July 26, 2002

• Biker episode #3:

  When I was younger, I enjoyed riding motorcycles, being right out there, feeling the rush of the wind in my hair. I also had some natural mechanical talent which had been nurtured and developed by my father. I kept in practice after his death by maintaining my mother’s cars for her, and in Wichita I had worked briefly for a Honda dealership, maintaining their rental fleet of 50 cc bikes.

  The old Harleys ridden by the outlaws needed constant maintenance and repairs, and it didn’t take VW very long to discover that my slender fingers did a better job on the nuts and bolts than those fat stubby things dangling from his hands. An ol’lady who could use a wrench was an asset. One who understood concepts such as torque and spark gap was a wonder and a marvel.

  He was pleased to go along when I decided to build a trike of my own. My preference would have been to ride a fast, lightweight bike such as a Honda or Triumph, but VW wouldn’t allow it. For him and his bros, if it wasn’t a Harley, it had to be one of the acceptable antiques such as a Vincent or Ariel. Rice burners and all of the great European bikes such as Ducatis, BMWs and Triumphs, were out.

  The old Vincent Black Shadow was a great-looking bike. Hard Luck had one. They were tricky to handle, especially at high speed, because the frame was jointed in the middle, and the front and rear wheels could tilt in opposite directions on a turn. Any high-speed wobble out on the freeway could be disastrous. Handling one of them took more upper-body strength than the average bike. Besides all that, they were rare and extremely expensive. An Ariel would have been more within my range for operating, but was even farther out of range in money terms.

  Briefly, I considered building my own two-wheel Harley chopper, but although I could handle one just fine once it was in motion, the damn things were so heavy that I had trouble getting one up to vertical off the kick stand. If it took more than a few kicks to start it, I was worn out before I got on the road.

  My goal was mobility, not embarrassment. The natural choice then was a 3-wheeler. I rode around on Tex Hill’s trike and decided that would do for me. I started drawing plans for what I intended to build. I’d seen a trike with a 55-gallon steel drum welded across the back, with a seat nestled in its cut-out side. Mine would include a sound system with internal speakers for the highway and external speakers for party time.

  Hard Luck told us about someone who had a “basket case” trike for sale cheap. When I first saw it, there was a frame in the corner of an old garage, surrounded by several wheels and tires, and some dusty boxes of grimy engine parts. One of the dusty old boxes on the floor contained a rust-spotted collection of gears and a cracked tranny case, but none of the guys who were there with me was even sure that the case could be fixed or that all the gears were there. Tucked away on a high shelf in a box of its own, was a clean, fully-functioning transmission. To clench the deal, the seller threw in the good tranny for a few extra bucks.

  The bike VW had been riding was a “panhead” model from the ‘fifties. The only customizing that had been done on it was some stripping-down, the removal of fenders and decoration that qualified a bike as a bob-job or chopper. I helped him keep it running and we fixed the broken fender strut, but neither of us wanted to put much energy or money into that bike. We had been to a custom bike show and looked at the work of the masters including Big Daddy Roth. We wanted a show bike.

  My trike would be our first project, and after it was on the road we planned to build a bike with molded frame, metalflake paintjob and extended front forks. We already had a transmission for it, because I’d gotten that box of gears cleaned up, had someone with a Heli-arc welder repair the case crack, and reassembled the “basket” tranny using the good one as a guide for how it went together.

  The trike went together fairly easily in its basic form. The old pistons had been badly pitted, and we replaced them with a pair of high-dome, high-compression pistons we got cheap because they were a design that never made it into production. That was understandable once we got it all assembled and fired the trike up. First run around the block blew the head gasket. It was a well-known phenomenon. Whenever one tried to up the performance of a hog by increasing compression, whether by doming the pistons or lengthening the stroke with a different cam, the weak spot was the head gasket. The solution was to replace the standard gaskets with an aftermarket high-pressure copper gasket.

  I had already blown a couple of copper gaskets and was experimenting with using an additional goopy gasket sealing compound, torquing them down harder… whatever might fix the thing without having to find a new pair of pistons and losing my pickup and extra speed.

  That was where things stood when the weekend rolled around for the Magic Mountain Music Festival on Mt. Tamalpais in Marin County. VW’s panhead wasn’t running, but my trike was. We went to our favorite parts shop and bought their last 3 copper head gaskets, so we’d have spares just in case. I could change one in 15 or 20 minutes on the roadside if necessary.

  It was a weekend for breakdowns. We were only halfway up the mountain and I was down to my last gasket. Several bikes had quit and their riders were either riding in the crash truck with the broken choppers, or were doubled up behind other riders. A red-haired Angel called *something* Red, either Dirty Red, Wild Red or Righteous Red or Little Red or something, but certainly not Big Red because that was someone else, had caught a lift with VW and me on my trike when his bike was loaded onto the crash truck, filling its bed to capacity.

  His extra weight probably contributed to the demise of my last gasket. We chained the trike to a pole off the side of the road and caught rides behind some of the other riders in the pack. Up the road a bit, we noticed some guys gazing helplessly at the smoking engine of their old white van. They were members of a band, The James Gang, I think. The bikers ended up hauling them and their instruments and amps to the top of Mt. Tam and that act of kindness resulted in some good press for the Angels. Some arrangement with the promoters had already gotten most of us free admission to the festival.

  The crowd was big and though I wanted to move down front nearer the music, VW kept me back on the hillside facing the stage where most of the bikers had settled down to party. I wasn’t close enough to see faces, but there was enough amplification that I could hear the music. I recall hearing The Fifth Dimension and The Doors that day. “Up, up and awaaay in my beautiful, my beautiful balloon…” “…break on through to the other side…” I knew it was about consciousness, about acid, and I still wondered what that “other side” of the mind was all about. For the bikers, the music wasn’t the main attraction there. The ride, the pack, the impression we made en masse, was what brought that pack of bikes up that mountain.

  I popped whites and drank a little bit of wine before switching to pop so I could stay conscious. When it got close to sunset, and someone showed up with another truck, we started down the mountain to load up my trike. I was riding behind Bill Moran, the prez of the Richmond Hells Angels. When we got to where I had chained the trike, it was gone. The chain, cut with bolt cutters, was still there. We would hear later through the grapevine that some Gypsy Jokers from San Jose had turned up with a trike like mine. I never saw it again.

  Even with all the hassles of the ride up the mountain, the frustration of not being allowed out of my ol’ man’s sight all day, and the loss of my trike, that ride down the mountain is one of my best memories of the years I was with the bikers. Bill Moran’s Ariel Square Four was the quietest, smoothest running bike I’ve ever had the pleasure to ride. Bill was a good rider, too, and I knew how to “pack”, how to melt into the back of the rider and become one with the bike on the curves.

  Mt. Tam is a beautiful place, and the road winds through dense woods, then suddenly out into the sun and over some open grassy areas before diving into the forest again. The Ariel was more maneuverable than any of the Harleys, and we were soon out ahead of the pack, running quietly alone through some of the most beautiful terrain on the planet. I suppose the bennies made their contribution to the euphoria I felt, but I know that wasn’t all there was to it. It was motor love, machine infatuation–that Ariel won my heart forever. Long after I’ve outgrown any fondness I ever had for combing wind-snarls from my hair, I am still in awe of that bike.

  • 5:42 pm
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