CSC Blog

A busy day, yesterday was.   Attendance at the Long Beach show was high, and it sure was busy in the CSC booth.  Lots of visitors, a filming session by Cycle Sports TV, and more…but I was able to sneak out a bit and grab a few shots.   The best time for us is early in the morning before the show is open to the public, because it lets me get out and around and take photos without too many people in the way.   Steve and I walked around a bit early yesterday.

One of the high points for me yesterday was when my good buddy Fonzie Palaima stopped by the booth…

Fonzie is a very well known motorcycle photojournalist.   You might not know his name, but I guarantee you’ve seen his work if you’ve ever picked up a motorcycle magazine or surfed the Internet.   He’s a fun guy to be around.

Here’s a cool photo Steve took of yours truly on a Royal Enfield.   Kevin Mahoney, Royal Enfield USA’s CEO, came over to our booth for a visit yesterday.   I tried to talk him into giving me a free Royal Enfield (they sure are beautiful motorcycles), but I wasn’t successful.  I still have another day today, though.   So do you, for that matter.  If you are in So Cal and you haven’t been to the Long Beach moto show yet, you really need stop by.   This is one of the best shows ever.

Here’s an early morning shot at the Ducati booth showing their newest model. I think it is the 1299cc Paningale (I didn’t look at it that closely). They are pretty bikes, but they are not my cup of tea (even though I love red motorcycles). Too expensive for me, and too big. They make great photo subjects, though.

There were several custom Hayabusas on display.   These bikes make for interesting paint themes, I think mostly because they have so much body work to serve as a canvas.   Interesting stuff…nothing I would ever ride, but interesting as displays of artistic talent…

Speaking of artistry, the rat look continues to adorn all sorts of vehicles.   There was even a brand new Indian given the rat treatment, as well as those Derelicts custom scooters I showed the other day…

Different strokes for different folks, I guess.   I suppose you could call my KLR 650 a rat bike, but that’s just because I never wash it.   KLR riders are known for two things…being cheap and riding filthy bikes.   We joke about it.   The first time I ever went to a KLR event (one of the tech days down in San Diego), I washed my bike before I went.  Boy, was that ever a mistake…my bike was spotless, and the rest of the guys there ribbed me all day long about it.    It’s suitably funky now after a few Baja rides, lots of mud, and successfully avoiding any effort whatsoever to clean it for the last several years.

Here’s a bike that really caught my eye…it’s a fully restored ’67 XLCH…

When I was a teenager I wanted one of those so bad I could taste it.   That blue was the color I wanted, too.   I left my card at the booth where the XLCH was on display in case the owner wanted to sell it.   Even if he is selling the bike, it’s probably beyond what my budget would allow.    I imagine a bike like that is somewhere in the $15K to $20K range (maybe even more).   I can dream, though.

Susie is coming with me to the show today, and of course I’ll have the Nikon.     Same time, same place, and all that….we’ll be back with more photos later!

Guys, it was a long day at the Long Beach show and we’re up again tomorrow early for the last day of this great event.   I grabbed a lot of shots today and I was just thinking that I’m too tired to post any this evening (it involves transferring them from the Nikon to the computer, sizing them in Photoshop, and posting them on the CSC blog).   Then I got lucky.   Our good buddy Bill sent us this absolutely striking photo of his Bobber up on Mt. Wilson….

Bill, thanks much for this outstanding photo!

Everyone else, we’ll have more photos from the Long Beach show up on the blog real soon!

Tonight was our first evening at the Long Beach International Motorcycle Show.   We’ll be hitting it again early tomorrow morning, but I wanted to post a few photos first before turning in.

As has been the case in San Mateo and Phoenix, both the CSC-250 and the RX-3 Cyclone motorcycles were big hits.   First, a shot of a fan admiring the CSC -250…

Here’s a shot (one of many this evening) of an attractive young lady on the RX-3…

People have asked me how the RX-3 is doing…and I’m here to tell you the reaction to the Cyclone has been incredible.   People were literally signing up three at a time!

Steve told me about a cool booth on the other side of the show…an outfit that was doing rat jobs on scooters (Derelict Scooters).   I had to check it out, and the Derelict dude grabbed this shot of me (using my camera) on one of their creations…

This bike comes complete with its own rifle, too!  It’s attached to the bike on the right side, and it looks like some kind of a World War I bolt action de-milled military number.   Cool stuff indeed, and you can bet I’ll grab more photos of these bikes for a subsequent blog.

And of course, just before the show closed, I walked over to the Ducati exhibit to get my obligatory “last call” pretty girl photo…folks, meet Kimberly…

We’ll be back in Long Beach tomorrow, with more photos to follow…

We’re off to the Long Beach International Motorcycle Show tomorrow, folks, and I wanted to share just a few more photos today of a couple of Indians from the Phoenix event.   I don’t know much about these modern Indians, except that they photograph exceptionally well…

Two-tone tank paint works well on any bike (we’ve done a number of CSC customs in a variety of color combos), and what we see on the Indian above is no exception to that rule.

Indians (both the originals and the new ones) have always sported a distinctive front fender light. Here are a couple of detail shots from the bike above…

The dealer displaying the bike above had it together with a supporting clothing line, too. Shirts, jackets, T-shirts, and even a cool belt buckle…

Here’s one last engine shot of Indian’s latest, the new water-cooled Scout model…

You know, I still have a few more shots from San Mateo and Phoenix, but that’s enough for now. The next big batch will be from Long Beach, and those will start tomorrow night or Saturday.

It’s going to be fun.   If you make it to the Long Beach show, be sure to stop by and say hi!

No, not the one in Italy…I’m talking (or writing, I guess I should say) about the one in northern Nevada, up near my good buddy J’s place.   Motorcycle Classics has my article on Genoa, Nevada, in its latest edition, and you can read the story here.   Better yet, spring for a copy of the magazine…it’s the best motorcycle magazine out there!

Just a few more days until the Long Beach show, but I still have a few more photos to share from Phoenix, my phriends….

Let’s his the celebs first.   Well, not real celebs, but people who bear an uncanny resemblance to movie stars and race car drivers – take a look!

Check out this George Clooney lookalike getting some seat time on the RX-3….

This next fellow was pretty funny.   When he came over to our booth, I said “Wow, you look just like Richard Petty!”   He threw his hat on the ground and said “I am tired of hearing that!   I AM RICHARD PETTY!”  He was so emphatic that he actually had me going for a minute.

After “Richard” left, Jeff (the guy in the booth next door on the right side of the above photo) said maybe the guy really was Richard Petty.   Steve said he wasn’t.   I’m still wondering.

Here’s a shot of an old friend…it’s my buddy Leighton, a fellow KLRista who used to be the parts manager at Brown BMW…

You probably remember me writing about my buddy Bob Brown and that San Felipe trip a month or so ago.   Bob was the guy who stated that he felt a 250 was the perfect size motorcycle for real world adventure riding.   That blog is here.

All righty, then, on to some classic bikes.  The Vintage Japanese Motorcycle Club put in a great appearance with a couple of bikes that really hit home for me.  I used to have a 1982 Honda CBX (an air-cooled straight six that Honda made from 1979 to 1982).   I loved that bike, and the VJMC had a nice one on display at the Phoenix show…

I love pearlescent white as a color on any vehicle, and it sure worked on that ’82 CBX.   I rode all over the Southwest on mine.   It was grand motorcycle (way ahead of its time), but it was time to get rid of it when Honda stopped stocking parts for it.

Another classic bike…a ’69 Honda 750…

I had a ’71 CB-750 in exactly those colors.   It was awesome.   A bike like the one you see above would sell for something like $15,000 today.   I paid $1,569 for mine in 1971.

Honda has a modern big four that evokes the memory of that original CB-750.   I think the modern one is an 1100.   It’s huge, but I like it…

The Phoenix show also had some real vintage iron.   Check this out…an original Vincent…

And here’s bike I had heard of but never actually seen until the Phoenix show…a single-cylinder Vincent!

And finally, an original, well-worn, appropriately patina-finished old Knucklehead Harley-Davidson…

Cool stuff indeed!

I think I have one more set of photos I want to share with you from Phoenix, and then it’s off to the Long Beach show for us.

Ride safe and keep watching the blog!

I hope you enjoyed Veteran’s Day as much as I did.   Today was a good day…I spent a few hours at the CSC plant, I had a great Mexican lunch, I played around with some photos, and I went for a motorcycle ride.   Good stuff.

First, the photos.   I spotted a custom Kawasaki at the Phoenix International Motorcycle Show this past weekend that sported a custom military motif paint theme.   The Kawi 1400 and its competitor (the Suzuki Hayabusa) are awesome bikes; they had the highest top ends of any stock motorcycle ever manufactured when they were introduced about a decade ago.   I wanted a Hayabusa for a while, but the urge passed without me ever pulling the trigger.   I still like looking at these uber performance bikes, and the paint on this one really caught my eye.   It seemed like the perfect bike to show on a Veteran’s Day blog.

One thing I didn’t realize when I was photographing the bike was that it had more than a few Pro-One parts on it.  Pro-One is our parent company.   Steve pointed out the grips and the levers (they are Pro-One parts) and I grabbed a shot of them…

More good stuff.   A while back my good friend Tom told me about a photo of himself with a Powell motorcycle (one of the Mustang’s competitors) taken when he was a kid.   That caught my attention immediately, because I knew I had a relatively recent photo of Tom with his Triumph Tiger…

I wanted to do one of my before and after photos like you’ve seen on the blog in the past.   I asked Tom to bring the Powell photo to the plant, which he did a week or so ago.   The “after” photo is the one you see above (today’s Tom with his Tiger).   Here’s the “before” photo (showing Tom as a proud youngster with his Powell)…

Cool stuff, Tom!

Steve and I had a great Mexican lunch, and while we were standing in line to order our food a couple about my age were behind us.   The guy had on a USMC shirt and I asked him if he served in the Marines.   He said yes; I said Happy Veteran’s Day and I thanked him for his service.   He asked if I had served and I also said yes, and he thanked me.   It was a good encounter.

I got back to the house about 2:00 p.m. today and I had an overwhelming urge to go for a motorcycle ride.  The KLR looked like it was depressed (I had not ridden it in a long time), so I topped off the tires, fired her up, and did the Glendora Ridge Road ride.  It was, in a word, glorious.   I didn’t bring a camera, but I thought I would include a KLR photo from one of the Baja rides…

I want you to picture your RX-3 Cyclone in that photo, and I want you to imagine yourself standing alongside it.   That can be you when we do the CSC Baja run.

Looks pretty good, doesn’t it?

Later, my friends.

Here’s more cool stuff from the recent IMS shows, and a bit about real adventure riding.   We are seeing huge interest in the Baja ride I’ve been writing about here in the blog.   If you’re interested in riding with us, drop a note to me (info@cscmotorcycles.com) so we know how many people want to go with us.   We’re going to hold the number of participants to something reasonable, but don’t worry about the number.   We’ll be going down there on a regular basis, and if you don’t get your oar in the water on the Inaugural Ride, we’ll get you in on a subsequent run.    We’ll provide more details as our plans become firmer, so check our CSC blog often.

The first time I saw the RX-3 Cyclone, I knew it was the perfect bike for Baja.   The comfort, the layout, the fuel economy, and the engine displacement are optimized for adventure touring in Baja (or anywhere in the world, for that matter).   The picture below shows a recent view from the RX-3 cockpit…the road in that photo is in California, but much of the riding in Baja is exactly like what you see in the photo below.   We’ll be seeing about 500 miles of it on the way down to Guerrero Negro.

Once we get on the road, I promise you that the riding will be some of the best (perhaps the best) you’ve ever experienced, and the food, the scenery, and the camaraderie will absolutely be off the charts.   And for any of you who are reading this and have made the trip before….yes, we will stop at Antonio’s for fish tacos.   Trust me on this…you’ll want to ride the 500 miles to Guerrero Negro just for that.

Anyway, back to the Phoenix show for a moment or three.   I have a few photos of a Triumph Tiger I saw that I want to share with you.   You’ve probably already figured out that I’m a Triumph fan.  I don’t own one anymore and I am convinced the RX-3 makes a lot more sense for the kind of real world riding I do, but I rode Triumph for a lot of years and they make a good bike.   My tastes and needs have changed…the Triumphs are too big and too expensive in my opinion, but I still respect them.

One Triumph I’ve always admired is the Tiger.   I had a 955 Tiger that I rode all over Baja.   It was big, it was beautiful, and it was fast, but it was heavy and a real handful in the dirt.   This is the ’06 955 Tiger I used to ride in Baja…and the photo actually is in Baja.  Those are giant Cardon cactus plants in the background (they grow nowhere else on Earth).

I like to see the latest Tigers whenever I’m at a show, and I saw some interesting ones this past weekend.   Triumph now has two versions of their Tiger model.   My 955 is no more…now they make a 1200 Tiger, which is a monster (no pun intended, Ducati) at nearly 700 lbs…

That 1200 Tiger is tall, it’s heavy, and when I saw it, my first thought was that I’d have a hard time just getting on and off the beast.   My next thought focused on what it would be like making a U-turn on that motorcycle on a dirt road.   I didn’t need to think about what it would be like in soft sand…I already knew that based on my adventures on the old 955 Tiger.

I think Triumph must have had similar thoughts, because a few years ago they introduced an 800cc version…

The 800 Tiger is a little smaller and it’s a move in the right direction, but it’s still too big in my opinion.   I’m past all that now, but I’m still interested in the technology.

Triumph had a bike on display in their booth that the Raiden team raced in the Baja 1000 this year, and it was impressive.   Here’s the “before” picture, when the bike was spotless…

The particular bike you see above (No. 121) was a DNF (did not finish) in the Baja 1000 this year, but the overall look and engineering of the thing was impressive.  I think that as a serious off road bike, the 800 is still huge, but it makes a bit more sense than the Tiger 1200, which (as I said above) is a monster.  What was cool about the Raiden Tiger at the Phoenix show was that it looked like it just finished the race…it was coated in dirt, oil, and dead bugs.

I grabbed a bunch of close up photos showing different features on the Raiden bike.  The first shows the flyscreen and the headlights.

Here’s another macro shot showing the headlight and the driving lights.

This is an interesting detail shot of the cockpit.   Notice how they moved the starter button and kill switch.   I’m not sure why they did this; maybe it was to give the throttle a bit more room.

This Baja 1000 racing motorcycle has an auxiliary fuel tank mounted behind the seat.

The RX-3 gets 70 mpg and it has a 4.2 gallon fuel tank.  It has a cruising range of about 250 miles, which is a good thing to have in Baja.   There’s one stretch on our ride (between El Rosario and Guerrero Negro) where the distance between Pemex stations is 221.6 miles.   Yes, I know the distance to the tenth of a mile, and I ran dry on that stretch once when I was on my Suzuki TL1000S.  The RX-3 won’t have that problem.    With its big tank and 70 mpg, it will go the distance…

Anyway, back to the Baja 1000 Raiden Triumph….this Tiger was ridden hard and put away wet…

An Arrow exhaust system on the Triumph….we’ll offer accessory exhaust systems on the RX-3 in the future…

Here’s a feature I didn’t quite understand.   I grabbed a shot of these metal bits on the Tiger’s exhaust headers.   My guess is that they are there either as guards (for dirt kicked up by the front wheel), for additional air cooling (maybe) or as vibration dampers.   I sent a note to my buddy Art (he’s a Triumph guy) to find out what these clips do…

Some of you might be wondering if there is an RX-3 race bike in our plans for the next Baja 1000.   At this point, the answer is:  Who knows?   We’re not planning any race activities today, but we are planning the CSC RX-3 Cyclone Baja Inaugural Run and it will be a hoot.  I want you to think about coming with us if you aren’t already doing so.   If you’ve already ridden Baja, you know what I’m talking about.  If you haven’t (trust me on this) you’ll thank me during and after the ride.

You know, when I listen to the beer belly brigade brag about where they’ve ridden, it’s usually to the corner burger bar or maybe Angeles Crest Highway.   The distances are short (they’re day runs at best).   You know the drill…the guys with the vests that have a zillion badges showing the various “runs” they’ve been on (almost as if they were campaign ribbons), the Ricky Racer bikes with carbon fiber bits, the Harleys with boom box sound systems, and all the other stereotypes.  Hey, it’s all good…we’re all out riding and whatever you ride, it’s fun.   But there’s something different about having ridden Baja.  It puts you in another league, in my opinion.

Imagine your inputs to those “where do you ride” discussions after you’ve ridden with us through Baja.  Think about how you’ll feel when you name towns most people have never even heard of…El Rosario…El Marmol…Bahia de Los Angeles…Mulege…Bahia de Concepcion…Guerrero Negro…Santa Rosalia.   This is the reason the RX-3 exists, my friends.   Real riding.   Adventure touring.   The real deal.

Are you up for it?

Well, not really on the street…but more wandering around the Phoenix International Motorcycle Show.   “Street photography” as an art form involves capturing street scenes (usually in urban areas).   I did this at the show, and I’ll continue to post miscellaneous images this week from Scottsdale until we hit the Long Beach show.  We’ll be in Long Beach this Friday night through Sunday afternoon.

So, back to Scottsdale…here’s a shot of the RX-3 from down low…

Cyclone pre-orders continue to be very brisk.    In fact, one of the other exhibitors (after watching us for two days) walked across the aisle and signed up himself!

That $3495 price is not going to last long, so if you have an interest, give us a call quickly!

In Scottsdale, we were just a short shot away from the Triumph booth.   Most of the bikes from the big OEMs are traveling the show circuit (just like we are), and that custom blue Gary Nixon Bonneville I saw in San Mateo was also in Scottsdale.  Here’s another view of it…

I liked that one so much I asked the Triumph dudes if they were offering a new model like it or if it was just a show bike.   It’s not going to be a regular Triumph model; it’s a custom bike that Triumph is giving away as a contest prize.   I remember seeing bikes styled like that when I was a teenager and I really liked the look (it’s the forerunner of what we now call sports bikes).   I remember watching Gary Nixon race flat track when I was a kid.  Between the reference to Gary Nixon, the style, and the color, I like it.   I like the RX-3 and my Baja Blaster more, but I will admit to liking the custom blue Bonneville you see here.

More cool Triumph stuff…a couple of macro shots of a custom Thruxton Bonneville…

All right, enough of the Triumphs.    On to more sights.   Hey, have you ever seen a $50,000 Kawasaki?   Well, now you can say you have…

That bike, my friends, is the new 300 horsepower (yes, 300 hp!) supercharged Kawasaki. It’s the R model, which stands (of course) for “racing.” Kawasaki is also offering a street version of this supercharged bike for a paltry $25,000.    That almost sounds like a bargain compared to what some of the BMWs, Ducatis, and Harleys are going for.   Imagine that…a streetable, 300 hp, $25K Kawasaki!   Technology does not stand still in this industry!

And of course, one more photo…my by-now obligatory pretty girl shot…in this case a “two-fer” in the Progressive Insurance booth area…

I’ve got quite a few more photos, and sometime in the near future I’ll post more info on the upcoming Baja ride.   We’re getting a lot of questions and a lot of interest in the Baja ride.   Your interest is much appreciated.   Stay tuned, and we’ll have all the good info in future posts.

Ride safe, everyone…

You probably know Genevieve Schmitt of Women Riders Now…

Genevieve wrote a fabulous CSC-150 review about three years ago.  I  remember well the day Steve and I enjoyed with Genevieve…it was a hoot!

I wasn’t surprised at all to read Genevieve’s latest article describing her discovery and love of adventure touring on a sensibly-sized motorcycle in one of her recent articles.   You can read about it, too, at http://www.womenridersnow.com/pages/A_Ride_To_Change_Your_Life.aspx.

It’s another “must read” article.   Pure Genevieve and well-written, it’s a piece that brings you right into the story.

FYI, one of the CSC high-rollers suggested yesterday that we should invite Genevieve on the inaugural Baja CSC Cyclone ride.     I’m doing that today, so stay tuned and we’ll let you know Genevieve’s answer…