Round·up

ROUND·UP

MORE TIME FOR LESS SOUND

Rare good news, at least for California motorcyclists. Due in no small part to persuasive efforts by the Motorcycle Industry Council, the California state legislature has approved a less stringent noise control law, and extended the time given the factories to meet the new limit.

In detail, on-highway motorcycles have until 1981 to conform to an 81-decibel maximum under the standard state noise test: wide open, second gear, 25 feet from the sound meter.

This is good news all the way around. The previous law set a 75-decibel maximum and was virtually impossible for any biker to meet. (While the comparison is inexact, 75 decibels is the noise level inside a new Volvo at 70 mph, that is, not much noise).

The new law is tough. But it can be met. Perhaps as important for the future, the new law comes after an MIC committee spent eight months and $25,000 in research, testing and lobbying for an effective and practical noise law. Political work does pay dividends for motorcyclists and we are learning how to do it.

ERRATA

The letters haven’t begun to arrive yet regarding our “Ten Best Bikes” in the October issue, but we cheerfully expect to hear from readers with remarks along the lines of, “You expected maybe chain snatch from a BMW?,” and “How come the winning Honda had a Yamaha picture and vice versa?”

No excuse, sirs and mesdames. What happened was, we were using a new typesetting system, new and experimental and a long way from the office. There were mistakes. There always are mistakes, but in the normal course of production we have time to find the wrong parts and change them. The new system didn’t allow the chance, alas, and we were most embarrassed.

We are no longer using that system. Does this mean we will never make an-

other mistake? No. We mention this here only because when we make a really bad error, in fact or typography, we’re willing to admit it.

WATCH FOR IT

The chaps at Interpart, home of the Boge/Mulholland suspension kits, shocks and springs, are working on a few more ambitious projects.

One is a replacement Monoshock unit for the Yamaha. More rear wheel travel, they claim, and more easily tuned. The reservoir will be remote, so it can be mounted low on the frame and thus lower the center of gravity.

Interpart is also planning to produce its own aftermarket forks, ready to bolt to popular motocross frames. Offset front axle, flat triple clamps, just like the hot items from overseas, with 35mm tubes and 10, measure them, 10 full inches of travel.

No timetable at this point, but we’ll be doing a full evaluation soon as we can get our hands on the parts.

THE PRICE OF ADMISSION

Two of the staff are just back from a fascinating and unprecedented trip to and through Honda’s Research & Development Co. The complete story will appear next month. (To be fair, might as well say now that we didn’t see anything Honda wasn’t willing to have us see, that is, we won’t get to reveal any secrets.)

One portion of the trip deserves immediate note: Honda’s research shows that the U.S. regulations for noise and emission levels can be met with existing technology and that meeting the rules will not bring more than a token loss in performance and efficiency. Motorcycles won’t go the way of cars, for which we can all give thanks.

Motorcycle noise, says Honda, comes 50 percent from the exhaust, 25 percent from the intake, 15 percent from mechanical engine bits and 10 percent from other sources. The hum of the tires and the whistle of wind through the spokes are pretty hard to reduce, but the other areas can be muffled with larger pipes, air cleaners, thicker engine castings and like that. Mild modifications inside the engine can produce enough added power to make up for the air-flow restrictions.

Honda is meeting the emissions rules essentially through the use of leaner and more precise fuel mixtures. They don’t deny building bikes with catalytic converters and engines using Honda’s own compound combustion chamber, but apparently that’s pure research and no such complications are on order for the immediate future.

Couple points beyond this hard news: Honda engineers and designers are not especially happy about doing this work. In general they like motorcycles and the sport of motorcycling. They are dutiful workers, and when they get an assignment, they carry it out to the best of their considerable ability.

At the same time, they made it perfectly clear that the job of meeting the standards was just that, a job. They have more fun designing sporting roadsters and comfortable tourers and competitive motocross machines.

When you are guests in a country, they said, you pay for your ticket of admission or you go away.

THE THRILL OF DECIBELS

Talk of rules for noise on the highway prompted the reporters on the Honda trip to ask about noise on the track: Can racing bikes be muffled?

Yes and no, said the Honda men. Competition engines can be silenced, and in the large-displacement classes where most bikes have more power than they can use, the quiet engine will perform as well.

But racing may lose something. As an experiment, Honda R&D built a flock of 250 motocross bikes fitted with silencers. They put the test riders on the track and invited the office ladies out for an afternoon at the races.

Most of the ladies went home early. Quiet racing was dull, they said.

KEEP PASSIN’ THROUGH

This is a case of the shoemaker’s children going barefoot.

Many months ago a nice lady from Australia stopped at our office while riding her BMW R60/5 around the world. She had to fly home for a family problem.

Shucks, we said, leave the bike here. We have room and it will be in good hands.

She returned, we rolled the bike out and looked it over. Odd. Where the idle speed and mixture screws used to be, there now were four empty holes.

Could they have fallen out? Not likely. Did she have any disgruntled former gentlemen friends in California? No, she said, I haven't been here long enough for that.

Rats. The only answer was an inside job, i.e., somebody on or close to the staff had needed some idle jets for a Bing carburetor, had noticed the dusty BMW in the corner and had taken advantage of the opportunity.

This sort of behavior isn’t as rare as we'd like to think. In the course of normal testing we frequently replace a lost Suzuki bolt with one from a staff-owned Honda, fixing that bike in turn with a bolt from a test Yamaha and getting that back in operation with a bolt from the parts bin . . . but never before had this happened to a guest.

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As hosts, our obligation was clear. Also time-consuming. Seems idle screws never fall out of BMWs, so neither the nearest BMW dealer nor the farthest within driving distance had the required parts. After a fruitless couple of hours, we fixed the right-hand carb with screws from a 400 Husky, the left-hand carb with new parts from a Maico dealer’s bins. Sure, the tapers were different, but we wizard wrenches got the BMW idling fairly well. Away the lady rode.

Moral? We are better mechanics than we are caretakers.

REMEMBER THE MARUSHO . . .

We received a technical question the other day. Poor fellow. He asked, “Where can I get parts for my Marusho?”

This is not the sort of question that will concern the vast majority of our readers. But it reminded us that the most solid of concepts (Marusho was a fairly good cutrate version of a BMW), can die for lack of an infinite supply of buyers or sufficient diversity of product line.

Into this category of marketing ephemera we also put the moped. The moped! The reader thinks he is now going to get Hard-core Motobook Lecture 2A on the sins of mopeds and how rotten they handle, how their riders alternately treat them as bicycles and then when the light changes go plunging into the traffic stream like cars, how they are ridden without helmets, shoes, pants, shirts, bras or any other form of riding prophylaxis.

You’re going to get nothing of the kind. The moped as a physical concept is kind of neat. It’s cheap to buy, burns little gas, is extremely quiet and is much less noxious to the sensitivity than is the fan belt of the average Plymouth sedan. The moped is useful, even if it ain’t real motorcycling.

So the moped is selling like gangbusters. It is filling a marketing vacuum, one similar to that filled by the Honda stepthrough back in the early ’60s. For, in spite of millions of dollars that have been poured into TV Nice Guy advertising, there are still mommies and college ladies who find motorcycles nasty. There are still barefoot boys with men’s desires who find motorcycles and the current crop of cars too damned expensive.

Due to corporate sense of responsibility, the major motorcycle manufacturers have been curiously non-aggressive in this submarket—selling mainly a high-quality machine with little attempt to skimp on features and cut price. This has left the market open to a plethora of imports from the Orient and Europe. Names we don't usually see over here.

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Legions of shops specializing in these sterile, two-wheeled appliances for reaching school, beach, girlfriend’s house and supermarket in quiet, legs-up, knees-together style are sprouting in the lively parts of town. Twenty by twelve display rooms and an adding machine in the back. Small business at its quickest, the individual entrepreneur at his sharpest, quick to realize the need—somehow forgotten by the now established companies—for cheap transport.

This isn’t the time or place to fret over the laws and attitudes encouraging seekers of basic transportation to choose a pseudo bicycle rather than a small motorcycle. Our main concern is not the lack of discipline possessed by the average moped rider, nor is it the danger posed in matching the moped to the stream of more powerful traffic.

Our bit of sadness comes from knowing that a lot of people will shortly be left holding the bag. When the moped bubble breaks—and it will, sure as you can get such a deal on hoola-hoops and fallout shelters—many of these little moped shops and distributors will have no second act. They will have no system of better models with which to upgrade the first-time buyer. Having no reason to stay in business, they will exercise their freedom to close their doors.

And that will leave the folks who are still around—the motorcycle magazines, and companies like Honda, Harley, Yamaha, Suzuki, Kawasaki, BMW et al.—to answer the questions about where to get parts for a two-year old moped they didn't make.®