Twittering Machines

Cadavre exquis [Exquisite Corpse]
André Breton

I was never a gear-head. Actually if there’s an exact opposite, that’s what I was and I have the piss poor results of my technical skills aptitude tests to prove it. Those diagrams where you had to figure out which way a particular gear turned or pulley pulled looked like a game of Exquisite Corpse to me. I wanted to add a chicken head or old boot and call it art. After all, a drawing of a machine is a drawing, not a machine.

But that didn’t stop me from owning and riding a motorcycle. Most of my friends rode and one of my friends, Paul who we called DePa, went to school to be a motorcycle mechanic and it was DePa who sold me my Kawasaki H-2 750 Mach IV. Mine was unbanded, unbranded and sported a home paint job in a deep maroon matte finish and a ‘stabilizer’ bar added by DePa to try to tame the H-2s tendency to flex:

The H2’s lightweight tubular cradle was incapable of containing the vicious thrust of the peaky stroker. The frame flexed under cornering, while any surface irregularity at speed would destabilize the front wheel, causing a disconcerting weave, and making precise positioning on the road something of a gamble. The H2’s weight was also biased toward the rear, which, combined with a short swingarm, caused the front wheel to lift under acceleration if the rider was unprepared.

Seventy-four explosive horsepower stuffed into a powerband only 2,800rpm wide; a frame better suited to a moped; fuel consumption that would drop below 20 miles per gallon; spark plugs that fouled in less than 10 minutes of city riding; and all this accompanied by clouds of blue smoke and the raucous ring-a-ding racket of a big air-cooled multi-cylinder two-stroke.

The motorcycling equivalent of the Sex Pistols, the Mach IV 750 stuck its middle finger firmly in the face of respectability when it burst onto the road in 1972. Essentially a scaled-up version of the H1 500 triple, with equally evil handling and similarly violent performance, the Mach IV was, in the hands of an inexperienced rider, an accident waiting to happen. Motorcycle Classics

Yea, it was the sound that turned me on (and the zero to 60mph in 4.1 seconds didn’t hurt). Nicknamed “the Widow-maker’ I prefer to think of the Kawasaki H-2 as an exquisite corpse-making machine.