Smell of Burning Rubber
Git yer minds outta the gutter! This is muttersickle stuff!
Once, while stationed in Great Lakes, several of my brothers and I went to some motorcycle drags at a strip near Union Grove, WI. It started to rain and the drags eventually got cancelled. One of the promoters of the races invited everyone still hanging around to meet at a local "biker bar" for an impromptu party. Most of us headed over that way to help with the ritual tapping of the keg.
It was a pretty good party and the rain finally let up in the early evening. Guys were smoking things up in the back alley with little short races. One fellow had a 114" Shovel that was a monster. This was back in the mid 70s and there weren't many HDs this big running the streets. It was a thrill just standing next to this thing when the dude fired it up!
Anyway, the party was winding down and with the break in the rain we decided to head back to North Chicago before the next round of wet rolled in. Six or seven of us jumped on our bikes and rolled outta the side street the bar was on. We pulled into the first gas station to top off and then got back onto the road heading to I-94 to hook it south. When we left the gas station several of us swung just a tad wide and (horrors) crossed the centerline.
A cop took offense and flashed us. Being at the back of the pack, two of us offered ourselves as hostages and pulled over. The officer was pretty nice and after lecturing me for having no tail light (it had rattled apart during a pass down the alley behind the bar) and being out after dark with only an Illinois learner permit, cut us loose and told us never to come back to WI. No tickets, so I didn't care what he said!
The brother I was with had one of those new-fangled Gold Wings, back before they became the plastic garbage barges they are today. We hit the Interstate and cranked it up to try and catch the rest of the pack. We were hammering along pretty good when I started getting whiffs of burning rubber. The smell would come and go so I wasn't sure whether it was one of us or something along the highway. It finally became a pretty strong continuous smell so I signaled to pull over. We ran into a truck stop and started checking out the bikes as we still didn't know which bike it was. When I went to put my bike on the side stand I couldn't find it. The Corbin Gentry rigid frame had enough space between the frame rail and primary cover to let the pin the stand pivoted on to rise up and fall out. Rats!
We noticed that the Honda's rear tire had a rub mark all the way round where the swingarm rubbed it, looking almost now like a white wall tire. We figured that was the smell, so we took off and rode a mite more slowly. When we got back to base housing where I kept my bike at a friend's house I noticed the smell was coming from my primary. I had recently put a belt drive on the bike and figured my belt was now toast.
When I came back the next day and opened the primary up the belt looked Ok but I could see light shining thru a bolt hole that once held the old primary chain tensioner in place. Seems my loctite job didn't hold at 130+ mph, which is what the Gold Wing rider said we were doing on the road the previous day. The bolt had gotten ‘twixt the belt and clutch shell and made a few rounds. I could see some marks on the pulley teeth on the shell, but the belt didn't look to have a mark on it.
The belt ended up lasting over ten years on that bike, which was pretty remarkable for an old square tooth Gilmer type. It finally popped after I sold the bike and it made one too many passes down the strip.
Honda put out some sorta recall or fix on the early Gold Wings because of the tire clearance problem we noticed on my bud's bike.
Once again, any ride is a good ride when you make it home!
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 Chrome sucks.
Barges are for chopping.
Twinkies: HD's first throwaway motor.
Patches don't care what you think!
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