Category Archives: Scooters & Motorcycles

July 15, 2010 — The two-wheel community in the Twin Cities is as varied as it is awesome. One of my favorite local shops is Bluecat Motors in St. Paul. It’s an unassuming little shop nestled in the shadow of an old water tower, in one end of an old warehouse, in the old industrial part of town. The reason I appreciate Bluecat Motors so much is their complete lack of snobbery. If it’s got two wheels and a motor, they’re into it. They’ll work on it. They’ll help you find parts for it. They’ve got their specialties — cafe racer conversions, near-vintage Japanese and British motorcycles — but even if you’ve got something weird and old they’ve never seen before, they’ll at least try to help you out with it. Bluecat is also one of the only places I know of where you can find restored Lambretta scooters on the showroom floor. Beyond their sales and service, Bluecat is a perenial major sponsor of the Rattle My Bones scooter rally, the local Mods and Rockers event, and the Bearded Lady Motorcycle Freak Show. Recently I discovered that Bluecat started doing a Third Thursday event this year, so this week I hopped on my CB650 to check it out.

June 24, 2010 — Last year I started a simple tradition: to take my birthday off from work and try to have some sort of adventure. Last year, I used the day to build a small trebuchet. This year, I took my first ever motorcycle day trip on my 1980 Honda CB650. At just 140 miles round trip, my ride wasn’t more than an afternoon’s jaunt, but what I experienced in that afternoon has cemented motorcycle riding into my life in a really profound way.

June 1, 2010 — Last October I read a book about the pleasure of working with one’s own two hands. In a way, all that Shop Class as Soulcraft did was remind me of things I already knew I enjoyed, but that reminder has really impacted my quality of life since then. I was already a tinkerer, but in kind of a half-assed way. The scope of my mechanical ambitions was usually pretty timid.

May 5, 2010 — In ancient greek mythology there is a story of a king called Sisyphus. This precocious fellow garnered the wrath of the gods through hubris and treachery. His now famous punishment was to roll a boulder up a hill, only to see it then roll back down over and over again. This, for all eternity. Today the gods of motorcycling decided to punish me with my own sisyphean challenge, except that my boulder was a 30 year-old, 485 lb motorcycle.

May 1, 2010 — “You wanna go for a ride?” the Mrs asked. We’d just arrived home a few minutes before. She in my MINI, and me on our latest acquisition, a 1980 Honda CB650. I’d snapped a few photos and had mostly recovered from the mild trial of the ride home. I had to think about it for a second. Do I give it a rest and let the whole thing soak in a little bit, or do I hop right back on and see if I couldn’t find my peg feet?

May 1, 2010 — With a bike for The Mrs sorted, now it was time to find something for me. I really liked that we’d found her a Honda, and so I wanted one too. I have a fondness for Honda because I’ve owned a couple of their cars and driven them beyond 200,000 miles. It also made sense to have two bikes from the same make just so that any special tools would apply to both bikes and to …

April 29, 2010 —Back in 2008, I got really interested in the idea of a Cafe Racer motorcycle. As far back as 2006 I’d been watching a lot of American Chopper, and though I rarely got too excited about the kinds of bikes they build, the whole notion of a proper motorcycle was something that really appealed to me — even before I bought my first scooter. That never really faded. With three years of scooter riding under my belt now, the motorcycle urge got a lot stronger this spring. Not just for me, but for The Mrs too. What we both wanted was not actually motorcycles specifically, but a new kind of riding that we couldn’t really do on scooters. We both wanted to expand our road wandering to a larger area and bigger roads. It isn’t that you can’t hop on a scooter and ride from here to Duluth, it’s that you can’t really do it comfortably. A motorcycle, on the other hand, is designed for exactly this kind of riding.

April 20, 2010 — It’s 7:30 a.m. My garage door groans its way open. Morning light spills into my little one-car garage. It’s about 40º out. It’s gonna be a cold ride this morning. Better get my balaclava. I walk around the back of my Vespa GT200L, my hand on the seat like I’m rounding a horse. I grab the handlebars and rock the Vespa off its center stand. Walking it backwards out of its suburban hangar, the machine all but whispers to me, “You know what? My grandfather was a fighter plane.” Key in — one click clockwise. Kill switch to On. Contact. All 21 horsepower fire to life. I rap the throttle a couple times to clear the idle jet and the Vespa grumbles happily in the crisp morning air.