I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about Robert Pirsig, lately.
Today, for some unknown reason I found myself compelled to take tools in hand and dive in on some long-deferred motorcycle maintenance.
I’m absolutely sure the two are in no way related.
My K1200LT – a motorcycle with the capability for transcontinental travel – never got further than Richmond, Virginia since the beginning of the pandemic.
I’ve had oil service intervals that have come up based on time since last change, rather than mileage.
My shame knows no bounds.
The BMW Motorcycle Company has always been a bit obsessive/compulsive when it comes to hydraulic brake maintenance.
A dealer with whom I sometimes did business had the ‘annual BMW brake service’ posters all over the inside of his men’s room. Including inside the bathroom stalls.
Maybe the human mind goes into some vulnerable, easily accessed programming mode when one’s bladder is full, but ever since my bikes stopped using cable-operated brakes, I’ve flushed and bled my brakes every year.
Until 2020.
No matter.
I had a MitiVac 8 liter fluid extractor, three new bottles of Prestone DOT4 synthetic brake fluid, and a Sunday afternoon all to myself.
Did I mention that the LT also has a hydraulic clutch?
It would have been better had the temperature been above 45. Better still would have been the subtraction of about 35 miles an hour of wind speed. And I wouldn’t have minded if some of the low scudding clouds have given their chairs to a little bit of sunshine.
But you work with what you got, not the fantasy set-up that might never show up.
I grabbed an old moving pad, placed it down on the slab next to the LT, and literally got down to work.
Lately, when the LT’s RPMs are up, I’ve heard what to my ear sounded like a vibrating muffler heat shield. A 20-plus year-old motorcycle with over 100,000 miles has a few rattles – it’s nothing unusual.
I was completely right about the buzzing heat shield.
What I wasn’t right about was the reason.
As I got down on the ground to prepare the rear wheel brake caliper for bleeding, what I saw just about stopped my heart.
When BMW designs a new motorcycle, the first model year is never a fully wrung out design. The 1999 K1200 LTs had two particular faults that pre-manufacturing testing did not identify. The first was that despite the adoption of a brand-new aluminum beam frame, the LT was not quite as structurally rigid as their design calculations seemed to indicate. The relatively minor amount of flex in the structure resulted in breaking welds on the exhaust header’s four into one collector as the system flexed ever so slightly. The second issue was that the LT’s overall length and relatively low ground clearance caused more than a few solid ground outs where when entering a driveway or any feature with a slight rise. Turning, for example, into a parking lot with a DOT code-standard break in a sidewalk, the rear of the oil pan would hit the ground, doing major damage to the engine.
The fix for both of these things was combined into a single structural element that sits in the hollow under the rear of the engine’s sump. A large, triangular piece of milled stainless steel provides a mount for a substantial bash plate – the BMW parts fiche calls it an ‘underride protector’ – while simultaneously providing an anchor point for a reinforcing arm that provides additional rigidity to the stressed portion of the exhaust system.
In the 99 LT, this was an empty space.
In LTs made in 2000 until the end of the run, that space is an absolute maze of complexity, with bash plate, mounting points and reinforcing arms all crisscrossing underneath the bike. It’s an assembly that would try the patience of a saint. I know this because if one needs to service the exhaust system, or even when one has to change the gearbox oil, it all has to come apart, and go back together again in a very particular order.
Underride Protector?It’s nearly impossible to tell from the parts diagram, but the bash plate and exhaust support rely on the same two long bolts.
Taking mine apart now, though, would be fairly straightforward, because three of the four critical fasteners had gone AWOL some time ago – the whole assembly was hanging there on one of the smaller stabilizing bolts and bouncing around in space.
I’d also remarked how much smoother my machine had seemed at highway speed. It was smoother because the exhaust reinforcing arm – which provided a pathway for vibration to enter the structure of the machine – was no longer connected, well, to anything.
I took a break from the shop, cleaned up my hands, and hit the computerized parts diagrams to see if I was lucky enough to be able to find generic hardware locally to set things aright.
Is anyone shocked that I wasn’t?
The key 2 bolts that secure the bash plate were M10 x 55 bolts.The other two bolts were even weirder at M8 x 22. (22!) Good luck finding any longer metric hardware whose length doesn’t end in zero. The new factory parts are also shouldered bolts whose business end is, shockingly, slathered in factory thread locking compound. A few moments on the MaxBMW website at least had the parts inbound toward the shop.
Back out in the shop, I made quick work of flushing and bleeding the bike’s hydraulic clutch and brakes, and did the work efficiently enough that I only used a single 12 oz. bottle of DOT 4. A look at my maintenance logs indicated that the last time I’d done a full service was pre-pandemic, in late spring of 2019.
I quick and careful spin around the block confirmed that both clutch and brakes were providing better feel and power post service.
The LT will need to stay off the road until the hardware arrives to put all of this stuff back solidly in place.
I’m going to look at the bright sides. First, I didn’t spit the whole assembly off at 80 miles an hour, which would have likely caused some entirely undesirable excitement. Second, I’m more than halfway to the disassembly required to change my overdue gearbox oil and complete that annual service.
Win/win.
Postscript:
This turned out to be far more ugly than it appeared at first glance. When the correct hardware arrived at the shop, I slid under the bike and attempted to put everything back in place – it very quickly became apparent that the bash plate and its associated hardware had taken some damage while it was hanging in space – all of the components were either bent or distorted. After a few minutes, I removed the single remaining bolt and took the debris over to the workbench.
After some time with Greg’s Low Budget Parts Washer (can of brake cleaning spray and shoprag), a bench vise, a set of locking pliers, and a small bubble level, I had de-bent the mild steel parts back into a shape that had all of the bits so that they were once again parallel. Having cleaned the parts up and examined them, the substantial dents and scrapes on the bash plate quickly disavowed me of any idea I might have had of just running the bike without them — there clearly HAD been a reason why BMW had re-engineered the chassis in this manner.
When the time to do the work finally arrived, I went through the extra trouble of removing all of the lower fairings — it made it far easier to do the work if I could see what I was trying to align and fasten. After about 20 filthy minutes, and a fair amount of Blue Loctite compound, the ‘underride protector’ and exhaust reinforcement support were back in place. 15 minutes more spent reinstalling the lower fairings and we were back in business.
A quick test ride yielded the sensation of a bike that seemed far more rigid — there was a subtle 4 cylinder vibration now perceptable resulting from tying the exhaust back into the bike’s structure.
For a motorcycle with over 100,000 miles, and 24 years of road, this LT is still an extraordinary piece of engineering — with a newly installed Michelin Road 6 GT front tire installed, the bike’s turn-in manners and cornering line holding are like those of a bike that weighs three or four hundred pounds less than it actually does.
Note to self – in future, don’t make assumptions about new noises rising from the lower decks. <smiley strongly implied>
Motorcycle Maintenance is not always the glamorous stuff of Philosophy Book Titles.
Far from being a conduit to a fully enlightened state of consciousness, sometimes it’s just greasy hands, dirt under the fingernails and a bunch of scraped and busted knuckles.
Today’s tale from the Annals of The Busted Knuckle was a short and simple tale – the fourth motorcycle battery in four months’ time to shake off this mortal (electrical) coil.
All this practice is making me genuinely good at the swaps, though.
The oldest bike in the stable is my BMW /5. It’s a 1973 model, and has lived a very full life. The fullness of the /5’s life has let it experience being modified and improved for most of that life, free of the fear of reducing its monetary value to some hypothetical collector, and focused only on ever becoming a better motorcycle to ride. The Toaster Tank has a sleeved up 900cc engine, custom machined needle bearing rocker arms, a dramatically lightened flywheel, and a more modern 5 speed transmission that was required to handle the additional torque and power that the original 4 speed repeatedly could not.
Despite increasing the size of the starter battery and the output of the bike’s alternator, my /5 has been the sketchiest of starters even under the best of conditions. The /5 was BMW’s first motorcycle with electric starting, and the bikes that immediately followed it had lower starter motor and flywheel gearing because it was nose-on-yer-face obvious that they needed to.
The net impact of all of that exposition is that any /5 with a battery that is starting to reach the end of its useful life will send you an unignorable signal that it is time to buy a new one – it either won’t engage its starter solenoid, or it won’t crank over, or both. You then get to choose between jump start, bump start, or life as a pedestrian.
The Toaster had been sliding imperceptibly towards this ignominy for the better part of two years. Finally, it got to that point where the frog had become soup, and I clicked up a new AGM battery from a seller in Edison (good place to buy a battery), New Jersey. Mighty Max batteries – a mix of AGM and Gel types — are made in Thailand and Viet Nam, and are very reasonably priced and seem to be well made. They exhibit very low self-discharge rates, and have great cranking power, at least so far. Ask me again in three years.
Two bolts and one rubber strap later, I had a new MightyMax sitting in the /5’s battery cradle. After buttoning the toolbox and saddle back up, I’d opened one fuel petcock, pushed in the /5’s elegantly aerodynamic ignition pin, set the enrichener, pulled in the clutch, and pressed the correct one of the /5’s only two available buttons.
The starter solenoid clunked into place with authority, and the big twin cranked over hard and fast. The little aero engine fired immediately, and came up to a solid idle that let me kill the enrichener – I blipped the throttle and the revs snapped upward. I always notice – only in retrospect – that a battery that can’t throw enough current to heave a starter motor also can’t throw enough current to keep coils and plugs in their happy places. The rock solid idle and great throttle response signified these coils were happy, if not downright ecstatic.
I let the Toaster do its ‘seemingly impossibly slow tickover’ thing while I pulled on my helmet and gloves.
I ran the ‘off pavement’ variant of my post-wrenching test route – sliding the old boxer down onto Poffenberger Road’s lovely gumbo of solid gravel and muddy water-filled chuckholes. The more off-road focused Heidenau Scout tires the bike carries provide a bit more confidence on this surface, and the new fire in the holes could punch the tire loose on throttle on demand in a very entertaining way.
It’s a road I know too well, and the ride was too soon over.
If the purpose was to validate that the bike was running well, though, then it was 100% mission accomplished.
As we came off the dirt and back onto the pavement, though, I came up behind a much overloved and seriously patinaed Chevy S10 pickup. It was carrying far less than Redneck Pickup Truck Nominal road speed, and I was catching bad vibes from this tiny truck carrying three fairly substantial young dudes, who sat staggered in the S10’s tiny cab, with the back seat passenger seated between his buddies in the center of the jump seat.
As we came back up out of the woods and into the residential area at the end of Poffenburger, my peripheral vision picked up a jackrabbit hauling jack on a front lawn parallel to the road.
When things go bad, I see in slow motion. It’s probably the reason old motorcyclist me is still here.
I clearly saw that driver snap the wheel to the right, and the S10 veered off the road.
Why anybody harbors this kind of unbridled hatred for rabbits is another datapoint supporting the decline and fall of western civilization.
When the truck’s right side tires dropped off the pavement, the left side tires leapt skyward. The driver, while bunny-hostile, was not utterly unskilled, and executed another snap steering wheel input back toward the left and the road – effectively unrolling his pickup and getting all four of his wheels back on the ground.
The bunny, I’ll note, had executed a hard right rudder with afterburners maneuver, and had peeled off away from the S10, across the lawn and clear of the blast radius.
Me, I did an evasive – or at least a buffer increasing – maneuver of my own – giving back throttle, and dropping from third gear back to second – trying to put as much space as possible between me and the Great Fearless Hunters.
Given these dudes had already clearly come down in favor of splattering bunnies for fun, I really had absolutely no interest in divining their attitudes towards motorcyclists.
Old fire trucks always had a sign that read ‘Keep Back 500 Feet’.
These guys could use one of those. It would make them just a tiny bit easier to spot.
Wouldn’t help the jackrabbits, though. Not that they seem to need it – in this battle of wits, they appear to have the upper paw.
Lately, it seems, she’s seemed …a tad more random.
Maybe it’s just me.
Anyway, when Moms N hawks up a sunny, eighty-degree day during the first week of February, I try hard not to overthink it, and just grab my leathers.
My riding life has been a bit restrictive of late. ‘Mr. If I Don’t Go for A Ride Everyday I Gets A Little Wiggy’ has been lots Wiggy on that account.
And a few other accounts as well, but the less said about that the better.
In the interest of my health, I have somewhat slowed the cadence of my relationship with beer. This necessity has given rise to a quotable aphorism – “If one is going to have a beer, one had best make it a good one.”
I have no doubt that the same concept – make sure it’s a good one – does not need substantive retooling to be applied to motorcycle rides.
A lot of my rides are what IT guys call ‘outcome based’.
Go from A to B.
Accomplish N
Go from B back to A.
Rides like this are primarily practical, with the bare minimum amount of hooliganism supplied just for seasoning.
This wasn’t one of those rides.
Sometimes one just needs to ride like a knob – to feel the wind in your face, to fill one’s lungs with air and whoop on the throttle – to get yer ya-yas out.
It ain’t where you’re going, it’s how you’re going there.
There’s only one horse in my stable for that kind of ride.
After moving the more frequently used practical rides out of the way, I rolled my 1975 R90S out into the sunlight. She’s been sleeping for more than a few weeks with a tank full of stabilized fuel, a crank full of clean oil, and a fresh AGM battery. I used my portable inflator to set the bike’s Michelin Pilot Activs to a pressure optimized for stick.
I pulled on my helmet, fastened and snapped the strap in place, and gloved up – cinching my favorite elkskins in place with their old school retaining straps.
Throwing a leg over an S is a level of magnitude less dramatic than climbing aboard the F800 GS that serves as my daily 2 wheeled SUV. It’s at times like these that I recall an old Peter Egan tale about his S, where he wrenched his back on the first day of a planned trip, and had to return home to swap out his Harley for the S, as it was the only motorcycle he’d ever had that exerted no stress of any kind on his personal chassis. If I recall correctly he made some comment to the effect of “if the guys that made plastic green army men toys had made a motorcycle, the R90S would have been it – one just snapped the green guy aboard and everything fell naturally to hand.”
Egan, unsurprisingly, wasn’t wrong.
For a bike that was supposed to be ‘a sports motorcycle’, the S fits me like an extension of my body – before the LT was acquired, I’d spent a whole summer commuting for work between Jefferson and Boston, Mass, and I never found myself wishing for a motorcycle that was more comfortable.
One that was 25 years newer, perhaps, but not more comfortable.
Taps on, choke set, clutch in, and I gave the S The Finger.
On the third compression stroke, she fired and came up to a fast idle without a single stumble. After hitting one of those bad spots where several of my motorcycles’ batteries failed all at once, I decided to try a new manufacturer for AGM starter batteries – Mighty Max – they’re roughly one third the price of the ones I’d been using – time will tell if it’s a better choice. Starting the S motor is certainly a good test – this one has a 1000 cc big bore kit and raised compression – and the engine turned over hard and fast on the starter.
I was able to slide the choke off after only thirty seconds or so, and the engine came to a reasonable, if a little noisy idle. The left cylinder is always a tad noisier when cold, but quiets down as the engine warms – I suspect I either have a bit more wear in the rocker arm bearings, or perhaps the left head is just the assembly that is the furthest away from the oil pump, and is just the last to get lubrication.
With the engine warm enough to take throttle and rev, I dropped the shifter down into first and headed for the road.
I always enjoy the run down Lander Road as it runs past the boat ramp on the C & O Canal. That part of Lander was probably designed in the first part of the 1800s, and the road is narrow, bumpy and follows the hilly topography, rather than blasting holes in it that level it out. It’s a perfect place for a narrow, agile motorcycle, and I long ago learned the shapes of this road so that we’re always leaning hard, hard on the gas, or engine braking to set up for the next tight bumpy bend.
When we get back to Maryland Route 464, I take the right and head down towards the river. With the engine heated through I rev each gear out a little – shifting at just over 6,000 –the thonk of the transmission picking up the next gear rings in one’s bones. For some reason the boxer feels more eager to rev today – maybe it’s the clean oil, or the fuel stabilizer has goosed our combustion chemistry somehow, or maybe both – but very few 50-year-old motorcycles behave like the upper right part of the tach is the only place they really live, but this one definitely was today.
Rolling north on Ballenger Creek Pike my perception of time slowed everything down — everything just went chrome. Opening the slides on the DelOrtos made for a solid kick in the pants when the accelerator pumps kicked in – the front wheel was coming up off the pavement above 5000 rpm in second and in third. With the revs up each power stroke made the bike’s steel-tubed frame ring like a bell. On some of the more pronounced rises in the Pike the S was aviating, taking air.
The whole experience was somehow rowdy – where many traditional BMW motorcycles are balanced, refined – the S is just a little too much of everything. It’s fun precisely because it isn’t civilized – it’s a bike that wants to party – the official motorcycle of ‘here, hold my beer.’
The run up Cap Stein Road is ‘S Optimized’ – the road is a mix of technical combinations and open straights – everything from corners strung together that have the rider exiting one bend and immediately setting up for the next one – leaning the bike from one side of the tires to the other and back again with no break in between, the ride seeming like a replay of the best European GP circuits.
Heading back across the ridge toward home and into The Valley, I came up behind a minivan doing the things that minivans do. At three intersections Mini turned in the direction I intended to travel. Finally we turned into Sumantown Road – one of my home roads that runs past the Former Shamieh Homestead. After cresting a short rise, Sumantown runs through the middle of an enormous cornfield, which in February was cut short to inches of stubble. There are no intersections here, and one can literally see for the proverbial country mile in all directions.
There is no time like the present.
I put on my turnsignal, gave a short flick on my eurospec passing beam, and rolled the throttle open to the stops.
The big boxer gave me the initial torque-laden kick in the pants, and then went into hyperspace. Mini was a dim memory when I slid back into the right lane, executed a slick shift at 7000, and got back into the throttle again. I’ve never felt this bike make this kind of top end power, and it felt way too good to have it be a one-time thing – I took the bike to 7000 again, shifted up to fourth, and then set about shedding some speed.
I might be in the middle of literal nowhere, but it wasn’t a one hundred mile an hour kind of nowhere – I slowly gave back throttle and returned to a world which features legal speeds and the occasional short-tempered Frederick County Sheriff.
Five minutes later the S sat in my driveway – silent except for exhaust pipes and alloy that were singing their song of thermal contraction.
It’s hard to put words to the lightness of spirit that such a ride catalyzes.
Although I know better, for a little while at least, it seemed that neither this motorcycle nor I are old, and that the both of us could never die.
A lot of life lessons achieve clarity in one’s mind only when far too much of life has already gone right by.
If the Buddhists turn out to be right and each of us get another life or nine to take advantage of one’s newfound wisdom, that would be great, but my money is on that not being how these things work.
It’s only very recently that I came to really understand that nothing is eternal.
So many people, institutions, communities, whole ways of life that I thought were immutable, immortal, have proved to not be so by simply ceasing to exist – disappearing – without warning.
Every one and every thing you and I have ever known, it seems, is just a brief flash on the detector of god’s own hadron collider – just a bright short blink in the eye of cosmic time.
So what heart-shattering departure from this earthly plane has me in such a philosophical state of mind – in such a hyper-aware state of both your and my own mortality?
I mean, like, who died, dude?
Just yesterday morning, I got an e-mail from Tom Coradeschi. Tom had been one of the key Admins that had helped keep the Internet BMW Riders e-mail list server and its supporting ecosystem and infrastructure alive. Tom let me and however many of us may still have been subscribed, that ‘alive’ was scheduled to end on February 15th, 2024. The whole idea of a text limited e-mail list was ridiculously anachronistic, usage was much reduced, and the whole operation was costing a small boatload of currency which the admins had apparently been paying out of their pockets. For quite a while.
Ok, so when a certain DNS change is made, no more BMW Motorcycle Mail will be exchanged.
So what?
The modern global network which we now all take for granted – delivering presence, voice, interactive video – once only had text characters.
And nothing that came after that text-based Internet BMW Riders list ever seemed to have such a well-developed sense of place.
Or such a palpable sense of personalities, of community.
I’m not trying to ascribe to it the stature of Arthurian Legend, but at very least, it was A Hell of A Thing.
***
I’d first discovered The List when I went to work for an IT Firm that employed quite a few talented and curious Card-carrying Geeks. They’d come from Unix server and workstation manufacturers, from America’s Nerdiest Science and Engineering Universities, and they knew about modem banks.
A desktop system in the back office made a do-it-yourself router, the modem banks were progressive – in that they’d bring up as many connections as one needed to move the bits – and they were connected to something called the Internet.
Never heard of it.
And now that I think about it, I’m not sure any of that Internet stuff had any serious thing to do with the stated business of our employer, but never mind that.
Net/net, though, was that by sometime in 1995 or 96, I had subscribed to the IBMWR list.
I’d been using my 1973 R75/5 as daily transportation since 1985 or so, and as a result, I had a very large thirst for information about how to effectively maintain my machinery myself, since Jr. Employees in the IT field then made dramatically less than BMW motorcycle mechanics.
The List provided nearly limitless Information, provided by folks that had been riding BMWs for decades longer than I had.
It turned out, though, that the people who shared that information were levels of magnitude more interesting than mere information about motorcycles.
Because of the relative infancy of The Internet, the ancient ones of the Arpanet sites – the precursor to the modern Internet – were still very much in evidence. The University of California System, U Chicago, all of the US Energy Department National Labs, MIT – you know, those groovy intellectual lightweights, all shared nerds with BMW motorcycles. Guys that taught and experimented in Physics, Mathematics, Mechanical, Electrical and Nuclear Engineering, and Computer Science tended to regard anything as dog mechanically simple as a Type 247 Airhead BMW Motorcycle as almost trivial to maintain and modify.
And those folks didn’t mind explaining it to the rest of us.
Actually, they seemed to sort of enjoy it.
There were other folks other than the Alpha Nerds on the list. There were personalities from BMW’s brief forays into racing – riders and mechanics. There were folks from across the motorcycle industry – engineers, writers, publishers. And a few genuine characters from the classic and antique motorcycle business.
And then there was the great unwashed masses – you know, the guys (and even a very few ladies) just you and like me.
Despite the broad spectrum of personalities, The List was operated as a perfect democracy. To avoid any kind of BMW Club Political Sillyness, each and every member held the Office of President – each individual and the collective shared ultimate power equally.
The Internet BMW Riders was virtual, democratic, and global – drawing participation from nations across the globe.
At a certain point, though, the list just crossed over into In Real Life.
It started out in a humble enough way.
As previously noted, I was making my living as a Humble Tech. In my Humble Tech role I found myself installing and upgrading file servers that belonged to the Federal Aviation Administration.
If there was an airport there, no matter how small, so was the FAA.
So if I needed to get to all of these airport offices, I’d fly there, right?
Silly Rabbit.
Airport Towns across the Mid Atlantic and the Midwest become spokes in The Never Ending Airhead Tour. The Slash 5 had its Rifle Fairing, a set of modern BMW Touring-Koffer which were commodious and rectangular, and a regulation Denfield German Police Solo saddle. It would go anywhere, carrying me, a shoulder bag full of personal effects, and a second case filled with server parts, load media and disk drive units.
So I toured most of Pennsylvania and Virginia and West Virginia and North Carolina and Ohio and Indiana, wrenching on NetWare and just riding my /5.
At one point, I had a flash of inspiration.
I announced my work travel itinerary in advance on The List.
The conventional wisdom at that time was that were one to meet people one had met on the Internet, they would be either serial killers and/or serial rapists and that you would most surely die.
Motorcyclists have advanced risk management skills, and after comparing 80 mph cornering with being victimized by catfishing killer rapist bikers, I was ok with my odds, and let people know where I’d be.
It would go something like this:
“hey – ( I had a profound aversion to capitalization at this juncture ) work is sending me to south bend, indiana next week. if you’re in south bend, and want to get together for dinner and a beer, lemme know.”
And a startling percentage of the time, somebody did.
And instead of being stuck by myself in a whole bunch of small and medium cities, I met interesting new people everywhere, all of us united in our love of our quirky German motorcycles and a cussed commitment to doing things our own way.
I wasn’t a major BMW Rally Rat, but I did a few big rally rides, and started running into the same guys I’d been meeting on the Never Ending rides at each rally, no matter how far afield that had taken them.
Work took me to Pittsburg and the area around it fairly frequently.
On one trip, Gary Smith, one of the Officers of the Four Winds BMW Riders had checked in while I was making trip arrangements.
“Whatdya want to stay in some Dog Box while you’re out here for? We got an extra bedroom. You’ll eat better. The beer is cold and if it will make you feel better you can make a contribution to the club fridge. Sound good?”
It did sound good.
It was good.
I came to be really fond of them Yinzers.
On another trip across the Alleghenies, I rode my recently acquired and precious 1975 R90S. Before I’d come along, my S had suffered from some inept maintenance, which caused it to have a somewhat prolonged recommissioning process, during which time it demonstrated some unnecessary tendencies towards dramatic behaviors.
I’d elected to take my new prize on a trip to Moon, Pennsylvania – which is the small town where Pittsburg International Airport is located. During the first lunch break, I was walking around The Equipment in the parking lot to see how she’d weathered her first long ride, and the news was not uniformly good. Out of a total of four engine pushrod tube seals, we had three that varied between ‘slightly’ cracked to ‘does this seal at all’ cracked. The amount of oil loss didn’t appear crippling, but there was 200 miles between Moon and my driveway.
Jeff Dunkel, another one of the Four Winds stalwarts, proposed a pit stop over another e-mail.
“I live near one of the local dealers. I’ll pick up the seals you need. I’ve got tools, You can swing by here after you wrap up work Thursday.”
When I left the Mars FAA Office early Thursday afternoon, I rolled over to Jeff’s place, and when I rolled up in the parking lot there, he had what looked like a sterile field for surgery – a clean BMW blue tarp, with all of the required tools line up by size along the top, solvents, lubes, fluids and shop rags along the left.
He’d made the joint look like a little dealership shop area – the only things missing were the tool outlines on our work surface.
During what little smalltalk one can make while field removing and resealing both top ends from a 1000cc boxer, Jeff shared that he’d been a maintenance tech for the US Air Force, which explained his really, really good shop habits, even when working in the absence of… you know… a shop.
We made genuinely fast work of replacing the seals, and then reset the valves – setting them slightly tighter than one would on a totally cold engine where the clearance specs are normally set. Given I intended to get home by suppertime, a warm engine valve adjustment would have to suffice.
Jeff, naturally, refused to take a dime, even for the seal set.
“Just be prepared to pay it forward, if somebody needs help where you live.”
The only appreciation I could show was to cover some subs for lunch, and to set the ‘BMW Saint’ flag next to Jeff’s contact in my personal directory.
The S ran like a scalded ape all the way back to Jefferson, and went on the stand in my driveway without a drop of oil outside the cases.
***
Stuff that broke seemed to really bring out the IBMWR Cavalry.
In 2000, I did something completely out of character, and purchased the first and only new motorcycle of my life – a K1200LT – a four-cylinder, water cooled, fuel injected, ABS equipped motorcycle, bristling with the second generation of digital controls.
For someone whose maintenance experience was largely based on an R75 with cable operated drum brakes, the LT shone a bright light on the many things about motorcycle maintenance I didn’t know.
When something broke in a big way on my LT, IBMWR’s big brains circled the wagons, and worked tirelessly to solve the problem. I learned more about my motorcycle from Paul Glaves, Tom Cutter, Don Eilenberger, Brian ‘Data’ Curry and others than I’d even previously known. Offers of related experience came from Presidents in California, Australia, Japan and South Africa.
And although that motorcycle ended up getting sold, a nearly identical LT is still the bike that gets the big travelling road miles.
***
IBMWR grew and grew some more.
First we started showing up as ‘an overlay’ at other Club’s rallies – bringing our own IBMWR Banner, and posing for Presidential Portraits.
Then we started hosting our own events – The Blitz to Branson and the North East Presidential Breakfasts. I even recall with glee a small departure reception held in Northern Virginia for Bob Higdon, who was aiming his GS into Mexico. Folks had ridden in from as far away as (Terry!) Miami and Boston just to pose for a picture and wish Bob a good journey.
I never had the spare time to be A Blitzer, but the Presidential Breakfasts appealed to both my sense of democracy – and my serious need for pancakes and sausage. One of the Breakfasts was held at an airport, and before the event ended my oldest son – then maybe all of thirteen years old — ended up behind the yoke of a Cessna 172, where a flight instructor confirmed that his skills at Microsoft Flight Simulator did indeed translate pretty cleanly to a real airplane. I concurred, as I was either trusting or reckless enough to be riding in that 172’s back seat. It was a pretty smooth ride, considering the Cessna is essentially a /5 that flies, right down to its cable-operated controls.
But the events, as much fun as they were, were just the icing on the sweet cake of a palpable sense of omnipresent community.
The manifold Presidents were smart, fun folks that shared their personalities and their knowledge with gusto and without reservation. Being only shared as a written word somehow made the exercise of imagination to provide the details that the word could not made my whole understanding of both the individuals and the whole collective experience somehow more vivid.
The number and quality of people I met through the list beggars the imagination – some of them quickly became real life good friends – others I have communicated with only via the ‘net for nearly 30 years – serving as mutual sources of fellowship and support — without ever having been in the same physical location.
Their willingness to share their experiences – particularly the stories of interesting motorcycle trips and travels – spoke to me in a way that is at least partially responsible for the last several years when I have chosen to develop my craft as a storyteller – if all of them could do it, I certainly could.
Those of you that have corresponded with me privately to share that my stories have had the effect of making people feel – through the power of their imaginations – that they were on those rides with me, do me the highest honor. I’m not at all sure that that honor is entirely deserved, so I keep trying to get better at it, to be fully worthy of it.
I know of nothing that can take the place of The Internet BMW Riders.
It was and is the only motorcycle club I have ever joined.
A Thousand Miles on Zero Motorcycles DSR/X Adventure Tourer
Introduction
Wade and I were loading up a very dirty Zero DSR/X onto the trick bike carrier he had mounted to the back of his Jeep SUV. Wade is the swell fellow that handles Zero’s press pool logistics on the East Coast. Part of his duties for them is to record the motorcycle’s mileage at recovery, which he accomplishes by using his phone to take a picture of the dash.
“I always love it when I bring a bike for you to ride. I know when we bring you a machine, you are going to really put some miles on it.
I got the strangest sensation loading this motorcycle back up.
After a flash of light we were doing everything in reverse – taking the bike off the truck the day it had been delivered.
Wade had rather stylishly powered the bike up when the straps came off, and demonstrated Zero’s new ‘Parking Mode’ feature – which provides low speed operation in both forward and reverse – by having the bike essentially unload itself.
The bike powered itself to the top of my driveway – with Wade walking alongside — and he tossed me the key.
“I’ll be really interested to see what you think of it. Have fun!”
The Setup
When I have a new bike to test, I really do ride them.
Those that know me well know I am a four-season rider. When I have a test motorcycle to ride, there are a number of my personal ‘German alloy mistresses’ that become quite cross with me, as they are utterly ignored – not so much as a single compression stroke – until the new bike is returned.
Motorcycles are my primary transportation and my primary recreation. I ride for business travel, for all of life’s errands, and for the pure joy of the sport. My home in rural Frederick County, Maryland has many dirt and rural paved roads, and lately I’ve been having an increasingly great deal of fun riding off pavement.
Looking at the DSR/X sitting in my driveway, I turned over the bike and its mission in my head. “…Purpose-built for pure adventure..” is what the brochure says… but the bike’s offroad credentials weren’t immediately obvious.
If BMW’s GSs are the model – narrow 21-inch front wheels, knobby tires, spoked wheels, crazy ground clearance, and an armor-plated bash plate – there was a fair bit of daylight between that notion and the bike I was looking at.
I’d asked Zero for a Backcountry Discovery Route-ready offroad warrior. What they had available was an unaccessorized perfectly stock bike.
This DSR/X had alloy wheels carrying street-biased Pirelli Scorpion Trail II tires. It did have better ground clearance and suspension travel than previous Zeros – I measured about 9.5 inches of clearance and Zero’s specs point to 2 to 2.5 inches more suspension travel in the bike’s fully adjustable Showa shock and inverted forks than preceding models. The battery pack and trellis frame have a stout plastic combo chin fairing and bash plate, but a real bash plate it isn’t – I mean, it’s plastic.
Pretty, Isn’t She?
Now a trip to Zero’s accessory catalog can close up the distance between the overland monsters and this bike – proper offroad tires, skid plate and a crash cage. The spoked wheels offroaders need – in this case trick tubeless tire spoked — were made stock items after this example was made — but in stock form, this bike wasn’t sending out ‘ready to rally’ vibes.
We’d just have to suspend disbelief, go riding, and let the bike do its own talking.
Part One – Getting Acquainted
The Beer Run
After work that day, I was determined to get in my first good ride – to start to understand the beast. I’ve been lucky enough to have previously had multiple Zeros to test – an original DSR dual sport, an SR/F naked, an SR/S sport tourer – every new model more developed and refined than its predecessors.
After cleaning up the dinner dishes, I let Sweet Doris from Baltimore know I’d be picking up some fresh beers to stock up the garage fridge from our new favorite microbrewery – in Williamsport, Maryland.
“Williamsport?”, she asked, giving me that knowing look that indicated she knew the beer run was the flimsiest of excuses for a really long ride.
“Have fun. See you later.”
I geared up – including a nice moto-specific backpack with my customary gear — and headed out to the driveway.
Throwing a leg over the Zero provided the first of what would prove to be many surprises.
Unlike a GS, which practically requires a rope ladder to climb aboard – the DSR/X has a dramatically lower saddle height – measuring 32.6 inches, or about 2.6 inches lower than the GS. Now 2.6 inches might not sound like a lot, but when one has 30-inch inseam on a good day, you’ll have to take it from me that those inches might as well be a mile. Zero had clearly designed its trellis frame with an approachable saddle height – determined to avoid some of the day-to-day annoyances of hardcore overlanding bikes. I was able to mount in the traditional manner from the left, and settled down into the bike, with both boots flatfooted on the ground.
Nobody of normal stature is going to look at a DSR/X in the showroom and conclude that the bike is too tall for them.
Turning the key puts the bike’s color LCD display through its startup animation, and after boot-up, displays the bike’s default instrument and control panel. I adjusted the rearview mirrors, and spent a little time refreshing my memory about the bike’s control functions. Zero has standardized on one, really important multifunction button on the bike’s left control pod. Given the bike’s direct drive – no gearbox, no clutch – it is good that the rider’s left hand has at least something to do.
‘The Button’ responds differently to fast slides in either direction, differently to ‘slide and hold’, and then once context menus are displayed, presses are used to select the required settings. Preset modes – ‘Standard’, ‘Eco’, ‘Rain’, ‘Sport’ and ‘Canyon’ – provide useful combinations of power delivery, ABS and traction control behavior. The modes also control levels of regenerative braking, where the amount of resistance provided by the motor and the capacity to generate power to store back in the bike’s battery, can also be adjusted. There are also submenus that allow the rider to independently adjust traction control and anti-lock braking behavior. If all of those choices don’t provide exactly what’s you’d like, Zero’s smartphone app, which communicates with the bike over a Bluetooth pairing, absolutely will.
It might sound complicated, but it really isn’t. My brain might not have fully remembered it, but my underused left hand seemed to.
I also spent a few minutes playing with the DSR/X’s manually adjustable windscreen. It’s an ingenious system that uses a rack and pinion type knob and gear setup that allows the rider to rotate the knob with either hand to move the small stock flyscreen though its entire range of travel. It was a mild night, so I took a flyer on riding with the shield all the way down to see how it behaved out on the road.
Rack and Pinion Shield Adjuster – Pretty Trick
I gave a gentle twist to ‘the thing that can no longer accurately be referred to as the throttle’, and with a gentle sci-fi whine from the electric motor located between my feet, we were in motion.
I spent a few minutes trolling around my neighborhood at low speeds just to get some muscle memory back in place about the DSR/X’s throttle response behavior. Riders that haven’t spent time aboard an electric motorcycle likely can’t appreciate the benefits of an electric drive system’s immediate and direct application of torque to the rear tire’s contact patch.
In an electric motorcycle like Zero’s DSR/X, the time to translate command to torque on the ground is closer to 50 milliseconds – think it and it’s already happened.
This kind of essentially immediate response completely changes the dynamics of riding in pretty much every context.
In my neighborhood, I was able to stand up on the pegs, and execute perfect small diameter circles and figure eights with no apparent effort. Try that on your ICE bike and you’ll be managing the clutch, hoping that your carbs or injection system are spot on, making sure you’re in the right gear – it requires a lot of focus and a lot of effort. On the Zero, it just feels like cheating, and it probably is.
I headed out of the neighborhood, and struck north towards Middletown. The strategy was to gain familiarity with the DSR/X on pavement first, before striking out off it and into the dirt. I left the Zero in ‘Standard’ power mode – after enough miles of electric riding I have finally trained myself to ignore the understandable temptation to dump the throttle each and every time I leave a standing start and do a creditable ‘Millenium Falcon’ hyperspace imitation. Don’t misunderstand me — it is fun, but it’s more fun to use energy intelligently and to still be riding when Han Solo, over there, is walking.
Rolling north out of Jefferson up Holter Road, I was quickly struck by both the ride quality and the refinement of the power delivery. Previous Zeros had been somewhat firm in their suspension settings – understandable with the need to manage the movement of the centrally mounted battery pack that makes of much of the motorcycle’s overall mass. The DSR/X’s longer throw fork and shock, though, seemed to be comparatively more compliant – my contacts at Zero had also described a brand-new frame and swingarm that had been designed with more designed-in flex. Working the bike though the sweepers up toward Middletown revealed a more comfortable and more planted motorcycle when ridden on the road.
The choice of destination – beer aside – was strategic. My route would take me west on US Route 40 Alt – the original National Pike, predating the Interstate Highway System. Unlike Interstate Routes, where engineering muscles were flexed to level and cut through annoying features like mountains – old US 40 worked with the topography, and in Western Maryland, 40 – where it still exists — is an endless string of grades and switchbacks, with banked corners of a type that likely don’t meet modern highway construction codes.
Which would likely be exactly why we love them.
When the light turned green in Middletown, I made the left and headed up towards South Mountain. The first mile or two of 40 Alt West are an old-fashioned roller coaster – 40’s two lanes work through hill after hill – climbing and descending with apexes at each change in topography. Coming past Bolivar Road, 40 goes arrow straight – providing a 2-mile view to the base of the mountain. There were two cars in front of me, and with a flick of my right wrist, they instantly no longer mattered – the DSR/X simply vaporized the speed and distance difference between us in far less space than seemed physically possible. I’d been trolling at about 35 mph at the time I decided to pass – the instant tsunami of torque had me passing through 70 by the time I cleared the second automobile. Internal combustion motorcycles will – by their very nature – have forward progress that is interrupted by limits to an engine’s torque and rpm curves, and the need to change gears – your gas bike pulls hard, goes neutral during a shift, and then pulls hard again. It’s like walking up the stairs of acceleration.
The Zero, on the other hand, is more like space travel. The bike – under spirited acceleration – just makes its signature high-pitched X-wing Fighter electric whine, and just accelerates seamlessly hard – in an almost logarithmic manner.
The faster one goes, the faster one goes faster.
I permitted myself, under these ideal visibility conditions, the luxury of staying planted in the throttle for two or three more seconds.
This wasn’t an accelerative walking up the stairs – this was an orbital insertion burn.
With the base of South Mountain and the most technical part of the road growing rapidly larger in the windscreen, I started smoothly giving back throttle to shed some velocity and get set up for the first corner. The ‘People Who Are Always Telling Us Things’ have told me that they don’t like “motorcycles that don’t make any noise”. What they mean is they don’t like motorcycles that don’t make their particular favorite kind of noise. You know the kind – percussive, internal combustion throb kind of noise, that burbles and pops when the rider rolls off the gas – the kind of racket that makes non-motorcyclists mutter questions about the intelligence and parentage of that rider when they hear it.
Zero’s DSR/X has a completely different sonic palette.
More than a few feet away from the bike, Zeros make almost no sound at all – I can no longer count the number of cell-phone hypnotized pedestrians to whom I’ve been forced to say ‘Excuse me, please.’ in parking lots. From astride the motorcycle, though, the whine of the motor is distinctly audible – and it rises sharply in frequency as the direct drive motor’s rotational speed rises with road speed.
Setting up for South Mountain’s first corner, though, the sound of the Zero’s Z-Force Electric Motor kind of turns itself inside out – the rising whine of power becomes a falling whine of regenerative braking as the motor transitions from turning stored electrical energy into torque to turning decelerative torque back into stored electrical power.
It might not be the open pipes of a Sportster, but it certainly is the sound of power, and way more of it than five generations of roaddogs, bikers, greasers and café racing rockers ever dreamed of.
I have the benefit of some saddle time on Zero’s motorcycles, so I’m no longer paralyzed in fear by the amount of power one might ham-fistedly unleash. I have the muscle memory of how their bikes deliver both power and regen, and have had direct experience of how the bike’s Bosch Motorcycle Stability Control (MSC) suite has my back when we’re tiptoeing up to the edges of the laws of physics.
It makes one confident, that, and comfortable as well.
40 Alt over South Mountain might not be Pike’s Peak, but it is sixteen hundred miles closer. I went as far to the right edge of the road as roadcraft would permit, and then rolled the DSR/X into the banked left-hand hairpin. Most motorcycles have some little wart in the way they enter corners – tire profiles that don’t transition well, a chassis that has transferred too much weight forward – but not this motorcycle. I’d transition back to the power well before the apex, blast out and then regen back into the next one – the motor’s whine rising and falling with each exit and entry. I had plenty of traction – The Pirelli Scorpion Trails had decent bite on the street. Their sizes and profiles were also dialed – they were particularly linear in how they transitioned into corners and held a line once selected. The east side of the mountain has about four left/right switchback combinations, and the precise control of grip and power allowed me to work these technical combinations with ease and control.
The old bikers with their large capacity internal combustion twins – Triumphs, BMWs, Ducatis and MotoGuzzis – used to kid about riding the torque that would allow you to be able to pick your selected inch on the road.
This DSR/X, though, let one ride one’s selected millimeter – at a certain point, the motorcycle almost disappears – one’s progress down the road becomes anticipatory, gestural – one thinks about where one wants to be going and one is effortlessly, precisely there.
How much of this backroad magic is just good structural motorcycle engineering and how much of it is behavior dictated by software is a long conversation we just don’t have time for.
As I crested the summit of South Mountain, where it crosses the Appalachian Trail, I had one of those moments of in-helmet enlightenment. In my garage I have five of my own treasured motorcycles – none of them have the precise level of control that lets a motorcycle ride like this.
The west side of the mountain, descending into Boonsboro, is not really the opportunity to chill out and relax. 40 Alt repeats the pattern of switchback clusters – in descent instead of climb – actually a bit more delicate bit of rider’s challenge to avoid staying out of the thirty-foot drop to the creekbed that runs along the right side of the road. The DSR/X though, just turned it into a spirited bit of play – by the time I’d come off the mountain into Boonsboro, I’d just run a stretch of road that normally stressed my skills and my motorcycles to the max, and I’d burned that road to the ground without busting a sweat.
Lappans Road west across Washington County is a road that has no straight. Lappans is either climbing, falling or turning hard for the next eleven miles. There is a bit more room to stretch out between corners – compared to South Mountain – and it let me flirt briefly with larger ‘power requests’. The boost coming out of each of those corners makes the space between 30 and 80 seem like a quantum state that no longer exists – the 169 foot-pounds of torque are there whenever and however you ask for them.
Thirty-two miles to a brewery never went by so fast.
I’m going to have to find another one that is further away.
I’d placed my brew as a web order, so my bag was waiting for me at the door. I one-eightied, got back to the bike, and put most of my newfound barley-wealth onto the DSR/X’s frunk. Since the Zero needs no gas, the bike’s faux tank is filled, in stock configuration, with nothing – nothing that will take a bag of groceries, or lunch, or specifically this. My moto-backpack had to settle for the little that was left. I geared up, keyed on, and rolled silently back for Lappans and home.
Lots of Room for Stuff in the Frunk
Offroad Mode
My experience on the backroads that night left me with just one question that loomed large – could a bike that was that buttoned down on the tarmac possibly perform in the dirt?
Being a nerd I read manuals, and given the software-defined nature of a machine like the Zero, the need for studying one’s documentation is doubly important.
Dan Quick, Zero’s Public Relations Potentate, had jokingly told me – “Me, I suck in the dirt, but with that bike’s magic button it hardly matters.”
If you tell me you have a magic button, I’m going to work to find it, so the manual is where one goes.
And it doesn’t take long to find out how to find and work that button.
Unlike its technical daddies, the DSR/X has a whole new set of settings, where traction control and ABS profiles can be selected independently of power modes.
With a few of the correct swipes of the left control pod selector button, something really cool occurred – ‘Offroad Mode’. The dashboard’s Traction Control and Antilock Braking status displays in the dash’s upper right corner changed from white to bright yellow, and from ‘Street’ to ‘Offroad’.
Offroad Mode, Baby!
In ‘Offroad Mode’, the DSR/X’s traction and braking settings are tuned for operation in the rough stuff – TC is greatly reduced, allowing for a whole bunch of wheelspin under power before intervening, and deactivating the ABS on the rear – allowing the bike to be steered with the rear wheel locked. ABS is retained at the front but tuned for operation on loose surfaces – threshold of intervention is much higher as some sliding is all but inevitable.
This riding profile isn’t groundbreaking – truth be told, my F800 GS, which is a design that dates back to 2013, has exactly the same profile which BMW calls ‘Enduro’ mode. The concept itself is rock solid, but how it was implemented in the software would tell the tale.
It’s a good thing dirt isn’t far away.
Dirty
As soon as the opportunity arose, I pulled on my new set of Revzilla-purchased Alpinestars Tech7 Drystar Enduros – which are way better boots when one doesn’t have getting them under a shift lever to worry about – and headed for Poffenberger Road. Poffenberger is like an instructional classroom for almost everything adventure bike – the base surface is made up of crushed limestone, with sections that are loose, rutted, off camber and chuckholed – in short, it’s most of what one will encounter on a BDR crammed into about three miles.
As I turned into the short paved section at the end of the road, I did my control button boogie and accessed the ‘Offroad’ setting on the DSR/X’s Traction and ABS controls. Zero uses color to communicate a lot on their displays, and the bright yellow on the status bars indicated we were no longer riding your Grandpappy’s Electric Motorcycle. I gave the bike some juice and headed down the steep hill that leads to the transition off the pavement.
Truth be known, my confidence was pretty low, and I didn’t really know what to expect of a 545-pound motorcycle with straight-up ridiculous levels of power output, riding on street-biased trail tires. Ready or not, though, I hit the bottom of the chute, stood up on the pegs, and cruised into the unpaved unknown.
There is a sharp off-camber corner at the bottom of the hill, and it’s the sort of bend that will let one know whether a motorcycle is really going to work off the pavement or not. With my weight shifted forward over the front tire, the DSR/X bit hard, and stayed on the selected line – no drift, no wrestling match, absolutely zero drama of any kind. The bike’s Pirelli Scorpion Trail front tire was tracking well and the inverted Showa Separate Function inverted fork was working hard through its longer stoke to keep that tire in contact and hooked up.
My sense of anxiety slowly began to lift.
At the bottom of the hill sits a nineteenth century iron truss bridge. Like many of such bridges that still serve the most rural sections of the county, there are 90-degree corners on each side of the creek, and two steep ramps that connect the road to the wooden bridge deck. The DSR/X’s instant access to torque and power allowed me to work these hairy transitions at sub-walking speed, in complete comfort and control.
Once on the other side of the bridge, there is a long straight that runs beside Catoctin Creek, with a mostly loose surface broken up by a few mud-filled chuckholes. I fed in the power and came up to what felt like a comfortable cruise, which a short headcheck of the dash confirmed to be about 10 miles an hour more than I usually carry on the GS. At the end of the straight, there’s a sweeping left that usually allows me to indulge my Gary Nixon fantasies – I weighted the outside peg, pointed the bike in, and felt the rear end gently step out and dial in just the right amount of wheelspin.
‘Magic Button’ indeed.
The rest of Poffenberger was kind of a blur – sets of 90/90s, the steeply rutted climb next to the Lewis Mill, and the concrete coffer drains on the upper section of the road were all inhaled and dispensed with no apparent effort. The front end was totally trustworthy, and the Showa suspension kept any chassis upset from getting to the rider.
My calibrated test rider gut tells me that weight distribution has a lot to do with the bike’s apparent surefootedness. The DSR/X’s 17.3 kWh battery represents the heaviest component on the motorcycle, and that weight is low – by eyeball engineering it looks to have a center of gravity roughly the same height as the DSR/X’s axles with a rider on board – and well forward. Assume the Adventure Rider-standard riding position – standing on the pegs, leaning gently forward with one’s knees squeezing the ‘tank’ – and the rider’s mass is added to the front contact patch, yielding a motorcycle that adheres to the dirt rider’s mantra – ‘Trust your front tire, give it plenty of (e-)gas, and don’t worry about what your rear tire is doing.’
Physics Works For the DSR/X
I’d assumed the DSR/X was too heavy and too powerful to be graceful in these conditions. I’d been completely wrong.
Having seen this little light, and watched it getting brighter, I wanted to add a few more offroad tricks to the first phase of my offroad testing. After arriving back in town, I headed for Sigler Road, which is longer, faster and looser surfaced than Poffenberger, and ends in the woods with a small stream ford.
Out on the long climb up the hill the DSR/X was happily roosting gravel, and was more than happy to do a comfortable flat track slide though the sweeping left at the end. I worked my way through the tight technical stuff that sits on the grade which runs down to the creek, and made the right to line up for the stream crossing.
Those same ‘People That Are Always Telling You Stuff’ will tell you that putting an electric motorcycle under water isn’t a good idea, and they might be correct in principle, but not in practice.
The DSR/X dropped off the bank and into the creek, and carried across the rounded stones on the bottom, and clambered up the opposite side, feeling as planted as if we were going through a bank drive-through.
My rising sense of security likely contributed to what happened next.
A neighbor of mine owns a few out of production pastures that are slated for future development – they have gravel entrance roads installed, have been surveyed, but have been waiting for either permits or funding for at least a decade. I cut down one of the entrance roads, and prepared to do a little orbit of the fields as I’ve done before many times.
Pirelli Scorpion Trails, it should be noted, are not as good on dewy grass as they are on crushed stone.
The slithery feeling I was feeling resulted in me carrying less speed than I would on a knobby-tired bike, and why when I saw a massive tractor-eating rut cut by recent heavy rains a few feet in front of me, I didn’t have enough room to stop or enough momentum to carry though it. I loosened my grip on the bars, kept my head up, and said manifold bad words as the front tire cleared it and the rear tire… didn’t – leaving the Zero to slowly slide backwards and come to rest upright (yay!) with the bike inclined nearly 40 degrees upward, resting solidly ‘cased’ with the frame rails and bash plastic sitting solidly on the ground.
Sitting well out of view of any public road, and by myself, I was either riding this thing out of here or walking home, so I plotted my escape. I gave the power request handle a little goose, and spun the back tire, moving forward just a little, and flinging mud into the air behind me. I eased off and the bike slid back into the rut.
A long unneeded lesson about driving big American cars in the snow revived slowly in the recesses of my brain.
I applied a bit more power, spinning the back tire and rocking forward again – I let off and slid backwards – and when I was all the way back I applied power again. This rock and roll got me about six inches further forward than the first attempt. On the third try I went for it – requesting significant power and, flinging mud a full twenty feet onto the air, finally punched out of the rut and resumed forward, if somewhat soiled motion.
Honestly, despite the self-inflicted nature of my little problem, I felt pretty chuffed about having ridden out of it without having customized the bike’s bodywork.
It was a good thing I’d taken my pictures of the DSR/X before this little miscue, and having recently been underwater I wasn’t too concerned about the effects of some much-needed garden hosing when I got the bike home.
Part Two – Doing The Daily
Going to Work
For the next little while, the DSR/X spent about 80 percent of its riding life doing practical point to point stuff on the street. Trips to the store. A few trips to various work locations.
One trip to Herndon Virginia – which is a congested, mixed two lane and highway route — demonstrated just how adept the DSR/X is at the quotidian. Herndon is about a 39 mile one-way ride, split between US 15 though Loudoun County Virginia and then Virginia Route 28 down to the area around Dulles Airport.
At morning commute time 15 backs up, and the direct drive, clutchless Zero electric driveline is the perfect set up for slow speed, stop and go operation – if one can get one’s following buffer optimized, the right combination of gentle power request, constant speed operation tempered with some strategic use of regenerative braking allows one perfect control in very slowly moving traffic in a way one would challenged to reproduce in almost any internal combustion vehicle
Once clear of Leesburg, however, one rides recently renovated limited access highway infrastructure, and in the cut and thrust of higher speed operation the Zero has a grossly unfair dynamic advantage. It’s ability to instantly deliver 169-foot pounds of torque will let one quickly dispatch 95% of the other vehicles on the road, save the expensive German, Italian and Silicon Valley-made iron driven by Northern Virginia’s wealthy tech denizens, who will invariable want to race with one of the few things that may actually be faster than them. Fortunately the high-speed part of the route is only about 13 miles long, as the high sustained speeds are somewhat hard on operating range.
I arrived at my work site with just under 70% of the battery’s state of charge remaining, so there was no need to even consider the search for a public charger or an unguarded electric socket into which the bike’s household current charger – which stores neatly in the DSR/X’s ‘Frunk’ — could be stealthily plugged. My highly developed skills at ‘Creative Plug Sourcing’ – a real thing for electric motorcycle transportation enthusiasts – would not get a workout this day.
After the conclusion of my business, having the DSR/X opened up one of my favorite escape routes from Northern Virginia’s traffic congestion. Leaving from the rear of the estate of one of Virginia’s early governors at Morven Park, there is a colonial era road that instantly takes one back at least two centuries. Less than five miles from the edge of the sea of datacenters that run from Ashburn down the Dulles Toll Road, an unpaved road runs deep into the woods past the treed property lines of horse farms dating back to the American Revolution.
One minute one is in the middle of it all, and the next minute one is far away from any of it as it is possible to get. It’s kind of mind bending.
Does Your Commute Look Like This?
Heading toward the village of Waterford, the road climbs some aggressive rutted grades, and some long straights joining sweeping turns where the road passes from one old estate to the next. The DSR/X is rock solid on these gravel tracks, and handles the sliding corner exits with surprising serenity. The precision of power delivery that let one choose one’s attitude and point on the tire on pavement was even more liberating once one went off it. I was riding better offroad with the DSR/X after only a few dozen miles than I did on bikes I’d ridden for years.
If this was cheating, I was all-in with it.
Interstate
The very next day I had another business conversation that would take me to Fulton, Maryland. The ride to Fulton is a different kind of ride – 50 miles of wide-open rural highways where users maintain pretty elevated sustained speeds – one needs to be able to ride defensively in these conditions, and that keeping up with, and moving through traffic is really non-negotiable, unless being rear-ended is ‘your thing’.
For sustained use out on the interstate, the DSR/X seems just a tad unhappy. The bike’s protective bubble in the cockpit is just a tad overstressed, with the narrow fairing’s air pocket collapsing at the edges producing some noise and buffeting, and while there isn’t any vibration on the traditional sense, the whole experience seems somehow ‘busy’. What is worse, at an indicated 75 or 80 or (deleted at the advice of counsel) miles an hour, the DSR/X is chugging electrons at a prodigious rate.
Once one exits from Maryland Route 32 onto Sanner Road, though, the bike is back in its element – a rolling country road where the bike’s dynamic qualities are a perfect complement to the road’s hills and curves. Pulling up to the office the DSR/X’s State of Charge had a message. The message was ‘48%.’
For those of you that are electric motorcycle newbs, less than half of one’s battery remaining means you don’t have enough left to get back where you came from. Fortunately, I’d done a bit of charger scouting that revealed that the building across the street had a number of public chargers installed in the lot behind the building. I rolled into their lot, and sure enough, there were roughly a dozen charge pylons installed – each with two J1772 Level 2 Charge heads installed.
Pay dirt.
I picked a pylon, rolled up, shut the bike down and set it onto its sidestand.
And that’s when I discovered another one of the fundamental truths of the Zero motorcycle experience.
A clearly overstimulated gentleman rapidly approached where I was standing taking off my gear – his eyes were wide open, his mouth slackjawed.
“MAAAAAAN! Is that an eee-lectric motorcycle? It doesn’t make ANY noise! Who makes it? How fast does it go? How far can it go? How do you like it?”
People. ALL People. Want to talk about the Zero.
People that ride unusual machines like sidecar outfits, for example, talk about ‘Gas Station Syndrome’, where once one pulls into a filling station, it can become all but impossible to leave because folks want to talk with you about their uncle Harry who rode his sidecar just like this one, here, all across the North Country, and how he had more fun than Doan’s has little back pills, and lemme tell you another thing …
This can become a problem, especially if one has to be in a specific place at a specific time.
With the Zero, let’s call it ‘Charger Syndrome’, although to be fair, this can occur any place one chooses to stop with it.
The DSR/X looks just Moto-divergent enough to key most interested people in that something weird is going on. And anyone that hears (doesn’t hear?) it operating knows that something is definitely up.
And that’s how it starts.
“MAAAAAAN! Is that an eee-lectric motorcycle?…”
After answering all of the standard question set, and a few non-standard ones besides, and allowing a few phone photos to be taken, I turned my attention to using the public charger.
To this point, I’d actually been charging the bike at home, so my public charger skills were a little rusty. At home, I’d just plug the 120V Type 1 charger that came with the motorcycle into my front porch’s outside plug. I’d do most of my charging during the daytime, when my home solar array was chooglin’, so I’d been ‘getting my gas for free’.
Here, though, I first connected the standard J1772 charge head to the plug just behind the Zero’s steering head. Then, I needed to reactivate one of my dormant electric vehicle charging accounts. I called the number shown on the charge pylon, and then went through an automated Interactive Voice Response system that figured out which charger I was connected to, and then who I was and how I was proposing to pay their bill. Once I’d authorized the payment, I heard the Zero’s charge systems relays close, and then the bike’s charging display came up on the dash. Current leveled off at about 65 amps, compared to the 11 or 12 I’d be able to draw at home. Data showed I’d be fully charged in about an hour and a half.
That hour and a half worked out to $2.12 for a half ‘tank’ of ‘fuel’.
Isn’t technology wonderful?
After a business conversation and some kebabs for lunch, I geared back up for the ride home. Having already got solid data for how much battery was required for the return trip, I was now liberated to be a bit more enthusiastic with the throttle, knowing that the difference between my conservative approach on the outbound leg and riding what my British road brothers refer to as ‘like a total knob’ was worth 8-9 percent difference in state of charge – in short, plenty of range with a large safety buffer.
So Knob it was.
Headed back up Sanner Road we were really dancing. I’d managed to fully acclimate myself to the DSR/X, and with the wind around my helmet being the loudest sound, I felt that this was a close to flying as I was ever likely to get. The rolling section – with its hilltop apexes producing momentary weightlessness – gave way to open highway, and with it riding with still more speed to be able to sense moving along long sightlines through the low spots in this central Maryland topography.
The power provided by the Z-Force 75-10X direct drive motor continued to amaze. My current and continued existence depends on an ability to locate areas in the traffic stream where I can be me and every other road user can be decidedly somewhere else. Finding those reserves of personal pavement usually involves breaking free of one clump of vehicles, but not accelerating to speeds that will have you running up on the clump up ahead – in between clumps is relative safety. And to get to relative safety one has to be able to move smartly and deterministically past those guys in the front of one clump who think they are the fast guys.
Regardless of the road speed, any enthusiastic application of the power request tube produces immediate and clenching levels of acceleration – its enough to have me reflexively moving my weight forward over the bars in anticipation of the power wheelie that never shows up – the bike’s suspension geometry combines with the low and forward weight of the battery to keep the bike from looping.
Having beaten afternoon rush, my 50 miles took about 47 minutes to deliver me back in the driveway. The bike went on the stand and I powered the DSR/X down.
There was no exhaust system thermal cooling sounds, no cooling fins tinking, nothing … only silence.
RTFM
Coming up just short of the highway range required to make a routine highway commute sent Nerdboy here back to the user’s manual. The DSR/X’s battery pack has a documented capacity of 17.3 kWh – the largest capacity battery Zero has yet produced. The bike’s Cypher 3 operating system, though, has implemented a charging routine designed to protect the battery’s long-term performance. The DSR/X’s charger limits – under normal circumstances – the actual state of charge to 90% of the maximum capacity – or 15.1 kWh. The 90% state of charge is the maximum capacity at which the battery can be stored without adversely degrading its chemistry. Perversely, the rider display indicates that the battery is at 100% when it effectively only charged to 90%.
The answer is a setting called ‘Extended Range Charging’. Extended Range is a one-time selection that the user can choose before the start of a charging session that allows the battery to be charged to its full capacity. Doing this allows the DSR/X to – in the immortal words of Spinal Tap – ‘to go to 11s’ – a fully charged DSR/X battery shows a state of charge of 110%.
Getting aboard the DSR/X with the SOC indicator reading “110%” is a full-on Nigel Tufnel moment, and I’ll cop to needing a few seconds to stifle the giggling before being able to fully focus on the ride ahead.
It Goes to Elevens
Zero is emphatic that motorcycles charged with the Extended Range feature should not be parked for any extended period in that state – if one is charged to elevens, one should be intending to ride the bike shortly after completing charging.
Given some of the rides I was contemplating before Wade came to reclaim the bike, going to 11s was going to come in handy.
Free Market Roads
In between practical transportation use – runs to the grocery, work and hardware store that made good use of the DSR/X’s ‘frunk’ – I continued to seek out more unpaved roads to further develop my understanding of the bike’s off-pavement chops. My homebase in Central Maryland is less than 5 miles from the Potomac River and the border with Virginia. In my home county of Frederick County Maryland, our diminishing inventory of rural roads are being conserved and are well maintained – they get at least two visits a year from county road crews with fresh gravel, graders and rollers that keep these routes in pretty swell shape. Loudoun County, Virginia, on the other hand, has many more of these unpaved miles, and tend to take a more ‘free market’ approach – ‘If you’re driving out here, Son, you’re on your own’. For someone looking to wring out an offroad motorcycle, that laissez-faire attitude results in more ruts, chuckholes, babyhead rocks, loose stuff and other challenging surfaces that are just about perfect for the task at hand.
Literally just on the other side of the Potomac is Furnace Mountain Road. Furnace Mountain is a road that looks so challenging that I rode past it for years thinking ‘Only a madman would try to ride a motorcycle up that grade’.
I switched the DSR/X to ‘Offroad Mode’, stood up on bike’s metal enduro-style footpegs and ‘gassed’ it, flinging a shower of small stones behind me down the mountain.
You can reach your own conclusions about my state of mind.
Furnace Mountain is another of those ‘step back in time’ roads – it hangs off the side of the mountain, working a series of increasingly technical switchbacks, with absolutely no modern road safety features of any kind. Off to the right there’s an unprotected 100 foot plus drop to the bottom of the ravine the consideration of which will take several years off one’s life, or, if one fails to successfully negotiate a corner, will take all of the years you have available right now.
The DRS/X handled Furnace Mountain with grace and aplomb – on the many decreasing radius switchbacks the bike would continue to keep the front tire hooked up and turning in in places where other motorcycles will start to scrub or push their front tires on the loose surface. The hyper-precise control of power output allowed one to keep the chassis properly trimmed and moving forward at even the lowest road speeds.
The DRS/X might be a big motorcycle, but the longer I rode it off pavement, the smaller it seemed to get.
Furnace Mountain Road ends in the tiny village of Taylorstown – a classic ’blink and you’ll miss it’ municipality. On the far side of the village I turned down Downy Mill Road, which has to be the smallest, narrowest thing aspiring to be a road I’ve ever ridden. I’ve never run into another vehicle on this stretch of road, but should it happen, I’m not sure how we’d handle it – Downey Mill has a drop into Catoctin Creek on the left and a stone ridge on the right – there’s just no place for either party to go. The surface is a throwback from horsepower to the horse – the road is simply a maze of mudholes, ruts and sections filled with large stones. When the road finally turns away from the creek, there’s another enormous grade whose surface has been made treacherous by ruts created by erosion. Once one finishes the climb – punctuated by several sets of switchbacks – Downey Mill opens back up, and becomes a series of long straights broken up by broad flat-track simulating sweepers. The DSR/X feels planted at speeds well above that of the motorcycles I usually ride here – it’s like some sort of magic trick – a big, heavy powerful motorcycle on street-biased dual-purpose tires that feels like riding on suction cups on a loose surface.
I’m still not sure I understand it.
Dirt playtime over, I cut back to the shop on stretches of twisting pavement I know well – Lovettsville Road and the Berlin Pike. Given I was only about eight miles from home I switched the bike back to ‘Street’ traction and ABS mode, and switched the power mode to ‘Canyon’. ‘Canyon’ mode is another new software-defined motorcycle feature – one that I used to approximate using a custom user mode in the Zero smartphone app. Continuing the communication via color theme, the entire display turns bright red when this mode is selected. ‘Canyon’ pairs the full, unleashed 100% motor output of ‘Sport’ mode with a high level of regenerative braking – a perfect setup for sections of tight, technical twisties – everything can be controlled with the ‘power request grip’. Want to speed up? Open ‘er up. Need to slow down, roll the grip back shut.
The DSR/X, I should point out, has excellent brakes – with one’s eyes closed, the 4-piston radial mounted J. Juan calipers are indistinguishable from Brembo’s current Stylemas – they’re powerful, have excellent initial bite and are easily modulated. If you’re riding with your brain in gear, though, and have reasonable situational awareness and your proper level of Regen dialed in, you’ll hardly ever use them.
Good Stopping, Too – Dual 320 mm disks, and 4 piston radial J. Juans
The Berlin Pike — so called because prior to World War Two the town now known as Brunswick was called Berlin – runs from Lovettsville Virginia across the Potomac and back into Maryland. The road is a picturebook steep descent formed by a series of increasingly tight sweepers – it’s as much fun as one might ever have in three miles of pavement on a motorcycle, and the DSR/X was rock solid as both lean angles and pace increased.
After crossing the river I took the Jefferson Pike back to the shop, and on a dead straight section with good sightlines I decided to take a good deep draught of ‘Canyon’ mode’s full, undiluted power output – I moved forward over the tank and opened the throttle to the stops. I don’t usually laugh while riding, but when, at about 60 miles an hour on dry pavement, I felt the traction control kick in as the back tire spun, the maniac laughter that filled my helmet may not have been entirely under my conscious control. The DSR/X, it seemed, was filled with surprises — surprises of the good kind.
A Target of Opportunity
The original pitch to Zero for this test had been to take their new Adventure bike out on the MidAtlantic Backcountry Discovery Route. Conceptually, a few days through ride with camping overnights would have been ideal, but the ideal and the real are two different things, and this time was no exception. Given that the MA BDR comes within eight miles of my home, it was an idea that I couldn’t quite shake.
I kept hearing the frequently unprintable words of Frank Zappa ringing in my head – “Is that a real poncho or a Sears poncho?” Was the DSR/X a real adventure bike or just a street motorcycle tarted up with some Adventure styling? The Backcountry Discovery Routes are table stakes for any real deal adventurer, and I was determined not to take any shortcuts to get to the answer. After having one extended weekend camping rally get vaporized by an unforecasted tropical storm, I found myself looking to the long-range forecasts for the next weekend, looking to get even.
Mother Nature, it seemed, had decided to play nice. The forecast for the coming weekend pointed towards a mixture of bright sunshine and partly cloudy conditions, with daytime highs in the low 70s. I have two friends that had long been asking about stringing together an offroad riding weekend, and, after asking Sweet Doris from Baltimore if she was game to take Moby The Camper Van back to the woods again – ‘Is that even a question?’ – I reached out to them again to see if they were available. After sending an initial text message to both Triumph Paul and my buddy Justin, I got positive responses back from both in less than a minute. Weirdly, both had the same context for their responses – their wives were both booked for non-mate-including activities this weekend, so they were both already actively on the hunt for some Lad-stuff to do.
For something spontaneous, the stars seemed to be aligning.
The outline of the plan was simple – we’d get a campsite and make camp in Pennsylvania’s Caledonia State Park. Moby The Camper Van would provide kitchen and cooler facilities for all and sleeping accommodations for Sweet D and me, and the site would have enough room to handle two more biker’s tents for Justin and Paul. Caledonia – which is about 50 miles north of my home – sits directly on the MA BDR, and in the dead middle of the Michaud State Forest, which has several hundred miles of unpaved roads and more challenging trails in mostly undeveloped wilderness. Sweet Doris from Baltimore had given me a Purple Lizard unpaved route map and a Butler MA-MDR map as Christmas gifts, and it looked like they were finally going to get to come out of the tankbag to play.
After some phone calls with Paul and Justin, the plan was for me to tail Doris and Moby up to Caledonia Friday evening after work and to set camp. Saturday they’d ride in early in the a.m. and we’d do a group ride focusing on the area north of US Route 30 – the old Lincoln Highway. Sunday we’d focus on the Southern Area, which would have the bonus of taking us roughly in the direction of home.
As plans go, it seemed to be a winner. I couldn’t wait for Friday to arrive.
The Ride Out
Friday finally arrived overcast and cool, and it was the kind of day where work of course gets busy at the one time you’d like to check out a little early.
No matter.
Business got taken care of – as it always does — and then I helped Doris load up the van with provisions and gear, and the big white Transit rolled out of the neighborhood and out of sight. I spent a few minutes stowing the DSR/X’s 120-volt charger, a water bottle, some snacks, a ball cap and my two offroad route maps in the bike’s ‘frunk’. I spent a few more minutes futzing with the many buckles on my new boots, and opening up the lower leg expansion panels on my ‘Stich to fit over them. After still more futzing with a new Bluetooth ear bud – letting me hear the Nice Assertive Lady that is the voice of my smartphone’s mapping application – I finally got all of my gear and the bike itself with the right buttons pushed and ready to roll.
Frederick, Maryland during Friday evening rush, is not a friendly or understanding place to operate any motor vehicle. Everyone on the road is in full manic flight from something they don’t like and would like to get away from toward something they’d way rather be doing and would have like to have been doing twenty minutes ago.
Patience, in this environment, is not ‘a thing’.
The goal for tonight was mileage disposal. With the fall days getting shorter, we wanted to have set up camp by sundown, and that meant ruthlessly efficient point to point transport – anti-destination riding would have to wait for tomorrow.
Once onto US 340 and 15 North, it was all full combat conditions – having a ride as quick to change directions and navigate through trouble as the DSR/X was more than welcome.
A few miles north of Frederick, some space in the traffic stream began to appear – my blood pressure slowly came out of the red zone and the pleasure of moving quietly through the air began to take over. I got off the highway and headed west at Emmitsburg where the roads instantly became bike-optimal – Waynesboro Pike, Fairfield Road, Carrols Tract – were rolling two laners that ran though the agricultural area to the south and west of the Gettysburg battlefield. German immigrants had built these farms – their barns are large, sturdy, have recent bright paint work, and were clearly built to last. Working the corners though Orratanna, PA., with the corn fresh cut I could see across and through the corners connecting one proud and prosperous farm to the next – I fully exploited the massive midrange thrust of DSR/X’s motor on corner exits – the bike makes one seem like a better rider than one probably is.
Coming up towards US 30 I saw the van up ahead – I’d erased my 10 minute plus deficit – and we both rolled into Caledonia together.
Props to the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR) – they had just wrapped a 100% renovation of the camping area in this mountaintop park – every bit of infrastructure – sites, tables, fire rings, water hydrants, bath houses – was brand spanking new. The whole facility looked beautiful. The public day use area at the bottom of the mountain even had free electric vehicle charging stations. We got Moby positioned on the pad, and opened up the cargo doors, and deployed our favorite chairs and campstove.
Avast! It Be The White Whale!
I took a little exploratory walk around the brand-new bathhouse that sat directly across from our campsite. All four corners of the building had two outdoor electrical boxes – a lot of the plugs were already occupied by a mixture of smartphones and battery bank chargers. I rode the DSR/X around behind the bathroom, set the bike to Extended Range changing, and plugged the charger brick in. I much preferred having the bike 60 feet away to having to hike up the mountain from the public chargers in enduro boots. I had more than enough time before the morning to get fully charged.
Creative Plug Sourcing 301
While making a campfire, I heard the unmistakable sound (to me, anyway!) of an 800 cc Rotax twin — the motor in older BMW F800 GSs. A gentleman in a high-viz enduro jacket rolled up — his bike’s cases displaying BMW MOA stickers — the road behind our site and stopped in a walk-in campsite that required one haul one’s gear up a stepped path about 20 feet above the parking spot. I walked over and introduced myself – our new neighbor was named Anatoly – and offered up part of our site if slugging all one’s gear up that staircase didn’t seem appealing. I invited him to the campfire I’d been making as he rolled up, and then he went back to slugging his gear up the hill and setting camp.
Later on, when he had a tent and I had a fire, Anatoly and I chatted for a while, and when he found we were there to hold a group ride in the State Forest, he asked if he could ride along. It sure didn’t seem like Anatoly’s first rodeo – he sheepishly admitted that used to ‘race motocross’ – so I gladly agreed.
Hopefully this was a case of the more the merrier. I’ve seen that go the other way, but I was feeling lucky.
Part Three – The Spontaneous Nerds Adventure Rally
Spontaneous Adventure Rally
After a great night of sleeping en plein air, I was nursing a cup of coffee when I first heard ’The Pig’ off in the distance climbing the grade up the mountain. ‘The Pig’ is Triumph Paul’s low investment introduction to adventure riding. After the better part of a decade on Heritage Bonneville twins and a few more on a very muscular 1200 Tiger, Paul discovered the unalloyed joy of a Gen1 Kawasaki KLR650 — a simple offroad big single that one doesn’t care about hurting and probably couldn’t if one tried to, anyway. Paul’s normal form is to do almost everything on the KLR on wide or near wide open throttle, and to just laugh at the sound of the re-piped engine’s bark.
Paul barely had his helmet off, and his hand pumping in mine, before I heard the sound of another, higher pitched single thrashing up the same long grade. This would be Justin – a rare case of someone who was well worth keeping around when the job where you’d met him maybe wasn’t. Justin is cerebral, technically astute, analytical – he was riding a fairly recent Honda CRF 250 sporting a fresh set of Shinko 705s – arguably he was the only one of the four of us who had selected the correct tool for the job at hand.
Looking at the four motorcycles arrayed across the front of our campsite, I couldn’t help but think that serendipity had provided the type of perfect assortment of off-road capable motorcycles that the motorcycle magazine editors of old used to lose sleep over assembling for comparison tests. We had a lightweight single cylinder dual sport, a tractor of a large displacement dual sport, a middleweight twin cylinder adventure bike and a heavyweight electric. Intended or not, the offroad comparo was officially on.
“Really? No fooling.”
I saw Anatoly looking the Zero over. He seemed kind of incredulous – “You’re going to take …this…” — sweeping his arm over the DSR/X –”..up THERE” – pointing towards South Mountain behind us – “riding on THOSE?” – indicating the bike’s Pirelli Scorpion Trail street biased tires. He seemed kinda put out at the notion.
“Yup. I think you’ll be surprised.”
I quietly hoped I wouldn’t be too surprised, either.
Justin, as he tends to, cut to the chase.
“So what’s the plan?”
I pulled my offroad maps out of the frunk, and set the Michaud one on the picnic table open to the northern half of the state forest.
“I figured we’d follow this loop” as I ran my finger around a route that ringed most of the northern section of the park.
“Up this route up the east side of the forest… cut across the ridge though this cut here… and then follow this route down the west side.”
“So…. every time we get to an intersection, you’re going to….look at a map?”
What seemed reasonable to me clearly wasn’t being universally adopted.
This would be good time to mention I’d been jokingly referring to this informal gather as ‘The Nerds Adventure Rally’ – I was clearIy was about to find how much truth lived in that humor.
Folks produced their phones and starting thumbing this way and that.
Paul produced an app that seemed to have track files that roughly lined up with what ‘Analog Greg’ had just described.
“I’ve never used this before so I don’t knowwwwww…I guess you just follow the arrow.”
“Congrats. You’re the leader, let’s go.”
Time To Ride
Triumph Paul pushed the yellow button on his mapping app, dropped his KLR down into first gear, and led the four of us in a merry chase down the steep winding road that leads off the mountain and out of the campground. Since the Zero makes almost no noise I had the pleasurable experience of hearing all these different engine types trying to sing together.
I was somewhat relieved to see that all four riders in our party were instantly displaying good group roadcraft — everyone was leaving good buffers and exercising throttle discipline — the group was moving safely as a unit. This is always a concern when you’ve assembled a new group of riders. I’d ridden with Triumph Paul only a time or two – I knew Justin well but had never ridden with him. And Anatoly, well, I’d found him beside the road, so that was clearly not a known quality.
None of these guys, thankfully, were either unskilled or unwise – Unit Cohesion was just one of those rare cases when the surprise the universe has for you is a pleasant one.
Pennsylvania Route 233 is the North/South paved backbone of the Michaux State Forest. Coming out of the campground we headed north on 233, and got to experience a few sets of pavement twisties where the road follows a stream though a tunnel of overhanging trees. It’s a spectacularly beautiful old road – green with shafts of sunlight occasionally breaking through.
In less than half a mile, though, Paul’s turn signal came on, and he made a left into a hole in the roadside trees. There wasn’t any real sign of a formal intersection there – there was just whole bunch of a chalky crushed stone, a steep hill, and a whole bunch of tracks left by knobby tires that had been here before you.
I followed Paul in riding standing up – the support from the new Tech 7s was comfortable and confidence inspiring – their enduro soles were locked in on the DSR/X’s metal enduro-style footpegs. With my weight over the front wheel, the Zero was locked in, too, although the local crushed stone was a little more slippery and a tad more slidy than my Maryland limestone. Both fork and shock – whose settings I’d never even touched – where just sucking up whatever the surface of the day proved to be. I dialed in some power and climbed the grade like a goat with attitude – the bike just kept making it seem too easy.
At the top of the grade Cap’n Paul signaled right, and went were immediately riding in the deep woods. We were in shade, and the dual track surface was as much soil and some muddy patches as it was stone. Predictably enough, I guess, the muddy patches would prove to be my nemesis for this day – the Scorpion Trails were consistently writing bad checks in them. After a very few self-soiling moments I had a revelation and a strategy – if traction at both ends evaporated simultaneously, don’t do anything quickly or rashly and without forethought, and patiently wait for the evaporated stuff to reconstitute itself and return to the scene.
That was the revelation.
The strategy, though, was to process the terrain far enough ahead of the bike so I could steer around the muddy bits altogether.
With the revelation and the strategy internalized, I had a much more relaxing ride.
After a brief dogleg on and off of pavement – which was a condition that would punctuate the next two days – the group found itself turning into Ridge Road.
I learned long ago that humans are not the most advanced or creative creatures when it comes to naming stuff, and I wouldn’t have to wait long to see that this principle was once again demonstrated here. Ridge continued to climb and get narrower – there were campsites and cabins scattered off in the woods off the sides of the track – and both the surface and the surrounding landscape became more rocky the higher we climbed.
Right here, right now, this forest track was the toughest technical stuff I’d ridden the DSR/X on yet, but nothing touched down, the front end did exactly what I asked, and the utter precision of the Zero’s power delivery allowed me to pick my line and put the bike exactly where I wanted it. There were some pretty big stones in this track but for the most part, I didn’t hit them, and when I did, the chassis just sucked them up. Justin’s CRF – with its low weight and long travel suspension – was having the easiest time of it up here, but this 545-pound electric motorcycle was both secure and still in the frame with Honda’s Dual Sport weapon.
Nobody in this group was having to spend any time sitting around waiting on anybody.
I was beginning to think the DSR/X was a real poncho.
In the back of my mind, I tried not to think too much about all the altitude we were gaining as the four of us kept climbing. My experience points to riding down steep hills having far greater potential for havoc than going up them, and – you know – what goes up must come down, and we were doing a whole lot of going up.
I’ve occasionally been guilty of overthinking things, and this turned out to be one of those. Once we had crested the mountain, the descent proved to be far more gradual than the climbs that got us there.
The rest of the morning was just a cheerful blur.
After just under 50 miles of trail, we looped back into the Caledonia State Park Campground to grab a sandwich, do some hydration, and plot an afternoon strategy. Anatoly, who had consistently demonstrated that his motocross racing days were not that long ago, had to be back home in Montgomery County Maryland, so he loaded his bike back up with his camping gear, and gave us a wave as he motored off.
I checked the Zero’s state of charge – while I had used ‘Extended Range’ changing, I still had more than 80% charge showing. Clearly, when operated at trail riding speeds – as opposed to highway speeds – Zero’s stated spec of close to 180 miles didn’t seem in any way out of the hunt.
Sweet Doris from Baltimore made everybody a sandwich, and, impervious to ridicule, I pulled my Purple Lizard Michaud offroap map back out of the DSR/X’s ‘frunk’. We’d spent the morning in the northeastern area of the State Forest – although the plan had been to loop the southern section tomorrow, everyone was still enthusiastic and fresh, and plans are only the roughest of guidelines, anyway.
After we wrapped lunch, no one had to be told twice to saddle up. We headed south this time on 233, and then picked up gravel heading west. After some route/reroute adjustments, and encountering a few trails that had been gated closed, causing backtracks, we picked up Newman Road headed back north toward US 30. I haven’t run into an unpaved road of this type before. Newman is wide enough for two large trucks, and has a maintained, graded gravel surface. If they let adventure riders roost on golf courses – they don’t, if you were wondering – such thoughts would give the average golf guy a stroke – it might be something like this. This is a manicured riding surface.
This might have been the one time all day I might have been less than entirely considerate of the small displacement CRF’s accelerative limitations. Coming out of one of Newman’s wide, sweeping corners, I called up the most enthusiastic power level I’d use the entire day. On this well-graded surface, the DSR/X went absolutely rock solid at 60 mph, suspension and chassis working perfectly – it was calm, planted. Riding the bike like this made the possibility of covering continents this way manifest, even if just for a few, suspended minutes.
Newman was so much fun, that of course it couldn’t last.
We found ourselves back at 30, and that seemed like not enough of a good thing.
“Guys! I saw two really interesting looking trails at a crossroads back about 6 miles. Wanna go check ‘em out?”
No dissent was expressed.
So we all one-eightied, and went blasting back down Newman in the other direction.
“Every motorcyclist hates a backtrack?”
Not always.
Turned out Newman was just as much fun riding south as it had been heading north.
When we got back to the crossroads, I went with my gut and made a right to the road headed west. District Road turned out to be that perfect ride in the woods – we were in the moist shade of old growth forest – the trees here were big – hundreds of years old. District Road’s surface changed frequently – some sections were gravel, some dirt, and some rode over sections of exposed stone. Sightlines were short, with frequent short climbs and matching descents. It was tighter, technical stuff, where too much acceleration could really mess with your setup for the next corner or three. The DSR/X made it all complete child’s play – no matter what one’s selected velocity, one had instant access to as much torque or motor regen as one needed. With the Showa suspension at both ends working to keep the wheels on the ground – the feel was of a machine that was completely planted.
Any anxiety I’d had about this motorcycle’s capabilities off pavement had all but disappeared. The control that the Zero gave me – less to manage and faster response – made me look like a better offroad rider than I really am – I was riding this relatively unfamiliar bike with more grace and confidence out here than I’d ever had before.
After a half dozen miles or so District came back out on the highway, and after parlez, we reversed course to ‘go try the other one’.
‘The Other One’ turned out to be Teaberry Road, which turned out to be a completely different kind of completely great. Teaberry rolled through a new growth forest – the trees looked to be about 10 years old, and their immature canopy meant the route was bathed in sunshine. The surface was a nice gravel dual track, with excellent sightlines.
Climbing up one long grade, I came up behind a line of gravel pedal cyclists.
I moved over into the opposite wheel track, dropped some speed, and channeled Schwinn-riding Greg – Sweet Doris and I spend lots of time on the bicycle rail trails in the region – and clearly said “Coming By On Your Left” – the standard bicyclist’s courtesy.
As I drew even with the rider at the back of the column, he turned his head to look at me.
His expression was one of the high points of a very good day.
Expectation: Another Lycra-clad he-man bicyclist, buff enough to be passing me, who is already pretty fast.
Reality: Aerostich-clad Power Ranger lookalike astride a large motorcycle that made absolutely no noise.
You’ve seen 1930’s vintage cartoons where the surprised character’s eyes get to be the size of dinner plates, and their jaw literally hits the ground.
Aaaa-OOOOO-gah.
It was kinda like that.
Motorcycling can fill one’s life with vivid memories.
Given we were riding motorcycles though rolling forest, though, I had to limit myself to only eleven seconds of chuckling before returning full mental bandwidth and focus to the task at hand.
The task at hand, it seemed, wasn’t particularly bad work if you could get it. Teaberry rolled on though sunlight meadows with the land gradually rising and falling beneath us and our three motorcycles.
Looking at the three of us rolling down this road time seemed to slow down and render us all in super slow-mo – wheels tracking the uneven ground and stroking through their suspension with the bikes seemingly floating above the uneven surfaces – our real lives had suddenly transformed into a lost outtake from ‘On Any Sunday’.
Teaberry came out of the woods, dropped on back on pavement, and a few twisties later, we back at the top of the hill in camp.
There was nothing on our three faces but big smiles. It felt like the first one to say something would be the loser – after a ride like that there is really nothing one can say.
The plan had been discarded hours and miles ago – what was left of it, though, we set on fire.
Triumph Paul, it seemed, had no-one at home to look after his dog who is, amusingly in this context, named Zero. Zero – who is an absolutely stone enormous and utter prince of a dog – is not the sort of dog I’d want to leave feeling lonesome and put-upon for too very long, either. Which left us all hearing the KLR’s 650 single disappear as it ran to the bottom of the mountain. Justin – even with his bike loaded with camp gear – had a development at home that caused another single to recede into the distance.
The President of our Camping Club recently bought a home only 6 or so miles east of Caledonia. Joe – bearing growlers from a local joint called ‘The Thirsty Farmer’ – visited us at the campground and ended up enjoying the steaks cooked over wood my riding buds had passed on.
It’s really hard to imagine a better riding day.
BDR
Having camp coffee at the picnic table the next morning, I studied my MA BDR map.
Sweet Doris from Baltimore wanted to do a tour at Presidents Joe and Gena’s new house nearby.
Me, I looked at the sun climbing into a clear blue sky, felt the temperature rapidly coming up, and thought that opportunities like this were not be squandered.
The Mid-Atlantic Back Country Discovery route – based on nerding out on the map – basically connects Caledonia State Park to my part of Frederick County Maryland. Resolved, it might only be a little more than half of one Section, but we were going to take the BDR home.
It’s a Map. Perhaps You’ve Heard of Them?
It would be a quiet, contemplative ride in the woods – absolutely no need to hurry, or be concerned about inconveniencing the group by stopping for pictures, or to talk to a man about a horse.
Better still, no one would give me grief if I wanted to look at a map.
I helped Sweet Doris get gear stowed in the van, watched Moby pull off, and then booted up the DSR/X and rolled down the hill.
The entry off PA 233 into the BDR route was, again, just a hole in the trees. Some helpful soul had made a tiny sign out of a stick and small slice of board which said “BDR =>”. The path instantly got narrower and rougher as it went into the deep shade of more old growth forest. Three quarters of a mile down the trail I came to a beautiful hand-built cabin. The cabin’s owners had placed a blue cooler by the edge of the trail, with another sign – “Free Water for BDR riders”.
It’s refreshing to be welcomed because I’m riding a motorcycle.
Welcome to the MA BDR.
It turned out that District and Teaberry Roads – which the pack had so much enjoyed yesterday – were the first legs of the route. It was a lovely warmup for the first few miles of the day, and frankly, a very different experience without my Internal Combustion Colleagues. District Road was an exercise in how suspension should work – wheels working furiously and rider unaffected and unperturbed. Without the noise of the absent two singles, the ride down Teaberry was just a silent flight though a sunlit meadow – the loudest sound was the crunching of gravel under the DSR/X’s contact patches. When the birds burst onto song, one could hear them.
Teaberry Road
After Teaberry, though, the ride became more technical. After another dogleg onto and quickly off pavement, High Rock Road was another cut into the deep old growth woods, and the trail quickly became soft and moist, with the trees beside the road so dense that it was almost like riding between walls. A lot of the roads I’d ridden in the northern Sections of The Michaud have subtle signals that one is not that far from civilization – that there are cabins or houses just over that hill over there.
Not so this section of the BDR, though. The forest was thick and dark, with no campsites, clearings or cabins — most of the road had earthen berms to separate the trail from the forest beyond. It felt like each mile was taking one further away from the overdeveloped present and into the wild where it was just the bike and rider against pretty much everything. I find it hard to remember any riding experience as meditative as this – a silent motorcycle, tires scrubbing on the rocks and soil, suspension working perfectly as I rode standing up, with the wind flowing gently over my upper body and my face through my open helmet visor.
Those Helpful People That Are Always Telling You Things will tell you that one shouldn’t – you shouldn’t – ride alone in areas this remote. That being alone dramatically raises the stakes if your bike is damaged or you are injured in a fall. Me, contrarian that I am, believe that the stakes don’t rise at all – fall riding with buddies and the only thing that changes is how many pairs of hands you have to fix what’s broke – you still have a bike to fix and have to ride it out of there either way.
Resolved: whether riding with companions or riding alone, endeavor to not fall down. Focus on trail conditions up ahead and ride at a speed appropriate for traction and sightlines. If you’re the kind of guy that likes to get big air off of rises in a trail you’ve never ridden before, solo trailing might not be for you. Fortunately, the DSR/X makes this kind of riding trivial – there’s enough power to go quickly when it’s safe to do so, and the same, muscular power available when conditions dictate proceeding slowly. Either way, there’s microscopically precise control of what’s going on at the contact patches – I felt more confident of my offroad riding on this motorcycle than I do on the bikes that I own.
Being silent and alone one gets in a certain kind of cognitive and performative groove. As I got further into the deep forest and higher on the mountain I did finally see a few other users of the trail – first I encountered a small pack of gravel bicyclists. As I lowered my speed to overtake their column we were able to exchange greetings and a jibe or two – it’s another unanticipated benefit of riding a silent motorcycle. After about a dozen or so miles of rolling down High Rock I came to an intersection that was nicely marked with what appeared to be Civilian Conservation Corps-era signage – you know the ones – brown wood with carved white inset lettering – marking the turn onto the excitingly named Rattlesnake Run Road.
Just this one time, I was hoping that road naming was metaphorical, rather than literal.
Corner of High Rock and Rattlesnake
Rattlesnakes or not, the trail continued to climb and get narrower – at one point I passed a few local lads that were out on their 250 dual sports – and the DSR/X continued to inhale the steep grades it was climbing – if the Scorpion Trail tires were a drive traction handicap, I sure couldn’t tell. We continued to climb until we got to the crest of the mountain and the border with Maryland. Buck Lance Road was actually some of the most challenging riding of the trip – it was a loose surfaced dirt road that dropped sharply down from the crest of the ridge. Remembering that I find going down hills more stressey than going up them – it’s way easier to manage power than it is to manage gravity — the DSR/X again beat expectations – the combination of some gentle rear wheel regen, and an occasional dab of front brake made short work of the descent.
The view of the North Valley of Frederick County — as we got towards the bottom of the descent – was nothing short of breathtaking. Buck Lance Road delivered me back into roads with which I’m more familiar – Old Catoctin and Tower Roads took me around the Eco-preserve at Thorpewood, and into the Frederick City Watershed and Gambrill State Park — lovely gravelly goodness all. At Gambrill we finally came back into the pavement, where the descent off the mountain – a series of stereotypical sweepers and switchbacks – gave the DSR/X a chance to shake off some dirt and provide one last reminder of the machine’s on-road sporting capability – the bike was on the sides of its tires and on rails, all the way down into Frederick.
Buck Lance Road and The North County Vista
10 minutes of Jefferson Pike later, the Zero was sitting on its sidestand, turned off in my driveway.
While studying the quantity and distribution of the trail surfaces the DSR/X had brought home with it, I noticed the changes Zero had made to the bike’s rear belt drive pulley. The knock against belt drive systems was when riding offroad, ‘stuff’ from the trail would get lodged under the belt, weakening it over time. The DSR/X’s drive pulley, though, had been modified with the goal of being more reliable offroad – with slots machined into the bottom of each tooth, theoretically providing a way out for that debris without stressing the drive belt. Looking at the hub on this bike, I could see the patterns on the dirt that showed ‘stuff’ was actually coming out the holes.
Nerds love it when shit works.
Dirt on the Sprocket is Not an Alternative Rock Band
I took my waterbottle, snacks, ballcap and maps out of the Zero’s frunk. I took a good long, hard look at it, and headed inside.
After a couple of hundred miles of trail, a shower and a beer had a certain attraction.
And in the morning, Wade’s Jeep showed up in the bottom of the driveway.
Bring It All Home
545-pound motorcycles that are designed to be operated off pavement enter the fray with about 200 things working against them. With that in mind, I didn’t really expect much when I took the DSR/X past the end of the macadam.
Which is why it was such an overwhelmingly pleasant experience to have been so resoundingly wrong.
Zero seems to have been able to wed some world class chassis and suspension engineering – motorcycle stuff – with world class energy storage, propulsion and stability control technology – Electrical Engineering/Electronics stuff.
The result is a genuinely excellent motorcycle.
Not excellent for an electric motorcycle. Just an excellent motorcycle.
Most folks bring bias to how they look at machines like this. They posit that electric motorcycles wouldn’t exist at all if it wasn’t for the drive to eliminate the use of fossil fuels as motor fuel. And while a machine like this will help you cut your carbon footprint, there’s well more than that going on here.
The fact is, Zero’s DSR/X just works better than its petroleum burning counterparts. The availability of maximum torque at every point in the motor’s rpm range, combined with the new offfroad mode extensions to Bosch’s Motorcycle Stability Control (MSC), make the DSR/X both easier and safer to operate in both off-road and on-road contexts.
The DSX/R may be the most precise motorcycle to operate I’ve ever ridden.
I am not a gifted offroad rider. The DSR/X, though, gives me the confidence to fully enjoy riding out in the woods because the Zero’s software makes controlling the motorcycle in low traction conditions easier to fully master.
On pavement, the DSR/X’s performance is just a bonus – the riding position is roomy and comfortable, and its cornering performance is at least in the same zip code with many sports motorcycles.
The entire Zero motorcycle is a level of magnitude mechanically simpler. There are so many less mechanical and wear parts on Zero’s motorcycles, when compared with an internal combustion bike. The entire time I had the motorcycle, I didn’t touch a single tool, nut or bolt on it — the only adjustment I made was to the height of the windshield.
I just rode it.
That ingenious windshield adjuster was – like the deliberate flaw left in a Persian carpet – the only thing about which I could find any complaint on the entire machine. After some initial experimentation, I determined that the shield’s fully raised position was the only one that worked for a rider my height. It also seemed like when I’d leave the DSR/X parked overnight, though, I’d come out in the morning and the shield would be in a lower position. Maybe, given the rough tracks I was riding, it was slowly working its way down because of the vibration. Either way, there’s a spring washer in the mechanism that just needs a few more muscles, and that issue will be fixed.
The basic configuration of the DSR/X’s powertrain makes physics work for the bike. The engine is coaxial with the rear swingarm pivot — keeping the carbon-reinforced aramid belt driveline from imparting any force – rise or squat – into the rear suspension. The weight of the motor is carried extremely low in the frame. The heaviest single component – the battery – is so low and so far forward that the front tire has extraordinary levels of grip. The engineers with whom I’d discussed the implementation process of the Bosch Motorcycle Stability Control had stated that MSC had an anti-wheelie function, but that it wasn’t implemented on the Zeros because the weight distribution and chassis geometry made it unnecessary.
Whether on or off pavement, the DSR/X is a comfortable, fast, safe, practical motorcycle that can serve well as daily transportation. Maintenance effort and cost are dramatically lower than a comparable internal combustion machine – tires and brake service are about all it will ever need.
So, were one to take Zero at face value, and elect to do one’s adventure riding on a DSR/X, what do you need to know? First off, although I was able to fake my way along on the types of offroad surfaces one encounters in Eastern forests on the stock Pirelli Scorpion Trails, a tire upgrade would be first on the list. Whether you’re a 50-50 guy – like the new Dunlop TrailMax Raids or Shinko’s 705s — or a ‘Take No Prisoners Full-On Knobbies-Or-Die’ type – like the Continental TKC 80s – a more dirt-worthy tire is an investment you will not regret. Especially if your favorite riding environment has any mud or sand in it.
Second, the protective options from Zero’s accessory catalog are probably a good idea – both a real bash plate and the crash bar cage are good ideas. Finally either Zero’s hard cases or a set of soft bags and some packing straps will be needed to secure your camping gear and clothing. The bike’s stock luggage rack is a pretty stout setup that needs no upgrade.
Colder weather or longer distance riders way also appreciate Zero’s optional touring screen, which offers way better coverage than the standard fly screen.
On gravel dual track and dirt roads, the DSR/X allows a rider to be utterly in command. Personally, there are some gnarlier riding environments where I wouldn’t take this motorcycle – bushwhacking single track where one has to wheelie over downed trees, for one example – or western US areas where there are big rock gardens that involve 4 foot drops off of rock faces for another – but that’s likely more of a statement about my limited offroading skills than it is about the DSR/X’s capabilities. One can make the argument that any bike bigger than a 250 dual sport ought not to be in either environment.
“But Greg”, you’re no doubt yelling at your screen, “You can’t go adventuring on an electric motorcycle – there’s no place to charge out there….”.
Starting with the Backcountry Discovery Routes, BDR.org and Zero have been doing development and investment work to position chargers at at least every Section Break on the BDR routes, and many more places along the routes as well. Pennsylvania and Maryland State parks, for example, have commercial level 2 chargers that are free. If one goes to the online versions of the BDR Route maps, there’s a toggle that activates a layer that displays all of the charging locations, and at least for the MidAtlantic BDR route, there are literally hundreds of them along the 1000+ mile route.
And those don’t even count the ‘Creating Plug Sourcing’ sockets, which may well be infinite.
Something you should also consider is that while riding the DSR/X at trail speeds – figure between 20 and 50 miles per hour – the range of the 17.3 kWh battery pack approaches 200 miles. The average BDR Section is just over 100. The DSR/X is the first of many electric motorcycle’s I’ve ridden where I actually stopped fixating on the State of Charge indicator and just enjoyed the riding – during the Nerds Adventure Rally we rode close to 100 miles of trail on Saturday, and the bike returned to camp with roughly 60% of its battery remaining. In trail riding environments, ‘range anxiety’ just isn’t a thing.
And yes, the DSR/X is not an inexpensive motorcycle – list is nearly $23K – but there really isn’t an ‘electric premium’. Depending on what state you live in, there may be state incentives to ride electric, as well. Consider that a brand new R1300GS base model lists at nearly $19K, and that most of the GSs that make it to the states will come with BMW’s ‘Premium Package’ – adding another $3.9K – and the two motorcycles are priced within $100 of each other. Subtract the cost of 3-6 oil changes, a valve adjustment and 36 months of gasoline, if you’re charging at home, over 36 months, and your overall cost for riding the Zero will be well lower, for what arguably is a better riding motorcycle.
I was fully prepared to be underwhelmed by this Zero once it left the pavement. Disappointment was the one emotion I never experienced while riding it.
***
Credits:
Thanks to Zero Motorcycles for the opportunity to fully test and experience their new DSR/X electric adventure touring motorcycle.
Portions of this story were previously published by Revzilla’s Common Tread and have been reprinted by permission.
Links to motorcycle products embedded in this story are for products which I have purchased and used at my own expense. No promotional or commercial consideration of any kind has been obtained for their inclusion.
Sweet Doris from Baltimore and I spend a great deal of time out in C & O Canal National Park. The C & O Canal covers 184 miles from Cumberland, Maryland to Georgetown – in Washington DC – and its former canal boat towpath – designed for use by mules, who were the tractors of the 1830s – provides some of the best pedal cycling environments imaginable.
On her birthday, we took Moby the Camper Van – laden with D’s recumbent trike and my now vintage Schwinn Sierra GS – up to Big Slackwater, which is one of Sweet Doris from Baltimore’s favorite rides anywhere. Big Slackwater is one of the few sections of the Potomac River which is wide and deep enough that the Canal Boats could navigate it directly, so the canal enters the river upriver from Slackwater, and then exits again just above Dam 5 after an approximately 6-mile open water run. In this section, the towpath runs over a highly engineered modern concrete structured surface which is cantilevered out of the stone cliffs that line the river. Being a citizen of these United States gets one a mixed bag of prizes, and what the National Park Service did here is one of the good ones.
Our riding day was uncharacteristically warm for mid-December – in the mid-fifties with no wind and blue, cloudless skies. Better still, we seemed to have the towpath all to ourselves – perfect conditions, and everyone else had failed to notice and stayed home.
It was an absolutely peak cycling experience.
After a great ride, we rode back off the towpath and into the parking lot at the Little Slackwater boat ramp. As l lined up on Moby to load up the bikes, I saw something that provoked a slight change in trajectory.
As I rolled though the parking lot, and went past the boat ramp, I confirmed that I wasn’t suffering from post-exertion oxygen deprivation, but I really was looking at an older rider, talking on his phone and standing next to his 1977 Harley-Davidson XLCR 1000 ‘Cafe Racer’.
The CR, for folks that aren’t fixated on the classic motorcycle enthusiasm and the associated economy, was a completely unprecedented factory custom motorcycle for Harley-Davidson, featuring styling elements that promised a performance focus that the machine didn’t entirely deliver. Superfically, my BMW R90S and the XLCR have a lot of similar styling elements, although, in complete candor, the R90S did, in modified form, win quite a few roadraces. Harley only made a few more than 3300 examples, which mostly sat unsold in dealerships, and were by all accounts an utter sales flop when they were new.
Through the lens of the modern collector, though, the XLCR is one of the most desirable Harleys ever built.
I dismounted, introduced myself, and struck up a conversation.
Tim, it seemed, had worked at HD’s York Assembly plant as a Test Rider. He’d decided he ‘got’ the CR when it came out, and bought this one from a dealer when it was new, at, what must be observed, was a straight up ‘He Stole It’ kind of price. Tim had been happy to see the thing in his garage, and the Dealer had been more than happy to see the dang thing out of his showroom.
The CR’s saddle was a tad unusual by modern standards in that it attached to the motorcycle using a system of snaps, although in the mid 70’s that wouldn’t have been quite so weird. Tim’s saddle unit was relaxing that day, and had temporarily been replaced by a throw-over pad made from some old riding jeans and some strategic padding. He was just out to grab some fresh fuel before winter, and one got the sense he wasn’t very far from home.
Me, I was unable to form coherent sentences or, you know, think because I was looking at a CR that appeared to be 100% original, and in close to showroom condition.
You Don’t See One of These Every DayComplete and Unmolested. Wow.
Had a great time talking bikes with Tim, but with the sun sinking, he needed to get home before the mercury plummeted, and we had a birthday party to get to.
He fired up the CR, and headed south along the towpath and the river.
That CR sounded spectacularly great.
So, Tim, if you’re out there and you see this, drop a comment and get in touch.
Tim doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy that has slid unnoticed though the last 50 years of his life, either. In fact, when I told this story to our good friend Bike Crazy Uncle Joe, he told me he’d had his own Roadside Tim Encounter, too. So if you’re NOT Tim, but you know who he is, tell him to get in touch.
He’s got more stories to tell than we could even begin to name in 10 minutes standing by Big Slackwater.
There are things about motorcycles that I would know if I had the good graces to just crash more often.
Sadly, though, crashing is something with which I have only a passing acquaintance, and I do everything imaginable to keep from having it become a close friend.
I’ve been spending a fair bit of time riding in the dirt lately. Unlearning and relearning traction management habits formed by close to forty years of on-pavement riding has required a lot of mental bandwidth but has been, frankly, a straight-up blast.
Last weekend, the Nerds Adventure Motorcycle Club (a non-hierarchical, semi-anarchistic loose affiliation of geeky motorcyclists) set up a group ride on the gravel roads and forest tracks of Pennsylvania’s Micheaux State Forest. One can tell we’re Nerds by looking at the bikes we ride – I was on a new Zero Electric offroader and my buds were on a Honda CR250 and a KLR 650. Over two sweet sunny days of riding, we clocked about 150 miles of deep forest trails.
A good time, unsurprisingly, was had by all.
Like a lot of these immersive riding engagements, I came away with two, well-considered, thoroughly reasoned flashes of enlightenment.
First and best thing was that Zero’s new DSR/X handles adventure riding far better than anybody had any reason to suspect. Despite my testbike being equipped with 80/20 street biased tires, the bike’s direct drive powertrain – which delivers all of its available torque at any road (or lack of road) speed – makes managing traction absolute child’s play – it seems like cheating. Ridden standing up, with the rider’s weight over the front axle, the front tire tracked and stayed hooked up, with the inverted front forks working perfectly. For a big, heavy, powerful motorcycle, the degree of control borders on PFM.
The second thing, though, is a corollary of the first.
If 560 pounds of electric missile is this good in the gravel, what wasn’t right with my F800GS?
A BMW GS – the OG of off-pavement motorcycles – set up with long travel suspension, proper big offroad spoked wheels sizes and Shinko Trail Master rubber – was the unquestioned overlanding champeen of the world.
My GS, though, has always felt tentative on off-camber stuff, tending to want to follow the topography instead of doing what one tells it. It just never felt like its front end could be completely trusted.
So I went back to a clear sheet of paper.
Right away, an dead easy problem presented itself and was promptly set right.
When I’d first purchased the GS, I’ll admit to having been a tad intimidated at the bike’s overall altitude. In an effort to keep my little bootsies from having light shining underneath them when I went to place one on the ground at stops, I’d taken the spring preload on the rear shock, and dialed it all the way back. Given the weight of a full 6.5 gallon fuel load – which sits behind the bike’s midline – the aluminum expedition cases (heavy!), and my significant rear end (when equipped with a full riding suit and enduro boots check in at somewhere north of 200 pounds ‘curb weight’), likely exceeds the GS’s design assumptions, made this adjustment likely counterproductive. Having insufficient preload on the rear shock will cause the bike to settle in the rear, transferring overall weight off the front tire, making it prone to losing traction. A few clicks on the adjuster brought the bike back to a level attitude with me aboard. Afterwards, no light shined under bootsies – a good outcome.
There was also something more complex that required a bit more thought, though.
When I’d purchased the bike, the previous owner had shared a tale of a small misadventure in a parking garage that involved a suboptimal interaction with some spilled coolant. Said interaction had resulted in a fairly hard drop onto a concrete surface. After that little demonstration of The Normal Force, I’d inherited a bike whose windshield and tubular steel windshield support had been customized to a degree that required replacement. I’d also noticed that the bike’s rubber mounted handlebar mounts had also been pushed out of alignment, and had addressed that at the same time.
That hadn’t been the end of the things that gravity had customized though.
I have some lovely bits of aluminum bar stock left over from our shop’s teardrop camper fabrication projects. I took a three-foot bit of bar stock and laid it across the fronts of the forks’ stanchions. With the help of this little visual aid, it was easy to see that the forks were twisted in the triple clamps – with the upper clamp centered and pointing straight ahead, the front wheel was pointing several degrees to the left, with the right leg siting slightly ahead of the left, and the axle at the same odd angle.
A trip to the Googling Machine provided almost instant insight.
Guys and gals that spend their riding time on dirt – being statistically far more likely to fall off when things get slippery – are well acquainted with front suspensions that go all cattywampus after a drop. Far from being terminal, the fix is so simple it seems like a motorcycle magic trick.
The short form is that any telescopic fork front end is held in place by roughly 18 bolts – give or take. Loosening up all but 4 of them – the ones that hold the fork sliders to the upper triple clamp, which is holding up the motorcycle — and stroking the suspension through a few stokes will automatically return the front end to the desired natural alignment. I was skeptical, but make it a point never to argue this kind of thing with Ari.
The process was almost completely trivial.
I did need to pull the handlebars to get to the upper steering head bolt. The bolts on the lower clamps were a tad tricky to access with the radiator shroud and driving lamp both intruding into the required space. The axle bolt, axle pinch bolts, and fender mounting fasteners were loose in a breeze.
When I got to the brake caliper bolts, I pulled up short.
All of the fasteners I’d loosened thus far had been torx headed fasteners. The four caliper bolts though, were a type I’d never seen before – reverse torx heads. Instead of a star shaped recess in the head of the bolt, the head of the bolt was a star shape that would engage a star shaped recess in a special socket.
I little research showed that these sockets are called ‘E’ sockets, and this particular one was an ‘E12’. Such fasteners are apparently fairly common in the braking systems of European manufactured vehicles – one wonders whether their use is a deliberate design choice intended to keep users from mucking about with their own braking systems because… they do not have the wrench.
Now I have the wrench.
The big box ‘hardware stores’ that are the nearly the only place left to buy tools do not have the wrench.
Fortunately, a few of my local Advance Auto Parts locations – I’m guessing they have some BMW car enthusiast customers – did have the wrench. After a 10-minute blast to the store and back on the CB500F, I was back in front of the brake calipers and then they were loose too.
I climbed up onto the GS, pressed my hands onto the fork caps, and gave the front end a few good strokes.
I could swear I heard something go ‘ping!’, but I could be mistaken.
I climbed back down, and squatted in front of the bike.
“Well, shit.”
Everything looked straight and square.
A further check with Greg’s Recycled Improvised Straightedge proved that it was.
A fast run back around the 14 bolts, and 4 more for the bar clamps, and we were back in business.
I rolled the bike out of the shop, climbed up onto the saddle, and fingered it to life. I flatfooted it forward and checked the operation of the brakes. Things stopped briskly, and we had no odd noises from the steering head. I clutched in and slowly rolled out of the driveway and down towards the end of my street.
Rolling at walking speed I gave the bike a few gentle weaves – the GS did what it was told, made no new or concerning noises and nothing fell off. All positive signs.
I went down to the end of the road, and did a nice feet-up 180… everything felt nice, solid and predictable. I rolled around the neighborhood, doing tight loops and even a few figure 8s.
Preliminary result was that everything had gone back together properly.
A real thorough test would have to wait for sunlight tomorrow.
***
As soon as I’d had some coffee the next morning, and it had had time to kick in, I booted and scooted.
I figured I’d not want to muck about, and headed straight for Sigler Road.
Heading down into Sigler’s little canyon, I swapped the GS’s drive mode into its ‘Enduro’ setting – BMWspeak for turning off the rear ABS, and dialing the rear traction control back to virtually nothing. Skid, roost and slide much?
As I hit the beginning of the gravel at the bottom of the grade, I stood up and gently shifted my weight from one peg to the other, making a little weave in the dirt which felt pretty positive.
By the time I got to the stream I’d slowed into the meat of 1st gear to give myself a half a second to read the streambed and pick a line free of bigger rocks. As I hit the opposite bank, the suspension sucked up the steep rise and then helped me as I cut hard to the left, gassed it and stepped the rear tire out just a little as we gained some speed heading back up the hill.
Sigler’s eastern side is a tight and technical piece of gravel, with two hairpins cutting up the side of the grade until one hits the top and the road opens up. The GS was finally working with me instead of fighting me – the compliance and stroke of the forks was markedly improved along with the steering. It’s stone amazing how much better everything works when the front end’s moving parts are all pointed in the same direction.
The upper part of Sigler is two long straights connected by a sharp banked right hand turn – cutting along at about 45 miles and hour the GS felt solid as a rock. Getting into and out of the right was an exercise in ‘chuck ‘er in there’, and a little throttle coming out was not a bad thing.
As I cruised down the long straight – making short, smooth work of the washboard surface — headed back down towards Lander Road, I began to think maybe I had this front-end thing sussed.
Frederick County unpaved roads tend to have sections where the center of the road is noticeably crowned – a natural byproduct of years of spreading fresh gravel and rolling and grading same. It’s these sections that had been the bits that had seemed to most rattle the tweeked GS – where picking a line or setting up for a corner meant one was working against the camber, and it felt a tad unsettled.
Rather than heading home. I headed down Poffenberger, past Lewis Mill where the most crowned bits are – and again, the shifting weight weave against and then with the camber felt as assured and pretty as could be. The front end was behaving and doing what it was told. It was as if the bike had lost 200 pounds.
Huzzah, boys. We be untweeked.
Embarrassed that it took this long to figure it out.
Ecstatic about riding this bike now that I finally did.
A old friend of mine – who has walked on – was infamous for his love of violent movies.
Those of us that knew him had an informal way of determining whether or not Little Walt would like anything that had just premiered in the theater – back when people watched movies in the theater – which was that the more gunfire or explosions the movie had, the more Little Walt was likely to love it.
A cinema highbrow Walt wasn’t.
Writing – of any quality – was not required to make the ‘Walt List’. Neither was a plot. Or Acting. All that was required was interpersonal violence – whether knives, gunfire, laser blasters, or bare-handed tearing people apart.
Give the man filmic cruelty and bloodshed, and Little Walt was content.
One of his personal favorites was ‘Escape from New York’ – a 1981 Dystopian Sci-Fi thriller that imagined a future world of – wait for it – 1997, where the destruction of the social fabric had resulted in the conversion of Manhattan Island into the United States’ only maximum-security prison.
Our protagonist – Snake Plissken — was a former US Army special forces officer who had developed a taste for robbing Federal Reserve Banks, which lands him a stint in Manhattan. When terrorists kidnap the President of the United States, and crash Air Force One on the island, Snake is recruited to rescue the Pres and get him off the Island in exchange for a pardon.
Much Violence and Bloodshed ensues.
Because – being a ‘Walt Movie’ – writing was not a prerequisite, the dialog has several repeating ‘bits’ designed to ground the viewer while they wait for their next violence fix.
One of these bits occurs when any newly introduced character is introduced to Snake. For reasons that are a bit thin, whether through intoxication, general squalor or a beat-down, most new characters are on the ground when the introduction occurs.
“Snake Plissken? I heard you were dead….”
<camera starts at the ground and pans upward>
“Niiiiiiiiiice Boots.”
To be honest, they were nice boots.
Hollywood’s costume designers had started with a set of 1960s vintage competition motocross boots – knee high with six buckles – and then added some bling to raise their production values. In place of the normal shin guard, the props folk had added some polished and textured stainless steel plates to the front of the boots, an accordion-pleated set of knee pads, and some dramatically modified toe plates which featured a few sharpened spikes useful for delivering quality interpersonal violence.
Niiiiiiiiiice Boots.
Snake’s boots, in my mind, became a stand-in for any pair of boots whose combat level armoring was their most important feature.
Personally, my taste in boots is one hundred eighty degrees removed from that of the fictional Snake. Sure, my motorcycle boots have some protective features – like impact adsorbent pads on the ankles – but place equal importance on comfort, ventilation, and waterproofness. Long distance road riding creates the requirements that result in soft-hearted boots like these.
That, though, was about to change.
It started when, before my recent bout of suboptimal health, Triumph Paul and I had been planning to go to an offroad adventure riding clinic, sponsored by one of my local bike dealerships. One of the many requirements listed by the instructor was that participants needed to have ‘appropriate offroad riding boots’.
The clear implication was that the boots that I owned were somehow inappropriate.
So I started to do some research to see what constituted appropriate offroad boots.
And boy, did I ever learn some stuff.
The Internet, of course, is filled with all manner of experts.
Some of them even know what they are talking about.
The consensus of these experts was that most Adventure Riders did not actually wear sufficiently protective boots for the range of possible injuries to which they were likely to be exposed. The most statistically likely injury during offroad riding was dropping the motorcycle in a manner where the rider didn’t recognize defeat early enough in the process, failed to get clear of the crash, and ended up with a foot pinned beneath the fallen machine. The resulting broken ankles were painful and complex injuries that dictated at least 4 months out of the saddle, never mind the complexities of getting back from the location where one had had one’s ‘oopsie’.
One expert even went so far as to state that any boot that had the word ‘Adventure’ in their name was likely not appropriate for actual Adventure Riding.
While that informed opinion may have been somewhat dramatically overstated, it wasn’t that far off the truth.
It didn’t take a lot of research to confirm this. One of the most popular Adventure boots is the Forma Terra Evo. These boots look the business – they have buckles, as well as a lightweight ankle brace – but even Forma – or at least their lawyers, want to disavow you of the notion that they’re enough boot for real offroading. Their web page for these boots features this little note:
*Even if your ride is only 1% offroad, you will need offroad boots for increased offroad protection. The Terra Evo Dry boots are soft adventure boots designed for comfort and long-distance touring. It’s unreasonable to expect them to perform as offroad motocross boots.
Net/net is that only motocross style boots will protect the rider’s feet when confronted with trees, rocks and occasionally having a motorcycle dropped on one’s foot. Four months in plaster and PT is a powerful motivator.
So what features are we looking for, then?
There are two critical functions. The first is sufficient reinforced plastic and padding to absorb a potentially damaging impact or crush. The second is an exoskeleton that limits the ability of the rider’s ankle to only move in the directions that it is designed to move – a state of the art bracing system will prevent the foot from a lateral ‘rolling’ over or under if stressed, as well as preventing inline over-rotation by preventing the toes from rotating upward or downward more than they’re designed to. There are other ‘nice but not necessary’ stuff one can stir in – a stiff shank for better support when riding standing up, and some admission that sometimes when we ride, Nature is wet.
There are not very many boots made that meet that spec.
So I decided to get the first ‘proper motorcycle boots’ of a long riding life.
My good buds at Motorcyclegear.com always have cyclic deals on almost everything they sell. One of their sale e-mails hit my inbox with a very good price on a pair of Sidi Adventure 2 boots, which minimally meet requirements, and are also just beautiful boots. My oldest set of boots are a set of Sidi City boots (sadly no longer made), which fit me perfectly, and have provided nearly 30 years of service, and after one resoling look good for another 30 more. I clicked on ‘em.
When they hit the shop, I sliced the box open and slid into them. After adjusting the buckles to fit properly, I wore them in my office for about 45 minutes. At the end of the 45 I was seriously considering chewing my own legs off. The boss at Motorcycle Gear – who provides reliable equipment reviews — had suggested that the Adventure 2s were biased towards riders with narrower feet, and that clearly wasn’t me. My right foot felt bad. My left foot felt very bad. Apparently, a youthful errant hockey puck that I’d stopped with that left foot had left its calling card – I have a large caliper in my shop that I used to measure the width of my feet and the left is 4 mm wider than the right.
Sightly verkempt, I packed the Sidis up and sent them back to Texas.
The only other boot that met specs required a higher level of commitment. The Alpinestars Tech 7 Drystar Enduros are deadly serious boots that command a deadly serious price. People that have ridden in them speak of surprising comfort, excellent protection and above average waterproofness. Folks that claim they have elephant-width feet also claim the Tech 7s fit them. Despite my skepticism that anything that looks like it was intended for a Star Wars Stormtrooper could possibly be comfortable, when a small financial windfall befell me, I ordered up a pair, in a striking desert sand colorway.
When the Tech 7s got to my office, I repeated the Try-on drill. While being snug out of the box, the fit was not painful, and reviews suggested that they’d go through significant break-in an hour or two of use.
“I heard you were dead…”
The next day, an opportunity to take them for a test ride presented itself. Putting the boots on a second time revealed that the Tech 7s had already conformed to the shape of my feet somewhat. I rolled my F800 GSA out of the garage, and prepared myself to learn how to shift a motorcycle transmission all over again.
My anxiety on that account was not misplaced.
While the Tech 7s do allow movement of the rider’s ankle to operate the shift lever, the overall size of the toe box and enduro sole make it really challenging to get one’s toe under the lever for upshifts. I aborted Test Ride One and headed back to the shop.
After dinner that evening, I pulled one of the two T-handle Torx drivers that I have velcroed under the bike’s case lids – these two sizes fit all of the Torx fasteners on the motorcycle — and spun out the bolt that secures the shift lever. I slid the lever off its splines and rotated it two teeth upward, and then replaced the fixing bolt. I pulled the Tech 7s back on and sat on the GS in the shop.
Now, instead of an anxiety-filled wrestling match, I could operate the lever without drama.
In two weeks-time, I won’t even remember it was ever any other way.
After Test Ride 2, the next day at lunch time, I confirmed we could easily engage all 6 gears, and enjoyed the solid sensation the Tech 7s provided when riding while standing – unlike the standing on tippy-toes sensation of other boots, these AlpineStars felt like standing on a flat wooden floor — it was easy to apply force to either peg and move the bike around underneath me. The sensation of the bike selecting the higher gears on upshifts is somewhat muted, but the shifts are positive and I haven’t missed any.
Now I just need to find some streams to cross, and my test will be complete.
Here’s hoping that the warm and mild forecast for fall in the Mid-Atlantic turns out to be correct, so Triumph Paul and I can get back the rides we lost when it snapped cold early last year.
Seems like it’s been forever since I’ve ridden a motorcycle off pavement in anger.
The strength to catch a sliding five-hundred-pound motorcycle with my leg or muscle the bars to bring a bucking bike back inline or even the ability to really work my clutch with authority have all been taking some time off and have been sorely missed.
But time either heals all wounds, or at least it heals the ones that don’t kill you outright.
And enough time has gone by that I’m pretty confident that I haven’t been killed off and my wounds are largely healed.
One Wound, Healed
It was finally time to giddy up and make some throttle music.
***
The heat of the day had finally broken, providing a window of opportunity for the breeze passing though my ventilated leathers to actually cool instead of making things demonstrably worse.
I rolled the GS out into the driveway, put the bike over onto the sidestand, walked around to the off side, and leaned in, stepped up onto the peg, and snapped my other leg over the tallest horse I own. My legs felt like they finally had some snap – the trick mount had felt solid and assured.
I lifted the bike up off the stand, pulled it up until it clanged onto the stop on the bike’s frame, pulled the clutch in and fingered the Rotax twin to life. Life, apparently had been something it had been missing, as the idle was lumpy and uneven, with the bike’s throttle plate stepper motors hunting for something that worked for the better part of thirty seconds before a suitable rotational speed was identified and achieved.
I gave the bike a few gentle rolls of the throttle, to get some heat into the engine, and to make sure that the engine would actually take gas. The first roll was sketchy – the next two were better.
With green lights across the board, I thunked the GS down into first, and sliced down the driveway and leaned left up the street.
We were headed for Virginia.
Lest you mistakenly conclude, from that folk-songesque aspirational statement, that going to Virginia is some sort of long journey, involving covered wagons, a banjo, head of oxen and days on the trail, I should point out that the Potomac River and the crossing into Loudoun County is all of four miles from my front door, if that. My interest and enthusiasm for crossing that bridge is based on the number of rural unpaved roads in that part of the state, and the utter lack of interest that the both the Virginia and Loudoun County Departments of Transportation seem to have in maintaining them. The Virginia roads I like the most were probably designed for oxen, though, so maybe there’s a tenuous connection, after all.
Maryland 464 takes one out of Jefferson and down towards US 15, the Point of Rocks Bridge and into Virginia. A fast dogleg right and a left puts the bike on Furnace Mountain Road. Coming across the bridge I toggle the GS into ‘Enduro’ mode – which lowers the bike’s power and the RPM of the torque peak, and turns off the rear traction control and ABS – like this, one is set up for sliding. The grade on the entrance to Furnace Mountain looks particularly imposing – for years I’d ridden by it and was a “Wonder what’s up there? – not that I’d ever ride up there” guy.
Now, though, it was an invitation I couldn’t resist.
Immediately, I’m standing on the pegs, moving my weight onto the front wheel and climbing a major grade – one with a loose and rutted surface and an increasingly steep unprotected dropoff to the right. With the Rotax twin up in its 4 valve sweetspot and the trans in second gear, I can dial in or dial out as much wheelspin as I care to.
Perfect.
By the time I cleared the top of the ridge and its hairpin left, my heart was thumping and I’m pretty sure I had the mother of all shit-eating grins filling up the inside of my helmet.
The guy that, several months ago, was too weak to consider taking my K bike off the stands, was gone.
The Rider, in his place, was back.
The rest of Furnace Mountain is tight and technical – there are plenty of switchbacks and several enthusiastic grades and paired descents. These are routes that reward a good balanced standing riding posture, and the ability to direct a fair degree of force with one’s legs through the bike’s footpegs. A few of the corners are first gear corners, followed by the long descent into Tayorstown. As much fun as the tight stuff is, I was jonesing for some more open running, where the GS, with its big front wheel, gets more stable when that 21 is spinning fast and allows one to ride like you trust your front tire, and don’t care so much about what the back wheel is doing.
It’s a very different traction management model than the one that 35 years of safe street riding would advocate for.
I doglegged up Loyalty Road, running beside the hand laid stone walls and manicured formal gardens of the old manor houses that were still being properly husbanded. It’s a green hilly landscape where the road is the only thing that’s close to flat. After a few miles of splendor, the right comes up for Featherbed Road. Featherbed is comparatively open, with long straights and many corners one can see though. It’s a place to let the F800 run and roll, and feel the suspension keep everything serene.
Almost every corner had me stepping the rear end out – these were sliding tires that didn’t set off the street rider’s alarm bells. The GS and its rider were in their respective zones.
And that’s what I took from this day – the feeling of a perfectly controlled slide then scoot, a roostertail of granite dust filling my rearviews, with the suspension making a loose rutted surface seem like a magic carpet ride.
Standing in the driveway, looking at the amount of dust I’d collected, I played back in my head, and was grateful for the sensation of calm I’d experienced, while riding temporarily zeroed out all of the many cares that I have in my life.
***
Back in the den, I got a tumbler of cool water, and pulled YouTube up on my laptop. The Algorithm suggested something a tad oblique for me—the very last song of the very last date of the very last Dead and Company tour. The very end of music’s longest and windingest road, which connected 1966 or so to right about now.
Of the original members, only Bob Wier and Mickey Hart are left in the Band, so when they say the last show, it really did have an end of the road vibe to it – the video somehow captured the feeling of it as it hung in the air between the Dead and their Fans.
The song they sang?
Not Fade Away.
A lovely thought which required a willing suspension of disbelief, when what was clearly in front of one’s eyes was two very old men – along with the musicians they’d gathered around them – at the point where they clearly could not carry on, where they would exactly fade away.
And the way the thousands of fans chose to embrace it was simply by refusing to believe it – as 80,000 or so hippies sang “A Love for real not fade away…” first with the band, and then by themselves after the band had stopped.
It’s a way to deal with time and what it does to us all.
By simply refusing to believe it, maybe we and all those we love can not fade away.
For some reason, this idea is extremely appealing to me.
In April of 2022, I took a motorcycle ride to Maggie Valley, North Carolina.
I was there to interview Matt Walksler, Curator of Dale’s Wheels Through Time museum, one of the world’s best collections of antique motorcycles. ‘Wheels’ specializes in American machinery, and, more importantly, everything on display in the collection is kept in running order.
I’d written about Wheels Through Time before, but Matt’s story – taking over leading the museum after the death of his father, Dale – just really got a hold of me, and it was one I really wanted to tell.
Due to some unforeseen disturbances in the modern media environment, the story took its own Backcountry Discovery Route to publication, replete with metaphorical mud puddles, stream fords, and rutted hill climbs littered with babyhead rocks. Progress was slow, and there were more than a few crashes and trailside repairs.
I kept telling people that the story was coming. People more than likely half stopped believing me.
Now, though, is the time.
My good buddies over at Revzilla’s Common Tread are featuring this story, ‘Wheels Through Generations’. I’m as proud of this piece as I’ve been of any other writing I’ve ever done. I had an utter blast writing it, and I hope you’ll have that same blast reading it
Rolling Physics Problem 