Peter

 I get asked to go riding with people a lot. It goes along with having a motorcycle shop I reckon. Thing is though, for me riding is not a social occasion. When I put on a helmet I tune into a channel of focus that usually involves speed that nibbles at the outer edge of control. I often top off the tank and do not stop at all or even let off pace until I am back to the fuel jug with a near empty tank. It may go back to my training rides when I was racing pro off road or it may be that it is just my happy place to be alone, eyes glazed, hands tightly clenched while my brain makes split second calculations.  I know my time to cherish in this behavior is limited. Someday I must slow down. Or at least get a gps tracker to let my partner know where I am at.  After all I am a dad now. I do have a couple of true old pals that I do enjoy to share my now valuable and infrequent throttle twist time with. Being a dad and aligning schedules with others is tough. So is being a serious rider though, no mater who you are. A couple of years ago an old skinny dude with a long grey Billy Gibbons beard came into my shop and like many found my shop inspiring. After inviting me to ride with him like so many others I was ready to retort my reply I keep on ready playback and then I stopped myself and said sure, why not. I think it was the way he talked about sliding 5th gear corners with a twinkle in his eye on the many gas and oil field roads he knew. Peter has spent his life working the oil and gas fields of western colorado, all the while riding dirtbikes. At 67 years old he still does just that. He has only bought two bikes brand new; A Suzuki TM400 that he rode into the ground and his current stead a 1982 Honda XR500. The first time we rode together, I was at first concerned. He proclaimed he was geared up after grabbing some old work gloves and a street bike helmet with a badly scratched visor. He took off like a raped ape and I was doing everything I could to stay above his roost. We were instantly in 5th gear as he flew over blind crests spinning his bald as a baby's ass rear tire like a speedway champ. "Crap!" I thought, I am about to have to call an ambulance to the middle of nowhere. But then he started giving me hand signals while in the middle of 5th gear corner slides... "Fuck! This dude IS for real!" Since then we have enjoyed some really good rides together. He gets paid to go out and service the oil pumps so it is free gas to him and he gladly hauls me along. He might not ride singletrack at my stupid pace though he is never far behind and he rides pace on the roads faster than any young bucks I ride with. He likes to stop every once in a while to puff one of his doobies. I however keep my recreating to only one form at a time these days. But I am learning to enjoy the ride along with the riding. 

Elvira's vibrator

 My brain cells have finally stopped doing the Hokie Pokie dance steps learned while designing the expansion chamber enough to finally write a post. But they are still sweating and gnawing like a husky sled dog ready for another haul across the arctic. The pipe about mounted up as good as I hoped but of course with a fair amount of my less than perfect way of just getting shit done. I hope it works but am fully prepared to do another version, if nothing else to perfect the fabrication skills. Hell, I may even use a cone anvil instead of my hands and an old steering stem to form the sheet metal. maybe even an upgrade from the tin snips I bought from the 50 cent crate at the pawn shop. The rear hub fits into the swing arm with about as much room to spare as a thong on a big black booty behind the pole in a club on north freemont street that acquires a young cracker patron in a pearl snap shirt and wont let him leave her lap until the sun comes up and he has to drive back home to colorado that very day. That was a long time ago. But she named me "Lil' White Chocolate" and my nipples have never been the same since. 

Anyhoo, the YZ450F ebay radiator fit up nice enough with some bracket weldin. I found a new XR750 seat on VFT. The seller asked what I was doing and told me my frame is worth more than my finished bike would be. He also told me with out me asking that he was a flattrack team owner or something. Whatever. I thanked him. The coffin tank was much more easy as opposed to tunneling out an old kawi tank. I think it also adds to the tarnished nickel frame polish. Hell even the primer grey seat works. U cant take the patina pervert out of me. I am trying to make something that looks a bit more optimistic than that of how it performs but I really hate using more than what I have in my hoard pile and I just might be a hopeless trash bin scraper Sleeper builder. Fuck. I hope this thing is actually ridable on a track let alone the blue groove track that is the only track in colorado. I cant help but wonder why nobody races a 500 2 stroke. I think A young Tim Neave companied one in the UK for a season before he went tarmac racing. Other than that zip zero nada. A 500 makes down low power not un like a four stroke 450 but it also has a quick snap and something like 28 percent more torque. So I engineered the pipe for a low and wide power band. Fuck if I know if that engineering works better than a duck fart in outer space. I also opened up the combustion chamber and from my experience Lectron carbs smooth the hit like ice cubes in a big bad water bong. But if this widow maker really is hell bent on teaching me the art of breaking collar bones I reckon I can always get out my JB Weld and lower the port heights. Now I just need to sack up and fit a brake and some foot pegs and see if I still know how to go fast in circles... Oh, and I did start it and it does sound like Puff The Magic Dragon having ben wa balls ripped out by Betty Page on top of  a stack of Marshall amps while Dime Bag Darrell from Pantera shreds a guitar solo. So yeah.

Inspiration

 

For Sale over on http://vft.org/index.html