Some people can’t leave well enough alone eh? And, I’m one of them.
Who would take a perfectly fine paint job on a 30 something old classic motorbike and change it?
Me. You know that old adage ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’? Well, I’ve had problems with leaving well enough alone. Since I can remember, I’ve always messed with what I’ve had. Hot wheels, lunch boxes, tool boxes, guitars, cars, trucks and clothing. If only I had a picture of the perfectly fine Levi’s jean jacket, that was sewn to black leather sleeves from a michael jackson thriller jacket. You know the one, with the big red V on it. Don’t ask me how I got it in the first place and why I chose it since I was just off the gas refinery payroll and I would have been pummeled for even the mention of that to my work buddies. Never the less, I found a very nice East Indian seamstress in Vancouver that either really admired my creativity, or was an aspiring fashion designer and saw this as a challenge, or saw ”easy money’ written on my forehead, probably the latter.
So that was a memorable misplacement of effort and money and there have been others, though I decline to share those right now. It’s a classic, that’s what they say in my bike forum, and in my magazines. It was a ‘nice blue’ some said. Blue smue- I want a little cool funk, subtle style, hints of sexy italian so, I chose school bus yellow.
Screams sexy doesn’t it? Oh yeah. I could have went with deep and sultry red, with hues of Ducati, Aprilia, Ferarri, Alfa Romeo and Fiat, but somehow I’m going with a color from my youth and not the part associated with sexy. More like the youth of smelly socks and squished peanut butter sandwiches in the last week of June. I need counseling.
So the plan is to take this mundane blue to snappy with my new color scheme. Now, I’m not completely driven by a singular motive here, I am considering the better visibility of school bus yellow and my safety. Sure, I could have strapped a traffic cone to the front and rear of the bike or laced a flourescent orange flag on a 10 foot tall stick to the back fender for a better chance of being seen, though nobody would be caught dead near me with that setup. I might as well add a hockey helmet to that picture and ride over to the guys with the Harleys and ask if we can be friends. It won’t be pretty, I’m certain.
Point is, everybody judges everything, even the small stuff, and in the blink of an eye I’ve read. So, if my bike is blue and boring, somebody at an intersection is going to ignore me, dismiss me or miss seeing me completely. Then they’ll send me out over the pavement like a 24 oz purple slushy slipping from the mitts of a 5 year old in a parking lot. Hence the safe color. Red is bright you say. Yes…., but automobile insurance reports have also identified red as the color most often involved in accidents and those reports don’t mention yellow, so let’s go with that for now.
It remains to be seen if this will give me the end result I want, but if it doesn’t work out, there is always that ducati red or even silver.
Thirsty Wrencher 