Twenty-one years on flat-six cruisers and I still misjudge my own driveway once or twice a year, and it’s always the same culprit: a phoenix palm my neighbour planted sometime in the nineties that now leans a good half-metre over the boundary and eats into the exact arc I need to bring the bike around from the street. A Valkyrie’s turning circle is not generous to begin with — low bars, a long wheelbase, and a wet weight that punishes any correction you make at walking pace. Add a trunk and a skirt of fallen fronds sitting right where the front wheel wants to track, and what should be a two-point turn into the garage becomes a stop-start shuffle with the bars locked hard over and my boot doing more of the work than I’d like at my age.
Category Archives: Garage & Workshop
Gravel to Concrete: What Changes for Two Wheels on Waiheke
The gravel stretch of my driveway on Waiheke has been rearranging itself under my boots for six winters, and it finally caught the bike out properly last July. Not a drop — just the front wheel washing sideways over loose greywacke while I walked the Valkyrie backward out of the carport, one hand on the bars, the other holding a coffee I very much did not want to lose. Three hundred and twenty-odd kilograms wet does not correct itself gracefully when the ground under it decides to behave like a riverbed instead of a driveway. That was the week I stopped treating the loose metal as a Waiheke quirk everyone just lives with, and started treating it as the thing standing between me and riding through winter at all.
Building a Hardstand on a Rural Block Outside Perth
Forty minutes out of Perth on five acres of sand and scrub, the bike used to live on a patch of levelled dirt that turned to bulldust every summer and a shallow bog for about six weeks after winter rain. Riding it out to the gate meant a rooster tail of fine sand behind the rear wheel and, more than once, a wheel spinning uselessly in a soft patch I thought was solid the day before. The hardstand I finally put in wasn’t about looking tidy — it was about having somewhere the bike, the ute and the trailer could all sit on ground that behaved the same way every day of the year.
Sizing a Shed Slab for Two Bikes and a Trailer
Every club run I organise starts the same way: my own bike, the spare I keep for the member who’s always borrowing a wet-weather loaner, and the box trailer that hauls the marquee, the first-aid kit and forty litres of fuel for the sag wagon. All three used to live in a single-bay shed in Mandurah that I built for one bike and optimistically assumed would stretch. It didn’t. The trailer tongue lived in the doorway for two years before I finally poured a slab sized for what I actually own rather than what I owned when I built the thing.
Carport Slabs and Salt Air on the Sunshine Coast
The bike I bought sight-unseen off a Sunshine Coast seller two years ago looked clean in every photo and turned out to have a fine white bloom of corrosion creeping up every exposed bolt head, a carburettor bank with pitted screws, and a chrome guard that no amount of polish was bringing back. It had lived its whole life under a carport four hundred metres from the water. I’ve since flipped six bikes through that same climate, and the carport slab itself — not just what’s parked on it — turns out to matter more than most buyers ever check.
Low Clearance and Steep Driveways: What Melbourne Riders Deal With
I came off a race bike with 140 mm of ground clearance and a fairing I didn’t much care about scraping. The flat-six has closer to 130 mm depending on load, a full underslung exhaust, and I live on one of those Melbourne inner-suburb blocks where the driveway drops off the street at an angle that would’ve been fine for a Torana in 1974 and is a genuine problem for a six-cylinder cruiser today. The header pipe found the transition on week one. It’s found it twice more since, which is the entire reason I started paying attention to driveway geometry instead of just riding over it and wincing.
Cold Starts and Frosted Driveways: A Canberra Winter Problem
Minus two on the dash and a driveway with a skin of ice on the top third of the slope — that’s a normal July morning where I keep the bike, and it’s the reason a flat-six with six carburettors and no fairing to trap heat does not want to fire cleanly before the sun’s been up for an hour. I’ve dropped a fully warmed-up bike on that same ten-metre stretch once, at walking pace, because the ice was invisible until the front wheel found it. Everything below is what changed after that.
Garage Floor Finishes That Survive Oil, Heat and a Sidestand
The slab under my bike went down in 2018. The concrete itself is fine — the problem is that the sidestand foot has parked in the same patch of floor for seven years, and it finally punched a coin-sized crater through the paint that was already there when I bought the place. Oil’s been finding that crater ever since, which is how a Saturday afternoon turned into research on garage floor finishes instead of anything more useful, with a 340 kg flat-six sitting three feet away making the point for me.