[Motorcycling] Update 7/16 -- No Bike...

[George Fazio]

Well, Doug and I went to the Harley dealer for the event they were having on 
Sunday.  We took the bikes, but I parked in the bank parking lot because I'm 
so embarrassed about the dent in the tank.  Afterwards, we went for a pretty 
good ride.  The one road left a lot to be desired, but it was manageable.  We 
got out again for a little bit after dinner too.  The big deal for Sunday was 
riding without a jacket.  I don't know that I'll do it all the time, but I'll 
probably do it more when I'm just tooling around the town.

Anyway, about that dent, and the subject of this email.  I decided that I was 
sick of the dent because it's keeping me from going places I want to go (or 
at least I was letting it keep me).  So, I called up the place in Reading 
that told me about the body shops and asked if they'd take the tank off and 
send it over.  After work, I got home and took the bike straight over to 
them.  It was a little bit of an interesting ride being out in rush hour on 
PA-61, but I made it without any issues.

When I got there and had the service ticket written up, I asked what kind of 
turn around I could expect.  I was hoping a week or two, but it's looking 
like closer to three.  They won't get the tank off until Wednesday (they're 
closed tomorrow for a company picinic or something), and it will be Thursday 
before they get it over to the auto-body place.  The guy said the auto-body 
place usually takes about two weeks to turn stuff around.  So, I was hoping 
to have it for the weekend of 7/28, but it's looking like I won't have it 
until the weekend of 8/4 at this point.  That kind of sucks because I was 
just starting to really have fun on it.  But, I can't stand to look at that 
dent another day, so here am I waiting for it to get fixed.

It'll probably be around $250 for the repair, plus a nominal fee to take the 
tank off and put it back on.  I told him to give it a once over while it was 
in there since I've never had any servive work done on it myself yet.  So, 
the bill will probably be a little over $300 when everything is said and 
done.  Oh, and he was going to see if he could order the decals, and those 
are another $50 or so.  I told him that it was no big deal if he couldn't get 
them, but that he might as well try to order them to keep it looking factory.

So, no bike for me for a few weeks. :(  Hopefully I don't forget everything I 
just learned.  It was just bothering me so much that I had to do something 
about it now.  At least I'll have time to get some other stuff done that I 
was pushing off to get riding time in now.  That's about the only good thing 
about not having the bike for a couple weeks.

The next update will be whenever I get the bike back ... unless I feel a need 
to whine about not having a bike ... which is unlikely unless something 
unexpected comes up and it takes longer than they're estimating right now.

George