Archive for the ‘motorcycle video’ Category

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Two-Wheelers In The News

Thursday, August 13th, 2026


This is a screen grab from a video released by the Colorado State Patrol. It’s too small to see clearly but just behind that white car in the left lane a motorcycle is in the air, having hit the white car in the rear. Also note the CSP car just to the left of the dash-camera car.

I don’t watch television but I do use internet aggregators that collect articles and videos and other postings that focus on motorcycles. Due to that I frequently will get a link for a video from a TV station news report. Two of these links took me to news stories that I found of interest.

This first one is dash-camera footage of a motorcyclist here in Colorado who was lane-splitting when things took a bad turn. Mind you, lane-splitting is illegal in Colorado. Lane filtering is legal provided that the traffic you are passing through is at a complete stop and you are not exceeding some fairly low speed limit, 10 or 15 miles an hour–I don’t remember exactly.

In the video captured and shown in this clip a rider is blasting along between traffic that is itself blasting along. And then someone in the right-hand lane decides to move into the left-hand lane. I’m sure this driver looked and saw there was room and made the move without dreaming that someone on a bike would be blasting up the center.

The bike is seen going end over end and as the traffic quickly stops you can see the rider lying on the pavement, with his bike a little ways ahead of him. I’m not sure what injuries the rider suffered. Anyway, take a look–it’s not an endorsement for lane-splitting. I couldn’t find a way to embed the video so I’m just providing this link: https://www.kktv.com/2026/08/10/colorado-state-patrol-reminds-motorcycle-riders-lane-splitting-is-illegal-dangerous-after-crash-denver/?outputType=amp

The other video addresses the growing use of e-bikes, electric motorcycles, and scooters. Let’s face it, there is use and there is abuse. I don’t see any harm in someone using a battery-powered bicycle to help them along as they ride on a bike trail. But if you have a more powerful one and it goes quite fast without you even peddling at all, that does not belong on a bike path. Heck, pure bicycles and pedestrians can be hazard enough if the bicyclist blasts past without calling out “On your left” or some such warning.

The police are not ignoring this developing situation. Some jurisdictions are cracking down. Ultimately I believe a major rethinking of what is and isn’t OK, and where, will be needed. Electric powered bikes have great potential to reduce car traffic and make streets less congested. Not to mention–as I have before–that these e-bikes have got to be a gateway drug that will lead at least some of these young riders to motorcycles later. We sure hope so.

But a Wild West approach where anything goes cannot and will not last for long. Here’s the link: https://www.kktv.com/2026/07/15/csp-warns-about-difference-between-electric-bikes-electric-motorcycles/

Biker Quote for Today

100 reasons not to date a biker: 77. We have scars and talk about them proudly.

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Posted in Motorcycle legislation, Motorcycle Safety, motorcycle video | No Comments »

Future Motorcyclists?

Monday, May 11th, 2026

I was headed to the grocery store yesterday and saw these three kids on their ebikes. They were waiting for a green light and when it came they started across only to have a person in a car make a right turn on red right in front of them. Hey buddy, pay attention.

I went on to the store and was only there for a couple minutes, then headed home. I turned off this main street where I had seen them and proceeded down this cross street and they came into view again, turning onto the street I was now on. I followed them a ways till they turned off at a park. Pulling away from a stop sign you can see one of them doing a wheelie.

What I only thought about later was that all of this was being recorded on my dash camera. That’s the footage you see above. If you can zoom in definitely do so because I couldn’t get my video editing software to do that. And it’s only my second encounter with them that’s in the video.

Anyway, watching these guys I couldn’t help but think about other members of the now defunct OFMC. Our original group was John, Bill, and me. John and Bill have known each other since grade school. When they got into junior high the two of them, plus several other friends, all got scooters, like Cushmans, and they were a gang.

More than once I’ve heard how they would ride their scooters to school on cold days, all bundled up, and stop a block from school, take off hats and gloves, unzip their jackets and pull up at school being totally cool. Of course they had lots of fun on the scooters–who wouldn’t?

They didn’t go right on to motorcycles as they got older but at one point John got the urge. He bought a Yamaha 750 Virago, which prompted me to get my Honda CB750, and then Bill to get his Honda Shadow. And the OFMC was born.

So the gestation period took a while but it finally produced results. How can that not happen with so many of these young guys–and girls!–out there today on these ebikes? Don’t tell me those things are not motorcycles. They are cycles and they have motors. Surely at least some of these kids will get the bug. I hope a whole lot of them do.

Biker Quote for Today

You might be a Yuppie biker if you’ve ever stopped at a red light & forgot to put a foot down (sober).

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Posted in Biker Issues, Electric motorcycles, motorcycle video | No Comments »

How Do You Learn? Sometimes The Hard Way

Monday, October 6th, 2025

Some of these have got to hurt . . . and they all must be a hurt to the wallet.

We’ve all seen these guys who do amazing things on their motorcycles–trials riding, street stunting, whatever–but I bet you have wondered, as I have, how they learn to do these things. The answer, of course, is practice.

But when practice means falling down repeatedly on a motorcycle that can get to be painful and expensive. But how else are you going to learn?

Well, Jerry is the king of sending motorcycle videos and here is one he sent me recently, titled “50 Motorcycle Crashes in 2 Minutes.” Some of these folks were indeed practicing, but most were out riding and showing off. Which means their embarrassment was especially public.

Prepare to grimace.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/50-motorcycle-crashes-in-2-minutes/vi-AA1JOAcn?ocid=socialshare

Biker Quote for Today

“There’s a fine line between fishing and standing on the shore looking like an idiot.” — Steven Wright

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Two Websites You May Want To Check Out

Thursday, August 28th, 2025

A section of the RIDE BYND home page.

I didn’t deliberately decide to post twice in a row about motorcycle websites but I take things as they come, so here we are.

In my email this morning I had two messages, one from RIDE BYND and the other from Ride Apart.

I’m familiar with RIDE BYND (pronounced “Ride Beyond”) because of these VANHA magazines I found in the waiting area at Fay Myers when I was having one of my bikes worked on. I wanted to check VANHA out and found that the magazine no longer is printed but they have a site called RIDE BYND. I signed up for their notifications and have by now received about four of these monthly notices. I had never clicked through to actually see what they were doing there so today I decided it was time.

Rather than a print magazine, what RIDE BYND appears to offer is videos, although their home page is divided between “Latest Episodes” and “Latest Videos.” The episodes are often long, more than an hour, and those I checked out focus mainly on individuals doing cool stuff on motorcycles. The videos are generally short, often just showing some cool footage of riding.

Here’s how they describe themselves.

RIDE BYND is more than just a podcast about motorcycles — it’s a celebration of the passion, creativity, and untold stories of the people who ride them. Hosted by the co-founder of VAHNA, Ben Giese dives into deep conversations with athletes, artists, adventurers, industry icons, and trailblazers from all walks of life—exploring the experiences that shape their journeys, both on and off the bike. The motorcycle is our connection. The stories are what take us BYND.

As for Ride Apart, I don’t know how I came to be on their mailing list, but I’ve been getting their emails for a while. It seems to be a general motorcycle-oriented site offering news, reviews, features, makes, models, with photos and videos.

The article that caught my eye this morning was headlined, “If You’re Against Motorcycle Helmet Laws, You’re an Idiot.” Considering my own recent remarks about helmets and helmet laws, I had to check this out.

The article is written by Jonathon Klein and, to extract just a bit, his main argument is, “But here’s the real truth, humans are inherently stupid animals, and we do all manner of dumb things all the freakin’ time. We can’t leave our phones in a cupholder for a second while driving a potentially idiotic 10,000-pound electric Hummer, for Pete’s sake. Why should we then be entrusted with our own safety? And that’s sorta where I’m at in terms of helmet laws, as I’m very much for them. Not because I like a nanny state or big government, I really don’t. But because I’d rather not see my fellow motorcyclists die a horribly painful death because they were too freakin’ stupid to just wear a full face helmet while out on the road. I mean, the data says it all, they increase your chances of survival in an accident.”

OK. Not a lot of new thought or information added to this long-running dispute.

Another example of what they publish is an article titled, “Despite What Amazon Says, You Shouldn’t Follow a Motorcycle So Freakin’ Closely.” This tells about what is purported to be a page from an Amazon.com delivery driver training manual that says to leave a four-foot distance between your delivery van and a motorcycle ahead of you. OK, yeah, I’ll read to see what that’s all about.

So they have kept up a steady progression of articles I have found interesting enough to click through on. Maybe you would do so as well. Check it out if you’re interested.

Biker Quote for Today

If you go fast enough on your bike you can fast forward your life to the very end.

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Posted in Helmet Laws, Motorcycle legislation, Motorcycle Safety, motorcycle video | No Comments »

Discovering VAHNA

Monday, April 21st, 2025

A screen grab from the VANHA website.

I was in the waiting area of couches, chairs, and refreshments at Fay Myers while they were putting my new front tire on the V-Strom and changing the oil and I noticed this magazine there on the table. VAHNA it was called, and they had a bunch of issues. I had never heard of this so I picked one up to look at.

It’s a motorcycle magazine, one I had never heard of, and what a nice magazine. Super high-quality reproduction on heavy paper and perfect binding. (“Perfect binding is a bookbinding method where pages are glued together along the spine, and then a cover is wrapped around the glued spine, resulting in a softcover book with clean, trimmed edges”–per the AI search results.)

Opening it up I was amazed. More photos than writing, it was full-page-spreads and double-page spreads of fabulous photos of motorcycles, mostly out off-road. It was gorgeous. But the writing was really good, too. Heck, I pulled out my phone and shot pictures of several pages as a quick and easy way to save the writing that I could see would be great to use in the quotes I end this blog with each time.

I also noted why Fay Myers has all these issues sitting there: toward the back of each issue was a full-page Fay Myers ad.

So I was really interested. What the heck is this magazine? When I got home I sat down at the computer and searched. First of all I looked for the meaning of VAHNA. I expected it would be an acronym for some motorcycle trade organization. Nope. Here’s the AI explanation: In the context of Indian mythology, “vahna” refers to a creature or vehicle that serves as a mount for a god. It’s a Hindi word derived from Sanskrit “vaha,” meaning “to carry.”

OK, so that’s cool. What a great name for a motorcycle magazine. We do ride the mounts of gods. We all know this.

But still, what is this magazine?

It turns out that VAHNA is more than a magazine. They make films and host a film festival. They’ll be launching a podcast this summer. They had a film festival tour that came to Denver for two days in January but I never heard about it. Darn. I’m going to get myself on their email list.

And the magazine? I did some searching before I found their site and a lot of people were saying the magazine was no longer being published. But as far as I can tell they are wrong. Or maybe it has gone online only. Not sure. But the site has articles posted as recently as March 5, 2025.

You should definitely check this out. I’d suggest doing so on a desktop computer just so you can fully appreciate the photography–a cellphone screen just won’t do it justice.

So you can file this under “gosh Ken, thanks for telling me about this.”

Biker Quote for Today

Feet on the pegs, head in the clouds.

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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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Posted in Honda motorcycles, motorcycle mechanics, motorcycle problems, Motorcycle repair, motorcycle video | No Comments »

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