CSC Blog

The featured “Destinations” piece in Motorcycle Classics this month is Hells Canyon National Recreation Area, and you can read all about it here.  It’s a cool place and it was one of our stops on the 5000-mile Western America Adventure Ride.  That was a grand ride, and I was able to write three or four magazine articles based on various spots we visited on that epic adventure.   Motorcycle Classics is a great magazine.  If you enjoy reading about vintage bikes and seeing wonderful photos, there’s no better publication.

Wowee, check this out:   Roland Wheeler’s racing RC3!

Much more to follow on this story, folks!

7 January is the day of our first CSC ride of 2017, and it’s going to be a run up to Newcomb’s Ranch on the Angeles Crest Highway!

Old, new, slow, fast….you’ll see all kinds of moto exotica at Newcomb’s Ranch on the world-famous Angeles Crest Highway!

The “Crest” is one of my favorite rides.   We’ll leave from the CSC plant at 8:30 (we’ll have a pot of coffee brewing when you arrive), take an easy roll west on the 210 freeway, and pick up world-famous Angeles Crest Highway near Glendale.   Angeles Crest Highway is a great ride through the Angeles Forest to one of the world’s all time classic motorcycle destinations.    You can read about it a bit more here.   We’ll have a great time and I guarantee you’ll love it.  One other tidbit…at each one of our monthly CSC company rides, we’ll have a surprise item on sale for those who ride with us, so don’t let this opportunity get away.

Let us know (info@cscmotorcycles.com) if you’re planning on riding with us.   We’d love to see you!

Wow, as I think back over the last 12 months, I’m thinking that it sure was a lot of fun!

Hey, best wishes for the holidays from the crew here at CSC! And as a special feature, let’s consider some of the high points from December 2015 to December 2016!

Reaching all the way back to December of last year, a few of my favorite photos from the Colombia expedition…

With Juan and Carlos below the Volcan Nevado del Ruiz

Twisties in the Andes Mountains

In January of this past year, Joe Gresh’s story about our 5000-mile Western America Adventure Ride hit the stands in Motorcyclist magazine.   Here’s the photo of Utah’s Highway 12 that formed the backdrop for this great article…

Utah’s Highway 12…as close as anyone gets to Heaven without a one-way ticket!

In February, we were busy evaluating our new TT250 model.  Here’s a favorite shot of one of the four prototypes we brought in for testing…

The TT250 has been a riotously successful motorcycle, and it my “go to” bike when I want to get my knees in the breeze.

That brings us to March of last year, with our outstanding 2nd Annual Baja Run.   Wow, that was fun, with some of the best whale watching I’ve ever experienced in Baja!   The best way to get an overview of that awesome adventure ride is to check out our YouTube video…

April 2016 saw lots of good things happening.  We were super busy that month, but I never work get in the way of a ride on my RX3 on Glendora Ridge Road!

The mighty RX3 up on Glendora Ridge Road!

May….what happened in May?  Oh yeah….that’s the month Rider magazine published their road test on the RX3!

Rider magazine testing a silver RX3. This was the first year we brought in silver RX3s.  I think it’s one of the best colors ever on these great motorcycles.

That brings us to June, July, and a bit of August, and those months were all about the grandest adventure ever…our 6,000-mile ride across China.   That was an epic ride (one that I will never stop thinking about).

A Zongshen advertising poster…Zongshen publicized the ride widely…so much so that Gresh and I were celebrities in China!

Electric scooters in Beijing…you’ll want to pay attention to developments in this area!

The Shaolin Temple…the birthplace of Kung Fu.

The celebratory, end-of-ride dinner in Qingdao…I sure miss these guys!

There are two epic videos out on the China ride…one from Joe Gresh, and the other from Zongshen…

That brings us to September and a big event that month…the Horizons Unlimited rally in Mariposa where I saw my good buddy Rob (who may ride with us on the Baja run next year)…

Iron Butt Rob and his RX3

October saw our TT250 ride to San Felipe with a great bunch of guys…Willie, Greg, Abe, Mike, Matt, Dan 1, Dan 2…it was a grand ride on a great motorcycle!

The Rumarosa Grade on the way to San Felipe from Tecate. Dramatic riding, to be sure!

We have a short video on that ride, too…

And that brings us to November, just last month…and the big news last month was that we’re going racing with Roland Wheeler on an RC3!

Roland and his ride…a sleek blue RC3…watch for more on this activity in future CSC blogs!

The RC3 is a great bike…here’s my video on it…

And here we are, one year later, in December 2016!   We’ve seen and heard about the introduction of several 250-class ADV bikes from the big boys, and we recently posted a blog about that titled “The Sincerest Form of Flattery.”  The results were predictable, with a handful of keyboard commando miscreants deeply troubled by our daring to point out that others were copying us.  Motorcyclist’s Joe Gresh said it best…we’ve “nudged the giant” (referring to BMW’s plans for a 310cc ADV bike).  I like that.

Nudging the giant? It’s what we do best, folks!

I’m in northern California again this week, celebrating the holidays with my family and our new granddaughter.  It’s been a banner year, and I’m excited about what’s coming up next year.  We already have folks signed up for our PCH ride and our next Baja foray.   It’s going to be fun!

Enjoy the holidays, folks….we sure are.

I’ve been thinking about it…maybe a 3-day ride from the plant up to Carmel, taking in the best part of the Pacific Coast Highway (from Cambria to Carmel).   Check out a few of the scenes from my recent run up the coast along this stretch…

That’s the Bixby Bridge in that next-to-last photo, and it’s got a pretty cool story behind it.  It was the bridge that completed the route along the Pacific, and it was part of Roosevelt’s effort to lift the US out of the Great Depression (the Bixby Bridge was a real “shovel-ready” project if ever there was one).  The cost estimate for the Bixby Bridge was a whopping $203K back in 1930…and those fellows completed it for just $199,861!

The Pacific Coast Highway really is one of America’s crown jewels.    My two all time favorite roads in the US are Highway 12 in Utah (from Bryce National Park to Capitol Reef) and the PCH.  They’re both great.

I’m thinking maybe a Friday-to-Sunday ride, maybe toward the end of February for a PCH run.  Let me know if you’re interested.  If we get enough CSC riders I’ll start scheduling it.

Ride safe, my friends.  I’m on the road again tomorrow!

One of the execs at CSC just forwarded this to me.   It’s the story of a woman who rode around South America on a 150cc Zongshen, and you can read it here.  I didn’t even know this online ADV magazine existed (shame on me), but I do now and I’ll be following it!

Well done, Egle, and thanks for sharing your adventure!

2017 is going to be a great year, and we’re filling in the dates now.   My good buddy Matt activated our CSC website’s calendar feature and it’s a quick place to check on upcoming events.  As a heads up, here’s what we have coming up:

• Every first Saturday of the month will be a company ride, leaving from the CSC plant at 8:30 to points north, south, east, or west, depending on the plan for that month’s ride.
• Our first 2017 company ride will be on the first Saturday of the month (that’s the 7th of January).  I’ll be there, and we’re going to do the Angeles Crest Highway (unless the road is iced over, in which case we’ll pick a different location).    If you’d like to ride with other CSC riders, pencil in 7 January 2017 on your calendar!
• We’re going to have an event at the plant on the third Saturday of each month.  Watch for more information on these in a future blog.
• Our 2017 Big Baja ride will be an 8-day epic event starting on 19 March and finishing on 26 March.  If you’re going, you need to get an email to us (info@cscmotorcycles.com) now.

That’s it for now, folks.   Keep an eye on the blog, and we’ll add more to the calendar as we go.

The sincerest form of flattery…clockwise from top, an original CSC RX3 in Baja on one of our free adventure tours, the Suzuki DL250, the BMW 310 GS, the Kawasaki Versys, and the Honda 250 Rally.

It’s no secret that several manufacturers are playing catchup with CSC and Zongshen.  Imagine that…other companies copying the Chinese!   What I’m referring to, of course, are the several new entries into the 250cc-class ADV bike category.   There’s been a lot on the Internet lately about the Honda 250cc Rally, the Kawasaki Versys, the Suzuki PeeWeeStrom, and BMW’s Mumbai Special, and of course, preproduction versions of these bikes (the only ones that currently exist) put in an appearance at some of the  international motorcycle shows

We’ve had folks ask if the new market entrants make us nervous.  The short answer is absolutely not.  We love it.  You’ll recall we did a blog a couple of years back about 250cc being the perfect size for real-world adventure travel (see our Why a 250? blog), and we still believe that.  It’s  nice to see others thinking the same way.   Our path to market puts us in a very strong position.  And there’s another factor…so far, none of these bikes are actually available….it’s all been smoke and mirrors and Internet postings and show bikes.   They’re coming, though, and that’s a good thing for growing the small adventure bike market.   It can only help us.

Not all of the information is available yet, but based on what’s out there, I assembled a comparison chart this morning…

I estimated the freight and setup fees on the Kawi, the Honda, and the Suzuki based on what I see dealers doing on their other bikes.  Actually, some of the combined freight and setup fees on dealership bikes run up to over $1400, so I’m being conservative with my estimates.  You might be able to negotiate the freight and setup down to $750 (you  might even be able to get these typically inflated fees even lower, but not by much; freight and setup is a major profit center for most dealerships).  BMW’s freight and setup is typically included in their list price, and I don’t know if they’re going to do that with their new 310 GS (so I just left it as a TBD for now).  I showed our freight and setup as “included” because right now it is; we’ll probably add that back to the price in 2017, but it will never be as high as the charges you normally see for these items at typical dealerships.

What surprised me were the motorcycles’ published weights.  We took a little gas from the keyboard commandos when we first published the weight on the RX3, but as you can see from the comparisons above, we slot right in with the rest of the new market entrants.

Where CSC has clear advantages are in the areas of price, our free online maintenance tutorials and service manual, and the freedom from the typical shenanigans you run into when buying a new bike from a dealer.  Plus, you can actually buy our bike today.   You can’t do that with any of the others yet.  There are other things, too, that you can’t really put a price on that come with every RX3:

• The RX3 has a proven world-wide adventure touring reputation (in my case, that includes China, Mexico, Colombia, and the US; others have traveled all over the world on Zongshen motorcycles).
• The solid reputation CSC has for customer support.   As I always say, don’t take my word on this; check out ADVRider.com and ChinaRiders.net to see what others say about us.
• Our free Baja adventure rides.
• Our really cool CSC blog!

As I said above, the new entrants are a welcome addition to the mix.    These bikes will bring other folks’ attention to the small ADV market segment, and anyone who does their homework will soon realize that the RX3 is the best (and least expensive) bike available.

A couple of months ago I recommended a tool kit for the TT250.   This new tool popped up on Facebook and I thought I would show it on the blog…

That looks like a worthwhile addition, but I’m waiting until they offer one with a Whitworth feature.  I used to ride older Triumphs, and their nuts and bolts were all Whitworth sizes…

Y0u’ve probably heard of William Randolph Hearst, and if not, you’ve almost certainly heard of Hearst Castle.  It’s the former private residence of William Randolph Hearst, who was about as eccentric a figure as ever lived.   As I hear it, every US President was in his back pocket during his reign, and the guy had more money than God.   The original family fortune was made in silver mining and then publishing.   Old Hearst built himself a castle along (you guessed it) the Pacific Coast Highway.   We passed right by it yesterday, and I’ve taken the Hearst Castle tour no fewer than four times.  If you’re ever out that way, I think it’s a “must see” part of any inaugural trip along the PCH.  When we do our CSC tour, we’ll take a half-day to do just that.

Anyway, to get to the point, on all of my prior visits I heard from  the tour guides that Hearst’s eccentricities included a world class zoo, and wild animals (including zebra) could still occasionally be spotted running free on the Hearst Castle’s substantial grounds.  I had never seen any of these rumored remnants from the Hearst reign…until yesterday, that is.

Look what we spotted on our way back to So Cal!

I had my Nikon D810 with me, and I brought along the 70-300 lens (the same one I grabbed those dynamite vulture photos with on the RX3 expedition in Colombia).   The zebras were a good 400 to 500 yards from the road, but that 300mm lens with vibration reduction really pulls them in.  It was a lucky break.  I’d never seen the zebras before and I thought the stories about them were baloney, but I was happy to be proven wrong!

That black-and-white paint theme is interesting, and on the way back, I wondered what a TT250 would look like done up in a zebra design.  Hmmm…