Vintage Engineer Boots

If engineer boots are your thing. If you know your Cat's Paw from your cord outsole. Your Sears from your Chippewa - or if you want to learn, get over to John's Vintage Engineer Boots blog, which is just about to turn its seventh year of boot and good-gear celebration. (Strummer is wearing Sears, by the way.) MP

Red Ming Boots

We love Jason. Click his very own label below to see more of his borderline insane ramblings from previous years. G

Yesterday was five hours of waiting around while my car got serviced. I decided to make the most of the time by making some shoes from the spare interior leather. 
The soles are rubber tread from a horse box. No shit. I thought I'd be able to make shoes. How hard can it be? Clearly I know the answer to be, no I can't.

Dimitri Coste Vans Flat Track Boots

These crappy photos, taken by me in my dining room, could get the perverted sneaker freaker world fizzed up. Why? They're the first ever pair of Vans to be made not using the waffle sole.
They were produced, as prototypes,  for Dimitri Coste to race in at Dirt Quake. They have Vibram soles (and looked better on and covered in Coventry clay). G
Good action photo: Grant Robinson

Stuff on eBay

Richard's Yamaha XS650 street tracker, in London.

Larry's Ducati 1100 GNC bike, in Ohio. Thanks to Wilky for the link.

Jason's Sidi Joel Robert boots.
Here's his description. Genius, as usual.

 These are unused size 43 (UK 9) I believe they are no longer available, which is a shame as they are just the job for mixing style and safety. I bought them when I had my vintage Husky 400 last year, to live out my, On Any Sunday, fantasies. Which you can see from the condition of the boots, remained a fantasy. Hey ho, keep dreaming. 
Shipping within England is £15.00 or collection from Leicestershire 
In an effort to answer the usual crazy questions see below 


1, Will I ship to Ulan Bator? No but you can collect. I'll even suggest some lovely visitor actractions for you to wonder round, in your new boots perhaps. 


2, What's your buy it now price? There isn't one, it's an auction. Bid, it's fun. 


3, Will they fit me? Certainly, I can also confirm they will also fit your brother, your gran and your cat. Hang on a second, how can I confirm all that? It sounds suspiciously like a lie, how could I know they'll fit your cat? Exactly, you Dingbat. 


4, If they do not fit, can I return them? What do you think this is? M&S. I don't want them back once you've had your smelly clod hoppers in them. I'm not the one looking at second hand boots am I. 


5, You sound like a fun kinda guy and I'm a gorgeous girl, will you go out with me? Send me a picture of yourself and your Mum, along with Bank statements and I'll certainly consider it. 


6, I'm from Nigeria and have a million pounds to give you, I just need your bank account details? Certainly, I'm a sucker for cash. 


7, I only have one leg, would you consider selling the boots individually? Yes and no. But mainly no. Sorry to hear about your leg. Hope it gets better soon. 


8, I'm not actually in need of any boots but am lonely and needed the excitment of email exchange with another human, so tend to just email rhetorical questions, such as, nice boots mate, I have some almost the same. Thanks, hopefully I will sell them soon, so the one thing we had in common will be gone. Hope life stops ooffing you in the nads soon. But try think about the only common donominator in your life. It's you isn't it? I think I've covered everything. 


Thanks for looking and good luck with your bid. Jason

RG Boots

This from our friends at Fantic/SWM. The boss there, Federico Fregnan, is a super-enthusiast and also owns the rights to classic Italian MX boots, RG. He's been planning to remake them for a while and has finally found the time.

'I am pleased to inform you that our legendary boots RG are available again.
As promised we have partnered with an Italian craftsman who works in the area of Montebelluna (Treviso), which uses only Italian leathers, which has a small team of collaborators in Italy and who believes in things done well.

We Redid the boots by following every detail of what was the shoe art of the past, we used a sole made from Vibram and after long research we also found the same mythical buckles used in golden off-road years.

The boot RG was the first to be used by teams like SWM, Fantic Motor, KTM and many others.
It was used by those great champions who still admire or remember their amazing sports feats.

Well now you can have them in "Black" or "Black & Red" color.
• Available sizes from 40 to 46.
• Cost EUR 240.00 + VAT (The cost of transport is excluded)
• You can order them via mail by indicating quantity, size, color, your data with vat n°, and place of shipment.
· Payment can be made by bank swift transfer.

Look forward to your orders via fax: + 39.0422.490620 or email info@fanticmotor.it

Peter from Yorkshire

Earlier this year I went on an amazing ride through Southern Africa. It was a tour led by Charley Boorman and run by Motoaventures. There were a bunch of great people on the trip from all over the world, but one I hear the most from since is Peter from Sheffield who was on the trip with his old mate Mick. Peter sent me these brilliant photos of his life on two wheels.
Here Peter is rocking the once popular 'Sutcliffe' look every man in the North of England seemed to adopt in the 1970s. No wonder it took the coppers so long to catch the Yorkshire Ripper.
Getting air in wellies.
Here’s also a couple from Mick and mines past. Way back around 1969, we had the use of a mates Dad’s garage in a fairly posh Sheffield suburb in which we had a load of bikes in various states of disrepair, 4 of us basically middle class kids but scratching for money with a ramshackle collection of old machines and a set of whitworth spanners.

Once we'd seen Easy Rider we realised that what we needed were apehangers. There's me and our two mates, not john by name. I'm sitting on my '57 Sunbeam S8, there are two Triumph 350s and a BSA SS80.

Below, me and Pete at Rollerburn. Thanks Pete. Great photos. G

Kit I trust

Knox Contour back protector and chest protector. I've worn this back protector since I started racing. You could probably boil it and make a nice broth. It's long, and covers the cocyx. I love it. I've just started wearing the chest protector. It feels good. I don't even notice it when it's on. Gericke leathers. Designed by Bjorn Gericke, who is a very cool cat, but doesn't work for them any more. I originally liked them for their style and the over-the-boot, straight legs, but they've proved very tough. I'm not crashing at high speeds, but I have crashed a lot on tracks with a lot of silica content, and the leathers have stood up to it. You've just got to see what they'e tracks do to a bike during a season to know how abrasive they are. The lining's ripped a bit getting in and out of them, though.

Arai RX7. This is an old road helmet relegated to dirt track battering. I much prefer a full-face to an MX lid. When I think of flat track I think full-faces on the miles (even though all the riders now seem to wear MX gear on short tracks I wouldn't).
TCX Speedway boots. Much better than the Styl Martins I bought to start racing in. These have and inner boot though I'm not entirely sure what it's for. These are like modern road race boots, covered in plastic. Not my style, but I feel secure in them.

I've been meaning to do this post for ages. This is the kit I wear to race. I'll be honest and say I manage to get most of it for free or cheap through contacts and friends I've worked with (what am I supposed to do, turn it down?), but I wouldn't wear it if I didn't trust it and certainly wouldn't promote it on the blog. Note the absence of gloves. The ones I'm wearing are yet to prove themselves. G

Fiddy!

This is Fiddy, the man behind Davida helmets. Davida were the company building quality open-face helmets when no one else was. They're not novelty lids, like a lot on the market, these are actually designed to save your noggin. The stuff Davida sells, all made and painted in Birkenhead, is tested by British Standards. And now they're making an approved lid with a smaller profile, the Ninety-Two more like a 60s lid than previous designs. Viva Davida! G

Red Marley Hill Climb

Picturesque English Worcestershire paysage, horsey girls wearing Jimmy Choo Hunter wellies and much tweed; miss-matching Brum accents, scrum on the muddy slope with shaven-headed beardy bikers in DP combat jackets. £2.50 for a polystyrene punnet of raw chips, toasted Paninis even more tasteless than the Brevel cheese-toaties they have superseded.
The pre-65 bikes range from £12,000 titanium catapults, to mobile chicken coops held together with bailing twine. The ES2 Norton in the montage here has a Dyno-printer name tag on the tank to combat amnesia after too many back-flips. BP

Full GI & BP feature in Sideburn, to follow.

Dirt Diggers Dinosaur TT

I found this fantastic photo on MotorCycho. This guy has got incredible style. The photo name reference the Dirt Digger Dinosaur TT. I didn't know anything about it, but it seems like it is/was held at Perris. A quick google showed the great photo below of CycleNut48 on his Cheney BSA. Absolute class.
Anyway got more info. GI

M&M's: Another happy customer

Big boots, big smile, lots of VMX style wrapped up in a Kawasaki 250 Domestic only package. Subarashi! G

Survival

New Boots and Panties

In 1977 aged little more than Baxter here, a family friend tried to impress me with Ian Dury's first - and best(?) album.
It only took 32 years to properly sink in, but now it's one of my all time faves, and it keeps me going through the small hours.
BP

Track Listing:
1 Wake Up and Make Love With Me
2 Sweet Gene Vincent
3 I'm Partial to Your Abracadabra
4 My Old Man
5 Billericay Dickie
6 Clevor Trever
7 If I Was With a Woman
8 Blockheads
9 Plaistow Patricia
10 Blackmail Man
11 Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll
12 Razzle in My Pocket
13 You're More Than Fair
14 England's Glory [Live]
15 What a Waste

mash-up

Anthropologists are running out of pigeon holes to put the kids of today in. Especially the Japanese. With blatant disregard for etiquette or politics or history, they are producing some 'interesting' concoctions. We consulted Dr Troy Vanstein about this Motoyan picture... BP

"The facemask in the photo is an AME BMX mask from the 80's (Looks like a copy since the goggles don't have the AME logo).
In the 70's and early 80's Scott was popular. There were others Oakley, Carrera, Seer. I think use of them had a lot to do with how crap full face helmets were at the time. Poor Vision, heavy, hard to breath in. The Bell Moto 3 was the start of the end of the face mask. It was light for it's day and better air flow and vision. Then the AMA made full face helmets mandatory and that was the end of the face mask I guess..."

You think you know someone...

I've been fortunate enough to interview Kevin Schwantz a few times. Saw him race in England too. Even got changed in the same room as him before we went to ride MotoGP bikes, but I never knew he was a dirt tracker. I knew that most US racers had raced on ovals, but it was so rarely mentioned in the Schwantz stories I'd read it had passed me by. Then I found these photos in a dusty corner of his website and they're gold dust. I love the ABC leathers, so I dug about to see why they had Darryl on the front and discovered this on the AMA Hall of Fame website 'He also raced a few amateur dirt track races using motorcycles borrowed from his uncle, AMA Grand National racer Darryl Hurst. Schwantz got his first taste of road racing at an event through the streets of Austin, Texas. Schwantz won the race over a slew of the best road racers in Texas riding his uncle’s Yamaha short-track racer.'
And he's setting the bar high with the outfit in the family photo, but his dad edges it in the style stakes. GI

SIDEBURN à Paris

The Rocker Speed Shop in Paris (France not Texas) is now stocking SB magazine. They are also the place to go for bomb-proof Scottish made Aero leathers, Redwing boots, Glory shirts, vintage Levis, and snazzy French Ruby helmets.
BP

Naboo

The bike is off-topic (not so far), but the look is ON - well at least in a festive Christmas panto', Mighty Boosh, kinda way. Beer-mat turban (or pure silk for the more dandy of you), Top Man shirt buttoned to the top, cummerbund, and 80s drain-pipes tucked into engineers boots. We dare you to turn up to your local looking like this.