I can’t recall the last time I heard quite so many hap-hazard, near-death experience stories, as when I started talking to Ron Brame. The funny thing about that statement is that two weeks after our conversation, he told me one of his most bizarre stories to date. The text I received from him was a picture of a half-eaten donut beside a neat stack of one-hundred-dollar bills and no additional information.When I spoke with him a few days later it turned out that he had been merged into by a “Post Malone” looking gentleman in a snow-white Lamborghini Murcielago, who offered him everything in his wallet not to inform the police of the incident. This story lines up neatly against all of the other farcical tales told to me by Mr. Brame.
We start our day in his garage, two-bay. One half holds a silver Nissan Frontier crew cab and a surfboard, while the other is filled with a workstation, tool chest and two motorcycles. One wall displays a random assortment of items, disassembled car parts, a flip flop, to name a few, but we’ll get to that later. To have such a developed garage at 24 years old, one would think that he grew up in an environment like this, or at least inherited some of the things inside of this garage. Brame, however, is self-made in every way, appreciating things more every year and learning by earnest trial and error.
His story stems from a need to fiddle, to fix, and a natural progression from broken stereos, to lawnmowers, to motorcycles and just about any combustion engine. He is not precious, nor is he spending tine adoring patina. These are machines that fuel his ability for freedom and fun.
“It probably started when I was growing up in Jacksonville,” he says. “I used to drive down San Jose road in the car with my mom and on weekend mornings there would be car shows. Just a bunch of old guys in their hot rods - nothing that cool. I wanted to go but I couldn’t ever because my Mom and Dad were not into cars.”
The fever for cars started at 11, but the fever for the combustion engine started much younger. An engineer by trade, when he was just a little kid Brame wouldn’t let his parents throw anything away until he had tried to fix it, or ruin it he says. “I was taking apart stereos, shocking myself, cutting myself taking things apart because I really didn't know how to.”
As he got older he started evolving to larger projects; the next-door neighbors would want to know if he wanted a crack at fixing a broken lawnmower or the chainsaw. “I wanted to graduate to the big leagues when my friends started getting cars,” he says. “I started working on my best friend at the time’s shitty 90s V6 Camaro. But it was a lot of fun.”
The Frontier in his garage had a life before him even though he picked out. His dad, though not a car guy himself, trusted his son’s opinion and agreed to let him pick out his new truck. And when Brame started college the coveted Frontier was finally his. “Honestly my truck [made me fall in love with Nissan],” he says. “Nissan wasn’t on the radar for me at least until I bought the truck but then I really fell in love with it.” While it may just look like another silver Nissan Frontier to most, the things that Brame loves about it are very specific. He mentions the V6 engine, and the “best truck bed on the market” though he admits he is not up on his truck market research.
“It's no EcoBoost,” he says. “It's not getting great mileage, but it will run forever. It is so buttery smooth, so torquey, it's so nice… the timing chain lasts forever,” he sighs. “It’s so good.” He calls this the secret sauce. “The bed and it’s just bullet-proof mechanically,” he says. “The whole drivetrain, the transmission, the engine, all the support systems. The interior is spartan but I like it that way.”
Brame is extremely proud of what the Frontier has accomplished in its time with him and his family. The affordable and basically unevolved Nissan helped his family during a hurricane and moved Brame personally across and the country multiple times. He’s been interrogated by the Canadian police in it, to Mexico and back, all while hauling bikes. It's taken him through the desert into the mountains, and it's done more off-roading than it deserves to have done as a non-4WD truck. “It's done more than I should have asked of it,” he says. “And it's never once let me down.”
He calls it an enabler, remarking on how his lifestyle seems to require a truck, but the lifestyle he lives has evolved from always having a truck. So, what came first the chicken or the egg?
“I’ve been the only one to ever work on that truck period,” he says. “Learning how to really work on a vehicle was truly something special because I'd worked on other stuff before like my friends Camaro, but never done everything to it, all the maintenance. I just fell deeper in love as I learned more. I kind of grew with the truck.”
Now we turn to the opposite side of the garage where a pair of Japanese cruisers sit. “I have twins,” Brame says. “I am a proud mother. A 1980 and a 1981 Kawasaki KZ 440 LTD. Honestly, it was that motorcycle [that got him into motorcycles].” After seeing a friend in college cruising around campus on that very bike once or twice it was love at first sight. Brame didn’t really have any experience with motorcycles, but he had to figure it out his way.
“I saw him riding it and it looked so beautiful, just so classic,” he says. “You don't get bikes like that, even the recreations these days. They don’t have the same noise, the same look, the same the vibe, the same rattle, you can’t replicate it.” He says it was a hot and heavy kind of passion he felt for the bike right away but had no formal training riding. “I told my friend I needed to borrow his bike, but I didn’t tell him I was going to learn on it,” he admits. “I rode to the bank and I almost flipped it over because I only used the front brake out of panic. I just borrowed people’s motorcycles to satisfy the craving all the time until I bought mine.”
It was not smooth sailing when he eventually convinced his friend to sell him the first Kawasaki. “He could never get it running right,” Brame says. “He's more of an aerodynamics guy, not at peace with the combustion, if you will.”
The bike was still leaking copious amounts of oil and overheating when it finally came to Brame.
“I didn’t have the money or the time, at that time in my life to rebuild those problems, I tried but clearly it was internal issues, something was way off.” During those years Brame attempted quick fixes. “I ended up just buying a little temperature gauge and got to know it - like once were 400 on the temperature gauge, ooooh just pull over to the side of the road and let her cool off. That was where she got really unhappy - and she never ran right. So that’s a long-winded way of saying I’ve rebuilt the engine completely.”
It was after his first internship after college that Brame found the time and resources to devote to this task. And it was this moment that marked as a culmination on his journey from tinkering as a kid, to learning about engineering, to now taking apart a motor he would need to depend on.
It again was trial and error and Brame says he has a lot of lessons learned from this endeavor. “It only had 20,000 miles at that point,” he says. “It’s already 40 years old [and] someone’s barely ridden it so I just decided to take my time and do it right.”
The starter needed to be rebuilt after it welded itself together on a road trip around Florida, and there was carbon buildup on the pistons and in the combustion chamber. Instead of just dealing with the problems on the top end Brame took it all the way down to splitting the crankcase; he cleaned and inspected everything and replaced the seals that were rotten and leaking oil. Brame also replaced the voltage rectifier, tires, chains, sprocket, and all of the lights.
“Pretty much everything except the frame, the wheels, and the seat,” he laughs, “I’ve replaced almost everything and it’s still a piece of shit.” The only project with the bike he has right now is trying to fuel inject it, “because I hate carburetors, with a passion,” he says. The bike itself does look pretty clean for its age, except for the stainless steal water bottle he has affixed to it with a zip-tie to keep oil out of his air-box. “It was meant to be a temporary solution, but that was also 2.5 years ago - so maybe it will never get fixed.”
“I am proud but also embarrassed of that bottle,” he says. “Because I did that fix on the side of the 405, but it does stem from my cheapness.”
While this bike is his original and his daily driver, the second cruiser is, unfortunately, being cannibalized for parts. But that’s only temporary Brame says. “Oh, I have plans,” he grins. When the time is right Brame plans to make it a performance bike, fuel-injected, with a modern Ninja suspension. “The frame, powder-coated white, snow-white with some flakes in it, and the engine is rebuilt and anodized black... it’s just,” he kisses his hand. “A centerpiece. It’s going to ride like a sport bike and look like a 1980s Kawasaki.”
Now we come back to the wall. The wall that Brame has proclaimed the “wall of shit that’s almost killed me” with all of the random mechanical pieces. He tells me stories about the original chain and sprocket, a burnt-out headlight and a rusty spark plug and how one way or another they’ve all almost killed him. Always involving a highway, always barely making it out of the situation.
“There’s a lot,” he says regarding scary moments. “The truly scariest was probably when I was interning a couple of years ago. I lived on a sailboat in San Pedro at the time so I was riding up to work on the 105 north and a car cut me off.” Brame had a highway off-ramp as an escape lane but he was taking it “way too hot.” His knee almost to the ground, hitting front and rear brakes with highway weeds stuck in his front fender he went off the road into the shoulder and almost hit the barrier. When the contenders for the scariest story including running on one cylinder during a torrential downpour on the highway in Florida or riding home on the 405 in the dark with a flashlight instead of a headlight, truly scariest to him has high regard.
Great (and scary) moments always involve riding with just one or two of his best friends. A big part of the experience for him is the sense of community. “It’s very personal,” he says. “I don't belong to any riding club or like a big group rides. It’s more like that one friend who likes to ride too, or that one friend who likes to work on cars, and you open a six-pack at his shop and work on his diesel truck. It's very intimate, it's very personal, and you have to find the right people but it's worth it. Because I feel like you definitely grow closer to one another and you learn a lot along the way.”
His most recent smooth day out was riding with a good friend to Vandenburg Air Force Base. “We just made a day out of it,” Brame says. “We met at my house, got some cafe con leche and then we did some canyon carving. We didn't have the biggest baddest bikes out there, he rides a little R3. We stopped in Santa Barbara, had pizza and just talked shit, cause that's what you do, you talk shit, you bull shit. Then we continued our beautiful PCH ride all the way to Vandenburg.”
As Brame’s skills have grown unsurprisingly he is now the go-to call for many friends with mechanical problems. But as it goes with Brame there is always a story, rarely humdrum. This one takes us to Portugal, where he was backpacking alone in the middle of nowhere. He was stopped by an old Portuguese woman who needed help starting her farm truck. “It was crazy looking back at it like her sheep are there, I’m there not speaking Portuguese driving her little stick Fiat up to her farm truck. It took like 30 minutes, then she waved at me and she drove off and I walked off. It was crazy. It was weird.”
It has been a natural progression for Brame. All of these experiences, the incidents on the motorcycle, the pushing and fixing of the Frontier, his profession as an engineer, every moment building on itself to teach him more about these machines and himself. He attributes this to the complexity of the combustion engine. “They’re not as simple as electric vehicles,” he says. “It’s like, been there done that with the stereo, been there done that with the little two-stroke lawnmower, what's new? That bug really bit me once I started learning about actual engineering not just as a hobby in middle and high school. I couldn't imagine myself in many other career paths as an engineer - because it pretty much is me, I'm always trying to build shit and learn how it works.”
Cars are simply a natural extension of his disposition and the extensions he owns provide him the ability to do anything he wants to do. “The truck will take me to the mountains, it will take me to the ocean, across entire countries - there's literally nothing I can ask of it that it won't do.” And as for the bike, “Even if it's just me and a backpack it will get me anywhere I want to go. Getting 50+ miles to the gallon, and also, it’s so fun, it is the cheapest thrills per dollar vehicle wise, ever.”
“It’s freedom and fun,” Brame says. “and right now, it’s more freedom.”
