After years and years of cruiser-oriented design pushing seat heights closer to the pavement, I view these bikes as natural alternative for those of us who have longer inseams and who value sufficient suspension travel, even if we never go off road.

I was always amazed at Dr. Bose’s ability to hire so many MIT engineers with tin ears. The place was crawling with them back in the late ‘70s when I worked at “The Mountain” in Framingham.

Nailed it. Back in the late ‘70s, I worked for Bose on their demos that they would cart around to impress the unknowing. We had a special pair of 901s that had split banks of speakers driven by source material on a Teac 2340 four-channel tape deck so that they could artificially enhance the direct/reflected sound. It…

There’s smoking and then there’s SMOKING. It was not the first, nor the last, two-stroke bike I owned. My Suzuki GT500 which preceded the H2 barely smoked at all as did the RD-350 which followed it. Both those bikes got much better fuel economy. The RD-350 was a much, much, better bike. It had the top-end rush…

What I left out was how I parted ways with the H2. In October of '77, I slapped a fairing on it, sold everything I owned (including my '69 Charger for $375), strapped a sleeping bag, a tent and a duffel on the back and rode it 2/3rds of the way across the country. I kicked around in Albequerque, NM for a while and…

The bike that followed the H2 was a ‘75 RD 350. I miss that bike. It handled well, it braked well, it was a revelation that made a Yamaha fan for years to come.

The ugly truth is that these are *awful* motorcycles. I owned the original 1972 model. I don’t know how they did it but, somehow, the Kawasaki engineers managed to hide a hinge somewhere in the middle of the frame. Lean it into a sweeping corner and the bike would set up a low-frequency oscillation. The less said…

There’s no excuse for Bose muddiness in any price class. Listening to Bose is like sandpapering your eardrums with Vaseline. The cost difference between Bose components and decent stuff is vanishingly small compared to the upcharges car manufacturers get for “premium” sound systems. Here’s an important point: more…

“...for no good reason..”

Let’s pose a hypothetical question: Let’s say every single farmer decided to become a web programmer. After all, it’s their choice what to do. Does society have an interest in preventing this? Of course it does. We all have an interest in preventing behavior that puts us at risk either directly or financially. Now,…

“...haul a Piper Cherokee...”

The day I picked up my access-cab Tacoma, I rode my motorcycle to the dealer. I was pleasantly surprised when the bike (Kawasaki 650 Ninja) fit nicely in the bed (at a slight angle, but not too bad) with the tailgate closed.