Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/125870
Two book reviews ' How to Select, Ride, and Maintain Your Trail Bike; by Doug Richmond, H.P. Books 1972, $5.00 H.P. Books seems to be trying to corner the market on large format (8Jh x 11) books on motorcycling. They now have five out, including a best seller (for motorcycling that's 10,000 copies or more), and two books on the general subject of trail riding. I guess we've arrived. Ten years ago you couldn't find two books on the subject of motorcycling, let alone one facet of it, This one arrived with a defusing letter from the autho r: "After the review of Shipman's The Boonie Book I'm almost afraid to submit my Trail Bike Book which is an opinionated treatment of the same general subject . . . . " which of co urse is pure nonsense. Deep down in his egotistical little heart every a uthor feels that every reader is going to love his book, regardl ess. Abrabam was once aske d to review a book on the making of graven images for fun and profit . . . A utho r Rich m ond need n' t have worried: h is book is qui te a few cu ts above Shipman's and I suspect he knew it when he sent it . Richmond has been riding something like forty. years, though not continously, and the experience shows. There's quite a lot of stuff in his book that you only learn from experience. either an author's or your own. The trouble is if you wait until you learn it yourself, you're 100 old to benefit from it, unless you write a book. Typical of the good ad vice is, "So the first rule in selecting a bike is: Read the ac cesso ry people's ads with the certain knowledge th at an y accessory sold to improve handling or performance o n ly serves to point up deficiencies in the basic machine:' This is true , but I never thought of it, and to my knowledge it's never been in print before. Along with the good advice there is some which, if not bad advice , is a bit misguided. "Insist on a trial ride," he says, when y o u're buying a new bike, and not a trial ride around the block. " Always get a trial ride under conditions roughly similar to your usual riding." That's okay, if yo u 're Doug Richmo nd and can hand a dealer your busi ness card by way of introduction. Not so good if yo u're 16 years-old and figu ri ng to pay for yo ur mo torcycle from you r paper ro u te earnings. By and la rge, Rich m on d 's advice is good a nd often original. This doesn 't go for all the material in his book , howeve r. Rich mond says , at the end of several good paragraphs o n helmets. "I feel this makes the Z-!JO sticker as wo rthless as a 'coon dog at a fox hunt." Ab so lutely co rrec t. and he goes on to tell someth ing of the Snell accreditation. Great . But off to one side, set in a half-box, there 's a seve ral -paragraph pitch for Z-90 standard helmets, and mo re on the following page! The style is different so I doubt if Richmond wrote this. He gets full points if he deletes it by the next em tion, Don 't pay much atten tion to the stuff in the boxes on the side. The book follows a fairly conventional pattern in its o rganization: There arc chapters on selecting the bike, gelling the correct gear, learning to ride, safety, maintenance, and camping. The riding section is good stuff, practical and fairly comprehensive. It seems to me that he rnigh t have included a few of the mo re sophisticated techniques, like powering downhill with the brake on, for instance, but m ay be that's too so p histicated for h is intended audience. He also seems to men tio n putting you r foot down a bit too often for my tastes , but that might be a matter of sty le. There are onl y two topics in t he c hap te r on safety, one of which is hypothermia a nd the other, a more general stricture against "riding over yo u r head ." I believe that the bit on hypoth ermia should be required re ading for everyone who owns a bike. If you read th at and pu t it away in the back of your skull, you 've got your money's worth . In spite o f this heavy value however, I d o feel tha t Richmond co uld have thro wn in a few more safety items as a bonus. For inst ance, the two habit s wh ich co n sis te n tly get riders kill ed or severely hurt a re using the wh ole road o n m ountain fireroads (especial ly in logging co u n try) and hillclimbing on hills where so meo ne can meet you co m in g from the o th er side. Neither o f these is mentioned. Neither is the absolute necessit y o f car ry ing water and matches, as a matter of occasi onal li fe an d death. The maintenance section is not so mu ch a co mprehensive , every-case chapter as a co mpe nd iu m of the author's experien ces, the tricks he has learned and so me bridge material. The value of the section depends largely on reader's current state of knowledge and how we ll he is matched to the autho r in terms of type of rid ing and machinery . For instance there is a photo showing how to plug the overflow vent on an Amal carb with y o ur finger when you're first sta rting the engine in the morn ing. 111is is one of those things that you had better know if you own a Bultaco . Very valuable, unless you al ready know it. Also in this chapter , the a uthor extols the virtues of push-starting your motorcycle_ on co ld mornings. If this is done just l or exercise and to warm up the ol d bo d, good e nough : but he seems to imply that it is the most efficient way to start so me bikes as well. Frankly, if a bike won 't start in freezing. wet weather with two or three kicks, it either needs fixing o r disposal. The winning Six-Day riders leave their race bikes standing in the rain all ni ght and kick st art them in less than a minute , so there is sure no reason why a trail bike sho uld have to be pushed. Another interesting notion in th e maintenance se ction covers repairing leaky gas tanks, trail-side, with Silas tic. The au th o r recommends it and whoever writes the little boxes on the side recommends against it ! Fascinating. Whose side is the editor on ? There was one other minor annoyance in the maintenance section , and one fairly large omission: Th e large omission was in the area of suspensions and geometry , in a wo rd, almost everything having to do with handling. Prac tical ly no advice whatever w as offered. While th is is regrettable (because that is surely an a rea of concern to the trailb iker) at leas t there was no no nsense offered in place of good advice. The m ino r annoyance was in the recom me nda tion of a tool fo r re moving stu bborn sc re ws called a n impact dri ver. li e cal ls it an Impak driver. If t his is a trade na me - a nd a pl ug - it should be acknowledged. If it 's just a miss pelling the editor sho uld be fired. (A uthors aren't supposed to know how to spell. but editors should.) The last chapter in the book is on motorcycle camping and as in most of the book, J found it to be about 90% righ t on, the obvious product of a lot of experience. We have a few d ifferences of opinion here and there. He rather heavily downgrades my most cherished camping item, a lightweight Primus stove. He considers it inconvenient while I well re me mber the convenience of a hot soup-and-coffee lunch on top of 14,000-foot Mt. Whitney when the gadgets he advocates probably wouldn't even light. He also has a few funny ideas about backpacks, but I suppose differences such as these are normal among campers. After I finished this book I found that I had objected to many of the same sort of things that I had objected to in the publishers companion Boonie Book. The type sty le was bothersome and the plugs for products were co n tin uo us and u nrelenti ng . If you don't like Bultacos, this book is going to drive you righ t out of yo u r gourd. Eve n though I'm a Bul freak m ysel f, a Bultaco on every page got to me somewhat. After all was sai d a nd d one , · 1·lik ~d th is book. Really . It's n ot all i t coul d be as a trai lrider 's m an ual, but it 's a good book about tr ail riding. The p hoto s o f the author's ca mps an d h is ex periences in Mex ico m a ke for good reading . When yo u get finished , you might not know everything there is to know about trailriding but you feel like doing it. It's that sort of book. I re commend it. The Explorer's Limited Sou rce Book; ed ., Allwyn T. Perr in; Harper and Row, San Francisco, 1973, $4.95 If you're a person whose only hobby is motorcycling, you don 't nee d this book. True, there is a section on motorcycling, b ut it 's nothing you 'd want to spend $5 fo r. On the o ther hand if you're o ne of th o se people who real ly dig al l kinds o f outdoor sports fro m ballooning to spelunking, and w hose only regret is that you don 't have time o r money to do eve ry th ing you 'd like, th is b o o k should re al ly tu rn you on. It is , esse n tial ly, a n ad dress book, o r a kind o f yell ow pages th a t lis ts bo oks, m agazines , associations, clubs, an d other so urces of information about lite rally everything in outdoor individual type sports. Some of the more obscure sports covered are dog sle dding, falconry, ski -touring and aerial photography. Each section, along with the addresses, contains a bit of an introduction to the sport. Naturally. since the book covers some 40 topics in 384 pages the coverage is somewhat minima! in most cases. For motorcycling they list about II of the 30 or so monthly motorcycle magazines. About half a dozen books are listed (in cl ud in g Richmond's) as well as the addresses of about 25 moto rcycle distributors and one accessory house. Although the national associations of most of the sports are listed, along with benefits and periodicals, the American Motorcycle Association is not. Can it really be that the Balloon Federation of America (which is listed) is better known than the AMA? Yes, sadly, it could be. Cycle News, inciden tally, is listed so if you'd like a subscription, buy a copy of Explorer's Limited Source Book and they'll tell you where to write for a s ubscrip tion, No fool in ' , it's a real dream book. Ron Schneide rs After a close race, Mike Baeder be at Richard Baron ( 112) in t he Cl\1C Road Race held at OCIRJuly 14. 17