A Lifetime of Experience - The Trade

[UberGoober]

I was surprised when Rusty Vandal showed up on my doorstep. I knew Rusty of course, we had gone to church together for years and had been mortal enemies for a while. Rusty’s older brother Jamie had tried to pick a fight with me at church one day when I was in Jr. High School and, as a reward for his attempt, had promptly found himself on his butt. That event, of course, had made me the enemy of all three Vandal brothers and although no further incidents had ever occurred, bad feelings had prevailed for years.

But that had been before. My family had changed to a new church a couple of years later and since I had graduated from high school and no longer passed him in the hallways, I hadn't seen him around much. Out of sight, out of mind and given time the old feelings of animosity had slowly evaporated. I heard he was selling Amway for a while. But Amway was not what had brought him to my door. No, he was after my 1972 AMC Javelin and he had come with a proposition.

The Javelin is a story unto itself. My best friend in High School, Rick Purefoy, had a 1974 Javelin. It was a beat-up purple beast of a car that had a whole litany of problems, not the least of which was a hyped up teenager behind the wheel. I had been quite taken with the car and had a lot of fond memories associated with it. So, when in my early 20s I joined the Merchant Marines and started bringing home the first decent money I had ever earned in my life, I decided I was going to invest some time and effort in finding and restoring a Javelin of my very own.

And that's how a shit-brown colored 1972 Javelin SST ended up in my driveway. Of course when I wasn't out at sea actually being a Merchant Mariner, I stayed with my parents, and my dad was pissed the minute that car hit the driveway. Today, many years later, I can understand how he felt, but back then I thought a barely running 18 year old muscle car deteriorating alongside the manicured gardens of my father's carefully tended lawn was perfectly acceptable. I didn't have long to hear him complain about it, however, within two weeks of my purchase I was off on another ship headed to the far side of the world, safe in the knowledge that when I returned home with more money in my wallet, my car would soon the envy of every other guy in town.

When I got home six months later what I found was not what I had left, at least it wasn't what I thought I had left. Over the months at sea I had pictured in my mind’s eye a near perfect project car that I could put into showroom condition with just a few magic twists of a wrench and a little TLC. What I found was a molding piece of shit that looked like it was glued to the ground. I guess I should have considered myself lucky that in my absence my dad hadn't called the wrecker and had it dragged off.

The car was a mess after 6 months of Washington state winter. Perhaps if I had known about the missing weather stripping and the leaking windows I could have added to my father’s unhappiness by throwing a blue tarp over it before I left, but now it was too late; at least two or three inches of water pooled on the floor inside of the car. That was just the beginning, of course, now that I was looking at spending more hard earned cash, I was looking with a more critical eye, the eye I probably should have used before buying it at all. That, in combination with the constant ass-chewing I was getting from my dad made me want out of this mess in a hurry. I decided it was better to cut my losses and walk away.

Lamenting my fate, I told my neighbor Kenny Storwick, who was better connected than I, that if he knew of anyone who needed a cheap car he should send them over ASAP because the car was going to the wrecker in a week. Kenny told a few people and in a small town word gets around fast. Two days later Rusty Vandal was on my doorstep proffering a deal.

Rusty was in a bit of a bind. Amway wasn’t quite working out the way he had thought it would and he had decided to put that on the back burner while he took a more traditional job as a salesman at a Sears store a couple of towns away. Problem was, he didn’t have a car and with the odd hours he would be required to work and the long distances he would have to travel, taking the bus was out of the question. He did have a motorcycle, however, a big old touring bike.

Now it would seem that, with summer coming on, a motorcycle would have been just fine for getting Rusty back and forth to work. However, as he told it, sales work required nice clothes and he really couldn’t risk getting dirty on the way to work. As we talked more it turned out there was one other problem too, he had crashed the bike a few weeks earlier and was now scared of it. Would I take a trade?

Logic is a weird thing. Did I want a crappy old car that didn’t run right and came with its own marsh on the interior or some kind of big old wrecked motorcycle? It wasn’t a tough decision really, I had a motorcycle already and I liked riding it around so I really wasn’t afraid of getting the bike. To top it off, a car took up a whole lot of space in the driveway next to the house when a bike could roll around back and into the woodshed where no one would really see it or have cause to yell about it - at least until time came to put wood in or take it out, but that would be later and I needed a solution now. Naturally, I took the deal.


The bike I took in trade for my Javelin was the venerable 1978 Suzuki GS850G. That means nothing to most people, so let me explain it as simply as I can. It was what we would today call a UJM or “Universal Japanese Motorcycle.” Still clueless? Let’s try this - if you are over 30 years old you will know instantly to what I refer if close your eyes and think for a second of any old motorcycle that isn’t a Harley Davidson. The first image that popped into your head is a UJM, now you know almost exactly what I am talking about. Don’t believe me? Look for yourself.

(Photo Caption - My 1978 GS850G shortly after restoration and modification)

[UberGoober]

(Part II)

Since, back in the day, there really were no niche bikes, i.e. factory built racers or touring bikes, people went out and bought add-ons to turn their UJM into exactly what it was they wanted. That’s hard to understand today, but, since it was the 70s just think of it as people doing the same thing to their motorcycle that they were doing to their Chevy vans. In this case, some previous owner had gone out and purchased a full Vetter Windjammer for the bike and turned the bike into a 70s version of what the Honda Gold Wing would evolve into during the 1980s.

The bike looked hideous. The Windjammer had a style unto itself and can be considered a good example of the kinds of automotive products that were made out of fiberglass in the 1970s. It was, essentially, a huge plastic wall topped by a windshield that you bolted to the front of your bike. It purpose was, I suppose, to protect you from the weather while you were out enjoying the weather. It also offered a place for a stereo with speakers and numerous cubby holes for things like gloves, wallets and anything else your average 1970s motorcyclist would want to carry. On the back was a set of luggage, molded in equally high quality brown fiberglass, with equal attention given to modern 1970s design.

Ugly as it must have been new, it was made worse when Rusty wrecked. Fiberglass doesn’t do very well when it slides on the pavement and the brown fiberglass of the Vetter was crisscrossed with cracks and scars, punctuated by paint chips and even one or two missing pieces. Clearly that stuff had to go.

As I stripped away the damaged pieces, I discovered that bike underneath was in remarkably good condition. The Windjammer had acted as a sort of shield for the bike as it slid along the road and protected everything within. Additionally the bike mounted a set of crash bars – steel bars that wrapped around the exposed engine cases to prevent to engine from smashing into the pavement in the event of an accident - and the engine didn’t have a scratch on it either. Sans its destroyed feathers, my ugly duckling turned out to be a swan.

Of course the bike still needed a few things. The headlight and front signals had been removed to facilitate the installation of the windjammer, so I needed to find new ones. The seat, a big wide soft seat made to stay comfortable during long cross country trips needed a new cover as well but these were minor things I soon fixed.

In my own frenzy of modification, quite the opposite of the original owner’s, I added a racing exhaust and a set of wide flat-tracker handle bars that made me sit up on the bike and provided the additional leverage it would take to turn this big old bike hard into sharp corners. I also added a set of sticky new performance tires in place of the hard old touring rubber – rubber that had probably played a part in Rusty’s crash.

The end result was something unto itself. No longer stock, it was not really a racer or a full custom either. With its beautiful black paint cleaned and waxed and all its wonderful chrome plated bits and pieces polished to perfection, the bike shined like a diamond in the sun. Without the benefit of period add-ons like the windjammer, the bike had a good clean styling, the kind of styling that one thinks about when they think of a 1967 Buick Riviera - clean, bold lines that speak of quality and class.

That summer I began an almost decade long relationship that would see me through a few girlfriends, two colleges and several career changes. We had our ups and downs, of course, and ultimately, the bike would meet a sudden and unexpected demise. But this is a story of creation, or at least of transformation, so I’ll not write that other story today.

Rusty did OK too. He took the Javelin to the service center where he worked and had the car professionally repaired. It turns out it needed a new distributor to make it run right - and run right it did. One fall day as he passed my house, he caught my eye and lit up the tires as he went by. I think he figured he got the better end of the deal.

But I think not. The GS took my attention away from cars and turned me onto motorcycles as a fully fledged hobby. I’ve never looked back.

[JulesAZ]

cool story! bike looks good!

[Alawicious]

Good write up Uber. I had a similar experience with my first Honda

[LaurenOE]

Awesome! Thanks for that!

[UberGoober]

Just something fun I've been toying around with writing for a while. Nothing informative in there...

[not2slow]

I read all of your write ups UG all of them gold IMO.

[acalliste]

Windjammer! I haven't heard that word in years!