Rhode Island for the weekend

This past weekend, Leigh Anne and I headed back to good old Rhode Island for our great friends' Dave and Ashley's wedding. After the ceremony, we decided to do a Slatch haus reunion photo with Ashley in the photo. Dave, the one with the red beard, was ecstatic all day and I'm pretty sure I've never seen him this happy.

The Slatch Haus was the house we lived in during our later years of college and into our first years of 'professional' life. It was a brand new house in a really nice neighborhood when we moved in and by the time we moved out, it was a house with the wood floors ruined, cabinets ripped off the walls and holes in the sheetrock throughout in a worse off than before neighborhood. Its very rare that you can take a picture like this and realize all of us look better NOW than we did back then. Probably due to all the excess drinking and hotdog eating back then.

One day, Jon B will open up the slatch.com archives to make the coffee table book that should have existed 5 years ago.

food and cooking

Williams-Sonoma never lets me down. This time, they are offering a great price on an Ebelskiver Pan and these gorgeous Ebelskiver flipping tools shown above. They are really just a Danish/Swedish take on chopsticks, but look at the form and shape of them.

So.....what is an Ebelskiver, its a small round pancake that you can either fill with fruit or chocolate chips or just leave as pancake batter. you use the pan above, flip them over when they are half done and eat them when the batter in the middle is 'barely' cooked. and I've already been corrected by Mr. Frank Hermansen that WS spells the word wrong and that the english language is clearly missing the AE looking letter in our alphabet.

super fun and potentially in my garage

Today I got to ride this awesome 1989 Honda Hawk that belongs to one of my buddies at work, Matias. This thing is really fun. Super fast, really nimble, handles like a champ and is smoooooth. The single sided swingarm is really rad.

They look good together, don't ya think.

Well, if he ever needs a new home for his bike, I've already volunteered to hold onto it. Of course, it would probably get a new paint job and a slightly larger laced wheels, and maybe a cafe style seat and then some clip on bars, but I'll tell you what, sport bikes are fun.

after 45 miles on my commute this morning...

...I can say that having even 1/2" of travel on a swingarm is WAAAY more comfy than running the struts.....I thought it felt the same on super familiar roads near my house, but man, a few doozies on the 5 north today and my back feels like someone put it in a compression chamber, not to mention the weird pain shooting down my right leg to my foot....

anyone got any 10" shocks laying around?

with an actual rigid frame, you have the room to put in seat springs which can even make a slight difference while the frame's geometry will also have a slight bit of 'give' but you can't run springs under a solo seat on a stock frame with struts. it just don't look right.

Snowboard Videos

...are one of the things I miss about my last job. Right about now, my mail box at the office would be filling up with this year's offerings from the snow heavens in order to keep my stoke lit up in SoCal. There's nothing like getting a new video, grabbing some beers and the bros and a few ladies and watching a new video with a small little screening in the conference room after hours (or sometimes during the middle of the day).

SO......if any of you out there have some extra copies of the new videos, feel free to 'donate' them to the Videos for LandMan fundraiser and you can even use this handy address:

137 Valencia Drive

Vista, CA 92083

anyone who actually sends one will be rewarded with a nice free gift back. of my choosing.

2 days in the garage

it was a very productive weekend in Vista. Nice to finally have a few days to work on the new bike. (well new as in I've had it for one week and its a 2001). A few tools that I swear have legs of there own, some phone calls to friends who have the answers, a saturday delivery package, removing bits and pieces and eventually everything, rewiring a new tailight and getting rid of emissions BS and I'm back on the road....

This is what I started with when I woke up Saturday morning. I had already changed out the bars it came with to some Biltwell Chumps that were cut down suuuuper narrow. Also I had pulled all the switches off the bars as well at this point.

and here's the same bike but with the following changes on Sunday at around 2PM:

Biltwell Risers in Cast Stainless

Biltwell Window Bars in Chrome

Biltwell Seat - Black Tuck n' Roll

Stock 2.2 Gallon tank from 1991 Sportster

Stock Black Fender chopped courtesy of Chris Brown

Sparto Tail light and license plate holder.

and of course my patented mess of wires until I rewire the starter and hi/low beam switches.

I still wasn't fully stoked on the stance, and most of that is due to the 12" shocks with the stock style fender. They just leave way too much of a gap between the tire and the fender. Even though this bike already has the 1" lowering kit on the rear of the swingarm that moves the shock mount bolts back, it still looked too high.

And here's where we're at after getting home from the first shakedown run to Encinitas and back.

A nice little stop to Chris's house turned into a few hours of just pulling shit out of this bike, like breather cables, stock petcock, and then replacing the stock 12" shocks with some Biltwell 10" struts and I was headed back home. I always swore against struts on a swingarm bike, but after riding 15 miles they honestly feel just like my old 10" skullman shocks that I was running on my previous bike.

Things to do next:

Biltwell Pipe Kit to make some sweet custom pipes

New Skullman or Licks 10" shocks

Order a West Eagle Thin Long solo seat pan - I miss that seat.

Mount the double stripe whitewall Dunlop tire I scored at the swap meet for 20 bucks.

Frisco Mount the tank like it was on the other sportster potentially

Rewire and move switches and ignition

Remove the riveted points cover and replace with Bench Mark cover.

chrome shoes - midway

got hooked up with a pair of these during Interbike. great comfy shoes with a little bit of cycling thought put into them from a brand that 'gets it'. The coolest feature of these shoes is the reinforced fiberglass shank in the midsole that helps the sneakers feel more like a cycling shoe when riding. they still flex from the ball of your foot forward, but they don't flop and flex under your feet while pedaling.

From the Chrome website:

We fused our tough cordura with durable suede to create a style that is uniquely Chrome with a toughness we could rely on. Like our bags, we make them with the most industrial materials we could find and build them to last.

• Made of our Weatherproof 1,000 denier Cordura and Grey Suede with back-padding
• 100% vulcanized construction
• Low profile design to better fit into a toe cage
• Re-enforced nylon/glass fiber shank to support the midsole
• Board lasted sole to eliminate pedal hot spot
• Skid resistant contact rubber on the sole
• Polyurethane contoured crash pad insole
• Durable rubber heel cup with reflective safety hit
• Lace garage so laces don’t get caught in your chain
• Steel anglets to keep laces from fraying