Geezer with a Grudge: Getting Tricky with a V-Strom

May 16, 2013

Getting Tricky with a V-Strom

The project bike after installment #1.

The folks at RideApart.com have started an interesting project, creating a better-than-the-Adventure-V-Strom for less than the additional $1500 Suzuki tacks on for the Adventure model. With a function-based goalpost, one of the usual bullshit "improvements" dumbass motorcycle magazines usually start with died out of the gate: "So we had no intention of throwing an exhaust system on this thing that would blow a grand of the budget to liberate 1.37 horsepower."

Suddenly, I have become a huge fan of RideApart.com. The last two issues of Motorcyclist and Motorcycle Consumer News have pissed me off with their insistence on making noise as a delusion of speed and power that I am tossing their subscription letters into the trash without bothering to look at what they are offering.
.
They started with the undeniably best and most indispensable "upgrade" a motorcycle can get, a center-stand, and progressed to a bashplate (also indispensable off-road) and a chain-oiler (we can argue about that one). With only $600 of their $1500 budget spent, this looks like one of the best upgrade articles ever. Apparently, having a budget is the key to spending money intelligently.Who knew?

No comments:

The Geezer Story

I stumbled upon this column name (Geezer with a Grudge) almost 20 years ago, in 1999. The first Minnesota Motorcycle Monthly editor I worked with, in late 1999, complained that the magazine was getting no mail and the editors wanted to know if any readers were still out there. I fired off a sarcastic note, as a joke, intended to provide a little humor and some feedback. He published it as an article and later called me to say he'd received more mail on that letter than he'd received in the past year! I followed that with an offer to write a monthly column attempting to piss off a particular section of the magazine's readership to see if that tactic would generate some mail.

It did, probably more regularly than the magazine wanted at times, and I wrote a monthly column for MMM until the magazine died in 2018.

I plan to post an occasional old Geezer article into the blog, followed by short comments about the current status of my perspective on our activity/sport/vehicle of choice.