Motorcycles

Okay, since no one asked, today I’m going to write about motorcycles. This is a blog, after all, so I don’t always have to write book reviews.

The first bike I ever owned was a 1978 Honda CB 750F. I was twenty-two years old, sharing a car with my brother, and traveling around Washington, DC mostly by bicycle. I wanted a cheap way of getting around when I didn’t have the car. My friend told me he knew someone who was selling this bike for nine hundred dollars. “That’s a good deal,” he said. So I bought it.

If I had known the CB 750F was not a beginner bike, I would have been intimidated. It was a very fast four-cylinder machine weighing somewhere north of five hundred and twenty pounds. I learned pretty quickly not to open up the throttle in the city. You needed plenty of road if you wanted to wring that one out.

I also learned it was a hard bike to pick up. The first time I dropped it was in a parking lot when I forgot to put the kickstand down while parking it. Doh! The second time, a guy stopped short in front of me on Fifteenth Street next to the US Treasury. I hit the breaks and slid across a twenty-foot oil slick right into the back of his car. The driver got out and wanted to beat me up. The third drop came when I hit a patch of gravel in a tight turn.

The bike met an early death at just over twenty-thousand miles when a fully loaded cement truck ran over it. The bike was parked at the time. The cement truck was backing up and the driver couldn’t see it.

Aside from a couple of fifty-cc scooters, I didn’t get another real bike for another thirty-plus years. In 2023, I bought a 2013 BMW F800 GT. I can say that on pretty much every level that was the best built and best handling bike I ever owned. The previous owner had fitted it with a set of high performance tires, and the BMW handled like a sport bike. I especially liked riding it on the winding country roads.

A few things about the bike annoyed me. I’ve never liked bikes with fairings because the fairing feels like a lot of extra crap between me and the bike, me and the road. I really prefer a naked bike. I don’t even use a windscreen because the summers in Virginia are so hot that I like having the wind on me.

The fairing on the F800 was particularly annoying because any time I wanted to work on the bike, I’d have to spend forty minutes taking the thing off and forty minutes putting it back on.

The F800 GT also has a problem with aftermarket windscreens. Any windscreen wider than stock creates a low pressure bubble that causes hot air to be sucked out of the vents on the sides of the bike. This blasts hot air onto the rider’s thighs. And when I say hot, I mean burning hot. With an aftermarket windscreen, the bike was unridable in summer. In winter, I could ride in jeans sub-freezing weather and my legs would still be soaked in sweat.

My biggest problem with the BMW was that it was too hard for me to work on. The bike is much more complex than most Japanese bikes, and more complex than BMW’s more serviceable boxers. Just getting to the engine can be an ordeal. Some work requires special tools you can only buy from BMW. Parts are insanely expensive.

We have an excellent BMW mechanic here in town. Because he’s good, he is always busy. If you want something fixed, you’ll have to wait, or drive to a dealer ninety minutes away. And whatever you want done on that bike, it will cost you.

I decided I didn’t want to sign up for long-term maintenance on that bike, so I got rid of it. I had also noticed that, as much as I liked riding the BMW, when I had more than one bike to choose from, I usually didn’t choose the beemer. It’s a great bike for highway riding, but mostly, I wasn’t riding on the highway.

When given a choice, I often chose my other bike, a 2015 Honda CRF 250L. This bike is incredibly fun to ride, and it will go anywhere. I liked to take it out to the dirt and gravel roads near the Blue Ridge mountains and tool around in the woods where there was no traffic.

The previous owner had raised the handlebars and added a jetting kit and an FMF exhaust. The bar riser made the bike nice and tall, which suited me well. It was a much more comfortable ride than the BMW, which seems to have been built for shorter riders. The jetting kit made the Honda surprisingly fast for a 250, but the exhaust was so loud, I got rid of it and went back to stock. The FMF was so loud it scared the horses out in the pastures. I don’t know why anyone rides with an exhaust that makes that much noise.

One day, my wife told me her friend was trying to sell her late husband’s Suzuki. She said it was a beautiful bike, so I went to take a look. Turns out, the 2014 Suzuki Boulevard C50 BOSS is indeed a beautiful bike. I bought it and kept it for a few months.

I had never understood the appeal of cruisers. They’re giant, heavy bikes that are hard to maneuver at low speeds and they don’t handle well. They can be quite comfortable, and they are very easy to manage at highway speeds. With its windscreen and bags, the Suzuki probably weighed around six hundred and fifty pounds. Like most V-twins, it vibrated a lot.

Both the BMW and the Boulevard were highway bikes but the felt very different on the highway. The BMW was very nimble and responsive. Any touch to the throttle, brake or handlebars registered instantly. The bike was built to glide through turns at high speed, and it was ready to turn at any moment.

That may sound weird, but the Boulevard, by contrast, was built to go in a straight line, and that’s all it would do until instructed otherwise. Twist the throttle and it would mosey on up to speed. Start a turn, and the bike would eventually stray from its straight line.

You have to manage the BMW much more carefully than the Boulevard. It’s a bike for riders who like to be actively engaged at all times. The Boulevard, on the other hand, requires little management. You just sit back and enjoy the scenery as you buzz along on the motorcycle version of a 1972 Lincoln Continental. I understood the cruiser’s appeal, but it just wasn’t my kind of riding.

Both the Boulevard and the BMW were too big for the kind of riding I like to do, so I traded them. In return, I got a 2024 Triumph Scrambler 400X and a 2025 Suzuki DR 650.

I had long wondered why so many people get rid of motorcycles after only a few thousand miles. Some of them do it because they find they don’t like riding, or they’re scared of traffic. Others do it because they just haven’t found the right bike. Sometimes, a bike just doesn’t fit your body, especially if you’re significantly taller or shorter than average.

After a few years of riding, I discovered what I liked. First off, lighter bikes. The BMW, the CB 750F and the Boulevard were all too heavy. They all work well on the highway, but I don’t ride on the highway much. At lower speeds, a lighter bike is much easier to handle.

I found I prefer a go-anywhere bike to a dedicated street machine. I do a lot of exploring around the Blue Ridge, including many unpaved roads. Both the DR 650 and the Triumph handle that kind of riding well. The Triumph is better on pavement, the DR off-road.

I prefer stripped-down bikes with no fairing and no clutter between me and the road. I also vastly prefer simple machines. I’ve spent the past twenty-six years as a software engineer building and maintaining complex, distributed computer systems. I’ve grown to hate complexity. It’s common in my line of work to have to change two or three lines of code to fix a bug. While the fix itself may take only ten minutes, in complex systems you may spend eight or ten hours trying to figure out which two lines of code need to be fixed, followed by two or three days testing how your fix affects the thirty other modules, components and external systems that interact with your software.

I really don’t want to have to deal with that kind of complexity on a motorcycle. The Honda CRF 250 was dead simple to work on. The BMW was an engineering marvel and a mechanic’s nightmare. (That’s not true of BMW’s boxer models, and it’s less true of the other F-series bikes that have exposed engines, but doing anything on the F 800 GT just felt painful.)

So I got rid of three old bikes and picked up two newer ones.

The Triumph is a relatively simple machine with long maintenance intervals and an easily accessible engine. It’s shockingly well built for its modest price. It’s quick, nimble, and much smoother than you would expect from a thumper. It does well enough on dirt and gravel, and surprisingly well on the highway, if you have to go there. It’s also good for tall riders, even though you wouldn’t know that by looking at it.

The DR 650 is about as simple as a bike can get. If you want to hack on it, it was built for that. That bike will truly go anywhere. I was looking for a bike like the CRF 250L, but with a stronger engine, because I do occasionally hit stretches of highway on my rides along the Blue Ridge, and the Honda’s 250 cc engine struggles with that kind of speed. The DR handles it all with ease.

Getting Into Motorcycling?

If you’re looking to get into motorcycling, the bikes I recommend most highly for beginners are the Honda CRF 250L and its successor, the Honda CRF 300L. These are excellent all-around machines, highly reliable and easy to maintain. Unlike some other small bikes that you might outgrow, these never get boring. They’ll go anywhere, so you can get an idea of what kind of riding you prefer: winding country roads, dirt, gravel, trails? These bikes, with their long-travel suspension, will eat up city potholes. The only things they’re not good at are freeways and two-up riding.

If you’re going to be commuting and doing a lot of riding under sixty miles an hour, the Triumph 400s are a great place to start. They’re easy to handle and they get great mileage.

If you want an all-rounder with little more power, check out the Honda SCL 500. In fact, just about any bike from Honda will ride well and run reliably at low cost.

If you’re under six feet and you want to start with an easy-to-handle cruiser, check out the Kawasaki Eliminator. It’s a stable, well-balanced bike that’s easy to handle. It’s also surprisingly quiet.

If you’re just tooling around town and maybe hitting a few dirt roads now and then, check out the dead-simple, reliable, easy-to-ride Honda Trail 125. This is a mini go-anywhere bike that gets over 130 MPG. It has four gears and no clutch lever. Just shift and go. It might hit fifty miles per hour with a lighter rider, but it does best at 40 MPH and under. It also has a huge rack for carrying cargo. My wife rides one of these, and I do too sometimes. It’s surprisingly fun. It also comes with some nice, practical extras, including a center stand and a kick starter.

If you’re looking at long-haul highway riding, I can’t help you there. That’s not my thing.

In general, you should look for used bikes. Many people sell well maintained bikes with only a few thousand miles on them. While dealers charge hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars in fees, private sellers do not. Dealer fees on a $6000 motorcycle may bring the out-the-door price up to $7200. Meanwhile, you may find the same bike, lightly used, for $4000, with no additional fees.

If you’re shopping, the best places to look are Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace. CycleTrader is a good place to do price research, because it makes it easy to access nationwide listings. Facebook Marketplace seems to have the best prices overall, but it also seems to have more neglected bikes. When buying a used bike, be sure to check its condition carefully.