A blog about motorcycles, motorcyclists, and motorcycle shops

Musings on riding and working on bikes, and observations as I travel and visits bikers, riders, motorcyclists, events and shops

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Monday, June 16, 2014

It's National Ride to Work Day, motorcycle edition

I know it's too late for many of you, and it rushed up on me this year, but today is National Ride to Work Day!  It's always the third Monday of June-I guess June for all of those who can't ride to work year-round like many of us in San Diego do.  It's still amazing to me that we only have 364 riding days a year out here.  I probably have ridden on every calendar day of the year over the 12 years of riding in San Diego.  While I haven't ridden every day of a year straight (yet), over the years I probably have every day covered.

So I rode to work today, my usual commute.  Unfortunately I didn't see an unusually high number of bikes, but many folks do commute by motorcycle already.  Here's a link to the national organizations website.  If you still have a chance, go on some kind of ride today, especially riding to work!

Sunday, June 15, 2014

Painting the bike trailer

Just a quick post tonight.  Don't want the blog to go too long without some sort of post, but this one isn't about motorcycle maintenance or the Trackside Wheel Chock.  Those are the closest topics to building a following for this sparsely read blog.  This post isn't even about a neat ride, although today I did my usual short loop and until I ran down some traffic I was cruising along smoothly and a bit faster than normal.

Nope, today was more a "work on bike stuff" day than "ride the bikes" day.  Local CMA chapters here in San Diego bought a motorcycle trailer from one of our members when he was selling it.  The trailer normally stays in my driveway, and rust was starting to take it's toil on the railing and get more severe.  I began sanding and roughing up the old paint and had primed the trailer a few weeks ago.  Today was my first opportunity to re-paint it, and with some help from my eldest daughter we got the first coat of black Rustoleum paint on it.  While it would look much better sprayed, I can't risk overspray where it is, and the trailer won't fit in my improvised paint booth (as shown in this Youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hN2-bM2D3V0  at least from the inside-all it was is an easy-up with paint drop sheets alligator clipped to the top).  So we're brushing the paint on just to get it covered.  It's a 50/50 paint job: At 50 feet or at 50 MPH it looks ok!

Hope you had a good Father's Day and good riding.