Welcome to Tank Slapper
Another generic motorcycle travel blog, I’m Chuck; your humble narrator and favorite idiot. Since I’m starting this blog at the best time of the year in New England for motorcycle riding, early Feburary I guess I’ll start with stories and my planned trips. I’ll start off with my entry into the motorcycle world, my awful choices I have made in my motorcycle riding career and the more amusing times
I started riding when I was 26 or 27, a late bloomer. I grew up surrounded by motorcycles and cars, and my father and his friends are a big influence on molding this impressionable young boy into a motorcycle obsessed weirdo. My dad was a member and helped run a local BMW club, BMW Mass-Confusion..get it? Cause they were based in Massachusetts. Their choice of motorcycles were the old 50’ to 95’ BMW R bike, also known as airheads. My dad had a couple, as well as a BMW K-bike, his weapon of choice for his long distance rides. He also had an eye for the weirder cars, while my childhood friends could recite specs for Corvettes, Lamborghinis and Ferraris, I was talking about old British sports cars, Triumphs, MGs and Austin-Healeys.
Flash forward to when it’s time for me to look for my first motorcycle, would I buy something sensible and reliable like a Honda or a Yamaha? FUCK no, I bought a beat to shit 1996 Ducati Monster 900, complete with a chopped subframe and tires cracked so bad you could see the cord. This bike exists in a very love/hate spot in my head. It never ran right during my ownership, I resealed and rebuilt the carbs to no avail, It had the turning radius of the USS Enterprise and if I braked hard I slid balls deep into the gas tank. And yet I loved the bike and it’s looks. After talking with the local Ducati dealer, Dunbar Euro-Sport about the problems I was having, His response being “The bike isn’t worth what I would charge to look at it” I love Tommy. It had developed a fantastic issue of only running right at idle or wide open throttle, with no midrange. I ended up selling it the following spring for more than I paid for it, so I consider it a win. I plan on buying another air cooled monster again, this time with fuel injection, or maybe the peak 80’s Ducati 900SS off which the Monster were based.
A glorious beginning
But even with a POS motorcycle and next to no seat time I had a insatiable desire to travel on two wheels. Scrolling craigslist one day I found a set of factory saddlebags for the early Monsters, a rareish part off a limited production Monster City edition. I bought these up and mounted them. My friends hated them, but with a warm November and December they proved their worth. That year I managed to do all my christmas shopping on the bike, traffic and parking is never an issue with a motorcycle. I started planning a trip to Vermont, a state very close to me but I had never visited I was going to only take backroads and visiting Brattleboro.
After the winter was over and spring started showing itself, I had decided to replace the Monster. I found a SV650 and a VFR down in Connecticut, the VFR being preferred. Well it was a pile, it wouldn’t even start when we went to look at it. While driving to look at the SV650 my friends hated, they found a 2002 Honda 919 for sale with only 150 miles. We were sure it was a typo. While I was talking to the owner of the SV and taking it for a test ride they were talking to the guy with the 919, as it turns out it wasn’t a typo and it indeed only had 150 miles. I explained the situation with the 919 to the SV owner who completely understood and told me simply to let him know after I looked at the 919.
Well the Honda 919 was exactly as he said. He had bought it down in Maryland when he was a elevator guy when he was flush with money and all his friends had bought motorcycles, and than promptly saw a friend nearly die on a motorcycle. He dragged the bike around with him as he moved for the next 12 years. He had just had some work done to the bike to make it rideable and was selling it. I took it for a test ride, shook his hand and loaded the bike into my truck. My friends didn’t even have a chance to talk to me about the bike, I knew it was too good of a deal and still asked for a discount and got it. I ended up putting over 10K miles on that bike that season, and the only thing it needed was a set of tires as the factory ones were dry rotted and gas.
I’ve decided the Honda 919 is the Toyota Corolla of the motorcycle world. Not great at anything, but not bad either. It just is, and it works extremely well. This is the bike I first started touring on. Smaller trips with just a tank bag to carry everything I needed. During a trip that was a little more than small I ended up stopping at a dealership and picking up a matching tail bag; these two bags are all I’d need for a 3 or 4 day trip. The 919 never had a hiccup, ran like a top during my ownership, and sadly was the first bike I dropped. You would think I’d have dropped the shitty Monster but no, my foot slipped on wet pine needles backing the 919 out of a parking spot and down it went onto a curb, bending the passenger peg and scuffing stator cover. I of course replaced them to hide my bruised ego. My only real complaint about the 919 was it’s undertail exhaust. It made aftermarket pipes expensive or gimmicky, I bought the pricey carbon Yoshi pipes as they were actually two cans, not just one real can and one dummy can. The other issue with the undertail exhaust was it made any aftermarket saddlebags melt. They got too hot and were too close to the bags, so saddlebags werent an option. And the straw that broke the camels back was a GSXR600. I found it for sale for cheap on facebook, it didn’t run but hey, I was a mechanic and at worst I could part it out for what I paid for it. Well after I got the GSXR running I quickly realized the suspension on the 919 was way too soft. I had a 2002, the first year for the 919 in the U.S., they didn’t gain adjustable suspension until 2007 and only in the front. I guess yea I could have installed emulators and revalved the suspension to make it more to my liking, or I could use it as an excuse to buy another bike to replace the 919.
The perfect mount of a budding vagabond
And this is where I’ll leave you, my loved and cherished readers, all 3 of you (Hi Mom, Sister and Girlfriend, I appreciate you!) I’ll continue on in another post or two about my increasingly bad decisions about what motorcycles to own and finish fleshing out my origin story about how I became the worst motorcycle rider in the world