adil_minhas
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Buddha sahi bhagata hai.
Biker's Lounge
- Thread starter Muhammad Omar
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Buddha sahi bhagata hai.
VCheng
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adil_minhas
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He is 73 years young.
Touch wood I will also be riding at that age brother. Knee down.
VCheng
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I wish you many and safe riding years. I am at over 40 years of riding and counting ....
adil_minhas
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I wish you many and safe riding years. I am at over 40 years of riding and counting ....
Sirji you are my hero! Seriously?!!! I took you to be maybe in your mid 40s. Why is there no genuflecting smiley when you need one.
VCheng
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Sirji you are my hero! Seriously?!!! I took you to be maybe in your mid 40s. Why is there no genuflecting smiley when you need one.
Age is only a number. It is only the state of mind that matters.
VCheng
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http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20160912-the-treacherous-road-with-318-turns
With hairpins, blind cutbacks and a cloverleaf here and there, this challenging 11-mile stretch is said to be among the best driving roads in the world.
Deep in the southern United States, in the thickly forested border of Tennessee and North Carolina, is a road that seems drawn by a doodler. It makes 318 turns along 11 miles of countryside, including hairpins, blind cutbacks and a cloverleaf here and there. It’s so windy and challenging that it has become a destination for motorcyclists and car enthusiasts; some say it's among the best driving roads in the world.
This section of highway US 129 is often called The Dragon, and Jared Barnes remembers the first time he took his motorbike on it. It was about seven years ago, and Barnes had no idea what he was doing.
The Dragon’s turns have become legendary among riders (Credit: Mark Scheuern/Alamy)
“I couldn’t ride worth a crap,” he recalled. “The local boys just about peeled the paint off my bike flying past me.”
Barnes was soon hooked on the adrenaline of it. Living just 45 minutes away, he went back three or four times a week. After constant practice, in 2012 he tried to break the record for the fastest ride ever. Video shows him doing it in 8:27, besting the previous record by half a minute and hitting more than 130mph – a good four times faster than the speed limit.
“It’s not official or anything, because, you know, it’s not legal,” Barnes sheepishly admitted.
His run may be the record, but it’s not uncommon to see that kind of speed on The Dragon. An unknown country road just 20 years ago, the route is becoming a destination for motorcyclists, gearheads and those who find adrenaline in the g-forces of an apex turn.
Drivers have to navigate several cloverleaves along the road (Credit: Mark Scheuern/Alamy)
With a lethargic 30mph speed limit, The Dragon has become a constant battle between local deputies and speedsters. It’s also created a small cottage industry of businesses for thrill-seekers and Sunday drivers.
The road traces the route of an old Cherokee hunting path, which was then used by17th-century European settlers to bring cattle to market towns. The federal government paved it into US 129 in the 1950s. Connecting sleepy hamlets deep into the Appalachian forest, the road remained largely unused until the 1990s, when internet chatrooms and motorcycle websites found it.
At the eastern end of The Dragon, there’s now a motel and a gift shop and a makeshift memorial of smashed helmets and motorcycle parts. Head northwest from there and the road descends into deep forest preserves. The entire 11-mile stretch has no driveways or side streets, no homes or businesses – nothing to worry about but the turn coming up. It’s also full of hills, so the road dips and climbs as it goes left and right.
A memorial of smashed helmets and motorcycle parts sits by the road (Credit: Zoonar GmbH/Alamy)
These turns have become legendary among drivers and motorcyclists for their difficulty. The toughest of them might be Guardrail Cliff, where the road is hugged by an unforgiving rock wall on one side and a metal rail on the other, both dented and paint-smeared from those who couldn’t handle the sweeping turn. Or perhaps the hardest is Gravity Cavity, a turn that becomes a deep drop followed by a hump, leaving motorcyclists in the wrong gear, struggling for power and apt to fall on the rise.
Many people who try The Dragon stay for a few days or a week, hoping daily trips on it will help them master it, said Brad Talbott, owner of Deals Gap Motorcycle Resort. Talbott’s 14-room motel, a former hunting lodge, is often booked up during summer months, sometimes a year in advance.
“This is like Disney for drivers. It has become the focal point for motorcyclists and serious car guys,” Talbott said.
The Deals Gap Motorcycle Resort is often fully booked in the summer (Credit: Susan Leggett/Alamy)
On a summer’s day, thousands of riders make the windy journey, according to Dave Allison, a photographer who sets up along The Dragon and sells the pictures on his website. People buy his pictures of their Harleys or Fords or sometimes even tractor trailers.
“I’ve got the best job in the world,” Allison said, as a hog roaring by drowned him out. On his morning drive from nearby Knoxville, Tennessee, Allison sees eagles nesting, sunrises through the white oaks and sugar maples, fog rolling off a lake and lazy black bears meandering across the turnpike.
He sets up in a corner called Picnic Benches. “There used to be benches here until someone crashed into them,” Allison explained. It’s a double apex, with a short straight between the two turns. Most everyone can handle it, which is the way Allison likes it. He rarely sets up in one of the more difficult turns: accidents mean less business when his corner is tied up by rescue crews, which often take an hour to respond.
It’s not uncommon to see riders speeding (Credit: Mark Scheuern/Alamy)
And The Dragon sees its share of crashes, often 10 or 15 a day, according to Allison and Talbott. Mostly it’s a motorcyclist who loses control and walks away with a bit of road rash. But some are far worse. Between 2002 and 2015, the Tennessee Highway Patrol documented 1,695 crashes on The Dragon, 37 of them fatalities. So far this year, there have been 103 wrecks, with three deaths.
Most of those deaths are riders from “the flat straight areas” of the US, like Illinois and Florida, according to Lt Randy Ailey with the traffic safety unit at the Blount County Sheriff's Office.
His deputies often write a dozen citations a day. But occasionally, the worst offenders just speed off, Ailey admitted. If a motorcyclist blows through the speed trap, Ailey doesn’t want his men to give chase.
“It’s not worth my deputies getting hurt for a speeding ticket,” he said.
The Dragon ‘is like Disney for drivers’ (Credit: thematthewknot/Flickr)
Barnes never had a run-in with the police because he did his speed runs on slow winter weekdays. He admits now his record-setting run wasn’t exactly safe. But he has quit racing The Dragon. He’s a carpenter at his family’s business, theIncredible Christmas Place, a massive holiday-themed shopping village in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, where he’s responsible for the store’s iconic glockenspiel, a three-storey working clock with hand-poured bells. A work accident left him with arthritis in his wrists and hands so he sold his motorcycle.
Sometimes he goes back up to The Dragon to visit the regulars. They call him “Dragon Slayer”. But the memories are bittersweet.
“I had every turn, every bump, every scar created by an 18-wheeler memorized on that road,” he said. “Man, those were the good days. My mind was so clear.”
For newcomers, Barnes has a simple suggestion: “Stay in your lane. It’ll get bad quick if you don’t.”
With hairpins, blind cutbacks and a cloverleaf here and there, this challenging 11-mile stretch is said to be among the best driving roads in the world.
- By Eric Barton
Deep in the southern United States, in the thickly forested border of Tennessee and North Carolina, is a road that seems drawn by a doodler. It makes 318 turns along 11 miles of countryside, including hairpins, blind cutbacks and a cloverleaf here and there. It’s so windy and challenging that it has become a destination for motorcyclists and car enthusiasts; some say it's among the best driving roads in the world.
This section of highway US 129 is often called The Dragon, and Jared Barnes remembers the first time he took his motorbike on it. It was about seven years ago, and Barnes had no idea what he was doing.
The Dragon’s turns have become legendary among riders (Credit: Mark Scheuern/Alamy)
“I couldn’t ride worth a crap,” he recalled. “The local boys just about peeled the paint off my bike flying past me.”
Barnes was soon hooked on the adrenaline of it. Living just 45 minutes away, he went back three or four times a week. After constant practice, in 2012 he tried to break the record for the fastest ride ever. Video shows him doing it in 8:27, besting the previous record by half a minute and hitting more than 130mph – a good four times faster than the speed limit.
“It’s not official or anything, because, you know, it’s not legal,” Barnes sheepishly admitted.
His run may be the record, but it’s not uncommon to see that kind of speed on The Dragon. An unknown country road just 20 years ago, the route is becoming a destination for motorcyclists, gearheads and those who find adrenaline in the g-forces of an apex turn.
Drivers have to navigate several cloverleaves along the road (Credit: Mark Scheuern/Alamy)
With a lethargic 30mph speed limit, The Dragon has become a constant battle between local deputies and speedsters. It’s also created a small cottage industry of businesses for thrill-seekers and Sunday drivers.
The road traces the route of an old Cherokee hunting path, which was then used by17th-century European settlers to bring cattle to market towns. The federal government paved it into US 129 in the 1950s. Connecting sleepy hamlets deep into the Appalachian forest, the road remained largely unused until the 1990s, when internet chatrooms and motorcycle websites found it.
At the eastern end of The Dragon, there’s now a motel and a gift shop and a makeshift memorial of smashed helmets and motorcycle parts. Head northwest from there and the road descends into deep forest preserves. The entire 11-mile stretch has no driveways or side streets, no homes or businesses – nothing to worry about but the turn coming up. It’s also full of hills, so the road dips and climbs as it goes left and right.
A memorial of smashed helmets and motorcycle parts sits by the road (Credit: Zoonar GmbH/Alamy)
These turns have become legendary among drivers and motorcyclists for their difficulty. The toughest of them might be Guardrail Cliff, where the road is hugged by an unforgiving rock wall on one side and a metal rail on the other, both dented and paint-smeared from those who couldn’t handle the sweeping turn. Or perhaps the hardest is Gravity Cavity, a turn that becomes a deep drop followed by a hump, leaving motorcyclists in the wrong gear, struggling for power and apt to fall on the rise.
Many people who try The Dragon stay for a few days or a week, hoping daily trips on it will help them master it, said Brad Talbott, owner of Deals Gap Motorcycle Resort. Talbott’s 14-room motel, a former hunting lodge, is often booked up during summer months, sometimes a year in advance.
“This is like Disney for drivers. It has become the focal point for motorcyclists and serious car guys,” Talbott said.
The Deals Gap Motorcycle Resort is often fully booked in the summer (Credit: Susan Leggett/Alamy)
On a summer’s day, thousands of riders make the windy journey, according to Dave Allison, a photographer who sets up along The Dragon and sells the pictures on his website. People buy his pictures of their Harleys or Fords or sometimes even tractor trailers.
“I’ve got the best job in the world,” Allison said, as a hog roaring by drowned him out. On his morning drive from nearby Knoxville, Tennessee, Allison sees eagles nesting, sunrises through the white oaks and sugar maples, fog rolling off a lake and lazy black bears meandering across the turnpike.
He sets up in a corner called Picnic Benches. “There used to be benches here until someone crashed into them,” Allison explained. It’s a double apex, with a short straight between the two turns. Most everyone can handle it, which is the way Allison likes it. He rarely sets up in one of the more difficult turns: accidents mean less business when his corner is tied up by rescue crews, which often take an hour to respond.
It’s not uncommon to see riders speeding (Credit: Mark Scheuern/Alamy)
And The Dragon sees its share of crashes, often 10 or 15 a day, according to Allison and Talbott. Mostly it’s a motorcyclist who loses control and walks away with a bit of road rash. But some are far worse. Between 2002 and 2015, the Tennessee Highway Patrol documented 1,695 crashes on The Dragon, 37 of them fatalities. So far this year, there have been 103 wrecks, with three deaths.
Most of those deaths are riders from “the flat straight areas” of the US, like Illinois and Florida, according to Lt Randy Ailey with the traffic safety unit at the Blount County Sheriff's Office.
His deputies often write a dozen citations a day. But occasionally, the worst offenders just speed off, Ailey admitted. If a motorcyclist blows through the speed trap, Ailey doesn’t want his men to give chase.
“It’s not worth my deputies getting hurt for a speeding ticket,” he said.
The Dragon ‘is like Disney for drivers’ (Credit: thematthewknot/Flickr)
Barnes never had a run-in with the police because he did his speed runs on slow winter weekdays. He admits now his record-setting run wasn’t exactly safe. But he has quit racing The Dragon. He’s a carpenter at his family’s business, theIncredible Christmas Place, a massive holiday-themed shopping village in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, where he’s responsible for the store’s iconic glockenspiel, a three-storey working clock with hand-poured bells. A work accident left him with arthritis in his wrists and hands so he sold his motorcycle.
Sometimes he goes back up to The Dragon to visit the regulars. They call him “Dragon Slayer”. But the memories are bittersweet.
“I had every turn, every bump, every scar created by an 18-wheeler memorized on that road,” he said. “Man, those were the good days. My mind was so clear.”
For newcomers, Barnes has a simple suggestion: “Stay in your lane. It’ll get bad quick if you don’t.”
VCheng
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A good piece, written by Kevin Cameron:
=============================
Once upon a time I was given half an hour’s conversation with Ducati’s then engineer Filippo Preziosi. He stated that motorcycle design – that is, making choices among reasonable alternatives – was tightly confined by restraints.
“You know what the wheelbase has to be”, he said, “and you know what suspension you plan to use. You put a swingarm in place, at the droop angle needed by rear suspension geometry. And that tells you where the engine sprocket has to be.”
He listed other requirements, such as the engine’s need for an intake airbox of at least ten liters’ volume, plus the fuel tank whose maximum volume is dictated by technical rules (racing) or by practicality (road). Rider location is also pretty much dictated by purpose. Back in the 1960s riders’ butts essentially rested against a vertical plane through the rear axle, but as power increased over the decades, the need to maximize acceleration by moving weight toward the front, dragster fashion, has pushed riders six inches or more forward of that. To allow the rider to move forward, the long “breadloaf” fuel tanks of the past have shortened into today’s taller, wider mushroom shapes. The engine’s need for an intake airbox displaces fuel from its traditional place atop the frame. At the moment, MotoGP design is putting most of the fuel under the front of the rider’s seat, but other possibilities exist; building a mock-up stimulates the imagination.
When Sr. Preziosi was done, about all that was left to design was the “bracket” (i.e. the chassis) that connects all the parts.
Necessity dictated almost everything else.
In the past when I built two-stroke exhaust pipes for race bikes, to guarantee ground clearance I built a plywood Vee into which I could roll the bike, with its suspension compressed to simulate rider, full fuel, and corner loading. That Vee defined the space into which my smokestacks had to fit. The angle on each side was the anticipated maximum lean angle, which varies with tire grip level.
While the sophisticated modern way is to do the mock-up on a computer screen after digitizing all the parts, what’s wrong with good old reality? Clamp the two wheels with appropriate tires to a narrow work table at the desired wheelbase. Assemble the fork onto the front wheel at the planned rake angle (on sports motorcycles these days that’s often 23 1/2 - 24 1/2 degrees, more on a dragster or cruiser). Place the engine you will use where it has to be (the engine sprocket’s position is defined by rear axle and swingarm positions) and block it in place. Now you can start to see where components have to go – radiator and hoses if any, exhaust pipes, footpegs and their brackets, suspension linkage. The space left for “the bracket” (i.e., the chassis) also becomes clear.
How do you design complex shapes such as the fuel tank? One way, making it easy to make changes as the design develops, is to carve the shape from a block of polystyrene foam. A rough check on tank volume can be made by the 2300-year-old displacement method of Archimedes (to find volume, he pushed irregularly shaped objects into a full vessel of water and measured the fluid volume that was displaced. When he first thought of this, he made his famous utterance, “Eureka!”). The artificial snow from sawing and sanding the polystyrene gets into everything, but once you have a workable shape you can smooth its exterior with a filler such as Bondo or gypsum plaster, sand it smooth, and use the result to make a fiberglass mold. Or, if finance permits, you can take the shape to “the tank guy”, who will translate your shape into aluminum.
A lot of work. And think of the potential for divorce in such time-consuming projects (“He lives in his shop anyway, so I told him to just move in there…”). Maybe it’s a better idea to just roll over to the dealer and take in the new models. Might see something you like.
=============================
Once upon a time I was given half an hour’s conversation with Ducati’s then engineer Filippo Preziosi. He stated that motorcycle design – that is, making choices among reasonable alternatives – was tightly confined by restraints.
“You know what the wheelbase has to be”, he said, “and you know what suspension you plan to use. You put a swingarm in place, at the droop angle needed by rear suspension geometry. And that tells you where the engine sprocket has to be.”
He listed other requirements, such as the engine’s need for an intake airbox of at least ten liters’ volume, plus the fuel tank whose maximum volume is dictated by technical rules (racing) or by practicality (road). Rider location is also pretty much dictated by purpose. Back in the 1960s riders’ butts essentially rested against a vertical plane through the rear axle, but as power increased over the decades, the need to maximize acceleration by moving weight toward the front, dragster fashion, has pushed riders six inches or more forward of that. To allow the rider to move forward, the long “breadloaf” fuel tanks of the past have shortened into today’s taller, wider mushroom shapes. The engine’s need for an intake airbox displaces fuel from its traditional place atop the frame. At the moment, MotoGP design is putting most of the fuel under the front of the rider’s seat, but other possibilities exist; building a mock-up stimulates the imagination.
When Sr. Preziosi was done, about all that was left to design was the “bracket” (i.e. the chassis) that connects all the parts.
Necessity dictated almost everything else.
In the past when I built two-stroke exhaust pipes for race bikes, to guarantee ground clearance I built a plywood Vee into which I could roll the bike, with its suspension compressed to simulate rider, full fuel, and corner loading. That Vee defined the space into which my smokestacks had to fit. The angle on each side was the anticipated maximum lean angle, which varies with tire grip level.
While the sophisticated modern way is to do the mock-up on a computer screen after digitizing all the parts, what’s wrong with good old reality? Clamp the two wheels with appropriate tires to a narrow work table at the desired wheelbase. Assemble the fork onto the front wheel at the planned rake angle (on sports motorcycles these days that’s often 23 1/2 - 24 1/2 degrees, more on a dragster or cruiser). Place the engine you will use where it has to be (the engine sprocket’s position is defined by rear axle and swingarm positions) and block it in place. Now you can start to see where components have to go – radiator and hoses if any, exhaust pipes, footpegs and their brackets, suspension linkage. The space left for “the bracket” (i.e., the chassis) also becomes clear.
How do you design complex shapes such as the fuel tank? One way, making it easy to make changes as the design develops, is to carve the shape from a block of polystyrene foam. A rough check on tank volume can be made by the 2300-year-old displacement method of Archimedes (to find volume, he pushed irregularly shaped objects into a full vessel of water and measured the fluid volume that was displaced. When he first thought of this, he made his famous utterance, “Eureka!”). The artificial snow from sawing and sanding the polystyrene gets into everything, but once you have a workable shape you can smooth its exterior with a filler such as Bondo or gypsum plaster, sand it smooth, and use the result to make a fiberglass mold. Or, if finance permits, you can take the shape to “the tank guy”, who will translate your shape into aluminum.
A lot of work. And think of the potential for divorce in such time-consuming projects (“He lives in his shop anyway, so I told him to just move in there…”). Maybe it’s a better idea to just roll over to the dealer and take in the new models. Might see something you like.
VCheng
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Blitzing through the famous Hawk's Nest with fabulous fall colors all around:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawk's_Nest,_New_York
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawk's_Nest,_New_York
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