Every year, we get bombarded. Professional marketing firms are allowed to use all sorts of psychological data and research to figure out how to entice kids to beg their parents and grandparents for the latest “must have” gift that will likely be forgotten about (or broken) by the time we ring in the New Year. […]
Over the last two weeks, two really great guys that I know that live thousands of miles apart have suffered catastrophic crashes on the back of their bikes. The reason isn’t weather, or distracted drivers, or even a random system failure. Nope. In fact, it is as far from those “traditional” problems as you can […]
Entire generations of riders have sworn by air-cooled engines and Harley took a whole ration of wrath when they decided to introduce liquid cooling into the Twin Cam 103 a few years ago. Mother Davidson was far from the first – in reality – they were one of the last – but is there an […]
I mentioned last month that I had the chance to cruise around the state of Wyoming a few days on an old, borrowed Gold Wing. The lists of towns and places isn’t important, although the effect they had on me was. More than once, I crossed the remnants of the Overland Trail, the Oregon Trail, […]
For a lot of the reasons we’ve talked about in these pages over the years, Harley has its challenges. An aging ridership, changing manufacturing, and a question of direction versus tradition. None of those answers are easy and the questions aren’t going away. Harley, though, has taken it all in stride and, at a time […]
About three of you will remember a few months ago when the neighbor ruined my riding jacket and the good news about The Bikers’ Den having just the new one I needed. Well, the neighbor’s wife isn’t trying to do my laundry, but now that the snow is blowing in a lot of places and […]
“How can I be lost, When I’ve got nowhere to go?” – Metallica, Unforgiven III We all do this – get used to riding close to home, we get set in our ways, we take weekend trips to stuff we’ve already seen. Park in the same spot. Take the same route to work. Eat the […]
The late, great comedian George Carlin had a rant in one of his shows years ago about “stuff” – you spent a lifetime accumulating it and then your kids spent years trying to get rid of it. He explained that you would go on vacation to “get away from it all” but still bring a […]
Eventually, you’ll try anything to clean your motorcycle parts with. It could be because you’re out of your favorite product and can’t get it locally that weekend, it could be that you’ve finally gotten tired of all the elbow grease needed to get some kinds of cleaners to actually polish chrome or stainless, or maybe […]
Hopefully, by the time you read this, Hurricane Harvey and the devastation that it caused in southeastern Texas will be old news and cleanup will have been quick, the death toll low, and the fallout – both literal and figurative – minimal. Somehow, I doubt it. Down here, we get hurricanes. Not every year, but […]
It’s been awhile since I wrote about adopting earplugs into my standard gear, but I’m happy to say that I’ve gotten pretty good at the habit now. With that being said, I’ve got to admit that after a few months, it had gotten a little … well, boring. Enter the Old Lady. I was … […]
When I first started riding three decades ago, a day on the bike meant you needed some gas in the tank, to check the oil, and make sure that you had some cash in your wallet. If the weather looked like it might get bad, you’d stash a slicker under the bungee cord or, if […]
So a week or so ago, I was attempting to sneak away from the desk and the computer after my second cup of coffee that morning and The Boss emailed me. “Bikers’ Den has partnered with Voss Helmets, so can you work some helmet stuff into the new blogs?” Now, I’ll be honest, since I […]
By the time you read this, Sturgis will be either roaring through the last weekend or the cleanup crews will be working overtime. Even though, for most of us as bikers, Sturgis represents the chance (albeit one we don’t often take) to go and hang out with half a million kindred spirits, the truth of […]
Just kidding. In a way, it’s true, though. Harley Davidson and Indian may not be officially working with one another, but it is interesting that they have both recently come out as looking for “sleepers.” These are the 9 million or so licensed riders in North America that don’t own a bike and have the […]
So three days ago, a friend of mine called me to ask a question about his bike and one of the “upgrades” he had done a month or so ago. Now, it’s not important what the bike is (it happens to be an immaculate Virago from a dozen or so years ago), but what is […]
If you ride a V-twin and live in North America, you’ve heard of Sturgis, South Dakota. For 77 years, if you believe the mythology, thousands of bikers – 99% of them on bikes are Harleys or want to be Harleys – have made the pilgrimage to Sturgis to not act their age, enjoy the company […]
If you’ve read these articles over the years, you know that I love old technology. The idea of fuel injection, computers, and – to a degree – LED’s for lighting seems superfluous to me when we’re discussing a mode of transportation that can’t even keep you dry or even marginally climate-controlled. On the other hand, […]
One of the side effects of being an independent and a guy who has owned the same bike for two decades is that every once in awhile, you finally get around to noticing something. These days, if you’re like me, you might see something that you like and make a mental note to look more […]
Waxers. One Percenters. Citizens. Weekend Warriors. You name it, we’ve made up a term to describe it. From Panheads to Crotch Rockets, bikers may not have done too much, but we’ve damn sure got a label for everyone and we don’t do a good job of mixing with others. You don’t see street bikes rolling […]
We’ve all been there – out on the road and you stop for a Coke and a smile and they come out of the woodwork. Posers, Wannabes, and the genuinely curious – all with questions about bikes and bikers and “how do I learn to ride a motorcycle?” Some of them I tell just to […]
Have you ever noticed how things always happen for a reason? The older I get, the more I know this to be true, and the day “the Boss” emailed me about Fox Creek Leather being back in stock at The Bikers’ Den was no exception. You see, last week, the young couple that live next […]
A couple of weeks ago, Harley Davidson released their first quarter financial results and, as usual, it makes for some interesting reading. Now, we’ve talked about profit centers in this column before, but what was really interesting isn’t that profits stayed virtually the same for H-D versus the first quarter last year, but that they […]
Like an awfully large part of the population, I enjoyed Sons of Anarchy when it was on. Sure, it got violent, it got over the top, I thought it was a pretty good portrayal, not of motorcycle gangs, but of certain types of personalities who just happened to ride. It was, if you really think […]
Last weekend, as I usually do, I rolled the bike out of the garage and pointed it down the road. No real plans, just a need to get out of the house and burn some fossil fuels. A couple of hours later, in a small town that was slowly dying as the population moved off […]
Well it was bound to happen and it did. My old buddy from Elk Mountain, Wyoming called me and had finally had some weather worth riding in. At 7,000 feet, his place sits pretty high and Spring comes late in those mountains, but they’d gotten up to 66 degrees last weekend and he’d drug the […]
So this last weekend, the 2 or so billion Christians in the world celebrated Easter in a lot of different ways. Especially popular in my part of the country – the Bible Belt – is the Sunrise Service. For those of you that don’t have this particular institution as a part of your religious lexicon, […]
So here we are, it’s time to drag the bike out and you haven’t done anything that you said you would. You filled up the tank and slammed it in the garage where it’s been lying buried under a tarp since the end of October and now the weather has warmed up and you’re itching […]
