Motoconstructor.com - Introduction Page

Introduction

With the sale of my eurospares.com domain and the registration of the new motoconstuctor.com domain, my plan is to archive the old version of the website and move in a new direction to go with the new name.

Background

I began riding moto cross in 1971, observed trials in 1974, and road racing in 1977. When I started racing "vintage" classes in 1988 I wasn't so much starting something new but rather resuming racing the motorcycles that were current when I began racing. The more modern dirt bikes didn't have much appeal to me as they were meant for going faster or over larger obstacles than I was comfortable with considering my limited riding skills. The Euro Spares website reflected my interest in the motorcycles of 1960s and 1970s when I began riding and racing.

In the late 1960s/early 1970s motorcycle publications there were often articles on various custom race chassis. Those caught my interest and while there was no road racing local to me, the cafe racer scene was very popular and one of the first project bikes I had was building a cafe racer from a 350 Ducati. When I started road racing on my TT500 Yamaha I soon built it up with a Kenny Roberts' dirt track frame. After moving to San Francisco in 1979 I started road racing with AFM, and at one race I met a person who told me of a shop in Sacramento where the owner designed and built race chassis. I made a trip to meet Craig Hanson at Grizzly Engineering and soon became friends with him. Craig mentored me on fabrication, machining and welding skills and soon I was buying machine tools and trying my hand at designing and building my own frames.

In 1990 I started a small business "Euro Spares" to sell Lucas electrical components, and in 1996 I became the North American distributor for John Bradley's first book in his eventual three book set on motorcycle chassis design, construction, and set-up. Having a website to help sell the products seemed like the thing to do, and it also let me start some email lists on a few different motorcycle topics (these are now hosted by micapeak.com). I figured there was no reason to not also use the website to share some images of interesting bikes and some information on various project bikes that I and my friends had. I mined my large archive of 1960s/70s/80s motorcycle publications for material, and the site kept getting larger and larger. Since I was actively racing much of the material was on race bikes.

Now that Euro Spares has been closed as a business for about 15 years, and after 45+ years I'm retired from competition as well as finding that with vintage bikes I'd reached a "been there, done that the entire time I've ridden, not too interested in it now" point, when I had a chance to sell the eurospares.com domain for a surprising amount it seemed time for a change. The old website is still useful to many people, and since it documents a large portion of my moto-life I wasn't going to let it disappear. So it will be available here but will be "frozen in time".

Goals

The new MotoConstructor domain will be used to let me share information, based on my experiences, on motorcycle design and construction topics. Yes, some of that will probably be pulled out of the old website, but it will not be as focused on race vehicles as in the past. Modern competition motorcycles are amazingly capable devices, but they are also very specialized. In many cases there hasn't been a lot of "revolution" in the technology, but rather large amounts of "evolution" in the details. To my eyes there is often a case of diminishing returns with modern motorcycle technology where a lot of effort goes to incremental improvements in performance that happen at levels far above where the great majority of riders can safely venture. It may be very cool, but if it largely makes no difference in my riding I'll probably ignore the topic. I will certainly use competition bikes, both modern and vintage/classic as examples where I think it appropriate, I'm more interested now in motorcycles as transportation. This is not to say the sporting aspects will be avoided, but rather that it will not be the main thrust of the discussions as was the case in the past.

My thought at the moment is that MotoConstructor will be a cross between a blog and a collection of related essays. It will be somewhat informal and based on the experiences that I and people I know have had as we try to design and build project motorcycles. I'll write about things that interest me and not spend much time on things that don't.

Non-Goals

What am I not going to do? I'll probably not talk about powertrain specifics much. There will probably be some discussion of how an internal combustion engine (ICE) might make different constraints on motorcycle design than would an electric or electric/fuel hybrid powertrain. But the powertrains will be treated more as a "black box" device, without getting into the details of how they work. There are many resources available that cover those details, I don't need to try and repeat what they have to say.

What I am also very much NOT going to do is attempt to duplicate the information in the motorcycle design/construction books by John Bradley, Tony Foale, P.E. Irving, and other experts in the field. John and Tony are friends and I've sold their books and software, and I'm of the firm opinion that everyone interested in the topics to be discussed should start by purchasing the books that they and Irving have written. Links to John and Tony's websites will be available on the site as has been the case for decades. Buy their books (and Tony's software) and study them and you will do yourself a large favor

How Will I Do It?

On the other hand, putting material on a website avoids the publishing constraints that print authors experience. John told me that he probably had another book's worth of material that he had to leave out because he had to keep the page count under a limit that made publishing and selling the books possible at a certain price point. With the new website I've got essentially unlimited space. If I want to discuss a topic, for example let's say leading link forks, and I decide that I want to show photos of 30-40 different examples of them I can do that. Between the material from the Euro Spares website and the images on my PC that I've gathered over the last 30 or so years, I can go into a lot of detail that might not be possible in a printed book.

I'll tend towards the practical side, as since I'm not a degreed engineer/scientist I can't go too deep into the theory behind how things work. I'll probably talk about how I've done things and why I made the choices I did. I will talk about alternate choices when I can, and also talk about bad choices that I made in the hopes that will help the reader to avoid going down the same path. I'll talk about things I've designed and/or built, as well as things that I wish I had built. I know a lot of talented and clever people who have made some very cool motorcycles/components, and I want to showcase some of their work.

There may be some moaning about how I think motorcycling in general and specific could have been much improved if only someone had asked for my advice and then followed it. After all, I've got a soap box here so I may feel inclined to stand on it and rant a bit. ☺

As with Euro Spares, this is not going to be a "fancy" website. It is meant to share information in both text and graphics. Unlike when I started in the 1990s when everyone was on slow dial-up connections, I have more freedom to include larger/detailed images. But I don't enjoy wading through a bunch of extraneous animation/junk to get to the information so I don't plan to include any fancy but useless effects. Since I'm not a web developer and I don't use mobile devices everything will continue to be basic and done with the presumption that the readers are viewing a screen of a reasonable size and have a connection with reasonable speed. I will probably try to do a lot of thumbnail images that link to larger versions so the pages don't take forever to load.

I am not going to set up comments or a forum on the site. If you have a question or suggestion, please email me using the link at the bottom of the page. I enjoy hearing from people when they express some appreciation. I also like to hear from people if I've made a mistake as I will want to correct that. There is far too much bad information around for me to want to add to it. The older I get, the more I understand how easy it is to be mistaken, and I will do my best to not publish anything here if I have concerns about the correctness of the information.

Thanks for reading to this point. Please check back periodically as I hope to add new material and/or revise existing material reasonably frequently. I'll be starting primarily with text, and then as I get a chance I'll go back and add images to further illustrate what is being discussed.

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