More progress and Visitors
Last weekend saw a lot of progress on the Green Goose.
Paint had been a concern. A couple years ago when I put the bike together, I painted it with rattlecans. Yes I was cutting a corner. No it didnt hold up well. But then I didnt expect it to. So this time around I searched for a pro to do it. Yeah it kind of goes against my "Flop or Fly I do it myself" ethic. But it was also a matter of economy. By the time I prepped my shop, bought tools, prepped the parts and paid for materials; I figured I was going to be into it 500-1000 bucks. And I would have to deal with the hazmat. AND there is a high likelihood of a screwup on my part requiring portions of the job to be done twice or even three times. My project efforts would be better spent on the mechanical aspects as well as doing home projects to stockpile the favor jar with my family so I dont feel so bad when I leave for a month.
So I put the word out that I needed a good, inexpensive paint shop. I am pretty ignorant when it comes to this. THe only other time I had something painted I pretty much just handed it off and paid the bill. First option was a feller who seemed to specialize in Choppers. Cool, but my job might be a bit boring for him. Moot point as two phone calls went unanswered or returned. Second shop, the guy I was actually supposed to talk to was gone for the week. Another guy there looked at the parts and the price started rising. He seemed to not quite understand what I wanted. He vanished over the horizon into a world of exacting antique restoration and the bill just climbed. Sorry man..But when you head north of 2 grand, then my effort becomes moot as I wont have the dough to take my trip. Sure the bie will be pretty...but it wont be going anywhere this year. Finally I was turned onto a young feller and his dad. They have been doing a lot of the local club racer bikes (and with lots of Microsoft money being spent on bike racing some want some seriously pretty racebikes) So they understand that it only has to look good at 90mph from 20 feet away until the next crash. This gave them the ability to understand what I want: Decent looking, single color, durable. They were enthused and the work of thiers that I saw was damned good. Under the principle of "Fast, Cheap, Right. Pick two" we are working on the latter two. Right now they have racers breathing down thier necks demanding a one week turnaround. So I told them I would hallse them for a month. We have an accord. So I will check back mid-April to see what is up.
As for the rest of my beast; I dismantled the new front end as well as the existing one on the bike. Sho nuff, the bottom tree is out of whack in a very subtle way. So this weekend I will be rebuilding the forks and assembling the front end. The forks dont actually need rebuilding. But now is the time to do it rather than find out that a seal is failing after it gets on the road and have to pull the forks off again to fix it.
I went down to the local Guzzi Emporium, Moto International, to get all my necessary bits. Now I gotta say...150 bucks doesnt make for a big bag of parts these days. But Moto-I had all but a couple items right there, in stock for a 30+ year old Guzzi. That, my friends, does not suck.Try that with damned near any factory dealer of near any other model. Doesnt happen. If your bike is over a decade old, you will be waiting for parts an awful lot and the service department probably wont touch the bike.
So this weekend I have more work on the machine lined up. Yay.
Visitors
I came across a nifty tool www.gvisit.com. You can generate a wee javascript that logs the location of the vistors to a page. According to it folks from as far as Glasgow Scotland and deep Australia have dropped by. Dont worry, I dont see IP addresses or anything. Just a map with pins to the city and country of the visit. Not a huge throng visiting this little corner of the Intarweb, but welcome nonetheless. I didnt expect throngs to care about my ramblings as I do this more for my own entertainment. And it appears I was correct. HA!
Paint had been a concern. A couple years ago when I put the bike together, I painted it with rattlecans. Yes I was cutting a corner. No it didnt hold up well. But then I didnt expect it to. So this time around I searched for a pro to do it. Yeah it kind of goes against my "Flop or Fly I do it myself" ethic. But it was also a matter of economy. By the time I prepped my shop, bought tools, prepped the parts and paid for materials; I figured I was going to be into it 500-1000 bucks. And I would have to deal with the hazmat. AND there is a high likelihood of a screwup on my part requiring portions of the job to be done twice or even three times. My project efforts would be better spent on the mechanical aspects as well as doing home projects to stockpile the favor jar with my family so I dont feel so bad when I leave for a month.
So I put the word out that I needed a good, inexpensive paint shop. I am pretty ignorant when it comes to this. THe only other time I had something painted I pretty much just handed it off and paid the bill. First option was a feller who seemed to specialize in Choppers. Cool, but my job might be a bit boring for him. Moot point as two phone calls went unanswered or returned. Second shop, the guy I was actually supposed to talk to was gone for the week. Another guy there looked at the parts and the price started rising. He seemed to not quite understand what I wanted. He vanished over the horizon into a world of exacting antique restoration and the bill just climbed. Sorry man..But when you head north of 2 grand, then my effort becomes moot as I wont have the dough to take my trip. Sure the bie will be pretty...but it wont be going anywhere this year. Finally I was turned onto a young feller and his dad. They have been doing a lot of the local club racer bikes (and with lots of Microsoft money being spent on bike racing some want some seriously pretty racebikes) So they understand that it only has to look good at 90mph from 20 feet away until the next crash. This gave them the ability to understand what I want: Decent looking, single color, durable. They were enthused and the work of thiers that I saw was damned good. Under the principle of "Fast, Cheap, Right. Pick two" we are working on the latter two. Right now they have racers breathing down thier necks demanding a one week turnaround. So I told them I would hallse them for a month. We have an accord. So I will check back mid-April to see what is up.
As for the rest of my beast; I dismantled the new front end as well as the existing one on the bike. Sho nuff, the bottom tree is out of whack in a very subtle way. So this weekend I will be rebuilding the forks and assembling the front end. The forks dont actually need rebuilding. But now is the time to do it rather than find out that a seal is failing after it gets on the road and have to pull the forks off again to fix it.
I went down to the local Guzzi Emporium, Moto International, to get all my necessary bits. Now I gotta say...150 bucks doesnt make for a big bag of parts these days. But Moto-I had all but a couple items right there, in stock for a 30+ year old Guzzi. That, my friends, does not suck.Try that with damned near any factory dealer of near any other model. Doesnt happen. If your bike is over a decade old, you will be waiting for parts an awful lot and the service department probably wont touch the bike.
So this weekend I have more work on the machine lined up. Yay.
Visitors
I came across a nifty tool www.gvisit.com. You can generate a wee javascript that logs the location of the vistors to a page. According to it folks from as far as Glasgow Scotland and deep Australia have dropped by. Dont worry, I dont see IP addresses or anything. Just a map with pins to the city and country of the visit. Not a huge throng visiting this little corner of the Intarweb, but welcome nonetheless. I didnt expect throngs to care about my ramblings as I do this more for my own entertainment. And it appears I was correct. HA!
posted by Z at
6:54 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home