The Gold Wing From Red Wing

The Gold Wing from Red Wing

LEANINGS

Peter Egan

AS A SCOUTING PARTY FOR NEW MOtorcycle acquisitions, we were an unlikely team. I was behind the wheel of a Ford Explorer, following a faded yellow 1969 MGB down Minnesota's portion of Highway 61, the famous Mississippi River Road. The old MGB had just been purchased near St. Paul by my friend Chris Beebe, and I was tagging along, just to make sure he got home okay. The issue was in doubt. Despite the best efforts of STP, the MG had a light rod knock, low oil pressure and smoked only a little less than the Battle of Gettysburg. We had about 200 miles to go.

So there we were, cruising smokily along the picturesque left bank of the Big Muddy just south of Red Wing when we slowed for the village of Frontenac. At the edge of town was a big Honda shop with a Moto Guzzi sign over the door, so we naturally pulled over.

The shop had many new Hondas and a couple of new Guzzis, well out of our bottom-feeding price range, as well as an old Harley Sportster parked over an oil slick of Exxon Valdez proportions, and a pair of early Gold Wings, 1976 vintage. Both Wings had Vetter Windjammer fairings with radios and were virtually encrusted in rusty old chrome accessories—case guards, highway pegs, saddlebags, saddlebag guards, luggage racks, backrests, whip antenna mounts, trailer hitches, etc.

We wandered around the shop a while, looking at jackets and helmets, but inexplicably gravitated back to those two Gold Wings, perhaps drawn by their slightly down-in-themouth aura of purchasability. Chris stood back looking at the two bikes, one yellow and one red, and said. “You know these early Gold Wings were actually a fairly clean and handsome design. There’s a nice, standardlooking motorcycle under all that stuff.’’

I fixed my attention on the bikes and nodded. “I remember when they came out; fast, heavy, smooth and unbreakable. Low center of gravity. They even handled fairly well. One of the all-time great bikes.”

Just then a salesman approached and asked if he could help.

“How much are you asking for these Gold Wings?”Chris inquired.

“Eight hundred dollars each,” the man said.

Chris looked at me, expressionless. It was the same deadpan look you get from a friend who hasjust been propositioned by an extremely good-looking tall blonde woman at a cocktail party. “That seems reasonable,” Chris said.

“Well, they’ve both got about 40,000 miles on ’em,” the salesman admitted, “and I’d like to get them out of here before winter sets in. Otherwise. they won’t sell until spring. I’ll sell the both of them together for $675 each.”

Chris looked at me again.

“Forget it,” I said “I can’t do it. I just bought a BMW that needs new tires. I’ve got a Norton waiting for a full restoration. You're on your own this time, good buddy.”

Three days later, Chris’s wife Dana drove him back up to Frontenac and he bought the cleanest of the two Gold Wings, the yellow one, for $750. He rode it home on a cold autumn night, stopping at a discount store in LaCrosse to buy two extra sweatshirts, a scarf and some heavy gloves. He got to his farm, half frozen, at 2 in the morning.

The next afternoon he rode over to our house, parked in the driveway and we went to work. I opened the garage door, got out some simple hand tools and we began to remove the accumulation of scabby old chrome hardware. We left the likenew Windjammer III fairing on the bike, but removed the heavy lump of radio and speakers, fiberglass saddlebags, case guards, luggage racks and so on. I brought out the bathroom scale and found we had removed 70 pounds of metal and plastic.

There are few things in life this side of the law more satisfying than subtracting weight—and someone else’s faded idea of custom beauty— from a motorcycle. We piled the old parts in one corner of the driveway and set down on lawn chairs to look at the reborn Wing. A good old noble beast of a motorcycle, a technological tour de force of its era, a bike capable of touring around the world with two people and all kinds of luggage, a genuine heavy-duty superbike with that classical Seventies clipper ship of a fairing, the Vetter Windjammer. All for a mere $750. Amazing.

There's no such thing as a nearly free lunch, of course. There was an exhaust leak in the massive, slightly rusty muffler unit; the rear tire was about 75 percent gone; the aftermarket seat was ugly and torn. By the end of the week, however. Chris had located a good used exhaust system and stock seat at a wrecking yard for $75 and installed a new rear tire for $ 1 20. He now has a $945 Gold Wing.

Yesterday, I took the bike out and rode it around the countryside for about half an hour. After all these years, the old original Wing is still a remarkable machine. It has amazing smoothness and power, runs with nearly electrical silence, handles far better than it has any right to, and it’s so comfortable your mind is free to contemplate the passing world, rather than dwell on numbness of the seat and wrist.

The best thing about Chris’s Gold Wing, however, is that it is neither new nor highly collectible, so it appears to have neatly side-stepped every sort of mania; it lives in that rare pocket of economic calm where some machines are temporarily sheltered from the inflationary forces of lust and envy.

Strip those away, like 70 pounds of rusted accessories, and what you have left is a very good $945 touring bike that goes 120 mph. And needs new saddlebags. ES