"Push'n Pavement"

Motorcycle Therapy

Guilty Dude — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 02:14:56 +0000

CHANCE ENCOUNTER from Josh Manning on Vimeo.

It all started with one sheet of paper, and a copier. That was the beginning of a journey that would change one man’s life for ever! A short-film about an overworked man who’s life is changed when he encounters a parked motorcycle.

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A Must See! The Wally Parks NHRA Museum

Guilty Dude — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 22:21:01 +0000

For auto enthusiasts and gearheads, a visit to Pomona, Calif. is a must. The Wally Parks NHRA Motorsports Museum features historical racing vehicles, photographs, trophies, helmets, driving uniforms, artifacts, paintings and much more. The building features 28,500 square feet of exhibit space. The NHRA Motorsports Museum is located within the Los Angeles County Fairplex. It is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays.

Two display cases are dedicated to the Detroit Dragway and there are photos from the Livonia Dragway in another gallery as well. The Detroit Dragway was a quarter-mile long drag strip located at the corner of Sibley and Dix in Brownstown Twp., Mich. Meanwhile, the Livonia Dragway was a three-quarter mile long drag strip located along Amrhein between Eckles Road and Levan Road.

“The museum has been here since 1998,” said Tony Thacker, executive director of the Wally Parks NHRA Motorsports Museum. “It’s kind of a shrine to California motorsports. This is sort of a snapshot of the history of dry lakes, drag racing, sprint cars, speedway, you name it, we’ve got a little bit of it here. We’ve got artifacts from dragstrips from around the country. NHRA is sort of our flagship company and our kind of core of our collection here. But we have all sorts of cars.”

How is the museum different from other automotive museums in southern California, such as the Petersen?

“Well, we’re totally different,” Thacker added. “We’re friends, but Petersen is more about the car and Los Angeles. This is pure racing. We don’t have any production automobiles at all. This is all about racing. There is a major difference from the Petersen. We have two vehicles that are very, very famous. One is Mickey Thompson’s Challenger, it was the first American car to go 400 mph in 1960. The other one is Art Crisman’s No. 25 car. It’s probably the oldest living dragster in existence.”

With the museum’s proximity to Hollywood, have any films or TV shows been filmed inside?

“Oh yeah, we film here all the time,” the executive director explained. “We just filmed an Xbox commercial a while ago. They just filmed an episode of Storage Wars here with Barry Weiss. We’re very media friendly. We have cars from some of the top Hollywood celebrities. We have two cars owned by Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top. We have a car owned by Chip Foose in here. We just got rid of some other famous cars. Even Eric Clapton had a car in here for a while.”

A new exhibit highlighting Mooneyes founder Dean Moon will open at the museum on Friday, Jan. 27.

“Mooneyes is one of those iconic companies in our industry,” Thacker said. “Even personally, it was the first hot rod t-shirt I bought as a kid. To me, Mooneyes is the brand. It’s about 60 years since the company was started. We thought it would be a great time to pay tribute to Dean Moon, who was an incredible photographer, an incredible self-taught marketer and engineer. We’re going to have cars out of their history, artifacts, photographs, all of that stuff.”

The 50th anniversary of the Cobra will be celebrated during the Ford-Cobra-Shelby reunion from April 19 – 21, 2012.

“Interestingly, the very first Cobra was built at Mooneyes in Santa Fe Springs in 1962,” he added. “Shelby and Moon were good friends so they shipped the AC from England and that’s where they installed the first Ford V8 there. It’s 50 years since that took place, 1962 to 2012. We’ll have an exhibit here of some very rare Cobras, some photography, artifacts. Right here on the Fairplex behind me, there’s a road race course where they raced from 1956 to 1963. That’s where the Cobras raced. We’re going to have three days of open track out there.”

Visitor Phil Jobe from Memphis, Tenn. made a stop at the museum over a weekend trip to the Los Angeles area. He used to live just a few miles from the museum when he lived in California, but he never made it inside. This Saturday morning that all changed.

“Being a gearhead and a car nut, I love it,” Jobe said. “It’s just amazing, just amazing. I’ve been to most of the local race tracks back in the day, you know, Lions, Irwindale, Fontana, Orange County. I never got a chance to see any of these things. I recommend it for anybody that likes cars and speed, come on down. My favorite cars are the Foose Hemisphere and the CadZilla. I like the old funny cars themselves. I went to school with John Force so you gotta love his cars. If you’re into drag racing and where everything started, my opinion is this is the place you need to visit in southern Cal.”

Museum goer John Foster from Houston was visiting the museum during a business trip to southern California.

“This is my first time here,” Foster said. “It’s great, man. I like all of them. When I was a kid, I had a little race car set. We raced the Mongoose vs. the Snake. I’m just visiting out here, working. I would like to mention two friends of mine were rag racers, Mark Lammon and Don Garlits.”

The Wally Parks NHRA Motorsports Museum is located in building 3A at 1101 McKinley Ave. in Pomona, CA. From the 10 fwy east, exit White Avenue, proceed North, turn left on McKinley Avenue, enter Fairplex Gate 1. From the 210 fwy, exit Fruit Avenue, proceed South, turn right on McKinley Avenue. The Wally Parks NHRA Motorsports Museum is located at Fairplex Gate 1, 1101 W. McKinley Avenue in Pomona. Call us at (909) 622-2133. Current NHRA members are admitted free. Admission for non-members is $8 for adults, $6 for seniors 60 and older, $6 for juniors 6 through 15, and free for children under the age of 5. AAA discount available. Hours: Wednesday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

For more information on the Wally Parks NHRA Motorsports Museum, visit museum.nhra.com.
by Jason Rzucidlo

Nash Sickle Garage hits SoCal

Guilty Dude — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 16:42:24 +0000

NASH Motorcycle Company announced today that a full service garage will be coming to Los Angeles this spring. The garage will be located in the back of the PERRI INK. Cartel on the historic Melrose Ave. The NASH Sickle Garage will include custom motorcycle builds, repairs, service and fabrication.

“We’ve been looking to do something in the southern California area for years,” Taber, owner of Nash Motorcycle Company said. “Through building a relationship with Nick and the Cartel, things just kind of fell into place. We also wanted to extend our reach to our customer base in the SoCal area, and my wife would like a tan.”

With parts manufacturing and additional motorcycle builds remaining at the NASH headquarters in Vancouver, WA, this new garage will be an extension of the already well respected NASH Motorcycle brand.

The already diverse PERRI INK. Cartel which opened its hybrid doors last year was the first-of-its-kind to include custom motorcycles, motorcycle parts & accessories, a tattoo and piercing parlor, barber shop and clothing line.

According to Cartel owner Nick Perri: “The expansion of the motorcycle angle of this shop was a no brainer. It’s been the biggest part of our business so far, and the opportunity to have a world class builder open a garage here is simply incredible. Taber and I bonded early on over our belief in next generation motorcycle builders, and supporting American made companies and products.”

105 year old Indian up for auction

Guilty Dude — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 13:39:50 +0000

It looks like a neglected bike long since consigned to the shed, but this two-wheeled contraption’s value belies its rusty appearance. The ancient bicycle is in fact a 1906 Indian Camelback, one of the first ever two-wheeled motorised machines and one which is hugely desirable to collectors. Just 1,698 of the rare cycles were produced 105 years ago, with its ‘unrestored’ state meaning the relic could fetch as much as £50,000 ($78k) at auction. Relic: The 105-year-old Indian Camelback ‘motorbike’ is worth that, thanks to its ‘unrestored’ appearance. The single cylinder, 2.25 horse power bike, may not be the most powerful but could still be worth a fortune. And as it packs a puny 2.25 horse, has a single cylinder and top speed of just 30mph, buyers certainly won’t be bidding on the ancient bike for its high-powered spec. It was owned by the du Pont family, which bought the ‘Indian Motorcycle Manufacturing Company’ that built it, and this cycle was last ridden in the 1970′s. Less than 1,700 of the rare bikes were produced in 1906, making it hugely collectable to enthusiasts. Whoever buys the machine will probably (or should) use minimum efforts to restore it to a working condition, as complete restoration would see its value reduce. The Indian cycles were the great rivals of Harley-Davidson, but the company eventually went bankrupt in 1953.

It had a rudimentary braking system and a steady foot on the ground would have been needed to help it stop.
The motorcycle is going under the hammer at Bonhams in Las Vegas, US, on January 12. Ben Walker from Bonhams said: ‘This motorcycle is in such demand because of its condition and to restore it would actually take value off.

Source: dailymail.com

Ed “Big Daddy” Roth and “Rat Fink”

Guilty Dude — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 16:30:21 +0000

In the den of Darryl Roth’s Corona home, cartoon ogres cover the walls, staring back at him with salivating tongues, bloodshot eyes, jagged claws and gnashing teeth. To Roth, the images represent rebellion, a gloriously grotesque imagination — and his father.

“I look around and I swear, it’s like he’s still alive. He’s still here,” Roth said. He’s the youngest son of iconic hot rod artist Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, and this year marked the 10th anniversary of his father’s passing. “Even now,” said the son, “I’m blown away by him.” Between the late 1950s and the mid-1960s, Ed Roth was what famed journalist Tom Wolfe described as the Salvador Dali of the hot rod world. Roth helped pioneer Southern California’s Kustom Kulture — a flamboyant style of hot rod building that relied on fiberglass rather than metal and reveled in flames, pin striping and exposed chrome engines — then marketed it through his artwork and accessories.

His character Rat Fink, a sort of grotesque version of Mickey Mouse, became shorthand for cool in the post-”Easy Rider” era. Young fans around Southern California, and then the world, scrambled to get their hands on his T-shirts, model car kits and plastic figurines of gruesome monsters stuffed into tiny, super-groovy hot rods. Their names? Mother’s Worry, Mr. Gasser and Drag Nut. But after the decline of hot rod culture in the ’70s and ’80s, Roth’s conversion to Mormonism and family squabbles over the business, Rat Fink and company became less and less ubiquitous until it all seemed to fade away entirely.

“My dad was always convinced that once the Beatles came to the States, kids kind of lost interest in cars and American culture and started picking up guitars instead,” said the 51-year-old Roth, who worked for two decades as a manager in an auto parts store and is a reserve policeman for the City of Bell. With today’s resurgence of interest in hot rod culture and Big Daddy’s legacy, Darryl Roth has decided the huge collection of his dad’s work that he spent years tracking down and now has lying around his house should probably be in a museum somewhere.

His den, garage and various storage spaces are crammed with original model kits of “Big Daddy” cars found everywhere from Japan to Mexico, old bikes and cars his father created, rare photo reels of him in his famous top hat and red suit coat with tails. Some of his collection includes an original sketch of the Flying Eyeball logo created by Von Dutch (born Kenny Howard), a Kustom Kulture legend and friend of Big Daddy’s whose name is now associated with a lucrative clothing line. The valuable collection contains thousands of mementos, art pieces and artifacts that his dad created.

For well-known custom car designers like Steve Stanford, Big Daddy’s influence doesn’t come with a price tag. “I had all the Rat Fink-related items growing up,” Stanford said. “It was rebellious, but paradoxically, it was just good clean fun.”
But to Darryl Roth, the collection is simply part of his childhood. Roth remembers souped-up hot rods his dad had worked on out of the renowned Movie World, Cars of the Stars and Planes of Fame museum in Buena Park.

“I used to sell Rat Fink key chains for lunch money,” Roth, the youngest of five brothers, recalled. And while hanging out in Roth Studios in Maywood, he remembers that his 6-foot-4, 240-pound father’s hands were enormous and dwarfed any brush he was holding. Life felt less sweet when Big Daddy began associating with the biker gang Hells Angels in the late ’60s. That lifestyle eventually contributed to the end of his first marriage, to Darryl’s mother, Sally, in 1970. It also took an emotional toll on Roth and his brothers, who moved with their mother to Cudahy after the divorce.

After remarrying several times, Big Daddy converted to Mormonism. Though he continued to build cars sporadically, he shunned the rebellious remnants of Rat Fink mania, dropping out of the limelight and severing ties with family and fans. By the early ’80s, he’d taken a job as a sign painter at Knott’s Berry Farm, using the assumed name Bernie Schwartz (based on actor Tony Curtis’ real name).

In the early ’90s, Darryl saw a renewed interest in hot rod culture and decided to start tracking down his father’s old signature hot rods, which were scattered from the garages of car collectors in Santa Paula to the casinos of Nevada. The first of his finds was the Wishbone, a car that Big Daddy originally hated so much that he sawed it in half after building it in 1967. After finding out that Darryl had restored the damaged auto with longtime Big Daddy collaborator Doug Kinney (a.k.a. Dirty Doug), he was so angry he refused to speak to his son for two years. Eventually, Big Daddy realized Roth’s quest was one born out of loyalty and a sense his father still had something more to give.

Pete Santini, a custom car painter out of Westminster, has helped Darryl track down and restore two more of Big Daddy’s classic cars, the Druid Princess and the Motorcycle Hauler.”I could tell that as more of the cars were being restored, deep down Big Daddy knew that … ‘Hey, it’s my name, but my kid pulled me out of bed, splashed water on my face and said, “Hey, we’re going back on tour.”
Roth and his father began rebuilding models together, and Big Daddy began appearing with his cars at car shows again and revived some of the old T-shirt designs and merchandise that had made him a legend decades ago. As a manager of an auto parts store, Roth was able to help Big Daddy with parts that he needed to build his new hot rods. The walls of his home shrine are littered with old faxes of drawings that his father would send him with salivating Rat Fink cartoons requesting steering wheels and tail lights. Little air bubbles over the cartoon’s mouth were full of amusing questions like “what’s your crazy dad up to now?”

But by the late ’90s, Roth’s brothers Howard and Dennis — both artists and hot rod builders in their own right — clashed with Big Daddy over the rights to operate Roth Studios, which their mother had owned since the divorce. Big Daddy refused to let them have it, sparking a court battle that resulted in him suing his sons and his ex-wife. He won the fight shortly before his death in 2001. Surrounded by his dad’s legacy, Roth feels an obligation to ensure that this unique slice of Southern California pop history is remembered and enjoyed by future generations. Roth said he would like to get the bulk of the collection into a museum. Exhibitions about Kustom Kulture and its effect have been done, most notably at the Laguna Art Museum.

Besides Big Daddy’s art, Roth’s collection provides a visceral sense of his dad’s personality jumping out at you like a lick of flame from one of his hot rods — a free spirit, a showman, a prankster, a dad.”He was always a showman,” Roth said. “He likened himself to a P.T. Barnum in the hot rod world. He wasn’t the lady with the beard, the man covered in tattoos or some sideshow act. He was the one at the center of it all, the guy who ran the circus.”

Source: LATimes.com
nathan.jackson@latimes.com

Detroit City Video with “Guilty” Gear

Guilty Dude — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 01:43:21 +0000

Our swag has found its way onto a variety of people over the years and now onto the stage with performers LetricKramer in their performance “Detroit City”, which promotes the city, it’s heritage and future. Look out for more sightings of “Guilty” swag showing up all over the place.


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Harley looking for “lay-off” volunteers
Guilty Dude — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 20:49:10 +0000
Harley-Davidson employees in Wisconsin must decide this week whether they want to volunteer for layoffs. The motorcycle maker expects to begin reducing its workforce by about 250 jobs this spring. Harley-Davidson says it’s offering employees financial incentives to volunteer for the permanent layoffs, but details weren’t disclosed. Motorcycle sales haven’t recovered from the recession, so Harley says it must cut millions of dollars in production costs to remain profitable. Harley spokeswoman Maripat Blankenheim says someone who is near retirement might volunteer to leave the company early. 
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It’s Better in The Wind Video Scrapbook
Guilty Dude — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 07:22:39 +0000


It's Better In The Wind - Short Film from Scott Toepfer on Vimeo.

When Photographer Scott G Toepfer took to the road and spent two years taking pictures covering his motorcycle adventures across the western U.S. and ultimately publishing a photo essay titled, It’s Better in the Wind, little did he know he'd be setting some very high standards for others to try and reach. Check out this book for yourself or others.  Great visual history of his adventures.

In Toepfer's own words, 
“For the last two years I have been taking still photographs for a personal project entitled ‘It’s Better In The Wind,’ all the while collecting video footage from each ride as we traveled around the Western United States together. I have been slowly editing the footage into a visual scrapbook of sorts for those who partook, and those who followed us via the web. No preaching the triumphs and failures of the motorcycle industry, no divisive commentary between manufacturers and styles…just a collection of imagery that will hopefully inspire more people to take to the road and discover what there is outside of our respective communities.” – Toepfer
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Social Network for Your Ride?!
Guilty Dude — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 15:31:22 +0000
In a world where social networking and staying connected is so important why wouldn’t someone’s ride have its own social profile? JustRides has allowed an exclusive preview into the most innovative social network for any ride yesterday, and it is nothing short of the car aficionado’s dream. Set to launch in early spring, JustRides.com will be the next generation in social interaction. Users can do more than simply create ride profiles (ride being anything from a truck, motorcycle, boat…even a tricked out bicycle!). JustRides is jam packed with features that allow users to browse through photos, videos, create groups and events, read and write blogs, and much more – all specifically related to rides. Users sharing an interest in their favorite rides takes on a new meaning with JustRides.com. You are quickly connected with others that share your enthusiasm and so begins a new type of “social friendship”.
JustRides.com creates opportunities to network with users on a different level…their ride. For instance, if a user loves their Honda, they are able to find and interact with others that share the same passion. Or if a user is having problems with their Ford, they can search for a helpful solution and ask for advice from experts all while staying within the same website. Its potential is endless. The company behind JustRides.com, is also the creators of the successful auto parts niche marketplace, JustParts.com. “JustRides.com is a natural fit into the JustParts family…We have integrated the auto parts and accessories marketplace from JustParts.com into JustRides.com.” says Michael Racco, CEO.
JustRides will not disappoint. It is easy to use, informative, interesting and interactive; certainly all the ingredients for success. Users can get a sneak peak by going to www.JustRides.com and when they add their email, they will be invited to the next exclusive preview of the full site before it goes live. The wait is almost up, so rev the engines, grab hold of the handlebars and get ready for the biggest rush for any ride enthusiast. For more information visit www.JustRides.com or follow JustRides on Facebook and Twitter.
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