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The roads in South Carolina seem to come in two extremes. There is rough with holes, craters, bumps, mountains and cracks. We are talking harsh. Rear wheel launched in the air harsh. Screws and bolts loosened. Riders cringing at the thought of the frame suffering. Then there is smooth. Baby’s bottom smooth. Fresh tarmac. Hands off the bars. Nice.

We had both types during Stage 7. We also had occasional contact with the repair crews out with their heavy equipment and hand tools. I made a point of waving thanks to them as the smoothness was definitely appreciated! The rough road section seemed to be responsible for the loss of a couple of Lydian’s machine screws. One was a screw which hold a bearing in place in the transmission case. Not critical but it still will be replaced before Stage 8 as the open hole allows some oil to seep from the upper case. The second screw loss was more destructive in that the rear wiring sub-harness (from mid bike back to tail light) got chewed up. The clips that normally hold the wiring in place under the rear fender let go, the wire dropped down and the rear wheel ripped it apart. No tail light, no brake light. Thanks to Vince (riding next to me) for observing this so that I could pull over and secure the flapping wires safely against the frame with a tie-wrap. We made up a new sub-harness during the nightly maintenance session so lights will work as designed.

Not everyone was so lucky as more bikes ended up on the sweep trailer. As you can see on the standings page, about half the riders/bikes have completed all the daily miles. There is one first place and that is held by Dave C. on his Class I Harley Davidson single…he is awesome. It takes a hardy soul to ride that machine over so many miles. He deserves a win if he can keep that up….but the next three slots are all Class II Henderson riders and they are hovering right behind him.

The toll of long hills and harsh roads is exemplified here on Doug’s Indian with burned exhaust and broken seat:

The grim sweeper keeps track of their haul as shown here:

Stage 8 is a shorter ride but we are going to visit the Wheel Through Time museum in Maggie Valley, hurrah! Rain will be present through a good bit of the ride but I have my Aerostich suit and ancient water-proof riding boots so all should be fine.

For East Coasters, its no big deal. I know, I was one of them. For West Coasters, seeing and smelling the Atlantic is a big deal. The contrast from our rugged Pacific Northwest coast is amazing…here was the view yesterday upon arrival in Myrtle Beach, SC:

The blue skies and wispy clouds do not show the true experience of the ride in South Carolina. After leaving Danville, VA we had a pleasant tour through the countryside. I was riding with Vince on a 1923 Henderson which can keep up with Lydian. The two Chicago four cylinders sounded great when side by side…resonating harmoniously. The humidity began to build in the late morning and the sun started to really heat things up. I added my evaporative vest under the jacket which brings the core temperature down quite nicely.

The other “cooling option” came from the skies. As we proceeded East, the dark clouds built and it was clear we were going straight into the rain ahead. Pull over, get gas, add rain suit over riding gear, head back out. Rain came hard but not for too long. The cooling was marvelous but short lived. By the time we approached the outskirts of Myrtle Beach, it was HOT and the traffic was BAD. Pull over, get gas, store rain gear, head back out. I have not lived in a place with bad traffic for the past few years so this was an unpleasant experience for me and for the other riders, especially those on single-speed bikes. They have to slip the clutch constantly in the stop-and-go.

Normal maintenance on Lydian, pizza and beer, bed. Early start and off to Spartanburg, SC for 260 miles or so with a 50-70% chance or rain.

At the end of Stage 5 yesterday, I was approached by a bike enthusiast and asked about the ‘28 Henderson. They asked how we were doing in the race and if I could win. With the bike running well and the weather holding out, I am a winner. But with my age (under 70), my bike’s age (1928) and grouping as Class VI (big engine), I would never “win” the Cannonball. Obviously that is not why I do this…we are here to ride, see the country, hang with friends and have fun. If I wanted to win, I would be on a really old bike (ie, 1912) with no transmission and get older! To see the overall standings as we complete the Stages, check the Scoring link: https://motorcyclecannonball.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/MC2021-Stage5Scores.pdf#zoom=100

The riding yesterday was up in the top tier of rides…cool in the morning, hot in the afternoon, no rain and lots of twisty roads in hill country. The start was early:

The hills of West Virginia and Virginia are amazing. Tight twisty turns threaded through the lush valleys. Some sections were completely empty of traffic, just me and intense concentration as we really worked the engine, tires and brakes for miles at a time. Occasionally I would come upon another group of riders and hang with them for a bit. The best was riding with Justin and Jared Rinker on their early Indians. These “twins on twins” are not slow pokes. The three of us swept bend after bend in formation, up and down 6-9% grades under the leafy canopy of shade tree. Awesome.

By the time we were in Virginia, the temperature and humidity had climbed in the 90s. I didn’t stop to take photos but Nancy and Vern pulled the van over at Lover’s Leap on Route 58 and captured the spectacular view:

Maintenance last night included adjustment of the exhaust valves – they had tighten from where I had set them (0.008”) to 0.005”. This often occurs as the new valves are bedding into their seats and should be OK. I will check them every night to be sure there is no valve seat recession occurring. Stage 6 takes us on the Eastern most extent of this Cannonball…all the way to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

It was a tough day…hard on bikes and bodies. Only 209 miles long but the afternoon took a toll. The morning started out great…cool and dry with quiet back roads through farm country. Although the Classes start out as groups of 10-20 riders, they quickly spread out. I prefer to ride with 1 or 2 people but really enjoy solo travel once away. I can set my own pace and make my own errors of navigation.

As we moved south from Ohio to West Virginia, the landscape began to undulate and the sweeping bends were great – until the course creators placed us on US 35. It might be a good road for cars and trucks but for these bikes on that day, it was hard and not pleasant. The temperature was now in the 90s and the traffic flow was 65-75. Cannonballers had to ride on the side of the right lane with trucks barreling down behind or alongside. There were some long uphill segments and it was hard for several bikes to maintain even 40 mph. This was particularly hard on the heavy Henderson sidecar rig driven by Wade and Kathy. The heat and strain was too much….a piston was holed. Game over. Cannonball 2021 finished for the couple from Wisconsin.. Riders shared their support with signatures:

The various adjustments we (Team Flintworks) made over the last several days have continued to work well as our Lydian is pulling strong and purring along. Best speed seems to be 48-58 mph with less vibration and you can hear the engine “come onto the cams”. Average fuel consumption is 35 mpg. We shall see how the next Stage unfolds as we have 260 miles to go with temperatures forecasted into the 90s as we arrive Danville, Virginia.

Earlier, I had mentioned how great most of the riders, crew and staff have been, I should also mention that some are very colorful characters. Over the next week, I can share some photos that capture their spirits. Here is one:

Additional content with photos and video is posted here if you are interested: https://m.facebook.com/motorcyclecannonball/

Ohio has lots of farms. We may have seen a good percentage of County Roads A through Z….most straight with some so smooth you felt like flying! (Of course, some were so bumpy that a lot of nuts and bolts had to get tightened). The higher temperatures and additional 240 miles were hard on some bikes and the sweep trucks had two trailers full by the end of the day.

Two first-Cannonball riders suffered injuries over a 24 hour period, both are doing OK. One had a leg fracture and underwent quick surgical repair. The other freak accident reinforces the value of a good helmet. Apparently the throttle stuck wide open while the Indian was in a gas station parking area. Unable to get it out of gear, the bike plowed into metal poles and the rider went between the poles which were the same width as his helmet. Head was protected! Bike is out of commission for this year:

The main reception at the end of the day was at the Rip Rap Roadhouse outside of Dayton. It’s great reputation as a gathering spot is well deserved. Nice grounds, outdoor stages for music, big covered decks and a stone-walled bar room. Even better, the bar has an Indian Scout right in it’s center. Outside was filled with hundreds of well wishers and motorcycles. The support and applause as riders crossed the finish line is so much appreciated! Thanks to the owner and staff of Rip Rap for doing such a great welcome. http://www.ripraproadhouse.com

Nightly maintenance includes a thorough once over of the bike, checking nuts and bolts, wiring, oil, air, chain, brakes, etc. Today while riding I noticed a more prominent vibration between 40-48 mph. Consultation with the experts:

We found a number of loose bolts including the 4 large ones that hold the crankcase against the lower frame tubing…that may be the vibration source. We torqued them down so the next Stage will tell. My only loss today was trivial…the heel to my right boot! The good news is that I have another pair of boots and don’t have to walk with the nails pressing into my heel. We are off to West Virginia and will report back tomorrow.

Use your mind to picture the first of four scenes: early morning riding on cool, farm country roads. Bike running smoothly with the smell of apples, cows and corn in the air. Suddenly a crazy amount of movement appears in the shady section of the road ahead. Slow down and don’t hit them…16-18 wild turkeys including little ones (are they called chicks?). This happens again a little later in the morning.

Mental image number two: farm lands with straight county roads; an Amish farmer plowing the field behind a team of horses. Someone must have laid out these roads in a grid as they are straight with stop signs only every few miles. Our course involves a series of right and left turns making it harder and harder to keep track of my orientation. It almost feels like I am a blindfold captive and the kidnapper is trying to be sure I have not sense of direction. One wrong turn led to a 6.5-mile diversion which means arithmetic for the rest of the 253 miles.

Image three: Battle Creek Harley Davidson dealership with hundreds of people and motorcycles welcoming riders across the finish line. Wonderful enthusiasm from the crowd as they press close for a better look and an excellent spread of food provided for riders and support crews. Nice.

Scene four: the large parking lot in a shuttered shopping mall filled with Cannonball support vehicles and work crews. Generators and work lights set up, tools on tables and bikes in various states of rescue. For some of our friends, the ride today has not been kind. Several motors have been removed from their frames. Fragments of aluminum from a holed piston need cleaning and frantic efforts are needed to see if a new piston can be fitted. People helping people with parts, advice and tools. Fortunately, Lydian has had only minor needs today…bolts tightened, valves adjusted and oil changed. Our fixes from prior days have held well. Thanks to Nancy for catching this scene on her phone:

Those four scenes represent the essence of the Motorcycle Cannonball. The next Stage is about 250 miles with warm, dry weather. Wish us all good luck.

Fog and cool temperatures greeted us at the ship museum in The Soo. The various classes of bikes were brought to the start line…some purring, some popping and smoking.

The roads out of town quickly brought us into some beautiful parts of Michigan. At first, straight roads through mixed hardwood forest; blue skies emerged and the riders and bikes settled into their “sweet spot”. For an early single cylinder motorcycle, that might be 25-30 miles an hour. For Lydian, that seems to be 52-62 mph – which was the case on smooth, straight sections of Route 31. We did get to negotiate the Mackinac Bridge with it’s metal grate surface…makes for interesting riding as the tires get steered by the grate groves. But motorcycles are meant for curves and we were routed to a really nice 20 mile stretch called The Tunnel of Trees. We had a continuous, twisty and narrow roadway with speeds of 25-45 mph. Occasional peek views of the Great Lake led to the quaint (with a capital Q) town of Harbor Springs.

Several bikes suffered with mechanical gremlins…parked on the side of the road trying to fix things before the Sweep Wagon and trailer came along. If you couldn’t fix the problem in short order, that was your ride back to the hotel parking lot. Creativity and resourcefulness reigned especially for Jeff and Loring. The beautiful 1912 Henderson shown in an earlier post suffered a breakage of the two bolts that hold the rocker tower onto the top of the cylinder. The number 4 tower came free and the bike ran roughly on three cylinders. The solution? Ride into a John Deere repair shop, borrow a drill press and left-hand drill bit, back out the bolts and install temporary replacement screws. Nice work and all miles completed on time!

Lydian suffered her own problems…one easy, one a bit harder to fix. The easy one only required a screw driver to tighten the throttle cable clamp and restore throttle control while standing on the side of the road. The harder challenge exemplifies the benefits of looking over your machine carefully on a daily basis. While parked on display at the Hagerty Insurance headquarters for public viewing, I put the bike up on it’s rear stand and noticed excessive movement between the rear sprocket and the rear wheel hub. That could be a disaster! A gentle ride back to the hotel parking lot and time to break out the tools. Four hours of work revealed a poorly seated sprocket on the hub splines with some wear. If this had been allowed to continue over the next 3500 miles, it would have destroyed the hub and ended the Cannonball ride for 2021. The repair was carried out with the help of Vern, Mark, Paul and Jeff who provided advice, tools and green Loctite. (That is the stuff for loose bearings and once set, cannot be easily removed).

Nancy has kept everything going on track with hotels, food and support. She is the best! Saturday brings us to Battle Creek which is about a 250 mile ride. Weather should be good and Lydian should be ready to roll.

Sometimes we use the phrase “soft start” when the initial action is a hint of what is to come. Yesterday, the 88 Riders got their first taste of the complex dance that makes for the Cannonball. We all assembled for a Rider’s meeting with Jason Sims and Staff who provided an overview of the course instructions, the Rules and Regulations, safety measures, etc. They also welcomed novice entrants to this motorcycle family. Nearly half of the riders are participating for the first time in this “life changing event”. The room was attentive but you could tell everyone wanted to get outside and riding:

Finally released to the bikes, each team sent their rider off to the check in and formal start. The slowest and oldest bikes (eg, 1910 Harley Davidson single cylinder, single speed) started first and the larger, “newer”, faster bikes started later. There are some beauties with the 1912 Henderson getting my vote as Queen of the Ball.

Some riders bring exceptional commitment to the spirit of the Cannonball including period dress:

Other riders have participated in every Cannonball event from the beginning including Shinya, a crowd favorite with his trusty (and crusty) Indian:

We did a short but scenic ride through the historic town of Sault Saint Marie and had group photos taken in the park by the water. Our ‘28 Henderson ran well but the rough road encountered about 5 miles from the finish revealed a minor problem with the front fork. Inspection revealed a worn shaft and bushing in the spring box which allowed too much movement and clash of box against frame headstock. This could cause major problems if left unattended! Disassembly proceeded with the help of team and friends…the short-term fix involved making a shim from a piece of a steel can. The long-term solution will require a machine shop and creating a new bushing/shaft combination. Let’s see how long this fix can last!

Friday the 10th is the run to Traverse City…190 miles of nice roads, pleasant temperatures and a reception at Hagerty headquarters.

This Cannonball breaks from past coast-to-coast events in that it conjures up the “three flags” of the past. When competitive motorcyclists of the 1910s and 1920s wanted to show how good they or the manufacturers bikes were, they would ride from Canada to Mexico to claim three-flag victories. Henderson riders were no exception; the first was done by Roy Artley in 1916.

Jason and the MC organizers have chosen a route that will provide great scenery, intense weather and some iconic places to stop. The trip is not short…3715 miles divided up over two weeks or so. Here is a high-level view:

In my universe of all things vintage motorcycle, two of the stops represent perfection: Dale and Matt Walksler’s Wheels Through Time museum in Maggie Valley (https://wheelsthroughtime.com) and the Barber Motorcycle Museum (https://www.barbermuseum.org) in Birmingham. I would encourage anyone with an interest in motorcycles (no matter what your bike inclination) to go and visit in person, you will not be disappointed. In fact, visitors are welcome to see the Cannonball bikes and riders at these stops as shown in the above schedule. If you get to visit Barber’s, allow for more than one day if possible!

Weather wise, we are still in peak season for some storms. The intense rain, heat and winds of 2021 will likely have a big impact on our riding. Hopefully no floods to shut down roads, no hail to batter faces and no triple-digit heat to cook engines! Fellow riders prepare for this in various ways from ride in the same jacket, jeans and boots everyday no matter what vs a full selection of hot/wet/dry/cold riding options. Most riders fall somewhere in between the two extremes. I think heat is the most common element to battle and I will be using one of those evaporative vests to keep cool. They are made of a special fabric which retains a fair amount of water from pre-soaking. While riding, a controlled rate of evaporation (done via jacket zipper opening) provides a nice cooling effect of your core. Our start tomorrow looks like partly cloudy with slight chance of rain…not bad for Michigan. Today will be spent going over nuts and bolts of Lydian, adjusting things as needed and replacing the copper fuel line with a rubber line with inline filter plus some test riding.

It was not easy to do. Getting a controlled explosion inside the combustion chamber required just the right amount of vaporized gasoline mixed with air. In the early days of motorcycles, engineers did not yet appreciate the details of fuel delivery and employed many different methods. Most utilized the suction provided by piston travel pulling air through an intake valve. None of the early carburetors could keep the air/fuel ratio (AFR) at about the ideal of 14:1 across the full range of engine RPMs (ie, idle to wide-open-throttle). For the Hendersons of the 1920s, the intake manifold was positioned so that fuel and air had to be drawn up from below and to do this, the Chicago factory abandoned the Schebler carburetor (used on the Detroit design) in exchange for a Zenith “updraft” model. By 1928, the Zenith T4X utilized several novel methods of controlling the AFR. Here is a diagram from Zenith, the supplier, back in the day:

Here is a photo of the T4X that came with my Deluxe:

When I first got my Deluxe running some years ago, I could not get it to run cleanly. It appeared that whatever adjustments I made to get it to idle correctly would cause it to not run properly when the throttle was opened way up. Eventually I took it apart to look at the metering jets (as shown as items I and G in the period diagram). Both were stamped with the number 20 – as they should have been – however a previous “mechanic” had opened one of the holes quite a bit larger. It also appeared that the shaft for the throttle butterfly valve was quite loose allowing for air leakage and sloppy control.

The short term solution was to borrow a working carb from my friend and fellow Cannonballer, Jeff. At the same time, Mark at 4th Coast Fours, was working on casting and manufacturing “new” throttle bodies, shafts and jets. As of this writing (days before the race start), I have not received one but I am told they have been test run successfully. It remains to be seen if I get one to mount in place the day before the race. Stay tuned….