The Ryetronics 2strokebuzz Cold Weather Challenge is underway! Enter early and get your name up on the winner board before the damned Minnesotans run away with it again. Right now, the only place it’s under 10°F is Yellowstone Park, so if you’re near there, you’ve got a lock.
Category: Lifestyle
Armadillo Scooterwear comes to U.S.
British company Armadillo Scooterwear is officially coming to America for 2009. Here’s a thorough review of their scooter parka by Lostmycage from Modern Buddy.
No parking? No problem
A british motorcyclist paints his own motorcycle parking space. Awesome. (Via Honky Tonk Dragon)
55 liters of fun
A new 55-liter Givi topcase fits two helmets, or 27.5 2-liter bottles of RC Cola (note: soda must be removed from bottles first). Those are Givi X.01 helmets, by the way, which have an interchangeable/removable chinguard, and I can’t see if the chinguard is in place or not, but even two 3/4 helmets is a lot. Givi has some cool-looking helmets, though not much in the full-face category. No matter, from now on we’ll post anything we see about Givi as an excuse to post Randy DePuniet photos.
New Dates: High Rollers and Ride to Work
Orin kindly reminds us all that the mega-huge 10th-anniversary Las Vegas High Rollers rally, which is usually held on Presidents’ Day weekend, is in March next year (March 19-23, 2009). Ride to Work Day, which is usually in July, will be held on June 15 in 2009. It’s also been renamed “International Motorcycle and Scooter Ride to Work Day”. Neat to see “scooter” officially added to the increasingly cluttered logo (did anyone actually feel excluded that it wasn’t before?). Also note that “International” is now used in the “International Male” sense, rather than the geographic sense.
Yoshimura scooter exhausts
If NCY and LeoVince pipes aren’t enough to impress your lame sportbike-riding friends, slap a new Yoshimura exhaust on your Zuma or T-Max. Or just enjoy your scooter and stop worrying that Pops Yoshimura is laughing at you from the grave.
Cold Weather Challenge
WINNERS:
- Bob Hedstrom: -16°F, 10.1 mi
1/15/09, Minneapolis, MN, 2007 Vectrix
… I’d been riding a Vectrix a lot during the past summer and always trying to test its limits. I really wanted to see what extreme cold would do to battery performance.
After checking the temperature at 10:45 am and it was still hanging in at -19. Time to ride. The Vectrix has a lot of torque and even the bare looking portions of the streets had a bit of slip to them. I had to be very careful but kept it upright the whole time. I outriggered my boots in all turns… Map - Tom S.: -11°F, 11 mi
1/15/09, Omaha, NE, 2008 Yamaha Zuma
Commuting in my Jeep is not a whole lot different from being on my Zuma at these temps so I bundled up extra good and headed to work on the Zuma of Doom! 90mpg is always better than 12mpg!… It’s getting cold enuff to where I’m ALMOST ready to give it to the Minnesotans… NOT IN A MILLION YEARS!!! haha! - Colin Doyle: -10°F, 14.1 mi
12/15, Collegeville, MN, Honda Ruckus 50
Video! - Luigi G.: -7°F, 10.1 mi
1/16/09, Dover MA, 1970 Vespa GTr
I had to do the run early in the night instead of just before sunup as I needed to get finished packing for the long ride to the FYBO rally… (epic report in comments below) - Stefan: -6°F, 10.3 mi
1/16/09, Cleveland, OH, 1980 Vespa P200
Old lady was driving me into work…I see the temp at Walgreens was -12°, and i’m all like “it’s on!.” get to the shop, fire up the “mf’n juggernaut beotch p-deuce”, map out a nice 2.5 mile loop, and run it 4 times.…Is it true the runner up prize is a 3 second pull on a bottle of malort with an old style chaser?
Chocolate Papalardo
Chocolate Skateboards’ Anthony Papalardo model. Usually deck designs come and go too fast (I can’t even find online images of the several scooter-related decks that come to mind), but I think I’ve seen this one around for a while, pick one up before it’s gone! (Thanks M5 and Myk)
CWC+2SB=AFU
Tonight I planned to post the Cold Weather Challenge sign-up page and unveil some new stuff for sale at Scootmoto. Tonight I ended up botching a WordPress upgrade, then locked myself out of the 2SB admin page, completely destroyed the site, and took three hours to fix it. I think it’s almost back to normal now, let me know if you see anything weird. For the last two hours I was pretty sure I’d killed the site for good, so just seeing it load is making me very happy. Maybe the Cold Weather Challenge will start tomorrow night. Sorry, Ryan. In the meantime, here’s the Cold Weather Challenge theme song (right click to download).
Cold Weather, Challenged
Well, the 2008-09 Cold Weather Challenge is officially underway. We came, we saw, we ate kimchi, we froze. It actually snowed a little. Above, a picture of Ron checking out computerized toilets at Super H-Mart. More photos in the 2sb Gallery. Eric posted some photos on Flickr and a video on his site, featuring crazy dancing asian man, which I thought was just a cold-induced hallucination. Thanks for coming, everyone, I’ll have the rules and entry form posted here on 2sb within a couple days, start watching the thermometer and your speedometer. I just made that up.