Bikes & Gear
Evaluations & Recommendations
Fury: Honda’s Forgotten Chopper
I was in a hurry. The day before I had arranged to pick up a 2025 Gold Wing 50th Anniversary Edition. I planned to put 6,000 miles on it that month, starting that same afternoon. While signing paperwork, something in the corner of my eye caught my attention: low, long, green, and slightly menacing. It gleamed under the warehouse lights — exaggerated curves and chrome in all the right places. ”Is… is that a Honda Fury?” I thought. It was. “They still make those?” They sure do.
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2025 Sport Touring Tire Test Wrap-Up
We ask everything of motorcycle sport touring tires. Unlike narrow focus tires dedicated to track-only performance or mud-slinging off-road roost chuckers, we expect sport touring tires to be a jack-of-all-trades and master of everything. They need to stick like sap, munch massive miles, conquer Colorado heavy rain showers and handle like MotoAmerica track refugees. Oh, and they need to last forever. Tire manufacturers attempt to work miracles with modern tires by engineering ways to expand a tire’s envelope in all these directions at once. A rare few sport touring tires do this, succeeding in all areas at once. Others fall short. Some fall way, way short.
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Lusso Leather- Premium Custom Leather Jackets
So when Lusso Leather reached out earlier this summer, offering me a custom tailored, fitted motorcycle jacket to ride with and review, I jumped at the chance. Lusso is a Canada-based leather apparel and accessories company, with a New York State distribution facility in Niagara Falls, that has begun offering motorcycling-specific jackets to the North American market. Their jackets and leather accessories are handcrafted in Turkey, then shipped to Canada and/or the upstate New York warehouse for distribution. Per their contact with me, “Our garments are manufactured in Turkey, where we work closely with skilled artisans to ensure high-quality craftsmanship and materials, especially for our motorcycle jacket line.”
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Honda Unveils A CB1000F Retro
We recently caught a glimpse of a new model that Honda has been developing for production this coming year. This retro styled CB1000F arrested our attention, so we dug a little deeper. Unveiled back in the spring as a concept, it seems clear now the motorcycle will definitely be built and sold. Whether or not it will come stateside is anyone’s guess right now, however.
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2025 Middleweight Matchup: Honda CB750 vs Yamaha MT-07
Over the summer, we had the opportunity to sample the new Honda CB750 Hornet, and earlier the 2025 Yamaha MT-07. Both of these are fantastic, affordable middleweight naked sportbikes, and we loved them both. We got the bright idea of riding them together, side-by-side and nose-to-tail, since they are comparable in size, displacement and rider triangle. After pitching the idea to Honda, who wholeheartedly jumped at it, Yamaha must have read our twisted minds, and preempted us by calling and offering one once they saw we had the Hornet.
Thus we began the bout.
Motorcycle Gear Review: Garmin Zumo XT2
Garmin has built guidance systems specially made for hurling ourselves into the the wind with no need for real maps or even a sense of direction. The Zumo XT2 is Garmin’s latest platform for telling us how to get from A to B, the fast way or the scenic way, with pretty much every conceivable convenience stop along the way while also alerting us to sharp curves, state helmet laws, speed cameras, traffic conditions, ETA and probably a few more things I haven’t figured yet.
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Tire-d Ruminations
Much trust is placed on those black donuts, much more when compared to automobile tires. Whereas a motorcycle has two oval contact patches roughly a credit card in size, passenger cars have four square contact patches, each about the size of 4” x 6” picture, or larger, and consequences for motorcycle tire failure are more disastrous. No driver has ever lowsided their Ford F150 after tucking the front end while trail braking into a corner. No driver has ever highsided their Honda Accord with too much throttle application on corner exit.
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PREVIEW: Honda CB750 Hornet vs Yamaha MT-07
I must state from the start, I have a great affection for both of these bikes, having ridden them both pretty extensively over the last year. I love middleweight twins in general (heck, I own a Triumph Bonneville 900), and these motorcycles are an absolute thrill to ride. We have ridden every current iteration of Yamaha’s 689cc engine, in their Tenere 700, R7, XSR700, and last year’s MT-07, and that “CP2” crank is a torque monster for its displacement. Then my recent stints with the new CB750 Hornet have sold me on Honda’s new little beast, and their 755cc Unicam stinger mill that powers it.
This will be fun, to say the least.
Royal Enfield Guerrilla 450: Roadster Redefined
Riding west out of Milwaukee, we hit I-94 and lit out for Wisconsin’s historic Kettle Moraine Trail region. After navigating around then out of the city, we opened up the throttles of the Royal Enfield Guerrilla 450 motorcycles and shot over to the passing lanes. Running up through the gears, I was once again amazed at the power the Sherpa 450 single can make, this time in a street-oriented roadster style motorbike. Pinning it in every gear, I was shifting at 8-9K rpm, and found myself doing 92 mph by the time I caught the lead group of riders. And I still had throttle left. “Geez, will this ‘do the ton’ if I stayed on it??” I wondered aloud.
Impressive.
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