Clutch doesn't Engage

Ummmm, you do realize that you can call your dirt bike an "agricultural
implement", don't you? You can ride your motorcycle from one field to
another field, and claim that you use it for herding goats or sheep, or
yaks, or bison.

Agricultural implements don't need to be green stickered.

Here in the southern San Joaquin valley, dirt riders can (and do)
follow dry river beds that run for miles and miles and the cops would
play hell catching them. There are also a bazillion dirt roads running
everywhere.

And people are riding their quads and dirt bikes all over their own
property. It's like, really, really rural around here.

OTOH, I just happened to be pulling out of a private road on an
unregistered dualsport
machine with the intent to access another private road. I had to ride
about half a mile alongside the paved road to get to the other private
road and a passing CHP saw me and wrote me up.

If I hadn't been in a lot of pain from arthritis on the date I had to
appear in court, I would have fought the stupid ticket because I wasn't
doing anything illegal at all.

This whole green sticker/ red sticker business is just a way for the
state to charge the people to ride on US GOVERNMENT LAND or to
transport a vehicle in a truck or on a trailer over state highways.

If you carefully study the laws relating to off highway vehicles you
will realize that off highway vehicles ONLY have to pay the green
sticker fee to ride on *public land*.

If you *never* ride on public land, you don't need a sticker. There's a
red? sticker for race bikes that are used on closed courses only, but,
you don't need that sticker either, if you don't race.

The red sticker theoretically lets you transport the race bike to the
race course. But road racers NEVER buy stickers for their road race
bikes, and I have only heard of one incident where a stupid cop ever
tried to ticket a road racer for no green or red sticker.

A law was enacted in the 1970's when a bazillion kids were riding their
Hodakas in the dirt alongside the paved road to get to a vacant lot
where they would ride around and around in circles for hours on end.

But *that* law is ONLY for motor-driven cycles that are 150cc or less
in displacement.

There is really nothing to cause a good old fashioned *dirt bike* of
over 150cc to have to be identified or registered, under California
law.

But the cops sure do act like there is a law against dirt bike riding
on private property and they try to throw the whole vehicle code at
innocent riders.

 

The subject was vintage motorcycle *racing*, not trail riding.

Vintage motorcycle racing is done on private property, with all
required permits.

The problem with the private property where motocross tracks are
located is that
urban sprawl is surrounding the tracks, raising the value of the land,
and the homeowners in the new tract houses complain about the noise and
sooner or later the track has to be closed.

I went out to the old Bay Mare racetrack that can be seen in the 1960's
Joe Namath
movie called "C. C. Rider." If you saw the movie, you may remember a
rider going over a jump and losing his front wheel.

Even then the home owners were upset about the noise and when I fired
up my engine to warm it up, officials came running over and told me I
would have to shut it off because they were only allowed to make noise
during actual races.

I only got 2 laps of practice and my two motos were onlt about 3 laps.
What a rip off.

Needless to say, I never went to Bay Mare again.

The whole amateur motocross affair turned into shit in only about three
or four years.

It died of excess popularity. Everybody wanted a special class for the
machine they owned. Vintage riders wanted a "dinosaur class" for
4-strokes. Old guys wanted an "Over-40" class. Women wanted a
"powderpuff" class. Guys on 90cc machines didn't want to have to race
against guys on 100cc machines. The "Peewees" were to young to race the
teenagers.

The race club was essentially supported by 100's of guys on 250cc
Japanese bikes.

They had to start up to five divisions of 250 cc "juniors". The next
larger class was 125cc juniors. They ran four divisions of 125cc
juniors.

Everybody wanted equal time. So everybodt had to pay the same amount of
money and they all got two lap races and 1 lap of practice to see where
the track went.

I gave up and went desert riding instead. I had to haul the dirtbike
100 miles out, and 100 miles back. It cost me 20 gallons of gas in the
truck to burn 2 gallons of gas in the dirt bike.

 

Mama Mia!!

I think most people understood the phrase I used:

"any value as a "restoration""

to mean it's not worth doing, not as a specific dollar
amount. And the dollar amounts I've been using have been example only
to illustrate the point which I fear you still have missed.

Haven't you ever been in a conversation when someone has said
"that bike ain't worth shit"

Do you then challenge them with some argument like "Hey, I just saw one
of those that wasn't running sell for $50 so your wrong, you can't count,
the bike isn't not woth shit, it's worth $50! blah blah blah..."

Ted

 

Ya know, I really don't have much sympathy for you, even though I'm
a landowner myself, because in the United States, just about every scrap of
land
in the country was obtained from the Indians by what the lawyers politely
call "right of conquest" meaning that the Europeans and Spaniards came over
here and beat the crap out of the original landowners, and killed a lot of
them, then planted surveyers and partioned off everything then started
selling the parcels they didn't deserve to have, to your and my ancestors.

Most of your commercial land investors accept the risk that eminent domain
might happen to part of some land they purchase for investment, and
they factor it into their investing. What the people out there buying
houses
have to grasp is that they need to look upon their home purchases the
same way, and factor in the risk that they might lose some of their land
to eminent domain as well.

We have friends who own a 300 foot by 100 foot yard, with a house on
one side of it, and they put in a large garden on the rest of the yard.
They
even have a little greenhouse they start plants in. This is right in the
middle
of a suburban area. They raise enough veggies and can and all that so they
never buy produce, and the stuff they raise is damn good, yummy stuff, they
give quite a lot of it away. Up the road from them is like a 10-15 acre
plot
of land that someone has put a Christmans tree "farm" on. That "farm" gets
a farming tax credit on it's property taxes, a damn big one. My friends do
not since they are in a suburb. But, the entire point of the farm tax
credit
is to increase the amount of acerage in farming production so that the
United States continues to grow more food that it consumes, so if something
nasty happened, like a war, we all wouldn't starve. We can't eat Christmas
trees.

I'd be a lot more in favor of the land rights people if tomorrow all State,
Federal, and municipal governments immediately cancelled all farming
tax credits and farming pricing supports and any of that. I see lots and
lots
of those on my taxes every year when I do them - I often wonder if
most Americans really know about these since so many Americans don't
do their own taxes anymore but that's a side issue - but until that happens
I think the rural landowners are going to have to understand that when
they are out there taking all their tax credits they are giving the
government
moral authority to come in and tell them how to run their land.


Ted

 

Oh dear: a lesson in English and logic as well as maths.

Quote/
Since he said it was a restoration job, he is going to have to have he
sidestand switch on if he wants it to have any value as a "restoration"
/Endquote

Ergo: no switch = no value.

When you make a boo-boo on Usenet, it is *always* better to fess up and
move on. Trying to justify what you wrote by moving your goalposts and
adding other qualifications merely shows up the initial idocy in a
brighter light.

 

Guys, you are both valued posters and very useful to the 'readers' please
drop it and make up for the sake of the group. This is doing neither of you,
nor the rest any good.

Any one going off 'in a huff' will be a loss to the group, and that's what
usually happens. Don't take umbrage at this, I really mean it for the best.

 

GaZ wrote:

Off in a huff? Moi?

 

Sorry, this is the US, yeah? You have guns? Defend your rights.

 

Just carry a package of seeds in your pocket and maybe a garden trowel
to plant them with and you can ride your unregistered,
nongreen-stickered dirtbike 1 mile ON the road without a permit.

You might also be able to ride down the road to Pancho's Pistachio Pit
and buy a bag of pistachios and legally haul them home under this law.
;-)

http://www.dmv.ca.gov/pubs/vctop/d16/vc36000.htm
Implements of Husbandry Defined

36000. An "implement of husbandry" is a vehicle which is used
exclusively in the conduct of agricultural operations. An implement of
husbandry does not include a vehicle if its existing design is
primarily for the transportation of persons or property on a highway,
unless specifically designated as such by some other provision of this
code.

http://www.dmv.ca.gov/pubs/vctop/d16/vc36005.htm

36005. Implement of husbandry includes, but is not limited to:

(k) Any vehicle which is operated upon a highway only for the purpose
of transporting agricultural products and is in no event operated along
a highway for a total distance greater than one mile from the point of
origin of the trip.

 

I can't help it if you mis-read it.

Good idea, you should try it!

Ted

 

Quit spoiling our fun!

Ted

 

I like this. Lots. )

 

Villiers engined bikes are popular for pre-65 trials over here. Stuff
like this
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/JAMES-KT-COMA...Z4650336186QQcategoryZ424QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

 

Yep, and I'm still owed a Jaguar with a Chevy V8 that "couldn't be given
away", and a box of TRX850 calipers which "weren't worth the postage".

-----sharks

 

They were probably right about the TRX calipers, at least ;-)

 

I beg to differ. A Green Streak was an imitation of a MX machine. It
came with trials universal tires instead of knobbies and it was smaller
than the full 250cc class displacement. As I recall, it was a bored-out
175cc engine.

I hated Green Streaks more than I hated CT-175 Yamahas, because they
would be gridded with the 250cc class. The Yamahas had a short
wheelbase, so they could corner tighter than a longer wheelbase, full
sized 250, and stay in front of me on a tight course like Indian Dunes
even though I had more power.

And, I was starting a race on the original Indian Dunes course when the
Green Streak rider to my left fell over in top of me. The starter ran
over and helped *him* pick up the Green Streak, but left me laying
there.

I remember a strange hybrid motorcycle running in that race. Some weird
guy had take a Montessa and a Greeves and welded them together. I think
he kept the weird Earles fork and used the back half of the Montessa.

He said that he sometimes called is a "Mongreeves", and other times he
called it a "Greentessa".

He wore a viking style helmet with criss-crossed leather straps and
complained that officials had made him remove the cow horns...

 

Rick Cortese wrote:

This has always been the case, though, hasn't it? We've never really
got into the drag racing thing in the UK, let alone the
stoplight-to-stoplight urban battles.

 

Bultaco started that ridiculous overbore crap with a 175cc engine that
they eventually bored into a 360cc El Bandito. The short stroke meant
that the exhaust ports weren't very tall, but were very wide to get the
required area/time.

That made the powerband very peaky.

Gosh, I never thought to ask him. There were about two motorcycles on
top of me, and the other guys got help getting started into the back of
the pack and I was left laying there with my machine on top of me...

 

You have to have some manufacturers that can produce powerful
engines that can make it down a drag track without blowing up.

You need stoplights for that, all you got are roundabouts.

Seriously, though, what really pushed the drag racing thing
was the NASCAR efforts of the auto factories in the 60's,
because what you had going was a lot of grocery-getter cars
that could easily be hopped up with bolt on engine parts.
However, after the hopping up was completed, you had a
monster powerful engine in a grocery getter, most of the kids
that did these cars ran out of funds by then, and didn't also
hop up the suspensions. Drag racing in a straight line was
what you could do with these cars.

Today, though, the urban battle at the stop light thing in the US is
completely a wanna-be thing the kiddies are doing, egged
on by a bunch of nostalgia movies. It's been probably 20 years
since I've seen a true hot rod driving around the city after 11:00pm
looking for someone to race against.

I used to drag race my 68 Torino, years ago, at the local quarter
mile. I lost interest in it when pretty much everyone I was racing
against was driving a Honda Civic with neon lights on it. Cars
today have gotten too complex for the high school kids to hotrod,
and most of the people out there hotrodding them are doing it
by totally ripping out the engine computer and all electronic controls,
and putting in mechanical systems, simply because they don't
understand how engine computers work. There are a very few
folks that do understand and run reprogrammed computers and
cammed engines, but they are very few and far between.

Ted

 

Heh. Fair point. Um....., I suppose the old Bentley Turbo lump
(turbocharged Rolls-Royce V8, memorably described by Car magazine as a
"tidal wave on wheels", might fit the bill. Not much else.

Don't diss our roundabouts. They're damn good for scrubbing in tyres.
Oh, and confusing American tourists who've hired cars and are slo
trying to come to terms with a manual gearbox and a steering wheel on
the 'wrong' side of the car....

I can believe that.