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This pick is of me my first daughter and Dad at his old dirt strip for his airplane (in the background). This was around 1977.
My avatar pick is of me with my trophy in 1972.
The Shop
This one was 1000cc:
And finally probably the Electro & Co EMX 14, it’s an electric converted Ktm 65 and I 3d printed the giant battery box for it:
I have been pretty lucky in the unusual bike game... several Husaberg’s, 2 Vertemati’s 2 Cheney BSAs, a Cheney Yamaha, a KX500, 2 KX500 sidecars one a Wasp one an EML, an EML Yamaha, a Yamaha Wasp, a full moto DRZ400 a full moto XR400, once raced an ATK 604, a YZF400, a CR500 a CR500 EML sidecar, a VMC Zabel sidecar, a Bastech Husaberg sidecar, I don’t have photos of them all and that’s my Brother with the DRZ... great thread...
But by far the worst bike I ever rode was a "Grumph"--an early 60's Greeves Challenger chassis, complete with its weird Harold aluminum cast downtube, even weirder Harold Greeves manufacture girder forks. These bikes stock with the little lightweight Starmaker two stroke engine were not terribly bad, and they won a lot of races--- but what made this truly bad was a 500 Triumph engine shoehorned into that weird chassis--to make it fit, they reversed the head with carb on the front, pipes out the back (it had two cams so you could do that) and the engine ended up located way forwards and very high in the frame, so it was fatally nose heavy and top heavy. I remember riding that pile in late 1968 or early 1969 on the Santa Cruz Inter Am track at De La Veaga Park in Santa Cruz , which had a bunch of humped up 6 foot high single jumps with flat landings. Whenever you launched it off the top of one of those jumps, it immediately lawn darted straight down into the ground for some real scary landings. I never raced that bike, it didn't belong to me and I wanted no part of it, but it certainly qualifies as the "worst of" I ever rode. Grumphs weren't uncommon, and I have heard good things about a few of them, so I sort of wonder if this was just not put together well? who knows, but it was an ill-handling pile.
Old doesn't mean bad, by any means. Other than that, most of the bikes I rode back in the day were really good when judged against their contemporaries, starting with my '69 pickle pipe CZ, some later CZ's, a run of five 450 and 490 Maicos from 1979 to 1983, and a not very good couple of 490 Yamahas (yellow 84 4 speed and white 86 5 speed) with a really great 85 250 Yam in between. After those, the rest I would say are modern and all good. I have more recently raced some vintage AHRMA motocross on a 500 Triumph Metisse, but that was actually pretty good, perhaps the best steering dirt bike I have ever ridden, believe it or not, although it was a bit heavy and very short travel, which made it brutal on jump landings. Like Mumbles up above, I also raced my dad's '58 BSA Gold Star Catalina, back in the late 60's/early 70's, but only in scrambles, not in motocross--and that was state of the art at one time, so while it was outdated and also heavy and brutally short travelled, it had a great torquey engine and good geometry and handled pretty okay considering.
This one-off Grumph though, it missed the mark by a mile.
Trail Boss Shane on his trusty Kawasaki KLR with the dual saddlebags, lest we forget
Not a super weird bike but I was the only 4 stroke there that day.
I think I might just create a picture folder in my 'puter just for his stuff.
Still got that Cheney TT, big fella?
Me, I've made so many 'specials' and hybrids over the decades. And, done quite well on them - there was nothing better than beating blokes whilst on a RM or CR chassis'd XR200 + cc 'thing' I'd made myself. Same thing goes for my much modified CRE500. People see, at first, a scruffy old CR500,(I use old, old plastics, 95% of the time - while having about 6 full sets of new plastics hiding in an Otto bin), many getting nostalgic about "big 2 strokes", then they start to clock all the mods I've made and tend to freak out. Modifying a bike to suit yourself, is so much fun.
Pit Row
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