Hobbies and Other stuff

Motorcycles: I always loved motorcycles, even if they are a bit dangerous... At present I have six of them, a Triumph Rocket III 2005, a Triumph Tiger 2000, a Honda XRL650 1996, a BMW R100GS 1988, a Triumph TR5 Adventurer 1974 and Triumph T100C Trophy 1967. These seems like rather a lot of bikes really, and that's not counting my sons Honda XR100 and XR150. I just like bikes I guess, and to hold onto them rather than selling junking them. The first four run well and I take them on the road pretty often. I do most of the family grocery shopping in order to give me an excuse to ride which ever one I did'nt go to work on. The old Trophy runs pretty well now, but doesn't have insurance or legal decals so I don't usually go more than a few miles on it, on unmarked private roads since I don't want to get prosecuted or anything. The TR5 I got from some old guy for $300 and it probably hasn't run for 20 years. It's rusty but all of it there so it's slowly being restored. One day it will look pretty good again. To fill your house up with old motorcycles go to Ebay motorcycles, Carbuyer.com (they do motorcycles as well) or Cycletrader.com.

Triumph Homepage This is the home page of the new Triumph company in Hinckley U.K, but includes some info about the classic old (oil leaking) Triumphs of yore. What happened is that Triumph were one of the biggest and most influential motorcycle companies in the world for most of the last century, with their heyday in the 50s, when they were selling lots of their classical parallel twins. This is a sort of odd design, first found in the pre war Triumph speed twins (my dad had one of these), but later found in the various 500cc Trophy, Tiger and Daytonas, and 650cc and 750cc TR6s and Bonnevilles. The two pistons go up and down at the same time, but fire alternately. This means you get a power stroke every time the engine rotates, but that you also get a lot of vibration. This simple design caught on though, and BSA, Norton, Ariel, Yamaha and even Honda made similar parallel twins. Anyway in the 60s and 70s Triumph suddenly got a lot of stiff competition from the Japanese, especially Honda, who started with bikes like the CB750 to use 4 cylinder overhead cam engine which don't vibrate much, rev very high, have great performance and don't leak oil. When you factor in disc brakes, electric starters, competitive price etc., it's perhaps not surprising that the old Triumph could not compete. So the old Triumph slowly went out of business in the 70s and early 80s following various governent bailouts, workers cooperatives etc. However, someone called John Bloor bought up their trademarks patents, etc. and opened up a new Triumph factory in about 1990. Apparently he wanted to prove that, given good management, the British could still produce a quality competitive product, which he has clearly managed to do. The new Triumph bikes are large modern, powerful, smooth mostly 3 and 4 cylinder bikes using water cooling, overhead cams, balance shafts, 4 valves per head and a lot of other high technology such as fuel injection, (most of them anyway), computer controlled ignition and so on. They don't leak oil, are very reliable and are fully competitive with any of the latest Japanese, German and Italian stuff. I got my first one, a Triumph Tiger in 2000, since I was tired of the BMW messing up all the time (see below) and wanted something reliable, so I bought it new. So far it's done over 28,000 miles mostly on roads, on which it is very stable, smooth and powerful. It handles very well and is pretty comfortable for longer trips. On dirt roads it is sort of O.K., but in my opinion is really two heavy to feel safe on, so I wouldn't go to far cross country on it. The 3 cylinder liquid cooled engine is a great bit of engineering but is just too heavy for serious use in the rough. In fact one time I fell off it on in the dirt and had a very hard time picking it up on my own, it being so heavy, almost 500 pounds. Because that happened I put crash bars on it, which I got from a company in New Zealand called Thunderbike Powersports. These I found on the web, ordered by email and got in like four days or something, a tribute to the internet, globalization, the NZ-UK-US axis and the far flung outposts of the old British Empire. These crashbars work fine, though they were a bit of a pain to put onto the bike. Here is my detailed recollections of the messing around I've done with it so far, not much thankfully. The bike itself feels good on regular roads, virtually no vibration and you sit up high, getting a good view of traffic. The brakes are also excellent, so I think it's a very safe motorcycle, unless you want to speed on it. It will easily do 100 mph and should go up to over 125 mph, though I'm (sensibly) too chicken for that. It's also very economical, running at 40 - 50 miles per U.S. gallon (Brit or Imperial gallons are bigger than the feeble U.S. version, so it's even more economical if you ride it in England). All in all I can recommend it. In fact I was so impressed that in 2005 and went out and bought a Triumph Rocket III, which was a very foolish thing to do, except if you think about it a bit. Basically Triumph wanted to break into the US cruiser market, so they wanted a something that looked like a Harley, which Honda, Yamaha etc. had been doing for years. But they realized it had to be something special to stand out from Harleys and all these Harley clones. So they got one of their three cylinder engines, blew it up to like 2.5 times the normal Triumph engine size and mounted it longwise in the frame. They gave the bike a shaft drive, counter balance shafts, fuel injection etc. The 2.3 liter engine has an enormous amount of power, far more than any normal human would ever need, like 140 horse power or so. However this power is good even if you don't use it much; it's very easy to pass things on the interstate, which is not the case with many bikes I've ridden. As of the time of writing I've put abou 8,000 miles on mine and got 34 to 40 miles per gallon out of it, not at all bad for such a huge engine. The local Harley crowd don't know what to make of it since it looks cool, but is very quiet compared to most Harleys. However if you want to race the Triumph can leave any Harley or Harley clone way behind; it's about as heavy as any other cruiser but has twice the horsepower. It's great to ride, no vibration at all, virtually silent in fact. Since the engine has enormous amounts of torque, you don't have to worry too much about which gear you are in, so that the next time you ride a normal bike you tend to stall. Also the thing is, at least by Harley standards, not all that expensive. I have had no problems whatsoever with mine, unless you count running out of gas, which is something I tend to do and is not really the bikes fault.

BMW GS information: This is the machoist motorcycle ever made by BMW, designed to go for ever on any kind of road surface in something approaching comfort. It's based on a racer they built to do the annual race from Paris to Dakar in Senegal, North Africa, which includes a few thousand miles of the Sahara desert. About 250 bikes start out, but only about 50 ever finish, and BMW have won quite a few times, though KTMs, Honda XLs and Yamaha Teneres do pretty good also. Anyway, it's my favorite motorcycle, and not just 'cos my initials happen to be GS. (actually GS is German for Gelaende-Strasse, sort of countryside and road in English; for some reason the early bikes, 1980 to about 1987 or somethin were G/Ss and the later ones became just GSs, maybe to save weight, I don't know). Some day I'll do Tierra del Fuego on it... Above is a picture of the GS in it's natural habitat, dirt roads in the countryside (picture courtesy of Michael W.H. Shaw).

I have to admit that my particular GS hasn't been very reliable really, in fact what's gone wrong with it has been a litany of catastrophe, but I still like the bike. The full story is this outlined here if you're interested;

The GS and the older G/S are in fact, for many people, the bikes of choice for long distance travel especially in exotic places where the roads aren't very good. Since I live off in the country I can testify to the fact the bike is an excellent compromise between something that is reasonably fast and safe on an interstate and also handles on a dirt road with potholes and even cross country. It's solid enough for the interstate and light enough that you can manhandle on a dirt roads, though you have to be careful as it's over 450 lbs, which could be a problem if it fell on top of you. In fact I got stuck in marshes and woods at various times and came very close to herniating myself trying to move it several times. All in all though it's great fun to ride, very torquey so you don't have to worry about changing gears much. The constant thump from the two cylinders sounds good and reassuring, though there is very little vibration. This engine has been manufactured by BMW in one form or another for over 80 years, and is called in German a "Boxer motor", since the two pistons sort of punch off in opposite directions like a boxers fists a bit I suppose. This engine is sort of half a VW beetle engine, which has a very similar design but four cylinders. Several people have tried to buy the bike off me, as bikes of this type are much sought after for adventure trips. Here is a page describing what you have to do to get a R100GS ready for a long adventure trip. Also check out the immortal Ted Simon's site at Jupitalia. This is the guy that wrote "Jupiter's Travels" about 25 years ago, a classic motorcycle travelogue, concerning a four year round the world expedition in on an ex-police Triumph 500cc twin (see below). A classic book I've bought at least three times since people borrow it and I don't always get it back. Now, at the age of 70, Ted's going round the world again on a, guess what? R100GS... Here's the Adventure Motorbiking Website in case like me you're thinking of Tierra del Fuego also. Here is the The Internet BMW Riders site: a center for Beemer Motorcyclists on the web. Also check out Airheads, a useful resource for people with old aircooled BMW twins like mine (as opposed to the newer oil cooled boxer twins, usually called oilheads).

BMW also make a 650 single cylinder Rotax engined GS bike and a new 1100 and 1150 GS twin with the new four valve oil cooled head, which are all supposed to be sort of road/dirt bikes like the original G/S and the early GS models. In my opinion these, actually like the Tiger (see above), are nice bikes but are just too heavy for dirt roads. The 650 single is about as heavy as my R100GS, so might be O.K. although on the beefy side, but the 1100 and 1150GS are simply monsters, way to heavy for anything but a good road. Probably the ideal travel bike is the original R80G/S, a lot lighter than the R100GS, lacking the paralever, but having a reliable and somewhat more economical engine, but original ones of these are hard to get hold of nowadays. However it's possible to buy some amazing new machines from HPN Motorradtechnik GmbH in Germany; New GS bikes, with the problems all fixed, yum yum. At one stage BMW made a 650cc twin GS type bike which would get you up to 70 or 80 mph fully loaded O.K, and why would you want to travel any faster than that? That would have been ideal for world travel probably, but they must be rare 'cos I've never seen one.

Older Triumphs: For more of the yore go to British Biker Cooperative for a bunch of old Brit stuff. I also have an old (1967) but superb Triumph, a T100C 500 Trophy, which has knobblie tyres and is set up to go cross country. Fantastic old machine... For some reason I also bought a Triumph TR5T Trophy Trail (1974), which must have been one of the last bikes that Triumph of Meriden produced. This is pretty neat also and I should have it running fairly soon. You can get old Brit parts surprisingly easily at many places including British Only. (I think they are about to go bust..)

Growing things: I like to grow plants, particularly primitive odd old things. Some links;

Cycads are funny primitive seed plants (gymnosperms) actually, that were more ecologically important before the now mostly ubiquitous flowering plant came along. Interestingly the dominant vegetable types (flowering plants) only arose fairly recently, in the last 100 Million years or so. Cycads are more advanced than things like moss and ferns though. So dinosaurs used to have to eat these plants which might explain why they have such tough leaves (the cycads I mean). Here is an Introduction to the Cycads and here is a place where you can buy them The Rainforest Collection (very expensive: there are even international gangs that smuggle and steal cycads!). I have quite a lot of these plants of different types, including the famous Florida Coontie, which grows wild here and used to be eaten by the natives before most of them got eradicated (the natives that is). Coonties have large bright red seeds which will kill your dog or you if you eat them.... In Guam you can get nasty brain disease if you eat their local cycad as you can read in Oliver Sacks' interesting book "The Island of the Color Blind / Cycad Island)", which is actually two books in one cover.

Gingko are another type of oddball plant which are peculiar if you look closely, and I've tried to find a good link to this tree. However, Gingko extracts are suppose to give you great memory, improve sexual performance, new age woffle, blah blah, etc. etc., and so all the sites I've found so far go into to this... Anyway I have a lot of these growing also, but have n't tested their medicinal properties yet.

Araucaria are the monkey puzzle, Norfolk Island pines, sort to odd looking clearly primitive trees that grow in a few places in the world today. If you look at one closely you can see it is very crudely constructed and obviously primitive. There are a lot of them in Tampa, St Petes and South Florida but they can't go below freezing so they die outside where I live (in North Central Florida). Similar trees are preserved in the Arizona petrified forest from over 200 million years ago. A new type was just discovered in Australia, and botanists were as excited as if they had found a T. rex!

Bamboos are just big grasses (Angiosperms, or flowering plants, so not all that primitive: during the time of the dinosaurs there were no grasslands, a little known fun filled fact) that grow well in Florida, and I have about 20 different types growing outside my house. Bamboo links; Tradewinds Bamboo Nursery and Lewis Bamboo Groves and Bamboogiant Gardens

Computer stuff: I got into computers relatively late in life, but have no doubt that I would have been a full time hacker if I'd been born 20 years later. As it is I am messing around on my PC and UNIX boxes when most other people are doing boring stuff like watching TV or playing dumbass games like golf. Here are some fun links if you like that kind of thing: The Linux documentation project and the Linux homepage shows you how to get free UNIX (i.e. Linux) to drive your PC so you don't have to keep subsidising your debilitating and financially degrading Microsoft dependency for an operating system, that, when all is said and done, is very expensive and pretty crappy. If you're into UNIX you'll like the UNIX guru universe which has a lot of links to free stuff.

Aircraft/Military/Space/Astronomy links: I always liked aircraft, military stuff, spacecraft and various other typically boy things. I can tell you about a lot about these topics if you are incautious enough to ask. Here are links to various pieces of military and space hardware that caught my imagination at one time or another; The Nasa Homepage, The Go ride a MiG or Sukhoi in Russia Page (wow!), The Kalashnikov homepage, and I could go on.....