TECH
a TERRY LOGAN By Wes Fleming #87301
“See a need, fill a need!” – Bigweld (Robots, 2005)
THERE ARE AS MANY DIFFERENT kinds of BMW riders as there are BMWs in the world. Some are satis- fied to sit there and twist that. Others are always thinking, always tinker- ing, always coming up with ideas to make things faster, easier or more efficient. This latter group of riders includes Terry Logan. Being a machinist in Somers,
Montana – which is snuggled into the northern shore of Flathead Lake about 400 miles northwest of Bill- ings, (site of the 2015 MOA Rally) and 100 miles from anywhere – has its advantages and disadvantages. “We have five seasons here in our beautiful valley – the one right after spring is tourist season, and it blends spring and summer together. In the spring and fall, the riding season is the best. Fall is my favorite, but it’s usually when I have the least amount of riding time,” Terry says. “I’ll suit
up in the winter if it gets into the high 30s or 40s, as long as the roads are dry.” “Montana is a big state,” Terry continues,
“with very few people for its size. Since I’m a western history nut – I can’t get enough of the 1800s – Montana’s history makes my rides more than ‘just a ride’. The downside is living 50 miles from Glacier National Park – it’s incredible, but it draws two to three million tourists a year, and the traffic chaos can be a bit overwhelming.” Motorcycling came to Terry in 1972,
when he got a Honda CB350 with extended forks, short pipes, Z bars and a rectangular headlight. “I was 19 and couldn’t have been cooler if I was sitting on ice,” Terry explains. “My brother-in-law showed up one day with a 2004 K 1200 GT, and I had to get a BMW. I got my first BMW, a brand-new F 650 GS, in 2007. In 2009, I went to Alaska with two friends. They’d been there before and rode R 1200 GSes; they had all the bells and whistles. Terry replaced his 650 with a 2005 R
1200 GS after one of his friends hit a deer with it. That deer-striking GS – what Terry calls “the pickup truck of motorcycles” – carried him to Alaska and back in 2011, a
trip he took with his brother-in-law. “Noth- ing is better than the big GS for long dis- tance travel, on or off road. It pulls like a tractor and handles like a sport bike!” The 2005 GS wouldn’t be Terry’s last GS. He explains, “After that
’11 Alaska trip, my
friend Wayne Hagdahl – who went with me on the first trip – decided to sell his ’08 GS. I sold the ’05 and got it.” In Ketchikan, Alaska, Terry learned an
important lesson. “I found out that if you go downtown, eat a nice meal, buy your wife a present, and stop at a bookstore and a really cool museum, it will cost you $650 for a plane ticket to catch up to your bike, because you missed the ferry. It wouldn’t have been a problem, except I’d already loaded my bike, gear, clothes and a Jack London book I was looking forward to fin- ishing onto the ferry.” As much as we would love it to be so, life
isn’t all about riding. Terry is a machinist, a profession he says he stumbled into after a stint in the U.S. Navy. As a young man in 1977, he discovered that few were willing to give a young man with no experience a good paying job. “I went into the personnel department at Gardner Denver in Quincy,
nd the creation of his Dual Tool
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BMW OWNERS NEWS February 2016
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