The former would run “hot” cams, which would give them very good power at the top of the rpm range, but would make them stumble at idle. When the rpm’s drop below a certain level, the oil isn’t flowing and engine damage is likely to result.
The Harley-Davidson set have V-twin engines that utilize a single crankpin design (generally). This causes the bike to “lope” heavily. The older naturally aspirated units…were prone to stumble and stall at idle….Due to the engine’s tendency to stall at very low idle speeds…some throttle maintenance was required to keep the bike running.
Now, most modern Harley-Davidsons are fuel-injected, and tend not to stall out when idling, but most of the bikes with earlier technology are still on the road. Several Harley owners admitted that now that their bikes are no longer stalling when stopped, they’ve lost their “excuse” to rev.
A few other technical reasons for revving, nicknamed “blipping” by riders, concerned auditory matters.
I’ve found myself on my bike with my helmet on and it idles so low that I can’t tell if it’s still running, so I rev it to make sure.
And sometimes a blip is a “gentle” reminder to others:
If someone in front of me isn’t moving on a green light, I’ll rev my engine before honking.
AESTHETIC REASONS FOR REVVING
Motorcycle riders might have reputations as macho tough guys, but their responses read more like opera criticism. Many of them, especially Harley owners, were obsessed with the sound of their bikes:
When I was eight or nine, I was nearly asleep in the backseat of the family station wagon, when a group of motorcycles went by and grabbed my attention.
I can’t tell you what color the bikes were or recognize any of the faces but I will never forget the “Sound.” My Dad told me they were Harleys and he knew because of the unmistakable Sound. That Sound only comes from a V-twin (air-cooled) engine.
Now, thirty-five years later, I still get that same feeling when I hear “It.” I think that most of us who ride Harleys love the Sound and don’t hesitate to share the Sound. Kinda like flexing your muscles at the beach, I guess. People in cars often encourage it by giving the universal signal, the throttle twist. And when they do it’s never just one twist. It’s always two or three. I don’t know about intersections, but if you pass me under an overpass, you will likely hear a couple of extra revs with the clutch in. Gotta love that Sound.
Harley Dave is a sharing kind of guy:
I rev it up and when my wife is on she says, “Why do you do that?” I say, “Because I love that sound!” When I am driving and some kid waves and grins because he (or she) is thinking “Someday,” I do it for them, too! Everyone loves the sweet sound of “Screamin’ Eagles” on a calm, quiet, morning. If they don’t, they better get used to it in Harley Dave’s neighborhood.
Riders were so passionate about the Sound (which they seem to capitalize as if it were a proper name) that we asked them to be honest and say whether they would still rev even if they found themselves stopped at a traffic light on a deserted road. We received many responses like this:
It’s just the sound that I like. I don’t care if there’s a hundred people around or it’s just me, the sound makes my blood flow.
One enthusiast brushes aside the mechanical arguments:
People can say their bike runs rough, it does not idle correctly, or a million other excuses. They are all lying. The truth is they do it because they love the way it sounds.
REVVING’S ALL ABOUT ME
Why ride a motorcycle at all, let alone rev it, if you don’t like the sound? But some riders are willing to admit the sound is sweeter when you draw attention from others:
[There is] Nothing cooler than sitting at a light at Third Avenue and Fourteenth Street when all those people walk by and look at you on your scoot. You give them a quick rev as acknowledgment or to catch the attention of a good-looking young lady.
What’s even funny to me as I sit at a light and a crotch rocket pulls up with mosquito-sounding pipes. They take off like a bat out of hell and you gently let off the clutch and everyone watches you coast in to the sunset. Now, that’s cool.
And it doesn’t hurt if there’s a cute member of the opposite sex to admire your coolness (even if it’s your spouse):
Love that thunder!!! That’s half the greatness of riding a Harley…The Wife just about gets too excited, especially when I start the Deuce [a particularly stylish Harley Model]. If I’m going with or without her, she is always in the garage when the bike comes to life. Sometimes between the thunder and the leather, I’m lucky enough to get out of the garage.
But not all riders view blipping positively, and see it as a sign of insecurity rather than confidence:
It’s an extension of their manhood. Just like the people who go out and put huge tires and lift kits on 4 × 4’s and never take them off the road. They’re making up for a shortage in their anatomy.
One Harley lover is worried that attention-getting behavior by others ends up stereotyping riders:
In the old days of weak ignition systems and poor carburetion, bikes had to be revved to keep them from stalling. Those days are are long past but a lot of wankers out there still rejoice in what most real riders refer to as stoplight motorcycle monkey spankin’, dolphin waxing (choose your euphemism). There are riders out there that dropped $20,000 on their bike and another $20,000 on chrome and mods [often modifications to make the bike nosier] and still suffer the insecurity and fear that they may not be noticed. The straight pipe stop sign throttle rapper is more than likely the guy who routinely gets dumped on at work, nagged by his old lady and ignored by his kids saying, “please look at me, I’m here…. I’m going all Sigmund Freud on you.
Just as likely, this behavior is another by-product of our ready-made subcultures that we no longer invent ourselves but rely on marketing and media to create and spoon-feed us. [The] motorcycles, politics or music scene we get—most of it is prepackaged. The resultant cultural behavior is predictable.
REVVING TO PUNISH
Motorcyclists have a term for automobiles—“cages.” More than a few folks on the forums have contempt for the folks inside the cages (“cagers”), if not for the cages themselves.
Several riders were willing to admit that they used the blip to punish annoying cagers. The single biggest offender seemed to be cell phone users:
The amount of throttle, duration and frequency of my “spanking it” at the light is proportional to the idiots in their cages on their cell phones. It’s so funny to see the windows go up [and] the phone shift to the other ear. Did I tell you I hate cell phones in vehicles?
But there was plenty of hate left for aggressive drivers:
If I am at a stoplight behind a car with a body kit, tacky paint job, and a bunch of “sponsorship” stickers, I will often rev the engine to get the driver’s attention. I have found that in 100 percent of such cases, the result is the moron in the car will take off as fast as possible, trying to impress me. This allows me to take off a pace closer to my normal (brisk) one. Also good for getting rid of the same type of driver when they are next to you and you want to get in that lane to turn.
and inattentive drivers:
I don’t blip at lights to enjoy the sound or to impress anyone. I do it to get the attention of the blond cager, with the cell in one ear and one eye looking at her makeup in the rearview, and the other eye on the light as it changes. I do it to remind her there is a motorcycle there so hopefully she won’t run me over until the SUV in front of me gets out of my way. Also to wake up the old cager in the SUV after he fell asleep at the light.
or conventional people:
I do it to annoy soccer moms [this was followed by a smiley face emoticon].
or even Imponderables book authors:
Look around next time, there’s probably some nob in a BMW on a cell phone drinking a latte I’m trying to piss off, or maybe it was you. Get back in your 4-door shopping cart dude, or bett
er yet buy a bike and join the dark side…
Gee, we wish we had a BMW. And if we bought a bike, with our coolness quotient, it would probably be a Schwinn with training wheels.
REVVING FOR FREEDOM
Scan the contents of motorcycle forums and the word “freedom” is omnipresent. Many riders insist that they blip not to annoy others, but to luxuriate in their favorite F-word:
We spend thousands to customize our bikes just the way we like them to please us! This includes the sound of the motor. Yes, I give it a little blip at lights from time to time, because I paid for that melodic sound with my hard-earned dollars, not as some have suggested that it somehow makes me feel like a big man—my lady does that for me, not my bike. Riding has always been an extension of freedom to me, not my manhood.
REVVING IS PART OF THE RIDING EXPERIENCE
Many riders don’t separate revving from the experience of being on the open road: Psychotherapist Brenda L. Bates, who rides herself and specializes in treating bikers who have encountered accidents, wrote to Imponderables via e-mail:
Many of us are what is called “motorheads.” We love the feel of the engine and take any opportunity to manifest the sensation that revving those rpm’s gives us. Many car drivers don’t care or know much about the engine in their auto. But motorcyclists can be different in that we truly appreciate the sound and feel of a good engine.
We thought blipping must be a way of revving up the metabolism of the rider as well as the bike, but competition racer Kris Becker (http://www.krisbecker.com) told us that for most riders, it’s exactly the opposite:
Harley riders (and any motorcycle rider, any brand), whenever stopped at lights or in a field when off road, have just come from an intense experience. Now they are “idling” mentally and mechanically, they rev the engine to fill the hole in their sensory input left after the movement and sensory intensity of the riding experience. Note that as soon as they are on a highway, at 50, 60, 70 miles per hour, they don’t look around much, they are relaxed, they have found the “zone.” Watch them stop and again, a little rev, some foot tapping, looks around, mouth popping, and “jonesing” for the reestablishment of the road experience.
REVVING IS—I HAVE NO IDEA!
Next to those who professed to love the Sound, the most popular answer was: “I don’t know,” but the love of blipping is the expression of an inchoate joy:
We do it because we can, honestly. I sometimes do it in my toy car for the sake of it, but on the motorcycle, it’s one of those, “Hey, I’m here” things. It’s our way to express ourselves while stationary.
I do it. I’m a blipper. I do it for lots of reasons. To be cool, to let others know I’m there and for well, I don’t know. I just do it. I guess that makes me an addict…. the first step in recovery is to admit…I’m a blipping blipper…
THE CASE AGAINST BLIPPING
This Imponderable exposed divisions within all three online communities of bikers. Cyclists are acutely aware of their image among nonriders, and some commented on this schism:
As you may gather from some of the…posts, many riders are quite defensive about this—there is an attitude that they have the right to make noise, and damn any objections. In the motorcycle world, aftermarket mufflers and exhaust systems are commonplace—a lot of guys will install them strictly for loudness, with no concern about performance gains…. And of course, once you’ve spent hundreds or thousands of dollars on a loud exhaust system, you want to hear it—so you’ll sit and rev it at red lights, getting envious looks from any guy within sight and dreamy eyes from the women, as you sneer from beneath your do-rag—but oops, I digress. As I said, some of us ride motorcycles because they’re fun to ride, and don’t feel that annoying the non-riding public with excess noise is required, or politic.
Most of our motorcycle enthusiasts were in the pro-blip camp or the anti-blip minority. Few were sympathetic to both sides. We exchanged a fascinating series of e-mails with “Hawkster,” who is attracted to the scream and the danger of motorcycles and other macho symbols, but is also aware of their pitfalls:
As a former range safety officer and instructor at an outdoor shooting range and as a current riding instructor, I’ve noticed a lot of similarities in the mind-sets of both shooters and motorcyclists. I know that if it’s both noisy and dangerous, it will probably draw my interest!
Many people own either guns or motorcycles because they feel empowered by them. Whether or not this is a good thing is a matter of some debate among instructors. I believe that it ultimately comes back to how a particular object or pursuit makes us feel—I’ve seen the “I’m a bad-ass” look on many a new shooter’s face. Unfortunately, empowerment only comes through proficiency, but most don’t seem to realize that.
Many riders, particularly the newer ones, are under the illusion that they are able to buy into the movie-and television-created “biker mystique” with the purchase of a machine. I call this the “bad-ass by proxy” syndrome…Crash statistics indicate that it doesn’t usually bode well for their riding career.
Much of my time at the shooting range was spent stomping out myths about guns. Oddly, I seem to spend just as much time doing the same during motorcycle classes.
We were impressed with how thoughtful Hawkster was, so we asked him why he’s so attracted to the noise and danger himself. He replied:
As an instructor, I can get all the attention without it becoming socially unacceptable (Are revving bikers straddling that line?). The need for attention is probably a “shadow motive” for many actors, activists, and teachers.
Regarding shooting and riding motorcycles on the street and in competition: I think that some people just function best in a threat-rich environment. I’m that type of person. Many of us have been labeled as ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder). I think it really gets your attention when your life is on the line. We enjoy that. I consider riding to be transpotainment.
I don’t think that anyone ever really grows up. We’re just forced into acting like it by cultural mores. Riding a motorcycle permits us to be (borderline) socially acceptable kids.
The Sound is both the boon and the bane to Harley devotees. A few years ago, when Harley-Davidson celebrated its one-hundredth anniversary, upstart motorcycle manufacturer BMW posted this billboard on the Interstate: “We’d say congratulations on your 100th. But you wouldn’t hear us.”
Submitted by Douglas Watkins, Jr. of Hayward, California. Special thanks to all the participants of the Motorcycle USA, GSResources.com, and HarleyZone message boards.
Why Are Salmon Pink?
Salmon are pink for the same reason that lobsters, crabs, crawfish, shrimp, and for that matter, flamingos are pink: They are what they eat. Salmon feast on shrimp, krill, and other small fish that are full of asataxanthin, a carotenoid (much like the beta carotene that give carrots their orange hue) that not only adds the reddish pigment to the salmon’s flesh, but provides plenty of vitamin A.
Skeptical Imponderables readers might think this answer is fishy for one big reason. Most salmon we see in supermarkets, fish stores, and restaurants are not wild salmon, but farm-raised. These farm-raised salmon are not pampered with shrimp cocktail feasts—they are given a less expensive commercial feed.
That feed is infused with plenty of asataxanthin for the most compelling of reasons: the color of salmon is a major factor in its consumer appeal. In a paper, “Salmon Color and the Consumer,” Stewart Anderson of Hoffman-La Roche Limited wrote:
Consumers perceive that redder salmon is equated to these characteristics: fresher, better flavor, higher quality, and higher price.
Anderson makes clear that redder salmon doesn’t taste any better and is not any fresher, but the bottom line is clear, which is why you are unlikely to see any pale salmon, from whatever source, in your store or on your plate.
Submitted by Simon Parker-Shames of Ashland, Oregon.
Why Do Parrots and Other Birds Mimic Human Speech and Other Sounds?
&n
bsp; Wouldn’t it be cool to be lost in the jungles of Belize and have a yellow-headed parrot assist us with a timely: “Hey buddy, bear left!”?
Cool? Yes. Likely? No way. As far as we know, birds, even chatty ones like parrots and mynahs, do not mimic human speech in the wild, but they do imitate other sounds, and especially other birds.
Why Do Pirates Love Parrots? Page 15
