Britbike forum Forums General discussion The Rod and Tappet Boredom Chronicles

Had a lovely 66 6TA about 20 years back. Yea, it is a bit rough and some bits went to the chrome shop, but it really has some nice original 'untouched' details left. From what I can see, it has been rubber-side-up it's whole life. I think the plan of putting together a really stock 66 is solid one...

Man, I'm doing fantastic. Enjoying two months at home-the longest stint in many years. Just started digging into the Commando. Wish you lived a few hours closer-looks like a fun project!

...Hi Ricochet; I have been thinking in what could be of my motorcycles; my music gear --I am a musician-(expensive guitar; vintage amplifiers etc HIFI stereo amps ect) and records; my tools and materials (I am a surfboard builder) and the other stuff that I normally use in daily basis when I die.
I mean; what about your bikes? Do you have sons that can inherit or to be interested?
I am thinking a lot about all that lately. I do not have any to pass the stuff or to be interested; you know, a person die and what happens with the stuff that are in that house if there is no sons etc?
I do not know how to deal with all that and I worry about it

HI brother,
WOW, man that's pretty heavy! Isn't it springtime down there, time for happy thoughts n stuff?

I don't spend a lot of time thinking about that, honestly. I never had any children either, and tho I have one nephew, he's not interested (far as I know) in any of the bikes. My very loose way of thinking about it was just to leave everything to my girlfriend- assuming she outlives me. She can auction it all off or do whatever she wants.

That said, I've been thinking about the bikes, by the time I get "too old", hopefully I'l have sold off most of them and will be down to maybe one. My plan for old age is to ride a Road King or something similar, something low to the ground that I can still travel on. Kinda been thinking about making some effort to road test some sort of big V twin, a Harley or Indian, sooner rather than later. Not sure why I'm so fired up about it lately but current thinking is to sell off the big BMW K1200 and my Norton and change things up a bit. Still trying to decide if I'll also get rid of the R100RS or not. Kinda have a hankering for a Ducati ST3s, honestly. Most of this is "coffee cup dreaming" I think, just thinking about bikes I'd like to own and ride. My "list" isn't long but my time (at 64) is probably getting shorter. I've owned the Norton now for a long time and been riding BMWs a bit longer than that. I guess I feel like it's time to change things up in my bike line-up.


But so far, I think a LOT more about life and living than death & dying! For me, so many of my friends died when we were all younger- absolutely a product of wild living. No idea how or why I survived it if they didn't. Not having gotten to the point where my remaining friends are dying of old age, I'm busily celebrating being alive. Death, and having to think about where all my stuff is going to go, isn't really on my radar. Hanging around younger people may have something to do with this- even tho I know and am friends with hundreds of people, all of my closest friends, the ones I regularly hang around with (with maybe 1 exception) are 10 years younger (more or less) than I am!

Anyway, man, I don't see any right or wrong in how you're thinking about this stuff, if you don't have any brothers or sisters with children, use everything hard while you're living and leave it all to charity, a homeless shelter or something local?

Meanwhile summer's coming on (or so I assume) down there in the South Cone. Ride, and surf your ass off, play your guitars & stereos loud now, think about dying later.

If you have no kids to leave stuff to, you should have a best friend who will assist your widow to get the best price possible for your stuff and/or to make first offers to those whom you would like your stuff to be made available to.

For example, let it be known that you want your bikes, spares, and tools to be offered on BritBike.Com BEFORE e-bay or whatever.

Also, if I'm your best friend, leave me your Vincent, please. You can have my Dreer prototype if I go first!

(I have 3 sons, a son-in-law, and 2 grandsons, so this is not my worry, thankfully)

reverb, what GP said.

Indeed, a few years ago I wrote up a bike inventory and a list of friends and others to contact either to buy the bikes or help sell them. Riding gear and tools, too. Of course, brother-in-law and son-in-law would get first pick, then a good friend ... . I try to keep things sorted and labeled, what goes with what.

One old friend says to plan on living to 100, not that you can count on it, but keep moving!

Hey so meanwhile back at the proverbial ranch, I hope everybody had a nice Thanksgiving. We woke up to a dusting of snow on the cars this AM, so I guess it's official, summer's finally over, yeah?

Im still enjoying photos I had developed back in late October. Sent 9 more rolls of film in last week so should have some new scans in soon.

Here are a couple shots I took back in early October when Wade & I went to western central New Jersey to the Night Of The Troglodytes chopper party weekend, hosted by the same guy who puts on The Race Of Gentlemen.

One thing about this group is there are a lot of "younger" people deeply involved in choppers and chopper/motorcycle culture. This crew, that I shot as they were about to roll out for home, rode in from I believe Conneticut and some folks rode their choppers down & back, from Massachusetts.



The next shot was with a "new" lens that I got in early to mid summer but hadn't used it all that much until later in the year. I love the "look" it has.

gawd, it's 1974 again. i love choppers.

people diss choppers all the time as impractical and poor-handling, and then kickstart their oil-dribbling and weaving plungers or girdered contaminator twins and wobble off into the sunset.

if the machine does what you want it to do, then its a success story that starts a new chapter every time you start it.

When I head off on the Last Big Adventure I have good friends who will sort any remaining stuff for 'Er on t Pillion.

ricochetrider.....If you ever do get up this way and drop in, you should bring a couple of your black and white negatives and I'll show you why you should probably be processing and especially printing your work. Only then can you truly put your own " look " into your prints. Looks like you're having way too much fun already.

Cheers, Wilf

Buy the st3, but don't sell the norton!

Bryan, I'm sure I'm not the only one wishing you many good years before we have to think about that!

Hi Wilfred, Hey thanks man, I would love nothing more than to come up specifically to shoot with you, and learn darkroom and printing technique from you!
I'll take you up on that offer when it's possible to do so.

BC is high priority among places I'd love to visit anyway- really want to run up & down the coast to find native totem poles to shoot photos of, and even have one in particular I'd like to seek out. I have a favorite cousin who's also a photographer living in Port Townsend near Seattle too so I could come up that way and do some border hopping to hang out with you and her both while I'm up that way.

[url=http://www.ginnybanks.com/about.html][/url]

Thank you Tom, I not planning on going anywhere like that any time soon, got another dozen years according to the medical expurts best guesstimation.

Not totally wore out yet, lots more miles still to be ridden

Good to hear Bryan !!!

This just in: The Motorcycle: Art, Design, Desire seems a museum of modern art Down Under, the Queensland Art Gallery’s Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) has a lovely exhibit currently, on the art of motorcycles. Its curators, Charles M. Falco and Ultan Guilfoyle, were the curators of the Guggenheim’s blockbuster ‘Art of the Motorcycle’ exhibition some years back.

OK I issue the challenge for you Australians in the crew: get your asses over there and bring back photos!

EDIT: interesting sidebar: 5 films (featuring motorcycles) to get you revved up

so now we rev it up and get out to youtube or where ever to find these 5 films, an excellent winter sport adventure!

EDIT #2: Motorcycles On Screen , another sidebar from QAGOMA, runs down the obvious and not-so-obvious examples of motorcycles on the Silver Screen across span of the history of cinema

more winter "sport" viewing!

Well folks, this thread has gotten a lot of looks, and since 2020 isn't dead yet, I'lll still be adding to it until the bitter end.
I do wish to offer heartfelt thanks to all y'all for checking in periodically. Whether you've commented or just been a lurker, I do appreciate your taking the time to pop by.


Meanwhile back at the ranch-

2020 ain't over yet but I'm compiling an album of my favorite film photos of 2020.
You may view my 2020 FILM FOTO FAVORITES by following this link.

I do have 9 rolls of film out for developing and expect to get the scans any minute now, so stay tuned. Additionally, I am beginning a *special* photography project real soon. Probably, I'll be sending stuff out to the lab right up to year's end (and maybe into January too), so that means I'll continue to add photos as long as they were shot in 2020.

The bottom line is I'll be adding more photos to this gallery over the coming weeks. if ya wanna check back, jus sayin.

Thanks again, sincerely.
Have a fantastic day, everybody.

got the new scans in today, 9 rolls but honestly, I blew a couple rolls! ugh. that said I still got 7 rolls with a good number keepers, so all in all I'm plenty happy with my results.















hey but it's not ALL cars & motorcycles!









If you care to, you may see all the latest HERE. Some of these will end up in 2020 faves too.

Thanks for popping in.

So at the very end of October I had a brief moment where I could do a small "get-away". On a bike. Which I'd been hankerin to do all year. Just having had some work done to my "big rig" K1200, I got the "G-O" from the GF and took the f*ck off for a shakedown run. Originally I'd been wanting to just zigzag all over Pennsylvania, but a certain rain cloud hovering over the state for days on end during my time-window put the grand ki-bosh on my plan. So without a plan, I rode in the the opposite direction- south.

In the back of my mind, I knew I was heading down to West Virginia, home of glorious motorcycling of all sorts. In the Mid Atlantic region of the U.S. east coast, with a few days to kill riding, WV does not disappoint. With this vague notion in mind I first rode west & south to pick up US route 30, the good old Lincoln Highway.



A quick hop off 30, down US 522 to Front Royal VA finds you, having now been in 4 U.S. states after only a 150 or so miles, at the northern entrance to Skyline Drive/Shenandoah National Park. Pay a small entrance fee and off you go into the Wild Green Yonder. It's lovely if not slow going; being in close proximity to Washington DC and some of the more populous areas of the Mid Atlantic region, I've never seen it deserted. This day was no exception, but with no particular place to go or be, what does it matter?

A stop here or there at some overlook or another... All good, REAL good in fact.



But once you've seen even a few miles of amazing mountains, twisty (but slow) roads, dramatically shifting elevations, breathtakingly scenic overlooks, and gobs of tourists hogging up the otherwise lovely surroundings, one tends to get over it all quickly enough. My goal wasn't to get into WV too far north, so after a while once I deemed myself to be "south" enough, I made a right off the parkway and headed west. More than a few miles later with damn few straight sections of road under my wheels, Darkness is setting in and where to stay the night? In the middle of nowhere there's not a lot of choices, but I managed to find a pleasant enough place with a restaurant next door on one side and a busy convenience store (beer at night, coffee + road grub at breakfast) equally close at hand.

I had fun playing with the key fob and analog phone tho- and WON THE LOTTERY TOO! Well Ok I won 1$ but winning is winning.



Woke up to yet another glorious day and took off, not too awful early.





By now a plan was formed in my little pea brain. I had, for some years, been dreaming of riding up along the Ohio River. A working river is something I don't have in my world, and maybe I had some romantic notion about barges and dams and tugboats and..... well who knew? Not me, that's fer sure. But I aimed to find out. And so- A Quest was ON.

I had 4 days, so the itinerary became:

day 1: get some tarmac under my wheels, get South then head West (check, done, boom)

day 2: ride West Virginia for all it was worth; zig-zag randomly all over, generally moving south & west to end up in Huntington, on The River

day 3: ride North along The Ohio, find some twisty roads going further North, get to where I could head East tomorrow, back into the mountains- North of Pittsburgh but South of Lake Erie

day 4: ride Northern & Western PA, heading generally East & South to get my a$s home

WV is FUN, excellent pavement, crooked roadways, nobody there. Brilliant sunshine, A lovely lunch stop. Life on the road needn't be any better.









Kinda tough impossible to find a mom-pop, locally owned motel down there tho, had to settle for a chain motel.. oh well, not the absolute end-all, but well... you know. The night manager kindly let me park the bike under the porte couchiere out of dewfall tho, so there's that



All above pics were taken with my phone BTW.

to be continued, stay tuned...

Next day I was up & at em. Huntington is right on the Ohio River and having pored over the map I knew I was going to start upriver on the WV side then flip over into Ohio at some point. WV was interesting enough to begin with, WAY interesting, in fact:





admittedly it was downhill from here but hey, one can't have a 30 foot long, Roadside Gargantua, hillbilly hot dog at every glance in this world, now can one.
Still pretty good tho





"for ale"? I'm def for that



After this, it being all farmed fields and stuff with the road moving away from the river views for a ways, I spied a convenient bridge crossing and could see a small town along the Ohio side, so off I went into the bustling little river town of Pomeroy, OH.



It was at this point where I realized what a blessing young hipsters actually can be in this world: they have brought upscale coffee beverages (MICRO BREWS TOO @kevin) to even the most remote places and small towns everywhere! Yay. I celebrated with a Cappuccino and some quiche, sitting in the warmth watching the river and traffic flowing past.



Things in Ohio stayed interesting enough for quite a ways and I stuck to the smallest roads possible, as close to the river as I could stay, for a long ways going North

dam nice, it was too



watching this guy navigate this river bend was an exercise in patience







but after a while I began to get close to running up on another city. I wasn't too keen on that idea and had targeted a twisty road out to the west a little ways so leaving the river in my rear view mirrors, off I went into the hills of SE Ohio. Well one thing led to another and while the riding was pretty good, and I had plenty of bike traffic going in all directions along with and around me, the road was finite with a beginning and an absolute end. There were a couple covered bridges along the way tho, so I stopped to take a couple photos of one of them



While stopped there, a modern Indian motorcycle pulled up. I'd seen this rider enter onto this road back at the beginning and had passed what turned out to be a her a little further up. She came wheeling in and stopped about the time I walked back to my bike, so we had a few minutes of conversation- never a bad thing talking to a nice lady who's riding her own bike, right? We exchanged pleasantries and I asked her about her Indian. She allowed she liked it well enough, and when I asked how it handled in the corners, she said, "I do drag it periodically". I next asked what year bike & how many miles. Her answer: 2019 & 70 some THOUSAND miles! RESPECT. This woman is a real rider, and make no mistake.

Sorry, horn dogs- NO I didn't take any pics of her. We only chatted for a minute anyway and I had some ground to cover since it was later in the day and I'd messed around so long down by the river... SO I made my way to the end of The Road and hit the big roads & freeway. Setting my cruise control at a somewhat illegal yet not too stupid of a speed, I headed North to my target destination of +/- Youngstown.

Tonight I managed to find a suitably funky, down low, locally owned motel. It seemed a bit seedy at 1st glance, but was clean enough. AND the owner had a small package store in the lobby. Turns out every guest gets ONE FREE BEER upon check-in! As luck would have it he had one micro brew on hand- a Great Lakes IPA. whee. There was an overhang outside my room so I could pull the bike in out of the dewfall so hey. Life is pretty darn good, eh boys? This night, I took the final photos of my trip, next day was strictly hammer time, that is to say:
all business.





All the black & white photos were shot with my 35mm FILM camera onKodak Tri-X BTW. As stated previously, all color shots taken with my phone.

SO next day it was a wee bit chilly but I got up early and hit the road as I had a long way to go and no idea how I was going to get there. I rode a ways North to pick up I-80 eastbound. Riding into Pennsylvania, I eventually cut further North and West to reach the northern apex of the ride along US highway 6 in PA's Allegheny National Forest, before turning to my right and heading on a gentle diagonal SE trajectory towards home. I rode a bunch of roads I knew and some I didn't know, picking my way along piece by piece. I do this by setting many interim destinations in my phone/sat-nav/GPs/whateverand leap frogging to one place or intersection at a time. Of course this being my home state I pretty much knew where I was going, but took a few roads I hadn't been on before- hence the actual navigation until I got far enough along that I knew where I was at. I think this was my biggest mileage day of the whole ride and, like an old stable nag headed for the feed bin at the end of a day's outing, I fairly flogged it to get back to the house.

At the end of it all, I'd ridden just under 1400 miles in 4 days. Not record breaking by any means, tho I'd had a lovely ride- and managed to blow the cobwebs out along the way. I'd accomplished a long-set goal, in riding along the Ohio. The weather had been absolutely stellar and the "new" bike (all new suspension, new tires etc etc) was running like a thorobred. All in all, extremely satisfying and fun.

I admit I sort of felt like I'd snuck thru Ohio- I have friends there and some folks on here I haven't met who are from Ohio- but I didn't really have time to "visit" and didn't want to complicate matters. I just wanted to ride! SO you guys, Bill, Rich B, whomever.... sorry guys but y'all can show me around the SE corner of your state another time. I KNOW there's loads of good riding down in there, but this time, I was

That's wonderful Tom! I'm bummed I was away; I LOVE riding in WV and it would've been fun to do a multi day ride with you again. The roads are great and the scenery is even better. Have you ever been to Seneca Rocks? Maybe in the Spring when I get back from sea we can get together and do some "local" riding in your neck of the woods.

Josh, thanks!
It'd be awesome to ride with you! I've been to (past it really) Seneca Rocks, I was in that area on this run, I believe. Let's figure on something for springtime for sure.

I know that area, I live in east york and visited and worked in that area a lot. This spring I'll be riding my A65 around all those places in your pictures. Maybe I'll post some also. Nice norton you have, hope to see you in area someday.

Right o, man. When Springtime comes, shoot me a PM and we'll get together for a ride. There are 2 other local guys, @wadeschields & @daveM, we can all get together for a ride, and/or have lunch & a beer/coffee/beverage of choice.

Also, not sure if it's on this year or not but the winter swap at York Fairgrounds is usually a good time with folks off this site coming in from all over.

I sure will. If you find out any info on york swap meet, please let me know. Hope to meet this spring, thanks👍