rattle can pretty?

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.

Seeking Simplicity

Maybe its the hurried state of modern society today that leaves me wanting simpler things, like my bike and my truck for example, both from the late 70’s. 

My cell phones (yeah- two), are on mostly all the time and my desktop continuously updates me with email, news, weather and such, both at work and at home.  It’s no surprise to me now that I’ve bought these two wrecks but I suspect most people would consider them inefficient and relics from the abundant oil  era. Here’s one, a little further down is the other.

I’m going to try to explain my rationale for the above statement because I feel like it and I can hear the arguments against such purchases building in my head (yep- I hear voices). I would like to put forth that these vehicles were engineered purposefully without constraint of weight restrictions or fuel economy and that made them cheap to engineer, cheap to manufacture and subsequently cheap to repair. Almost any person can work on these two machines with minimal mechanical skills because they’re simple like legos and in my opinion, the engineering philosophy and technology at the time was okay with ‘good enough’. I’m alright with that. Really. I also believe that this era saw the culmination of mechanical innovation (in consumer automotive terms) prior to the advances made though computer aided design or computer controls.

As I’ve been taking this GS down to the bones and exploring the road worthiness of putting it all back together, I have been musing on the ease of what I’ve done so far. Granted, I am mechanically inclined and enjoy fixing things, but the bike has been really easy to work on and that’s often induced whistling or singing on my part. It’s a good thing the garage doors are closed and the shop radio is louder than myself because few would care to hear my impersonations of Morrissey. Well, I’ve noticed there are very few other times I sing and whistle so something must be good about all this and I think it’s the simplicity.

Sure, doing what you like helps and one could argue that my personality suits the tasks I been doing but I think there is more to it. The bike cost 10% of a new bike, that’s a whole lot of savings that makes me feel rich. The truck cost way less than new and both get me where I wanna go and haven’t put me in the ditch yet.  Doesn’t seem any different than if I’d have bought new. I ride and drive new and old the same and I know this because I’ve driven, rented and owned new. The one thing that does change is the stress over wrecking the new ones. There’s a hell of a lot of money on the line with new ones. Insurance is supposed to cover that concern but  I wonder how much our insurance has gone up cause our vehicles are more expensive to repair because there’s extensive engineering in them now?

I had a long time BMW mechanic friend back in Austin who told me that it took 13 hours of labor to get access to the problem in a Mercedes dash and console, then time to fix it and another 13 hours to put it back together. In 13 hours, I would have nothing but a frame and parts scattered around my truck. Is that better? I think so. Some would say not.

So, I worry less. Doesn’t seem like much ado in a sentence. Impact is huge on my life though. I’m whistling and singing.

What else can I simplify?