Art and Artisans

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Yamaha’s TZ750A was unique for its four-pipe exhaust layout, all of them flat. Later models would adopt a different configuration. (John Owens/)

As the winter of 1973-74 wore on, wisps of news regarding Yamaha’s revolutionary TZ750A roadracer began to arrive at Boston Cycles (it would win the Daytona 200 nine consecutive times). It has four pipes! The pipes are all under the frame and the only way they can fit is if they’re flat.

My heart sank. I had tried flat pipes in the spring of 1970 and they quickly cracked as exhaust pressure pulses, coming at the rate of 150 per second, tried to blow the pipes out to a round cross-section. Their flat sides heaved like the flanks of an exhausted horse.

Then, more rumor: Don Vesco and Kel Carruthers have a surefire treatment that keeps the flat pipes 100 percent OK—not to worry. Another bit of info claimed that you could “just sand-blast the flat pipes and no cracking—ever.” Or wrap them in asbestos paper. Have them annealed. And on and on.

Homegrown solutions to the TZ750′s flat-pipe dilemma appeared out of necessity. (Tim Sutton/)

I didn’t believe it. Bend metal back and forth, back and forth, and it will fatigue and crack. Reciting poetry to it doesn’t change that. I ordered sheet metal to roll my own round pipes. My plan was to put just two big fat pipes under the frame, with the simultaneous-firing cylinders No. 1 and 4 routed into one pipe, and No. 2 and 3 into the other. These were 2-into-1 pipes.

Trouble was, my supplier didn’t have deoxidized (“killed”) 20-gauge sheet steel in stock—just some hot-rolled stuff. I took it. When the bike arrived at BC, I picked it up and started cutting. I hung the four strange-looking flat pipes from a water pipe in the ceiling of my basement shop. If I had them today, they’d be worth amazing bucks from the purist resto people.

When I started to weld the cones I’d made, I knew I was in trouble. As I pushed the glowing puddle along each seam, sparks exploded out of the metal, causing the torch to pop, blow away the hot metal, leaving a hole, and often go out. It was grim going, but I filled the holes and soldiered on. It was lumpy.

To anyone who welds, the pipes looked awful, amateurish.

At Daytona that March, long spears of shattered flat pipes littered the track. Soon, Kel Carruthers would show Yamaha a pipe set consisting of three under and one pipe crossing left-to-right just behind the four carburetors. His pipes were round, and Yamaha quickly put them into production.

In mid-1974, after BC’s rider Jim Evans had finished third at Talladega (as the top privateer behind two Yamaha team bikes), I got a strange phone call. The man on the line said he was seeking Boston area artists to lend samples of their work for a special show.

Someone had fingered me!

The fellow arrived and seemed delighted with the pipes and wanted to take them away on the spot. I needed the pipes for upcoming races, but there was an equally strong other reason not to show them in public: They were ugly.

I told the show rep this.

“Oh nooo,” he said, “That’s why I want them, need them for this exhibit. They’re so elemental! They look as though you’d pulled them with your bare hands from the fires of creation!”

As by then I had a capable assistant who was making really nice copies of those pipes for customers, and out of the proper sheet stock. I showed the rep their beautiful welds and graceful body-worked curves.

“Will these do?”

He looked downcast. “No, those are too… too…”

As he struggled for words, I said, “Good-looking?”

We left it at that and he went away empty-handed. I wasn’t about to put my ugly creations in an art show, with the implied excuse that I was some kind of “crafter.”

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