Honda's XR75

Alright, let’s talk about my favorite bike - the XR75. This one bike has had more impact on mini bikes (and my life in general) than any other bike ever made. Honda introduced the XR75 in 1973 and found worldwide success. In the 70’s, motocross was becoming huge in the United States. There were motocross tracks everywhere and you could ride almost anywhere you wanted. In grade school, I remember half of the kids rode or raced motocross, and the majority of them had XR75s. It took me and my brothers a little longer than most to come up with our first XR, but we were persistent. Chris, Brent and I were heavily into BMX racing and our parents weren’t ready to make the shift to MX just yet. Each of us had a few expensive BMX bikes, a sidehack, go-karts, and a number of other toys that were keeping our parents on the edge. Plenty of hours were spent riding friends and neighbor’s XR’s, but ours somehow eluded us.


Our cousin, Brian, owned a BMX/Motorcycle shop (N.K. Cycle) in Poulsbo, WA. Every year we would make an annual trek to check out the latest BMX parts and ride his trick XR’s. As a matter of fact, the first time I ever heard the word “trick” was at his shop in the 70’s. One of the times we went to visit Brian he had a ‘77 DG package racer XR75 with all of the trick parts for the time. It had a Powroll 116 stroker motor, gold DG everything, Fox shocks, and Betor forks. It was almost too much for a twelve year old to comprehend. That was it! I was going to build an XR no matter what. Since I had access to BMX bikes, but not to a bunch of money, I figured I could trade my way into my dream ride. We put the word out in our Junior High school that we were looking to trade for an XR75. It didn’t take long. One of our buddies had just gotten a new YZ80, so he was willing to trade his XR75 for a DG Rooster BMX bike. We loaded the bicycle up and headed to his house to make the swap. When we arrived we found a gray 1974 XR with a DG pipe. Perfect. With the XR safely in our garage the real fun began. We immediately disassembled it and painted it red. I remember jumping on my JMC BMX bike and riding down to Ace Hardware to buy a can of Krylon red spray paint. The plan was to make the bike look like Marty Smith’s factory Honda before unveiling it to the neighbor kids. Other than eating a set of points that first day, and having the neighbor yell at us for making too much noise, it was a glorious day. It didn’t take long before every kid in the neighborhood had a motorcycle. Some of the best races I have ever been in occurred on that residential neighborhood track.

At our BMX shop, we used to carry a magazine called Minicycle/BMXaction that had all of the cool parts and stories from the day. There were tons of companies making parts for the little XR. Jeff Ward’s dad had a company called J.W.R.P. They made frames, swingarms, pipes, ignitions, etc. Red Line Engineering also made a frame early on for the XR75 (before BMX consumed them). Dave Miller, of DMC fame, had a company called Miller Mano that cranked out some super trick one-off XR parts. There was also PK Racing, the Vulcan Bros, Burnsworth Racing, and of course DG Performance. DG was the king of all things aftermarket for MX. They made a monoshock frame and swingarm for the XR, plus they carried every imaginable hop-up part ranging from seats, to heads, and forks. DG had every part you could want, and made each one of them cool. All of the best riders of the day rode for DG and used their products. You couldn’t go anywhere in the 70’s without seeing a DG logo. Somebody at DG was a marketing genius and had a huge passion for all things MX. My brothers and I respected that a lot. Here's a DG catalog page from 1978 (courtesy http://www.vintagefactory.com/)


When the two stroke MX bikes started taking over in the late 1970’s, Honda started selling the XR75 as a playbike. The after market companies that continued to produce parts for the XR75 started gearing their items toward adults and the playbike market. Eventually, the two-strokes completely took over the racing scene, and the BBR brothers followed. I caved in and bought a 1979 YZ80 to keep my racing dream alive, and we soon owned a stable of two-strokes. But just like many of the racers, we continued to ride XR’s in the backyard for fun. Chris was always more interested in play riding, so he upgraded to a 1978 XR75. He saved his money, and bought all of the latest DG performance parts that were available at the time, and did every modification possible. At some point, he decided he was going to build a complete single shock frame for his XR, so at the age of twelve, with no one telling him he couldn’t do it, he started on the frame in Junior High shop class. It was a two year long project that we both worked on together, but Chris was the one who kept pushing until it was completed. I will admit that I gave up a few times along the way. When I went off to High School the next year, I had machine shop class which gave me access to a milling machine for the first time. Chris gave me some drawings of a linkage setup he was working on for the bike. After two weeks of class, the teacher (Don Sharp) thought we were ready to start working with the shop equipment. He showed the class the “sheetmetal box” project that we would all be working on for the rest of the quarter. I raised my hand and said, “Hey, can we work on our own stuff?” He laughed and asked, “What do you have in mind?” “I want to make a linkage for a motorcycle me and my brothers are working on”. I showed him the drawing and he just laughed at me. “Boeing couldn’t make that set up”, he said. “It is too complicated”. So I told him that it would sure be a better project than just a sheetmetal box! Amazingly, he let me work on it. I spent the next year working on that linkage setup. That is when I realized I could crank out billet parts. It took more than a few tries, but by the end of the year I felt like I could make anything. When Chris showed up for high school machine shop the next year, the teacher didn’t bother asking him if he wanted to make a sheetmetal box. He just let us do our thing. I worked on the billet stuff, and Chris started to focus on the frame and motor. Even though Brent was in college then, he showed up for class a few times to make some parts. He would tell the shop teacher that he was a “new student”, and then would work with us. I think Brent is the only person in history to get high-school detention without even being a real high-school student. Too funny!


Once the frame and linkage were complete we needed a shock, so we gave the guys at Works Performance a call and they cranked one out for us, to our specs. Chris sprayed the frame with some left over Plymouth R6 red paint from Brent’s drag-car, and then Brent pinstriped the frame 70’s style to finish it off. When the bike was complete, we loaded it up and headed out to our local track (S.I.R.) to race it. This was the first time I remember running into mini-dads. I had never heard so much whining in my life about rules, points, and inspections, etc. I lined up on the gate with 39 yellow two strokes, and me on the lone red 4-stroke. I ended up going 6/5 for sixth overall. I remember being a little disappointed, but looking back it was a small miracle. Show me a couple of kids that built their own bike from scratch, raced it, and put thirty other guys behind them. Check out the video of the bike here:


We never stopped riding and modifying XR75’s. When they morphed into the XR80 and 100, it just gave us more to work with. Eventually, the whole movement moved into the Langtown/ScrewyDilla type backyard races (which is a whole story by itself). As big as these races, and several others, became it just goes to show that the whole country was riding XR’s for fun. As we got older and were racing big bikes, we would continue to ride XR’s in the back yard as much as we could. There was a time when you could pick a decent XR up at a garage sale or swap meet for a hundred bucks. Usually you could just swap out the points and they ran like new. At one point, our parent’s backyard shop looked like an XR junkyard. People were just showing up and dropping off XR’s or abandoning them on our backyard track. At last count we had been through more than two hundred of them! As a matter of fact we are still going through XR’s – We just got a 2009 CRF100 last week (which is just an updated XR100). In our spare time, we like to restore all of the old rare XR’s, and related parts, that we could only dream about back in the day. A lot of the fun of the restoration is the hunt to find the old bikes and parts. If you have any old XR parts or vintage BMX parts you want to sell, trade, or donate to the BBR show-room, please drop us an email at ‘sales@bbrmotorsports.com’.

OK, for all you XR nuts out there, here are a few of the rare XR75’s we have restored over the years:

The first one is the Holy Grail of XR75's…The Jeff Ward Racing Products 1975 XR75. It has a chrome-moly frame and swingarm, Curnut shocks, 82cc piston, J.W.R.P. cam and ignition, 22mm carb, Akront rims, CR125 side plates, and the famous 3x number.

The second bike is a 1976 Red Line Engineering XR75. It has a nickel plated chrome-moly frame and swingarm, Ceriani forks and clamps, 17” front wheel, P.K. Racing ignition and 82cc piston, DG pipe, Mini-Mudder front fender, and Pro-Tec chain guide.


The third bike is a 1974 DG mono-shock XR75. It has a gold cad-plated chrome-moly frame and mono-shock swingarm, Luft shock, Vulcan Bros. forks, DG Performance piston, head, cam, and porting, 22mm carb, J.W.R.P. ignition, DG pipe, and DG valve cover.


The fourth bike is a 1978 DG package racer. It has a DG chro-moly frame, DG gold anodized swingarm, Fox 13.5” air shocks, Betor forks and clamps, D.I.D. gold rims, Duck-bill front fender, Powroll piston and cam, Answer mini bars, J.T. Supercross number plate, and DG up-pipe.

The fifth bike is a bone stock 1978 XR75. This bike was assembled about 10 years ago from N.O.S. parts when you could still get them from Honda. We ordered every part number for an XR75 and almost everything showed up. Basically, this a brand new bike one bolt at a time.


Blast from the Past

This week’s blast from the past comes from the March/April 2006 issue of Pit Racer magazine with Jeff Hain and the gang. On the last page of every issue they did a column called Classic Pit Racer. They did a feature on our Red Line XR75 that was stolen a few years back. It was stolen by some “victim of society” who has been “dealt a bad hand” and for whom “the government isn’t doing enough to help”, and has been “repressed by the man” and whose “parents do not love him”. He hooked a chain to the front door and pulled the whole front of the BBR shop off (guess he is good at something). He then cut a cable that was strung through a dozen bikes and stole the Red Line XR. Can’t blame him for wanting it, I guess, but it seems his method of getting one is a little different than how we would do it. It was heartbreaking to know it was gone, and we have not seen it since. We found another Red Line XR years later, that you heard about earlier in this story, but I had to trade my first born for it. Pit Racer also covered one of the DG Monoshock XR’s we had a few years ago. It is now part of a vintage collection in northern California.

I also found this great Jeff Ward XR75 article in Motocross Journal from Jimmy Mac and the gang. This bike is sitting in the Primm Museum. If you ever get a chance to visit them in Las Vegas, it is one of the most incredible places in the MX industry.

Question of the Week

“I see you guys are into XR75s. Do you sell parts for them or know where I can get some? I’m restoring a ‘73 XR75, and am having problems finding everything I need to complete the project.” Barney (in Tucson)

Hey Barney, love the ‘73 with the duel red stripes on the tank. We really don’t sell anything for the XR75’s but there are some good companies that we have run into over the years that do. At the top of the list is Scott Steger over at http://www.vintagefactory.com/. Scott is the king of vintage bike restoration and nobody has more fun and passion doing it than Scott and his crew. If you have a complete bike you want to send off to have restored, Vintage Factory is the place. Check out his great website for cool old vintage photos, a swap meet, and streaming videos. Scott also has almost every vintage sticker you can imagine, so check his site out. Another great place to find all of the little detail items that separate an amateur restoration from a show winner can be found at http://www.re-mx.com/. They have gas caps, levers, seats, etc, and they are friendly guys. Another great company for performance parts for the XR75 are http://www.xrminiracer.com/. Alex, the owner, has been racing and riding XR75’s in SoCal from the beginning. He has all of your favorite pipes from back in the day and many more items. Check ‘em out. Last but not least is http://www.powroll.com/. These guys have been at it since before I was born and are still making XR75’s go fast. Give “Powroll Pam” a call and she will hook you up with the right parts. Hope this helps! Duane

OK, that’s it for this week. Thanks for helping us live the dream!

Duane

New Product Development

Let’s talk product development this week. I remember when we first started BBR, and being a young, broke, (and dumb) college student. I was trying to race motocross and I couldn’t figure out why everything cost so much in the motorcycle world. How could a works Honda cost 100 thousand dollars? There was no more metal in David Bailey’s works bike than in my stock 1986 CR250. Also, why didn’t the aftermarket companies make the parts I really wanted, in the color my buddies and I wanted them in? Well, growing the business at BBR has definitely given me, and my brothers, a crash course in reality. Trying to please the public, ourselves, and the racers is not as easy as it looks. I remember thinking that if I was in charge, I would just build the best parts all the time and the rest would take care of itself. I have come to learn that making the best parts on the planet is the easy part. Balancing the needs of the vendors, employees, media, advertising, R&D, market trends, all have an effect on what gets made and how it gets priced at BBR. Passion can only take you so far.

I get calls from time to time from people asking how we come up with so many new and unique items. When you ride and race as much as we do, the products almost invent themselves. Some products are more obvious than others. Any adult who jumps on a 50 can tell you that it needs taller bars. Anyone who has ever put a big bore kit onto a KLX 110 can tell you it needs a D-comp cam or a forged output shaft to stay in one piece. Every part evolves from a need in the industry. I will let Chris take it from here since he has designed and developed a good portion of the BBR products over the years:


There are many great new product ideas out there. We like to think that we come up with our fair share of them for our industry and it is always fun to see the many other great ideas that are developed in the MX world. But many people just see the finished product, and don’t even think of all the work that goes into the development of the product, and what it takes to bring it to the market. Anybody who’s ever picked up a wrench (even the lowly crescent wrench) has thought about something they would/could/should build. We get 4 or 5 people a month who show up with some idea that they think will change the world. Just cruise the internet forums and you’ll see dozens of ideas. Many are great ideas that are impossible to build. Others are rehashes of something somebody else did 10 or 15 years ago. Many ideas we see are nothing more than drawings. Drawing a part is (maybe) 1% of the process. If it is a napkin or pencil drawing, then it’s more like 1/2%. The process of taking the idea from the napkin to the market is very complicated, and takes much more than a great idea.

At BBR, new products generally start with Duane (or somebody else in the shop) riding and noticing something that needs changed. Sometimes it is nothing more than that an existing OEM part feels weird. Sometimes we break a part and know it needs a change. Sometimes we stumble onto some performance gain in a weird way. Other times we go after a performance gain by redesigning a part. Anyway, the idea isn’t the hard part. We have hundreds of great ideas getting fleshed out at any one time. Once a promising idea is found, it goes onto the next stage.

Generally, this means that somebody’s going to have to make a sample part to start testing. It might be that somebody in the shop (often Duane) will hand-make a part. We joke that we “cut/grind/weld” the first of many prototypes. If the part it too complex, we have to skip this first stage and move right to drawing the part in a design based computer program. You can’t exactly hand build a new transmission part. Depending on the part, though, we might go through a dozen prototypes before a final design is settled on. Somewhere in this process, I get a part (or idea of a part) that I draw (Kurt Hall, our lead engineer, also draws many of our products). When I say draw, that doesn’t mean I grab a pencil. In fact, I’m not much of a pencil artist. We’re talking about modeling the part on a computer. Some folks call it CAD (Computer Aided Drawing/Design/Drafting), but in modern language it is solid modeling. We use SolidWorks for all of our work. The cool thing about SolidWorks is that you can draw all the parts that make up a complete assembly, and check fit clearance, motion, etc. all before making a real part.

We also have a Microscribe digitizer that lets us get measurements of existing parts we need to model. It sounds a lot easier than it is. Drawing all these other parts can be 75% of the work of drawing the new part. Here is an example: When we made the adjustable linkage for the CRF150R, we had to draw the back half of the frame, the swingarm, the rotating link, a dummy shock, and a subframe. The frame drawing had to have enough information to level the bike so we could see where the seat would be. If you took our linkage, and drew it from scratch, it could be done in about an hour. The real setup time to draw the linkage actually took about a week due to the complexity and relationship to all of the surrounding parts.

The other thing to remember is that it is easy to draw a part that can’t be manufactured. You have to consider what process is going to be used to build this part. If it is going to be welded, machined, forged, or cast; all will need a different design. If you are going to machine the part then you have to remember that a revolving cutter, of some diameter, is going to remove material. Some places simply can’t have square edges. The old joke is, “How to you drill a square hole?” (With a square drill bit of course!) If you are forging (or casting) you need draft angles built in so that the part can be removed from the tooling. If you are welding the part you have to account for heat distortion during welding. If the part must be heat-treated you must account for distortion. All these things must be considered in the early stages of drawing a part. Remember, too, that the drawing must be as precise as the part needs to be. If tolerances of .001” are required, then the drawing must reflect that. Simply writing on paper “.25” doesn’t cut it.

Once the part is drawn, it goes to our CNC programmers. We use MasterCam for all our CNC work. The SolidWorks drawing is imported into MasterCam and the programmers decide every cutter to use and every machining operation to carve a block of material into the part. The machining operations are tested on the computer hundreds of times, and then refined many times before any chips are actually hitting the floor. At the same time, fixtures are designed (and built) to hold the raw material in the CNC machines as it is cut. A simple part might have 4 or 5 different (highly precise) fixtures that have to be made, each being durable enough to survive thousands of uses on each part.


Once the first part is made, it goes back to step one. We fit the part and test it again and again. If it is a motor part, it goes on the dyno for hours of testing. On most parts, we generally let a wide range of riders try them out to see if they meet our expectations. Another round of the cut/grind/weld process often occurs at this point to refine the product further. Sometimes the part is perfect but doesn’t make enough of a difference to justify production. Sometimes it simply sucks. If this is the case, we go back to the drawing board (or computer, in this case). Changes are made to the drawing and it must go all the way back through the CNC guys for updates, then back to step one again…(and the cycle continues until we are 100% satisfied with the results).

Once the part is perfect, we’re still not even close to being done. In fact, the work so far is often the easy part (the fun part for certain). Packaging and instructions have to be worked out. We also must figure out whether the part needs to be further processed (anodized, painted, laser etched, etc). All that goes into the final product and we’re not even to the boring stuff. Somewhere in this journey we also have to figure out what the part is going to cost. You have to consider all the overhead involved. Things like cutters, machine time, finishing, packaging, marketing and material cost are obvious. But we have a business to keep running. The true cost of a part includes things like employee’s salary, insurance, and even the lighting bill.

Once we know what each part will cost to build, we have to figure out what it will sell for. The motorcycle industry has set expectations for what markup for distributors and dealers will be. Unlike many companies, BBR usually sets a reasonable retail price and then work backwards. Sometimes the price we need to sell it to distribution for is less than the part costs us to make!

Two more considerations work into making a new part. First, some parts we simply can’t make in the US. If you want something chrome plated, cast, or injection molded, the regulations in the U.S. make this next to impossible. These regulations and environmental concerns drive the cost through the roof. A good example is our U-Flow filter kit for the KLX110. The tooling for the 4 molded parts included in this kit would have been about $50,000 in the US. Overseas the tooling was considerably less. That helped us cut the retail cost to about half what it would have been. But remember, molded parts usually require a minimum of 1000 parts for each production run. The tooling and these minimum production runs require a huge investment for each new product. We were so confident in the U-Flow that it was a no-brainer, but there are many items that require a substantial gamble on our part. Luckily, we have had very few failures in our new product development, but the risks are always there.

Most of our new parts go to our race team first for testing. We raced the new V3 KLX110 frame for most of 2008 before releasing it to the public (it’s happening now). We’re not trying to keep the parts out of our competitor’s hands; we’re trying to make sure it is the best it can be before it is released. Nothing is better for testing the quality and durability of a part than racing.

As I said before, there are many great ideas out there that are just waiting to be developed. If you have an idea for a new part, let me give you a tip for getting your product idea manufactured. Don’t ever show up at a company with just a drawing of your idea. If you really believe in your part, invest the money to get it made. Build it, test it, and refine it. Then when you show up, you have something that already works. Do a cost analysis. What will this part cost to make (or have made) and what can it sell for? Prove to the manufacturer that your product can work and that it can make a difference. Figure out who is going to buy it and why. Anything else is just another idea.

Thanks to Chris for walking us through this complicated process. It is great to be in a position where we have the people and manufacturing capabilities to develop great ideas into finished products. I can’t think of anything we would rather do.

Question of the Week

“I just installed a big bore kit in my KLX 110 and after one ride, it’s like the bike is now stuck in second gear.” Michael

Oh, the dreaded output shaft! This is the shaft that the countershaft sprocket, first gear, and the kickstarter, rides on. It breaks the end off (opposite the countershaft sprocket) when the KLX motor is modified. When the shaft breaks it sticks the transmission in whatever gear it was in when it broke (if you’re lucky). Then your day is ruined. Worst case is that the engine case gets broken too. Our engine guy can change these things in his sleep but unfortunately you must split the cases to do the job. After changing four output shafts at MiniMoto SX one year we decided to take matters into our own hands. BBR came up with a forged output shaft that all but eliminates the problem. It also comes with first gear, because that is the next weakest link, and we used to blow that up too. If you are going to do a big bore kit, over 130cc, it is highly recommended that you switch the output shaft or switch to the D-Comp cam. Hope this helps! Duane

Blast from the Past

This week’s blast from the past is from the April 1996 issue of Dirt Bike magazine and the French magazine Moto Crampons. The Dirt-Bike Title read “If NASA Made Dirt Bikes” And the Moto-Crampons title read ”The Future Looks Perfect” In 1994 Chris was fighting pancreatitis and I was fighting a job that I really didn’t like. Life was pulling us away from the dream of motorcycles. When Chris was sitting in the Hospital I realized that life is way too short to not do everything you want. I told Chris and Brent that it was now or never. We had spent our whole lives working towards this – The bicycle shop, cars, college, etc…and the real world just isn’t fun. I don’t want to work a job I hate and sit at a computer whining about how I would do it. I want to be the guy doing it! I walked into my work and announced that they could all, “kiss my butt!” I wanted to make sure I couldn’t go back! I went home and told my family and friends. No one seemed quite as excided as I was (especially my pregnant wife) but that didn’t matter. We were on a mission to build the trickest dirt bikes in the world. We had about six months to get it together before the money ran out. Twenty hours a day were gladly (if not nervously) spent. We decided to build three bikes. An XR100, a 280, and a 400. The 100 was an aluminum framed YZ80 with a bored to 150cc XR100 engine. The 280 was an XR250 engine bored to 280cc with a hand made aluminum frame and gas tank. The 400 was a brand new for 1996 XR400 engine. The frame was aluminum and carried the oil plus used the 1996 CR250 geometry. I knew we were onto something when my lap times were better on the BBR 400 than on the 1996 CR250. When the bikes were complete I gave 4-Stroke friendly Dirt Bike Magazine a call to see if they would like to ride them. At first they blew me off and said they had all of the XR400s they could test, but we could send some pictures. The pictures were sent and Joe Kosch immediately called back and wondered how soon we could get to California. We loaded the bikes into the back of a borrowed pickup truck and headed to Valencia. Once there we became fast friends with Joe, Lumpy, and Ron. They shot the bikes for hours in the studio and then we headed to Texas canyon to do some test riding. Darrin Hoeft whipped the BBR400 for the cover shot of Dirt Bike. They shot me on the 400 for the centerfold of an article submitted to French magazine Moto Crampons. When these two magazines came out three months later we were in business. This turned out to be one of Dirt Bike magazine's biggest issues ever (even to this day). If you want to see more check out the video and magazines here:


It’s been a wild ride for the past twelve years. Thanks for helping us live the dream! - Duane