Expensive Hobby

Lets see. In the past few days I’ve done quite a bit of shop­ping. Here’s the list:

• Pro­gres­sive rear shocks
• Rear fend­er
• Corbin sad­dle

Today I fin­ished my list by mak­ing a grand tour of the Bay Area. Unfor­tu­nate­ly I did­n’t find any­thing I liked at Road Rid­er in San Jose, but thanks to a series of very humor­ous nav­i­ga­tion­al errors Turnsignal Tim and I end­ed up in Dublin.

“Hey!” I exclaimed, “we could go check out the Arlen Ness store!”

So we went and looked at all the pret­ty bikes and I spent some time look­ing at expen­sive acces­sories. The remain­ing items on my list were a tail­light and rear turn sig­nals, and new mir­rors. The stock mir­rors on the Guzzi were fine until I put low­er, straighter bars on the bike. Since then I’ve been see­ing noth­ing but my arms in my mir­rors. I want­ed some mir­rors that were a bit low­er pro­file and on longer stems. Most of the long stems I found pushed the mir­rors up instead of out, which I don’t like quite as much.

The Arlen Ness mir­rors were a bit more expen­sive than I want­ed to spend. The mir­rors I did­n’t like at Road Rid­er ranged from $20 per pair to $30 each. Arlen Ness mir­rors start at $45 each.

On the way in, I saw the shape and pro­file of a mir­ror I liked. Nice lines, noth­ing too osten­ta­tious, not too small. They were pret­ty much what I want­ed. But at the dis­play of mir­rors, I did­n’t see the ones I thought were good. So I asked the very nice gen­tle­man at the counter if they had any­thing like “the mir­rors on the sec­ond-to-last bike in that row.”

“Scar­face” Randy will be grat­i­fied by his answer: “Oh, no. Those aren’t on the shelf. Those are the stock mir­rors on that Vic­to­ry.” I cringed when he added, “I have some in back, but those are more expen­sive than our mirrors.”

Well, OK. I’ve already proven I have more mon­ey than brains, so I want­ed to see them. One advan­tage of the Vic­to­ry mir­rors, as it turns out, is that they use a 10mm thread­ed stem, just like most Euro or Japan­ese bikes. So unlike the Arlen Ness mir­rors, I would not need an adapter to mount them onto my brack­ets. That’s a good sign, and sur­pris­ing since Vic­to­ry is cer­tain­ly not a “met­ric cruis­er” company.

So these stock mir­rors are $85. Each. I held one in my hand, and it felt sol­id and well-made. The mir­ror glass is held in with rub­ber to damp­en vibra­tions. And the stems have a deep­er bend, which keeps the pro­file low. They aren’t cheap, and part of me felt a lit­tle odd about buy­ing a stock part for anoth­er make of motor­cy­cle, but these were the mir­rors I want­ed. So after I hemmed and hawwed, the sales­man offered me a mod­est dis­count and I bought them.

I also walked out with bul­let direc­tion­al lights.

Installing the mir­rors was way eas­i­er than I antic­i­pat­ed. ‘Nuff said about that. I’m still get­ting used to the very dif­fer­ent shape of the mir­rors, but I can say two glow­ing things about them: I can see what’s behind me in my mir­rors now, and that rub­ber-mount­ed glass real­ly does damp­en the vibra­tions. Not only can I see behind me, I can see behind me more clear­ly than ever before.

So OK, not cheap. But in both sens­es of the word.

Then tonight I trawled around online and looked at hun­dreds of pic­tures of tail­light assem­blies until I found what I want­ed. Hooray for eBay, I now have a tail­light on its way. It’s very pos­si­ble that as ear­ly as next week­end I could start the project of rework­ing the Moto Guzzi’s rear end.

I went to my mail­box today too. Along with the bills and cred­it card offers and all that was the title for my Vira­go. Which I can now say is MY Vira­go. I still owe the bank some mon­ey, but I guess I’ve paid enough of it down that they fig­ure I should have the title. Not sure exact­ly what their log­ic is there, but the bot­tom line is: now I can sell it.

I won’t sell it imme­di­ate­ly, because Jolie has been rid­ing it and I like keep­ing Jolie hap­py. While she is exact­ly who that bike was designed for (she is eighty pounds lighter and six inch­es short­er than me) I think she’ll be hap­pi­er with a sporti­er bike. But she can ride the Vira­go until she picks out the bike she wants.

But now that I have the title… well, it actu­al­ly seems like an asset now. That’s a real­ly good feeling.