My doctor drained the fluid out of my knee and shot it full of cortisone. He asked me, "Why do you have that scribbling all over your perfectly good arms?" I replied, "In my line of work, sleeves are like silicone tits in Hollywood." He laughed, Nurse Ratched gave me a cold stare, and I left his office. On the ride back to my shop, I started dissecting what I had said. My sleeves have much deeper meaning than a new set of custom fun bags. Some people wear their heart on their sleeve-I wear my soul on my sleeves in the form of a whacked-out collage of gears, shafts, arteries, and skulls.
When I was a kid, I thought about gears and sprockets all the time. I tore apart my Honda 70, Hodaka 90, and then my Husqvarna 125 to check out the transmission, primary reduction gears, and the clutch. This stuff was neat, and it gave me wood. When I told people about my wood, they would look at me as if I had a thing for farm animals, so I learned to keep my mouth shut. Fast-forward through my life to Baker Drivetrain. I now rub elbows with people just like me who can talk gear ratios, sprocket ratios, and primary drives all day long. They get wood, too. Talking gear ratios and transmission configurations makes me feel like the bumblebee girl in that Blind Melon video who walks through the iron gate and finds all those other bees-but not quite as lame.
I think I feel at home with the American motorcycle subculture because we as a group are mechanically inclined way beyond the average Joe. We learned it growing up. We were the first at our school to learn how to pick those cheesy barrel locks so we could swipe bicycles from the bike rack at school. After stripping the bikes, we would build our own bikes with the hot parts. We ripped off bottles of gin out of the drunken neighbor's garage and never got caught. At 1 a.m. we hot-wired golf carts at the local golf course and took them for a joy ride all over the place. Oh, yeah, we did the greens, too. When we heard sirens, the golf cart got ceremoniously ditched in a pond on the course, and we scrambled through the woods to avoid making that late morning phone call to Dad from the cop shop.
Our mechanical aptitude started to shine through by the time we were teenagers. If Dad needed the car or lawnmower fixed, he would come to us because we impressed the old man with our mechanical abilities. When Uncle Jimmy had a busted chainsaw, he would bring it to us. No money ever changed hands-just a case of Wiederman's or a similar cheap barf beer was the preferred payment, because we weren't old enough to buy yet. Relatives were always giving us their junk that didn't work anymore, such as bicycles, lawnmowers, boat motors, old cars, power tools, and kitchen appliances. We saw value in a pile of galvanized angle iron that nobody else could.
Then the karma thing from our evildoings as youths came back to bite us in the ass. Now we're adults. Poor Aunt Jenny is living on Social Security, and her refrigerator is broken. All it needs is a new thermostat, but Aunt Jenny doesn't know that. You see, it's August, and her four-day-old tuna-puke casserole might go bad in the heat. You don't want to tell her that it tasted like crap the first day she made it and insisted that you have some while you fixed her leaking faucet. But Aunt Jenny's a good soul, so you oblige her and throw a new $20 thermostat in her 25-year-old fridge.
We became the family resource for all mechanical things gone bad, as well as the purchasing decisions for vehicles, tools, and appliances. If you have to be labeled as something, the family mechanical thesaurus ain't bad. Look at Uncle Ted, for example. He was the school teacher who got popped spanking his monkey in the movie theater and lost his job. So now he's recognized as the family pervert for life. Most of us have done far worse dirty deeds, but the difference is that we didn't get caught. Uncle Ted always was a dumbass, anyway.
Mechanical things fascinate me, and motorcycles represent the highest art form of mechanical wonderment because you can see all the parts right there in your face. By making transmissions and drivetrains for a living, I am able to advance American motorcycles as an art form through constant innovation in my little area of expertise. That's my job, and that makes me a lucky fella.
I get my new ideas by immersing myself in what I love (American motorcycles). In 1997 the big-motor movement told me that a six-speed overdrive was needed, so I made one. In late 2000, the wide-tire wars spurred me to change the tranny output to the right side, thus giving birth to right-side drive. In 2004 our direct-drive six-speed was delivered to market as a quieter, more refined six-speed for the touring folks.
I was also lucky enough to hook up with Kevin at the Inkporium in Lansing, who creatively interpreted my story in the form of ink on my arms. The crazy collage of gears, shafts, arteries, and skulls reminds me every day where I came from, what I am made of, and where I'm going. It is also a reminder of how proud and lucky I am to contribute to a culture made out of people who understand this motorcycle experience and feel this obsession to work on these machines.-Bert Baker