ClevelandMoto 033 Live from Johns garage in 2013.

13 years ago!  Recorded 07/12/2013 

Quite a rogues gallery showed up in Johnny Mac's garage and we recorded the shenanigans. 

This is one of my absolutely favorite episodes because Pittsburgh Paul, Joe Hongosh and Mark McDermott were all in the same room together. Talk about gasoline and matches...it's a great episode and about the most pure Clevelandmoto experience you can ask for. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_06 0:00

Alright, we got a podcast. We do. Oh, Renee, can have a beer, please. We are uh yeah, everybody. While you're off your beer, Steve, we have got, in the spirit of the Red River Gorge podcast, we have another Cleveland Moto Gaggle Fu. Uh the Cleveland Moto podcast tonight, we're at Johnny McElfresh's garage. Hey! Honda Whisperer. And uh you can hear the Honda's fixing themselves in the background. And uh it's uh Mark Van Dermitt's here. Mark's mechanics, Dustin, of course.

SPEAKER_00 0:31

Yep.

SPEAKER_06 0:31

Yep. Joe Hongosh.

SPEAKER_00 0:34

Joe has nothing to contribute.

SPEAKER_06 0:35

Joe has nothing to contribute. Nothing to contribute. Bill Waters, your humble narrator. Paul Helfritch is here from Pittsburgh. Curator of Captain America. That's right. The owner of Captain America, one of the most revered fucking lambbrettas in America. Curator. That's the only that is the only uh scooter that I can think of that's been on a whole bunch of patches and shirts, and uh you got a scarf with your scooter on it.

SPEAKER_03 0:58

And a pin.

SPEAKER_06 0:59

And a pin, right? And you know you're somebody when your scooter's on a club pin. Yep. And I can tell you what, you ain't been living until you've ridden Captain America naked. And I think there's a lot of people in this room that have ridden Captain America naked. I have not, but I'm looking forward to it. The entire left side of the garage has ridden Captain America naked. And sometimes I've done it with his permission. Other times I've just stolen it.

SPEAKER_03 1:19

The seat smells like a salad shear. Jesus Christ.

SPEAKER_06 1:24

And then Renee's here. Renee works at uh Pride of Cleveland, and she's been part of our band of idiots for a thousand years. Uh so Renee, say hi, Renee.

SPEAKER_07 1:33

Hello.

SPEAKER_06 1:33

So you do have something to contribute to the podcast. There you go. You said hello. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:38

See, Renee and Joe were trying to escape to the bar, and uh, well, John closed the garage door.

SPEAKER_06 1:44

John trapped him. Uh now we're gonna take two seconds to talk about Joe's fucking scooter.

SPEAKER_05 1:49

Uh Joe's got to be on the road right now if probably clearly when I delivered my parts I ordered months ago. Wow. Wow. Yeah, sure.

SPEAKER_06 2:00

Oh, oh wait. Sure. And it was on the road, blood.

SPEAKER_05 2:05

Talk to your short fat guy.

SPEAKER_06 2:08

Jesus Christ. They're ordered. Okay, Joe's got this scooter that we bought, what was it, 96 or some shit? A while ago. A long time ago. 98, and we bought it like a few nights before the Niagara scooter rally. And we bought it from a friend of mine down in Columbus, and I Joe was like, I want a Lembretta. I'm getting it, I'm gonna get into this scooter thing, we're gonna have a good time. And I and Joe's been doing the punk rack thing here in Cleveland forever. He was a doorman at the Euclid Tavern when I met him. Uh and Joe and I have been friends for a long time. And so we got this scooter, my friend down in Columbus hooked me up and he's like, This bike, what did it have on it, Julie?

SPEAKER_05 2:41

Like 300 miles on it.

SPEAKER_06 2:42

300 miles on it for a 1980 Lambretta Jet 200, uh made in uh cervetta, actually. And so it's not made in Italy, it's made in Cervetia. It's a Spanish Lombretta. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:58

And it's Lebretta.

SPEAKER_06 3:00

Right. Well, we picked it up and it kinda ran, and it had tires on it that were from 1980, that had big old cracks in the side, and they were nasty, and I was like, well, and Joe hadn't been riding scooters at this point.

SPEAKER_05 3:13

I hadn't been riding anything.

SPEAKER_06 3:14

Joe had ridden nothing. So he's gonna enter the game on a Lambreda Jet 200 a few nights before one of the major rallies on the East Coast. So we take the thing back to my garage and we sweat and bruise knuckles and get this thing dialed.

SPEAKER_05 3:31

Now I'm not sure if we did anything to it before the first rally.

SPEAKER_06 3:34

No, we we had to go through it. We went through the whole thing. I don't know. We checked it all out. We had through the tires. It ran? Yeah, we had to do the tires. I don't think we did the tires. Oh no, because there's a little story with those fucking tires. I think we took Rich's word that it ran. Correct. We took Rich's word that it ran, we came back, we went through it real quick, fired it up, and Joe blasted it up and down my street a few times. Boom, we end up at the Niagara Rally. Well, Niagara Rally is like the third weekend of May, and the weather is, let's just say, unreliable. Because you're in Niagara Falls, you're in Ontario, and we're out having a good time, and Joe is two up with his girlfriend at the time. Now, Joe's not good enough rider to be one up. No, I wasn't I wasn't one at all.

SPEAKER_05 4:12

Yeah. Oh, did you dump her off with? Yeah, I think she was one of the bosses. Sure was somebody who actually knew how to ride already.

SPEAKER_06 4:17

Okay, because I had your friend at the time.

SPEAKER_05 4:19

She might have rode with you.

SPEAKER_06 4:20

She rode with me a little bit, but then I picked up who was your friend at the time? Your best buddy? Teresa. Teresa. I had Teresa on the back of my Rally200, and somehow the fucking sky opened up. And this lunatic from the local club named Crash led us on a ride.

SPEAKER_00 4:36

That's a very unfortunate name.

SPEAKER_06 4:38

Very ominous fucking name. Okay?

SPEAKER_00 4:40

What's your nickname?

SPEAKER_06 4:43

Oh my god, Jesus Christ! Okay, wait, I'm gonna tell you what.

SPEAKER_07 4:48

This story gets worse because Renee, you were on the back with Austin.

SPEAKER_06 4:54

I was, who also had no rider skill whatsoever. And the ride was the ride was led through a million turns, a hundred miles, and every time the rain would get heavier, Crash would say, It's okay, guys. I know of a bar up here, they're gonna love us. We go here all the time and it's great. And Crash would be like, I got a shortcut. And he took us down a fire road, a canal, because it's Welland, Ontario, is all the canals, a canal access road that didn't have gravel on it, it had boulders on it. Gravel is something you can sort of drive through. This is like, if I threw one of these at you, it would kill you. It's like a quarry. I think the proper term is spall. Spall, alright. It was huge fucking gravel. And the bikes are swimming around and everybody's panicking and it's raining sideways. And the world is just shitting itself.

SPEAKER_03 5:45

It was horrible.

SPEAKER_06 5:46

Right. And at one point during the ride, when we got on some real road, the whole ride decided under Crash's fucking infinite wisdom to make a hard left-hand turn. Well, Joe was going next to a gate. Joe was going a thousand miles an hour. And no rider skill on tires from 1980 that were like hard brick rubber tires. And Joe locked the fucking bike up in a panic stop. And all I could think was, this is Joe's first rally. He's traveled 14 miles tail there for a few minutes. And he's about to die. I saw the bike fish tail. Joe was left on he was on the left side of the bike, he was on the right side of the bike, he was on the left side of the bike. At one point I saw his left foot go over his left shoulder. But it stayed up. He rode it out like a fucking cheap rodeo. It's like if you're having sex with your girlfriend and you shout her sister's name out. He held on to it. And he got it all back together, and I was like, fuck! And he's like, am I cool? And I was like, And he stalled it, of course, because he was in fourth grade when all this shit happened. I was like, no, just put it in neutral, start it again, and catch up to them. Because I was doing road guard because we I literally threw myself in front of oncoming traffic because nobody said we were turning left. And we went onto all this gravel and the road just never ended. We went to probably the worst bar in Ontario. Oh, no way. Knuckleheads?

SPEAKER_05 7:15

Knuckleheads? Knuckleheads. Knuckleheads was a great bar. It crashes the fence, yes. Knuckleheads was a great bar. I think the rule at Knuckleheads was. Do you still have the picture of everybody in front of it? Yeah. Yeah, I do do that.

SPEAKER_03 7:28

I do too. There's nobody dead in that picture yet.

SPEAKER_06 7:31

That's right. Everybody in the picture is a miracle in and of itself. Which is weird. There's a couple should be institutionalized in that. The deal was if you bought a shot, you got a beer for free. I like this bar. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:43

Yeah, I'll say, that's funny.

SPEAKER_06 7:45

And if you bought a shot, you got a beer for free. And back then in Ontario, beer and stuff was cheap, not like it is now. So we went in there in a downpour, everybody's soaking wet. Nobody knew what rain gear was. Precious few of us had a helmet that was passable. And every time we would go out of the bar and somebody would get motivated to be like, you know, we need to leave. We've been in the bar now for an hour. And before we get stupid, stupid drunk, we should probably go. And you'd go outside and like lightning would hit, and another monsoon would roll through, and you'd just be like, fuck it, go back in the bar. I think we were in the bar for three hours in the middle of the day on Saturday. And when we left the bar, it was seriously, we can't let him drive. We cannot let him drive. He's in bad shape. So who's gonna ride his scooter? Oh shit, we have too many scooters, not enough people, and it came to various different people were not qualified to drive out of there. So it turned into the game of has anybody ridden a scooter before that knows how to shift? Because we were picking people off of bikes that they didn't ride in on and putting them on bikes that weren't there. So we could ride back. The miracle of the ride was it took us, what, an hour and a half, two hours to get to the bar.

SPEAKER_05 8:59

I didn't even go back with you guys. Me and the Boston guys got way lost.

SPEAKER_06 9:03

It took us 25 minutes to get back to the rally site. This is using two hours. This is using four or five of Crash's shortcuts. GPS didn't exist. We didn't even have pagers back then. Joe left later than us with the Boston guys, and they didn't show back up the rally site for a couple three hours.

SPEAKER_05 9:22

We were lost for a few hours.

SPEAKER_06 9:23

That was actually a hail storm. Yeah. And that was that was when Joe created the whole like the Joe Hongosh rule of everyone else leaves the bar and Joe stays at the strip club for two or three shift changes. And it's one o'clock at the scooter rally, and we we left the strip club at three. And we're like, where the fuck are those guys? So we're trying to call them, and we're getting random calls back from these guys at the strip club going, no, no, we're we're on our way back. We're just trying to get a cat.

SPEAKER_05 9:51

Two hours later, nothing. We were just lost that time.

SPEAKER_06 9:56

Fantastic. But that was your first ride out. It was it was fucking terrifying.

SPEAKER_07 10:00

That was my first rally.

SPEAKER_06 10:01

That was your first rally? It was mine too.

SPEAKER_07 10:03

That's what we met. Wow.

SPEAKER_03 10:04

I was series one, didn't I?

SPEAKER_06 10:06

Yeah. Yeah, you had the Nixon launch.

SPEAKER_03 10:08

That's a salad shooter. That seat too is that there's been a whole lot of naked on that seat, too. We had to change it in their underpants for that.

SPEAKER_06 10:17

Oh, Jesus. Yeah. So you can tell in this room there's been a lot of a lot of being drunk and naked and riding scooters around each other. And that's why we do it. That's why we do the scooter rallies. Paul, tell me about tell me about the bang stick. Boom! Boom stick, boom stick, boom! Okay. Wait, so you're let's just talk for a second. His Lambretta is a Series 3 Lambretta. It has, when he bought it, it had poorly painted Captain America emblems, like American flag emblems on the side of the Lambretta, both sides. Easy rider style. Easy rider style. And there was that's perfect for an Italian scoop. And you could tell that they were done like in the 60s or 70s. 68. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 10:58

Right after the movie came out.

SPEAKER_06 10:59

But it was beautiful. So it was it had the right patina, it looked right, and kind of everybody told Paul, you don't fucking paint those. Under any certain you don't touch those. Right. You do not touch those panels.

SPEAKER_07 11:11

I can't touch them.

SPEAKER_06 11:12

Now that motor, now wait, hold on. That motor scooter, to the best of your knowledge, how many motors have been in that bike?

SPEAKER_03 11:21

I found it the other day. It's been my test bench. Everything I built. And a TS1 in there. Right. Well, it was a 125.

SPEAKER_06 11:29

And a TS1 for people who are listening is uh over 200 CC's, dirt bike style, multi-transfer port, two-stroke motor. These motors are piston ported like a dirt bike, where Vespa motors are rotary valve like a Vespa. And when they do the TS1 kit, uh TAFSpeed created, well, stole some dirt bike technology and slid it onto a Lambretta. And what you ended up with was you took a bike that had about 11 horsepower. And you gave it somewhere along the lines of 23 to 25 horsepower. With a with l literally a bolt-on kit, depending on how deep you went into it. And this kit moved so much air so efficiently that you fucking went from a 20mm carburetor to a 35mm carburetor. Like that, you went from a 20 millimeter scooter carburetor to a 35mm dirt bike carburetor. So it's more dirt bike engine than it is No room for an air filter. No room for an air filter, right?

SPEAKER_03 12:31

So it did not last long in that scooter. But yeah, 125, 150, 225, 175. Oh, now it's a 215 white scale conversion. It fits like a glove. Yep. And I had two different pipes on that just for fun.

SPEAKER_06 12:45

Right. And with the two-stroke bikes, the expansion chambers make all the difference in the world. Getting your exhaust out of the bike is as important as detonating the gas that's in it. And if you have the correct expansion chamber theory, the bike acts like it acts like a turbocharger and literally sucks the shit out of the piston. Okay. Now, this boomstick that you got. The boomstick, yeah, wow. Right. Now, because Paul has been through a fucking sload of exhausts on a trusty scooter. Now you've had like a uh no. You had one.

SPEAKER_04 13:15

You have it in your basement. I tried getting it off you for years and you set up yourself.

SPEAKER_06 13:20

I have one. Didn't you win it at a scooter rally?

SPEAKER_03 13:23

Yeah. Where did that come from? You bought it. I remember when you bought it. You bought it because Christian was buying one and everybody else was buying one. No.

SPEAKER_05 13:30

I don't even know if I paid it.

SPEAKER_03 13:31

$650 or some shit. It was it was a big thing way back when.

SPEAKER_05 13:34

I don't even know if it's 10 years. I don't even know if I paid for that pipe. You won another chip.

SPEAKER_03 13:38

$650. It was a big bad stupid money.

SPEAKER_05 13:41

No, because uh it was there.

SPEAKER_03 13:42

When you bought it, I said, oh wow, you're buying one of them, Jelly.

SPEAKER_05 13:46

Fight, fight, fight. No, no, no. I didn't buy it because uh I thought that somebody else had won it in a wrestling. No, one of the Canadians got it for free.

unknown 13:54

Okay.

SPEAKER_05 13:55

Because they ordered two pipes, they cancelled one, they sent some like the more expensive one, and never charged them for it.

SPEAKER_03 14:02

Oh my.

SPEAKER_05 14:03

This this is a Canadian deal.

SPEAKER_06 14:04

This is a gobshite. The gobsite's good for in Canada.

SPEAKER_05 14:07

It's a gobshite. I may have paid something for it. It was like less than half price.

SPEAKER_06 14:10

It was a ridiculous deal, though.

SPEAKER_05 14:11

That was why you end up with it. I'm not even sure if I paid for it. He might have just gave it to me. Because he ended up with like one or two pipes for free somehow. Like, because he kept the uh what was the other one from England? Um, well he had a PM tuning.

SPEAKER_06 14:24

Yeah, the PM tuning.

SPEAKER_05 14:27

What was even like the step up from that though? Like the crazy expensive English pipe.

SPEAKER_06 14:30

Oh, uh not Ancelotti, but uh you know which one. I don't know. I don't know, but it was but yeah, I know exactly. It doesn't matter to anybody listening to this fucking thing.

SPEAKER_05 14:38

But anyway.

SPEAKER_03 14:39

But I've been trying to get that pipe off for 10 years, I think.

SPEAKER_05 14:42

Maybe scooterists aren't your target market here?

SPEAKER_03 14:44

Well, yeah, I'd have a better chance.

SPEAKER_05 14:46

If they don't like it, they can give their fucking money back they paid for the podcast.

SPEAKER_02 14:49

Somebody said they wanted to hear about scooters, so here you go. Right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 14:52

Y'all fucking asked for scooter talk. Now you're fucking trapped. It's like being at a rally. Boom! Boomstick. So the boomstick is actually dirt bike technology now. The science has settled. Somehow twisted to fit under a lambretta, which is like it's impossible. Like the twisted, it's like a roller coaster tycoon. Spring. Right.

SPEAKER_02 15:13

So if you don't understand what a Lambretta exhaust is like, it comes out, goes out the towards the left, curls around to the right, and then swings back to the back. They really first it goes down.

SPEAKER_06 15:23

When they engineered out, yeah, we got when they engineered the scooter, they were like, okay, what looks enough like a Vespa that we can sell 'em. Good. Okay, it's got a motor in there. Now where are we gonna put the pipe? Well, the only place we can put the pipe is under the bike. Fair enough. Let's just put a big metal box in there, put a tube going into the metal box, and a little tube coming out of it. Well, but that's fucking poor and inefficient. Who fucking cares it fits? And let's build a million of them. So they did. And it goes putt, putt- putt and nobody cares about horsepower, it's a fucking scooter. Well, now the boomstick fucking works finally.

SPEAKER_04 15:58

Wow!

SPEAKER_06 15:58

How many fucking years later did it take for somebody to perfect 1950s technology?

SPEAKER_04 16:04

Wow!

SPEAKER_06 16:04

Yeah. Wow! Wow. It makes Paul happy.

SPEAKER_04 16:12

I'm telling you, it was that big a difference. It was it was absolutely crazy.

SPEAKER_06 16:16

Now, how much money do you normally have to give to for give for a boomstick? If somebody owns a lambretta and they want to make it finally work right.

SPEAKER_03 16:21

Worse than that. Worse than that. In 98, the West Coast Lambretta pipe was the hottest thing on the market. 500 something bucks.

SPEAKER_07 16:29

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_03 16:30

You know? And I bolted on her and I didn't know how cool that was. That wasn't that cool, but it was a nice pipe, and it had a silencer on it, and looked cool, and it kind of worked. It kind of worked. Then I put a scooter S pipe on it, some different engine configuration, and I could feel a powerband sometimes. Sometimes. Occasionally. Yeah. Between 6,000 and 6,200 RPMs. When you fucking rack and you so I said, there it was. And then I put that scooter S pipe on the TS1, yeah. Another bike, and I said, There's a power band. So at least I'm in power band mode with it.

SPEAKER_06 17:03

Because if for every different two-stroke exhaust is designed and engineered for a particular RPM range, and if you haven't matched the RPM range that your motor delivers, you might as well throw your fucking money away.

SPEAKER_03 17:13

And the size of the city.

SPEAKER_06 17:14

Because all you've done is got a big chrome fucking phallic looking thing under your bike, and now you can't turn right. And it's noise.

SPEAKER_02 17:19

Because it's all based on like the speed of sound because you got the exha the the the boom coming out of your exhaust port has to go back the bike, bounce back, and stuff some of the exhaust gas back into the cylinder. Correct. And the the length of it, the shape of it, all the effects, where that power is going to happen optimally.

SPEAKER_06 17:38

Oh, we played with this for years back in the day where we were like cutting pieces of tubing to make different stinger lengths, and we were changing the performance of bikes dramatically just by changing the length of something as stupid as a big thing.

SPEAKER_02 17:49

The size of the can, the heat, the temperature, how hot you can keep it, all in brewers. Stainless steel or not.

SPEAKER_06 17:54

The type of it. Yes, it's like. So it's really crazy. And so finally now, 40, 50 fucking years later. The science is settled. We got boomstick. Boomstick. So if you need to if you got a Lambretta, you need to be talking to people about boomsticks.

SPEAKER_00 18:07

See, they need to make a sticker or a t-shirt or something that says exactly that. The science is settled, right? Boomstick.

SPEAKER_05 18:13

People actually used to tack like stinger cans onto it. Yeah, we did. Yeah, we did.

SPEAKER_06 18:18

Yeah, forever. We did that. Um we did Volkswagen. Uh my the one that I built that I still love the best was I took an old PM tuning pipe that somebody crashed the bike, and it was all dented to shit, so it didn't work anymore. So I cut it, bent everything out, welded it all back together again, and then I took a Volkswagen Beetle stinger, the little whistlers they call them. I took the whistler off a Volkswagen Beetle and I welded it on to the back, and all of a sudden the pipe worked for my particular motor, I had a TS1 uh 225, and it actually fucking worked. And I was like, I had other exhausts that I actually paid real money for that I took off and sold to people at a huge loss because I finally had something that fucking worked for that particular motor.

SPEAKER_03 19:01

It's locked into the science.

SPEAKER_06 19:02

Just locked into it like an idiot, just locked into it.

SPEAKER_03 19:05

That may be the case with the best.

SPEAKER_06 19:06

And then I put a hole in the pistol.

SPEAKER_03 19:07

Maybe the case with the back stick on this bike. It's a 215 Weissco conversion. It's got a longer rud, shorter deck height pistol. It's got a longer rud?

SPEAKER_06 19:17

Rod.

SPEAKER_03 19:17

Rud. Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_00 19:18

Rod. Speaking of Birgian. Burgian Genser.

SPEAKER_03 19:25

28mm card. Apparently, the size of the cart makes a difference. Oh, yeah. A little bit. But I put this stupid thing on. And that's their power band. Anybody who ever wrote a banshee?

SPEAKER_01 19:35

They're all powerband.

SPEAKER_03 19:36

All power band. Yeah, all power band. You start out and all of a sudden you're spinning wheels and you didn't even try.

SPEAKER_06 19:42

That was kind of my first rally with the Pittsburgh folks we went out to our friend uh Christian and Jason's camp. And I think that might have been when I met Renee. And we went out there to that rally. Niagara, we just discussed this. Was that when I met you? Okay, so it was right after Niagara. It was right after Niagara we did camp. Yeah, Hillbilly Weekend. Hill Billy Weekend. And so we went out and Renee had a little small frame vest, but she was plodding around on. But uh Jason Tolko was a Harley guy and he wanted fucking nothing to do with us.

SPEAKER_03 20:10

Until he saw how much fun it was.

SPEAKER_06 20:11

Right. Sat in the corner and powded. Sat in the corner and pouted. And he's a mountain of a man. And he drank his rolling rock, and he was just fucking all your fucking fucking scooter fags coming out of my fucking camp and fucking driver fucking. Sat in the corner, made sure he didn't talk to anyone. Right, and my and and I will always look for the scariest person in the room and go make him my friend. And so I did that, and my wife was hanging out, and my wife was like, Who's this guy? And I was like, This is Jason, he owns this place. And he's like, after a little while, we started talking about Kawasaki H2s and stuff like that. I had an H2 at the time. And he's like, Oh, you want to ride something with some two-stroke power? You ride my banshee. H2. And he goes, You ride the banshee, but you be real careful. So I took his banshee out, and seriously, I've never met a quad in my life I trusted ever. This thing was fucking out to kill me.

SPEAKER_01 21:00

Yeah, they're fucking sick.

SPEAKER_06 21:02

And it was a two-stroke RZ350 motor put in a quad with just nothing but performance. Nuts. Spent, he's like, I spent $2,300 building that motor. I'm like, and you got your fucking money's worth of it. So I'm driving around this camp, and there's a few little camps hiding on this little gravel road back there, and I'm like, oh, I'm having a great time.

SPEAKER_04 21:21

Wow, wow, wow, wow.

SPEAKER_06 21:22

And I see this kind of open area full of very tall elephant grass. I'm like, that looks like the perfect place to go play with a quad out in the elephant grass. What I found out was some fucking lunatic didn't like quads playing on his property, so he cut down a bunch of trees. Big, big 18-inch trees, and he laid it, and they were all just laying randomly in the elephant grass. Well you didn't see them until you hit him. And then when you hit them, you weren't on the quad anymore. And then you had to like go back and start the quad again and you know, try to hop the big logs with the quad. Didn't work out so well. But I took the thing back to him and I was like, that's pretty good now, Jason, and Jason, what do you think Jason weighed then?

SPEAKER_01 21:59

Three

SPEAKER_06 22:00

40, 50. Yeah, 340 or 350, maybe. He held it well. He wore it well. And he still does. And so Jason was like, Well, what do you got there? And I was like, well, I got a yeah. When he fell, he kept falling forever. Not agile. The title in. Yeah, not agile.

SPEAKER_03 22:18

But bumbles bounce.

SPEAKER_06 22:19

Yeah. My god, he bumbles bounce. So I give him the keys to my my Rally 200. My Rally 200 had a at the time it had a 208cc performance motor in it and a pipe and all the good shit. And I was like, well, go, you know, you he's like, fucking scooters are gay. I don't want to be anywhere near a scooter. You fucking weirdos, you need to leave my camp. I was like, here's the keys, go ride my bike. So I took the side panels off my bike because I knew he was gonna crash it. Thank you. So, and Rally200 side panels are like a fucking king's ransom.

SPEAKER_01 22:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 22:48

Yeah. So I took the side panels off, threw my keys, Jay goes over to this thing, I explain how to start it, I explain the way the transmission works. Yes, please, I would love another beverage.

SPEAKER_07 22:59

Oh, last two.

SPEAKER_06 23:00

Oh.

SPEAKER_07 23:01

Boom.

unknown 23:02

Boom.

SPEAKER_06 23:02

Boomstick. Boom. Boomstick. Boomstick. Last two beers, this is gonna be a short podcast. Cholco takes off on my Rally 200. You got nothing to say. Cholco takes off on the Rally 200, front wheels in the air on gravel. I'm I it I literally see my scooter's life pass before my eyes. You gave the weight, did you get the weight?

SPEAKER_05 23:23

Okay, he's like 6'4. Oh yeah. Which also needs to be. Yeah, he's a monster. At it.

SPEAKER_06 23:28

And he goes and just fucking takes off, and we can hear him laughing. Just fucking laughing. And after like 20 minutes, he brings the thing back and he's like, ho! And Jay's normal delivery is like slow and low. He doesn't get excited about much. And he came back and he was all amped up. And he was like, man, that thing's a lot of fun. I've been riding Harleys for years, and I've never ridden a Harley that was that much fun. And uh and by the end of that weekend, we fucking got into his soul. And he's been riding scooters ever since. You know? And just one of those things, man. He got a little taste of it, and all of a sudden. How many Harley tattoos do you think he had?

SPEAKER_03 24:09

He got a couple.

SPEAKER_06 24:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 24:10

And a steel mill.

SPEAKER_06 24:12

Yeah. How many Harleys has he owned since then? Just a small steel tattoo, though. Zero!

SPEAKER_07 24:17

I don't think it was a steel. Oh, oh, that one.

SPEAKER_06 24:21

The foundry tattoo, which looks like grain silos. If you're not from a steel town and you don't know what foundries look like, to people, it looks like Nike site missile silos or like nuclear power plants. To people who don't know what a foundry is. It looks like the opening scene of The Simpson where they lose the losing rod. Well, that's his back piece, and because he's a big man, his back piece is the size of a whiskey barrel. Yeah. If he ever found his way into a concentration camp, they could make an entire lamp out of his back. I'll make a circus tent. Boomstick. Boomstick. Boomstick. Boomstick.

SPEAKER_01 24:59

The first time I ever rode a banshee, a buddy of mine. I had been riding four-wheelers, and a buddy of mine said, You gotta ride this thing. And I'm like, okay. I got the thing up in the second gear, I turned around and brought it back. I'm like, dude, I'm not ready for that. I'm like, I'm not ready for that. You need a quarter mile. Pulling down the tree stomp. I was riding like an EX at the time. I'm like, no, I'm not ready for that.

SPEAKER_06 25:21

No, nobody's ready for that. That's just a bad idea.

SPEAKER_03 25:24

So the front slam with a boomstick. I thought I reached a pinnacle of engine technology and scooters. With a TS1. That was cool. White scout of 215 conversion. That's really cool. It takes a simple motor with just a simple tweaks, and it's almost a TS1. And I still don't know why anybody buys or builds a TS1 and do a 215.

SPEAKER_06 25:44

Well, because for years TS1.

SPEAKER_03 25:45

Right. For a third of the price. Yeah. And then put a boom stick on it. And then do a boom stick on it. I want a boom stick now. Listen. Right there when it got dark. Okay. And I had to go to bed for work. Oh yeah, I want to start this on it right around the block, right?

SPEAKER_00 26:03

Right.

SPEAKER_03 26:04

Oh man. I thought I had to warm up or something. Right. I wondered what's up with my bike. I know this motor. I wrote it to Detroit. From Pittsburgh. Yeah. It's different off. I mean, I'm in my backyard. Like a dirt bike. Like a stupid airplane. And it's still cold. Yeah, I went down the street. Get a couple hiccups on it.

SPEAKER_04 26:43

Like, it was like, oh, I gotta shift already. I gotta shift again! Holy shit! I had the face on my own scooter! It was great! It was great! And I haven't had this in two years!

SPEAKER_06 26:57

And what we have to tell people who are listening to this, remember when we're talking about the scooters, I know which if you're not familiar with the kind of vintage bikes we're talking about, the TS1 bike that I was riding around for a few years, we had uh radar confirmation of 92 miles an hour. Wow. So I have motorcycles today that are 500cc that don't like to go 92 miles an hour, especially not when you're on 10-inch wheels on split rims with inner tubes in them. And that's just fucking stupid.

SPEAKER_01 27:23

Stupid.

SPEAKER_06 27:24

It's crazy stupid. Yeah, and you can hear every part of the bike failing. Yeah. Most of the parts falling off. Yeah. Because there's never been anything in the world as rickety as a Lambretta scooter with about 10,000 miles on it. It's like controlled demolition. It's held together with 2,000 fasteners. Everybody's like, how come you like working on it? Yeah. How come you don't like fucking working on goddamn lambbrettas? Because there's 2,000 nuts and bolts to get to anything I need to work on. Yeah. They put all the bodies.

SPEAKER_05 27:54

Unless they're made in Spain. Unless they're made in Spain. They got rid of at least 40. And age 20 years in a barn.

SPEAKER_06 28:00

Okay, well, Joe's fucking bike, years ago we're doing a event in Cleveland. We're doing a Mara Vespa event in Cleveland, biggest goddamn national rally. And I want to make sure that Joe's bike is gonna stand tall. For good reason.

unknown 28:12

For good reasons.

SPEAKER_00 28:13

Because Joe owns it. Because Joe owns it.

SPEAKER_06 28:15

And I want him to participate in the rally. And I'm like, Joe hasn't ridden this bike in a long time. And Joe's idea of taking care of the bike is parking it like within eight feet of his house. So that most of the snow doesn't actually land on the bike. But I have been to his house and seen four feet of snow on top of his bike. The garage? He doesn't have a garage. Covers. Well, covers appear and covers disappear. And covers they disintegrated. They disintegrated. Years. Carbon dating. His fucking crowd, his cover one year looked like the shroud of Turin. You can hold it up to light and see a lambretta on it. The fucking thing hadn't moved forever.

unknown 28:56

Become ground covers.

SPEAKER_06 28:58

There's just animals living in there. And then mulch. And the funny thing is we go on his fucking bike and we're like, okay, well, let's turn the fuel on, pull it shove, kick it, kick it, kick it, kick it. Yeah, oh yeah, it's gotta go in the shop. Kick it, kick it, bro. I'm like, there's no fucking way this bike is running.

SPEAKER_01 29:14

Because there's no ethanol in the game.

SPEAKER_06 29:15

He changed the light bulb. So he could feel good that he had done something to it. I was like, Joe, I'd love to tell you that it needed all kinds of fucking work so you could go ride with us, but realistically, this mystery fucking scooter is the most reliable lumbretta on the planet. How you lucked into it, I have no idea.

SPEAKER_03 29:33

300 miles.

SPEAKER_06 29:34

Rich? Yeah, rich, rich, rich Grotzinger down in Columbus, man. Great deal at the right time. I think we paid 600 for it. At least you did it. Back in the day, man. It was cheap. 600 for a bike with 300 miles on it. It was crazy cheap. Yeah, you paid more for a pipe. Exactly.

SPEAKER_05 29:49

It had like a fucking uh ace hardware toggle switch to the start of the bike. It had pieces of garden hose incorporated into its mechanics.

SPEAKER_06 30:00

That makes for a great bike, though. There were a number of hillbilly modifications. Like the fuel tap did nothing. The fuel tap was simply there for show. There was another fuel tap hiding downstream. We just had to spend some time looking around at the bike and seeing all the different things that actually made it function. There was actual garden hose in it. There was garden hose in it, yeah. There was garden hose in the bike.

SPEAKER_00 30:22

Oh, I've definitely incorporated plenty of duct tape in the bike.

SPEAKER_02 30:25

Oh man.

SPEAKER_00 30:26

It needed a little duct tape before, really, actually.

SPEAKER_02 30:29

Just for the record, I have not put any duct tape in it.

SPEAKER_00 30:31

Yes, you have.

SPEAKER_06 30:37

And maybe we'll also have little patterns like that. You can put some punk rock leopard skin duct tape on you. I went to the duct tape festival. Pretty cool duck.

SPEAKER_01 30:49

I work for duct tape.

SPEAKER_06 30:50

Yeah? There you go. Hankle. Hankle. Hankle. Hankle. It's the good stuff. Mythbusters. So 9,000 rolls of duct tape. We'll build whatever we want.

SPEAKER_01 30:59

Yeah. Oh, you can go on eBay and buy anything made out of duct tape right now. Yeah. Shoes, wallets, horses.

SPEAKER_00 31:06

John, are we gonna talk about what Phil is sitting on? Oh yeah, I'm sitting on a motorcycle animal. Something that you picked up yesterday. Today. Today.

SPEAKER_01 31:15

I got drunk in the garage waiting for him to come back with me.

SPEAKER_06 31:18

Yeah, yeah. So John, MackelFresh.

SPEAKER_00 31:24

Because we have talked about this bike. The C V1.

SPEAKER_06 31:26

Yes, we have. Yes. Sounds like Angels Fucking. As Dustin explained. The uh, yeah. So where the hell did you find this motorcycle that only has 3300 miles on, yet it's what, fucking 20 years old? This is 20 years old?

SPEAKER_02 31:41

This was got a long play. I ran into this kid in front of a friend, drinking one night, blah blah blah. Oh, you're in the motorcycle?

SPEAKER_06 31:48

Now hold on. We're gonna we're gonna talk for one second about long play. Yeah. Long play is when you know that somebody else is basically just holding a motorcycle for you. There's a bike hiding in a garage. Terry Stewart from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame held that blue super hawk for me for 16 years. Yeah. He didn't know it. He was just keeping my bike okay. Yeah, he was just holding it. And he paid me to work on my own motorcycle for years. Keep it free. So he could ride it once a year. Right? Keep it fresh for him. And then he eventually was like, Yeah, I gotta sell it.

SPEAKER_01 32:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 32:19

And so, yeah, so the long play, how many years? Probably five years or I learned about this bike.

SPEAKER_02 32:24

Yeah. And I talked with him, and then yeah, then I'd forgot, and then I talked with him again. I'm like, oh yeah, you have a C B1. You have a C B1. Oh, I gave the I gave it up too soon. I'm sorry. It's okay, no, that's fine. So he had a CB1. No, Mark already said it.

SPEAKER_06 32:40

Yeah, I did.

SPEAKER_02 32:40

He ruined it right now.

SPEAKER_06 32:41

And people who listen to the podcast know what a C B1 is.

SPEAKER_02 32:43

I'm like, well, what's wrong with it? I lost the key. I had it for a couple years. Are you fucking kidding me? We figured out today you bought it with 2,700 miles on it. It has 33. He's 600 miles. He put 600 miles on it.

SPEAKER_06 32:54

And then lost the key.

SPEAKER_05 32:56

I know somebody else who did that. Losing keys to motorcycles can happen.

unknown 33:00

That can happen.

SPEAKER_05 33:01

Okay. Oh guilty!

SPEAKER_06 33:04

That's a perfectly reasonable thing to have happen. Now, right now, John's thinking that five years with no key is kind of an irresponsible owner. It was like three. Joe.

SPEAKER_07 33:14

For the record.

SPEAKER_05 33:16

Yeah, it was.

SPEAKER_06 33:21

Joe wanted you to stick around. Joe lost an entire relationship and a gas grill in the time that this key was missing. And the bike didn't move a fucking inch. Because the key was behind his dresser. It was lost. There was nothing wrong with the motorcycle. It wasn't like there was something maybe wrong with it and he would have stopped riding it. No, he lost a key.

SPEAKER_00 33:52

You can hot wire that bike in two minutes. Once again. Where were you?

unknown 33:57

You didn't ask.

SPEAKER_00 33:59

I didn't know you. You didn't ask. I offered.

SPEAKER_06 34:02

But you pull the back off the ignition and jump all four wires together before it starts. I offered to buy Joe. Okay, first of all, when Joe is involved, we talked about the Lembrata, the performer that sat for years and years and years under the Cartes. Okay, it was Ron, it just wasn't worked on.

SPEAKER_05 34:20

The point It ran back then. I wrote it occasionally.

SPEAKER_06 34:24

Your neighbors wrote it. The uh now the his neighbors would just come and borrow the bike. James wrote it. I wrote it, Ryan wrote it. We just show up and just ride a bike.

SPEAKER_05 34:34

James used to run away from home on it when he lived with me.

SPEAKER_06 34:37

I'm leaving it, I'm taking your scooter.

SPEAKER_05 34:40

He did.

SPEAKER_06 34:41

It bump started. Motorcycles, two wheel vehicles in Joe's possession move at a glacial pace. I mean, seriously, he's like, ten times I was like, I can get you a new ignition for that for 60 bucks. Uh I'm gonna look some more. And then a year later. Joe, look at the biggest. Well, I found it, didn't I? I saved $65. Never mind the fact that the tires had flats in it. Flat in them. Due diligence. Right. I want to ride my bike. Kadunka, kadunk, kadunka. Where did the bike go? Where is it now? Uh Did somebody buy it? Somebody bought it, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 35:19

Okay, alright. That's not the one though.

SPEAKER_06 35:20

And it had a key. The wind blew out. It had a kid. The whole bike was now. The whole bike was covered in patina, except for the key, which had been lovingly preserved under his bike door. Okay, John.

SPEAKER_02 35:33

So this bike that's missing keys. So and okay, so some once, saw him again, then said, hey, you know, I can probably hook you up. I can get that fixed, you know. Let's work on it. Well, then one thing later or another, he's too busy, I'm too busy. Just had a key. I never got to pick it up. A year goes by, two years goes by. Uh then I see the Facebook post. Just got married. Oh, Nathan's married. I'm like, he's gonna be giving me my time to go get my better get my bike out of my garage. Somebody from at one point I was interested in helping him fix it, and then I'm like, I backed off of that, and I'm like, let's just wait. Don't make it too easy on it. I'd kind of like owing that bike. And then you could run down and fuck one of them, or you could walk down and fuck them all. A couple months after I saw the marriage post, I get a text yesterday. I think I want to sell the CB1. I think about it. Now don't act excited. I was thinking about it, uh, how's 1400 sound? Well, it sounds really steep for a bike that hasn't run 13 years. I'm like, I'm interested. I know whatever, you know. Uh, when can I come do it? I can be by tomorrow.

SPEAKER_01 36:40

Ping, ping, ping, ping, ping, address. He waited eight minute eight minutes before. What's the ruling on that? Can I get a ruling on that?

SPEAKER_00 36:49

What seems precocious?

SPEAKER_01 36:50

He waited that on.

SPEAKER_00 36:51

Meanwhile, in between, he's texted me last night, like, I might be by the CB1. Okay.

SPEAKER_06 36:57

And then to throw a little salt on the fucking wounds, so we have this weird honor among thieves in our little group here. So John somehow asks me permission to buy this bike because he's like, I don't want to step on your toes because you're kind of the CB1 guy. Being the CB1 guy is like being the Fuji rabbit or silver pigeon guy. If you own one, you're officially the world's authority on them. So John is kind of like, well, I feel bad. I'm like, why would you feel bad? I don't even know the thing. Go get the fucking bike. Go get the fucking bike.

SPEAKER_03 37:30

And don't you dare pay that kind of money for it. Don't come home without that bike.

SPEAKER_00 37:34

That's that's I think I'd probably be the authority on it now because I've been the guy that most recently worked on one of them.

SPEAKER_01 37:40

Well, alright. He pulled up in it and he's like, What did you think you'd give me for it? I got out and I go, I'll give you a thousand right now. Right. Yeah, exactly. I just paid $1,200 for it. It's okay because it's okay, but it's blue. Yeah. Well, it's the second thing I said, I'm like, ah, we gotta paint it to Japanese market red.

SPEAKER_06 37:57

It's okay because it's but it's got the cool but they only came in blue. But it does have this aftermarket, like race tech uh fairing app. I told him.

SPEAKER_02 38:05

I think it was purpose-built for the floor. I think you're right.

SPEAKER_01 38:08

It's probably uh they're probably a small production run in air technique. Yeah, it's probably air tech.

SPEAKER_00 38:12

It's an air tech.

SPEAKER_01 38:13

I told him if he took off that bottom half of that fairing where it bolts on to that top half and kind of rounded that out a little bit, that would look like. Oh, I'm gonna keep the whole thing. You need to, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 38:20

No, keep the whole thing, yeah. Keep not it's weird. I it was kind of I I couldn't help but say it. He's like, I'm like, I said, Oh, I see you got married. He's like, yeah, I said, I knew you'd be calling me.

SPEAKER_06 38:32

And in a recent podcast, you were quoted as saying, you know, I'm looking for a nice 90s sport bike.

SPEAKER_02 38:38

And that's what I mean that's the other thing that was like, I'm like, you know what? I kind of was just gonna get a C V R600. And then I was like, well, this is a lot cooler. Yeah, I'll tell I can live with a C V1.

SPEAKER_01 38:47

It's a really rare bike. You don't have C.

SPEAKER_02 38:49

For people who don't know what a C B1 and haven't heard of the podcast, it's a four-cylinder, liquid cooled, 400cc, so 100cc cylinders, you know, like the excitement starts at 10%.

SPEAKER_00 39:00

I would have the gearing on them is retarded.

SPEAKER_02 39:03

Yeah, it's all high end. But I will say this, he in the 600 miles said, Oh, look out, because uh 1300 you know RPM red, and then like when you get up there, it's gonna wheelie. It does. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 39:15

Shit happens real fast. Well, I put a thousand miles on uh the red one. Yeah, and uh it's every ride on that bike is engaging in a race.

SPEAKER_06 39:23

Yeah. If you're going to even if you're going to get a pack of smokes, yeah. It's like you're racing.

SPEAKER_00 39:29

No, because it sounds like it. No matter what you do on that bike, you need 20 people to chase you going to get a pack of smokes to make it feel like it, what it feels like.

SPEAKER_06 39:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 39:37

Someone to trade paint with in the turn to the 7-Eleven.

SPEAKER_06 39:40

Every time Emmy rides it, like when we're bringing the bikes in at the end of the night from the shop, Emmy's always like, I need the keys for the CB1. Because she won't just ride the C B1 like around the store and bring it in the back doors. No, no, no, no, no. She's gotta go through the neighborhood. Yeah, so crack the bike. And so um, we have rules about like what streets you're not allowed to go fast on because we're neighbors. So she will take the authorized route, speed route, the speed route, to go, you know, crack this thing, and when she brings the bike in, you know, she disappears. We've moved in seven bikes, eight bikes, and she reappears, and she parks the bike and it's doing that cooling down. I was like, you just did seven minutes at 10,000 RPM. It it just likes it. The bike likes high RPM. Wait, seven minutes at 10,000 RPM is 70,000 revolutions. The motor just counted to 70,000. It was like playing a game of hide and seek. Yeah. 11,000, 2100,000, 3100, 41,000. Yeah. Pretty fun.

SPEAKER_00 40:39

Well, it's it's weird now that uh you dropped your hawk off to me, which is the big brother to that bike. It is entirely different. It's a V-twin. It's a V-twin, 650.

SPEAKER_06 40:52

No, I've had a bunch of those. But yeah, the one I bought, I flew down to Dallas and drove it home from Dallas. Uh and did drove it home from Dallas in 16 hours. So got a real nice Saddle Sor 1000 out of that one. And uh, but they're they are amazing motorcycles. They really are. That's kind of you know one of those things. It's one of those bikes that defies, you know, it was over-engineered, it was overbuilt, there was too much technology in it. It was too expensive, nobody bought it.

SPEAKER_00 41:18

Well, they built it just to get into that race class.

SPEAKER_06 41:19

Yeah, they had to get into the race class, they wanted to spank Yamaha, and they wanted to spank uh Suzuki, and they did. Well, Dustin, I'm looking forward to getting this thing running.

SPEAKER_02 41:27

So do you want to let me know? Let me know, buddy. I mean, I don't see there's any reason why I should learn how to clean the car. No, really.

SPEAKER_00 41:37

Dustin just said he was the authority. You know what? Once you dig into it, you'll realize, hey man, this isn't that bad.

unknown 41:43

All right.

SPEAKER_00 41:44

But hey, anytime you got uh a 12-pack and whatnot to roll over, uh, and that is kind of the cleaner.

SPEAKER_02 41:51

I don't know later.

SPEAKER_06 41:52

We'll see. Yeah. There's uh there's that weird community around here of just kind of moving bikes around from garage to garage.

SPEAKER_02 41:58

I'm sure when I go to sell that, it probably won't fall from far from the table.

SPEAKER_00 42:02

No, it won't fall far far from the fold. Yeah. Yeah, I'll probably be like, so John, I know what you've got into that bike.

SPEAKER_02 42:09

I publicized.

SPEAKER_00 42:10

And you're gonna be like, God damn it.

SPEAKER_06 42:11

How many lines can you put on the back of the title before you actually have to take it to the title?

SPEAKER_01 42:18

Oh wow, uh, you filled up your entire title there, right? Yeah. It's a $3,500 bike all day long. Oh, all day long.

SPEAKER_00 42:26

Oh, easily, yeah, all day long. Yeah, especially that aftermarket fairing, I'm really liking it. That's what I thought.

SPEAKER_02 42:32

I had actually when I was, I was looking, you know, I was doing, okay, I'm buying a C V one, Wikipedia, let's look at CB1s, videos of CB1s, all that C what. I'm like, you know, I like the naked bike thing, but I kind of would like some sort of, I might put a fairing on it. Yeah. There it is. There it is.

SPEAKER_06 42:46

Well the funny thing is the back of the fairing, the back of the fairing, they painted the front, they didn't paint the back. Nothing, nothing. The back's all choppy, yeah, not even prepared. Right? And on the back, it just says in giant sharpie marker, CB1. Blue. In case you couldn't see, the fairing! If you can see to read CB1 blue, you've already seen it's blue. You know it's blue. In fact, the only thing you don't have to write on there is blue. Unless the guy that works in the park department is colorblind. Then you might need to write that on there, yeah. Right. Little boy blue. Yeah. Yeah, it's very funny that it does say CB1 blue. It's written CB1 blue on it, I'm seeing in three different places. Four. Four.

SPEAKER_01 43:28

Oh yeah, and it's got the uh square headlight. Yeah, the square headlight on the right.

SPEAKER_06 43:31

The very desirable square headlight conversion. It's got a beautiful round round headlight on it. What are we gonna do? Let's put a square headlight in it. It is Mark said, why did you put a square headlight in it? Because it's easier to fucking cut fiberglass in squares than it is circles.

SPEAKER_02 43:45

With an enormous, like, welded rat steel cage around.

SPEAKER_06 43:49

The cage around here is monster truck quality. Yeah. Yeah. We know that no matter how hard you crash it, that cage around the headlight will always survive. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 43:58

I would go like on the other side.

SPEAKER_00 44:03

Well you don't have to tell the whole podcast community what I'm doing. Dustin's going pee.

SPEAKER_06 44:08

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 44:08

Go pie. Go pee.

SPEAKER_06 44:10

Yeah. Yeah, whatever. Oh, so that's cool. So anybody have anything else they absolutely positively need to talk about? Okay. Then uh we're gonna make Dustin drop this podcast really early. He's gonna put it in front of some other ones because we have an event coming up, mods vs. Rockers August 9th through 11th. So we're gonna make Dustin drop this like Tuesday. Uh mods vs. Rockers event here in Cleveland, August 9th through 11th. Uh you can get on the website. If you just type in mods vs. Rockers Cleveland into Google, it'll take you right to it. Um it's a good event, and if you live within a couple hundred miles of Cleveland, you should probably come up to it. Friday night, they're doing a thing at a bar called Porco, which is on Is it a Porco?

SPEAKER_01 44:50

I thought it was a McCarthy's.

SPEAKER_06 44:51

No, Saturday's McCarthy's. Okay. So Friday night is Porco. That's our buddy Stefan's bar. Um the bar's not technically officially open. Stefan owns? Yeah, Stefan owns a bar. It used to be called Crankies. I think that's the most awesome thing I've ever heard. Yeah. Stefan owns crankies. Yeah. Because that could be a lot of fun. Well, Stefan owns crankies because Stefan's house is 75 feet. The bar.

SPEAKER_05 45:12

The bar is his front. Yard.

SPEAKER_00 45:14

I used to love when they would do bike nights and he would show up on a bike. Yes. Like, dude, it took you longer to warm that up.

SPEAKER_06 45:22

He would let he could push it across the parking lot. I think he did once.

SPEAKER_00 45:25

Yeah, he did one night. He pushed his one scooter over there.

SPEAKER_06 45:28

Yeah. Pushed it across the parking lot. But the nice thing about Stefan's bar is if you get really, really sideways, Stefan's house should be in like the cool house book of America. Awesome. Because Stefan's house is one of those ultra, ultra modern square on top of a square, on top of square houses that actually used to be a real Cleveland little tiny uh steel mill worker's house. He likes quadruple the side of the house on the addition.

SPEAKER_00 45:52

And he is a urnal in his bathroom.

SPEAKER_06 45:53

He has a urinal in his bathroom. I installed one of those ones in the house. It's hard to think about a urinal. He has his wallet. The entire house is zombie-proof with remote control. Nice. He has three patios. He's got the main level patio, which is beautiful. He's got his secondary upstairs patio, and then he's got you have to go up a spiral staircase to get to the actual tip top roof of the house. At which point, you had a beautiful view of Cleveland when you were on the ground. Because he is the only thing between the valley, you know, the Coyota River and the city. And there just happens to be no trees. No, we those all just spot.

SPEAKER_03 46:33

You should see his patio furniture bill. But come to Mods and Rockers and see the boom stick. Yeah. There you go.

SPEAKER_06 46:44

Yeah, so Friday night's gonna be at a bar called Porco. The address is 2527 West 25th Street, downtown Cleveland. Saturday, there's gonna be some rides. And then Saturday night we're doing McCarthy's down in the flats.

SPEAKER_01 46:55

So we're not doing Spitfire this year?

SPEAKER_06 46:57

No. McCarthy's. No. McCarthy's Saturday night, and then who knows, Sunday we I might throw together some kind of a survivor's ride.

SPEAKER_00 47:03

I might actually make the Survivor's ride. I usually don't.

SPEAKER_06 47:05

Usually with the Survivor's ride, it's a ride that goes out through the twisty hilly portions of the east side of Cleveland, goes through the our our ancient neighborhoods, or we'll do some kind of a uh what do they call that? The the uh industrial wasteland ride. Oh, that's good. That's always fun.

SPEAKER_02 47:22

Are you planning on going to Mid Ohio? I mean Nope.

SPEAKER_06 47:24

Nope. Not going. What? Nope. No reason to. You know what? The prices went up. It jumped the shark. It jumped the shark.

SPEAKER_00 47:31

It jumped the shark a long time. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 47:33

And realistically, every time I go down there, I sell whatever Chinese scooters we bring down, and then people come up and they're like, And we burn the ones that we didn't sell. We burn the ones we didn't sell. That's true. It's happened. Yeah. And uh usually, you know, Dustin and I've talked about this before. We'll have we'll drag down some like Honda CD350 or something, and we'll put a price on it at like 800 bucks. And in Mid Ohio, you know, Haglin's part of the fun. Or at least always has been. Well, what happened now is people are just like getting into the cafe racer crazy and they're like, I'm gonna go down there and get me a cheap bike in Mid Ohio. They don't know Haglin's part of the fun. So they just see 800 and they look at it, it's got rust on it, and they run away. They run away. They don't want to talk. And what they don't realize is for 300, you probably would have pushed that bitch out of there. Right.

SPEAKER_00 48:20

Uh that happened the the one year, you know, two years ago, when that really started happening, right? Uh guy came up, I had a bunch of turn signals that I was selling. He's like, Oh, what do you want for all four? I'm like, 60 bucks. And he's like, Alright, and he walked away. And and this was after like three days of this, and I was like, I don't think you know how this game is played.

SPEAKER_06 48:42

I took a big sheet of paper once and I wrote The Rules of Mid Ohio, and I taped it to the headlight of a motorcycle. And I was like, the price that's on the bike means fucking nothing. Offer us what you're willing to pay. And see what happens. You know?

SPEAKER_00 48:56

Oh, my favorite was that pile of shit, Chinese whatever you had that was down there, that Phil wrote on the price for it. It was like $350. OBO. No offer will be refused. Right.

SPEAKER_01 49:08

And nobody offered.

SPEAKER_00 49:09

Not no reasonable offer. It was no offer will be refused. And these old dudes were coming to look at it and they're like, ah, $350, huh? And they'd walk away. And and finally, Phil, the the the last guy that came to me was just like, will you read that plate? Uh $350, no offer will be refused. He's like, I'm telling you, no offer will be refused. He's like, Yeah, but I don't know. And Phil's like, I told you no offer will be refused. And he's like, how about $100? And he's like, Sold. Sold. Done.

SPEAKER_06 49:41

Sold. And when I told him it was sold for $100, the price he came up with, then he was like, well, I don't know. I'm like, what part of this fucking conversation weren't you here for? He fucked me down $250 and $3.00.

SPEAKER_00 50:00

And the thing is, he could have said $25 and we would have said from there. Please drag this away from here.

SPEAKER_06 50:07

And he was like, $100. And he said yes, way too fast. There must be something wrong with it. Well, yes, it's a Chinese drunker. There's everything wrong with it. But it does run. It's got 40 miles on it now. Two years old and night. Yeah, so it really, if for the money we were spending to be there and the time to be away from the show. What were we going this year? Fucking POC, work our tails off. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 50:33

The funniest that year though was our piss bike. Yeah, the piss bike. That you had oh, unreasonable price on it.

SPEAKER_06 50:39

We had to put 50. We had put a price on it so high that we knew we would never have to walk to the bathroom.

SPEAKER_07 50:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 50:46

And uh so this was what? Was it Saturday or Sunday?

SPEAKER_01 50:50

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 50:51

Uh and uh It was Saturday. A guy pulls up on the exact same model scooter. Exact fucking buck. And he gets off and he looks all excited. And uh we're just drinking beer, fucking hanging out.

SPEAKER_06 51:01

We've given up on the idea of selling anything. And it's Saturday, and as far as we're concerned, this place sucks. It's over. We're gonna try and not get a sunburn. John was laying under our fucking table. I have pictures of that. That is the so hot.

SPEAKER_01 51:18

That's fucking great.

SPEAKER_06 51:21

That's something's coming through our easy up.

SPEAKER_02 51:23

It was a table under the easy up. It was a table under the easy up. I felt like a hot hound dog.

SPEAKER_06 51:29

I was like, he lost a he looked like a polar bear on a foreign exchange program Caribbean. He fucking couldn't have been more miserable. And he's laying under a fucking picnic table, and it might have been three, four in the afternoon. And to say we've been drinking since nine is kind of an understatement. We're the night before.

SPEAKER_02 51:53

Yeah, brush your teeth with a beer and stuff like that.

SPEAKER_00 51:55

We're brushing our teeth with a beer bar on the best. And this guy came up and told Dustin. The story was, you know, I get up, we have a whole group of people in our spot, I see the guy pull up in the exact same scooter, he hops off looking all excited, so I'm like, haha, that dude's gonna buy it. And I get myself, I tell Phil, I'm like, hey dude, I'm gonna go sell your scooter. So Phil took that as code as like, Dustin's gotta go take a shit.

SPEAKER_06 52:18

Right, Dustin's gotta go take a shit. Because that was the thing. You leave the booth and the bike had this price all over it, so you would meet more people going to take a shit on a running bike because they'd see you riding by and they knew the thing ran because you're using it to go poop on. Yeah. And so he's like, I'm gonna sell your scooter. I'm like, No, he's gonna take a shit. So I walk up to the guy and I'm like, hey. So I make another fucking dark and stormy.

SPEAKER_00 52:39

Yeah, no. So he's just sitting there talking with everyone drinking, whatever. I walk up to the guy and I'm like, hey, how you doing? He says, like, yeah. So uh does 650 still stand? It's good? I'm like, yeah. He goes, Okay, I gotta go get some money. And I turn around and walk back to Phil. I'm like, sold your scooter. He's like, Thought you were taking a shit. I'm like, no, I told you I was selling your scooter. He's like, What? 15 minutes later, the guy comes back with 650 cash.

SPEAKER_06 53:06

That was our fucking go away price. That was our we are never gonna walk to the bathroom price. Was that an X caliber or what? It was some worsh shit Chinali. I don't know what it was. Yeah, it was some horseshit Chinese thing. It didn't cost the guy who sold it $650. Right. It wasn't that much retail. Did we have a roll cage? No, no, no.

SPEAKER_00 53:26

That was like our big sale that year. Yeah. And you selling my uh XS 650 while I was sleeping.

SPEAKER_06 53:31

Right, you were asleep and I sold his bike at 4 and I was like, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 53:36

Wake up! Why? I need the title. Why? I'm like, for what? He's like, I sold your bike. Oh fuck, how much? He's like, 900. I'm like, awesome.

SPEAKER_06 53:46

I would have taken four. He's like, I would have taken four.

SPEAKER_00 53:51

I get up a little groggy after like 18 fucking hundred beers and a nap. I'm like, uh, here's your money, here's your money.

SPEAKER_06 53:58

He got up for that. Yeah. It was fucking. But realistically, those are the only things we sold, and we were there for fucking four days. Worked our tail off getting in, got rained on twice. Big old mud pit. Everything we owned got dirty. Oh, that was a bitch. And so the long and short of it is, you might have made okay, you might have made a hundred bucks the whole weekend. You spent six hundred. You spent six hundred doing it. Your beer and ice budget in those stupid Domino's pizzas.

SPEAKER_01 54:24

Yeah. You know. Oh, those things suck. And then paying five bucks to take a shit or a shower.

SPEAKER_06 54:28

Right, exactly. Realistically, you know, it ain't worth going. So if you don't ask why we're not gonna be at Mid Ohio this year, I think we just laid it out pretty nicely. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 54:35

How about $70 parts line bread at once?

SPEAKER_06 54:39

Uh there was one time many, many years ago, when Paul and I decided we were gonna go to a swap meet in Portland, Indiana. And Paul lives in Pittsburgh. So we had this big conversation about how we're gonna last minute just jump in the fucking van and go all ass to Portland, Indiana, but Paul's gotta get to my house first from Pittsburgh.

SPEAKER_03 54:54

All you gotta do is get to Cleveland.

SPEAKER_06 54:55

All you gotta do is Cleveland Paul, once you get to Cleveland, I got you covered. Easier said than done when you're Paul at the time had a Ford Station Wagon.

SPEAKER_01 55:03

Bro. Enough said.

SPEAKER_06 55:04

Okay. It was like the little baby LTD once, right? And so Paul's like, I'll be at your house at 9 o'clock in the morning, or 8 o'clock, it was fucking early. And he's like, I'll be at your house at 8 o'clock in the morning and we're gonna roll out. That means he's showing up at 6. Okay. No. I got my coffee going, the van is ready to go, we got the bikes we're taking in the van, everything's pimped out, ready to go, and I'm like, motherfucker said he's gonna be here at 80. It's 8.20, where the fuck is he? Well, at 8.21, I hear the motherfucker pulls in my driveway on a performer, a white performer with a windshield as tall as a house on the front of it, and he's got a big shit shitty and grin on his face. And I'm like, what the when did this turn into a when did this turn into I'm riding a scooter from Pittsburgh to Cleveland?

SPEAKER_01 56:00

Is it when my port broke down in it?

SPEAKER_06 56:01

And he's like, well my my pickup truck or my my wagon wouldn't start and I was like, so how did you how I rode the turnpike? Like you rode the fucking turnpike from 200 on a fucking 200cc vintage scooter? Yeah, wide open, wide open! No helping, no doubt. Wide open from Pittsburgh to Cleveland on a fucking turnpike. I can only imagine what the truckers were saying. Yeah. You know, oh shit. With the windshield. We're gonna suck him in. Yeah, you know, clearly the shortcut. Yeah. Fucking shows up, and I was like, well, if that fucking don't beat all. So yeah, we loaded up, we went out, and uh, we went for the the swap meetings, all old men and cushions and shit. And we went and we swapped her out, and I was like, I wasn't having a real good time, I wasn't making any real action happen. You couldn't hit it. Raise it up. Raise it up, open the gas. We're almost done. We're in here smoking. This won't last long. We're at the end here. Renee knows it'll be over before she knows it. Uh but Paul comes walking down a fucking aisle with a sewing machine. Now we're at a motorcycle swap meet. And Paul walks down the aisle excited as fuck with I think an iron and a sewing machine.

SPEAKER_07 57:17

Look at that. But he's fucking totally excited.

SPEAKER_06 57:20

Look at this! Look at this. It was a fan. It was a fan. Yeah. 15 bucks. Look at this. And he's the proud papa, like he fucking won. And meanwhile, we couldn't get play on nothing. Right? We couldn't, we were trying to haggle with people, we're trying to make some shit happen. You had a prima at the time you were trying to find a seat for. Anything, something. Anything for a prima, an NSU prima. He's walking around, he would smell somebody that saw a prima once. And wander into their booth and be like, hey, hey, I see that horn you got there. That's from a prima. You got a seat for one of those? Where's the seat? And meanwhile, the seat on this thing was literally a piece of rotten springs with a piece of white rubber stretched over it, and it was like a catcher's mitt for your ass. And there were two of them. Stupid ass on the scooters. And Paul's just bothering everybody who never knew, and he was like, it's not a prima, just a prima. It's a prima D. It's a prima d'habitation, just a prima. It's a prima D. Prima donna. Prima D. And I know that when we left there, when I saw Paul's face with that fucking fan, and you were so happy, I was like, we need to go away now. This is it. Paul just got the big score that fucking swapped me. We have heard every story from every Cushman asshole.

SPEAKER_03 58:42

Cushman's huh?

SPEAKER_06 58:43

And we brought like two Vespas to sell. We had bikes to sell. We had beautiful looking bikes that we could sell, and nobody. That was the opposite of Mid Ohio. That was like we had like $2,200 on these perfect 800 mile scooters. Yeah. And people are like, give you $400 for it.

SPEAKER_01 58:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 58:58

And we're like, oh Jesus Christ. And at that point, I was just like, let's just fucking ride these things around and see what we can fall into. And and yeah, he was the big fucking winner that day, man. Wrote his fucking Lambread all the way from Pittsburgh and bought $15. $15 goddamn fan. How'd you give the bank to Pittsburgh? Bag of the scooter? Oh, you believe? You drove him back? Well, well, no, no, no, no, no. We eventually worked it out. But that van later got traded to you for a gun. That's right.

SPEAKER_03 59:25

I took your van home.

SPEAKER_06 59:26

Right. Because you took my van home because we traded your six sour. And I had your registration for a year. For my how long can you hold a title with no water? Apparently a year. Aerovan? Yeah, my blue Aerostar. How many rallies do we go to in that fucking thing?

SPEAKER_07 59:44

I slept in that.

SPEAKER_06 59:44

Yeah, we're good. I slept in that van. Paul leaves my house with his scooter in the back of my van, and I have a pistol.

SPEAKER_01 59:54

And I got a fan. And he got a fan. And a sewing machine. Many vans is a few.

SPEAKER_06 59:59

Was it a sewing machine or was it just a fan? Phil should have t-shirts that say blender or something.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:03

I slept in Phil's van and all I got was this shitty t-shirt.

SPEAKER_06 1:00:07

Yeah, so he got those. Yeah, he got a fucking uh Aerostar van three Aerostar vans. Right. Yeah. A nice safe ride home. And then years later, at a scooter rally, Paul shows up in my Aerostar van and he goes, you know? It's gonna be the last rally for that van. And we need to make it look tough. And anybody who's ever seen the Paul Newman movie Slapshot knows that they made the van, the truck or the bus look tough by attacking it with pocky sticks and beating the shit out of it. Well, it was a peanut butter and chocolate Reese's moment. Because we were at this scooter rally, Chain of Fools rally in Virginia, out in the middle of the sticks. You got my van? And Paul got your gun. He was like, I believe my peanut butter's in your chocolate. And I was like, well, if you have my van and I have your gun, we want to make your van look tougher. Nothing looks tougher than a bunch of bullet holes in the side of your van. Just don't hit the windows. And it was the two rules were don't hit the windows, don't hit the air conditioning compressor. So we're like systematically looking at this van, and we're like, I think right there would look beautiful. And you're like, did it come out the other side? Yep. Good. Because I mean, I was carrying, so the only thing I had was like hydro shocks. Like you're not gonna carry like plinking rounds. So they were making nice holes.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:29

So that's how we find out the back door was made out of fiberglass.

SPEAKER_06 1:01:32

Right, we didn't know the back door of a Ford Aerostar was made of fiberglass. It will stop a bullet. Really? Really? Yeah, it's that thick of fiberglass. Wow. It'll stop. Was that 40 caliber? Yeah. That was a 40 caliber. Or was that 10 millimeters? Sig. 40 cal.

SPEAKER_07 1:01:45

40.

SPEAKER_06 1:01:45

40 cal sig. It'll stop a goddamn 40 caliber. The back door. So if you're ever in a gunfight and you see a Ford Aerostar, get in front of it. Get in the back. Get in the back. 40 cal can't get through there. But yeah, we shot the shit out of it, and then I shot a combine because it was looking at me funny. That was a black combine. There was a whole rust and red combine. Come on. But in its defense, we had a 20-minute debate ahead of time about how long the combine had been sitting in this field because the trees were growing up through it. Yet those really big giant rubber combine tires appeared to still be holding air. So the discussion was, is there air in those tires, or is it just the stiffness of the tires holding this combine up? And I said, Well, I believe we have a way we can check. And we were like, okay. And we walked around for a few seconds and thought, is this a good idea? What do you bounce? And we went. So I was like, I'm gonna shoot it at an angle at which if it does bounce, it's going somewhere safe. And three rounds, and the combine all of a sudden got droopy on one side. Started missing the port. A combine that had been there for 20 years that would have been somewhat easy to move, just got a lot harder to move. Yeah. We did nobody any favors. But yeah, that was in the good days when you could just bring guns and shoot vehicles up at rallies. And burn. And burn anything that didn't move.

SPEAKER_05 1:03:05

Putting bullets in anybody's property, no matter what it is, is generally not doing them favors.

SPEAKER_06 1:03:10

And I will refer back to the rule number one of it seemed like a good idea at the time. At the time, it was the best idea we could come up with. Shooting the best, shoot the combine! It was it was just a good thing that I got eight more bullets to blow it. Right, exactly. At one point it came down to a bullet inventory. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:28

Once you start shooting shit, it's hard to do that.

SPEAKER_06 1:03:31

No. Yeah, it was very good. Well, alright, with that, we're gonna wrap up another uh fun filled adventure hour of the Cleveland Moto podcast. Thanks to everybody here, and uh and remembered drive fast and take chances.