re in full bloom now. My wife thought this was hilarious and got a lot of mileage out of it at my expense (”Look at the big tough biker going to look at the flowers!”), but whatever. They were pretty. And I am a big tough biker, so I don’t care what anyone says. Plus, I killed several puppies with my bare hands and ate their hearts raw while I was out there so I could keep my tough guy cred, so I’ve got that going for me.

Anyway…

It was a great ride. It was pretty much the same ride I’ve talked about in the last couple of entries, but I’ve already said that Bouquet Canyon and Lake Hughes Road are two of my favorite roads, so why be surprised if I ride them again and again and again? The loop up to see the poppies went through a few miles of road I actually hadn’t ridden before, so I have a few new roads to explore again later. Here’s the map of the route, just in case anyone’s interested. Ignore the fact that the data says my top speed was 190 mph — I clipped the start and end off the GPS track and I think that screwed up Google Earth’s calculations. My top speed was really only about 100.

View Larger Map

I had a little footboard issue along the way. When I added my skid-plate the other day, I forgot to put Locktite on one of the bolts when I re-mounted the footboard, and it fell off on the ride. That left the footboard hanging by the other bolt, which severely compromised my cornering. I jury-rigged a fix with a bungie cord by threading the hook through the bolt holes and wrapping the excess around the footboard, but that’s only going to last until the bungie cord burns through from touching the exhaust pipe. But it’ll do for now.

Here’s a picture of the repair, and I’ve also taken the opportunity to highlight how ground-down the footboard is so you can see that I’m not exaggerating when I say I need the skidplates. Notice that I’m grinding the bungie cord down now too.