Motorcycles
click here to view my motorcycle gallery
My interest in motorcycles began first as an interest in bicycles. When I was eight or nine years old, I disassembled the Schwinn Varsity 10-speed that I inherited from my older brother, Steve, and painted in metal flake purple. Inspired by The Easy Rider poster hanging in my room, at age 12, I painted the same bike red, white, and blue, with white stars on its seat and going down the front fork.
I bought my first minibike at the age of 12 with my own grass-cutting money for $119-- a lime green Sears 3-horsepower "hard-tail" model, and quickly followed that up with many other bikes including a couple Honda 50s, a Honda CT70, a new Yamaha Mini-Enduro, a Kawasaki 100 Trail Boss, a Jawa 90, a Honda CB160, a Sears 106SS, a new Suzuki TS90, a kitted Suzuki TC125, several Suzuki TS185s, a Suzuki TM400, and more, all before I turned 16!
My later interests in street bikes had me riding every model of Kawasaki 3-cylinder 2-stroke made, a CB550 Honda Four, a Triumph Trophy Trail, a '67 Bridgestone GTR350, and many others, culminating in my part ownership of a motorcycle shop while in graduate school. I ended up with a Honda CBX that I was sure would kill me--I sold that to get some of the money for my first house in 1981 and pretty much stayed away from motorcycles until 1994. That's when I bought a Honda VT500 Ascot--and then starting buying up old bikes like crazy--bikes that I either had or wanted to have when I was a kid. I also started doing complete nut-and-bolt restorations around that time, and did some nice bikes (a couple won prizes). At one point, I had more than twenty motorcycles in my fleet. Regrettably, we sold down when we moved from Massachusetts to Arkansas. My primary riders today are a 2001 Kawasaki W650, which looks like an old Triumph Bonneville but is far more reliable, and a Suzuki TL1000S with complete Yoshimura exhaust, one of the baddest sport bikes I have ever owned. The rest of our motorcycle "fleet" is constantly changing.