They Forge The Chains They Wear In Life

Forgive me, Charles Dickens. But finding a witty title is a deadly game of one-upsmanship here in the 2StrokeBuzz boiler room.

Motoblog.it shared a video they came across showing some industrious Italians making their Honda SH150 a bit more adherent to the road. That is, at least the rear wheel.

Much of the country has experience a strange winter this season. But I’m sure someone, somewhere, could have used these tidily assembled chains to be a hardcore commuter.

Honda… Integra?

More from EICMA: Honda has dusted off the Integra name for its new 700cc scooter, throwing car fans into a tizzy, despite one commenter pointing out that Honda used the name for the 1984 Honda VT250F Integra MC08 motorcycle a year before unveiling the automobile so beloved by car thieves.

Thanks, Bradford! (I guess a link to Corazzo is still de rigueur?)

2sb Visits Paris, 2011

I visited Paris in 2006, and wrote about my experiences and shared some photos. I was lucky enough to go back last month (April, 2011) and it seemed that things have changed enough to make a new story and photo gallery worthwhile.
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Return of the Honda Motocampo?

Scooter Station features photos of a new Honda Motocampo concept, a modernized version of the scooter that was designed to fit in the back of the Honda City automobile for the 80s Japanese market. It was a great idea then, and still is, but will Madness be available for the television commercial?
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Pasadena to Waukesha

You know you watch the Rose Bowl Parade every year and wonder where all the parade marshalls’ Honda Metropolitans end up. Duh, Waukesha, WI of course. Looks like they “debadged” them, though, lame! And it’s not as cool without the jumpsuit.

Thanks for the link, Rye!

It’s Time to GIVI Thanks

About a month back I received a call from Phil Waters from Pride of Cleavland Scooters. He had an offer I ultimately couldn’t refuse. GIVI USA offered an opportunity attend the Indianapolis Motorcycle Grand Prix as guest of the LCR Honda MotoGP team, run by Lucio Checchinello. Phil was generous and thoughtful enough to pass this opportunity along to an enormous fan of MotoGP. An impromptu ten hour road trip later I was rewarded with the VIP treatment in the exclusive Grand Prix paddock and the privileged of watching qualifying practice from the LCR Honda pit garage while rider Randy DePuniet put in his best efforts while recovering from a violent crash only weeks before where he broke his leg. We were hosted by team representatives Elisa Pavan and Oscar Haro who lead us out to spend time right on the pit wall during the closing minutes of qualifying when riders were putting in their last ditch efforts for pole position. Our paddock passes allowed us amazing access to spend time rubbing elbows with the greatest motorcycle racers in the world. Sunday we watched the race from the main grandstands and had a wonderful time before heading back on a non-stop drive back to Minnesota.

I just wanted to give special thanks to POC Phil, Givi USA and the LCR Honda Team (links to their Facebook pages). Without this opportunity my next post regarding the Lambretta Racing Team wouldn’t have been possible! Stay tuned.

(/shamelessplug)

Who rides a Honda PCX?

If you speak Russian and dig guys wearing Speedos, you’ll love this

Honda PCX video. It’s sort of the “Vespa Gringo” of Russian-Thai-scooter videos, so you know it was Rye that found it for us.

Admit it, you watched *way* longer than you should have, didn’t you. I wanna hang out with those guys.

It’s Official: PCX 125 to U.S.

Also via the Scoop: As we expected last September, Honda has added the new Thailand-made PCX 125 to their USA lineup. The US model is unlikely to feature the innovative (and probably overrated) gas-saving feature that stops and restarts the engine at lights. It looks like a great bike, but will customers be willing to pay a premium price for a 125cc scooter in a country where there’s no 125cc licensing restriction for beginners, especially when some great 150cc and even 200cc scooters with similar features are available?

Honda 3R-C

2SB has learned to not get excited about concept vehicles, so we’ll let Steve and Orin tell you all about Honda’s new futuristic 3-wheeler. We like Apple (and Genuine’s) policy on prototypes and concept vehicles: just make cool products NOW, and announce them when they’re ready.

Innovative Honda for U.S.—sans innovation

The whiz-bang new Thailand-made Honda PCX 125 is a pretty good-looking scooter, and features new technology that actually stops the engine at idle to save gas. The story mentions a 2010 U.S. model, but only to say it won’t feature the “stop-and-start” idle technology. It will feature fuel injection and linked brakes.

Cub’s new CV-Matic

The venerable Honda Cub is getting a new CV-Matic motor for 2010. It’s sad to see the Cub go full-automatic after 50 years and 60 million units, but here’s hoping that handsome little lump becomes as ubiquitous as Honda’s GY6. (Who knows, maybe it means we’ll see the Cub back in the United States…)

Update: More, in English from The Scooter Scoop.

Dumba Dumba Dumba: Madness’ “City”

Madness’ awesome TV commercials for the Honda City, The City was a compact hatchback with a matching folding scooter that tucked into the back, a concept that deserves to be revisited with the Fit. The jingle was later reworked as the “In the City” single, and “Honda Honda Honda” was replaced with “Doomba Doomba Doomba.”

(Thanks, Heather, awesome find!)

Spree to the beach

Artist Jay Nelson rigged up a custom Honda Spree with a surfboard-bearing roof, a retractable awning, and a wooden storage bin. (An early sketch shows he originally intended it to be a Vespa.)

Funny how stuff like this spreads around… The scooter was exhibited last Fall at Nelson’s “The Autonomous Zone” exhibit at TripleBase gallery in San Francisco. Apparently a current exhibition of Nelson’s work at Gottino, a restaurant in NYC, brought the scooter to the attention of a Portugese-language green design blog, and the image ended up on Notcot, where it was spotted at random by John Park at Makezine. In this case, 2SB reader Sharon spotted it there and sent it our way (Thanks, Sharon! This rant has nothing to do with you), but I’ll probably see the Makezine story later tonight when I’m scanning Google News Alerts, and it’ll be on every scooter blog and newsgroup in America by tomorrow, credited to Makezine. I just point this out because it’s interesting how blogs come across stories then other blogs link to the blog they saw it on rather than the original blog, and what could have been a big bonanza in hits for the person that originated the story ends up bogging down their server with anonymous hot-linked image hits. It’s the internet, whattaya gonna do, but I thought it’d be fun to track down the reason that a year-old art exhibition was suddenly getting a spike in attention. It’d be fun to do a website that pulls stories off Boing Boing and Metafilter and Slashdot and Digg and tracks them back to their original genesis, which is usually by someone that put a lot of effort into the story, and was forgotten in the process of re-writing, simplifying, linking, and forwarding.

Not that I don’t do the same thing, all day every day (though I generally don’t help myself to photos when I don’t know where they came from). I’ve been sort of reluctant to post this sort of sixth-hand story lately, but I guess that’s what what bloggers are supposed to do. Hopefully my occasional hard work on original content makes up for it. Sorry about the weird tangent there, but these things interest me.

Honda SH125i review

Telegraph.co.uk reviews the new Honda SH125i, Europe’s top-selling scooter that will come to the U.S. for 2010 once the scooter boom ends. They also points out how un-standardized motorcycle fuel efficiency ratings are. (Thanks, Maddox!)

Honda Elite Returns for 2010

It’s Honda News day: The venerable Honda Elite will return for 2010, but in name only, it appears to be a rebadged Honda Lead 110. I never thought I’d be saying this, but as out-of-date as the original Elite design was, it’s 25 years old and thus ripe for nostalgia. As Eric points out at Modern Buddy (thanks for the tip, Eric!), the least they could do is give it a pop-up headlight. Devo has a new album coming out and Lou Reed’s playing Lollapalooza this year. Grace Jones, Adam Ant, and Jim McMahon aren’t too busy lately, let’s get the old gang together!

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