CSC Blog

Well, maybe not that far north, but I’m in Nor Cal this weekend visiting friends and relatives.  That image crossing the Grapevine you see above is from the driver’s seat in my old Corvette (12 years old, to be exact, and I’ve had it since it was new).   The antiskid system doesn’t always work well with the Z06’s cruise control, so I turn it off when I’m rolling on the freeway miles.

Here’s another shot along the “Ruta de Fruta” (the region through Gilroy where the fruit stands are plentiful)…

Gilroy is California’s garlic capital, and the rich garlic smell along bucolic CA 152 is just amazing.   Beautiful scenery, with aromas to match.   To paraphrase Robert Duvall, I love the smell of garlic in the morning.

I’m heading over to Hollister later today, not to start any drunken brawls at a motorcycle rally (you old-timers will know what I’m talking about), but to visit my buddy Paul and get in some range time.   Paul recently completed a custom muzzle loader for one of his custom gun clients, and he’s test firing it for the first time today.   I’ll get a photo or two for the blog.

Wow, the China ride is coming up quickly.   You’ve seen the route…

It’s going to be a grand loop and I’ll be riding it with my buddy Joe Gresh (from Motorcyclist magazine) as well as many of the guys who were on the original Western America Adventure tour.  We’re flying over there in just two short weeks.  I am pumped up about this….another grand tour, another opportunity to explore places I’ve never seen before, another chance to check out and ride new Zongshen models, and another book in the making.  I can’t wait.

Time to grab another cup of coffee and fire up the Vette.   I’ll talk to you later, my friends.

We do boosted posts on Facebook quite frequently and they work well for us.    Having said that, I can tell you that we’re very careful about the words we use to make sure our posts only get to the right people.

Others are apparently emulating our approach, but I suspect they’re not doing such a good job targeting their markets.   Take a look at this post that popped up on my FB feed earlier today…

I immediately posted a comment, of course…hey, I can be a butthead on the Internet once in a while, too.   It was the same question I once asked a Rolls Royce salesman:   Can you get my payments under $200 per month?

I’ll let you know what they say…

That’s what happening with the TT250s, folks….

I’m headed up north again tomorrow morning, and I’ll probably do that trip in the Z06. Love those road trips, especially with a small-block Chevy Corvette. Crossing the Central Valley (this time with air conditioning) is going to be sweet!

Our good buddy Charles and his wife just took delivery of their new RX3 motorcycles here at the CSC plant, and they are headed home for Wisconsin!

The two avid riders you see above are going to take three months to get back to Wisconsin, which is the kind of ride I’d like to take.  That’s going to be quite the ride and quite the adventure!   We’re looking forward to the photos!

Yep, that Remington Model 700 I wrote about last week is a keeper.   I had a fun hour on the range earlier this afternoon. The first reloaded ammo I tried in it did the trick…and it broke the half-minute-of-angle barrier with a three-shot group of 0.498 inch!

I’m not wild about the scope, as it doesn’t seem to be able to focus the reticle and the target out at 100 yards simultaneously (or maybe it’s just these old eyes).   A new Weaver or a Leupold is in order…we’ll see.   But the initial results with this resurrected old warhorse are promising.

Later, folks.

Yesterday came and went with a whisper.  D-Day.  6 June.  The day our soldiers, sailors, Marines, and Coasties saved civilization back in 1944.  It was the beginning of the end for the Axis powers.

Ordinarily, I’d get out on the rifle range with the Garand or the Springfield (I almost always do that on D-day and Memorial Day), but it was too nice a day to punch holes in paper.

Nope, yesterday it was time for a one-day road trip.   And that’s just what I did.   Points north.   The Three Flags Highway.   That’s US Highway 395, which runs from the border with Mexico all the way up to Canada.   Get it?  Three Flags (Mexico, the US, and Canada).   It hit 104 degrees out there yesterday, and I loved every minute of it.

Highway 395 is magnificent, but I wanted to scoot up there quickly and do a bit of exploring in and around Manzanar, which is a cool 210 miles north of Casa Berk.

I’ll tell you more about Manzanar in a bit, but first, any road trip through this region wouldn’t be complete without a peek at the Cottonwood charcoal kilns (and, as you’ll see below, a peek from within)…

The Cottonwood charcoal kilns are about 10 miles south of Manzanar and about a mile to the east of Highway 395.   It’s soft sand, but it’s doable on a bike.

Ah, Manzanar.  It’s a free National Park, and it’s worth a trip.   If you don’t know the story, it goes like this:   When World War II broke out, Franklin Roosevelt had Americans of Japanese descent rounded up from the three western states on the Pacific and put into what were basically concentration camps.   It was a national disgrace, it’s hard to believe such things occurred in this country, and if I had to choose a single word to describe my visit, it would be “disturbing.”  On the one hand, it’s hard to believe such a thing could have happened in the United States.  On the other hand, while I believe that people are basically good, the potential for abominations such Manzanar could happen anywhere.   Hell, it happened here.

The camp was just to the right of the guard tower you see above.   Even though it was 104 degrees down on the Mojave floor when I shot this photo, you can still see snow in the eastern Sierras.

There were 10,000 Japanese-American internees kept at Manzanar.   This is what the inside of one of their barracks looked like…

One of the Japanese-American internees was a kid named Bob Uragami.   When I was a big wheel in the Aerojet corporation (in another life a few decades ago), Bob worked with me in the cluster bomb business.   He was a test engineer.

There was a list of all the internees inside the museum at Manzanar, and I found Bob’s name…he was rounded up with the rest of his family when he was just a boy…

Here’s a view looking out the door of one of the barracks toward the Sierras…

This is the Manzanar cemetery.  It’s about a mile away from the barracks on a dirt road, but the road is hard pack and it’s easily doable on a motorcycle…

And the exit…the camp was guarded by US Army MPs…

I had my Nikon with me, and I made a bunch of stops to take photos.   Check out this unusual house, guarded by a rusty old T-rex…

You see a lot of unusual things out in the Mojave, not the least of which was an interesting collection of iron art.   Someone was very good with a torch…

One final shot, folks…and of course, it’s my signature selfie…

So that’s all for now, folks. I’ll be in the plant tomorrow, and things are gearing up for the China expedition. I’ll be posting more about that in the near future, so keep an eye on the blog!

Steve, Duane, and yours truly got out on our RX3s today for a ride up in the San Gabriels, and as you might imagine, it was 50 miles of pure Heaven.   The sun was out but it wasn’t too hot, the traffic wasn’t too bad, and all was well with the world.   After a great breakfast at Flappy Jack’s in Glendora (thanks, Steve!), it was lots of miles of San Gabriel twisties, flowers in full bloom, and great riding.   We stopped for lunch at the Mt. Baldy Lodge (thanks, Duane!), and I got out of there before it was my turn to pay for a meal!

Here a few photos and a quick video I pieced together…my personal RX3 was kind of hogging the 11-16 Tokina lens I used today, but hey, she’s been around the block a few times and she needed some attention!

Yeah, I know….enough of the Baja Blaster!

Here’s a shot of Steve and Duane and their silver and blue RX3s (reportedly, these colors are nearly as fast as the orange)…

That video I promised?  It follows below.   When we made the turn onto Glendora Mountain Road (from the East Fork Road), we spotted another RX3.    You’ll see the bike in the video.  I got out in front of Steve and Duane after that.  The yellow wildflowers up in the mountains were in full bloom, and you’ll see a lot of those in the video, too.  It was a grand day!

I’m headed out to Manzanar tomorrow for a piece I’m doing for one of the motorcycle magazines.  It’s going to be fun.

Later, my friends.

Well, the heat is on…both in terms of prepping the TT250s for you, and in the actual temperatures.   I put a lot of miles on my TT250 yesterday, and it was hot….as in over 90 degrees.  That kind of weather is okay on a motorcycle if you keep moving, but it’s sauna-like when you stop.  It’s supposed to hit 100 today.  Steve and I just got back from lunch, and it feels like it’s there already.   The heat notwithstanding, we’re going to ride the San Gabriels this Sunday.  It’s going to be fun.

We’re ramping up on the TT250s in a big way.   Derek (I know you guys love photos of Derek) was the only guy left when I snapped this photo (everyone else was having lunch).   The good news is that we’re shipping bikes in larger quantities every day.   Hang in there…we’ve increased our delivery rate and we’re still getting better.  I wish I could snap my fingers and get everybody their bikes immediately, but we are checking everything on these bikes so you won’t have to.   We’ve picked up on rerouting the front brake line, Loctiting the muffler cap in place, and a bunch of other things.  We put miles on every bike, too, to make sure it is as close to perfect as we can make it.

There’s construction going on across the street from us, and we were wondering who was moving into the new digs.  Today we found out….

As I was sitting in my corner office earlier today, I noticed a couple of cars pull into our parking lot and five folks piled out and started prepping stuff.  Hey, it was none other than the crew of a new Starbuck’s coffee shop, and they’re going to be right across the street from us.   The Starbuck’s team stopped by to give us all free coffee, which I thought was great.  It literally made my day.   Imagine that…a Starbuck’s right across the street!  There’s a joke in there somewhere about BMW GS motorcycles and Starbuck’s (there’s a sentiment often expressed online that BMWs spend more time in front of Starbuck’s than they do on the road).   But so many of the folks who buy our CSC bikes also own BMWs, I won’t say anything because I don’t want to offend anyone.

Next topic:  Stocks (and in particular, a gun stock).   You may recall about a year ago I posted a blog in which I mentioned a rifle I bought.   It was an older Remington 700 BDL in .223 with a bull barrel.   I bought it for cheap at Gunrunner in Duarte.  That’s a cool little gun shop close to CSC and every once in a while I’ll stop in there to see what they have on the used gun rack.  They had a Remington Model 700 and, as the saying goes, I pulled the trigger.   The Remington Model 700 is one of the best rifles in the world.  It has a lightning-fast lock time (the time between the trigger releasing the sear and the firing pin starting the excitement), and because of that, it is a preferred action for many kinds of rifle competition.

I bought the rifle for a scant $400, which I thought was a hell of a deal (I think new ones are about a thousand bucks now).   The Remington was pretty well gummed up with old oil (so much so the firing pin and trigger were stuck), and the standard M-700 BDL high gloss urethane finish was going south in a big way.  This gun was on my project list of things to do and this week I finally made the time to get to it.

I took the barreled action out of the stock and spent hours on the stock with 0000 steel wool.   When I was finished, my reaction was wow!  I was surprised and really pleased at how well it emerged.   The rifle now looks way better than these rifles do with the original high gloss finish (which never really appealed to me…it’s too Hollywood for my tastes).   The stock had a few nicks and scratches before; now, those are completely gone.   It is a thing of great beauty with a nice, subdued, European-style finish.  Last night I was fooling around with my camera and I grabbed a few shots, and then I played with them a bit in Photoshop to subdue the background and highlight the rifle.  I like how the rifle and this photo in particular turned out…

That gun shot into an inch at 100 yards before I did any work on it (which ain’t too shabby) and that was with what I regard as junk .223 ammo.   I’m going to work on developing a load and I’ll bet I can get it to shoot into 1/2-inch.   We’ll see.

So, about now, you’re probably wondering…okay, the sweltering heat, Starbuck’s, and a gunstock…so what’s the South America thing about?  (In case you forgot the title of this blog.)   Well, I sent the above rifle photo to my good buddy Juan Carlos in Colombia last night (Juan and I did the Moto Colombia trip together, and he is a firearms enthusiast, too).  I had a nice message from Juan (complete with photos) this morning…

Hi Joe:

That rifle is beautiful!!!  

I imagine it must shoot with great precision.

Today I was remembering our trip. I am now in Barichara with my girlfriend Eliana (she is a biker, too).   I’m testing a new 200cc AKT bike for the magazine and told her that here you felt the desire to return with your wife someday.

I share a few shots!!  

Juan

As you will recall, Juan and his buddy Carlos showed me a wonderful time in Colombia, and it was indeed the grandest adventure of my life.   That photo above of Juan at the edge of a cliff is near Barichara, and it is a similar photo of that exact spot that I used for the cover of Moto Colombia!, our book about the Colombian expedition.   Fun times for everyone.

That’s it for now, folks.  Ride safe, and stay tuned….as always, there’s more coming on the CSC blog!

While there are a few different ways I can get to the CSC plant in the morning, none is more fun that the mountain route…Glendora Ridge Road, Glendora Mountain Road, East Fork Road, and Azusa Canyon Highway.   That’s exactly what I did on my TT250 this morning…

Yep, Motorcycle Online (the world’s oldest online motorcycle magazine) tested the CSC RC3.   I just read the review and I thought it was a good one.   You can read it here!