Member Blue Angel once again brings us coverage of the annual Custom Bike show in Bad Salzuflen, Germany. This time his Suzuki GSXR Bakker (second go around) is on display. Check out his build journal as he worked through fabrication, accidental de-fabrication, and final build HERE.

CUSTOM BIKE 2009 PICTURES

Blue Angel - Suzuki GSXR Bakker

White Wash Ducati

Custom Bike 2009

Custom Bike 2009 - 2000 Yamaha R1

BMW - Custom Bike 2009

Harley-Davidson Knucklehead

Iwan-Bikes

Harley Panhead

Started Life as a Sportster?

Buells are pretty popular on that side of the pond.

GSXR 1100

Yamaha MT-01 : A bit of a rarity over here.

BMW R90S

Camo Yamaha V-Max

You can see the rest in the picture gallery HERE.

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Scottsdale, AZ — The Scottsdale Pavillions are always packed during weekend of the Goodguy’s show at Westworld. This has an inverse effect on the number of motorcycles that show up. However, there will be higher quality and more classic bikes as a result. Here are a few of the bikes that could squeeze into the lot with the hot rods.

Honda CL 350 K4

Maico

1979 Honda CBX

Ossa

Royal Enfield

Future Classic! (Our Bias Is Showing!)

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Chandler, AZ – With the weather getting cooler and snowbirds flocking to the southwest, motorcycle activity is picking up. On Wednesday night we decided to take a spin to downtown Chandler to see what the Harley crowd was up to on their bike night. Since it was the middle of the week and in the suburbs of all places, I didn’t expect to see but a handful of bikes. Unexpectedly, there was quite a crowd and a few nice rides.

Jesse Rooke's Maddie

The gathering is set up at a row of restaurants and bars just off of Arizona Avenue, the main street running through downtown Chandler. There were rows of Harleys, Victorys and choppers in all the parking slots up the sidewalks and pretty much anywhere there was solid ground to put out a kick stand. What was particularly cool to see was that there was some uncommon fare among the crowd. Against the curb in front of Santan Brewery and behind two rows of bikes was Jesse Rooke’s Maddie. His bikes have always been particularly interesting. The classic bicycle style gives this motorcycle a look that nobody else has done and his choice of running gear would certainly make the bike interesting to ride. All I have to say is “jockey shift” and “sprotor”. It’s enough to get your blood pumping and palms sweating.

Evolution Custom Cycles

Just down the street were two custom jobs, by Evolution Custom Cycles of Tempe, using Buells as donor bikes. Of particular interest to those standing around was the rear disc brake on their bob/chop. It was not mounted to the hub or doubling as the rear sprocket like the previously mentioned sprotor. This bike has an arrangement similar to a racing setup I’ve seen from the 1970′s. The old bike used a brake disc that runs co-axially with the front sprocket whereas this arrangement is slightly different in that the disc is shifted back about one foot on an idler. In this case, because the gear ratio on the disc and the engine sprockets are 1:1 (or appear to be), the benefits and drawbacks of this design are the same regardless of the exact position. This design allows you to get greater braking forces from smaller discs because the force is multiplied by the same ratio as the drive sprockets. On bikes with rear suspension it also helps to reduce unsprung mass. However, there is a fairly substantial drawback in that the rider loses any ability to apply the rear brake if the final drive chain breaks. The Evolution guys addressed this by adding a good sized front brake disc.

Chandler Bike Nights for this year will conclude the day before Thanksgiving but be sure to check back after the new year to see when everyone will be getting together again. We’ll be there because there are inevitably some sweet rides (plus it’s fun to watch the RUBs walk up and down the rows trying to find their brand new stock Electra Glide).

Chandler Bike Nights

Drag Racing

Neons

Buell Lightning Exhaust

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Overview

Wankel engines, often referred to as a rotary engine, is an internal combustion engine that completes the four strokes of the Otto cycle by turning a rotor within an hourglass shaped (epitrochoid) combustion chamber.

The rotor is triangular in shape with convex sides and seals against the combustion chamber walls at each point of the triangle. Each point is called an apex and has a seal, referred to as apex seals, which trace the wall of the combustion chamber. This creates three continuously moving chambers. As the open chambers move around the perimeter their volume changes. As the volume reduces you get the compression and exhaust cycles. As the volume increases you get the intake and combustion cycles. This, in turn, causes the rotor to turn an eccentric drive shaft.

A Wankel engine has three chambers per housing and each turn of the rotor turns the drive shaft three times. In other words, there are three combustion cycles per rotation which results in higher power production than an equivalent four stroke engine. This design results in many fewer moving parts and a higher power to weight ratio.

[teknikka.com] Details

Early engines had intake and exhaust ports in the perimeter walls of the chamber. Contemporary designs place the ports on the flat sides of the combustion chamber.

The hourglass shape of the chamber is not very well suited to combustion. For this reason, each combustion chamber has two spark plugs. There is one on the leading edge of the combustion area and one on the trailing edge.

Rotors and apex seals are made of cast crucible steel.

Displacement is calculated as follows:

(Number of rotors)x(chamber volume)x2 = equivalent displacement

[teknikka.com] Wankel Motorcycles

Several companies put Wankel engine bikes into production. Most notably, Norton produced the twin rotor powered Commander, Interpol 2, Classic and F1. Suzuki nearly broke the bank with it’s RE-5.

Check out BSA’s patent for a wankel engine in our wiki by CLICKING HERE.

“Even now any man with the sense to pour piss out of a boot should take all the money he might spend on a new motorcycle and instead buy Honda stock – or any one of about thirty others, including Harley-Davidson, which despite a stone-age concept of management and technology is still the only American manufacturer of motorcycles.

The story of Harley-Davidson and the domestic motorcycle market is one of the gloomiest chapters in the history of American free enterprise. At the end of World War II there were very few of them imports. During the 1950s, while H-D was consolidating its monopoly, bike sales doubled and then tripled. Harley had a gold mine on its hands – until 1962-63, when the import blitz began. By 1964 registrations had jumped to nearly 1,000,000 and light weight Hondas were selling as fast as the Japanese freighters could bring them over the ocean. The H-D brain trust was still pondering this oriental duplicity when they were zapped on the opposite flank by Birmingham Small Arms, Ltd., of England. BSA (which also makes Triumph) decided to challenge Harley on its own turf and in its own class, despite the price-boosting handicap of a huge protective tariff. By 1965, with registrations up 50 percent over the previous year, the H-D monopoly was sorely beset on two fronts. The only buyers they could count on were cops and outlaws, while the Japanese were mopping up in the low-price field and BSA was giving them hell on the race track. By 1966, with the bike boom still growing, Harley was down to less than 10 percent of the domestic market and fighting to hold even that.

With all its machinery and thinking geared to 1,200-cubic-inch [pretty sure he meant cubic centimeter] engines, the company has little hope of competing on the light and middle weight markets until at least 1970 . . . but they still have plenty of muscle in the heavyweight class, and in 1966 Harleys were winning as many big races as BSAs or Triumphs. This hazy equality has not been maintained, however, in the market place. Most H-D racers are custom-built originals, made to order for some of the best riders in America and with much larger engines than their British competitors. Harley has yet to come up with a production model that can compete with Japanese or European imports – on the street, the track or in the dirt – in terms of weight, price, handling ability or engine size.

There is surely some powerful lesson in the failure of Harley-Davidson to keep pace with a market they once controlled entirely. It is impossible to conceive of a similar situation in the automobile market. What if Ford, for instance, had been the only American manufacturer of autos at the end of World War II? Could they have lost more than 90 percent of the market by 1965? A monopoly with a strong protective tariff should be in a commanding position even on the Yo-Yo market. How would the Yo-Yo king feel if he were stripped, in less than a decade, of all his customers except Hell’s Angels and cops?”

Forty-five years have passed since Hunter Thompson wrote that page in Hells Angels. It’s now easy to look back on the history of Harley-Davidson and see that they simply couldn’t deal with the onslaught of competitors on the track. However, they did not follow the myriad of other marques that continue to come back from the dead only to return to the grave a few years later. H-D found another way around and it certainly wasn’t win-on-sunday-sell-on-monday. They don’t go toe to toe with Honda and Ducati on the track or in the dirt anymore. The Fuzz have gone the way of BMW in many places and the outlaws. . . well, I guess there are still some outlaws somewhere. Harley has something else keeping the company alive. It’s that Harley lifestyle. No foreign or domestic company can take a chip out of H-D in that regard. Nobody else can be the American classic.

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Originally published at TEKNIKKA.com

Book Review: Motorcycle Electrical Systems – Troubleshooting and Repair

Electrical systems can be intimidating to work on. When there is a problem hiding in your wiring harness or a switch somewhere on your bike it may seem like an unruly herd of gremlins has crawled under your fairings and started to party. However, once you gain a basic understanding of electricity and how it works it will go a long way to reducing electrical system anxiety.

The Motorbooks book entitled Motorcycle Electrical Systems – Troubleshooting and Repair by Tracy Martin, is a good source for beginners to get a basic grasp of the fundamentals of electricity using simple, straight-forward language and well thought out diagrams. It’s not all academic, however. This book covers most of the important electrical systems in most types of motorcycles and explains how to test their function, troubleshoot the problems and how to repair them.

In the end, this is another good selection from Motorbooks. If you are always pawning the electrical work on your bike off to your buddy because you can’t seem to figure it out this should be your first stop in learning to do it yourself.

Motorcycle Electrical Systems by Tracy Martin is available through Motorbooks.com

Check back next week as we review another new selection from the Motorbooks Workshop.

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Solvang Motorcycle Museum

Originally published at TEKNIKKA.com

Solvang, California is a small town northwest of Santa Barbara in the Santa Ynez valley. This place is known to most as a tourist attraction town where one can find Danish food, windmills and buildings painted to look like they belong in a small European hamlet. To motorcyclists, it is the home to a sampling of Virgil Elings’ motorcycle collection known as the “Solvang Motorcycle Museum”.

Word has it that less than half of his bikes are on display here at any one time so you can know that the next time you pass through there will probably be something on the floor that you haven’t seen before. For a small fee of $10 you can spend as much time as you want looking the bikes over. There are no velvet ropes or glass panels to keep your at a distance, here you are able inspect the bikes as closely as you desire. Just don’t touch them.

Here are a handful of pictures that we took. To see the rest cruise through our gallery HERE

Britten V1000

Yale Twin

Moto Guzzi GP

Honda RC181 - Mike Hailwood

Crocker

To get to Solvang from LA, just take the 101 North to the Buelton/Solvang exit. Then take hwy 246 into Solvang. Turn right a few blocks into town on Alisal. The museum is in a small shopping complex about 1/3 of a mile down the road on the left.
View Larger Map

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Visit the Solvang Motorcycle Museum website at www.motosolvang.com

Live coverage of Bike Week is difficult. It turns out that it is extraordinarily difficult to type while operating a motorcycle. We did however, snap pictures all week so that you could live vicariously through us when we post up all the photos.

2009 Cycle Fest

For those new to AZ Bike Week, it is a week (as the name would explain) bookended by two packed weekends for a total of nine days of fossil fuel burning, V-twin powered goodness. Cyclefest at Westworld, where almost every ride terminates during the last four days, is intended to be the centerpiece of all the action. (Though it’s really just a bunch of vendor tents that you have to pay $20 each to look at.) There is something for everyone somewhere in the valley every day. As one would expect, we opted to hit the places where you were likely to see nuts, bolts and wrenches rather than turkey legs, tattoo artists and t-shirt stands. Some of these events aren’t exactly associated with AZ Bike Week, so it can be a little more difficult to find out where to go. Tune in here next spring and we will guide you to the best locations to see the cool stuff and skip the lame.

By far the best event we went to was the annual Arizona Antique & Classic Motorcycle Enthusiasts Show and Swap-Meet. I’d never been there before and was half expecting a small parking lot with a handful of bikes. I was wrong. There were easily 50 or 60 top notch bikes on show, a large swap meet with some surprising finds in the large back parking lot and at least a couple hundred bikes in the parking lot which were mostly oldies as well. There will be a post specifically about this show coming shortly, I really just wanted to get some pictures up for everyone to take a look at. . . so, without any more lallygagging here are some AACME pictures:

1914 Excelsior Henderson

1914 Excelsior Henderson

1908 Aurora Thor

1908 Aurora Thor

BMW R75

Honda CBX

Suzuki GT750

Suzuki RE5 Rotary

There are plenty more pictures coming along. To see all of them check out the AACME album in our gallery

Cyclefest:

More to see in the parking lot than at Cyclefest!! Haha!

Turbo Harley

One place to put a tank

Bobber / Chopper

Ford?

Chopper / Bobber

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Chester's H-D and Indian Motorcycle Dealership

March 27-29,2009 – Arizona Bike Week gets bigger and bigger each year. Even with the faltering economy this year appears to be no different regarding the motorcyclist rites of spring. This year’s festivities were launched on Friday night by Charlie Daniels Band at the recently expanded Chester’s Harley-Davidson and Indian Motorcycle Dealership. By 8 p.m. there were easily thousands of bikes filling the parking lot of not only the dealership, but all businesses for the next half mile down the road and all the nearby side roads. Without a doubt the residents of Mesa, Arizona know that the riding season is here.

Saturday got moving a little late for obvious reasons. The students up at Motorcycle Mechanics Institute were ready to go at 11 a.m. with their open house. They graciously allowed all of us grubby motorcyclists to meander through their classrooms. From what I could tell by the items sitting around the room, the current chapter of study appeared to be head flowing on some Japanese thumper engines of some kind. Most of the people seemed to be most interested in the Suzuki Hayabusa that was being run on the dyno. Interestingly, all the Japanese bikes were going into one room while all the Harley-Davidsons were being run in another. . . and I thought segregation in schools was illegal. Seriously, though, I guess the charts on the H-D dyno just don’t go up to triple digits! OK, enough jabs at Harley. All of us Honda guys still know and love them.

MZ 125 Classic

Out in the parking lot of MMI were a number of custom builders and a little bike show. (Not for bikes for undersized people. There just weren’t many bikes in it.) Most bikes were stock except a paint job, but there were a few interesting ones to take note of. For example, sitting on the outskirts of the show was a rarity in these parts. An MZ 125 with leading link front suspension.

Finally, on the way out of the MMI open house were the custom builders. Of particular interest was the attendance of Titan Motorcycles. The last I had heard was that these guys were out of business after the initial raging success and subsequent crash of the brand that was punctuated with bank ownership. As it turns out, a Canadian company has acquired Titan from the bank and is doing a booming business selling motorcycles from the desert to our neighbors to the north. Hopefully 2009 sees Titan getting back on track.

The MMI open house wound up around 3 p.m. and as they say “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.” So we headed back down to Chester’s where it looks like they will be rocking all week long. As we arrived we could see some motocross riders getting huge air out in the distance. They were actually high enough that they could have easily cleared the edge of the building if they were trying. Like I said, Chester’s is doing it big this year. By this time in the day, the smell of grilling turkey legs and burning rubber wafting across the street was too inviting to skip.

Saturday afternoons are generally the time to be out on a ride. Still there were a few hundred bikes crowded into the lot and side streets. Inside was the typical bike week attractions: beer, unhealthy food, a tattoo artist, a couple of chicks doing a bikini bike wash and a row of antique bikes. Sitting proudly on it’s jack stands was a very unique bike. It is probably fair to say that most folks walking past didn’t have a clue what it even was. You can’t hold it against them since it’s been a while since board track racing was popular.

Excelsior Board Track

There, in between an immaculate Harley and a Triumph, was a rough looking Excelsior board track racer well on it’s path to restoration. The owner stood by proudly explaining this project along with the numerous others that he has worked on. It’s great to spot these kind of historic projects getting displayed in a show along side the typical bike show fare.

While speaking to the owner of the Excelsior I became alerted to another popular activity of bike shows. That is the burnout competition. I don’t get it. Let me explain my commentary here. I’ve burned off a few tires in my life. Generally, it’s when a few friends are around and you are about to pop a new tire on any way. I’ve spent too much energy trying to scrape together rideable tires at certain times in my life to waste a perfectly good set of rubber.The guys that were lining up looked like they had tires with many more thousands of miles of meat on them. Then again all these guys are riding on at least $20k of motorcycle to start with, so what difference does one new tire make?

Burn Out

The announcer came on the loud speaker and offered 50% off of tires and labor to anyone who would go up and burn off their tire. Immediately, there were a few takers lined up ready to go. The rubber goes up in a cloud of smoke, the crowd cheers and off the bike goes to get a new shoe. Doing silly crap on a bike is infectious. After watching a few of these guys burn through their tires, I was half way tempted to pull the RC51 around to show them how it’s really done! It doesn’t need any water to get the smoke started!After careful thought and coming to the conclusion that they probably didn’t have a 190 Michelin Pilot Power in the Harley service department, I decided against the burn out and called it a day. There is still the Pavillions show tonight and a few rides to hit tomorrow, but I think I’ll turn in early to save my stamina for the remaining seven days of Arizona Bike Week.

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AMF Harley Davidson Aermacchi 350

DUCATI SD 900

The Thingamajig

Yamaha DT 400

And here are some more just for fun:

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