About a month ago, while I was doing my weekly refueling on my 15MPG F-150 something in my head just snapped. It happened when the pump stopped at $87.00 and change. Granted, this wasn't quite as high as a few years ago when I paid $97.60 to fill up, but it still stung.
My business requires me to put about 150 miles a week on the odometer. I've done all I can to re-arrange my stops and combine trips, but 150 miles is as low as I can get it. My mornings consist of visiting my accounts and "fronting up" my product and writing up what I need. Then I go to my warehouse and pick the orders. After boxing them up and writing invoices I go back and deliver.
So there I am, grumbling as the pump spits out my receipt for what is now my largest weekly overhead expense when I decided to do something I've threatened to do since moving to Texas. Buy a motorcycle.
I've owned bikes in the past, in fact I had my first mini bike at 12 and my first motorcycle (a Honda Trail 70) at 14. Street bikes came along shortly after getting my driver's license. But with the traffic and the miserable winter weather in the northeast, the luster fell off sometime in the mid 90's and I sold my last bike to a co-worker. I missed riding, but didn't miss the anxiety that come with it when riding in all that traffic.
Here I have miles and miles of open road and very little traffic. It's a biker's dream.
I found a nice bike on Craigslist up in Austin and bought it. A Honda Shadow 1100 that was adult owned and well taken care of. The only thing it needed was a new rear tire. The old one still had life in it, but it was closer than I prefer.
As I was shopping online for tires I remembered an old biker dude I ran into way back in the 80's. He had been riding since before I was born and his bike at the time was an ancient Panhead that looked as if it had thousands of road stories it could tell if only it could talk. I remembered that as I looked the old bike over, I noticed the back tire looked strange. I asked if that was a car tire on the back, and the old guy said "Yep, been usin' them since the 60's. They last forever and handle better than any cycle tire I've ever had"
So, because Google is my friend I did a search and lo and behold there is a movement out there where otherwise sane motorcycle riders are putting car tires on bikes. They call it Riding On The Dark Side. They even have an online forum, and we all know if there is a forum dedicated to it, then plenty of people must be doing it. So I read up on it then went to YouTube and watched a few video clips of guys riding on The Dark Side. I decided it was worth a try. I went to my local Wally World, purchased a Goodyear Viva, cash and carry, $82.00 out the door. About $50.00 cheaper than a mediocre bike tire and half the cost of a really good one. On average, a motorcycle tire will last about 13 to 15 thousand miles. Most guys running car tires get 25 to 30 thousand miles. Do the math and it gets real attractive in favor of the car tire.
I knew that Wally World would never want the liability of such an unorthodox notion, so I didn't even ask and took the tire and my wheel to a local tire shop to have it mounted. The Mexicans working there looked at me like I was crazy. "You want to do what Senor? We've never done that before." But they did it, and now I have a new tire on the back of the Shadow.
I got it home and put the bike back together. I rode it cautiously at first to rub off the molding release agent that new tires have on them. Once I had a few miles on it I gave 'er hell. I leaned into a few turns and scraped the pegs. It was as if the bike was on rails! I rode the tar strips and blacktop seams and the bike never wavered. At low speed, the big contact patch is fantastic. I'm really liking this and I'm glad I did it.
All this fun and since I'm doing the first half my day on the bike, I'm saving a bunch of money on gas too. 48 miles to the gallon and it's a fun way to start my day.
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