European Invasion

The European invasion has begun.

Twinline has been taking in European stuff from the beginning, but word has only just gotten around that the guys can master these bikes as well as Japanese ones. It happened overnight. We had no British stuff at all, and then wham! We got hit by six projects in a week and a half.



One guy wants us to do a cafe seat for his Triumph. Another Triumph is in the works. We've taken in a '68 BSA Lightning, followed shortly thereafter by a '71 or '72 Norton Commando 850. The Italians didn't want to be left out, so a '61 Ducati has appeared as well.

"It's gonna be fun to work on these bikes," Ian said. "They're designed differently and have a different character than Japanese bikes, so they're a refreshing change of pace after having our heads in the belly of the Japanese beast for two years."



The guys already solved the BSA's electrical problem. We just got the parts for the Triumph pictured. The Norton is waiting its turn.



"We're keeping the Norton in the shop because it's really gorgeous and we want to look at it for as long as we can," Ian grinned. "Ah--but we can't wait to ride it, either."

The owner took two years of weekends and evenings to put the Norton together. He did fantastic work but couldn't get it to start.

"It's hard for a person to work on a big project without somebody to bounce ideas off of," Ian said. "Plus, the weather's getting really nice and the owner doesn't want to waste weekends trying to get the bike started. He kicked it for two hours straight and couldn't get it to go. Hopefully we won't have to kick it for two hours, but we will if we need to. We'll figure out what's going on with it."



The (well-funded) Ducati will be a 250 Manza cafe bike--Ferrari red. We'll document it well.

"It's gonna be hot," Ian said. "Way hot."

We're Famous!

This is what happens when they do a writeup about a little bike shop in the PI:



That doesn't even show the bikes out front in various stages of deconstruction--and it's before the European Invasion (see blog to come). The guys now have to do a kind of sliding-puzzle game each time they switch out the bikes they're working on.

Here's the article:

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/360306_needle24.html

Sound Rider magazine also did a piece on us:

http://www.soundrider.com/current/may08/twinline_motorcycles.htm

KUOW just covered us next past week:

http://www.kuow.org/defaultProgram.asp?ID=14984

A Seattle Metropolitan article is soon to come. I think we might need to expand our capacity.

Bring it on.

The Dyno Party

We had to put off this blog for the Dyno Party, which happened April 12, because nobody had been in charge of getting pictures. Then somebody brought us one, so Ian took a picture of it on the wall with his cell phone.



Bunch o' hooligans.



Here's the whole pic--one might say the panoramic view. This is so you can see the guy in the red hat. What he's doing is anyone's guess.

The party was a blast--literally. Everybody had to stand at the opposite end of the shop from the Dyno, presumably for safety reasons but really, probably, because it was so freakin' loud.

Fortunately, the keg was right there where everyone was standing.

I met a bunch of great folks: a chick with brilliant blue eyes, a tall, skinny guy who told me about Buckaroo's in Fremont, and a kid who rode around in South America. That last guy might also be the one who has a Suzuki DRZ 400, which I think I want. If any of you care to shoot me a line and remind me of your names, I'd love to stay in touch. But I digress.

With all the beer and barbecue and Dyno runs sold, we raised about $500 for racing projects and Dyno'ed some kick-ass bikes. Yeah!!!

The next event we've got planned: a "cafe sprint" around town in July on whatever you've got that runs (because we realize that some cafe bikes out there don't run--not naming any names). We'll fill you in on that as we get closer.

Oh--and some more pics have trickled in, because someone had the wherewithal. Methinks we have a new offical photographer in the man Chris . . . ?



Gotta wear shades.



Wild Rucki, in from the plains. The NRA (Northwest Ruckus Alliance) came out in full force.



Brandon, the barbecuer and money-taker. Note the fabricated sheet-metal spatula, created to fill the void of nobody bringing a spatula.



More hot steeds.



Guys, doing that thing. This wild lawnmower of a machine (owner: Paul) almost got its rear wheel up to 1 horsepower.



Wow, what a great Dyno.



Ian, what the heck are you doing? This guy wants to ride some more.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who came to our first Dyno Party! Cya at the next one, next year.

RD350 Goldhead

Project "Goldhead" is this 1975 Yamaha RD 350 that a customer brought to us. After he bought it, he took it back to his house and dismantled it. He found all sorts of cool bits for it, like a very striking gold head (hence the name), new pipes, an electronic ignition, rear sets, and a fancy-schmancy swingarm--in fact, about 99 percent of the parts needed to put the thing back together.



Here it is as the customer found it on Craigslist--something like a confused drag bike or dirt tracker. Hard to say really what it's trying to be, but it's interesting. It's a good color, at least. I learned from Ian that yellow is the fastest of all colors: any yellow bike travels somewhat faster than the speed of light. (Thanks, Ian. I learn something new every time I come in here.) Not that it will be yellow when we're done with it. I'll leave you guessing as to what color it's going to be.



So the customer showed up at Twinline with the bike in a bunch of boxes. Ian and Isaac slapped another tank on the back to see what a chopped-up tank might look like as a seat. They decided that it looked pretty good.



As sometimes happens, the bike has taken on a life of its own. Orignally just a matter of putting a basket case together, it's now way into deep custom work. But you gotta go with how these things want to go.



Here's the aluminum swingarm that the customer brought in. They jabbed the screwdriver in there to see if the thing would fit. Voila! It does.


The guys prepped the bike to make a mockup, grinding tabs off and building the seat. The idea is that it will be a sleeper bike. It's gonna be under 300 pounds and have about 60 hp in the rear wheel, which should embarrass a lot of sport bikes. The customer, a proficient rider, will make full use of the Goldhead's abilities.



Here's Isaac cutting the tank in half to create the seat. Oooooh, sparks.



It's all prepped for a powder coat, which is a thermal painting process that cooks paint to the metal so you can't knock it off. This will we a pretty simple powder coat, so we'll get into technicalities when we do a more difficult one.





Here's what it looks like when they actually put it together.



"It's the kind of bike that doesn't put the wheel down until you hit fifth gear," Ian said.

Dyno Test Night

Tonight has been the first night for testing a customer's bike on the Dyno. The guinea pig was a 1970 Honda CL175, owned by a guy named Ian, hereby referred to as Ian #2. ("Two Ians don't make an Isaac," an anonymous person said.)





The guys got the Dyno set up while Ben from Hellbillie pinstriped the KO 360, Isaac worked on the bike he's going to race this weekend, and Ty took apart and put back together a petcock, which is the thing that turns fuel on and off. (I didn't name it.)









As I write this, they're taking the guinea pig through its third run. Damn, it's loud, even from the office.

The first run on the guinea pig resulted in Ian #1, Ian #2, Jesse the Bystander, and me clustered around the monitor, reviewing the graphs. Ian #1 declared it a good baseline.





Things went awry with the second run. I noticed something sparking as Ian kicked it into high RPMs, but who was I to say it wasn't supposed to do that? Anyway, nobody could have heard me had I spoken up, is my excuse.

Isaac wandered by, noticed the sparks, and signaled Ian to cut it.

So the sparks were bad.

For the next hour, the bike has been dismantled and remantled to fix the problem. Gas got all over everything when they removed the fuel tank.

"That's gonna make for a really good fire the next time there are sparks," I commented evilly.

When they got it going again just now, Isaac said, "It sounds better than last time."

Well, that's good.

As I hung out on the work table, I noticed that one or two of the guys had beers. Where'd they get them? I searched both refrigerators, to no avail. To my delight, when I returned to my perch, I heard the lovely crack/fizz sound of a beer can opening. The beer belonged to Ben, who kindly gave me his second-to-last one--and then, as he was leaving, his last one! I can never praise Hellbillie's work enough.

Ty

I'm getting into this interviewing thing. It reminds me of my college journalism class, except it's funner. The catch is, I've been working with a borrowed tape recorder that's at least a decade old. I also have an electronics disruption field, which means that an improbable number of electronic devices go fritzy around me.

So it's not my fault that the tape recorder randomly edited out about half of my interview with Ty, a Twinline intern since October. At least, I think he said he started in October. The recorder edited out that part.

"Does it pick up 'mumble' all right?" Ty asked, eyeing said device.

"Yes," I said, "but only if I set it much closer to you than to my loud mouth."


Ty started at Twinline only a couple of months after he learned how to ride, which makes him a newbier newby at motorcycle mechanics than I am. (He did have an idea or two about why my bike has started surging and jerking, though. I think I'm gonna try a new air filter, spark plugs, and an oil change.)

"Riding is something I always wanted to do," Ty said. "I just never got around to it. My girlfriend got both of us riding lessons for my birthday, and that led to us buying a bike."

Okay, so he's a new rider. I knew what that meant for me: dumping the bike . . . a couple of times.

"I haven't dumped it," Ty said. "I guess the first time I do it is the last time."

I laughed.

Already, Ty plans to make motorcycles his career. It gets into your blood fast, it does.


"I just want to be around bikes," he said. "I haven't done much, but I want to do more. I like the creative aspect."

He started work at the Eastside Harley-Davidson the day I interviewed him.

"The first day there went good," he said, "but it was a little nerve-wracking. Those guys do things way different than they do here. The guys here just give me shit--call me 'HD Boy' and tell me to have fun pushing the big bikes around. They're great for learning."

"What would you get if you could have any bike?" I asked.



"If I had a garage and the money, I'd have a number of different bikes. There are aspects of different bikes that I like."

"Like what?"

The tape recorder deemed the answer unsuitable for publication.

The Dyno

A recent addition to the shop has been a dynamometer, a.k.a. the Dyno. Ian came across it via some techs at the downtown Harley shop, who didn't want to run it in their neighborhood.

A dyno is a like a treadmill for motorcycles, with a 350-pound steel drum on which the bike's wheel spins. A computer records and analyzes the bike's performance.

"It looks kind of rusty," I said.

"The rust is part of the uh . . . charm . . . yeah," Ian said. "One of these things brand new is like fifteen grand. For our tiny little vintage shop to get hold of a performance dyno is huge. It just doesn't happen."


To make room for the Dyno, Ian cleared out his "pile of crap," including "rat bikes" and parts bikes, and stuck it outside to rot in the rain.

"What's a rat bike?" I asked, picturing something out of Ed Roth. (I never pass up a good tangent.)

"It's any rusted-out bike that has sat around forever in a garage or a backyard," Ian said. "Some people build rat-style bikes, but basically rat bikes are roaches. There's no way to get rid of them except for the junk man or a shop like mine. We only use them for parts, so they're pretty much dead souls. If somebody stole one, I wouldn't really care too much. I'd just find another one for fifty bucks."

Poor things.

But back to the Dyno.

Ian's finishing up the platform, which still needs a ramp. The computer brain, which diagnoses all the information, is being serviced at Dynojet. The computer also needs a monitor--as well as a printer for printing out the runs.


"We're going to post the kings of certain classes up here," Ian said, "so that everybody knows who's the biggest dog in town to beat."

Ian had to steal from the Twinline Motorcycles race fund to cover the Dyno. He's planning a "dyno party" to top the fund back up.

"We'll do a keg and some live music and run motorcycles on the Dyno," Ian said. "This'll help us raise some money, so that we can go out and be competitive and have a good time at the raceway."

Ian plans to throw the party at the shop on a Saturday night in April.

"Hopefully it'll hit some nice weather," he said. "I think we're probably going to get forty or fifty bikes through that night, which is insane. It'll be eighteen bucks for a single run on it, and it'll be fifty bucks for three."

The party aside, Ian intends to use the Dyno primarily for vintage customers and for rebuilding motors for Twinline cafe bikes.

"We could line sport bikes out the door all day long," Ian said, "but that's not really what we want to do with it. We'll rent it out sometimes, but we're putting it in so we can build motors and build horsepower for our customers. This will also help with our vintage racing, because we'll be able to build horsepower for race bikes."

Ian wants to cater to vintage racers, so when somebody says, for example, "I need 45 horsepower," Ian can back up the completed work with a dyno report.

"The Dyno was just too awesome for me to pass by," Ian said.

Isaac

Last Friday, amid the mild chaos of friends, beer, and the buzzing of Ian's work on the Dyno (article to come on that), I endeavored to interview Isaac, Ian's only paid employee so far. Isaac started at Twinline Motorcycles a month after Ian opened for business in 2006.

"I wasn't into motorcycles when I was a kid," Isaac said. "I was more into racing RC [remote-control] cars. They have little gas motors, and they can get pretty fast. I had to rebuild the engine just about every race, so I learned the mechanics of them and what went into building a good motor."

Then Isaac's buddy bought an '86 250 Ninja that needed some fixing up. It was the first bike Isaac ever rode, and he decided to fix it up.

"My parents were totally against it," he said. "I had to mow lawns for-fuckin'-ever. I got a big ticket on that bike for riding without a license, speeding, no mirrors . . . . I didn't know the cops were behind me. They didn't use their sirens. They called it evading and all this other bullshit, so I couldn't get my license until I was 18."

Isaac finished the 250. Then another buddy, doing some backyard cleaning, asked if Isaac wanted a little 125. Yep, Isaac did.

"So he dropped that off at my house," Isaac said. "It was five bucks for the title. I was going to sell it just to get some money, because I didn't have a job and it was in pretty good shape. It had a bent valve, though, so it wouldn't idle or do anything under 5,000 rpms."

"What's a valve?" I wondered. I'd heard of valves, but that was about the extent of it.

I got a good description.

"As the piston's coming down," Isaac said, "the intake valve sucks in air and fuel. Then the piston comes up, compresses them, and goes boom. The piston goes down, and the inertia of the crankshaft brings the piston back up. The exhaust valve opens and lets all the exhaust out, and that's how the exhaust goes into your pipe."

My brain's intake valve sucked in this new information and, I'm sure, will soon convert it into enough power to dominate the world (but don't tell anyone).

"When the intake valve closes," Isaac continued, "the pressure builds up. So when it's cracked open a little bit, it doesn't seal up and cause combustion. You don't get very much power. So I tore into the bike, and I found out the problem. It was no big deal. I ordered a new valve, dropped it in, and called it good.

"Then I started playing around with horsepower tricks. I smoothed out the passageways from the carburetor to the intake valve, because usually there are a whole bunch of bumps in there from casting that the factory doesn't smooth out because it would take too long.

"Then I cut the exhaust pipe to make it louder. A bike like mine is so small, most people can't see it, so it's better if you hear it.

"I started cafe-ing it out. I dropped the handlebars. I moved the rear sets from the swing-arm to the frame."

Swing-arm?

"The swing-arm is what the rear wheel attaches to," Isaac explained. "It's called the swing-arm because it swings with the suspension. The sets were mounted on that, which feels kind of weird when you're riding. You hit a bump, and your feet come up. So I put them on the frame in the same spot, with a different connector."

The more Isaac worked on the bike, the more he loved it. He did as much as he could without a license, up to riding around the block. He took an Auto Body class.

"I didn't want to paint car parts," Isaac said, "so I decided to bring the bike in and paint that. While I was in there, I also made a cool-ass seat. It was a whole bunch of pieces of steel that I just kind of bent around. I welded them in and cut off what I didn't want. Most of the time, seats are fiberglass, but I didn't know how to work with fiberglass."

This is right in line with Twinline bikes. A Twinline bike usually gets a tunnel seat: a piece of sheet metal bent into a tunnel shape, which is aerodynamic and has room for a taillight under it.

"So that's basically how my love affair with cafe bikes started," Isaac said. "I had no idea what was out there. My parents split up, so my dad and I moved out to West Seattle.

"I was out looking for a job at Delta Marine. They make kick-ass boats--really expensive ones--but their hours weren't going to work for me. I was driving home and got lost. I drove by here and saw a whole bunch of vintage bikes! So I tried calling, but Ian was never here because he just had his baby. Matt and John didn't know what was going on about a job opening, so I decided to stop by and hang out. I brought my truck down, and everyone loved that. It's a '63 Ford Econoline--a van with a truck bed on it. It's pretty cool. Orange and black. I brought my bike down, and they loved that even more. Then I got to see all of their bikes, and that was awesome. Then Matt and John asked me to go hang out with the Cretins. It was totally eye-opening to see all these other people with cafe bikes. I didn't know that anyone in the Northwest was doing it. Georgetown is the right place."

"Tell me about your differences with Ian," I said.



"Ian and I butt heads about everything," Isaac said, "but it's not a bad relationship. Our creativities are on totally different levels, but it's not in levels of quality. It's all just in levels of taste, like the Bat Seat. The Bat Bike is growing on me, though."

"What are your plans for the rest of your life?"

"I want to do this for the rest of my life. I'm so young right now that I don't really get all the credit for what I do. People are like, 'Oh, this kid's building motors. He's only 20 years old. What the fuck does he know?' But if I put enough bikes out there . . . ."

Isaac now owns four bikes, including his white Transformers bike, which is coming along, and his next big project: a bike he's building for racing.

Superball Jess: Your New Blogger

I'm Jessica, a.k.a. Superball, joining Twinline Motorcycles to do some blogging in exchange for learning motorcycle mechanics. I found Ian on Craigslist while looking for random little jobs to fill out my job collection. (I have five.) I didn't even know it was possible to hope for something like this: the chance to learn motorcycles inside and out, essentially for free, from kick-ass teachers who make their living doing this stuff.

I've got a lot to learn. I love to ride--in fact, have rarely gotten around town in any other way during the past five years--but riding is about all I know when it comes to motorcycles. An example is in order: My boyfriend, Jack, has a 1971 Honda 350, and I mentioned that to Ian and Isaac.

"Oh, yeah?" they said. "Is it a twin or a four?"

"Um . . ." I said.

"Does it have one exhaust pipe or two?"

"Ya know, I never really took much note of the number of exhaust pipes," I admitted.

They didn't laugh. They didn't even blink. Well, maybe they blinked, but only once. All they said was, "That's all right. Hang around here enough, and you'll be an expert in months."

Sweet.

So how did I reach this sorry state of affairs? Well, unlike apparently every other biker in the world, I haven't been riding since I was a kid. After I got to ride on my dad's bike maybe once, he traded it for a gun. That has annoyed me to this day, but now I think my mother had a lot to do with it. (When I first told her I was getting a motorcycle, her response was similar to when, at age 18, I told her I was getting married: "Oh, no!" Of course, if I'd grown up on bikes, I'd be the first chick in the Moto GP about now.)

As soon as I finished growing up, I got married. My husband didn't want me to get a motorcycle. As soon as I got divorced, I bought my 2000 BMW f650 from a friend, who was a great riding mentor but didn't teach much in the way of mechanics. After failing to convince a BMW dealer to let me watch an oil change, I got a boyfriend who rides. I now know how to change my oil and spark plugs. (Hold the applause, please.) I'll need to know a lot more than that, though, if I'm ever gonna make it to Tierra del Fuego, not to mention Madagascar or Mongolia, on Jack's and my Big Trip.

Now I've met Ian and Isaac a couple of times. This last time, Ian planned to set me up for blogging, but the website was down--probably the fault of my electronics disruption field.

With that plan thwarted, they let me dive in head first with them on one of their pet projects: a 1974 Honda 360. I got to unscrew the handebars, headlight, and instrument panel. While Isaac held the bike, I pulled off the front wheel. Then I unscrewed the front fender and brake. (I seem to take to this unscrewing. I'll keep you posted when I try the reverse.)

And all of this on a hangover. (Okay, I was recovering from a few days of a bug that started with a hangover, but let's not split hairs.)

So it begins.

Tidler Tour

Thanks to the VME! Half of my shop and our fathers made it out and about on Vashon Island this year. We need to build more small bore bikes and have more people come out. Great event and better than a crummy olde' game of golf.