Sunday 19 January 2014

Sonny Barger's Let's Ride

I just started Sonny Barger's Let's Ride.  I have to admit, I'd never heard of him prior to picking up the book.  He's evidently quite famous for uncovering the Hell's Angels in the 1970s in the U.S..

I'm only a couple of chapters in, but he is a straight talker who doesn't come off as weirdly particular about his motorbiking.  He's as hard on Harleys as he is on European or Japanese bikes.  If you're looking for an honest, knowledgeable review of motorcycling over the last half century in North America, this will do it for you.

I just got through his description of the British and North American failure to respond to the Japanese motorcycle invasion of the early 1970s.  He pulls no punches and his insight describes the sense of superiority and apathy that was rampant in non-Japanese motorcycle companies at the time.

Barger is an American patriot at heart, even if it means he had to spend three miserable decades riding under-engineered Harley Davidsons.  I sympathize with his loyalties, but don't share them.  I appreciate how he keeps saying that my own priorities in riding may be different from his.  He offers advice without limiting your ability to express your own interests in riding.  Sonny is a big 'merican bike fan, but he understands that people come to biking from a variety of angles.

One of my earliest motorbike memories was sitting out on
this corner when I was six or seven watching a parade of
old Triumphs, Royal Enfields and Vincents power through
town.
Myself, I'm a complicated guy.  I'm a Brit who emigrated to Canada when he was eight years old and then paid off all his student loans by working in Japan.  I've been living outside of my native culture for so long I'm not even sure what it is any more.  My earliest memories are of watching old British bikes thumping down the road outside my grandparent's house in Sheringham.  

As a teen in Canada I was a giant anime nerd and loved Japanese motorcycle culture.  My dream bike was a Honda Interceptor because it reminded me of Robotech mecha.

So how do I take Sonny's advice?  With the realization that I'm getting into motorcycling from a very different direction than he did, and he seems OK with that.  I'm still finding his experience and explanations of biking to be very informative.

I'm enjoying the book so far, Sonny has a great writer's voice (especially when he goes off the deep end and gets really opinionated).  If you want a book that offers you an inside look at motorcycling, Let's Ride is an enjoyable, informative read.

Sunday 12 January 2014

More Moto-logo ideas

I did a round of name/moto themed logos, now I'm exploring some others.

I found some good fonts for this one.  Time to get a watch is a mechanical font that verges on art, very nicely done.  The other font was one included in Windows, but a nice contrast.  The mechanical sympathy concept came from a Guy Martin quote:



Wednesday 8 January 2014

Variations on a Theme

I've been playing with the idea of branding the garage.  Cafe Racer TV plays this card all the time, so why not?  I could totally pull off KingMoto, or Timoto, or I could name it after my son and go with MaxMoto!

In launching a school motorcycle club I put together some basic graphics for it and it got me creating variations (who said that time in art college was wasted?).  Here are some of them (made in photoshop):


The one for school (Centre Wellington DHS): a fairly nondescript naked bike,
I liked the idea of integrating the wheels into moto...
Dug up a pic of my grand-dad's bike for this one... 


Just swapped out text for this one, easy to do in layers on photoshop

A bit more graphics work on the Royal Enfield used in this one
With Ninja - nice to have my current bike in there.


Variation on the Ninja theme




All the fonts I used are freely available online.  The CW fonts are New Motor (the modernist font used in moto) and Rugged Ride (the tire font in the background CW). The jagged looking font in Tim Moto is My Underwood, modelled after the classic typewriter.


A tire track's a tire track, I couldn't find any bike specific ones, but this one is a nice piece of work.
Nice modernist font with a bit of motoriness in it!



Another motorbike related font I found was Yamamoto

Nice font, couldn't find a place for it but I'm keeping it on file
Even if you only have a word processor (Openoffice is a great free one), you can throw together a decent looking logo using these fonts.  If you want to get fancier with the graphics it wouldn't take you long to get handy with a graphics editor and layer in something interesting.  Finding clean side shots of motorcycles is easy on Google.  If you've never used one before, The Gimp is free and quite intuitive to use.

If any moto-inspired types are interested in messing around with logos contact me through Twitter or Google+.  I'd be happy to cobble something together for you.

Sunday 5 January 2014

North American International Motorcycle Show

Hey NAIMS, you coulda had my wife there... a master's degree,
great job, but you're not appealing to her demographic...
My son and I went down on Friday morning in -25°C  temperatures for our first ever motorcycle show at the International Centre in Mississauga.  My wife didn't come because the advertising on the website (which also had a complete lack of social media) put her off.  I suspect you'll get a better class of customer with more in their pocket if you appeal to educated women interested in the sport.  I'm not sure who you cater to with the twinkies, but I suspect they aren't great customers.  You'd also bring in many more younger riders (I think the average age at the show was about 50) if you embraced social media.


Old white guys & twinkies, it's a weird,
backwards, and kinda creepy
dynamic, time to change it up
Since it was my first time at a show like this I was a bit worried that I was bringing my son to a de-tuned strip club, but I was pleasantly surprised.  There were a few other families there and the crowd represented a typical Canadian cross section.  With the bike clubs on hand, the variety of bikes on show and the various supporting retailers, this wasn't a biker bar scene at all - it's a shame that the advertising doesn't show this for what it is.

There were little herds of Harley aficionados trying too hard in their leathers and badges, but they were a minority.  On our way in from the parking lot an older fellow we were walking in with gave us a discount coupon, and the people in the show were encouraging, accessible and not at all snobby (which is nice when you're a n00b).

We spent the better part of four hours walking around and missed an entire hall.  The amount of material was prolific, from the gear to the bikes themselves.  Two brands really stood out for me and the others were generally a disappointment.


You'd normally be hard pressed to get me interested in a
Harley, but they make it easy to like them, and what a
good looking bike!
I'm the furthest thing from a Harley Fan, but Harley Davidson Canada put on a great show.  They took a good chunk of floor space, had a lot of room to try out bikes and were more than willing to focus on developing a relationship with their customers rather than leaving it to dealers who are only interested in moving units.

Having dealers take care of your brand loyalty is like have the tigers at the zoo do the job of the zookeepers.  If they can drum up any customer relationship building at all they're only pretending, all they really want to do is feed themselves a sale.

I ended up throwing a leg over a bunch of Harleys and I'm much more curious now than I was before, well done HD.

Shows like NAIMS are an ideal opportunity for manufacturers to develop a relationship with their customers, and I was surprised that so few did.  I want to be a Triumph fan, I'm from the UK, I love their bikes from a design point of view, but they were only there through a local dealer who parked the bikes so close together that it was impossible to sit on many of them (which was no doubt the idea).  The special 'deal' on Triumph t-shirts had them on 'sale' for $60... for a t-shirt.  Between the inaccessible bikes, the over-priced merch and the dealers rolling their eyes whenever your kid wants to try and sit on a bike, we didn't spend much time in Triumph land.

After the show I'm reconsidering how and why I might become attached to a specific make, or even whether I should (though motorcycling seems particularly intense in its tribal approach to brand).


Beautiful naked bike, the Z1000... it's got me
thinking...
Another manufacturer who didn't take my loyalty for granted was Kawasaki.  My first bike was supposed to be a Honda or a Suzuki and it ended up being a Ninja. It's been a great first bike and the KLR has long been on my mind as an alternate/multi-purpose bike (though the insurance chat later is making that unlikely).  Kawasaki has been good to me so far, and the show only made me more of a fan.

Like Harley, Kawasaki showed up instead of only being there through dealers.  The reps they had on hand were friendly, helpful and approachable.  The bikes were displayed in a way that encouraged you to try them out, and Kawi also brought the bling (which I immediately put up in the garage).  

Kawasaki was never on my bike lust list when I was younger (I was all about Interceptors and Gixers), but as an adult buyer they have my attention.  Well done Kawasaki!

The rest of the bike show was a whirlwind of gear and meet and greets.  Two Wheel Motorsport was there, and I had a quick chat with my motorcycle course instructor (while getting a great deal on a Bell Helmet for my son - I'm all about Bell helmets since seeing Rush).

I had a chat with Riders Plus Insurance.  They insured me in my first year of riding and were helpful and efficient.  This time round I was curious about how insuring multiple bikes work.  They told me that buying a second bike means you're doubling your insurance payments.  This doesn't make a lot of sense to me as I can only ride one bike at a time.  I expected something like you're insured at the rate of whatever the highest cost bike is plus 10% for the paperwork on the other bike.  What I was told was that you get a 10% discount on your second bike and pay another full set of insurance on it... which makes owning multiple bikes not really financially viable, so that dream goes down the toilet.


I was looking for Motorcycle Mojo as we wandered about since I've been emailing with the publisher, but couldn't find them!  This show really is huge.  But I did find The Widow's Sons.  After a round of secret handshakes I got some contact information.  A number of guys in my lodge have bikes but don't ride with others.  I'm wondering if I can start a local chapter, or perhaps join the Grand River Chapter.

My son and I both really enjoyed the show.  It let us throw our legs over a lot of bikes and talk with a wide variety of people in the sport.  It was a wonderful thing to get excited about riding again even as the temperature outside turned truly arctic.  Kawasaki & Harley both get nods as my favourite manufacturers of the show.  Their stand up showing has me questioning brand loyalty based on some weird sense of belonging rather than a manufacturer's interest in genuinely developing a relationship with their customer.  As a new rider I'm looking to be wooed.  Harley & Kawi both did some quality wooing.

My suggestion?  Get yourself out to the North American Motorcycle Show and bring your family along, they'll have a great time and maybe even get a sense of why you love riding like you do.  

I hope the show will reconsider the marketing angle and get away from the twinkie/biker thing on the website and embrace social media next year.  If they do, maybe I can convince my wife to come along with us.

Some pictures from the show.

Wednesday 1 January 2014

One Bike To Rule Them All!

I think I need 3 bikes, a road bike, an off road/scrappy bike and a touring bike that lets me 2 up easily.  The wee garage would easily swallow this stable.  The Ninja was $3500.  I think I could cover the other two for $4500.  Keeping the bike stable at half what our cheapest car cost seems reasonable.






The Ninja is the sport bike... $3500








This Kawasaki Concourse was $2500 in the summer.  With a pillion seat-back it would make a great long distance shared riding bike.









If I could pick up a good dual purpose bike for under $2000, I'd be able to fill out the stable for about $8000 (£5000).  This KLR fits the bill, though I'd be longing to paint it (not a problem).





Unless I can find a way to throw legs over as many bikes as I can, I can't see another way to get an idea of how various bikes ride.  Finding a bike that does everything is a fool's errand.  Bikes that claim to do this are a series of compromises.  The key to riding a variety of styles is to ride a variety of bikes.

The first bike that would suffer in a diversified garage would be the somewhat sensible all round Ninja.  In its place I'd be looking for a naked streefighter... a Triumph Speed Triple would be on my short list.


Motorbike show NOTE:  I had a chat with Riders Plus Insurance.  They insured me in my first year of riding and were helpful and efficient.  This time round I was curious about how insuring multiple bikes work.  They told me that buying a second bike means you're doubling your insurance payments.  This doesn't make a lot of sense to me as I can only ride one bike at a time.  I expected something like you're insured at the rate of whatever the highest cost bike is plus 10% for the paperwork on the other bike.  What I was told was that you get a 10% discount on your second bike and pay another full set of insurance on it... which makes owning multiple bikes not really financially viable, so that dream goes down the toilet.