1997 Vulcan Classic

      Forgive me, but I have left out a bike. Maybe it was a mental lapse since I never considered it my bike. A friend of mine had this motorcycle and was involved in a messy divorce. He wanted a loan and gave me the motorcycle to hold as collateral. I had a Kawasaki KZ1000 in my younger days, so I loaned the friend thirty-five hundred dollars and took his Vulcan Classic home with me.

  
  The bike cleaned up real well and I kinda liked the low end torque of the 800cc engine. My friend had installed a set of Cobra exhaust pipes on it, but never had the carburetor re-jetted, so that was one of the first things I did to it. Notice the chrome piping around the edges of the fenders? I bought a roll of it through a mail order company and when it arrived it was 100 feet of the piping instead of the ten foot roll I ordered. Needless to say, I have used it on just about every bike I have owned since then.

 
   I took over the Vulcan Classic at the same time I owned the 1997 Gold Wing, so despite having the best highway cruiser on the market, I made a couple of trips to Palestine on the Vulcan Classic just for a change of pace. The trip from my home to Palestine is 183 miles, so I had to plan on at least one gasoline stop along the way. Since the trip was made at five o'clock in the morning I needed to find a station that was open for business at that time of the day.

   After about a year of having two bikes in the garage, Momma started to give me a little grief. When I contacted the friend I was holding it for, he told me about another girl in his life and to just keep the bike. He signed over the title to me and now it was officially mine. We would use the Gold Wing for long trips with friends and use the Vulcan Classic for short jaunts around town. The Vulcan was chain drive, and a lot of people are turned off by this feature....BUT chains have been the driving force for motorcycles for more years than the drive shaft on most modern bikes. I have discovered a chain-lube that should be on your garage shelf if you have any chain-driven vehicle. It is made by Honda and contains a teflon ingredient to make it stick to the chain rather than being slung off onto your fender and chrome items. What I would do is put the bike up on a stand or jack...and clean the chain real good...then run the bike around the block to warm up the chain..and then put it back on the jack and spray the chain with the Honda Chain-Lube. Let it dry by itself before riding and it will really amaze you. It also quietens the chain a little.

     In the top photo is me cleaning the bike. I was doing this one day and a woman driving by stopped to ask if the bike was for sale. She was a nurse at the Veterans Hospital in Bonham and was looking for more economical transportation from Denison to Bonham. I let her ride the Vulcan around the area while I accompanied her alongside on the Gold Wing. She loved the bike and said she needed to talk to her husband about it before jumping off the deep end. Usually that means you will never see that person again and they just wanted a joy ride on your bike, BUT she and her husband showed up about an hour later. He took it on a spin around the block and came back smiling. This was in 2002 so the bike was five years old, but only had around forty-five hundred miles on the odometer. I was firm, and they ended up giving me $5800 for the bike. He drove home in the car and the nurse followed on her new ride...a 1997 Vulcan Classic.