Heaton Automotive / Extreme Performance

Once upon a time there was this really grubby building at the corner of Main and SW Dennis in Hillsboro. It looked like they had been repairing greasy machinery there for a hunnert years. It was so bad you wouldn't even want to drive onto the lot for fear that your tires would become so grease encrusted you would leave tracks all the way home and into your driveway. The sign on the wall said Doyles' Truck Repair, and it looked totally moribund.

Then about a year ago Eric Heaton took over the place, cleaned it up, painted the building, paved the lot, put up a fence. Made it look like a real professional establishment. It was a big place and I wondered how he could afford the rent, but he seemed to be managing. But then we had the snowstorm this winter and it just killed his business, so he has moved to new digs around the corner and down the street, just behind Big O Tires on West Main Street.


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Doyle's meanwhile has moved down the street and around the corner to a prefab metal building. Evidently it is still a going concern. It shows no signs of the grease infestation. Yet.

Eric always has something interesting on display in the office. At the old place there was room for a car or two. The new place is a little more cramped, but there is room for a couple of motorcycles. These two were there this morning.

Just down the street from Heaton's is Extreme Sports where I saw the odd looking ATV a couple of weeks ago. Stu asked for a picture so I took a few.

Two Stroke Quadracycle

They are all Yamaha two-stroke, water cooled ATV's. The twin cylinder engines displace about 350cc. They only quit making the two-stroke version a couple of years ago. These are all used. Some are as much as ten years old. I talked to couple of guys while I was there and discovered one reason that ATV's may be so popular: traction. Motorcycles only have a single, relatively skinny tire, which limits their acceleration at low speeds. Give it too much gas the rear tire will spin. These ATV's have two rather wide tires. So what? You say, well more traction means faster acceleration, and that's one of the thrills throttle jockeys enjoy.

They had one in the showroom that had a stroker kit in it that boosted the displacement towards 500cc. They took it down to the local dragstrip just to see how fast it was and it turned in some pretty amazing numbers: 10.28 seconds in the quarter mile at 126 MPH. 13 seconds and 100 MPH is about what you can get out of a hot Camaro or Mustang, so this ATV is fast.

Update September 2016 replaced missing pictures.
Update July 2019 replaced dead Picassa slide show with single photo and link to album.