Let's Ride (2 page)

Being quick to pick up on anything that exploited the average American’s fear of the unknown, the magazines and newspapers of the day (remember, this was back when hardly anyone had television) published stories on anything and everything that frightened people, whether it was Communist infiltrators, unidentified flying objects, or a bunch of guys out having a good time on their motorcycles. If something wasn’t scary enough to sell newspapers and magazines, the newspapers and magazines would just stretch the truth until it was more sensational.

For the most part, I always get along with just about everyone I meet. People fear the unknown, but once they get to know you, they treat you the way you treat them. If you treat people with respect, they’ll usually treat you with respect in return. If someone attacks me, I’m going to defend myself, but I don’t go around doing things to scare people. But the problem comes when people read a lot of the crazy things that are written about me and think they should be afraid. And if it will sell papers and magazines, the press will print whatever crazy story they think people might believe.

That’s exactly what they did with a motorcycle rally that got a little boisterous in the small town of Hollister, California, over the Fourth of July holiday in 1947. About four thousand motorcycle riders came to town that weekend, mostly to attend races sponsored by the AMA (American Motorcyclist Association). That was a lot more people than the town expected and things got a little hectic.

Eyewitness reports tell of such things as motorcyclists throwing water balloons off balconies, popping wheelies on Main Street, and generally riding around whooping and hollering. There were a few drunken fights, and more than a little street racing, but other than a couple tools being stolen from a tire repair shop, there was no real crime to speak of. One guy was arrested for pissing in the radiator of a car that was overheating; when his buddy Wino Willy of the Booze Fighters Motorcycle Club went to bail him out of jail, he, too, was arrested for being drunk.

A total of twenty-nine people were arrested for drunkenness, indecent exposure, and traffic violations, but overall the motorcyclists were just a little rowdier than the cowboys were when the rodeo came to town. Finally one guy rode his motorcycle right into a bar, prompting the owner to call the California Highway Patrol, who cleared everyone out and put a stop to the party.

The Hollister event would have gone down in history as just another good Fourth of July party in a small town had not a photographer put a pile of empty beer bottles around a motorcycle and had a guy pose on the bike. He sold the resulting photo to
Life
magazine, which ran it with a short story about how hordes of motorcyclists were descending on the country hell-bent on destroying everything in their paths. Within weeks motorcycle riders replaced Communists as public enemy number one, which is more than a little ironic considering that most motorcyclists at the time were honorable patriots who had risked their lives serving their country in World War II. They just wanted to have a little fun, and they sure as hell had earned that right.

The
Life
magazine story inspired a guy named Frank Rooney to write a short story for
Harper’s Magazine
called “The Cyclists’ Raid.” This piece of fiction became the basis for the 1953 film
The Wild One
. Mostly the film shows a bunch of people having a good time on motorcycles, but back then Johnny, played by Marlon Brando, seemed like the Antichrist to the average American, and the film helped to spread mistrust between motorcycle riders and nonmotorcycle riders.

The film might have scared “average Americans” witless, but when my friends and I saw
The Wild One
as teenagers, we wanted to be just like Chino, the character played by Lee Marvin. Johnny seemed like he spent a lot of time feeling sorry for himself. I don’t care what anyone says; Marlon Brando’s character was a bully, and I don’t like bullies. Whenever something happened, Marlon Brando said, “Me and my boys will take care of it.” It was never: “I’ll take care of it.”

Chino had balls, and he knew how to have fun. Lee Marvin’s character was like a real person. He wasn’t out looking to push anyone around; he just wanted to ride his motorcycle and have a good time. He wanted everyone to be together as a group.

But as I say, most Americans didn’t see the film the way we did. Where we saw motorcyclists having a good time, they saw criminals who needed to be locked up. By the time I started riding motorcycles, motorcycle riding itself was practically a crime; not only did we have to be on constant vigil against careless car drivers, wild animals and dogs, and other hazards of the road, but we also had to watch out for the cops who would harass us at every opportunity just because of the mode of transportation we preferred. With this kind of pressure on us at all times, it made sense that we would seek the brotherhood found in motorcycle clubs.

B
ACK AROUND THE TURN OF THE
twentieth century, people formed clubs around just about anything. There were clubs devoted to collecting butterflies, clubs devoted to examining dinosaur fossils, and clubs devoted to studying electricity. It only made sense that people would start forming motorcycle clubs almost as soon as Gottlieb Daimler first bolted a gasoline engine to his two-wheeled wooden Einspur to create the original motorcycle in 1885.

Motorcycle clubs remained popular throughout the first half of the twentieth century, but after World War II they became even more popular. Most able-bodied American men had served in the military during the war, and many of them missed the brotherhood they had shared with their fellow soldiers. Motorcycle clubs offered these veterans a way to re-create that camaraderie. By 1947, when the Hollister bash took place, there were dozens of clubs on the West Coast alone.

Just about everyone I know belongs to some sort of biking club. Riding alone is fun, but being part of a group provides advantages. With a group, you’ll have someone to watch your back if something happens or help you if you go down. Plus it’s nice to have someone to share the ride with. There are all sorts of clubs, and I encourage every rider to consider joining one for the brotherhood and camaraderie.

In 1957 six other guys and I started a chapter of the club I’m still in. Within six months I became president of our chapter, and I remained president for about thirty years. I’m still a member, but I haven’t held an office in the club for more than twenty years. The type of club I’m in—a one-percenter club—probably isn’t for everyone. No club is for everybody, but no matter what kind of riding you’re interested in, you can find a motorcycle club that focuses on it.

I’
VE SAVED MY PERSONAL FAVORITE PART
of motorcycling for last: freedom. This subject is so important to me that I’ve written an entire book about it. I appreciate all the other benefits a motorcycle provides, especially the brotherhood of riders that forms around motorcycles, but for me in the end it all boils down to the freedom I find on a bike.

When I pop the gearshift lever on my bike into first and ride out onto the open road, I leave everything else behind. Before I get on my bike I might be worried about some deadline I have to meet, or some person I have to call, or some other obligation I have to fulfill, but once I ride out of my driveway, I leave all that other stuff behind. There’s no room for it out on the road. I’ve got enough to worry about just trying to avoid all the other drivers yapping on their cell phones—there’s no room for the petty worries that would be on my mind if I wasn’t out on my bike.

At least I try to shed all those unimportant thoughts when I ride. Sometimes they creep in, but I do my best to avoid them because they distract me from the business at hand, which is not getting hurt or killed on my bike. Normally I do a pretty good job at clearing the unimportant crap from my mind and focusing on riding my bike. Because riding is such an intense activity, it demands your full attention. On a bike you’re bombarded with all kinds of stuff coming at you, and I don’t just mean other traffic. Riding reveals so many raw sights, sounds, and smells that they can overwhelm you. It can be a little intimidating at first, but I promise that riding will ultimately produce an amplified sense of being alive.

Once you let the experience of riding consume you and drive all the useless thoughts from your head, that’s when you really start to enjoy the freedom of riding a bike. It doesn’t matter if you’re riding five miles or five hundred miles; time has little meaning when your head is in the act of riding and it’s just you, your bike, and the road—at least until your ass starts to get sore and the pain interrupts your motorcycle meditation. Later in this book we’ll talk about ways to prevent even that from being a problem.

R
IDING REALLY IS A FORM OF
meditation. Most religions have ways to help focus your thoughts—meditation, prayer, ceremonies—and in this way riding a motorcycle is a lot like a religion. I’m not going to talk about organized religions here because what people believe or don’t believe is their own business. I don’t talk to people about what I do or don’t believe, and I appreciate when they don’t talk to me about their beliefs. But when it comes to motorcycles, I figure that if you’re reading this book you most likely have an interest in what I believe, at least as far as motorcycles are concerned.

And I believe that riding motorcycles is as good a religion as any, and probably better than most. For me, riding a motorcycle is like being part of a ceremony; it’s a sort of transcendent experience some would call holy. I think a lot of my club brothers feel the same way. That’s why we call going to our club meetings “going to church.”

The rest of this book will cover the things you need to do to learn to ride a motorcycle, tell you how to buy the right motorcycle, teach you how to be comfortable and safe once you get it, and give you advice on what to do once you start riding. I hope that by getting the proper training, choosing a good motorcycle that suits your needs, and practicing good safety habits once you start riding, you’ll stay strong and healthy and ride for many trouble-free years. Do that and you’ll experience the pleasure that motorcycling has given me for more than half a century. Whether or not you join a club, if you love to ride a motorcycle, you are part of my church.

© by Sonny Barger Productions

M
otorcycles seem like they should be simple because there’s really not much to them. You’ve got an engine, two wheels, tires, something to sit on, some controls to manage the machine, a tank for gasoline, and a frame to hold the whole works together.

In the early days of riding, the preceding description pretty much accounted for an entire motorcycle. The controls consisted of a cable going to a rudimentary carburetor, which was about as complex as a Turkish water pipe, and hopefully, a crude brake. The transmission was made up of a pulley that tightened a flat, smooth leather belt that ran from an output sprocket on the crankshaft of the engine to another pulley on the rear wheel. If the contraption had lights, they were likely powered by kerosene and turned on with matches or maybe a very rudimentary battery on more advanced models. A modern motorcycle has more computer chips than an early motorcycle had total moving parts.

Motorcycles weren’t that much more complicated when I started riding. There had been a few improvements, but not many. Instead of total-loss electrical systems with enormous lead-acid batteries, the first motorcycles I rode had extremely basic six-volt electrical systems. These didn’t provide enough juice to reliably power an electric starter, so we still had to kick-start our motorcycles. By then motorcycles had recirculating oiling systems so the rider no longer had to pump oil into the engine by hand, and chains took care of final drive duties instead of the smooth leather belts that spun the wheels on the earliest motorcycles, but overall, the bikes I started riding were closer to the motorized bicycles from the end of the nineteenth century than they were to the reliable, practical motorcycles we have today.

PUTTING THE MOTOR IN THE CYCLE

I
N THIS BOOK
I’
M
not going to teach you how to overhaul your motorcycle. Most modern motorcycles are too complicated for you to do much more than change the oil yourself, but you will need to become familiar with the essential parts of a motorcycle and how everything works together. If you already know these things, you might want to skip ahead to the next section, though it can never hurt to brush up.

The engine, of course, is what puts the
motor
in
motor
cycle. Engines come in two basic types: four-stroke and two-stroke. Two-stroke engines haven’t been used much in the United States over the past several decades because of emissions standards. They’re called “two-strokes” because every two strokes of the piston comprise one complete cycle. The piston goes down and draws in the fuel charge; it goes back up and fires the fuel charge. Two-strokes are simple engines that don’t have internal oil-lubrication systems. Some of the oil lubricates the inside of the engine, and the rest is burned with the exhaust, which is why they pollute so much. The last full-sized street-legal two-stroke motorcycle sold in the U.S. market was Yamaha’s RZ350 from the mid-1980s.

For several decades two-stroke engines dominated Grand Prix motorcycle racing because the engines are light and generate twice as many power pulses as a four-stroke engine, but they’ve been phased out over the past decade. In 2002 the top class switched from 500-cc two-strokes to 990-cc four-strokes, and in 2009 the 250-cc two-stroke class was retired, to be replaced by a 600-cc four-stroke class for the 2010 season. That leaves just the 125-cc class as the last of the two-stroke road racers.

But because two-stroke street bikes are too old and too small to be used as practical transportation, we won’t be discussing two-strokes in this book. The day may come when we’ll ride around on electric motorcycles powered by hydrogen fuel cells, but for the foreseeable future we’ll be riding motorcycles powered by four-stroke gasoline engines.

The basic systems of a four-stroke engine are the bottom end, the cylinder block, the piston, the cylinder, the combustion chamber, the cylinder head, and the fuel intake system.

The Crankcase

The crankcase is often referred to as the “bottom end” because it’s located at the bottom of almost every engine (though it’s at the center of opposed engines like those found on a BMW twin or a four- or six-cylinder Gold Wing—I’ll explain that later in this chapter). It consists of a crankshaft that rotates in a series of bearings. This rotation carries through the clutch, transmission, and final drive system, until it becomes the rotation of your rear tire on the pavement, which is what makes your motorcycle move down the road. Piston rods connect the crankshaft to the pistons.

These days most motorcycles are so reliable that if you regularly change your engine oil, you can ride for hundreds of thousands of miles and not give any thought to the bottom end, but that wasn’t always the case. Before we had the advanced oils, oiling systems, and bearing materials we have today, spinning a bearing or throwing a rod was a common occurrence. These are catastrophic failures that can result in internal parts of the engine exploding through cases and cylinder barrels and becoming external parts. This can be a little like a grenade going off between your legs, so it’s a very good thing that modern bikes have such reliable bottom ends.

To be fair, some of the methods we used to rely on for hot-rodding our engines, like “stroking” them (this refers to the practice of installing a different crankshaft that increases the length a piston travels up and down in the cylinder, effectively increasing cubic inches without making the cylinder itself any larger), improved performance, but they also put more stress on the parts and increased the likelihood that the engine would grenade between a rider’s legs. Modern motorcycle engines are too complex to easily stroke, though a few people still do this to their older 74-inch Shovelheads and Panheads. If you plan to do this to your engine, make sure you or whomever you hire to do the job knows what he’s doing.

The Cylinder Block(s)

Every gas-piston engine has one or more cylinder blocks. They are aluminum blocks (any practical modern motorcycle that you will consider buying will have an aluminum engine) with a hole or holes drilled in it or them for the piston or pistons. This hole is usually lined with a steel liner for durability, though some motorcycles have cylinder walls coated with harder alloys in place of steel liners.

On a single-cylinder or an inline engine like that found on a four-cylinder sport bike or a parallel-twin engine like that found on a Triumph, there will be just one cylinder block. There are a small number of V-four engines in production; these usually have one large cylinder block with four holes drilled in it.

On a V-twin like a Victory or a Harley, there are two cylinder blocks. V-twin owners usually call these cylinder blocks “barrels” or “jugs” because they look like water barrels or jugs. They may have earned the name “jugs” because some people think they look a little like certain parts of a well-endowed woman, but it takes a lot of imagination to see the resemblance.

All motorcycle cylinder blocks (except a few specialized cylinder blocks used to build drag-racing engines) will feature some sort of cooling system. On water-cooled bikes this will consist of water jackets around the cylinders (hollowed-out spaces through which cooling water circulates from the radiator to the cylinder block and back to the radiator again). On air-cooled bikes like Harleys and Victories this will just be a series of cooling fins that provide a surface area over which the passing air can remove the heat generated from the combustion process.

The type of cooling system is probably the single most important factor in reliability and longevity in a modern engine. Liquid cooling is generally the best type when it comes to making an engine last. All modern cars and trucks are liquid cooled, and most modern engines will run for more than two hundred thousand miles.

Today’s motorcycles are also water cooled, though air cooling is not necessarily a bad thing. As engine size increases, the amount of heat generated also increases, so it becomes harder to cool an engine with air alone when the cubic inches start to rise. As their air-cooled engines have grown larger, Harleys have had some cooling issues in recent years. To alleviate the problem Harley offers a system in which the rear cylinder shuts down at idle to help keep it cool when the bike is at rest.

Victory takes a different route. There are oil jets in a Victory engine that spray streams of cooling oil at the bottoms of the pistons, right at the area in which the most heat is generated. The cylinders still crank out a hellacious amount of heat and will bake your inner thigh on a hot Arizona day, but that is true of just about every motorcycle. If you want to ride in air-conditioned comfort, you’re reading the wrong book. I can tell you from tens of thousands of miles of experience that Victory engines seem to run cooler in stop-and-go traffic than Harley engines, which is one of the things I like about Victory motorcycles.

Harley does make what seems like a very good liquid-cooled motorcycle: the V-Rod. I have friends who own them and they speak very highly of them.

The Pistons, Cylinder, Combustion Chamber, Cylinder Head, and Fuel Intake System

The pistons—the aluminum slugs that go up and down in the cylinder blocks—are the beating heart of a motorcycle engine. They’re powered by a fuel-air charge that burns in the combustion chamber, which is the area at the top of the cylinder. This burning generates an engine’s energy as well as most of its heat.

The cylinder head is the assembly that sits atop the cylinder block. It contains valves that open and close to allow the fuel charge to get in and the spent exhaust gases to get out. Motorcycle engines can have anywhere from two to five valves per cylinder. Most Harleys have two valves per cylinder: one intake and one exhaust. Victory motorcycles all have four valves: two intake valves and two exhaust valves. Some Hondas have three valves per cylinder, and a handful of Yamahas had five valves per cylinder, but most modern motorcycles will have four valves per cylinder.

With very few exceptions, the fuel-air charge is injected by electronically controlled atomizers on modern motorcycles, though there are still a few good used bikes out there that have old-fashioned carburetors mixing the fuel-air charge and getting it into the combustion chamber. Triumph recently switched from carburetion to fuel injection on its Bonneville-series twins, and these bikes had been some of the last new models to feature carburetors.

THE FOUR STROKES OF A FOUR-STROKE

F
OUR-STROKE ENGINES ARE CALLED
four-strokes because each cycle of the combustion process consists of four strokes of the piston. The first (downward) stroke is called the “intake stroke” because the intake valves open on this stroke and the downward-moving piston draws in the fuel-and-air charge. The second (upward) stroke is called the “compression stroke” because the upward-moving piston compresses the fuel-air charge, which is ignited very near the top of the compression stroke (called “top dead center,” or TDC). The energy generated by this ignition is called “combustion,” and it’s what gives its name to the third (downward) stroke, the combustion stroke (also called the “power stroke”). The fourth (upward) stroke is called the “exhaust stroke” because the exhaust valves open on this stroke, allowing the upward-moving piston to force the spent exhaust gases out through the open valves.

REDLINING

I’
M NOT A HUGE
fan of Harley-Davidson motorcycles. That is partly because for many years Harley sold motorcycles that were worn-out antiques even when they were new. In 1969 AMF (American Machinery and Foundry) bought Harley. By that time the Japanese had begun to introduce motorcycles with modern technology, and in the following years the pace of development of motorcycle technology quickened. When AMF sold Harley in 1981, the motorcycles coming from Japan were so highly developed that they made the motorcycles they produced in the 1960s look like antiques.

The bikes Harley built between 1969 and 1981 had barely changed; if anything, they got even worse. AMF looked at Harley as a cash cow and milked it dry. The company put very little money into product development. Instead, AMF ramped up production so that besides selling antiquated motorcycles, Harley’s quality control went down the toilet; not only were Harley’s motorcycles handicapped with old-fashioned technology like cast-iron engines, but they also became increasingly unreliable.

It wasn’t that way when I started riding. In the 1950s all but the most expensive high-performance motorcycles had cast-iron engines and Harleys were as good as or better than any other bike on the market. But within fifteen years the Japanese, German, and Italian manufacturers were selling motorcycles with aluminum cylinder blocks almost exclusively. Besides Harley, only the British still used cast iron for their cylinder blocks, and it didn’t work out too well for them: by the early 1980s the entire British motorcycle industry had gone bankrupt. In fact, the British motorcycle industry would have gone out of business many years earlier if the UK government hadn’t propped it up for the last twenty years of its existence.

Harley almost died at the same time. The Motor Company continued to build bikes with cast-iron cylinder jugs until the mid-1980s, when the aluminum Evolution engine hit the market. Because it is important to me as a patriot to ride an American motorcycle, I was stuck riding unreliable cast-iron Shovelheads all those years, and they were terrible motorcycles. Back then I spent as much time wrenching as riding, and it pissed me off. Harleys got a lot better after they started building the Evolution engines, but even today they are still old-fashioned air-cooled pushrod engines. (That means they have their cams down in the bottom end, and they use pushrods to operate the valves.)

Only a few other motorcycle manufacturers still use pushrods, like Royal Enfield from India, Moto Guzzi from Italy, and Ural from Russia, none of which are terribly reliable motorcycles. I wouldn’t consider any of these brands when buying a motorcycle for practical transportation. Almost every motorcycle built today uses modern overhead-cam systems. Even most V-twin engines, like the engine found in my Victory, feature overhead cams.