Mosshead

marketing guys do have a sense of humor

You’d have to have quite a sense of humor to even think up a chainsaw chopper

Add comment November 8th, 2005

social terraforming with books

I’ve just rediscovered Bookcrossing which provides a social structure for sharing books - brilliant!

Add comment November 2nd, 2005

paint and the customizer aesthetic?

I have some stylistic ideas for fixing up the xs650 but don’t know a lot about the technical details of automotive painting so I did some research today.

Looking around on the web, I have to say that the average custom American bike strikes me as kinda average. The same low ride, 1 of 3 handlebar choices, 1 of 10 grips. 1 of 4 airbrushed themes (fantastical wizards, skulls, dragons and snakes, ye olde airbrushed girlies, the ubiquitous flames, and nostalgia-driven designs). 1 of 3 tank styles. I don’t know, something about it just makes me feel impatient.

Many of them don’t even look that fun to ride. They look to me like they might just fall over on a tight curve or bottom out on the 1-inch lipped cul-de-sac driveway.

What’s happened to the aesthetic of customizing one’s bike? I suppose I’ll leave that question to the academics to answer.

In the meantime, despite my own distaste for most of what I found online, I did collect some valuable information about what’s involved in customizing my own bike into something that I do like.

Powdercoating is an involved process that would be appropriate for parts that I want to be uniform. I’m not sure that’s what I want and I probably don’t want to invest too much $$ in a first-timers project.

I watched Mike Learn’s airbrush demos which are good. If I had any talent at all in that arena I’d sign up for his seminars. But I can barely sign my name let alone draw a consistent line. I don’t think I’ll be doing any airbrushing.

My design can be accomplished with a combination of pinstriping and masking. From what I can tell, the Beugler striping kit is a must-have. For masking, the easiest thing for me to do would be to create a design in Illustrator and “print” it to a cutter plotter. Mike Learn swears by his Roland Camm cutter plotter. Fortunately, my local sign making company will cut a design for me for about $25.

So, that’s what I learned today.

Add comment November 2nd, 2005

the new Vincent

I never would have guessed that Vincent Motorcycles was now located in San Diego and under a new release phase. I was doing an Google image search of British bikes and one of the top returns for Vincent bikes was this wonderful short history .

In any case the Vincent HRD is being revived. It uses a Honda engine so I suppose it’s somewhat a nostalgia/image thing. I’m not so certain that Honda engines are all that special. But they’re probably fine for the average biker.

I think of the pros and cons of performance engines v. floor models as pretty similar to the Windows v. Linux debate. It just depends upon your motivation and usage. I’ll bet I’d be pretty pleased with a modern Vincent cruiser and I’m sure it performs satisfactorily.

fun cruiser This would be really fun with the Matchless Silverhawk flat pipes. Actually, those pipes would probably look good on any bike.

Now, all I’ll need is a few $k. Well, more than a few $k. I’d guess they’ll start around $25k for all those nostaligic warm fuzzies.

Add comment November 1st, 2005