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I've decided to fullfil my role in life as the typical male - lots of fast and loud toys. Here's my proud collection of things to show off. As soon as I can borrow a digital camera, there'll be some pictures here. Lemme see, where do I start.... Motorcycles My ticket to temporary citizen ship. Have owned a number of bikes over the years, but seem to end up gravitating back to Hondas for some reason. Most of my motorcycle-specific waffling has now moved into it's own separate area with stories, ride reports etc. Getting bored at work one day, and motivated by a collection of WAR posts, I started a little collection of bikes done in ASCII Art. One of those interesting little diversions. Cars Ah yes... my beloved Falcon (sold when I left Perth to head to the UK for work). "It doesn't happen overnight, but it will happen". Looks good, goes slow. Insurance company and depth of my pockets are preventing me from doing any more work to the car just now. I haven't really done much to the car except keep it feed and watered. My car has been terribly abused in its time. I used to work a block away from a mate when I lived in Sydney. From home to work to home was around 140Km each day, so I tended to get bored in the car. I took the back streets. However, I was very choosy in what I took. Lots of corners, some nice hills to get some air over, and of course minimal number of traffic lights. When my I saw my mate on the road, it became a drag race (he owned a convertible VW Beetle with wide tyres on it). As I entered the car-park at work, the smell of burning brake pads and rubber was quite intense. Lucky for some nice sticky tyres (Falken 410s) to help get round corners quicker... So why am I boring you with a plain old looking car. Never judge a book by its cover they say. Its what's inside that counts. I never get bored listening to music so I have a wee stereo system worth about A$7,000 to keep my mind off...errrr...on the road. Or at least it gives everyone within 3 blocks enough notice that I'm coming. Obviously, dance and speed garage techno music are my favourites when in the car. No point having a decent noise maker unless it is rattling the mirrors, the seats, the doors, your teeth and everything else. The Shed Ever seen Home Improvement? Well I make Tim The Toolman Taylor look like an amateur :) There's enough gear in here to rebuild a car (or a glider!) from the ground up. In fact, I do it quite regularly. I don't ask for anything when I work because I just love playing with this sort of stuff. For a bottle of Jack Daniels or a case of beer I'll fix almost anything. A good percentage of the work car park has had some form of contact with my shed. Mainly this is in the form of cutting out rust and fixing dings and scratches. Occasionally some more mechanical things like head gaskets and other engine work is also performed. About the only thing I haven't done is a complete engine rebuild and I'm sure that will happen sooner rather than later (I've already worked on 2-stroke motorcycle engines quite a lot). The list of bikes or bits that have wandered through my shed are: RD350LC (complete respray) FJ1200 tank - very badly dinted ZZR250 - all the fairings broken after a prang 906 Paso panels. Had to rebuild a heap of bits that were non-existant. KR-1S x 3 (various resprays and rebuilds. And no, they weren't all my own bike) YZF600 Front guard FZR600 - various scratches after a slide down the road. One of the things I like to do is teach others about things I know a lot about. I've run quite a few informal courses for the WAR group in Perth and Wetleather in Seattle. The first was panel work. This included fibreglassing, body filler, sanding and spray painting. The second course was in suspension setup. A most excellent day with 14 riders all learning what the various bits of suspension settings do to a bike. The biggest course I ran had about 40 people turn up to learn how to adjust their own suspsension.