Tis the season....

Warmer weather has my Motorcycle juices flowing. I spent a sizable chunk of my time Friday trying to get my Valk up and running. Last spring I didn't ride much at all, then summer arrived and I got even busier. Pretty soon it was fall, and I still hadn't taken the girl out on the road. Fall turned to one of the coldest, snowiest winters in decades and the Valkyrie continued to sit - dejected and forlorn under the cover of the front porch of Castle Paladin.

Just one of those things, I guess. Many (but not all) Bike riders that I know tend to ebb and flow with their desire to ride. Sometimes you hit stretches were it just gets pushed to the back burner. Its always "next weekend" that you plan to hit the highway. But sometimes next weekend doesn't come. Thankfully, I've been riding long enough to know that bike apathy isn't usually permanent. I didn't do anything rash like sell the bike, or anything.

I have a friend who has owned 3 different bikes in the past 10 years. He would get bored with riding and sell his bike. Then a couple of years would pass and he'd get the urge again and kick himself for getting rid of his ride. He'd buy another bike, ride for a couple of seasons, and then sell it again....

The only mistake that I made was not prepping the bike properly for storage. Gas and other fluids sitting in an unused motorcycle over most of a year can do nasty things. I've managed to get her going, thanks to some Seafoam, but I think it'll be a couple of tanks of gas through her before she levels out and starts behaving right. Hopefully her cantankerousness will no rise to the level where a carb tear down is necessary. Rebuilding the six carburetor rack in a GL1500CT is not a project for the faint of heart.

I'm to the point where she'll start for me, but she's wanting to idle too low, clatter a bit when I roll on the throttle, and it takes forever for her to settle down and stay running at idle when I come off the choke after start up. I don't have legal tags/inspection on her yet so I've been limited to trips around the neighborhood. I'll put down some highway miles as soon as I'm street legal and see if that helps.

I've also started to notice that she's showing her age, cosmetically. A few chrome blemishes here, some paint scratches there.... just the usual stuff that you get on a 10 year old bike. She still looks awesome, from a distance. Kinda like a Monet - beautiful from afar.... but you start to notice weird stuff when you're up close.

My windshield is toast, too. The original owner used some sort of harsh cleaner on the windshield and it ate part of the protective covering off. Its deteriorated from there, even though I only use soap and water. The windshield situation is so bad that I finally just took it off while working on the bike today. Just couldn't see through it well enough under any kind of low light or glare conditions. I found a place online where I can get a replacement, so I'll probably look into that before too long. Just hopping around town without a shield is ok... but at highway speeds I gotta have a windshield.

Impacting a grasshopper at 70 mph is like getting shot with a ball bearing from a slingshot :)

I'd like to get the Valk painted one day. I'm really liking the "Satan Black" that I've seen, which is basically a flat or matte black. I might even go as far as blacking out most of the chrome on and around the engine, and have the wheels powder coated to match. That would look bad assed tough...


If any readers are in the DFW area and know of a good bike paint shop here locally, drop me a line or leave a note in the comments... I'd like to test the waters and see how much something like that would cost.

Of course, I could just try to do it myself. I could probably rattle can it if I went the matte black route. I'd be more comfortable having a professional paint shop lined up ahead of time, though, if I screw it up.

Here's a pic of a bike someone did in Flat Black with just rattle can paint - not too bad, in my opinion. Its not a Valkyrie, obviously, but you can see the paint treatment I'm talking about:

And now here's Miranda Kerr on a Yamaha R6 - just because.