John Hateley Wheelies for Boone's Farm Strawberry Hill

The wheelie stunt in this Boone's Farm Strawberry Hill ad was done by former professional motorcycle racer and Hollywood stunt man John Hateley (whose garage was featured in Motorcycle Dream Garages). This ad was his first major Hollywood stunt work, and it led to his appearances in more than 50 major motion pictures, including Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Crank and Iron Man 2 (see his IMDB profile for details). For more about John and his colorful career, check out my feature article about John in the September issue of Motorcyclist magazine.

Colorado Pass Bagging Resources

If you are looking to cross as many passes as you can in Colorado, this list below will help you plan a route, pick your passes, and find a motorcycle. Watch the November issue of Motorcycle Escape for my feature article about bagging passes in Colorado.

Pass Baggging Resources

Vail Off Road Rental
PO Box 3753
Avon, CO 81620
970.446.7153
reservations@vailoffroadrental.com

Listing of Other Motorcycle Rental Businesses

BMW Colorado Pass Bagger 50
The BMW Motorcycle Club of Colorado hosts a contest in which you sign up and do 50 passes. Only a handful of folks do it each year.

Pass Bagger 50 Resource List
Includes recommended books and maps as well as links to Google maps of the passes. Also includes downloadable Excel spreadsheet list of all passes with GPS coordinates and difficulty ratings. Awesome resource.

Randy Bishop’s Web site
Randy has bagged 131 Colorado passes, and he heavily documents his rides. He also did the Iron Butt 1000 on a KLR. 


RECOMMENDED BOOKS

Colorado Roads and Recreation Atlas is great for planning your route. Every small road in the state is shown, and this atlas is focused on road travel rather than foot travel.

In The Passes of Colorado, authors Ed and Gloria Helmuth have compiled information about 469 named passes in Colorado. For each pass, you'll find a brief history, the elevation, map location, which topographical map the pass appears on, and the elevation.




COLORADO ROAD RESOURCES

Passes and Canyons: Guide to Colorado Motorcycling
Motorcycle Roads Colorado Listing
Colorado Office of Tourism / Recommended Roads
High 5: The Highest Road in North America 
Open Road Journey / Colorado Suggested Road Routes
Alpine Loop Byway
65-mile loop that includes Engineer and Cinnamon Pass

Looking for Incredible Garages . . . from Around the Globe

I'm working on a follow-up to Motorcycle Dream Garages, and this one has an international spin. I'm looking for the best garages of the world. Personally, I love those funky spaces that have housed racers, backyard builders, and home hobbyists for decades. I am also looking for a handful of completely over-the-top spare-no-expense gorgeous palaces. And anything else that is fascinating, odd, wacky, or just the home of a great story.

The garages need to house primarily vehicles, either motorcycles, cars or something else that burns fossil fuels. The space should be amazing, featuring interesting architecture, an incredible setting, or a building or situation that is funky and unique.

I'm particularly interested in garages in Japan, Central and South America, Russia, Mexico, and of course the UK. And Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Morocco . . . you get the picture.

Contact me directly with any leads at lklancher@mac.com.

Southern Wisconsin Beer Destinations

I recently filed a story about touring craft breweries in Southern Wisconsin for Motorcycle Cruiser magazine, and the list of  beer destinations was too long to print so I posted it here. I've also posted a map. Cheers!


View Wisconsin Craft Brewery Tour in a larger map


Breweries

New Glarus Brewing Company
Minhas Craft Brewery
Lakefront Brewery
Sand Creek Brewing Company
Tyranena Brewing
Esser's Best
Pearl Street Brewery
Rush River Beer
Capital Brewery
Sprecher Brewing Company 


Museums 
Milwaukee Beer Museum 
National Brewery Museum 
Museum of Beer and Brewing


Brew Pubs, Tap Rooms, and Dive Bars
Baumgartner's Cheese Store and Tavern  
Bodega Brew Pub
Great Dane Brew Pub

Delafield Brew Haus 
Roman's Pub 
Water Street Brewery 
The Safe House

Lodging 
The Iron Horse Hotel  (Milwaukee)
Chalet Landhaus Inn (New Glarus) 

Small Garage Paradise

While my move to Austin, Texas has overall been wonderful, one of the tough parts has been leaving behind my dream garage in Minnesota. The time has come to rectify this situation, and make my little garage here in Austin into a gearhead escape. 

I'm looking for suggestions from readers about how to affordably outfit a small garage, with a focus on DIY and products that provide high return (they don't have to be cheap--just worth it).

So if you have suggestions for projects, products or designs that use space efficiently, let me know! Send some photos if you've done something particularly space-saving or just plain cool in your own garage.

Note that my garage caters to several specific needs. It houses motorcycles and gear, bicycles and gear, camping gear, canoe gear, and a small workbench with a vise and a grinder.

Here are some of the specific storage challenges I'm looking to solve:

• How to coat the garage floor in a high-quality, DIY, economical fashion
• Motorcycle gear storage; any interesting ideas for helmets, gloves, etc.
• Bicycle storage: as compact and efficient as possible
• Laptop mounting: I'd like to have a station to mount your laptop near the work bench for garage projects
• Air conditioning / Heating: I'm interested in one wall-mounted unit that does both, as efficiently as possible
• Garage door technology: I'm interested in garage doors that are space-efficient.

If you have suggestions that will help small garage owners, drop me a line at lee@671press.com.

Chimera F2 10x20-foot Light Bank

Creating studio photography of some of the rare and collectible John Deere tractors at the Keller Collection in Brillion, Wisconsin provided an interesting challenge.

The collection of valuable machines is owned by Walter and Bruce Keller. The father-son duo has more than 620 tractors, with more than 400 of those John Deeres. The son, Bruce, runs a commercial construction business, and he worked closely with me to build the studio to photograph his tractors.

Bruce and I determined that the studio could be built inside a closed building with minimal outside light sources and ample power. The largest of the machines, the Model 8010, was 18 feet long, and more than 11 feet high. After careful calculation, I determined a 20x30-foot floor space would be big enough for the 8010. The walls would be 16 feet high. This would allow us to photograph the big machine, as well as about 30 others.

The crew of seven consisted of myself and Bruce Keller. Walter was in and out, providing commentary on the machines. A videographer and second photographer (Josh Kufahl) and editorial assistant (Joseph Holschuh) were hired to keep the shoot running smoothly. Another three men were hired to move, wash, and detail the tractors. All of us would work together to construct the studio.

Lighting the machines properly required a large, overhead source of direct, even light. The best choice for a light modifier was the Chimera 10x20-foot F2 light bank. This large soft box uses two layers of translucent silk to soften the light. You can also (as we did) bounce the light off the inside cover of the top of the box. The result is even light on a vehicle that provides gorgeous highlights on the top curves and casts enough soft light on the entire subject to require only minimal bounce card fill in order to create beautiful studio images.

The large box is key, as it makes the reflections on the machine clean and seamless. Post-production work was minimal, as the highlights were nearly perfect as shot.
We powered our 10x20-foot light bank with eight Speedotron heads powered by two 4803 strobe packs. The result was even light that was incredibly powerful. When I metered the first shoot, which had the box about eight feet off the ground (set for the shorter machines), the light read F20 @ 1/200th at the top of the stack of the tractor and F16 at the bottom of the scene. The meter actually read F16 under the tractor, as the light bounced off the floor with considerable strength. The exposure range was similar with even the largest tractors under the box.

The 10x20 bank we used is the transportable model. Heavier versions are available for permanent studio use. Our bank weighed about 150 pounds without lights, making it easy to lift into place.

The box is easily transportable, and folds down into three large duffel bags. We used the older generation box, which is set up with tools. Construction required several hours of work by four people. Chimera has since changed the design, and the new model can be set up with two people in less than two hours.  The new version of the box is priced at $9,900, and available direct from Chimera. 

Note: Photos by Josh Kufahl. 

Motorcycle Adventures in Hokkaido, Japan

 James Pratt has created a cool new mag called Adventure Riding. This month, he ran my feature story about discovering the joys of rider houses, hot springs, Japanese bikes, and beer machines on the motorcycle paradise that is Hokkaido, Japan. Check out this month's issue.

The Devil Can Ride

My latest book, The Devil Can Ride: The World's Best Motorcycle Writing, is out and on the shelves this month. The book is a compilation of great motorcycle writing, with pieces from Hunter S. Thompson, Robert Pirsig, Mark Singer, Kevin Cameron, Peter Egan, and Jamie Elvidge.

Check out my Q&A with The New Yorker magazine about how the book came to be, or a book review by Larry Edsall.

And, of course, you can buy The Devil Can Ride: The World's Best Motorcycle Writing


Here's a bit of background about how the book came to be.
 

I read Runaway Ralph a minimum of 572 times at age eight. While I loved to read and would have consumed books voraciously wherever I grew up, my habits were compounded by the fact that I lived in rural northern Wisconsin three miles outside of a town of 50 people and there wasn’t much else to do, particularly when the thermometer read 60 degrees below zero, the narrow little gravel road to our house was snowed in from here to eternity, and the county plow trucks’ first priority was to open up the roads to the seven bars in the township before the DTs killed their customers.

After a particularly long, cold winter, most of which I spent huddled under a blanket in our living room fixating on motorcycles and mice, my father dragged me away from my books long enough for me to fall desperately in lust. You see, my Dad cut wood to heat our little house, and he needed to get his chain saw sharpened at a shop a few miles from our home. That shop later housed the Three Little Pigs Restaurant and the Swine and Dine Saloon, a tiny bar-restaurant where art-deco wall hangings, slumming south Minneapolis granola sorts, stoned hipsters, and local farmers with manure stains on their cuffed Levi’s intermingled in Leinenkugel-fueled harmony.

That was later, when the outside world started to creep into the North Woods. Before the onslaught of chain restaurants, radio syndication, and cable television, the place was a proper greasy little shop that repaired the locals’ hacked-out small equipment for pennies and sold chain saws, power ice augers, worms, fish hooks, milk, and Indian motorcycles in order to pay their astronomical heating bills.

My first terminal case of showroom lust was caused by one of those Indian motorcycles, a machine built for Indian by Italjet with a chrome tank, motocross bars, and a loop frame. I loved that bike and would sit on it and beg mercilessly for one. My parents were both teachers, and Dad had just enough cash on him to pay the $1.50 to sharpen the saw chain. Plus Dad considered it exorbitant to pay more than 20 bucks for a family meal, a hotel room, or a set of tires. He was not opposed to spending slightly more than that sum on rototillers, purebred beagles, and shotguns, but a new motorcycle was not and never would be part of Dad’s fiscal priorities, means, or intentions. 

In the summer of 1977, my entire family packed up into the family’s pickup truck and took the great American summer road trip through the West. After the mandatory stops at Mt. Rushmore, Yellowstone, and the Corn Palace (and never paying more than 20 bucks for a campsite, much less a hotel), we crossed the Great Salt Lake and spent a week with my Mom’s sister’s family in a Sacramento suburb. Tucked away in the back of my uncle’s garage was a Honda CT70. During one of Uncle Jim and my Dad’s beer and B.S. sessions in his backyard, Uncle Jim offered to sell the Honda to Dad for $25. To my great shock, Dad eventually agreed to pay the lavish sum, and the bike and I rode together in the back of our Ford truck all the way to Wisconsin.

On the way home, I added motorcycle magazines to the stacks of science fiction, mystery, and spy novels in my room. Reading-wise, my taste ran toward Heinlein and Ludlum as a teenager, although I read anything I found on the shelves in our house or the local library. I read 1984 several times because my parents had a copy, and I read a host of Reader’s Digest condensed books for the same reason (and came to despise them).

I ground the CT70 into bits riding it in the fields and trails near our house. When the CT70 died, Dad bought me an XL100 in nearly perfect condition. To this day, I consider that act proof of how deeply he cared for his children because I suspect he didn’t quite understand the allure of motorcycles, and I know he didn’t believe spending $400 on one to be a wise use of his limited resources.

The rest of the machines of my youth I bought with my own money, and I worked and rode as much as I could through high school, devoting all of my earnings to motorcycles, movie-and-burger dates, and library fines.

In journalism school at the University of Minnesota, I was introduced to literary journalism (also known as narrative nonfiction) by Professor George Hage, a wonderful man who incessantly railed on me about my grammar and read my work out loud in his class. The writing form appealed to me tremendously, blending my interest in drama with my desire to read extensively on a topic as intriguing to me as intelligent robots, sexually aware aliens, or secret agents with mysterious pasts. As I became a semi-adult (an ongoing process that my wife assures me regularly is far from complete), I was increasingly drawn to nonfiction writers who used the dramatic techniques of fiction writers.

Tom Wolfe, Tracy Kidder, and John McPhee became (and remain) three of my favorite writers. I could read their books in the journalism school library without having to hide them under the covers of Harper’s or the Minnesota Daily, plus the topics these writers covered—astronauts and roadkill-eating naturalists, for example—hit the sweet spot of my literary sophistication.

Shortly after college, I went to work for Motorbooks as an acquisitions editor and became immersed in the world of motorcycle literature. Reading motorcycle magazines became part of my job, and knowing who did what well was a key component to being a good editor. I read and learned and also had the good fortune to work with a few of the better writers in the field.

When I set out to do this book, I wanted to combine some of the great short pieces and book excerpts from mainstream writers who delved into motorcycles with meaningful things written by writers from the motorcycle magazine industry. I also intended to include pieces from interesting motorcyclists who had something to say but weren’t necessarily paid writers.

The writers in this collection all have something to say about the role motorcycles play in personal lives as well as society. Unfortunately, none of them write about sex-absorbed aliens. But I still found material that related to what I know well, which is riding motorcycles and reading dramatic narratives.

If you think I missed some great literature, you are probably correct. I was not able to read everything written on the topic, plus these pieces were selected by a man whose favorite works include a bit about a guy who holds the world record for stuffing weasels down his pants. Hungry ones.

So if you want to suggest some piece of motorcycle writing you believe is worth considering for another collection, email me at lklancher@mac.com. There is certainly room for another book like this at some point down the road, plus I’m always up for an interesting read.

I hope you enjoy the book, and be sure to take your nose out of it once and a while to go down to your local chain saw shop or motorcycle store and fall in lust. Better yet, go riding.

On the Road: Tractors, Garages and John Deeres

The road is calling. To be more specific, garages are calling. In less than a week, I'll be packing my gear in the wagon and heading out on a photographic adventure for two upcoming books. For The Art of John Deere (Voyageur Press, April 2011), I'll be photographing some of the rarest John Deere tractors in the world in a custom-built studio near Appleton, Wisconsin. The  tractors are owned by Bruce and Walter Keller. The Keller Collection contains more than 600 perfectly restored or original condition tractors, many of which are the first and last serial number of their model line.

For Ultimate Tractor Garages (Voyageur Press, October 2011), I'll be photographing a large handful of places throughout the Midwest, including Farmall-Land, the incredible collection and museum owned by Jerry Mez. I'll also hit places where farm tractors are treated to life inside the house, a farm built around one of the rarest tractors in existence, and some crusty old shops where old-time mechanics have been wrenching on old iron pretty much since time as we know it began.

I'll post some highlights on this blog. If you are interested in regular updates in real time as all this unfolds, check out my Twitter Feed.

P.S. And for those of you who eat, sleep and breath cars and motorcycles, stay tuned. I can't let the cat out of the bag quite yet, but we have something special cooked up for y'all.

Geezers Garage

While waiting for an NHL playoff game to start the other night, I caught a "news-oriented" show that featured at least five minutes of people sucking suggestively on pickles. This led me to wonder: if sophomoric crap like that can make it on the air why is Geezers Garage not showing 24/7? Check out this clip. And have a great weekend!

The Bob Lutz Garage

This video tour of Bob Lutz's garage from AutoWeek's Web site is fascinating. Bob is a hard-core car guy and it shows, plus he has interesting tastes in cars. The Cunningham and the Pinzguaer are my favorites--I love purposeful vehicles. Bob's commentary on GM is also well worth a read. No punches pulled, and minimal B.S. I can respect that.

http://www.autoweek.com/article/20100427/CARNEWS/100429863

KTM/FMF Motocross Fan Experience

KTM and FMF have again partnered together with MX Sports Pro Racing to bring KTM Motocross fans the ultimate viewing experience - The “KTM/FMF Motocross Fan Experience”. The events will take place this summer and in conjunction with four rounds of the Lucas Oil AMA Motocross Championship Series.

The KTM/FMF Motocross Fan Experience, which sold out at both venues last year, is a KTM exclusive trackside seating area and all-day VIP access offered to KTM fans and owners. The events will take place at the Hangtown Motocross Classic (5/22/10), Thunder Valley MX Park (6/26/10), Red Bud Motocross Championship (7/3/10) and the Lucas Oil AMA Pro Motocross Championship season finale at Steel City on September 4, 2010. Tickets are now available for purchase. 

With each ticket purchase fans will receive:

Race day admission pass
All-day pit access pass
Free parking for all participants – includes special motor home parking for the first 30 KTM/FMF fans that show up on the day of the race (does not include camping fees)
Free catered lunch
Access to KTM exclusive trackside seating area with Live Timing Screens
Special Autograph Signing with KTM Factory Riders
Post-race Track Walk with explanation of the various elements of the racetrack lead by Jagermeister/KTM and FMF/KTM Team Manager Casey Lytle
Free KTM/FMF event T-shirt
Free Jagermeister/KTM swag for fans over 25 years old

“KTM and FMF were determined to bring fans a pass that lets them live the day in a life of a factory team rider or member. This pass gives you everything – all day admission and pit access, free parking and great seating. Not to mention a free BBQ lunch! This opportunity is too good to pass up,” commented KTM President Jon-Erik Burleson.

A package of this type typically runs for over a $200 value. KTM has partnered with MX Sports to subsidize the tickets for KTM fans and owners and will be offering tickets for only $85.00. A very limited amount of tickets are available per event.

For tickets please contact motocross@ktmusa.com or visit your local KTM dealer.

See you at the races!

Jay Leno's Garage Interview

Jay Leno cracks wise about spanners, car fires, and marital harmony during my interview with him for Jay Leno's Garage, his Web-based show featuring the cars, motorcycles and authors that frequent his incredible garage in Southern California.

The High-Tech Side of Jay Leno's Garage

In honor of my interview last Sunday for Jay Leno's Garage, here is a video brought to my attention by book designer Tom Heffron. The piece showcases a super-cool machine called the NextEngine 3D Scanner that creates a 3D digital pattern for any part. You can then use Dimension 3D printer to make a plastic prototype of the part.

Note that writer Lindsay Brooke pointed out that rapid prototyping has been around since the 1980s. What's relatively new about this development is the fact that the machine used in the clip is quite affordable. You can pick a scanner up for about $3,000--check it out here. Hmmm . . . does your garage need one? Mine certainly does!

P.S. More on my visit with Jay last Sunday to come shortly. 

Baja Off-Road Racing Documentary

I came across this well-done video of two mountain bikers who decided to tackle the Baja 1000. If you like the teaser, go to the Chainslayer Web site to see all of the episodes about the racing drama experienced by riders Radek Burkat and Andrew Krynen. Mountain bike cinemaphotographer Ambrose Weingart put together  the film, and it's worth a look. Not to mention an inspiration to ride!

Upcoming Film, American Cafe

This interesting film, American Cafe, was brought to my attention by fellow tractor journalist Guy Fay. The film captures the Cafe Racer society through the eyes (and on rides with) members of southern Wisconsin's Slimey Crud Motorcycle Gang, and also as they build a couple of cafe racers out of a Honda CL350 and CB650SC. Looks like a cool film and producer Jason J. Gullickson of Second Society is now putting the finishing touches on it. You can sign up for their Twitter feed at acmovie.

And since we are on the topic, you can sign up for my Twitter feed at leeklancher. I'm mostly Tweeting while on the road, but also am sending out interesting motorcycle news.

Happy new year everyone!!