Robin: Hey man, damn good to see you. Damn good to see you too. In this episode, valves, GPS units, and the legends, plural, of Bessie Stringfield. Well pronounced. Annunciated. Brian, did you ride today?

Brian: Oh, you would ask. No, I did not. I basically had to haul some cargo today, so I had to use the van, so that's my excuse. I did do a little motorcycle work today, so I touched a motorcycle today. Is that enough? Well, what else have they got on? What's good? So a few weeks ago, I went down to the Triumph dealer after getting an email from them. They've been begging me to buy a bike forever. I went down to the Triumph dealer for a test ride of the Scrambler models. There was one event where I test rode almost everything they make, except dedicated sport bikes, because my knees don't work that way. Sure. That was fantastic.

Robin: The Triumph Demo Ride Report, which was before the Scrambler event, you just went in and rode like the Tiger Sport 800 and 600 and all that stuff. That's a good article. If you go to tr.bike and look up Triumph Demo Ride, that's got ringers, grubby fingers all over it.

Brian: Yeah, they had another event for just the Scrambler models. This one wasn't as big. I got to ride one bike, and then there were way too many people for the number of bikes available, and they seemed to go out for quite a while. So I stood around for about an hour, and then I left. So I went to another motorcycle dealer to pick up some sealant I needed, and then on the way back from that, I passed by an Indian dealer, and they had, hey, Indian demo rides today. So I'm like, well, okay, I'll ride anything once. You just fell out of the sky like, and now we're going to talk about this. Nice. Yeah, so it's kind of fun. The FTR, they don't make that anymore, so you couldn't ride that, you know, because nobody bought it. Basically, all of them were like these gigantic cruisers. I'm not into the cruiser thing whatsoever. I'm not into like my butt on the ground and my armpits in the wind and not into that at all, but Indian does make some really amazing engines. They're very well-made motorcycles for what they are. They're still cruisers, very limited ground clearance. I kept banging in the floorboards and in the roundabouts. The way they did this test ride was a little different. They basically led you on the test ride, so people would mill around, and then this one guy would just sort of say, okay, let's go, and then, or he wouldn't even say that. He'd just get on one of the bikes in the front, and off we'd go, whoever was there. So nicely unorganized. I like that. You just pick out a bike, put your helmet near it, on it, and wait, and off you go. Just a quick loop, 10 minutes out, you know, something like that. Kind of fun.

Robin: The industry seems to eyeball one another when these things are happening, because I remember doing this with Can-Am, and then Suzuki was like, hey, we should do something like that, and they did something that was nothing like that, but it was close enough for rock and roll. Triumph is like, hey, we should do something like that, and Indian's like, hey, the domino effect of take a little ride.

Brian: Yeah, and I think, you know, demo rides and the events with the trucks, I mean, they're fantastic ways to find your audience, and again, you know, I've ridden Harleys. I think Indians really hold up well, and just those little things, the control feel, what you see from the cockpit, all that kind of stuff, the way the computer systems work and everything, I mean, it's very high-quality stuff. Like, again, I'm not into the whole butt-dragging cruiser thing whatsoever. They don't handle right, but that's just fundamentally, but if you like that sort of thing, hey, check it out. It was fun. Really love for a Yamaha or Suzuki or Honda Kawasaki. I really love for them to put together some demo rides around Indianapolis. I mean, there's a lot of riders around here. You know, come on, people. Speaking of gigantic cruisers, I don't understand. There's a friend of mine, like we know each other through vintage Suzuki's, and somehow he ended up buying this. It's a C90. It's a Suzuki Boulevard C90, and so it's the 1500cc. It's a gigantic cruiser. I mean, I don't know what this thing weighs. It's got to be pushing 800 pounds. It's wide. It's long. V-twin? Yeah.

Robin: Okay.

Brian: Gigantic thing. He brought it here, and I'm doing some work on it for him. New tires. Like, the front tire is a 150-70-16. It's like this gigantic balloon tires on either end. The tires are like the heaviest motorcycle tires I've ever seen because the bike weighs so much. It's got these huge disc wheels. I haven't taken them off yet, but that's going to be interesting. Like, to put oil in the engine, you have to remove a cover on the right side because they have a cover on it that's chrome and made to look like a Harley transmission something. I don't know what it is. The tank you see, the tank is actually under the seat.

Robin: Why are we even talking about this? Go on. Yeah.

Brian: So, the tank you see is like these two little thin covers on either side, and there's an air box under there and a bunch of electronics, and it's fuel-injected. Anyway, every damn thing on this bike is weird, and you have to take something apart to get to, like, normal stuff. Getting the rear wheel off is going to be a nightmare.

Robin: You want to put air in the tires? Oh, that's under the battery. You got to pull the battery out. Yeah, no, that makes Interesting, though.

Brian: Again, it's a great engine, but, man, it's really weighed down.

Robin: Well, is this one of those things where it just gives you a chance to turn the wrench and kind of hang out, or you're just helping out a buddy or something like that?

Brian: Yeah, yeah, kind of. Turn a wrench, some of it, I'm just going to be doing it and, you know, making a little bit of money for my own tires.

Robin: Ah, yes. Yes, which we should talk about when we get to the valve points, because I charitably gave you nothing for your constant assistance.

Brian: I would accept nothing. Your money's no good here. How did the Kentucky ride go? Kentucky was amazing. We had perfect weather, and we chose a perfect weekend because this weekend coming up would be kind of sketchy weather. So, yeah, perfect weather, like, high of, like, 65, 68 degrees, cool mornings. One of the things you really have to work around in October in Indiana and Kentucky is the shorter days. Oh, yeah. The sun is so low that you can't really leave until nine o'clock or so, but kind of shorten the routes a little bit, so we would be able to leave at nine, have a good day, take lots of breaks, and then be back by around five o'clock, because it's still light after five o'clock, but the sun's getting really low, and you start to see more and more deer, and we saw sheep. That mood lighting for the deer love. It's in your eyes and so forth. You get back a little early, and it was really ideal. We take the breaks, have fun, kind of relax, chill, last big ride of the season. I really stay out of the countryside from mid-October through December, really, just during deer season.

Robin: The mosh pit of venison. It's such a big populace of deer there. I can't blame you, especially if you got scar tissue from it. If they are the enemy, when you know it's time, let's just not.

Brian: I'll ride around in town, go run errands and stuff like that. The weather in Central Southern Indiana is a little weird, because we do get some riding days in December, January, February, once in a while. I usually don't have to put stable in my bikes. I'm usually on them at least every once every few weeks.

Robin: You said you have, what, maybe a half month of cold that is virtually unrideable, but then after that, it's pretty good?

Brian: Usually around February. It's not bad. One of the things, we stopped to take a break, and there's a tobacco barn across the road. Oh, nice. So one of the guys goes over there to take a picture of it, and he discovers that it's actually full of pot. Of marijuana. Mary Jane. The devil's lettuce. Satan's cabbage. We actually pass several fields of weed in Kentucky. It's legal-ish in several states, and it's got to come from somewhere. That's where it comes from.

Robin: In our riding circle, some people partake, others don't. With decriminalization, the world's become a lot more mellow, I will say. Yeah.

Brian: That's a sight to be seen. Thousands and thousands of pounds of pot hanging in this barn to dry. Yeah. Previous felony status. Just captured their imagination. We pass several fields of marijuana, and nobody but me noticed. They're like, oh, I was looking at the road. I didn't see anything around me. Well, yeah, geez.

Robin: You're allowed to look around. We've got to talk about that at some point. The pleasure of your destination where you're going to be when you're doing your riding, being able to embrace that environment versus focusing on the road.

Brian: Eastern Kentucky is absolutely gorgeous, and you should look around. It's wonderful. Yeah. New Mexico is gorgeous, but nobody go there or anything. Yeah, no, no, no.

Robin: I've landed in New Mexico. We are completely set up. Our footprint is structured. We've got our rig parked next to a paved patio, metal awning, a 12 by 12 shed full of bikes and tools, and this podcast recording, as it were. You were not wrong. I got here, and I immediately was way more relaxed. Much happier. But you don't just ditch stress. Oh, now I am not feeling any of the effects of that stress. No, no, no. The effects of stress, they linger, and so you're left wondering, when is it? Is it over yet? Do I feel good right now? Am I happy? You know that you're in a calm environment where you can kind of chill out and get your act back together, but you look back at two months of constant uncertainty with everything you do. It doesn't just go away. Not immediately, at least.

Brian: Yeah, it takes time for the cortisol to leave your system, the stress chemicals.

Robin: Fight or flight, just too much activity in two months. Way too much, which we'll get to in a second. I will say, I'm sitting next to Maggie's beautiful SV here. It's a lovely machine. Did ride our local route several times. Rode out to Winston. I'm tempted to record a podcast episode with you in Winston at the Winston General Store in Winston, New Mexico, which is an awful place. Nobody should come to New Mexico. It's terrible. Stay away from here. We will take care of these roads for you. Nobody else needs to worry about them.

Brian: I just want to say, maybe we should come up with a slogan for Baymont. Baymont. Hmm, what's that smell? Or Baymont. It'll do. Or try the powdered eggs. I'm not sure. They're adequate and I lived. I don't think I have bedbugs. What else can you ask for? It's funny you say that, Brian. Are you ready for some Lister questions? We need a jingle for Lister questions. Not right now. At some point.

Robin: I already came up with my jingle. You got to come up with your own. We do have one live Lister question. If you'd like us to field your questions, visit email.tro.bike in your web browser and send us a message through the contact form. We always abbreviate sometimes at the request of the listener. S asks, I hope you can help me with tire size. My front tire is 3.25 H18 RB2 and rear 4.10 VB18 tubeless. Don't match any current tire sizes. My bike is a 1970 Honda CB350K. How cool is that? Nice. Do you know someone who could tell me a size that would fit? As it happens? Several people. And it is when I told this listener that I definitely know people that could come up with the right sizes. I mentioned the website. I mentioned our road rubble rankings. If you visit tro.bike, it's under digi tools and the site navigation. I knew that we were going to have an answer for this, but I had never seen those measurements. I knew that they were probably dealing with inches or something. I was like, all right. So I reached out to you and I reached out to our own Jordan Lieberman and you guys both said the same thing. Those dimensions for your tires need to be translated over to the current metric, which in his case, the front is a 90 over 90 18. The rear is a 110 over 90 18. And then I thought to myself, CB350K doesn't really have 18 inch rims. And lo and behold, it do. So yeah, what do you got, Brian?

Brian: What he originally sent was my front tire is 3.25 H18 RB2. So there's a lot of extra extra information in there. I think that was causing a little, when you're dealing with older tire designations, they're either inches or they're numbers. So the number 3.25 or 4.1 or 4.5 or whatever you have is the width of the tire. There's a wheel size in there somewhere. And in his case, it's 18 front and rear. A lot of really old bikes are the same front and rear. They didn't really start diverging until the seventies, later in the seventies. You convert those into millimeters and there are charts you can do this with. My conversion came up with a 100-90-18 in the front and a 110-90-18 in the rear. Some conversions or some people would advise a 90-90-90-18 in the front rather than a hundred size. It's not much of a difference. You Google tire size, motorcycle tire size chart, you will get a chart that will kind of show you how these all line up. There's also an even older system of letters used to designate motorcycle tires. If you Google up a chart, you can find those. MT and so forth. But yeah, once you convert it into modern stuff, then I like to go over to AmericanMototire.com. AmericanMototire.com, not a sponsor. Hey guys. They're kind of the place that has the biggest selection. They're a distributor of everything. And they also have some really good filtering on the left side of their site. All the tires this width and this rim width and this aspect ratio and so forth. And you can filter it down. You can also filter by what's in stock. And then you can narrow down and see which ones are available in both front and rear and then narrow it down from there. Nice. I sent some recommendations. I sent a bunch of links. I sent a bunch of recommendations. Maybe went overboard. I don't know. What it came down to, there are actually several choices. The Shinko 712, I've used those on my vintage bikes and they work great. They're inexpensive. Right now, my vintage Suzuki is wearing Bridgestone BT46. Those are a great tire for vintage bikes. And then there's a Pirelli Sport Demons. Those are good for grip. So if you're on a track or you just want the ultimate.

Robin: I get the feeling that this listener is not concerned about sticky. They're more concerned about maintaining a certain amount of respect for the vintage appeal of the bike. I'm sure what they have on there is a rectangular square-shaped tire with perhaps white walls or something to that effect. Who knows?

Brian: Probably from 1982 or something.

Robin: Yeah. Yeah. Which one is closest to having that vintage feel that's still a good tire?

Brian: Any of these really would be a really good all-rounder if it costs a little more. And also the Dunlop 404, it has that older look. It doesn't have that rib look like they originally came with. You can't really get those anymore. It does look like an older tire if that's important to you. And it works fine. It's not the greatest, but it works fine. But yeah, the BT46 looks good and it should feel better. And the thing is, all these tires are like light years beyond what race tires were in 1971. I mean, it's not going to feel vintage. It's going to feel far, far better than it ever could back then. These are all going to work really well. I also sent some links for tubes. I always get like IRC or Bridgestone tubes because that's what the factories put in them back in the day. And they're still great quality.

Robin: Yeah. Looking for sponsors. I got to work on that a little bit harder and will.

Brian: We got to get better at this sales thing. But yeah, if you sell motorcycle tires and accessories, we want to talk to you. Absolutely. Let's move on. That question was sliced, diced, mashed, and recombined.

Robin: Before we move on, if you'd like us to field your questions again, visit email.tro.bike in your web browser and send us a message through the contact form. Segment one, jigsawed valvery. The Suzuki GSX-8R valve check. Dreaded. Mysterious. Done. There really were a lot of moving pieces to getting it to happen. And we did. Every time I began to fade, Brian was right there helping me get through the process, even clock wise, like just in terms of the timing on the clock, it went so late. You finally figured it out. Yeah. I don't do social cues at the end of it all. If we look at this in retrograde, when the whiskey came out and we were done, you finally just got up and went to bed. You didn't know.

Brian: I leave when it's time to leave.

Robin: No. We have to talk about working with this bike, the intimate experience to work on a GSX-8R, which immediately was one of the major hiccups. Yeah. I see we got our notes up here, but there's a beautiful song by the great Jacob Pistorius called Three Views of a Secret. Your take on the experience, my take on the experience, and what did the bike suffer in the process? So that's how we're going to do this. I'm going to go first. It's my machine. It's a machine I want to know. I knew the Suzuki before it to a fault. The bike before this one was a BMW R1200RS, but the Suzuki GSF-1200S was a rebored Gixxus motor, and I did everything to that bike that can be done to that bike. So I knew it. I understood it. With life and time constraints and unexpected mishaps and just physics of the universe, it was really hard to even say, yes, let's do this, because the mindset of wrenching varies with the person. I'm high-strung with limited time, and the boundaries of my start to the conclusion of it, they were frightening. I didn't know the bike, and you didn't have to. All you needed to do is like, this is my garage. We either fix it or we don't. Either way, my bikes are still in it, and my bed is right over there. You don't have to really worry. You care about your friends. You've helped all of us out several times, but in the grander scheme of things, you can't force yourself to worry to the same extent as anybody who brings the bike to your garage and hopes it's going to leave the garage. I don't know the bike's plastics. I don't know the bike's mechanics. I don't know which components will need to go where or how much of a rabbit hole is one way of putting it. How do you describe something where whatever it is that you snake into, whatever it is that you weave your way through, when you go backwards through it, you have to go the exact same direction, and how many of these paths can you keep in order before you find yourself back at a complete bike that's reassembled, ready to ride, and reliable? That's scary if you haven't even walked through the door of it yet. I have the factory manual. I have everything I need, and I knew what I was going to do. We had a plan. Back and forth logistics. It already came up with its own flub, which was, oh shit, we need gaskets. But we fixed that. You went into the fiche, observed your previous experience with which rubberized materials were going to be pliable enough to reuse, perhaps, and we still ordered those gaskets anyhow just in case, and which gaskets definitely, definitely, definitely were going to have to be replaced to make this job work. They arrived, and that meant I needed to arrive so that I could then spend my time alone in your garage carefully processing as much information about how these plastics come off as possible, and did. Next step was to deal with the cables into the tank. I managed to find one video with some very talkative urbanites who really were just wanting to hang out and took it upon themselves to try to document the process as best as they could. We may have had our critiques about their documentation of it on video, but in the end, somebody tried. They actually gave it a go, and it gave me enough information to work with that I was able to clarify what they did. The tank popped up. The lines came off. Pictures were taken. An article will exist. We will link you to how to check and change the shims on a Suzuki GSX-8R in coming weeks, I promise. I managed to get to where the tank was off, and I was greatly satisfied with that. Then what did I see? A bowl of ramen with random adapters. One of my favorite Travis Burleson quotes while he was working on my bike, or I was working on his, in regards to Molex connectors. That. Why does it have to be that? It's two wires. Why are they shaped this way to connect? It could just be this and be labeled with a number or stickers. Why does it have to be shaped like that? That's what I found. It was a pool of wires, and it was time to carefully start disconnecting. Listeners, you know how long I've been talking at this point. This is what modern bikes will present to you. You have to go through what I've described as black swan origami to understand your plastics, unfold the magical dimensional rift that allows you to get these things off so you can see challenges ahead of you. Then you have to get the tank off without breaking any of the unnecessary connection systems that could just as easily be duct tape. Once that's off, then you can begin to address labeling and understanding why things are where. And be careful, there's a reason that that line goes up over that little shoulder of plastic to keep it from burning off on the motor. This is the point after all of this where I begin to hallucinate and stroke out. All of a sudden, the door opens and Brian Ringer is done with his work day, and he has arrived to at least have a gander at where the process was.

Brian: If you had to strip your bike down to that point now, tank up and you're staring at the bowl of ramen, how long would it take you? 15 minutes, maybe, probably 10. Six, eight hours later, you know, he's at this point. Yeah, and that's what I found on a lot of bikes. You really, the first time through, especially if it's a new bike, especially if it's still pretty, you really, really have to be careful. Nothing in the manual tells you exactly what it feels like to snap this piece of plastic where it needs to go. You just don't know. Or just snap it right the hell off. Yeah, right.

Robin: Where are the tabs? Nobody knows. I don't think they know.

Brian: Oh, it's awful. They're grown on the bike. Yeah, when I work on a bike that's like still pretty, I always make the owner strip it down the plastics because I don't know how to do that yet. Once we got down to the engine, then, oh, that's all very familiar. I've done shim under bucket a million times. Show up and, you know, we're dealing, there's this whole bowl of electrical connectors over the engine. When you have a big bowl of electrical connectors.

Robin: And a plastic base plate that is designed around their contours.

Brian: There's all a logic to it. You kind of have to start picking it apart and go to, and you're not going to connect the wrong thing to the wrong thing. Going back together, getting the routing correct is difficult. That's one thing where the factory manual really works because the factory manuals have very detailed diagrams of exactly how everything is routed.

Robin: Oh, it's so well done. We did miss one.

Brian: Yeah, we missed one. You had to go back in. Yeah.

Robin: We spent so much time addressing the process that something just didn't feel right. And I remembered, yeah, there's a shoulder on the engine. It has to be wrapped over that, which means you have to feed it through. So you have to disconnect and run and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, I woke up the next day and took care of it. But I think when you walk through the door, that's when it was all like, okay, thank God, I need a friend to lean on. And this was something we talked about.

Brian: Just need moral support.

Robin: Yeah. The psychology of a committee. I can tell you right now that if I have a committee, I become dumber. Okay. If I have the right help in the room, I will compartmentalize my approach, which is okay. These are here. That goes there. Sorting this. We'll set this divider up so that that's the right side of the bike. That's the left side of the bike. I know where that came from. Oh, and that washer, it's actually, you itemize everything and you know all of it because you're alone. You have your thoughts to yourself and you're going through a process. But if you start to do that, and somebody who also knows their noise, in Brian's case, knows better than me, when that person has something to say, your whole train of thought will derail. You got to get to a point where you just surrender what you know as you go through the process, but you also lean on the people who are there for you because they want to help. While it was a mountain to climb, we had all of everything we needed to do. It worked out. Interrupt me at any time now, because you are the committee. You're in the garage. I did my part. And now I wanted to be a supporting role. When I see what is supposed to happen, I will shout it out loud. When I'm not certain, I'll just try to help with my mouth shut. You know, I remember with the Bandit, I pulled the pairs valves off and got blockers. The jigsaw, that'll probably happen eventually, but with the Bandit, I could feed the valve cover to the left or to the right. And with this one, you had to pull the radiator. And if you're going to pull the radiator, that means you have to pull the pair system. That was the one and only time we tried not to have to do what we were going to have to do and discovered, let's not try to not do what we know we're not going to have to not have to do. Sure.

Brian: That made sense. Yeah. We had to feed it forward. There's a lot of bikes where they say, Oh, you don't technically have to pull the radiator to do about, but no, just do it. It gets it out of the way. Yeah. If you're going to pull your radiator and you're going to have it in your hands and you're going to try to clean the radiator off, keep a good grip on that thing. Yeah. Try not to throw it.

Robin: We weren't sure. Do I throw this across the garage or do I try to hold a grip on it? Brian was like, man, flipped a coin tails. I throw it low and behold, let me get a running start. And I threw it as hard as I could across the room. Boy, did we ever kind of half suffer the consequences for that?

Brian: That was the moment where I saw like every bit of Robin's adrenal glands, just completely empty into his bloodstream. It was both tragic and hilarious, but what's Jordan say? You got to laugh. Are you going to cry? Fortunately, the radiator wasn't leaking. We did discover later that one of the outlets was kind of oval. Although there was like a little folded over place and so forth.

Robin: I think that the channel locks did that to get the hose to break free. It's a large coolant hose. I took channel locks, set them to the general diameter, very gently gave it some clinch, just enough to bite into the rubber and then twist it to get the rubber to click. Then I let them go and I pulled, but I guarantee you that just getting those hoses off.

Brian: That might be why they got squashed. Yeah. Which is all right, because you had hose clamps and you knew they would work and they did. The stock hose clamps are spring clamps and they depend on round things being round like circles. They don't work on ovals. I dug up some hose clamps that were narrow enough to work on motorcycles. Got that all sorted out. That's later on. We're getting out of sequence.

Robin: Okay. So I pulled the plastics. I disconnect the wiring. I got the tank off and disconnected the spaghetti underneath. We managed to filter through some of the components that had to be moved out of the way to get to the bolts comfortably, to not strip them out or cause any havoc and loosening them to get the valve cover off, which had to be fed forward through the radiator. So the radiator had to come off, pulled the ignition coils, the lids out, and I got nothing left. The guilt begins to seep in because it's two days of effort. Guilt just starts to be this crown of, my God, how much more can I ask of you?

Brian: There's a divergence perception here. Once the lid is off, we're like 80, 90% of the way through it. We're in a homestretch now because we, you know, Got everything exposed. We do the measurements and I'm very glad we did this. It was a little bit early on this bike, a thousand miles or so early due to logistics. What we found was all the exhaust clearances were right at the minimum or very close. One of them was a little above that. All the intakes were basically right in the middle or in the lower third. Exhaust hot! Two things to know. One is that on pretty much any engine, valve clearances tend to decrease over time. The idea that your valves will make noise when they need attention is totally false. That may have applied to like granddad's flat eight. I don't know.

Robin: Yeah.

Brian: Valves do not make noise. They stay quiet and the clearances tend to decrease. Without getting into a lot of detail, it happens because the edges of the valves where they seal to the cylinder head wear very slowly over time and they tend to retreat. The valves come up further, the clearances slowly decrease over time. This is true on every motorcycle engine, car engine too for that matter. The other thing to remember is that like Robin said, exhaust hot! Your exhaust valves will always change clearances a lot faster than the intakes. Again, this is true on every motorcycle engine. Shim under bucket, screw lock nut, shim over bucket, however it works. Your exhaust clearances are going to change faster because more heat, hot gases flowing, metal contact and so forth. All that accelerating, that very slow wear process happens a little bit faster on the exhaust cams, which are on the front of the engine on most bikes. And again, this bike has been used. I don't want to say beat on, but the rpm range has been exercised quite regularly.

Robin: The Suzuki GSX-8R makes peak horsepower at 1000 rpms, shy of redline. I bought it this year after having ridden my BMW R1200RS a little bit at the beginning of the year. Bought it with zero miles on it, brand new, first owner. It is at right now 14,402 miles. That is the current odometer. So yes, it is getting ridden.

Brian: That includes two track days, a lot of high velocity. Anyway, the point is we found the exhaust cams, they needed attention. It wasn't below spec, but yes, it was time to do that. And so the strategy is to set your valve clearances to the top end of the spec as far as you can. The exhaust, I believe, don't quote me on this, but I believe the exhausts were supposed to be between 0.20 and 0.30 millimeter clearance. Correct. And three of them were at 0.20 and one was at 0.23. And so we changed the shims in those to smaller shims. So like three of them had a 2.90 in them, and we put in 2.80 shims to bring those up to 0.30. That's going to mean that this valve clearance check is going to stay in spec for a very long time. The other thing that happens is the first valve check is always the most important, because that's when things move around. Once an engine settles in, especially a modern engine, a really modern water-cooled engine like this, it's going to stay in spec for a very long time. To make a long story short, we set all the valve clearances on this at the maximum or close to it so that Robin could probably ignore the next one very safely. He's probably not going to need to touch it until it hits 45,000 miles.

Robin: I will be skipping the next valve check for sure, and that would be at the 30,000 mark. So I anticipate I will check the valves again at 45,000 miles. I've always thought that the iridium plugs would last longer. They claim this 30 to 50,000 mile range. When we pulled those, they looked good as spares, but they looked used too, and significantly compared to the newer ones that we installed. Then there was the tiny click. Yeah, that was... The look on your face was a more lucid and appropriately concerned Brian that I'm used to seeing. We pulled the cams and got the timing set up. We learned about the points on the chain where the gearing needed to be based on the arrows on the actual cam cogs. We knew what needed to happen and started to go through the process. I actually didn't see you get the chain back over it. I didn't see the first time. I turned around, I was cleaning something, putting something together. I came back and you'd already gotten the cam sort of set, and we talked for a second, looked at some stuff, started to fasten some things together. Then both of us in the silence of the work lab, we heard a shick. The look on your face, it was surgical focus. You looked up at me and you were like, you heard that, right? I was like, yeah. I looked and there was a dip in the chain above the cams. You then explained what that was. It was slip and it had chased the gears to another tooth. We went through the motions to fix it because that guard on top of the chain is what ensures that that chain will not slip. Made the adjustment. If we had put the bike back together in that status, it was going to sound all kinds of wrong. Would it fire? Probably. It'd probably run. Would it sound rideable? Maybe not so much, but we got there. So that tiny click, make sure you understand which pins in the chain those arrows are supposed to point to when you are lining up the timing of your engine.

Brian: We had to pull the cam caps off and then reset the intake cam. Those one had slipped by one tooth. Yeah, you got to watch for those little tiny details and make sure it's exactly correct. So I used zip ties to hold the cam chain onto the cam sprocket this time around, just to make double dog sure that it would not slip before we put the tensioner back in. The last obstacle was, first we had problems with the oval radiator outlets. I was a little worried we wouldn't spill anything, but I was there and I had your back.

Robin: We got coolant everywhere, as is a clause in the Brian Ringer school of, let me help you out with that bike. You must spill some kind of crude oil. Yeah, it's got to be on the floor. If it's hazardous. I mean, we had a mercury leak. Do you remember this? Your carburetor sink tool, the mercury was all over the floor.

Brian: Oh yeah.

Robin: I swear that explains why I could smell sound.

Brian: We had to basically collect, recycle coolant and filter it through a coffee filter. And I had some lying around, but we didn't have quite enough.

Robin: I learned from that too. Filtering it through a coffee filter works. Good enough. The burping though, man, burping the coolant in that system. We got that wrong twice back to back until we read the manual. And I was like, Oh, there's a screw in the middle of the engine that needs to leak.

Brian: That leaks. And a picture of this screw was, you could see a picture and you could tell it was an engine. And then there was an arrow pointing to like a blob of black ink.

Robin: Yeah. This was a point of pride for me for all the work and help you offer it up. I saw that screw and was like, that's the one. And lo and behold, we got the job done. Got her done. Then the plastics went on, then the booze came out and then we stayed up till four and I have not felt that sick in years. Years. I slept to one anxiety hangover. We've got Joanne Dahn in the house. That means the armory brought to you by gearchick.com.

Joanne: I did some homework and I'm super excited to share this because I was able to pull up some things. We're talking about GPX routing, navigation. I think a much more useful topic for people is just the higher conversation of navigation, because there's a lot of ways to do it and there's a lot of stuff out there and people use a lot of different things. And the advice I like to give is how I like to give gear advice when people are shopping for maybe a jacket or a glove is the first thing to do is you have to pick your method. If I talk about a jacket, how do you want to go about finding a jacket for let's say winter? Do you want the jacket to be a waterproof jacket? Do you want the jacket to be a layer jacket? How do you want that item to be set up? I think it's the same thing with navigation because there's a lot of different ways to go about navigation depending on your budget, depending on your bike and what you ride. So I'm going to give you four things and I shared this with you guys too online so that you have it for notes. I'm going to show you four different ways to do navigation on your motorcycle and it doesn't matter what kind of motorcycle you have. All these methods apply regardless if you're on road, off road or adventuring, it doesn't matter. You're just going to pick which way you want to go about it because some people are going to be really adamant that, no, no, no, you have to set your bike up this way and other people are going to say, no, you should set it up this way. It's like any other bike thing, a tire or whatever.

Brian: You're doing it wrong. Yeah.

Joanne: Right. Maybe it just depends on you and it depends on your motorcycle needs and it depends on how you want to do it. I'm going to go in the order of cost because you can go in super cheap or you can really throw down and invest in some really interesting systems. For those of us who've been riding for a good couple of decades, there weren't systems. There was nothing. It was paper and I remember taping paper with painter's tape on my tank.

Robin: The lead sheet. Yeah.

Joanne: Right. That was what I did is I used painter's tape and I taped my directions or my tank bag. I'd print out my directions and put them in my tank bag. I mean, it worked. There's nothing wrong with that. If I missed a turn, I'd turn around, whatever, but that's the cost-free way, I guess, is tape your directions to your tank and be prepared to change pages. That was really only annoying in Pennsylvania because you had to splice together 18 different roads to make a decent route. If you live in, say, San Francisco, it's literally two highways. You get on 280 and you get off at 92. Boom. Now you're in the heart. You don't have to do anything else. That was really challenging and I hated it. Then I decided, let's start with phone because our phones have come a long way, but 10 years ago, we still had iPhone. We had Android phones. Phone is probably this next light, least expensive. You already have this $1,000 phone. Why not use it? That was always my thing. I'm like, I have this expensive-ass phone. I'm going to use it. A few apps I'm going to throw out to you. Aside the obvious, everyone uses a Google Map, right? Right. With GPS. Duh. That's obvious, but my understanding of Android, because I'm not an Android person, is that if you want to download your GPS route, you can if you have an Android. Correct?

Robin: Yep.

Joanne: But that's not available to us, iPhone folk. If you're an Android person and that works for you and you can save it, right? You can create a route on your Android Google Map and save it.

Robin: You can. Actually, for your iPhones, you could also use a GPX file. There are apps that do it.

Joanne: No, totally. I want to share that, but I just wanted to clarify that Android has this bonus feature, right?

Robin: Yes.

Joanne: Built-in, right? If you have an Android phone, your Google Maps is a little bit more advanced and you can generate your GPS routes and save it. Maybe that's enough for most people. That's all you need. It's really easy. Then if you're a visual person, well, you get a phone mount for 20 bucks, maybe 30 if you get a really good mount. Then that's it. You watch the directions and then you add a couple hundred bucks if you want to hear the directions. That's how you tier up the costs there with your phone. But I'm going to throw out a couple of apps that are really great. OnX OffRoad is great if you're an off-road person because the maps are off-road. That's really important for people who are adventuring and off-roading. You can't just use Google Maps, right? You've got to use an app that has you in mind. Whether or not you're 4x4, you could be in ATV, you could be in a side-by-side, but the maps themselves are off-road focused. OnX OffRoad is great. A lot of influencers in the motorcycle space use it. You can find a lot of reviews on YouTube. For street folks, I'm going to mention a really great iPhone app called InRoute. InRoute uses Google Maps as its mapping system. What's really cool about InRoute is you can do easy on-the-fly routing just like Google, and it'll save and export GPX files right there from the app.

Brian: But you need a data connection, right?

Joanne: Yeah, you do need cell service to make the route. But it's like Google where, let's say you lose service, as long as the map is generated, you'll be fine.

Robin: Yes, once it's been produced.

Joanne: Once it's produced, you're fine. The other tool I want to add to that is if you're going to use your phone is a really cool website called Furkot, F-U-R-K-O-T, furkot.com. What's really cool and why I love that is that way on my computer, I can make maps and the platform is really easy to use. What's really cool about it is you can put start and end points. Hey, I want to start from Austin, go to New York, and I'm going to leave at this time on this date. My bike has only X miles of range. I want to start at 9 a.m. and I want to finish at 6 p.m. and it'll actually throw down recommended gas and hotel stops for you.

Robin: Nice.

Joanne: I used that extensively to do all my routing when I was living in PA and wanted to go ride where there were actual roads like West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee. When I actually wanted to find some incredible rides, I did all my routing there. I have a really good library of routes and they're multi-day, all-day routes that give me, again, stop me at 6 p.m., started me at my start time, and then it found gas stations too. It was really great. It already threw out the stops that I needed besides food. You could do that too. You could tell it, hey, I want you to add points of interest or show me food. It's a great way to create your app off the phone because you really don't want to create this extensive multi-day trip on your phone. It's a pain in the butt. It's just a website and it's free. You can import GPX too. You can import it. You can export it. You can share it with people. Yeah. I actually used to do that with my Garmin. I would make the GPX on the Furcott and then I would send it to the Garmin app. There's your pretty affordable way. Now, if you want to level up, there's this crazy company called Chigi. That's C-H-I-G-E-E. If you want to level up what you're mounting on your motorcycle and you want to go beyond the phone, you're like, you know what? I need more than the phone. These are tablets mounted on your bike. They run basically CarPlay.

Robin: Absolutely. Yes. Nice.

Joanne: Let's say there's apps that you like, you use, and you just want to have a bigger phone basically mounted on your bike that's touchscreen and more easy to use. They have a few different products, but they also have cell service, options to add on integrations, cameras, Insta360 support, tire pressure monitors, all these other integrations you can add for more money, of course. I think their base unit starts at $400 or $500, if I'm not mistaken. Then if you add on stuff, you might spend close to $800 or $900, not going to lie. But hey, if you have the budget to add on these features, if you're really technologically oriented, this is a product for you, in my opinion. But I think it's also great for people who aren't really tech-minded either. CarPlay, a lot of people have that in their modern cars. Everyone's familiar with it. There you go. If you want a tablet that's bigger than your phone, rugged, you want to mount it on your bike, you can buy them on Amazon. It's not like you have to buy them overseas. I want to say they have two units. They have a $400 unit and then a $600 or a $700 unit. But the fact that they have all these integrations is cool. Garak Moto, he did a review of his. He's a huge fan. So he has a really good review about the Cheeky products. Check that out. That's chige.com. Yep. Nice. That method is, I just want a big tablet, apps that I like on my phone, and I just want to use it. This is your solution. That way you're not tied to specific software like our next traditional option, Garmin. It's been around forever.

Robin: Base camp.

Joanne: My workaround for that was to avoid using Garmin software. I would use EnRoute, make my GPX, upload it into the Garmin program, done. It syncs to the Garmin, boom. I would have the route that I made. So that way I'm not futzing on it. But I will say this, I had an old Garmin from 15 years ago and it sucked. Right when the iPhone came out, a couple iPhones in, I'm like, I can't use this. I've got my iPhone. It's better. So actually using EnRoute was super helpful. I made my routes there. I threw them in. But the interface has changed quite a bit and it has improved. It's definitely better than it was before. And it's much easier to use. And what I did use it for on my last trips, I actually used it instead of my phone because it connected to my phone, connected to my headset. I could have a split screen of my music and my map, kind of like in the car. It worked great. That's all I need. I'm not looking for a lot of the advanced features, but I might. The Cheeky products actually look amazing. And with all these integrations like that and the advanced technology that they're utilizing, I don't know that Garmin will want to keep continuing to support motorcycle products because I don't think motorcycle products are a huge percentage of their business anyway. They have watch, everyone has a watch and all these other products, which is great. They have the little GPS for emergency. I don't know that the XUMO is going to last very long. If you really love Garmin, sure, get the newer version. It'll be better than the previous models. The XT2 is the one that I have. And for the longest time, Garmin's strongest asset was that it was waterproof and really rugged. And it is a pretty rugged unit. But you know, these other competitors like Cheeky, they're pretty much for the same purpose. Motorcycling, they're rugged. They mount in deeper than just on a RAM mount. You can actually get one to replace your entire display system.

Robin: The whole HUD. Yeah.

Joanne: Yeah. That's above and beyond what Garmin offers. Definitely look at it and consider it again, especially if you're really tech minded and you really want something that's very modern and state of the art. The last option is if you're an Android diehard person, there's a company, it's a European company called Thork Racing. THORK! TH4KRACING.COM. And they have a huge unit. It's an entire system. It's a motorcycle specific system. I want to say that Itchy Boots, she uses that system for all of her navigation and that woman has ridden everywhere still riding. But that's like a whole complete setup. And I would say it's probably competes head to head with what Cheeky offers. European company, European products. I think you'll be paying the most if you use that platform. I don't even know that you can order that on Amazon, but it's definitely worth looking into because it's pretty cool. Like the tablet is pretty big. It's pretty rugged. She seems to have a really good experience with it. She never seems to experience any issues if you watch her videos. And she's riding everywhere and doing a lot of riding in crazy places. It's definitely tried and true.

Brian: Yeah, the THORK and similar are just amazing.

Joanne: If you're going to do like some extensive riding, like you're going to go from here to South America and do like a really long haul, that's worth your investment. You know, that's the kind of investment you make. But the Cheeky options, say you have an older bike and you want to replace the tack because it's ancient.

Brian: Yeah.

Joanne: You know, you want to replace your whole display system.

Brian: Yeah. I wonder like on an older bike, if it would integrate. It's actually simplifies a lot. It's called the M unit and it's a whole system for running all the electrics. Like a lot of bike builders use it when they're making a custom out of an older bike and so forth. Be really interesting to integrate something like this into an older bike.

Robin: Probably.

Brian: There's just a lot of options right now.

Robin: Yeah, that's the beauty of it. I'm hugely inspired by everything you've said, Joanne, because when you started with the whole idea that it's kind of an individual thing.

Joanne: It really is.

Robin: TRO, we really push right with GPS a lot just because in a planning environment, it lets you select which platform you're planning on. So you can choose dirt, you can choose Google Maps and there's tons of stuff out there. You tapped into the whole thing with our standalone GPS units obsolete. No, not necessarily. The backwards compatibility to GPX doesn't always land.

Joanne: I think it's more the simplicity. And my husband and I were arguing about this earlier. Well, who's going to want a garment anymore when you have this? And that's a very valid point. However, I point out to him, there are a lot of people out there who are using Garmin. Garmin has been around for a long time.

Robin: Yeah.

Joanne: So there's a lot of people who've used it. There's a lot of groups of friends who might use it. And if all your friends use it, there's a reason you might need it.

Robin: We use it for towing our rig because we're 13 feet, six inches tall and we need a specialty GPS that's dedicated to that purpose. They have one that saves the day.

Joanne: There's one reason right there, but there could be a plethora of reasons why someone would choose a system like Garmin that is technologically behind.

Robin: Would you say a plethora?

Joanne: A plethora, right? But I don't know. I mean, for me personally, I wouldn't choose a Garmin over a Chiggy or a Thork, but you never know, right? People have individual experiences. And I'm going to talk a little bit to the boomers out there that having to learn a whole nother level of technology, it's a lot. And if you've already done the work to learn how your Garmin works and you're happy with it, great. Do it. There's nothing wrong with that. It just comes down to what you're looking for for yourself. If you've never used a Garmin and you're probably a Gen Z-er or even younger rider, then you want the state-of-the-art products. They're going to work better for you. You're not going to enjoy a Garmin product. My point is everyone's different and there might be people out there who just want their phone. They're like, you know what? No, I'm not going to spend money on a system. I'm going to use my phone and I'm going to use my in-route or my Google and I'm happy.

Robin: Or in my case, two phones because I have one that's dedicated to that. Well, because the cameras do get beat to hell by a motorcycle. Pummeled. I have a solution for that.

Joanne: We have a solution, right? But my solution is two phones. There's your solution. But maybe now you have another option to explore if one of those dies.

Robin: One interesting truth that you brought up when you talked about the lead sheets in the beginning there, where you have the alphabet soup on your tank.

Joanne: Yeah, just tipping your map.

Robin: Well, you can actually still do that. There are many services I do know for a fact that Ride with GPS will let you do it where you can print the cue sheet in four miles, turn left here. The thing is, it's too meticulous about it. One eighth of a mile, turn immediately. That's the next stop sign. It's just say, take the next left, but it works. Maybe that's what you like. Old schoolers. Yeah. The vintage rallies.

Joanne: Right. Like we don't know. I mean, I've got a friend who, he won't give up his 20-year-old Arai because it's still in perfect condition. I said, listen.

Robin: Is it though?

Joanne: Look, your helmet lasts more than five years. Sure. But 20? 20? And he just won't. I'm like, well, good luck, man. I hope your head never hits the pavement.

Robin: Yeah. What's this white powder that keeps coming out of it? Oh, that's just the protective layer.

Joanne: People are people. And I'm not going to tell you that one way is the best way. I'm just going to tell you that these are the different ways to go about it. And once you figure out, okay, I want to use my phone, then that's when you'll discover more options. But first you need to decide how you want to go about it. Otherwise you'll rack your brain forever and you'll never make a decision. If you've got a Gixxer or you've got a 90s sport bike, there's no room for anything. So you're already limited and you're probably only going to be able to do one phone mount. That's it. That's how I recommend making a decision.

Robin: Similar banter at higher revs can be found via the Gear Chick website. Visit gearchick.com and dig in. On to moments in motorcycle history with Jordan Leeman. Same as last episode, Jordan is covering the story, the legends, the lore of Bessie Stringfield. Some of it true, some of it not so much. Some of it you can understand why not so much was how it needed to be so she could get through whatever she was getting through back in the day. Take it away, Jordan.

Jordan: In 1941, America goes to war against Japan after Pearl Harbor and she steps up, realizes she could help serve her country. At this point, she is living in Florida and she becomes a civilian courier for the military, delivering top secret documents between military bases and messages between different officers and whatnot. And she was one of eight on a motorcycle. She was a motorcycle courier, 1941 to 1945 in Florida. She did not serve overseas and she was not enlisted, but she did work for the military as a civilian with seven other all-black couriers. She had to train with them and they did all kinds of riding off-road, hill climbs and whatnot just to get their qualifications. There is a photograph of her with the seven other riders. Let me just interject that on Sunday, my day off, I went to the Harley-Davidson Museum in Milwaukee where they have a display all about Bessie Stringfield. They didn't even know they had it. I went to the front counter and I said, where is the Bessie Stringfield exhibit? And the girl says, who? And, oh, I think it's downstairs. From there, I realized that this woman behind the counter that doesn't know who Bessie Stringfield is or what exhibits they have within 50 feet of her kiosk are. I go ahead and wander. And sure enough, it's on the second floor where we start. It is in the main room with the early historic clubs and races and riders and the videos. And she's got a 10-foot spread across the wall with another woman named Lillian something or other white woman. The gist of it is Bessie Stringfield and most of her story is told there. And they did a professional job with her. They have actual documents like her dispatch riders. Certificate, actual photographs, and her riding boots that she had in the sixties and the seventies, they're pure white, straight out of like an Elvis movie, riding boots with gold details on them and fringe, it's crazy what they have for her, which is really great. I was very impressed with the Harley-Davidson Museum's depiction of diverse riders. It isn't all white people that are riding Harley-Davidson's that have to wave the American flag like we see a lot of on the street, it is all walks of life. And there is a lot of black people represented as well as other races and nationalities and whatnot. There is a 40 foot hall on the second floor dedicated to black motorcycle clubs, which I thought was really cool. If you think about it, these are people that wouldn't easily be accepted necessarily by the existing white motorcycle clubs, and it's like bowling. Bowling is not a white sport. If you decide you want to do it, you make your own club. And that's what these people did. And I think that's great. I definitely will go back when I have more time and delve deeper, but I was really only there for about an hour, hour and a half, but yeah, that exhibit started on September 25th of this year. So I got lucky. She was a religious woman. She always talked about how a lot of the graces she's had through her life were because of what she called the man upstairs. Basically, Jesus took the wheel for her. While she was being trained as a dispatch rider, she learned to make bridges from rope and logs. After the war, which is another thing that I wonder about, it says that she qualified as a nurse and she became a nurse for a number of years. And so this is how she's financing her motorcycle habit. She goes to Europe, Brazil and Haiti on a motorcycle. In the sixties, she moves to a suburb of Miami, Florida, and she starts the Iron Horse Motorcycle Club, which is still going and I believe it is mostly black club, there is a huge following for this woman now, I mean, and the Iron Butt Clubs, the Black Motorcycle Clubs, tons and tons of videos. Most of them say about the same thing. All in all, she's owned 27 Harleys, all blue. In 2002, she is inducted to the AMA Hall of Fame in Pickerington, Ohio. The AMA to this date still has an award that's given out annually called the Bessie Stringfield Award for Women. Having said all that, she crossed all of the lower 48 states, came up with her own origin myth that she was born somehow in Kingston, Jamaica. She also told us the story that she was taken in by a Irish Catholic socialite, wealthy woman who bestowed upon her, her first Indian. And she did ride until her death. She was a masterful storyteller, which explains probably how she ends up getting gas for free at a lot of places. She continued racing in Florida. On top of all of this, Florida, in or near the town where she lived, they named a street after her, the Bessie Stringfield Way. You can find a video by the Southern Florida Bikers, Miami Garden Resolution that talks about naming the street after her. She was in her sixties and seventies. Her doctor told her that she has an enlarged heart that she should stop riding and she completely ignored that and rode till she died.

Robin: Wouldn't we?

Jordan: Wouldn't we? Absolutely. Kickstart my heart. All of those things. Now let's go through the question marks. Take a chug. I'm going to chug. Yeah. Well, we're going to have you edit this to make it sound like I'm not stuttering and stumbling, like I said, you can't take these things from her. There are pictures of her. She did a lot of these things. But like I said, this woman was a masterful storyteller. Let me tell you a story about what happened recently with me. I joined the Moose Lodge. This is a Frank Flintstone Moose Lodge that I joined. It was unintentional. The guy that I rode to Colorado with and one of our mutual friends is a member of the Moose Lodge and we're going to go and we're going to meet this guy, Sean, and several beers into that. Sean says, Hey, you want to be a member? And I'm like, sure. He says, okay, I'll buy you a membership. So all of a sudden I'm a member of the freaking Moose Lodge. Everybody there's a rider, mostly Harleys, but a little bit of this and that. So you get a few drinks under your belt and there's some guy to your right and there's some guy to your left and they finally warm up to it. It's like, so what do you got? They're talking about their Harleys. And Sean says, well, Jordan has a lot of bikes. He works mostly on vintage bikes. And the guy to my right says to me, so what's your oldest bike? And I look at him knowing that he means Harley, but I don't really feel like I need to explain this to him, so I just tell him I got a 59 and his jaw dropped and his eyes opened wide and he goes, you're really cool. I want to know you. And I just shut my mouth because at that point, am I really going to be hanging out with these people? I don't think so, but I let him think that I had a 59 Harley, even though it's a 59 Yamaha, it's still pretty cool. But this guy thinks that I have a 59 Harley. Okay. That's how these stories start. And so Bessie's Drinkfield probably wasn't much different. You know, the story that sells is a story you run with. And back in those days, they didn't have a lot of ways to check what you had to say. Like for instance, did you really get given a equivalent of a $10,000 Indian by a wealthy Irish Catholic socialite because she liked you? That's a little sketchy. Now, earlier in her career, she did, she was a housekeeper. There just isn't any proof. And there's plenty of ways to get a 1928 Indian without actually paying for it. And I'm just going to leave that right there, but she did. And she ended up riding around the United States. She makes up stories about her past and she changes her name repeatedly. Six marriages and changes her name repeatedly and changes her story a lot. I mean, credit to the woman for what she did. There's a lot of holes in the story. So we'll start with the death of her parents at five years old. Both parents die of smallpox. That kind of thing can happen. What happened between five and 16? That's 11 years unaccounted for. What happened then? We don't know. Now we get to her niece, whose name is Esther Bennett says, I quote, she basically lied at 86 years old. She says, tell me the straight story. I want to hear the truth about the story. She sits down with Esther and tells her the truth. She doesn't believe she was born in Kingston, Jamaica, because there was nobody from Kingston, Jamaica and Esther literally names her parents as Maggie Cherry and James White in Eddington, North Carolina. There's pictures of Eddington, North Carolina, and it was a black community in 1911, not 1912 in Kingston. There are also social security records tying these people to North Carolina. So let's just say Jamaica probably isn't true. A lot of the stories, it's very likely that I could cross America in the 1930s and come across motorcycle activities and have seen them and go on to the next town, said to somebody, I was just in town X or Y or Z, and I saw these races or I was at these races, did you race? Oh yes, I did. She probably did. She probably did kick ass and take names, but there ought to be some documentation. If this person did all these things for 1928 through 1980 something, there ought to be photographs of her racing or a jersey or something. So where are those things? I mean, I think it's great. God love the woman. I love the story, but you can't get away with these things these days. There's just too much oversight. What else we got here? When children die, I don't know, do they keep records? Probably. So there's just a couple of things that stand out, but the fact that I went to the Harley museum and there was a lot of documentation, I mean, there's proof that she was a dispatch courier, right? Or for United States army. This is all proven. This is good. I love that information, but there's a lot of stuff that I wasn't unable to find proof of, leaves me with question marks. And I'm totally open-minded. I would love for someone to say, Jordan, you're wrong. Here is the name of the Irish benefactor that gave her a motorcycle in 1928. I'd love to see that proof that she entered these races, did not win, but entered. I'd love to see that. Send that to the Harley museum. That's cool stuff. There's plenty of pictures of her. She did get around. I'm impressed. Hey, Brian and Robin, I know a guy that has a bike for every week of the year. His name is Jordan Liebman. How many of those run? I can count them on one hand. How many of them run right now? So Betsy Stringfield may have owned 27 Harleys, or that might have been numbers she made up. Or she might've owned 27 of them and 20 of them were parts bikes. We don't know. It's just a romantic story. Now, back when she did get her first Indian and then Harleys, motorcycles were considered to be agricultural. You did not have to register them. They did not have to have a title or a license plate back in the in most States, which is why you can get a title for a pre 1960s motorcycle in several States because they were never registered or they were a farm bike or whatever, there wouldn't be records of that either. So what are your questions?

Robin: Awesome. So that brings us to what do you want to talk about next episode? What do you feel like doing? What do you feel like all of us would be good at talking about next episode?

Brian: We're in the Northern hemisphere. We're staring straight into the rectum of winter. And I would like to talk, how are we going to get through this? How are we going to get through winter and be sane? I think there's some stuff to talk about there. You know, how do you get through it? Is snowmobiling enough? What if you don't live somewhere where the snowmobiles work? We can talk about all the work we're doing in the garages. We can talk about people who leave for warmer climates. We can talk about flying away and renting a bike, pushing the season. All of that. You know, some of us do podcasts in the winter and talk about motorcycling just to stay sane.

Robin: We're here for you folks. We know some of you are Minnesotan, Canadian, Alaskan. You probably ain't riding unless you really got a bug up your ass about it. Don't worry. We will be there talking shit, talking shop. Send us your questions again. Visit email.tiro.bike and fill out the contact form. Send us a message. Ask us a question. That's what I got. Y'all ready to get out of here. Let's get out of here.