The other eighty percent: A Quick Pit Stop with Nick from Airhead Misfits
Who is Nick? A Denver rider who came to motorcycles late, got told he was doing it wrong, and stayed anyway. He hosts the Airhead247 SWB Video Podcast and created the Airhead Misfits. He owns four old BMWs and has been on the internet defending strangers' taste for about a decade.
Welcome back to Pit Stop, the corner of American Moto Co. where we pull over to explore the craft, the culture, and the creators who keep the raw, unfiltered soul of motorcycling alive.Today we're catching up with Nick, host of the Airhead 247 SWB Video Podcast and creator of the Airhead Misfits.
Nick did not grow up on bikes. His uncles rode, but it was never a family thing, and he was in his late twenties before it happened at all. Then his soon to be father in law handed him a motorcycle two days before he married the man's daughter. Talk about a freaking gift.
It was a Suzuki TS-250, a two stroke enduro out of the seventies. He and his wife had one car between them, so Nick commuted on it, twenty miles each way, through the winter, on a two stroke dirt bike. He is very clear that this was not the plan.
He outgrew it fast, and right around then the cafe airhead scene hit its peak. He watched a video of a group riding customized airheads into the mountains to camp.
"When you watch it now it's the most quintessentially over the top hipster bullshit you could possibly see. But at the time it was exactly what I needed to see."
What he actually saw were the cylinders. Horizontally opposed, sticking straight out the sides of the bike.
His father in law, the enabler, picked up on what Nick was reading about and went out and bought an airhead. Then he dropped it off at Nick's garage and explained that he had no room to store it, so Nick would have to, and by the way, keep the gas in it fresh.
Which is a father in law's way of saying this is your bike, go ride it.
About two years after that bike landed in his garage, twelve years ago now, Nick and a group of friends went out for six or seven days across Colorado. A KLR, a Honda Shadow, a small Ninja, and Nick on the oldest machine there. Planning was few and far between, this was a trip where you woke up each morning asking where the twisty road was between here and roughly over there, then you send it.
Day four or five they rode the north rim of the Black Canyon. Nobody is on that side, everybody is riding the Million Dollar Highway. How did they end up on it you ask? Because it looked fun on the map….
They hit it at the right hour, at the right temperature, deep enough into the ride that the real world had melted away. "That ride was what took me from I just like riding motorcycles to this is a personality trait."
Which matters, because by then the airhead community had already been telling him he was doing it wrong. He rode that entire thousand mile week on eighteen inch shorty mufflers.
He had come in through the cafe door, so everywhere he turned he found older guys who were not happy about loud pipes, or grips that were not spec'd for a BMW. It was off putting, and a lot of people would have taken the hint and gone elsewhere.
Instead Nick was motivated to make a change. He spent years on ADVrider and the Airhead forum as the guy who showed up when a twenty five year old posted a cafe project and got buried for it.
"You're never gonna convince these guys to make a bike pristine and perfect from factory spec if you're just gonna tell them their ideas are shit. You gotta kill them with kindness."
And somewhere in the middle of all that arguing he noticed something, the purists are maybe ten percent, the chop crowd is another ten. The other eighty percent are in the middle. They like both, they ride bikes that fit neither category, and they have no interest in the fight at all.
He has a design background, so when he woke up one day wanting a BMW roundel mashed with a Misfits skull on his tank, he slapped it together in Illustrator and printed a few stickers. His buddies immediately said we have to have those. The name was already sitting there waiting.
We're the misfits. We're in the middle. We just like these old bikes and we want to keep them on the road.
In full appreciation of airheads Nick and two friends bought worn out RTs, kicked them into shape, and rode fifteen hundred miles out of Denver through Steamboat, Utah, Wyoming, a corner of Idaho and Montana, the Tetons and Beartooth Pass. Loosely modeled on Top Gear, each of them prepping his own bike, points awarded along the way for best fuel mileage and who could get a loaded bike up on the center stand and who could pitch camp fastest. The points meant nothing.
Nick's bike had something like a hundred and twenty thousand miles on a spotty odometer. His buddy's white one rolled ninety thousand during the trip. Neither was road worthy when they bought them two months earlier. Nick was in the garage at five in the morning on departure day redoing a steering head bearing for the fifth time, because he had gotten it wrong four times already.
But he wanted to prove a point.
"You don't have to go out and buy a six or seven thousand dollar BMW. You can go buy a bike that's in rough shape, put some time and effort into it, do it yourself in your own garage, and go have an adventure. It might not run perfectly the whole time, but you're gonna have fun."
The airhead community, like many others, is loaded with people who have relentlessly preserved the information surrounding these machines. But they are getting older and if guys on forums keep scaring the new riders away from the airhead, we are going to lose it entirely.
Snowbum, who spent most of his life documenting everything there is to know about airhead BMWs on a website that is famously impossible to use, but insanely detail oriented, passed away recently. Brooke Reams did the same work from a different angle and is gone too. Nick is forty one and has noticed that the stewards are running out, and that he is now old enough to be one.
"We're in this unique transitional part of our lives. I have a little bit more focus now, and I want to help this community continue on. Make it a little less gatekeepy, a little more welcoming of all walks of life. I wanna see more female riders on airheads. I wanna see more people of color riding airheads. I wanna see more LGBTQIA+ people riding airheads. I want all of that. This is the niche I'm in and this is where I have influence."
That is what the podcast is for. It is called Airhead247 SWB, for short wheelbase, it came along well after the stickers, and it now runs on the BMW MOA's YouTube channel with their sponsorship behind it.
You can find Nick on Instagram (@airheadmisfits), and tune into the Airhead247 SWB on the BMW MOA's Youtube channel. And if you have an airhead sitting in pieces in the garage that you have been told is too far gone, he is the guy to talk to, because he is going to tell you to go ride it.
