I’ve long dreamed of starting a webzine called “Oldbike” or something like that for people who own and ride motorcycles on the principle that the are fun and practical and who consequently own older, low-cosmetic-value workhorses. We could write articles about what the best value for money is for 500 to 900 hp standards from 1980 to 1995, where to get decent used parts online, how to repaint crash damage for minimum cost, what the highest capacity saddlebags are, that sort of thing. We would not obsess about any particular brand in a fetishistic way, yammer on about the nuances of the latest gimcrackery that’s pretty much the same as last year’s equally overpriced model, or insist on comparing the riding characteristics of motorcycles only of the same colour.

That isn’t quite what RatBikeZone is, but it’s the closest I’ve seen. Instead it’s a place for fed up crusty types who ride for pleasure rather than posture to bitch and whine endlessly about all those asshole Harley, BMW, and Ducati owners (in roughly that order) who seem to ride purely for the purpose of floating their nervous egos. Which, hey, is bitching and whineing I can relate to. As they say, every obscure niche culture has a home on the internet, and I guess this if fairly close to mine.

There’s something a little suspicious about the front page though. This text:

Just do the minimum to keep them healthy and Ride. Let your bike wear it’s visual history with pride. No time consuming cleaning, washing, polishing, adding shiny parts that do nothing.

flows between thumbnails of motorcycles which look as though they have been very carefully spraypainted and accessorized to look as though they are devil-may-care madmax atrocities. This smacks of some kind of niche hypocrisy. But I’m willing to look past that for now. At least they are far cheaper hypocrisies than the high-concept art-crap you see churned out for unspecified small fortunes on the Learning Channel. You could probably buy and customize 6 of these carefully prepped beaters for what it would cost to own and maintain a single late-model Harley Davidson “factory custom”. And judging by the fairly healthy discussions going on in the RatBikeZone forums, I’m reasonably confident that whoever built those display ratbikes actually rode them to the bike show.

And this comment touches my heart:

Here is a picture of my 1983 kawasaki KZ1100. I bought it 4 years ago and then it was all shiny black with a lot of chrome. The first day while I was giving it a test run the front breaks jammed and I fell on the concrete. While falling the bike slided along the pavement and spilled fuel, then it imediatly set fire cause the iron on the pavement made sparks. After I put out the fire the bike wasn’t shiny black any more but matt black, so I decided to keep it that way. Replaced the burned parts and repaired the brakes. I bought a few can’s of matt black heat resistant paint and sprayed it al over the bike. I sawed the saddle in half and made an lugage rack of an old caravanstep, and now I’m maintaining the bike at minimum cost and intend to keep it riding as long as I can.

After he put out his bike, he decided to keep it that way. And I learned something. Maybe the problem with Josephine’s matt black spray-paint “paint job” is that it isn’t heat-resistant paint. Whatever man. Whatever.