Motorcycle Comedy
When a motorcycle sits in a barn for a double digit number of years, it will tend to accumulate some reminders of that time in the shade-- dust, mud, surfast rust, the odd weed, and more spiders (and their webs) than one really wants to contemplate when reaching under the fender. Add to this the accumulated grease and grime from being the road before the extended barn hiatus, and the end result is quite messy.
Living in a loft has some tremendous advantages when it comes to motorcycle restoration. You can have the bike int he middle of the room, and if it decides to drip its precious bodily fluids onto the polished cement floor, you only have to wipe them up and you're done. No muss, no fuss, no bother. However, the loft lifestyle comes with a downside as well. When something has accumulated a decade's worth of barn and road grime, you can't just take it out into the driveway and hose it down, as there's no hose and no driveway to speak of. But you aren't helpless against the evil grungemonster.
Tonight's project: take the frame plus the rear wheel and fender to the local coin-op hose-it-yourself carwash and give it a good dose of high-pressure soapy water. If I was a proper Bud-swilling football-watching republican-voting red-blooded American, this wouldn't present much of a challenge at all, as I could just throw the parts into the back of my petroleum-swizzling pedestrian-crushing road-hogging SUV and be done with it. But no, I'm oneof those California namby-pamby liberals, and I drive a small car. Lucky for me, it's a convertible.
The service of getting the rather heavy frame to the car was provided by one of the shopping carts that lives in the garage. It would have been slightly easier to wrestle the frame into the car if I'd removed the forks first, but c'est la vie.
I'm sure I looked plenty hilarious driving down the road with a motorcycle frame sitting in the passenger seat, but if that's the worst thing that happens to me during this project I'll be in great shape.
The absurdity of wheeling a motorcycle around in a shopping cart was not lost on me. Or my camera.
