Thanks but I'm staying totally out of what he buys.  I've said my piece.  He has his heart set on a sport bike.  He is temporarily out of cash since he bought a 96? Camaro last week.  He has a good job where he works about 30 hours a week.  He is a senior in high school - goes to a joint vocational school.  Works as a machine maintenance/repair intern at a precision aluminum factory that makes cast aluminum parts for Honda.  Blocks, pistons, and a bunch of other castings.  Great pay for a high school kid and when he graduates he'll make really good pay and superb benefits for the area just to start.  I'll mention that SV650 to him.  Sounds like a great bike.  I'm too large and beat up for a bike that size.  A CB1100 a couple of years ago convinced me of that.

It’s not lost on me that a lot of classic 2 strokes are now EPA exempt now…. I was looking at Raresportbikesforsale.com a few weeks ago looking at a last generation RGV-250SP and daydreaming about it. It was stock with the dry clutch that the SP’s came with, really nice condition, but it was a Rider and the guy wanted $16k. It ended up selling for $10k, but even at that price I would need to spend a lot freshening it up and re-springing it for a corn-fed American…. Then I’d have a bike that was restricted in the ECU that would need pipes and a chip that is probably as rare as rocking horse poop to get fuil power out if it.

Maybe the smell would be worth it…..

YOU DO, LoL!

I had one and lost it in my fire-it really does smell like a 1970’s Formula 1 grid….

You like my windshield?

The one on the BMW? My wife loves it, I hate it because the freeway buffeting is something fierce as I’m taller than her.  After years of riding sport bikes with windscreens so low they might as well not be there 99% of the time, I prefer no windshield at all. Had the same issue with my KLR650 when I put the tall screen on it. Eventually just yanked it off.

CBR 600 f3 Joe camel edition.

Were you on Cycleforums or SBN? Was a member there with pretty much the same screen name.

Car that hit me was in the left lane of a 4 lane decided highway. I was in the right lane left tire track. Car came up from behind and changed lanes right into the front wheel and kept going. All I seen was silver and taillight and the bars ripped out of my hands followed by sailing off the bike on to the highway sliding on my back into the grass. No idea why I didnt see the car in the mirror. Must had got lax (sp?). Aerostich Roadgear suit did its job as did the Shoei and Knox back protector. Just got a bruise from a 55mph get off. Was taking the bike to the dealer in mid march for the g/f. She didnt want to ride it in that temp (45F). SHe seen the whole crash happen from her car behind me. 2 weeks later we had a double fatality hit and run on 2 bikers. All those years saying I'll still be riding even when I need a walker went right out the window then Weird thing is I've known people who died on bikes (more in cars). No idea why the double fatal bothered me that much. Really didnt know them, but they both been in the local sportbike group.

We went back out after we got the bike back from being fixed. Just didnt go riding as much as we did before. Havent had her HD out since 2020. Mainly work reasons now.  

I kept racing bikes. Still road race cars also and probably will keep doing that until I cant pass the medical anymore.

lol. I wanted an SB-8R.


I had a couple of RZ-350’s for awhile. Those were fun.

Never heard of those forums-only bike forums I have ever been on were gixxer.com and Apriliaforum/EBRforum.

I think most people who ride long enough go thru a period where they experience something that scares them or turns them off to the point they take a break or stop riding altogether. In my riding group in the last 2 years, we lost a few guys due to crashes, had a pretty serious injury (Tuono V4 got highsided into next week, broken bones all over-really fucked his hands). Everyone in our group but me seems to have slowed down a notch or two, and a couple gave it up.

Worse than that, we lost a friend to a degenerative nerve condition who used to lead our group-he was 74 and fast as fuck on his Ducati-he used to run an AMA 250GP team and was a brilliant man and the fastest guy I have ever ridden with. He was poetry to watch-like most old men, there was a measured economy of motion in everything he did and even on a bike he seemed unhurried and unflustered. Chad lived life in a way that when he did something, he left nothing on the table and he had a pile of racing injuries to show for it…. When he would pull away from a stop, he would have to reach down and grab his leg to lift it onto the footpeg from a serious crash at Grattan 20 years go… Seeing him die the way he did really hurt because it was an inglorious end to a great man and the old saying about a library burning when an old man dies is really true. But I’m glad he got to Live while he was alive.

Glad to hear you are still racing, I’d take that if I had to-I just can’t imagine my life without a bike in it-even if it’s just my Grom in retirement with ADV tires to get up and down my cabin’s 2 mile long dirt road.

It was my first twin-I was expecting it to be fast in the midrange (it was), but it was also really strong on top-basically like a good 4 cylinder. The thing had massive throttle bodies and weighed a stripper-girlfriend less than the TL1000R donor bike… It was faster from 70-130 than my friend’s Hayabusa, then fell on it’s face a bit like all twins do under tall gearing. It was stable and had good brakes and the suspension was a clear step up on what I had been riding at the time, but I wasn’t sophisticated enough as a rider to adjust it and make it better for me-it felt a little low in the back, probably needed some ride height adjustment in retrospect to sharpen up the steering.

Build quality was stunning for the time and probably still would be. One thing I didn’t like was that it was really sensitive to tire pressures and would develop a hing in the middle of the frame under cornering loads if the tires weren’t writhing about 5psi of where they should have been. I really, really enjoyed riding it. It sounded great too, the sound of the TL cam train, water pump, the induction honk thru those massive intake runners, and let me tell you… the stock cans were made by Arrow even though they look OEM-the Italians apparently never met the EPA because this bike sounded glorious for a stock bike.

Enjoy!

Thank you for that write up.

Used to be a gixxer.com member also. Dont freaking remember my user name. CF (cycleforums) and SBN (Sportbikes.net) were 2 very large forums. CF was a spin off of SBN after SBN's admin went nutso. Both were eventually bought by Verticalscope (as did gixxer.com) and both pretty much died not long after.

Used to be a guy on SBN that was 73 at the time who still did trackdays on a 929. Guy was in Briiish Columbia.

Who was your friend? Knew Rich Oliver, Jason Disalvo, Michael Barnes, Mike Himmelsbach and Chris Ulrich back in the day. Other than Rich, I've been passed, err lapped by the others ones regularly in CCS when we did Road America.

SBN, now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time! I totally forgot about that forum. I was a member there decades ago.

I had a 96. Fuck that 16” front wheel. You could pull the 17 from a 600 and use it but you might have to make spacers.

Great bike otherwise. I put 25k on mine. Added a radar detector and air horns.

add to cart  Thanks, that could save winter.

Chad Hines-he ran a team with his son and another rider who I don’t remember-he might have been South American .  I don’t know a lot about the team’s history - all I know is that Chad figured out how Rich Oliver was making his bikes fast based on something he said about “it being in the transfer ports” on the TZ’s. His son broke his back on a 749 towards the end and Chad himself got broken up on a TZR250 at a club race at Grattan that pretty much ended racing for him. I was a fan of the racing at the time and would go watch at Mid Ohio but these guys would have Ben toward the back of the pack from what it sounds as funding just wasn’t there.

Yeah-vertical scope is a shit company. They are owned by a Canadian tech billionaire who kicks non-left wing voices off of their websites and then you are shut out from all VS owned websites. I’m one of them.