One afternoon, after sitting in the third hour-long meeting where my presence was only there for show and my input to the questions at hand were completely irrelevant, followed by a couple hours of headache-inducing spreadsheet wrangling, I had a bit of an epiphany. I had slowly morphed from a ‘guy who does stuff’ to a ‘guy who stares at a computer screen’.
Don’t get me wrong, I stare at computer screens a lot, at work and outside of it. At this point I was the creative director for the newly-forged Center for Excellence in eLearning at the University of Cincinnati, and there was some good and cool work to be done, and in my personal life I am a filmmaker and musician – both things that also involve a great deal of computer work.
The nub of the gist of the thing – I wasn’t ‘doing’ things anymore, I was managing, and I wasn’t moving much. I also needed a challenge. Enter Ewan McGregor. A friend of mine turned me on to his “Long Way Round” and “Long Way Down” adventure documentary series. If you haven’t seen them, FIND THEM. As of this writing they (and the brand new “Long Way Up”) are on Apple TV+. In short, Ewan and lifelong pal Charlie Boorman hopped on a couple BMW adventure bikes and first rode from London, east and north through Russia, across to Alaska, down into the US and across to NYC. Amazing stuff. “Long Way Down” went from the northern tip of Scotland to the bottom tip of Africa.
Let’s just say if I wasn’t hooked on the idea of a bike already, I sure as hell was now.
So – I took the local riding course and got my endorsement. I then waited about a year before purchasing a bike to make sure it was something that was sticking in my psyche and not just some whim that would fade at the onset of the next shiny thing. It didn’t fade, so I started looking. A dear friend and colleague, Mike Mitchum, is an avid rider and he rode a Suzuki Savage at the time, and highly recommended it as a great starter bike. A Harley-cruiser-type 650CC thumper, low slung, not too bonkers powerful and pretty forgiving to mistakes. Also, I knew I wanted to learn to do some wrenching on it. Use my hands again, do something new. It was early in the summer of 2015 when I began the search, and within short order I found this:
The fun bit was the woman I bought it from only lived about four miles from me. Serendipity.
It had 8000 miles on it, and had some minor issues. The battery died two days after I bought it, but that was an easy fix. All in all it was a pretty stalwart little bike, and I put around twelve hundred miles on it before things got a little weird.
Oh – before we go farther, a note about this blog – some pages are going to be terribly brief. Some are going to be terribly detailed and long. I’ll probably end up repeating myself now and again. There might be vampires. Never forget: “To be forewarned is to have four arms” – Kelly Bundy.
One more thing I think is -really- important to make clear as you read. Before this project I had -never- done anything like this at all. I’d never been more than a passenger on a bike, and even then it hadn’t been since my buddy Jane Carter bought herself a Virago right after high school (four and a half million years ago) and would take me on rides. I had never worked with metal, I had never tried to design something that had moving parts. I only say this for one reason. If I can learn to do this stuff, anyone can. If these ramblings manage to inspire, then my work is more than done. If a little voice in your head tells you “I could never do -that-“, but you want to try, then tell the little voice to piss up a rope and start Googling. Ok. ’nuff said there.
I think you’ll enjoy reading through this monstrous blog from beginning to end to get a real vibe for the whole process, but in case you’re wanting find specific bits, here’s a quick table of contents:
2 – The First Oil Leak Repair
3 – A Busted Tank and the Impetus to Mod
5 – New Blue
6 – Return of the Oil Leak and My First Brand New Bike
7 – Adventures
8 – A Really Shitty Summer
9 – Thoughts of a Rebuild Begin
11 – Design and Tear Down
12 – Work Actually Begins – Seat Hoop and Electric Pan
13 – New Rear Rim and Lacing/Truing the Wheel
14 – Paint, Part I
15 – Designing the Seat Pan/Cowl
16 – Fiberglassing
17 – Rearset Bracket Design and Build
18 – The Big Page of New Wiring!
19 – New Dashboard
20 – A Bunch of Cosmetic Stuff
21 – The Saga of the Seat Mount
22 – Another Bunch of Cosmetic Stuff
23 – The Saga of the Side Stand
24 – Exhaust, Pt 1
26 – It LIVES!!!
27 – Paint, Part II
28 – Housekeeping, AKA Eating the Low Hanging Fruit
29 – Exhaust, Pt II
30 – Rear Brake
31 – Horrible Horribleness
32 – The Seat
33 – The Big Reveal