Old-Guy Drivel: My Honda XR650L Story

Here’s a short-ish story about my old motard-modified Honda XR650L. I bought this bike new in 1994, intentionally planning to make it a motard. That year there was only one factory-made motard available, the very first generation KTM Duke. A friend of mine living in Minneapolis had purchased one and loved it, but within the first few hundred miles the needle fell off its speedo (all speedos were mechanical then) and was rattling around the bottom of the instrument, and there were no KTM dealers in Duluth, a far smaller town than Minneapolis.

So I decided to try and make one out of the then first-year-released Honda XR650L. After working on it for two years (funding limits) I had the little wheels made by Buchannan’s Wheels, a big front brake, shortened forks, and a shorter shock. Plus, different taller-geared sprockets. Everything came together with stiffer pre-shaped foam inside the saddle and a few other changes and soon I was learning how to do nice stoppies in traffic and use its overall ‘entertainment’ potential.  It wasn’t fast, but was good enough for city use and commuting, and spectacular on bumpy surface streets, which we have a lot of here (Duluth Minnesota) due to the hard winter road damage.

Now it’s twenty-nine years later and unbelievably the Honda company is still producing this same exact model with essentially zero updates or technical changes. In a few months, this bike will have been in production for thirty years. Which is completely unbelievable.

In August of 2001, I decided to see if I could take a longer trip on it, packing very light, riding backroads, and camping. Almost nobody was taking long trips on smaller bikes then. My own travel and highway bike at that time was a BMW 1000cc boxer. I rode the little Honda 650L from here to LA and back. No problems. Wonderful trip. Got pulled over once for speeding in a canyon somewhere but only got a warning. Camping was primitive, due to packing very light. Did not carry even a stove. Didn’t miss it.

The funniest thing about this bike was during the first year or two after I lowered it and put the little wheels on it, several of my local riding friends looked carefully at the results of my work and then very seriously asked me: “Why did you ruin a perfectly good dirt bike?” All I could do was shrug my shoulders and smile. Most riders at that time had no idea what a motard-style bike was.

-- Mr. Subjective, October 2023

PS - Because my Honda 650L motard was specifically purchased to be modified and employed as a small-town daily utility-transportation ride and commuter, and not for speed or higher performance, it still has its stock, stupid and fairly quiet muffler. *shrug*

Do you have a ‘Long Service Model’ story?  Send it to us here. We’d like to read it. This is one such story.

PPS – This substack essay is about the disappearance of high-quality window ‘box fans’, because air conditioning became more affordable and universal.

This essay actually relates fairly closely to maintaining and riding a long-service model motorcycle like my ancient Honda XR650L. When I started in college a long time ago, I bought myself a medium-quality window box fan, and just like the Honda I still have it. Despite its age and ordinariness, this fan is much better quality than the box fans sold today. Mine probably came from a Target or Walgreens store and was no more special in its day than the box fans those stores sell today. Assuming they still sell box fans.

For many summers I had it placed in an open window in the guest bedroom of my apartment, running on a lamp timer set switch it on in the evening. It would run unattended all night exhausting warm air, and this system kept the place comfortable as the cool evening ‘in’ airflow entered via open windows on the north side of the living room and larger bedroom.  At some point, this fan’s electric motor failed so I took the grill off one side and removed the motor. Then I took the motor to the parts counter at a business called “Melke Electric” which is an industrial electrical contractor place. They either had or ordered (I don’t remember) a similar electric motor, which I used to replace the one that failed. That fan is still with me, though I don’t currently have a use for it.

I was surprised to find this young kid’s substack essay lamenting the commercial obsolescence and disappearance of moderately high-quality box fans like mine. As an ‘old guy’ now, I am surrounded by old stuff accumulated with some effort during my lifetime. I have a quite nice box fan, now about fifty years old. Mostly metal, including the blades. A better electric motor than the one it came with. Probably the motor, frame, and blades all were made here. It’s almost embarrassing. Wait. Not almost. It is embarrassing.

PPPS – Going from three simple stamped aluminum box fan blades to molded plastic or (even better) ultralight ultra-stiff compound-curved, pressure-molded carbon fiber fan blades, shaped to biomimic the evolved and highly specialized aerodynamic wings found in nature on ultra-quiet predator birds like owls, would greatly increase airflow efficiency and reduce the noisy propeller thrum of my old slide rule-engineered aluminum-bladed box fan. Today’s digitally-controlled higher quality electric motors are surely more efficient than the motor in my fan as well. A higher quality old-fashioned thing does not mean new versions of that thing must necessarily be of lower quality. Had air conditioning never been invented, many of the box fans being produced today would be of better quality.