Name: Steve Walker
Age: 68
Home: Mountain Center, CA
Occupation: Triumph restorer

On a late October morning, Mods and Rockers again gathered at a seaside resort town for an epic event. But this wasn’t Brighton Beach in the 1960s; it was Fort Lauderdale 50 years later. Mods and Rockers in South Florida? Why not—it’s the second-largest motorcycle market in the country after Southern California; it’s just known more for blinged-out choppers and sportbikes than cool café racers. The annual Mods vs. Rockers Rally has proven to be a fantastic gathering of motorcycles and scooters that highlights South Florida’s nascent vintage scene.

Spurred by their success in the off-road market, Fly Racing has expanded into production of street gear by offering the Terra Trek adventure-riding jacket. Fly’s industry experience has translated well, and the Terra Trek is a value to be reckoned with. It offers a waterproof chassis, loads of pockets and CE-approved armor at half the price of similarly equipped jackets.

Most of us have purchased a used motorcycle at some time and gone through the following analysis: Is it clean and well cared for? Continue. Are there service records available? Continue. Is this the original owner, and are they a genteel person? Continue. Is the asking price reasonable? Continue. Test-ride it and it rides beautifully. Negotiations must begin!

Many riders who have considered roadracing have been put off by the expense and logistics. Acquiring a bike, tires, fuel and all the other paraphernalia a race weekend requires costs thousands. Then there’s transportation to the event, setting up your pit area and navigating the gauntlet of unfamiliar procedures. Just getting to the starting line is a major challenge, never mind the race itself!

When Yamaha dropped the reverse-top-end bomb on the 450cc class in 2010, the YZ450F was radical and readily embraced by professional racers. Thankfully, the all-new design has proven reliable for amateur riders, too. It runs hard and stays strong. After such a major redo, Yamaha is going with small-but-welcome changes for ’12. The changes are more extensive than in ’11, and aside from the addition of black rims and a gold chain, all are improvements the rider can feel.

If you could get an off-the-record response from professional motocross and supercross racers during the 2011 season, most would have agreed that the factory Suzuki RM-Z450 was the best bike out there. Despite being one of the smaller members of the Big Four Japanese manufacturers, the yellow team still threw down a whooping with regularity.

Rider: John Dolman
Then: High-school junior
Now: Retiree

I am a dedicated denizen of Craigslist and other online motorcycle classified sites. It’s not that I’m in the market for any more motorcycles—my garage is already at critical mass. Instead, I enjoy perusing ads for the sublime pleasure of becoming one with the secondary motorcycle market. Maybe it’s for the adrenaline jolt that comes from spotting a bargain-priced Ducati or a rare Bimota. Maybe it’s my fascination with the motorcycle market’s ebb and flow. Classifieds are the nexus where motorcycle buyers and sellers connect. Ads offer a broad spectrum of opportunities: occasional bargains as well as blatant rip-offs. Bike adverts also have their own culture, mores and lexicon, most of which gracefully dance around the theme of “Please come and buy my pile.” Here are some simple translations of common phrases you’ll encounter as you glide through the classified ads:

It's one wheel and a roof short of sports-car status. And nobody will accuse the Spyder RS-S Roadster of being a motorcycle, least of all the Can-Am factory types who gave us a go on their latest, sportiest offering. They call it a Roadster. Bring too much two-wheel baggage along for the ride and the three-wheeler is guaranteed to disappoint. Give those preconceptions the afternoon off and it might surprise you...

Check out what's inside the current issue of Motorcyclist on sale now! Grab a copy at newsstands or subscribe online to get the newest issue first. Here's what's new:

There are several excellent reasons to bleed your motorcycle’s hydraulic brake and clutch lines. For perform-ance-minded riders, there are the always popular braided stainless-steel or Teflon hoses to install. You might also be in the midst of replacing some brake or clutch component. Others, concerned with reliability in addition to performance, could be flushing out old fluid and replacing it with new.

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When Matt Olsen of Carl’s Cycle called to ask if I would be interested in photographing a 16-day cross-country ride on pre-1916 motorcycles, I didn’t take him seriously. To ride from Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, to Santa Monica, California, on valuable antiques from private collections and museums bordered on insanity! Then he made it sound even more unbelievable when he explained that he was building a 9-horsepower, single-cylinder, single-speed 1914 Sears from scratch to take part in the event.

Husqvarna’s TC250 powerplant is stunningly compact. Some of the engine’s “I could be a 125” look comes from the amount of daylight visible around it within the new chromoly chassis. A hydro-formed aluminum perimeter frame tends to hug the engine tighter, but the TC’s steel-tube skeleton conveys a svelte, supermodel appeal.

Whenever my wife Colleen ventures into my motorcycle world, there’s always a period of adjustment. I operate with a highly refined sense of style and cost, most of it rooted in the Depression Era I so sadly missed. Each trip she has to re-learn that the piece of twisted metal and scrap we are riding is not trash, but is, in fact, a valuable motorcycle.

When Art Friedman left Cycle Guide to join Motorcyclist in 1978, he lobbied for me to join him. Editor Dale Boller rolled the dice, and I joined Ken Vreeke as a novice road tester and eager photo model. Our office was a run-down wooden building just off Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood; we weren’t in the big Petersen Publishing high-rise next door, where some people reportedly wore suits. We were out of sight and out of mind, with an endless supply of new motorcycles, custom leathers with our names on them and a company gas card. It was a good place to be a 21-year-old.

The KTM Duke celebrates its 18th birthday in 2012, and this latest 690 feels more grown-up than earlier models. The original Duke and subsequent iterations were hard-edged and aggressive— a key selling point for some riders, but too extreme for the majority. This latest version is updated to reflect its name. It’s still quick, light and happy to wheelie, but some of the rawness has been soothed.

What is riding technique? And what makes a technique successful? Is riding just a composition of good or bad technique, or is there something more basic?

America’s collective wealth more than doubled in a decade when change was the only constant. Mass communication and cheap transportation let us listen to the same music, buy the same goods and adopt a relatively common culture. Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs yet Mickey Mouse became the most well-known Yankee in the world. On the flipside, Jazz Age hypocrisy outlawed booze with the 18th Amendment and supported the rise of organized crime and, eventually, stock-car racing. As the decade ended, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini cast a menacing shadow over Europe as America inched toward crushing financial disaster.

Motorcyclists mostly focus on acceleration—horsepower figures, power-to-weight, quarter-mile times, etc.—but potent deceleration is nearly as important when it comes to improving lap times, and even more crucial on the street. This month’s Gear spread is aimed at improving your 0-60 and 60-0 mph times.

America’s first board-track was built at the Los Angeles Coliseum in 1909. It was a modest facility, just 1⁄3-mile around with 25-degree banked corners, modeled after a typical French velodrome. By the time the Roaring Twenties arrived, board-track racing was one of the nation’s most popular spectator sports. “Motordromes” had morphed into massive pinewood constructions a mile or more in length. As many as 20,000 spectators crowded grandstands at Beverly Hills, Dodge City or Sheepshead Bay to watch fire-breathing 1000cc V-twin racers storm around precipitous, 60-degree banked turns at over 100 mph. The action was loud, fast and horrifically dangerous. Countless big-name riders—and a number of spectators—were killed at the so-called “murderdromes” when crashing bikes were flung straight up into the crowd. The Isle of Man seems like a Shriners parade in comparison.

Any rally-car driver knows front-wheel drive is unbeatable for finding grip on questionable surfaces. And roads were nothing if not questionable 90 years ago—so why not create a FWD bike? Of course there were many complicating factors, not least how to drive and steer a wheel at the same time. But Fritz Cockerell, the inventor of the truly bizarre Megola, didn’t think these problems were anything clever engineering couldn’t overcome.

Baggers are hot right now. Seems cruiser riders, in their old age, have come to appreciate the convenience of saddlebags. Or maybe they've just got more baggage? Whatever the reason, Victory jumped on the bandwagon recently with its Cross Country and Cross Roads baggers, and now this here Hard-Ball, which the company calls a "naked bagger."