Hello, Joe Berk here. I've been asked by the California Scooter Company to handle the blog activities on this site and I am excited about doing so. By way of introduction, I'm a guy who's been riding for 46 years and most of my two-wheeled activities have been on larger street bikes. I particularly love sport-touring here in the southwestern U.S. and the Baja peninsula in Mexico.
You might be wondering why a guy who's into sport touring and bigger street bikes is writing a blog on a scooter site. It's a fair question, and I'll give you the Reader's Digest version of my answer. One of my great friends and riding buddies (Joseph Lee) works for Steve Seidner (the California Scooter Company founder). Joseph managed the production operation at Pro-One Performance Manufacturing, Steve's other motorcycle company. Joseph referred me because I've done some writing (my scribblings appear in Motorcycle Classics magazine, Rider magazine, and a few other places).
So what qualifies me to write about Scooters? Well, that one's a bit more interesting, and it all depends on how you define what a Scooter is. It turns out that the definition of a scooter is not all that well defined. Most of us think of something that looks like a Vespa when we hear the word scooter (although quite a few people who ride traditional motor scooters like the Vespa don't even agree on that). The bikes California Scooter Company manufactures aren't anything like a traditional motor scooter. Turn back the clock a bit, and think about how we refer to our motorcycles. Old school guys like me call motorcycles "Scooters." When I hop on my Triumph and point it toward Cabo San Lucas (about 1000 miles south of the border, at the southernmost tip of the Baja peninsula), I tell my friends and family I'm taking my Scooter out for some fish tacos. They get it. They know what I'm talking about. The bottom line here is that to many of us, "Scooter" means "motorcycle," and the California Scooter Company bikes sure don't look like Vespas.
So, that's a bit about me and why I'm doing this, and it's probably enough.
Let's now turn to something way more interesting, and that's the California Scooter Company and its motorcycles. Steve Seidner is the guy who created it, and his background in motorcycling, classic car restoration, and hot rodding is extensive. Steve's the guy who founded Pro-One Performance Manufacturing, a company that designs and builds high-end V-twin performance machines. One of Steve's fascinations has always been the old Mustang motorcycles, a unique design manufactured in Glendale, California from the late 1940s until the early 1960s. With his extensive background in motorcycle design and manufacturing, and an appreciation of classic motor vehicles of all sorts, Steve created a company to manufacture bikes that take their styling cues from the original Mustangs, but are thoroughly modern in all regards, street legal, and fully CARB and EPA compliant. That story's been told elsewhere, so I won't go into it any more here (see the blog, for example, at http://www.motorcycleclassics.com/blogs/blog.aspx?blogid=44).
The photo to the left shows Steve Seidner with a California Scooter Company Classic at the company's La Verne, California production facility.
When my friend Joseph first told me about these machines, I was a bit skeptical, but that evaporated the moment I saw the first one. Joseph brought a red Classic over to my place, and one look was all it took for me. I was thinking that the bike was going to be a motor scooter styled like a motorcycle. It wasn't that at all. Don't think of these bikes as motor scooters. The California Scooter Company bikes are a completely different animal. They fill a motorcycle niche left untouched since the Mustang went out of production in the 1960s. Imagine blending one of Harley's Custom Vehicle Operation's bikes, the gas mileage of a traditional motor scooter, the Mustang's unique style, a lot of high-end features as standard equipment, and a near complete absence of plastic, and you'll find yourself with a California Scooter Company motorcycle.
That's it for now...more to follow.