More cool stuff...

Wowee, wowee, wowee…I have more cool stuff to share with you this morning.

For starters, things are moving along (albeit slowly) on the Cafe Racer. We are finalizing the configuration with Zongshen and hopefully I’ll be able to report more progress in the very near future. I’ll keep you posted on when the bikes will be here.

With Zongshen’s worldwide success, they are bumping up against capacity issues, and we can’t always get the bikes we want as quickly as we want. Stated differently, demand for Zongshen bikes all over the planet means that getting new bikes is taking a bit longer. It’s similar to what Harley went through in the early 1990s, except you won’t ever have to pay a “market adjustment” (read: dealer gouging) price for our bikes.

High worldwide demand are keeping the plates spinning at all three of Zongshen's manufacturing campuses.

High worldwide demand is keeping the plates spinning at all three Zongshen manufacturing locations.

More interesting stuff: I received a nice note from my good buddy Greg (who owns both a TT250 and an RX3, and who rode with us on three Baja runs) telling me about his appearance on a motorcycle podcast. You’ll remember Greg…this is a photo from the TT250 run through Baja…

Good buddy Greg on the Rumarosa Grade in northern Baja.

And just because I love the photo and the location, here’s a shot of the Rumarosa Grade…

Fabulous riding on Baja’s Rumarosa Grade.

As Greg said in his note, the podcast is a little irreverent (read: lots of profanity), but as they say, there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Here’s the link:

Listen to Podcast 207: Emotional Steam and The Perfect Fling Poo from Motorcycles & Misfits in Podcasts. https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/motorcycles-misfits/id687516909?mt=2&i=1000386710650

Greg did a good job explaining the TT250, the RX3, and CSC. Greg, thanks for sending the link to me.

More good news…we’re getting more classic bikes in the showroom and in for maintenance, and I’m going to get out on Steve’s Norton later this week…

Steve’s Norton Commando…I’m riding it this week!

Watch for our report on what it’s like to ride a classic bike up in the San Gabriel Mountains in the next week or so. I’m excited. It’s been a while since I’ve ridden a vintage British twin and I’m really looking forward to it.

And speaking of classic bikes, you’ll remember the story I did on the MotoDoffo visit a few months ago right here in the CSC blog. One of the photos in that feature took a little extra work to get right. The entrance of the MotoDoffo collection is a really cool veranda overlooking the vineyard, and it has a bunch of classic bikes in the eves. The challenge was getting a decent photo properly exposed to show both the bikes and the surrounding hills. When I shot the vineyards, the bikes were underexposed…

The vineyards are properly exposed, but the bikes are too dark.

…and when I set the exposure to capture the bikes, the surrounding fields were overexposed…

The bikes are properly exposed in this photo, but the vineyard is overexposed.

The difference in exposures for the bikes and the fields was too dramatic to try to let the camera adjust for it using its built-in HDR feature, so the drill was to take two the photos shown above (from a tripod), and then cut and paste from one into the other in PhotoShop. Here’s how it’s done..