Sunday, December 16, 2007

Nice Vintage Engine Stand

This is a product I've used in my shop for over a year. It works really well with ca 1969-1975 CZ motors. From what I can tell it will work with almost any vintage single - two-stroke or four-stroke. It's highly adjustable, easy to use, and Mike Kincaid over at Rampant Racing is a great guy.

When you buy a lot of products over the internet, sight-unseen as I often do, you never know what's going to show up at your door. Often it's a decent product taped into a shoebox or grocery bag or somesuch. Mike doesn't deliver that kind of nonsense. The Rampant Racing stand came fully broken down and fixed in a custom wooden shipping fixture. It was the best-engineered shipping container I've seen and made sure that everything arrived in order and undamaged no matter what the chimpanzees at the freight company did.

That might seem silly, but a guy who puts that kind of thought into how to package his product isn't going to make a cheesy product to go in it. You can bet the engine stand is first-rate — solid engineering, excellent manufacturing quality, nice finish, and easy assembly. If you work on engines out of the frame this is a tool you wqant under your Christmas tree.

Saturday, December 15, 2007

High Quality CZ Logos

One of the things that always bugs me is not being able to get decent logo images for the old vintage bike brands. If I want to make some kind of graphic or flyer or use it on the web I have to scrounge the internet and try to find something. And usually it's a crappy scan of some old sticker or magazine ad, or old race flyer. I can't fix that for everything, but I can fix it for a couple of things. I had my friends at Practicalia LLC recreate a couple of CZ logos in a vector format so I could use them at any size I want.

First is the very nice red/blue/black Jawa-CZ "Choice of Champions" logo. I really like this one because you don't see it very often. A while back CZ Guy was nice enough to send me a scan of an original Choice of Champions sticker to use as a pattern. Next is the more traditional black/red round CZ logo. This is the one you most often see on jerseys from Bertus and Metro Racing. I'll try and get the early CZ tank badge logo next and post it here, too. In the meantime, here's the two I have in a variety of formats:

• Jawa-CZ Choice of Champions logo
• Adobe Illustrator CS2 file
• Adobe Illustrator v3.0 file (for Illustrator 3-7)
• Adobe PDF v1.3 (Acrobat 4) file
• 538x538 pixel gif file
• CZ Round logo
• Adobe Illustrator CS2 file
• Adobe Illustrator v3.0 file
• Adobe PDF v1.3 (Acrobat 4) file
• 400x400 pixel gif file

Just right-click and "Save Link As..." on the file format you want.

Friday, December 14, 2007

1973 Honda CR250 Elsinore Jumps 301 Feet

Think you need a modern MX bike to get some air time? Think the Step-Up contest at X-Games is a new thing? C'mon! We did it all in the '70s already. Bob Wills flies his '73 Elisnore over 300ft off a ramp.