Robin: Hello everybody, I'm Robin Dean. I'm Travis Burleson. And I'm Tim Clark. It's 2019, and this is the first Writing Obsession podcast of the new year!

Travis: Today, joining us is Don Beefcake Beerin, an Illinois MSF instructor and friend to all of us here at the Writing Obsession.

Robin: What the? I did not add that. Who added that? Tim?

Travis: I imagine Don might have put that in there. That's his preferred... Don doesn't have access!

Robin: Don doesn't have access! Go on. What is he again? An Illinois MSF instructor.

Travis: Yeah, so Don's an Illinois MSF instructor, a friend of us all, and he'll be taking part as we discuss various things.

Robin: Discussing...

Travis: As we discuss podcasts, outline, and subcontent.

Tim: Alright, this episode of the Writing Obsession podcast is brought to you by VoloLites, the inertia-triggered brake light that automatically warns followers while engine braking. Learn more about them at VoloLites.com, and also by the Ugly Apple Cafe of Madison, Wisconsin, where they use local overstock produce to offer a quick, tasty breakfast.

Robin: TheWritingObsession.com is always seeking sponsors for this podcast. Sponsors are given three focus mentions toward the start, middle, and end of their designated episode. Their contributions are put towards bettering the program's content and recording equipment. I'm going to take this opportunity to promote our next group writing tour. It's scheduled for spring of this year, and we have three spots left, I think. Dubbed the Trip Sevens Tour, seven writers will cover seven states in seven days, starting May 26th of 2019. It's a twisty, sport-touring getaway of epic proportions, and we hope you'll sign up. That's going to be led by Travis and myself. More information about that tour is available via TheWritingObsession.com. Visit the group tours link, which is anchored under events in our navigation menu. As for announcements and corrections, first off, the good stuff. There's a big hubbub going on over at the Arizona Motorcycle Safety and Awareness Foundation. If you visit amsaf.org, you can learn about their Riding for the Long Haul event, which features a safety is sexy fashion show. There's a motorcycle drill teams from the local police departments, a People's Choice Motorcycle Show, vendors of motorcycles and accessories, clothing, and jewelry, a ride through food tent, that ought to be interesting, they just throw pizza at your face, as well as motorcycle safety demonstrations, food, photos, raffles, with a grand prize valued at $2,500, and much more.

Travis: Don's going to the safety is sexy fashion show in his chaps.

Robin: I am. All right. Oh, and admission is free. Also, they're seeking items. This is the big part. They're seeking items as raffle donations. If I remember correctly, so all you upstarts out there trying to gain momentum, this is a surefire way to build some popularity. Next up, I want to give a big, big thanks and shout out to the hosts over at Loud Pipes. Another great motorcycle podcast. They cite our article on sport touring motorcycle history during their recent discussion on the BMW R1200RT. That article was written by resident author Joe Conrarty, so due credit goes out to him. If you want to check out the Loud Pipes podcast, visit loudpipes.net, and more specifically, episode number 148. Ooh, that's a .net. That'll never get you anywhere. Do they save lives? They Loud... Oh, well, they don't really go there. I don't think they talk about that, though. You know, the thing is, if Loud Pipes save lives, imagine if you actually learned how to ride.

Travis: Well, it's loudpipes.net. It's .com.

Robin: A little Homestar Runner tip of the sidebar. Joe's article is a reference source now on Wikipedia for their page on sport touring, which has us feeling pretty legit.

Travis: Yeah, you're not legit until you're on an open source website that anyone can edit.

Robin: That's right. Did you do that edit yourself, Ryan? I did not. I did no such thing. You know, we're a team. I say we're a team of, yeah. Those are the announcements. And now to personal notes. Before we begin, let's welcome Don Barron to the show. Don. Hello, everyone. Welcome, Don. How's it going? It's going great. How's motorcycling been for you this month?

Don: Crappy. I live near Chicago, and there hasn't been a good day for, well, several weeks, and I missed that one day. Yeah. Doing something else. What were you doing? Sitting right where I am right now, watching TV.

Robin: Yeah, not motorcycling. I'm sorry to hear that.

Don: Not motorcycling. And it was a marginal day. It was in the lower 40s. Yeah. Yeah. That's on my borderline too cold for two wheels.

Robin: Nice. What's your primary ride? What's your main motorcycle?

Don: I have a 2014, brand new, right out of the box CB1100.

Robin: I've seen this bike.

Don: It is beautiful. It is. Thank you.

Robin: It's a wonderful machine. I'm happy for you.

Don: But it's just sitting in the garage, got the battery tender on it. Every once in a while, I go out, start it, say, ooh, okay, and I shut it off when I go inside because I'm cold.

Robin: Tim can relate to that. He'll probably tell a little bit about that in a bit here. Yeah.

Don: Yeah.

Robin: Well, we're going to have you tell us a story here in a bit. And first, we'll just go around the room and just talk about the most recent efforts in staying happy while it's cold, myself perhaps having a little bit more luxury down here south in Texas, which is nice. Travis, what about you, man? How's your month going?

Travis: It's going all right. You know, I've been playing music again, which is nice. Got together with this, we had mentioned in the last podcast, this great musician here in Madison, Julie Johnson. And we've been kind of working up a ukulele upright bass covers of like 90s, like grunge and punk songs.

Robin: Nice.

Travis: So we'll see how that goes. And then she had a gig lined up here just this last Sunday. It was all just her original stuff, kind of folky pop that we kind of pieced together with a great drummer, Jenna Jonas. And that was, we had a good time at Boss Meadery, a band called Line opened up for us. They were amazing. Four part harmonies, amazing singers. Wow. Really good. Really good kind of stuff. If you like. I don't know what I would liken it to. I'm sure there's some artists, but it's like kind of folky pop.

Robin: So they were, but they were doing four part harmony while playing instruments.

Travis: Yeah. I don't know if they were doing full four part while playing, but they had a couple of kind of bad things where like the drummer stood in front and then there was like the lead singer and then the other three band members were all doing just harmonies behind her. That was cool. Yeah. So it was pretty, it was pretty cool. Still working on the ER6N tank, doing, trying to get that fixed. I got some primer. I got the color match paint in, usually like sign for like FedEx delivers it and like you need to be like 18 to sign for paint. It's like who's ordering paint that's like going to go graffiti, like who's going to go online and order paint to go like graffiti something. I don't know what, what, what like 16 year olds going to do then. But yeah, so I got the color match paint. I still got a, now that I got primer on it, I can see some kind of divots in some stuff in where the Bondo was a little clearer with a, with a primer on it. So I'm going to go back and put another coat of filler in just to make sure it's like as smooth as I can get it. Do another primer coat, sand it and then sand it and sand it and then paint it and sand it and then sand it and paint it, paint it, sand it.

Tim: So you can put the filler right on top of the paint, on top of the primer?

Travis: Yeah, I should be able to.

Don: Okay.

Travis: I mean it's like super thin, like it's just little, little bits there. It doesn't have to be on raw metal as long as it's scuffed, it should bond. Or it'll work and then we'll go from there.

Don: Rinse and repeat.

Travis: Yeah. Sand and repeat. And the other day, Laurel and I went out to Cassville-ish, like Potosi, like Southwestern Wisconsin, in the Driftless, like basically to the Mississippi River to pick up a fridge and freezer for the restaurant. Oh nice. And they were, but, and it was a beautiful day, it was before the snow came and man, the roads out there, we were on like Highway N out of Potosi, like by where the brewery is.

Tim: Oh yeah.

Travis: Yeah, and that was, man, it was just gorgeous.

Tim: There's some really fun places to, kind of tucked in in the bluffs along the river down there.

Travis: Yeah, it looks like, I'm just kind of on the Google map, there's this place called Burton Tavern that's on like a dead end road and nowhere. But yeah, I'm trying to remember, we were like on Irish something road is where this guy lived, like in this beautiful house in a valley, big south facing windows and overlooking the valley. It was pretty awesome. But yeah, definitely need to get out there this summer and do some riding I think, do some exploring. Just kind of beeline, take two hours to get out there direct and then spend the afternoon out there. Seems like some great, great roads out there.

Robin: Yeah, I've never been out there and not enjoyed riding by that river. The river, there's some fast, deep sweeper roads.

Tim: Do you remember the bypass I took you on when we needed to get around the Catsville Ferry that was not running? Yeah, I do. That was some of those roads down there too. Those are gorgeous.

Travis: And then the only other kind of motorcycle thing that's been going on is a Robins Hawk GT started leaking gas all over my garage in the cold.

Robin: Now, how did that happen again? What did you discover?

Travis: It was leaking out of the carburetors, so I'm not sure.

Robin: Did you send a petcock? Was a petcock open?

Travis: Probably.

Robin: Yeah. I closed it. You closed it, so that means it wasn't closed before when you saw it, right? So, who was the one that rode that bike last?

Travis: I don't know. All of my carbureted bikes have float bowl gaskets on them.

Robin: Good check, Travis. And this has been the RidingObsession.com podcast.

Travis: But I closed it and cleaned it up and stuff, and then it started leaking again when we got another cold snap when it got down to the sub, the below zeroes. So I went and drained the float bowl, so hopefully we're good now.

Don: I'm not gonna make too much fun of you for that, Travis. Because I started on the CB1100, and it took me a couple weeks before I stopped making the motion for turning off the fuel valve. And then I rode the Nighthawk one time, parked it in the garage, and I forgot. Oh, yes. I can understand.

Travis: Because even actually my last... No, I guess the Buell was standard. But the big one had a vacuum petcock, so didn't have to worry about it on the big one.

Don: Well, my Nighthawk has a vacuum petcock, too, but it could still fail.

Robin: Yeah, it's funny. But yeah, I was gonna say, the vacuum petcock, the Banta had the same thing, but I always reached down and made sure I turned it off.

Tim: I don't know what it is. I know a lot of the Suzuki vacuum petcocks were having problems. Everybody on the DR650s would replace those with manual. Yeah, I never had a problem with the manual leak, but... Yeah.

Travis: So that's kind of it. Just kind of waiting for the snow to go away. We got winter weather advisory right now, and it's snowing and blowing out there. Yeah, speaking of which, Tim was just driving home tonight, weren't you, Tim?

Tim: Oh, yeah. Nice and slow. Nice and slow. I'm watching everybody who wants to prove how good a driver they are, and they're driving all way too fast for the snow.

Don: Yeah, I come out to the car after work tonight, and the car's just covered in a 16th of an inch of ice.

Tim: Oh, yay. Yeah. We got a little bit of that freezing rain, more like freezing mist this morning, and then snow on top of that. The place didn't slick.

Don: It's really hard to get a grip on the scraper. You got to flip it over to those little knobby points and break through first, and then you can straighten it off.

Tim: Oh, yes.

Robin: Just do what that one guy does with the flamethrower. Just burn it off. There's a guy that's blowing out the snow of his driveway with a flamethrower. I think it's fantastic.

Tim: Yeah, I'm only a couple blocks away from Travis's house. I had some guy foaming around a bus that was dropping off passengers and started fishtailing really bad. I had that little split second where I'm looking dead on both headlights. Please, please, please do not do this. It's not the new car, is it? Not the new ride. That was in the new truck. Oh!

Travis: Yeah.

Tim: I'm like, you are going to make me cry if you hit me.

Travis: I haven't even made a payment on it, truck.

Tim: Yeah, man.

Travis: Yeah.

Robin: That's one of those things where now you, in this weather, in this situation, you're going to have to become an assertive, decision-making, escapist driver for that kind of stuff.

Tim: Oh, right. Yeah. Driving in the truck like I'm riding a motorcycle.

Robin: Yes. Absolutely.

Don: Late Sunday morning, Monica and I were driving in her car on a two-lane country road in Wakanda, and there's a middle third lane. It's not quite one of those double left-turn lanes. Yeah. It's just this, well, maybe for the future it's a left-turn lane kind of thing. Anyways, so we're driving along. There's nobody on the road. There's a big pickup truck some distance behind us. Up ahead, there's a snowplow. It comes out of the side of the road, and he's heading towards that middle lane, but he's got his right turn signal on. I'm thinking, okay, what's this guy doing? So I hit the brakes. I slowed down. I'm going to let this guy do whatever he's doing because he's a snowplow, and snowplow drivers don't think that regular driving laws apply to them. So he takes a right from the center lane to get ahead of speed up to plow a driveway just to get a perpendicular attack. So I noticed at the last split-second possible moment, the big pickup truck behind us, I don't know, distracted.

Robin: Oh, no, no, no.

Don: Swerves to the right, goes onto the shoulder. The snow that had just fallen the day before slowed him down. He ends up hitting the snowplow just barely, just bumper on fender, probably a little tiny dent.

Robin: Only thing that makes that better is if the snowplow was shoveling his driveway. That'd be perfect.

Don: But, I mean, if he had gone to the left, he would have been clear. If he had gone to my left. But he goes to the right. And I look at Monica and I look at them and I figure, well, that was just a little tap. We're going on our way. No one needs help. Let them sort that out. Yeah, no one needs help. We're going off to our moms. No one's hurt. Yeah.

Travis: I think that's the right call for sure.

Robin: Travis, you're still in control of this, man. Where are we at?

Travis: Oh, no, I handed it off to Tim very slightly, but, you know, we get distracted.

Robin: Oh, yeah, Tim.

Don: What's going on?

Travis: All right.

Tim: Well, you know, I'm trying to remember. We talked about it over the Skype conversation, but I don't believe we actually talked about it on the podcast. So I got the new truck, which is going to be the hauler of motorcycles for big adventure trips. And also we have ordered a teardrop camper for base camp camping.

Don: I saw that on Facebook.

Tim: So it's going to be until late August, September before that thing is delivered to us.

Robin: Tim, I'm so happy for you. That thing looks like it's really decked out and stuff and tricked out, right?

Tim: It's going to be fantastic. It's going to be so nice. It's kind of their overland package, so it's going to be high clearance, rugged. It's going to be able to go anywhere the truck can go. So Tim will be going down the highway.

Don: You'll see this cutoff. Head to the cutoff. 20 minutes later, you see him rejoin the highway, right? Yeah.

Tim: Maybe. So I can do that sort of thing with the truck and the teardrop behind too now.

Robin: It's not Voltron, man. You can't just like, all of a sudden you're super powered because you're off. Your bike is not the head of Transor Z, the vehicle.

Don: Tim, Robin's been telling me about your riding habits.

Tim: Oh, yes. Yes. I've got a little bit of ADD when it comes to highways. I have a hard time staying focused and just going on a straight line. So I'm always looking for, is there a loop? Is there a cutoff or something like that? And I'm diving into these little neighborhoods and sometimes, you know, saying hi to the natives. And sometimes, you know, get myself into trouble. But for the most time, it's good. Especially like the big trip I took. I'd see what looked like a through route. And I'd cut off and it'd devolve into like an access road for the railroad that would cut through a swamp. And it's just like, I'm not going there with a loaded bike. No. I'm not doing that. I mean, if it was rocky and nasty, yeah, I'd go.

Robin: I don't do swamps. You've become kind of a scientist of the ADV nature. You really have. I mean, some of your, like the footage from that big trip, which, you know, episode three of that discussion is coming up eventually.

Tim: Right. Yeah. And I've got to get through more of that video. I haven't touched it for a while.

Robin: You know, yeah.

Tim: This is the time to do it when it's all cold and nasty. Yeah. We got six inches last weekend and we're looking at another probably six inches before it stops snowing in the morning.

Robin: Yeah.

Tim: So, and my motorcycle is buried in the back of the garage behind, you know, the lawn furniture and toolboxes. Who knows what else? I've yeah, I've got to, I've got to get that bike apart. I've got to change the air filters. I haven't. That's one of those things that's on the list of maintenance items to do.

Travis: Is it on the twin? Is it one of those to change the air filter first, remove everything that's not the air filter?

Tim: Yeah, it's not too bad. I got to pull. Like I could do it without pulling the crash bars off, but I'm going to because it's a lot easier.

Travis: Yeah.

Tim: And it's basically take the red parts off the big, the main plastics have to come off.

Travis: Yeah. So they take 10 minutes to take six bolts out and get the bars off.

Tim: And then yeah, there's a handful of plastic clips and tabs and then you're good to go.

Travis: Yeah. The NC is, is, is a pain cause you got to get all the, you got to get all the plastics off and the plastics are stacked in a way where you have to start at the back and work your way forward.

Tim: Oh yes. Yes. So I've got this idea of while I'm pulling it apart, I want to plastic dip it and change its color.

Travis: Really? From the red. Yeah. From the red, black, and white.

Tim: I was thinking about thinking about changing it up. I don't know what I'm going to do with it yet.

Travis: Royal blue.

Tim: No, I was actually thinking I'd go all full redneck on it and give it some camo. Camo.

Travis: Yup. Can you do camo plastic dip or do you have to like do like the rattle can camo where you like just mix and match it? Or are you going to do like a digital camo vinyl wrap?

Don: Well, you could do go for a sublimation pattern.

Tim: Oh, you can, you can just layer it up. You start with your dark colors and go lighter or no, you start with your light colors and then go darker as you layer out.

Travis: I think you should do, get a digital camo vinyl wrap and do that. And then, then it would look like the new KLR or the last KLR, I guess.

Tim: Right. That would be all, require all sorts of precision where the plastic dip is kind of, you just slop it on there. But that's about it for me with motorcycles. I've sadly not, not touched it. I've been putting some effort into planning for the Arkansas trip in the spring. And we'll see how that goes.

Don: I've been working on a saddlebag project on the 1100. I bought a set of field sheer, soft saddlebags, and I've got a couple of hinged brackets, kind of welded stainless steel. I've been working on getting some just the right bolts. And just today I received the aluminum spacers from aluminum spacers.com. Oh, really? Yeah. This is placed in California.

Travis: It's the spatula city of aluminum spacers.

Don: That's all they do. You get, you, you look up the ID, the OD and the length and the material you want.

Tim: Oh yeah. Just some guy in his garage in LA.

Don: You know, I don't know, but, but they, they say they ship thousands to big shops or just a few to your garage hobbyist.

Travis: We did get Facebook questions for Facebook question time.

Robin: I don't doubt it. I do not doubt it. Let's not go there yet. Let's not go there. Or did you already go there?

Travis: We haven't talked about it.

Tim: No. Okay. Well, we are ready to talk to you about your month in motorcycles.

Robin: Okay. My month in motorcycles. Goodness gracious. I'm just glad I have more than one phone account. All right. My month in motorcycles. Um, well, I got to take our own Maggie Dean, my wife, Maggie, who writes for the site as well to the twisted sisters. So she could write them herself on her street, triple R she and I've written them two up, uh, plenty of times since we've been here and, dripping Springs, Texas. It's a pretty route that basically takes about an hour to get to the start of the twisted sisters, which is a combination. I think it's, uh, something 35, something 36, something 37, but a beautiful road. And she, uh, she killed it, man. She went out there and, uh, you know, she wasn't going millennium Falcon speed, but I tell you what, she rode safe. She made safe decisions and she painted a beautiful line through the entire trip. And, uh, I was really quite fond of riding with her in that environment. Uh, I also, for our, my BMW, I got a new key fob. We won't talk about why I need a new key fob for legal reasons.

Travis: I think that was in a, uh, in an earlier podcast, what Robin did to his key fob, that would drain a battery in two days.

Robin: So I guess if you want to be a fan or if you want to come at me with legal repercussions, that's how you'll find out. But I got myself a new key fob. And also I've been installing an auxiliary power plant on the, under the passenger seat of that bike so that I can have heated gear and, uh, let's see, not Fobo, um, Volo lights, which we mentioned as one of our sponsors for this episode, uh, full of lights are going to go onto that bike. Also a USB port with some splitters so I can keep things charged like my, um, GoPro and such. Uh, it's, so it's coming along there. Um, so it's a new year. Oh, you know what? I got my coveralls back. Thank you, Travis Burleson. Thank you for my coveralls, sending them from his basement.

Travis: With a, a special treat.

Robin: Yeah. So we all got special treats right now for the, for this year's podcast. Every episode for me is going to start with a sip of this Prairie gin. All right. And you guys got, uh, two perhaps smaller bottles than I would have liked to have sent of, uh, garrisons, Texas whiskey. That's that is Texas whiskey top shelf stuff. So good. Tasty.

Travis: Uh, yeah, the whiskey, the bourbon's really, it's like really smooth, really nice bourbon. Uh, I think Kim and I were both surprised that the, uh, the pull tab for like, so it's wax dip. Um, and there's a little pull tab underneath the wax to, to open it up. The, the, the, the thing that's under the wax to pull it up is a little strip of leather.

Tim: Yeah. It was a nice touch.

Robin: I don't know. Oh yeah. Are you guys happy? Do you like, is it tasty? Or is it what do you like? I don't know.

Tim: It's tasty. I like it. It is good. It's a very mellow one.

Robin: Yeah.

Tim: Yeah. It's fairly high alcohol content, but still, you know, it doesn't have a lot of bite.

Don: That, that is, that is good to hear. Travis, how many, how many strips of that leather would I need to make a new set of traps?

Travis: Oh my God. several hundred.

Robin: I'm in my segment. So you're going to quiet this down.

Travis: Probably, probably a thousand or two. I mean, technically it's a leather thong.

Robin: The same Don Baron, man. He'll make that.

Travis: That's, that's, that's the term for a small strip is a song.

Don: Could I get away with a, maybe a couple of dozen of those small strips to make a leather thong? Oh yeah.

Robin: Just stepping all over my time, Don, stepping all over it. Welcome to the show. All right. Next item would be that I made a promise to myself that I would write one well-researched article per week, if not a revamp of older articles. So I've been sort of doing a little do-si-do with that. I'll write an article and then I'll revamp something that was from previous, whatever. So I'm trying, I'm looking for quality over quantity these days, just because the site's already been seeded and has plenty of content. The latest season of grand tour has started. Sadly, they're only doing one episode each week, which is, I was hoping they would dump the whole season so I could do a full binge, but I'm glad to watch one episode at a time. That's fine. And the first one did not disappoint. Travis, you watching that?

Travis: I have not watched it yet.

Robin: No.

Tim: Tim? No, I haven't gotten to it yet.

Travis: It's been on my, yeah, on my, it's on my list, but I just haven't gotten to it. I think they just come out this week. What day did it drop?

Robin: It just started last week. Yeah.

Travis: Yeah. So I just haven't had.

Tim: Love the way they've been advertising it. It's been pretty silly.

Robin: Yeah. Don, what about you, sir? I have not seen it yet. Well, then I am proud to be in the lead.

Don: I'm winning. So I just turned on my TV and I'm going to, I'm going to talk into my remote and I'm going to say grant tour. And then I'm going to set it for recording.

Robin: That's what I'm talking about.

Travis: So, uh, yeah. I said not to fully step on Robin's time here, but, in a related motorcycle web streaming note. Um, so Ari and Zach formerly of motorcyclist.com. You know, uh, yeah. yeah.

Tim: Ari and Zach, uh, Zach courts and area heading.

Travis: Yeah. Um, they, uh, they left motorcycle.com. They now work for, uh, 10 network for motor trend.

Don: Whoa.

Travis: And so, so if you'd get, I get motor trend on demand. Um, and, uh, but, uh, they have a new motorcycle series on there called throttle out, uh, which is pretty cool. They did one where they did like, the last one they did, they went to a motorcycle junkyard, found two junkyard bikes, made them run, and then went to like a zombie apocalypse, paintball, um, place. And then like, like shot zombies with paintballs on motorcycles.

Tim: Oh, I like the sound of that.

Travis: Yeah. And then there was the other one where they went like off-roading on like mini bikes. I'm like ground.

Robin: What's it called again?

Travis: Throttle out. Throttle out.

Robin: I'm going to add that to our list.

Travis: Yeah. I think you need to have motor trend on demand. They might end up on YouTube after X amount of months, but, and they're still doing, um, like the garage segment with, uh, with, uh, aerial. And then, the commute segment with Zach. Nice.

Robin: I'm gonna have to check. These are things that belong on our links page. Just keep people entertained, especially in the North during this cold months. That's good stuff to watch.

Tim: So have you seen the, the Grom Kana video that they put together? Grom Kana. Uh-huh. No. Oh my God. You've got to check it out. It's, I don't even want to describe it.

Robin: We can't just leave us there. Why are we checking this out? What, what is this?

Tim: All right. This is airy and Zach on Grom's beating the piss out of them. Okay. Jumping on burnouts slides. And it's the, they did a whole silly presentation for it. It's so much fun. All right. They even, they even jump the Groms. How high can you jump a Grom?

Robin: It wasn't much. How big is the hill down to the ramp?

Travis: Send it.

Tim: Hashtag send it.

Robin: Hell yes.

Tim: Well, given that, like I bottom out the shocks of a Grom hitting the brakes, you can't do much without bottoming them out.

Robin: Keeping on topic, completely related. Uh, we're about to bolt. We're about to, we're about to leave Texas. So we've, we've made our trek. This has been the coolest three month stop. It's set the bar for this adventure that my wife and I are on. Margaret and I are in a carbon three, three, seven toy hauler traveling the States. We're in a dripping Springs, Texas. We're about to take off. Um, we're going to bail. And what did I put here? we are packing up to head to New Mexico. And that means I have to remind myself how half of this shit works because I was pretty good at it for a while there. And now we've been stationary for so long that I'm just not remembering a lot of things. You should have a checklist. We do. We do have a checklist, a clipboard and a checklist and a checklist. Maybe, maybe like a, uh, some kind of card system that would help us get through the process. We can just read it.

Don: There you go. Like range cards. Yeah.

Travis: You need, you need, you need some fastidious friend to show up in a high vis vest and chaps to make sure you do everything correctly.

Robin: And now that's going to, I'm going to let that lead us right into our guest interview with field correspondent and my wife, Margaret Dean, AKA max.

Travis: Our latest interview features Isaiah Walker, a vintage motorcycle enthusiast who also knows what's what in the electric motorcycle industry, his research and development work was pushing new e-bike tech in the right direction. Let's have a listen to what Isaiah has to say.

Robin: Yeah. Isaiah, do your thing.

Maggie: Well, here we are with Isaiah. You are Tro's first interview of 2019.

Isaiah: Wow. Awesome. It's an honor. Thank you guys so much.

Maggie: And we're going to talk electric bikes.

Isaiah: Yes.

Maggie: So do you want to tell us a little bit about your background in it?

Isaiah: The big thing to me is I just have an automotive background, like through and through. And what I mean is I have a bachelor's degree from Southern Illinois University in automotive technology. I did an extra year in auto body and collision repair for automotive tech. The BS degree is spelled. That's as far as you can go. There's no master's degree for that. But what a lot of graduates do is go into engineering. That's kind of like the next step with the automotive degree. You can't go into master's program because there's not enough to actually transfer between the two automotive is much more hands-on, right? But it is very technical in it. You have to do a lot of technical writings. There's a lot of business coursework that's involved. So I went into mechanical engineering for a bachelor's degree at Oklahoma State University, and I did that for three years, and I did not finish. But within those three years, I was on a collegiate engineering design team called Formula SAE. And that is Formula, which is rules, you know, for racing. And then SAE is Society of Automotive Engineers. It's a worldwide collegiate competition. It's pretty much, it's all engineering-driven education, you know, the kind of program. And the reason I say that is because we were accepting. We would have business majors come in, and, you know, if you wanted to be an art major and you wanted to get involved, we totally accepted you. But it was truly an engineering program. And so with Formula SAE, what we do is we use motorcycle engines, and they increased the rules recently up to 750 CCs with a, I think it's a 30-millimeter restrictor on it. So it limits us to about 90 horsepower, and we design and build that vehicle in-house.

Maggie: Wow.

Isaiah: Yeah. And so it is taking all your engineering knowledge you learn in school and you apply it. And so first year on the team, put the best I could into it. Second year, I was lead engineer for engine and drivetrain. And then the third year, my last year there, I was president of the Formula team, in which my last year, I was given one of our Formula cars, which is the 2015 car, which is when I was engine and drivetrain lead. That was the car that I helped build. Since then, we were still in Oklahoma during this and really wanted to move to the West Coast. So we chose Oregon, Eugene, Oregon. It's where I'm at now. And I've dealt with vintage motorcycle parts for like six years, seven years, since 2012. And Robin probably remembers this, that I was at an auction down in Oklahoma, you know, 2012-ish, and there was an old Honda Yamaha dealership down there that had closed down. And, you know, it's like they sold the parts. Nobody knows where the parts went. Well, this older gentleman passed away who had a salvage yard, and the parts were inside of this building, completely covered under old cardboard boxes and all kinds of stuff. And I didn't plan on going to it, to this auction. And not really anybody knew what all was in there, just what you can see on the outside. You know, like old Ford Model A bodies, and a bunch, a bunch of Japanese bikes, like CB750s, KZ900s, and stuff. They were just sitting outside, you know, for like 20 years. I knew it was there, and, you know, definitely love the vintage motorcycle scene, love Japanese bikes. And I had to go to school because this is when I was taking off-campus classes at Southern Illinois up in Chicago. So let's say it's Friday. I had to be in Chicago on Saturday because my classes were over the weekend. I ended up, well, I'll tell you what. It was Friday, right before I left or something like that. My dad says, Hey, hop on the CB550. I want to go ride around with you or something. I'm like, No, Dad, I don't really. Because I have to ride on the back, so it's something I'm not used to.

Don: Yeah.

Isaiah: You know, so I'm like, No, I don't want to do it. And he pushed me and he says, Come on, do it. No, Dad, I don't want to do it. And I hopped on the back. Well, I'll tell you what. We're heading down to his house, which is just like a block away from his mother's house. My grandmother, she's 96 years old, still alive. She's awesome. And I step on a freaking nail at this. It was one of my grandmother's houses that burned down. We think some people got into it and set the place on fire. The house burned down, and there was a bunch of old debris. And I stepped on a nail, like a roofing nail, and it went clunk. I swear to my bone on my foot. Oh. So I'm just like, Gosh, dang it. And I'm thinking, Why? I didn't want to do this. Now look. And now I got to go to Chicago the next day. And we just go ahead and go right back up to the house. And, yeah, my foot hurts. And so I'm like, You know, I can barely walk on it. I don't go to the hospital. I know I've had my tetanus shot, like, three times because I always forget that I do. So I know I'm good with tetanus at this point. So I waited out. So next morning, still hurt. I was just like, You know what? I can't drive. I just can't drive. So I decided to go to the auction and found a lot of new old stock parts for Japanese bikes. And that's where I think Robin probably remembers this. I told him I bought, like, a whole bunch of NOS parts. And I had sold that off for, like, I still have this stuff. But I sold it for the last six years, seven years. You know, it kept me going through. You know, I did it part-time, kept me going through school and all that stuff. And so when I moved out here to Oregon about a little over a year ago, that's what I started off doing. I was like, You know what? I'm just going to buy all these parts, you know, just keep selling them. I'm sorry. This is a long background.

Maggie: No, it's great. I didn't know any of that stuff.

Isaiah: Yeah. And I decided, You know what? I think I just want to make this, like, a full-time thing. But I tell you what is I've always been technical-minded. I love new technology and stuff like that. The reason I really got into motorcycles or what really drew me originally was the simplicity of them. Because with the automotive tech, you know, education, you learn about collision avoidance systems, all these sensors. You know, everything that's needed to make, you know, modern things run the way they do. And here I am hopping on an 82 Honda 750 Supersport, which is my first bike. And I take the carburetors off. And I'm like, I cannot believe how simple these things are. But to me, it was cute. Because you need heavy equipment, you know, like, you know, like jacks, you know, giant floor jacks to, like, lift the vehicle up and engine hoist and all that. And I'm able to, like, pull. I can carry an engine in my hand, you know. It might hurt my back, but I can still do it. So, to me, it was really cute. That's what initially got me into it. So, because I had much more modern technical background, that was what my real interest is. You know, for tomorrow, for the future, to make things better for us. Automotive, renewable energy is something that's really big for me. I absolutely love it. The problem is, is with the vintage bikes, is that I was stuck in the 60s and the 70s and the 80s technology. That's all I dealt with.

Maggie: Yeah.

Isaiah: So, I didn't feel like I was really growing that way, you know. And so, it's something that was always on the back of my mind over a couple years, especially after I finished school. And I was like, you know, I could definitely do this. There is good money in new old stock parts. But also, the other thing is that's a limited resource, because there's only so many that's still floating out there nowadays, right? It's kind of hard to find them. But I decided, you know what? I got to make this full time. My daughter's about to be born. So, let's see what I can do. So, I set a goal to be the largest NOS dealer on the West Coast. Pretty big goal.

Maggie: Largest what?

Isaiah: New old stock.

Maggie: New old stock. Oh, okay, NOS.

Isaiah: I found a whole dealership's worth of parts in Florida. Got in contact with this guy. This is probably about December of last year. Bought a flight, you know, a ticket. Went down there. Just took me three days from finding him, making contact with him. Made the deal. Wrapped all this stuff up. I hired a freight transportation company called Roadrunner Transportation based out of Wisconsin. And went home, you know. Flew back home. And sat and was like, you know what? I made a really good deal here. And I think I'm really able to make this happen. Following tracking and what do you know? The tracking freezes. It doesn't change at all. Says it gets to Atlanta and that's it. So, this is about, you know, Christmas time. Going to New Year's. And, you know, it's kind of holiday. So, not a lot of people are working at the time. So, I have to wait until after New Year's. And I start talking to them. I said, listen, something's not right. My stuff hasn't moved at all. And they said, oh, don't worry about it. Well, give it a month down the road.

Maggie: A month?

Isaiah: A month. You know, this is really every week. And then every two days, me calling like, what's going on? Well, to make a long story short, it's all lost. They don't know what happened to it.

Maggie: Hmm. That's the story they're going with, huh?

Isaiah: Yeah. No kidding. Seriously. Anyway, there's technical stuff too. Talking to them, I knew there was something definitely fishy going on. They didn't have the proper paperwork when they picked the stuff up. Yeah. Anyway. So, during this, it really gave me time to think, hey, you know what? Is this something that I really want to do? Because, you know, it was a lot of stuff that just went missing. And it really made me, like, become introspective on what I really want to do. And when I was down there in Florida, I was like, you know what? You know, when I was buying this stuff, I was like, you know what? This is something I could definitely do. But if there's something that's better for me out there, like, I'm all game for whatever changes in my life. And stuff gets lost, I start thinking about it. And I start thinking, you know what I always wanted to do was get involved in renewable energy and in transportation, electric vehicles. You know, I don't mind what it is. It could be hydrogen fuel cells or whatever. But electric vehicles is something that I've always been interested in. And so that stuff is gone. It's out of my mind. And I start looking at electric vehicle companies here in Oregon. The first thing that I had done even before this when I was like, you know what, I want to do electric, you know, electric vehicles is I bought a bicycle. And then I bought, like, a little cheap Chinese conversion kit. You know, it was like $200. It had the battery, the motor, the controller, everything. And I went ahead and started putting this thing together. And now in engineering school today, you learn coding. So I started, I had a Raspberry Pi, and I started doing the coding for, like, the turn signals and stuff like that. And started reading up on laws because I'm like, you know what, if I do electric, you know, conversions or want to get into electric motorcycles, like make my own, what am I going to come across? You know, what rules, you know, what laws are there that I'm going to have to do? And I spent, you know, when you work on your own, like, I'm sure, you know, you guys are on the road, you're doing your own thing. This stuff can take a lot of your time, right?

Maggie: Yeah.

Isaiah: So a lot of research doing this. I'm doing the coding for the turn signals, and it just hits me. I'm like, you know what, I can't do this on my own. I cannot do this on my own. This is not a one-person thing. So that's when I start looking for electric vehicles in the area. And then I find a company called Arcimoto that's in Eugene.

Maggie: Okay.

Isaiah: It was just a Google search away. And I say, oh, my gosh, this is it. This is what I want to do. All right. So I get up. I start getting outside. I start jogging around, build some energy up. Like, yeah, like I really found something special. Like this is awesome. This is what I need right now. And I go ahead and go down there. I apply. I bring in a hood. Actually, I'm going to grab this hood and show you. This is the hood off of the formula car for the 2015 car.

Maggie: Wow.

Isaiah: Yeah. Do you like it?

Maggie: That's pretty cool. Yeah. So it's a smaller?

Isaiah: We say it's like quarter scale Formula 1 cars.

Maggie: Quarter scale. Okay. Oh, okay.

Isaiah: Motorcycle engines, it's much smaller. It's an over-engineered go-kart.

Maggie: Okay.

Isaiah: I bring it in and say, you know what, listen, this is what I want to do. Who do I talk to? And I say, you know what, just shoot HR an email. And it just took a couple days. I hear back from him going for interview. Feels great. Get a second interview. It was great. And then for the third, I'm hired. Right. Okay. So now I'm working for Arcimoto and their question is, is that I have, I'm sorry, I don't mean to brag when I say stuff like this, but I have an extensive background. Right. And I have the hands-on. I have a bit of the technical with the engineering. So they asked, what is it that you want to do? And I really think about it. And they say, listen, we have, we have so many pre-orders. It's something like 3,500 that they need to, they need to get done. I decided, you know, I'm going to work to help make you get, you know, to, to build these things. So I get put on gearbox or transmission assembly. So I am the gearbox person. The only one who actually like builds these things for, you know, for the Arcimoto's they're called the FUV. That's the model. It's a two seater. And it was a lot of fun and it was really interesting seeing, seeing what electric vehicles are capable of. My first experience with electric motorcycles would be with Xero. And I went down to a dealership that's here and real friendly guy says, you know what? Just hop on this thing, ride it around, see what you think, stuff like, you know, and they are freaking awesome. You know, I, I'm a motorhead. First thing you hear naysayers say is they don't make noise.

Maggie: Yeah.

Isaiah: And I got to say, I hop on this thing and I'm like, this is kind of weird. This is kind of weird. You got all the power you want. It's just like anything else except the noise. But just after 10, 15 minutes, I was like, you know what? This is, this is super cool in its own way. You know, forget the noise thing. Now I'm like really in with what all, what all is going on. So absolutely loved it. I knew that electric motorcycles, this is absolutely the future. And ever since then I, yeah, as you can tell, I ended up working for Arcimoto. So it's something that I would like to help create for today and for the future is to bring more electric vehicles, you know, for the mass.

Maggie: You and me and Robin both, we are, we've always been interested in electric and renewable as well. Just, you know, more sustainable energy. That's super cool. The experience you've had with actually working for a company. Can you talk about the, the growing trends with?

Isaiah: Sure. The biggest thing right off is they're growing and from demand from cells. And we are a global community now, right? Economically and whatnot. So I really like to look at China and see what's going on there because they are really pushing this technology. We have the entire EV market. We have the manufacturers of the vehicles and we have the battery manufacturers. We have charging companies that are making that. And we're just seeing crazy growth. And one thing that's really pushing that, and this is something that was driven to me in automotive school was EPA mandates. What I was pushed is that big reason why sustainable transportation is really coming out besides, you know, public demand is because of carb regulations because of EPA regulations. But with carb, you sell so many vehicles and you have to make sure that out of all the vehicles that are sold, that they have an average fuel economy of say 20 miles per gallon, 30 miles per gallon, something like that. So one way that manufacturers are able to work with this, let's look at like Chevy. All right. They make their gas guzzling truck, gas guzzling car, and then they can produce so many volts to kind of offset their average fuel economy for, for all their vehicles. And these regulations are just becoming stricter and stricter. China has had something similar and what they call it is like an emissions initiative, something like that. But China has a mandate that's coming up in 2025. It's called the China sustainability goal. 2025 they want, you know, so many vehicles on the road to be sustainable and the government's push is towards electric vehicles. So that's 2025. And then here in the U S the next big EPA mandate is going to be 2020. And once again, this is going to affect carb. It's going to be the average fuel economy. And this is only next year. And when I was in school, I remember thinking 2020, you know, this is six years from now, five years from now. And it's like, yeah, that's quite a while, you know, quite a ways away. But now here we are. And this stuff definitely has to get done. So if it truly is just because the EPA regulations that are pushing manufacturers to produce more sustainable vehicles, that's all right. But I really, really do believe, and this is what we're seeing that there is a growing demand and the flagship for this is Tesla. Last time that I went through Chicago, like, you know, North suburbs, I saw so many Tesla's driving down the highway. I couldn't believe it. I could not believe it. And now, you know, I went to LA just over New Year's. And once again, so people are definitely wanting these. There's no doubt the demand is there. There's, you know, there's different factors for it. You know, the big one is climate change, right? Man, I tell you, when I was at Oklahoma State, ooh, that is an oil school. And it was kind of frustrating. And I've got some stories about earthquakes there. I was in Stillwater, Oklahoma, Central Oklahoma, and we were getting three or four earthquakes that were, you could feel them, that where they would shake the house a week. And that was crazy because 10 years prior, you might get one earthquake every three months, four months that you would kind of feel, but you just felt, you know, the frequency of these things just increased. But anyway, that's another, that's another story. But let's see.

Maggie: What was the frequency of the earthquakes caused by something? Like fracking? That was not a leading question. I actually just...

Isaiah: It is the truth, and I tell you why. I experienced it firsthand. So the area that I'm in has a lot of fracking wells. At least in Stillwater, it had a lot of fracking wells. I think it was like 50 there, just like within like 30-mile radius of the town, of the city there, right? So we're getting all these earthquakes. It was something that we as students talked about, like, oh, did you feel that last night? Yeah, it woke me up. I couldn't believe it. You know, stuff like that. And then you turn on the news, and they'd be like, well, this town just had a big earthquake, and all these storefronts just had all their stuff damaged inside. And then they go and interview people, and I kid you not, one of the people said, oh, yeah, yeah, I've heard that earthquakes are caused by fracking, but I also heard they're caused by UFOs too. You know, like trying to make it seem like anybody who says that fracking is a problem is crazy. That was the mentality that, no, this is not what's going on. But then there is the crossroads, the oil crossroads of America, which is a small town called Cushing, Oklahoma. And that's probably about, it was about an hour, no, it was 30 minutes. It's away from Stillwater, from where I was at. And I tell you, you go there, and you can smell oil in the air. You can smell it. It has a very strong, you know, like a pungent scent. It kind of almost like burns your nose. You can smell it, and there are massive pipelines. And I mean, you know, they're all underground, but there are certain junctions where they come up from under the ground, and then they have the control valve that's there. And there's security that's posted up, and outside of the town there's massive like oil reserves and all that stuff. You know, huge tankers, right? Well, this town of Cushing got hit by like a 6.3. And this was like, you know, right before I moved, because this is, I was like, you know, we got to get out of here. 6.3. I don't blame you. Thank you. It was like November of 2018. Is that right? No, November of 2017, okay? Look it up. This was an old town, you know, like early 1900s buildings. And you hear on the news all these buildings were damaged from the earthquake, and I said, you know what? I got to see this for myself because I'm getting hit with these things enough. I got to know. Hop on my motorcycle right through the rain, get down there to Cushing, and as soon as I get to downtown, everything is closed off. I mean, there's police line tape everywhere. The police are everywhere. There's like almost not a single soul downtown because it's all taped off. I hop off my bike, and I decided to go ahead and walk past this stuff, you know, walk past the police line and check this stuff out. I live feed it on Facebook, and I kid you not, all these buildings, every single building had damage. And I mean like the front, like facias or whatever, the buildings were collapsed. The roofs were caved in. And, I mean, these were like mall and pop shops, you know, in these small little towns. And you would like look through the mirror or look through the glass, and you would see all these people's like inventory, all their goods they had for sale just completely collapsed on the ground, broken. I kid you not, it's like two-story building. The roof caved in, and you can see how the roof like came down into the bottom floor. It was crazy. It was crazy. And as every building was damaged, everyone hopped. So I'm like feeding some security guys like, Hey, you're not supposed to be over here. I'm like, you know, I'm friendly. I'm like, okay, thanks for letting me know. I didn't know. And so I hopped back on my bike and I decided to just go ahead and just ride around and just see all this stuff. I just want to see what the damage of this place was. So I hit it outside of town and I think it was going south of this town. And this is where their huge oil tank reserves are. That's what I'm talking about. Those giant cylinders, you know? So I forget which company it was, was obviously a company that owned all this stuff that was out there. I'm right out there. It's raining. And there's a cop that's posted up in this vehicle, blocking the roadway going back into, you know, where all these, all these oil containers are. And all you see is all these workers just running. Like they're panicking, like bringing backhoes, like digging the ground using these backhoes to dig all this stuff. I mean, they were in panic. They were in panic. And I would, I sat there and I watched this. I was probably about a block away from the road that where the, the police officer had blocked it off. And all of a sudden I saw a semi just come in, coming out, pass it, pass the cop car and go past me. And it was old pipeline that you could tell that they just dug up and put on that thing. Old ass pipeline. So I know for damn sure who knows how many pipelines. Oh, it was such a disaster in its own way that surprisingly Oklahoma, some, somebody, some government agency in Oklahoma shut down every fracking well within the like 30 or 40 mile radius of where I was at. Wow. Yeah, it was amazing. It was, it was mandated. They all had to be shut down. And what, what do you know? The earthquake frequency started to really tip off. And then I was probably there three months after that four months. And then we didn't get a single like earthquake where we could fill probably after a month and then, you know, like two months. So yeah, yeah, that definitely, definitely does that. Now, you know, there's, there's geological reasons for it too. Like there's fault lines are through there. So, you know, breaking the rock, you know, that where it's already kind of, you know, kind of shaky, it's not the smartest thing, but that's what they were doing. And Oklahoma was the earthquake capital of the United States. Gosh, but like 2014, 2015. And I mean, you think of earthquakes, you think California, right?

Maggie: Yeah.

Isaiah: Oklahoma where the wind blows and the oil loves to come out of the ground. But yeah. Yeah. So that was more, not ammunition, but it's confirmation that we really are doing some type of damage, you know, to, to our planet.

Maggie: There you have it folks. Cause and effect.

Isaiah: Heck yeah.

Maggie: I'm sorry. So that was a crazy story. And I don't remember any of that from the news, but I also am not a huge news watcher for certain reasons, but that's a sidebar. I'm sorry. So getting back to why there's such a demand for electric vehicles, electric motorcycles, and you were saying climate change is one.

Isaiah: Climate change, EPA mandates, and from hearing a lot of the EPA like regulations and some of the other like safety regulations, sometimes I started getting the idea that these are actually probably created by the auto manufacturers themselves to make things more technologically advanced that would be a lot harder for competition to build up and for new people to come in. And I don't know if that's exactly right, but it's an idea that I have in the back of my mind because some of this stuff can get, can get pretty technical. But what we do know for sure, the EV market in general in China has doubled in the last four years. Another thing you'll see, and this is the same thing for like developing nations. You always get smaller vehicles. Like you look into places like Thailand or, you know, like South Africa and you'll see everybody running around on little scooters, right? To save fuel costs. Well, there is a micro car boom that's been going on in China. And these are these tiny little cars and they're only capable about 30 miles an hour. They're extremely affordable. They're like a thousand dollars like us. And they're just like a prerequisite for something that's more affordable and more sustainable. The one thing we know for sure is that electricity is three, four times cheaper than gasoline. And I'm talking about actual distance that something would get you from point A to point B. And then the simplicity of electric vehicles over internal combustion engines. I mean, it is night and day. Like I said, I'm a bit of a motorhead when I was doing an engine and drive train for the formula team, I was getting to, you know, some engineering principles, figuring out, I told Robin years ago and he's like, wow, that sounds pretty cool. But knowing everything that goes into the design of engines, and then we have regulation or emissions regulations on top of that. It's a whole nother world. When it comes to electric at Arcimoto, when we went to apply for our EPA stamp, guess what? We send the application and then we got something back and it said exempt. So that's huge. I mean, R and D costs, manufacturing costs just because that you don't have to comply to, to, to emissions regulations, a pusher in itself for, for manufacturers. Now we know battery technology, right?

Maggie: Yes.

Isaiah: Research it's up there. And then motors I've heard with, with zeros motors that it is like an in-house design and they have this thing certified to be like an aircraft or be like aircraft rated, which is like the highest you can do. Well, you know, they've got their patents all over that thing, protect that. But the amount of, of money, you know, amount of capital it must've taken to get to that point. I'm sure it's up there. The other thing to that is look at like Honda. They stopped designing their own transmissions. For example, they realized was the best thing to do was to hire companies that were all they did was specialize in designing and building a particular component transmissions in this case. And they just buy it directly from them. And so that really saves on the R and D costs and all that. Then if you did it in house. And so that's something that the EV market, you know, if you go online and look up, you know, motors, you know, you want a 40 kilowatt motor or whatever, there's tons of them, tons of people, you know, Companies are making these things. And if we start really driving this, you know, into the future, then the cost of all this stuff has gone down. And I mean, that's a whole nother conversation. It's how the price of production of all this stuff and the efficiency of all this stuff is just constantly, the cost is going down and efficiency is going up solar cells. For example, that's a huge thing right there. And the battery technology is always, always getting better.

Maggie: Okay. So with battery technology, where are we at right now? We're lithium ion batteries.

Isaiah: Lithium is like the battery. It's a preferred thing. It's what Tesla uses, but there's even different types of like lithium. You can get into lithium phosphates, life fees. If you ever heard of those lithium iron, it sounds like ion, but it's F E like iron, like steel.

Maggie: Oh, okay.

Isaiah: We had a lithium iron battery for formula and it was unbelievable compared to what we used before. It was an AGM battery, the AGM they're heavy, but boy, they can really take a beating and they can really hold a charge even in crazy temperatures. That's what I use in my bikes is our AGMs. But we went from like a 10 pound battery to something that was like half a pound and it provided more cranking amps. It was incredible. But the problem with at least our lithium battery, and I think it's pretty, this is lithium in general is you have to be careful not to discharge these things below a certain amount. If you completely cycle them down, you really cut the life expectancy. This is something that you can definitely look up and actually really see firsthand like the charts and the graphs of how much the life is depleted by that. But as long as you take care of lithium batteries, they're pretty superior. They are really darn superior. People also still push for nickel metal hydride, which is a heavier battery. I don't know a whole lot about them, but because of concerns that lithium is unsafe and, you know, they'll catch fire and stuff like that. Nickel metal hydride is I guess a more stable, but it's a safer battery in case there are accidents or any charging issues or discharging issues, that kind of, but it all comes down to battery chemistry, the quality of the materials. There's different things that many people take like a buffer zone. So like how much you separate the internal components of the battery cells, just in case something were to happen. That's another conversation, the ways that you can make lithium batteries safer than what they are today. To me, every time I hear about safety concerns with lithium, I always think back to some documentary I saw years ago. It was about, you know, gasoline cars are first coming out to the public and you know what you did? You rolled up to the gas station and they hooked up like a ground wire to your vehicle because they were worried about static electricity. But not only that, people were freaked out by gasoline. Worst case scenarios, explosions, which rarely happen, but people had a serious fear for gasoline. And that's kind of gone away over the years. You know, the amount of technology that's gone into gas tanks, composite materials and the way they're designed and where they're placed. I mean, it is night and day. Worst case example is, oh gosh, that car that was from Flint, Michigan, that always caught fire every time you would hit it. You know what I'm talking about? I don't, but maybe Robin would know. I bet he knows, you know, like commuter economic car and a commemoration of Flint, Michigan. Well, these things, every time they're in a rear end collision, they always caught on fire. But, you know, it's just engineers, you know, they're trained. I'd love to say we, but I'm not an engineer, but engineers are trained to solve problems, right? Real world problems. So to me, yeah, there's, there's going to be fires. There has been fires. You look into it and I got two examples, like a cell phone batteries, like why they were catching fire. There's a report that was done and they said, you know what? The manufacturers of the batteries, either they were doing things improperly or they weren't doing into like actual like regulation and laws for, you know, for EU standards or for American standards, that kind of thing. And let's see the other one. Hysteria, right? You know, like the news, not always, you know, they're not always the most accurate. I love reporters, you know, but there can be bad reporting, but I love reporters. Anyway, the last Tesla car that I heard, the model S that caught on fire headline was Tesla got a flat tire and then caught on fire. That's the headline. And it's like, what the heck? All right. That makes no sense. You look into it and I believe the vehicle actually hit something and it punctured the battery pack. So when I'm not sure this is true for all batteries, but for lithium batteries, if you puncture them and you short them out, you can start, they can start creating like a chemical reaction. They start heating up main reasons for battery fires. But anyway, so it hit something battery pack. I punctured, and then it was towed to a tire place. And then that's when the car caught on fire. And so they kind of like scrambled it around.

Maggie: Yeah.

Isaiah: This Tesla car caught on fire. You know, it's always like, are they safe? Are they really safe? It's I trust the engineers. That's where I'm at. And you hear other cases and the vehicle actually tell the driver, you know, you need to get out of the vehicle right now because they have all the sensors to, you know, to figure out there's actually something that's about to happen with the battery. And so it gives you time to get out. Yeah, I'm sorry. If you want to go ahead and ask another question, because I could totally just start.

Maggie: What about when electric vehicles started gaining more popularity and the hybrids, part of what helped them was the regenerative braking in relation to motorcycles. Is that a feature that can also be used with motorcycles?

Isaiah: It definitely can. Arcimoto is a three-wheeled motorcycle and it's technically a motorcycle because it has three wheels and they use regenerative braking for the front wheels. It's an awesome, basic electrical experiment. You could take a little electric motor, hook it up to a battery, and then it powers it. And then go ahead and take that and then spin the motor backwards or, you know, spin it without the power of the battery and then it produces electricity, just simple charging. And that's exactly what happens is that they reverse the polarity, the flow of the electrons back into the battery. Regenerative braking, I think it's about 70% efficient. And so I think it's fantastic and it reduces wear on your brakes, right? But it's really interesting and it totally can be applied. When I would drive the FUVs, the Arcimoto FUVs, I would use the regen brake all the time and I barely had to use the brakes. The regen alone, I was able to slow it down to where I wanted it. I know it's going to be applied, but yeah. Oh, and I mean, same thing with just motorcycles in general, where they're started, well, they have been adopting ABS. And so that's something that really probably should just keep on getting pushed on with new models and new models and models. The reason I say that is that regen, it definitely takes, not a whole lot of time, but you have to get used to judging how much it's actually going to break down on you. And the other thing is, you know, you don't want to like lock up your wheel, right? So if you combine regen with ABS, then you have yourself like a bulletproof system, right?

Maggie: Oh, okay. So how about some of the, the leading companies in electric motorcycles? I know that Robin definitely likes Energica.

Isaiah: Yes, badass motorcycle.

Maggie: Energica, Lightning, Alta, Zero. Those are the ones that are out there. Are there some others or do you agree?

Isaiah: Yeah. Energica, you know, they've got like the zero 60 in three seconds, like 150 miles an hour and even 150 miles, miles an hour, top speed. Incredible. Awesome. Right. They do a good name for, for, for EVs and the Lightning, which Jay Leno, he had like an episode of that in Jay Leno's garage, which I love that show. Also 150 mile an hour motorcycle. First company that comes to mind, Zero, they're doing great things. Like I said, it's the first one that I hopped on and I, I fell in love with it. You know what I'm saying? Like I really, really, really enjoyed it. Alta, and I'm kind of having difficulty finding out exactly what happened, but it seems like they, they closed down or, you know, like I had some type of trouble, but I was really trying to figure out if that was actually true or not. Did I notice that Harley had anything to do with Alta? Do you know if that's true?

Maggie: I saw something about there was a partnership, some investment partnership, and then I don't know what happened after that.

Isaiah: Gotcha. And another one here in Oregon, I think it was Ashland, Oregon, which is just North of me. It was a company called Brammo, which made a racing electric motorcycle. And they did really well. They had their own model out. I think it's the impulse and they did really well. And I think Polaris came in and just bought everything that they had, just bought the name and everything. That was another company that's no longer around, but then there's Harley Davidson. And that is a story in itself, right? And electric motorcycles and yeah, every Harley rider that I've spoken with, they're not the biggest fan of electric motorcycles. And it's, it's really cool. I'm really glad that they're doing it and God, I mean, that must've been a really tough decision for them to do, but there's another thing, you know, in that, that they saw where the market is going. They know what the future is and they said, you know, we got to do it. And here they are, they're coming out next year, I believe with the live wire. So it's a pretty cool looking bike, I got to say, but yeah, I'm really looking forward to seeing how that comes out. Okay. There's a little cute motorcycle. I think it's pronounced UBCO, the U B C O.

Maggie: Hmm. I haven't heard of that one.

Isaiah: It's called like the two by two. It's a little small, you know, just get around putt, putt utilitarian, uh, EV bike. Um, but it looks like it reminds me of like the old school Honda CT nineties and like one tens.

Don: Oh yeah.

Isaiah: And that's something I've seen five, probably about five times around here in Eugene, people riding around on. And I I've seen them, you know, take it out in the dirt, like going off these little like hills and stuff. They look like a lot of fun. Those are probably, those would be the biggest companies I would definitely look out for right there. But the big, big, big thing is seeing what China's coming out with. What are the manufacturers, new companies are coming out there. There's six or seven EV automobile manufacturers in China. I don't know if you heard of Neo, they were like a recent one that just, they had an IPO about six, seven months ago, something like that. But they're definitely growing. They're coming. US companies are growing. Um, there's a whole bunch, a whole bunch of even like smaller ones that just, you know, kind of have like a moped ish, you know, like electric bicycle kind of, kind of feel to them that are, that, that exists. But so like zero energy, uh, lightning Harley. Um, yeah, I guess that's really about it. Oh, and that upco the one I really liked.

Maggie: I did see that China is expected to be a major player in that market. And, you know, there's some estimation of some 35 million units by 2023. It didn't even occur to me who would be the suppliers of those bikes. It makes sense. You know, it's a large population. It's a population that is already embraced bicycles, you know, um, for efficiency and, um, obviously is, would be clean. Uh, but, uh, I think that's pretty interesting that China is going to be probably the largest single country anyway, um, in the market for electric motorcycles. And, uh, I, uh, you know, I think it's got to help that the, the, the consumer market is embracing electric vehicles or they're more confident in electric vehicles. I think Tesla's definitely helped with that. And, uh, I'm, I mean, we're seeing, you know, a lot of the urban cities have the different like bike sharing programs. And so I saw that there's going to be a couple of cities looking at, um, EV scooters, scooter sharing.

Isaiah: Excellent point. So for smaller stuff like that, like the electric scooters, I think it's called line. And if you go to like San Francisco, you'll see all these little like, uh, scooters, they're kind of like on the curb and in front of people's homes, like just lying out on their lawn. And it's just cheap transportation. And there, there, there's a lot of demand for these things. And you look at today's kids growing up, they have all these little like hoverboards and little electric, this little electric, that, and they're growing up with this stuff. It's cheap. It's a lot of fun. And so that's a huge thing for me. Why the future truly is electric transportation in electric motorcycles in particular, because that's, that's the next thing. If you, you just sell, I mean, have you seen all these electric power assist bicycles? Yeah, it's, it's really, it's the next step. You know, we all know electric, uh, motorcycles are a lot of fun. There was like a big dip dip off. I think it was like 2007. There was like a peak of motorcycle sales in the U S and then it just like plummeted. Well, it's leveled out, I think in the last two or three years. And it's starting to go back up again. So if we can as a motorcycle culture always teach others, you know how to get on and, and have fun and not be worried, you know, your first times to ride a bike and stuff like that to really spread it out. I see a huge, huge market potential for motorcycles for electric motorcycles, but it's really looking at the kids today and all the little electric stuff that they have. There's a, there's a kid that rides by my garage. Um, I've got eight motorcycles right now, pop the garage door open. I'm always working on something. And there's like this little eight year old kid that's always riding by on this super cool motocross electric bike. And he's just, he's just here to go up and down, up and down. And you can tell he loves this thing. And when you're a kid like that, and there's other cool kids in the neighborhood, they're like, Hey, can I try out your motorcycle? You know, your little electric bike and you'll see his friends ride it up and down and stuff like that. So it's, to me, it's the future. It's, it's self-evident.

Maggie: I think that's a good thing. And that's something that the manufacturers should be. And they're not already embracing the trends. There's a lot of prototypes and concepts, which is great, you know, but Rob and I were looking at a couple of slideshows. There's one called ethic. I don't know if you've seen that E T H E C. And I think it gets up to 250 miles. If I, if I'm remembering correctly, this is the one that was built by some Swiss students, you know, to school, but it's not going anywhere. It's just a concept. There's a lot of people for fun or for art or the challenge. They're making a lot of interesting looking prototypes and concepts for electric bikes and scooters. But right now I want to hear more about how are these going to, are they going to remain concepts? Because some of them will cost you $50,000. That's not going to appeal to the kids and the millennials coming out of, you know, college with debt that do like these little efficient and fun, cool little electric rides. So I hope that, I hope the manufacturers are really taking this seriously.

Isaiah: For sure. And they're just, they're going to get beaten out by manufacturers are able to make it happen for low costs. Henry Ford, the model T, right? You know, he wasn't the man that invented the car, but he was able to do the assembly line, which made them much more affordable for the average person to afford. And that's what really made them sell is that they were affordable with that. Something my dad always told me is if you're able to get something that where the, the average person's able to easily afford it, it's not going to hurt them. Then it's going to sell. And you're totally right. It's the same thing with this. If they can appeal to the millennials who don't have the income, then it's going to happen. It's still going to happen. Like hybrids just in general. I've seen a lot of people in my age group that have hybrids. They love them, right? Because you really save the money. My wife, she has a Prius, a Prius C. She's had it for like three years and just two weeks ago, she convinced her sister to get a Prius as well. And already the first thing she says, and, you know, we always associate hybrids with fuel economy because that's really what they're designed for. She had a Jeep Compass. She says, you know, I put $20 in my tank on Monday and Friday, I still had half a tank left. And for her, that was like incredible. So yeah, it's affordability. Absolutely. And whoever is able to just produce and produce and produce and, you know, get all the, all the issues and work out all the kinks and stuff. And just naturally the cycle of business and productions that things always get cheaper over time. That's a matter of time and it just depends on who's really going to put the first step to really make it happen. And we already know some of the major players are making it happen.

Maggie: So you, you kind of touched on this earlier. You, you, you bought a conversion kit and you have an, you have a mechanical and engineering background and you realized that you were not going to be able to, to, to get through this conversion kit on your own.

Isaiah: So not the conversion kit, but if I wanted to start like an electric motorcycle company.

Maggie: Oh, I see. Gotcha. Okay.

Isaiah: Cause conversion kit, not a problem. Oh my gosh. Like I said, internal combustion engines, a lot going on there. But as soon as I bought this conversion kit and I started messing with it, you know, it's like a bench tested, right? You take the motor, you put it like on the floor, you know, get your legs crossed and you hook up the battery and then you hit the, the potentiometer to make it run. It starts running. You're like, are you serious? You don't have to deal with all the cranks and cans and all the timing and all that stuff. No, none of that.

Maggie: Valves carbureted. Yeah. Yeah.

Isaiah: So, oh yeah, they're, they're so simple. And it's, it's honestly, it's something that anybody can do. I mean, if you want to start off with a bicycle definitely, definitely easy on, like I said, just go on eBay, you know, like a hundred to $200 for like a complete kit and just slap that thing on. It's, it's simple enough. It's simple enough for the everyday person to do. And you know, that's another thing with utilitarianism and people being able to take care of their own stuff. There is a whole thing out there with major automotive manufacturers. This is once again, it's another conversation about how they purposely make things that where you can't access certain types of data going on with the vehicle and ways to be able to figure out what the computers are thinking and what they're sensing. So what they've wrote, the really doing is that they're locking mechanics out of being able to repair these vehicles that were, you have to take them to their own dealership with EPA laws. You have this thing called OBD onboard diagnostics too. And this started in 1995. This was emissions, federal emissions laws that were every single vehicle that sold the United States has to be able to let anybody who wants to access this information has to be available to them. And so that's, you know, old school mechanics or I say old school and I'm talking about people in the nineties because you see we're in 2019 now they can just hook up their regular old scanner and they'll find their code, you know, like peel 300 or whatever and they'll be like, Oh, this is what it is. They go by that part, throw it in, fixes it. No problem. Awesome. The computer did his job, told you what you needed to know, but it's a thing called global OBD too. There's a little technicality and I don't know how this got in there, but not all codes and not all information has to be readily available. Only certain ones. And so what we're seeing or what we've been seeing, this is one thing I was taught and this has been in the last at least six years that you'll find a code, the computer spits it out and then use a different scanner and you get a different code than what you got. And then you take it to the dealership and they could have an even different code. And this is manufacturers taking revenue and they're making go back to the dealerships. There's arguments that it's really for quality control that they want to make sure that their vehicles are able to be repaired correctly because I guess with the consumer reports and then JD power and associates that they look into that kind of stuff as well. You know, after three years, after five years, how many repairs had to be done and how it was to repair and stuff like that. But ultimately people are getting locked out of being able to fix these things themselves beyond the fact that things are becoming so much more complicated. You really should go to school for at least two years, understanding how all these systems work and how to diagnose and all this other stuff. But they're becoming so complicated that now if you want to be a regular DIY, good luck. You don't have like a background trying to fix your car. But with the electric vehicles, they're so simple. This is something that you just spend a month or two working on and you can just universally put it anywhere else. You can fix this bike, you fix that bike, fix that bike, you get the, get the basis of it. So I think for a future society, you know, sustainability, people being able to repair their own stuff, that is super important. I think that's another major selling point is that, you know, people say, Hey, you know what, this, uh, this electric motorcycle I bought or electric scooter or whatever, it might have issues, you know, it has this issue, but don't worry. It just costs $30 and believe me, you can replace the part yourself. It's not a problem. That's another thing I'd kind of be looking forward to. Besides it being more affordable, also the ease of being able to repair these things and maintain them.

Maggie: Yeah. Low maintenance. And, uh, what you're talking about, both my motorcycle and Robin's motorcycle has that where, uh, let's just say there, there's a little diagnostic icon that appears on our dashboards letting us know it's time to take it to the dealership. And even if it's something simple that we could do, for me, it's a little wrench that appears and you can try to ignore it for a while and say, Oh, that doesn't bother me. I already addressed that. But at some point it's going to bother you, you know, like, Oh, maybe there's something else that I just don't know about. I won't name mine. Actually, anyone who reads, who knows the site can see what I have and Robin's as much as he loves his motorcycle. Uh, I won't name them. They're very popular motorcycle starts with a B and the W. Anyway, you brought this up already, but this sort of weaves in through everything. Uh, we talked about battery technology, uh, and we talked about how China is really embracing an EV society. And I think you're up to, because they, they already have smaller vehicles and they have the stricter emissions protocols in the large urban areas. You'll see a lot of Teslas. Are we at a point like, is it, do you think this trend is still going to remain more in larger urban areas besides diehards who love the noise that their motorcycles make? And I'm what, I do love the sound of my bike, but what about, um, the issue if it is an issue with charging with motorcycles, is it going to require some special charging protocol or is it, will it be as easy, you know, to, to plug it in and, and you're good to go again in another 30 minutes or an hour or whatever. Is that getting better or what's going on there?

Isaiah: It is getting better. It is. And big thing is the type of charging systems we have. That's a, that's a whole nother market. That's there's a charging manufacturers. You'd hear about level one, level two, level three chargers. And as far as I can tell, we have up to level two for motorcycles, for EVs and that really knocks down the charging time. So if you start off with a regular level one, which is like your one 10 in your house, you're looking anywhere between like eight, 12 hours to charge. You go to a level two, which is a bump up in voltage and things like two 20 then, then it knocks it down to about an hour and a half to two hours.

Maggie: Wow.

Isaiah: Yeah. Now the big thing, and this is what Tesla had to do. And I'm not trying to use them as an example in this, in this case, but they realized the problem really is infrastructure. If we're not there yet with the battery technology to really make these things run, you know, like 400 miles before a charge and all that, we need the infrastructure. What's really nice is that zero, for example, you can use a level two charger and you can park it at any regular car charging station. Big thing for me is just plain old power, you know, just basic old torque and horsepower for, for industrial purposes, torque is super important, right? You just want to be able to get some heavy machinery to be able to do some heavy jobs and torque is where it's at. So, you know, you look at farmers with like a combines and semi trucks, Tesla's making electric semi trucks because that's what everybody knows. You associate electric motors with a crap ton of torque. And that is absolutely true is there. So one thing, and this would be an interesting social experiment. I guarantee it's going to go this way as you start taking real heavy equipment, get rid of the diesel, you know, tractors and all that replace them with electric. And in this case, it's going to be economic. It's going to be cheaper, more cost-effective to go ahead and do this. They have a large plots of land. They're able to hook up, you know, the cheaper, the way more efficient solar panels of the future. And then their kids are going to grow up, you know, farmers kids are going to grow up with these electric vehicles. And I already said, you know, there's nothing wrong with this. This does the job. Right. But you're totally right. The, the, the, it's American culture as well. And I have respect for it because I'm, I'm partially a part of it. I love turning combustion engines, you know, you're like hearing the boom. I don't really roll coal, you know? Yeah, it is kind of funny, you know, it's fun, but it's not my thing, but the culture is there for respect for, for fossil fuels and that kind of thing. But the electric vehicles for the rural, Oh my gosh, I actually never even thought about that for farms and stuff. How far do they travel? They stay with on the farm.

Don: Yeah.

Isaiah: Okay. So basically, yes, as technology builds on, you know, battery technology, and then we start adding infrastructure for rural areas, it's just a matter of time. And I'm not saying that I really think that, you know, they're all going to switch over majority to electric, but it's definitely going to have an impact and there's going to be a market that's going to be there once this stuff continues on.

Maggie: I am looking forward to my first ride on a electric bike. I mean, I do like the sound of my, of my street triple, but I don't think it'll take me long to get used to the quiet of the bike. I think, I don't think that'll take me very long. I think I just love my bike. So I like the sound of my bike. It's not that I necessarily need all of that, but I'm looking forward to it.

Isaiah: Oh, I told her, yeah, you definitely should do it. Just when, if you guys pass through her and Eugene, you know, just take, take a couple hours from your day, plan it and I'll take you down to the dealership and introduce you to the guy and hop you on those areas. He's got a couple there and he's always happy to have you guys try them out.

Maggie: Deal, deal, deal.

Isaiah: The other thing with that, right, is we love the sound of our, of our engines. We love it. But then there's also the piece of the quietness that's there, like really just being like, you know, in the moment kind of thing. And we all know how meditative and relaxing riding a motorcycle is, especially, you know, like cutting corners and all that stuff. But yeah, on an electric motorcycle, it is, it's, it's different. But yeah, I totally hear what you're saying.

Robin: Isaiah Walker, ladies and gentlemen, Isaiah, you're my hero, man. But at an hour and a half, we have run the gamut for this half of the series for 2019's first episode. It's a two-parter. Don't worry though. The next episode is going to be available to you tomorrow, as in the next day after this episode's publishing date. So check back in. We'll pick back up where Isaiah left off for a short stint before getting back to the segments of the Riding Obsession podcast with guest host Don Beeren. Come on back and check it out. With the Riding Obsession, I'm Robin Dean. Safe travels, everyone.