Archive for the ‘Honda motorcycles’ Category

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Further Assessment After The Crash

Monday, July 7th, 2025

I don’t have the energy to do anything active so when I’m not sleeping–which I do a lot of–I have a lot of time to think. Right now I’m thinking I lead a charmed life.

 A closer shot of some of the front-end damage. Smashed  lights and windshield, twisted fork.

In the past year and a half I’ve had two vehicles totaled, both entirely due to somebody else. Some people might look at that and say their life was cursed but I don’t see it that way.

In the first instance some guy with his face buried in his phone blew through a red light and hit me broadside, demolishing my car. I came out of that totally unscratched. Not the slightest injury.

In this second instance a drunk ran into me head-on, and this time I suffered severe injuries. But nothing that happened to me is anything from which I will not recover. It will take time, and it is painful, but I will recover completely and be as good as new.

I’ve always tended to think of head-on crashes as the worst kind but I no longer think this. That guy hit me head on and my motorcycle took the greatest brunt of the force. It gave its life to save mine. Imagine how different it would be if he had hit me broadside, as the other guy did. For certain my leg would be crushed and I might easily have been crippled for life. That’s if I didn’t lose the leg entirely. I’ve known two people who have lost legs in motorcycle crashes.

And then there’s the vehicles. I really liked my car, and it didn’t have a lot of miles on it so I was planning to drive it for a long time to come. But you know what? I like the car I got to replace it even more. I really, really like my current car. Now, it cost me all the insurance money plus $10,000 cash to get the new one and I’m not thrilled about that, but it’s only money. My health and well-being count more than the money.

With the bike, this was a really special bike. That CB750 was the first bike I ever owned and I have owned it and ridden it for 40 years. I loved that bike. But you know, it was an old bike and old technology. There were a few things I really honestly did not love about the bike. One was removing the seat, which took a wrench, finesse, and about five to ten minutes. Then the reverse to get it back on.

Another was the way it smoked. I thought a couple times I had resolved that issue but I had not. It still smoked like crazy when I started it up and I would stand there embarrassed hoping none of my neighbors was looking out their window at how I was turning all the air in the neighborhood blue.

I intended twice to just spend whatever money it took to fix this problem but when it finally came out that to do so would cost at least $3,500, and probably more, I decided to do what my mechanic had been saying all along: just live with it. And of course, now I’m so glad I did not spend that money.

Unlike with the car, I don’t want to just absorb all this loss. I do want some sort of recompense and with whatever money I can get for it I will buy a new bike and a lot of new, really good (read: really expensive) protective gear.

Of course, through all of this my wife has been there like a rock beside me, and that most of all is why I truly believe I lead a charmed life.

Biker Quote for Today

Graveyards are filled with people who “had the right-of-way!”

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Posted in Honda motorcycles, Motorcycle Gear, Motorcycle Safety | No Comments »

Assessing The Damage After The Crash

Thursday, July 3rd, 2025

I was finally feeling able so I went to the impound lot yesterday to take a look at my Honda CB750 Custom. After Sunday’s crash I knew it would not be pretty.

 The front end of the bike got it the worst, but the left  exhaust pipes got mangled, too.

As expected, the front end was totally mashed and twisted. I couldn’t tell that the frame was bent so with some money it might be rebuilt, I don’t know. The pipes on the left side were mangled.

I figure it’s totaled but if not, the lot has its own way of forcing you to that conclusion. That bike is probably taking up about 14 square feet of a multi-acre lot and for that space they are charging $135 a day. To get it out of impound even now would cost $675. They’re closing for four days for the 4th of July and I assume the cost keeps adding up on those days. That’s got to be some of the most valuable real estate on the planet.

The guys working at the lot were super helpful in removing my bags and the pigtails on the battery for my heated vest and trickle charger. That entailed lifting the tank to get one bag off and removing the seat to get to the battery. Seats didn’t used to just lift right off like they do today. It’s a major pain.

One of the guys asked me if I had a lawyer. I said no, though several of my friends have been telling me I need to. He said he got in a bad motorcycle crash some years ago and the guy he worked with was great. He dialed him up right there and handed me his phone. I’m sure he gets a finder’s fee.

So I talked with him but this was not a very good time to get into any kind of real discussion, so he agreed to call me later. He did and we talked. I told him that if the guy who hit me is some poor schlub who has no insurance and barely has two dimes to rub together that I’m not interested in going after him personally and loading him up with crushing debt for years to come. He agreed that that was not what he wanted either, that they would go after whatever insurance company could be found legitimately obligated, and then work for a settlement without going to court.

My wife is an attorney and she abhors litigation but agreed that if I wanted anything out of this I would need to get a lawyer. I would like to be made whole. That motorcycle, besides being something I loved, had some value. The helmet that saved me from severe injury was not inexpensive and will need to be replaced. And I just put a lot of money into that bike in the last year, getting it into top running order. It was running great.

And yeah, I am hurting. The pain shifts around. Sometimes it’s my thumb with its stitches. Other times my right knee hurts like hell. But pretty much my whole right side hurts. And just today now my whole left hand has turned purple.

So yeah, I guess I’ll be hiring a lawyer. Then I’ll just be able to leave it all in his hands and whatever comes out of it is what it is.

I’d much rather this had never happened.

Biker Quote for Today

“There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.” — Ernest Hemingway

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Going Riding Today (Or Not)

Monday, June 23rd, 2025

The Honda is sitting there charging as I write this.

Today is June 23 and I have not ridden either of my bikes yet this month. What the hey?

June has been extreme. We’ve had a lot of spring this year, and that means a lot of rain. Then, in between the rain storms, we have had blistering heat. Neither one makes you yearn to get out on the road. But today was going to be different.

Today is cool with rain forecast for the afternoon. Fine. I’m getting on the Honda to go for a ride in the morning. The Suzuki will take care of itself; I’m taking off tomorrow–regardless of the weather–with the RMMRC on an overnight trip up into the hills.

So what happens? I geared up, rolled the Honda out, swung my leg over, and hit the start button. And the motor turned but didn’t quite catch. I kept trying, and it kept trying, but eventually it wore down. This bike is going nowhere until it has more juice in the battery.

I put the charge unit to work, which is where it is now, and will try to get it going in about an hour.

The thing is, I thought about exactly this yesterday but didn’t do anything about it. I had the thought that because it had been a while since I’ve run this bike, maybe the battery would be low. I could have tried starting it yesterday, or I could have just put the charger on figuring there was no downside to that. But I didn’t. And now here I sit.

And it’s not like I can give it three or four hours if need be and then ride. I have a standing engagement on Mondays at 2:30 p.m. I intended to be on the road before 10 a.m. and then be back in plenty of time. I can still do that if it starts an hour from now. If not . . .

Oh, and I checked my records. I just bought this battery in August 2023, so it should still be good. That should not be the problem. Apparently it just sat too long. Dang.

Update:
Now 11:10 a.m. and I had a thought. It occurred to me that the mileage on the tripmeter was right at the point where I need to go to Reserve. Maybe it would have caught if it had been getting gas. So I flipped to Reserve before pushing the start button. The motor turned over strongly but still did not catch, like it needed gas but the line was dry. It takes a moment in this kind of case to get gas flowing again, so I’m hoping the next time I try it will catch. We’ll see.

Biker Quote for Today

If I was interested in dying, I wouldn’t dress up like a neon green clown before every ride.

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Posted in Biker Issues, Honda motorcycles, motorcycle problems, Suzuki motorcycles | No Comments »

Mind If I Smoke?

Thursday, March 27th, 2025

I’ve written any number of times about the smoking that my 1980 Honda CB750 Custom does when I fire it up. So I decided it was time once again to take it in and pay what I knew would be a large price to get it worked on and actually fixed. Aside from everything else, it embarrasses me enormously to think one of my neighbors might be looking out their window when I’m generating this huge cloud of blue smoke. This is serious air pollution.

I had taken it in a year ago to get the work done but for some mysterious reason the bike would never smoke for the guys at the shop. And they said they couldn’t work on it in good faith if they couldn’t see what the problem actually was.

So they did a thorough tune-up and gave me the bike back in really good running order and it didn’t smoke. How weird. It has smoked for years. And it didn’t smoke for me, either, so somehow the problem had gone away and I didn’t have to pay for it. But then about six months later it started smoking again and I started thinking about taking it somewhere else and telling them just do the work. You have my direction to do so. But I also shot a video. That’s what you’ll see up above.

It shows me firing it up and there is no mistaking the clouds of blue smoke that come pumping out. I showed this video to Jerry at One Down Four Up, where I took it this time. He might not see it with his own eyes but he saw it on the video.

So they looked it over. They also found that there was only about half as much oil in it as they should be so they did an oil change, and in the process found that a spring and a ring that is part of the oil filter housing was missing, presumably forgotten by the last place when they put it back together. Once they had done that they fired it up and guess what: It didn’t smoke.

Jerry suggested I just keep a better eye on the oil and keep it topped up. I asked nevertheless for a quote so I would know how much actually fixing it would cost me. I was ready to spend the money.

It turned out the price he quoted me was a lot higher than the already absurdly high figure I had in mind. OK, maybe I won’t go that route after all. But I did have them put a new front tire on. Heck, why not? I just saved a couple thousand dollars.

But this got me wondering. Is there some connection between being low on oil and burning oil? I asked Google that question. The answer I got back was “Yes.” Ooooh, really? What it said was that if there is not a proper amount of oil the motor is not cooled as effectively as it is intended to be, and so it gets hotter and ends up burning oil it would not have burned otherwise.

That didn’t totally make sense to me. Where is it going to get this oil it’s going to burn? Of course I knew the head gaskets leak–that’s what I was going to pay to have fixed.

I told Jerry about this and he suggested that perhaps as the engine gets hot the metal expands and that creates the opening for the oil to seep into the cylinders, where it gets burned. This is speculation.

The bottom line, however, seems to be that my chronic neglect is at fault here. I have said many times that I’m a bad bike owner. I don’t give my bikes the kind of care they should have and because they’re so well built they just keep running anyway. But apparently I’ve been running chronically low on oil for years. When I took it in the first place they put in enough oil and it didn’t smoke. It didn’t smoke for me until six months later when I had let it run low again. Then the next place filled it with oil and it didn’t smoke.

Does this make it through your thick skull, Ken? Check the oil regularly and top it off whenever it’s low. Better yet, change the oil regularly. This is not rocket science. And if I grow neglectful again, at least when I start noticing smoke again take that as a serious clue to deal with the oil. I think I’ve learned my lesson. I think. I hope so.

Biker Quote for Today

To my motorcycle: Thank you for putting up with me, being there for me, and loving me in your own special way.

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Best Roads Stumbled Upon

Thursday, March 6th, 2025

This is going to be more the piece I started out to write a week ago, about best rides. I really should have been thinking in terms of best roads. So now that I’ve got my head screwed on straight, let’s go.

Me, headed back to the Stewart’s Point Skaggs Springs Road several years later.

One was the Stewart’s Point Skaggs Springs Road in California. The company I was working for sent me out for a month to Sacramento and I was determined to ride while I was out there. My bike was back in Colorado, however, so I went to a dealership there and ended up speaking with the owner, asking if he would agree to sell me a bike now and then buy it back from me a month later, of course for a bit less. He said sure, no problem. Bless his soul.

That put me on a 1984 Honda Nighthawk 550. And every weekend I was there I took off on Friday after work and came back to the motel on Sunday evening. I rode down to Yosemite one weekend and covered as much territory as I could in the time I had.

On one of these trips I headed through the Northern California wine country. I had a map but mostly I was just wandering. I decided to take a road up past this big lake and somewhere along the way I saw there was a road that cut through the hills to the coast. Oh, yeah, I definitely want to go to the coast.

This road was the Stewart’s Point Skaggs Springs Road. I almost lost the trail getting to it, finding myself in a really odd little hill community with not a lot of road signs. But I made the correct turns and was on my way. What a road! This little piece of great asphalt (roads stay nice in California because they don’t suffer the freeze-thaw cycle we get here in Colorado) was the most curvy little thing you can imagine. And in most places it was only one lane wide. Deep in the forest. If not for the road itself you could have believed the nearest civilization was a thousand miles away. It was unreal.

And then it came out right on the coast, on Highway 1.

A few years later when the OFMC made its first trip to California I took John and Bill to this road and while John loved it as much as I did, Bill said it started making him feel motion-sickness with all the constant curves. Sorry Bill. We loved it.

Then there was the Alpine Loop, in Utah, on another OFMC trip. The three of us were in Heber City headed for Salt Lake City and we asked a local what the best way to get there was. We were figuring a loop north and then west or else a different loop west and then north. Nope. This person told us about the Alpine Loop, which took the diagonal–more or less–through the hills and brings you out just south of Salt Lake City.

To get to it we just needed to head west, toward Provo, but then turn north and follow that road up past Sundance, Robert Redford’s place, and just keep going. Wow, what a road!

Once again, this thing was full of twists and turns and at places it, too, was one-lane. Instead of going through cities and riding the interstate we were in the hills away from traffic and congestion and out where it was gorgeous. What a fabulous ride. The road did finally bring us down into Little Cottonwood Canyon, which spills out onto Sandy, Utah. That road was so good we’ve been on it at least twice more since then. And who would have known it was there were it not for that friendly local. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

So that’s a couple. Maybe I’ll remember a few more and revisit this theme again.

Biker Quote for Today

Taking the scenic route all summer long.

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First Real Cold-Day Ride Of The Winter

Monday, December 16th, 2024

The Honda across the street from the headquarters of Liberty Media, down by Centennial Airport.

About five minutes before I got home on Thursday some guy on a GS ruined the lede I had composed for this blog post. I’m always playing with words in my head when I’m riding so that when the time comes to write about the ride it usually just flows because it’s already half written.

What I intended to lead with was: One telling thing about my ride on Thursday was that I didn’t see one single other rider. Not one. It was cold.

But there I was at Boston and Arapahoe and this guy on a GS goes by. Oh well.

It was cold. Fortunately, for once I was prepared. I wore my riding pants with my heaviest long underwear, my electric vest, and my heated gloves. I almost blew it with the gloves. I figured my winter gloves would be enough but then I figured I might as well bring the heated ones along in the tank bag. Then I had a better thought and put them on right at the start, set to the lowest setting. By the time I came home I was no longer on the lowest setting so you can imagine how cold my hands would have been without the heat.

With all this gear, however, it was a very comfortable ride. It was sunny most of the time and that makes a big difference.

I knew I wanted to be out at least an hour because I needed 46 miles on the Honda to at least get more miles on it this year than last. The time is past to ride in the mountains this year so I headed for the prairie.

Out Hampden all the way till it ends at Gun Club Road and I turned south. I wanted to get onto Smoky Hill Road and then it was my intent to take that series of roads south to where I would get to CO 86 coming west from Elizabeth, then take it west to Franktown. I didn’t have plans beyond Franktown.

But out in that area there are a lot of roads and I don’t get down that way particularly often, so I sometimes am not sure which road is going to come out where. I was wrong this time. I rode Smoky Hill to where it ends with a right turn and becomes Delbert Road. This is out on the current fringes of the city, where the housing developments finally end, and I always like to see just how much more there is out there than the last time I was there. There’s always more.

Delbert ends with a T intersection at Singing Hills Road and at first I thought I was on CO 86 but I soon saw that I was wrong. Oh yeah, I know where this goes. It feeds into Hilltop Road and that leads you back to Parker Road. OK, fine. Not what I planned but it will do.

Actually, looking at the map now I see that a left turn onto Hilltop, rather than the right I took, would have gotten me onto Flintwood Road and that was the one I had been looking for. I’m hoping these details stick better in my brain now.

Now I was headed northwest on Hilltop and crossed the intersection with Parker onto Hess Road. Hess Road bends around and heads south, coming out at I-25 down by Castle Pines. As I like to do there, I got on the frontage road, not the slab, and took that north to Ridgegate Parkway, jogged east on Ridgegate to South Peoria, crossed E-470 and turned left to loop around the south end of Centennial Airport. Then north on Inverness Drive West to Clinton, the jog over to Boston, and a stop at the light at Arapahoe. And there goes that guy on the GS.

Then just north to home. I more than got in my 46 miles and I had a really nice ride. Thank goodness for electrics.

Biker Quote for Today

You might be a Yuppie biker if your jeans are clean; in fact, if any spot on you is clean.

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Posted in Colorado motorcycle rides, Honda motorcycles, Motorcycle Gear | No Comments »

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