This video was put together by some AZ vintage riders — Bill Ramsey of The Motorcycle Accessory Shop made the video, based on a technique he learned from Mark Smith. I struggle to start my old big-bore CZs, and have repeatedly ripped the buckles off my cool vintage Hi-Point MX boots. Not cool. Maybe this little trick will save my boots, until I crash and have to start it the old-fashioned way. Of course, this only works with bikes that have carburetors.

First we need to acknowledge that if a real thief wants your stuff, there’s little you can do about it. But most thefts are crimes of opportunity — someone sees your stuff, sees an opportunity, and takes it. That’s the kind of thing I want to prevent. So here are five things I’ve done to reduce my chances of losing my stuff.

We’ll start with the most obvious. I use an enclosed trailer to tow my bikes and gear. That’s a pricey step that many people don’t want to take, but I use the trailer for hauling street bikes, as well as occasionally hauling other stuff that needs to be kept out of the weather. So the $3k I spent for my 6×12 v-nose enclosed trailer was worth it to me.

Anonymity is good, so I left the exterior of my trailer blank, unadorned with stickers of any kind. There’s no indication of what’s inside. Crimes of opportunity are risk/reward evaluations by the thief. If there’s doubt about what’s inside, the reward part of the equation becomes difficult to assess and maybe they’ll go somewhere else. But if they decide to tackle my trailer I’ve put a few other obstacles in their way.

I use good-quality hitch locks and locking pins. When the trailer is hitched to the truck there are hardened locking pins to keep the hitch closed and keep the hitch in the receiver. Oh, and the ball itself is welded to the hitch (actually, it’s galled so bad you can’t break it loose with a vise and 2-foot length of pipe) so you can’t unbolt anything and get it off the truck.

When the trailer is unhitched I use a good blocking lock that prevents putting the trailer on a ball. None of these things will stop a dedicated thief, but they will slow him down. Total cost for these items was under $50.

Next I purchased a good wheel lock from Trailer Keeper. I really like this unit, as it not only locks the wheel, but covers the lug nut to make it much harder to remove. You can’t just quickly pull the wheel to disable the lock. I use this whenever the trailer is parked. Cost was about $75. So even if the thief disables the hitch locks, towing the trailer away is still a problem.

The final item I added was a security system. Again, this is a pricey item that many people may feel is too expensive. I spent about $650 to have an auto-style theft alarm installed, with it’s own battery and a pager with a 1/2-mile range. Considering I often have $10k+ of stuff in my trailer, $650 seemed a fair investment. The trailer alarm works in conjunction with my existing anti-theft system in the truck, which disables the ignition so driving the whole combination away becomes problematic.

The alarm has magnetic triggers in both the rear and side doors, as well as a motion detector. If the wires are cut, the door(s) opened, or the trailer shaken significantly the alarm goes off, and so does my pager. This is particularly helpful in hotel parking lots.

The alarm was installed by a local stereo shop that does car alarms, and they did a nice job. Again, anonymity is good, so there are no visible signs that a theft-alarm is installed. The idea here is that if a thief does get into the trailer, they won’t be expecting an alarm and will be spooked before they get too far along. And with the pager, I should be able to get there in many cases.

In total, I spent about $800 on security measures, to protect $10k+ of merchandise and give me piece of mind both at home and on the road. None of this guarantees I will never have my bikes, gear, or trailer stolen, but it does raise the odds in my favor and I sleep a lot better at night knowing I’ve done what I can to protect what’s mine.

With luck, anyone looking to hijack my stuff will see the obstacles and simply move on to something that presents an easier opportunity — maybe like your trailer???

These are real women, working on everything from Ferraris to jet airplanes.

Based on the preview photos, some of these women are no slouch in the looks department, either. I don’t know about you, but an attractive woman who can actually do something is far hotter in my book than an anorexic supermodel clothes horse. But that’s just me. Anyway, I thought this was cool and deserved a post for those of you who like real women. Check it out.

A couple of years ago I bought a 60-gallon, two-cylinder, 12 CFM compressor that was on close-out (about $350, I think) at Lowes. I had an electrician come in and wire a 220 outlet into my garage and hook it up. But I never used it. Not even once. I never even turned it on except to be sure it ran. I didn’t have any piping or anything. So, like most of my projects, it sat for a year and a half while I went on to other things.

Back in the spring I bought a spinner bike that had been in a fire. It’s a nice unit — a Lemond Revmaster — but the paint was pretty badly smoke damaged. I plan to rebuild it and I have all the parts, but I needed to paint the frame. Before I can paint I need to get the burned powder coat off. Sanding it by hand was not getting me anywhere — there are just too many nooks and crannies and odd angles. I needed a sand blaster! At least, that’s what I told myself.

So I went to Tractor Supply and bought one of their 20-gallon pressure pots for $129. It’s made by Clarke Products and is, at best, a piece of Chinese crap. But I knew that going in. Really, it’s not too bad. I mean, a metal tank is pretty much a metal tank. It’s just that the fittings and manifolds and filter/gauge are junk. The pressure gauge was actually broken on the one I bought.

So I bought a better pressure gauge at Sears ($10) and, using some Black Diamond blast media I got at Tractor Supply I tried blasting. It didn’t work at all. Clogged up immediately and wouldn’t blast a wet paper bag. I was unhappy.

So I started reading the stickers on the side and one of them said, “Use only 80-grit or finer media.” I don’t know anything about blasting grit, but it looked to me that the Black Diamond I bought was pretty coarse. It didn’t say anything about grit on the package. So I dug around on the internet and found some info that said it was probably 30-60 grit.

Aha! I thought. I need finer material. So I did more research, talked to a couple of people, and learned that I needed something called Star Blast. It’s about 100-grit, and I bought it locally at a blasting specialty shop downtown for $10/50lb bag.

I came home and tried it again. It worked better. But after a little bit the sun started to set, the temperature went down, and suddenly my blast nozzle was spluttering, spitting, and spewing water. Bad. I Looked at the cheap Chinese filter and thought it was at least part of the problem (I can’t afford an $900 chiller/dryer right now.) The next day I had to go to a plumbing supply house so I stopped by Northern Tool on the way home and bought an Ingersoll-Rand filter for $50. I put that on and tried it again.

Sure enough it worked better. But the unit still didn’t work very well. It just didn’t put out enough volume and the pressure in the tank wouldn’t stay high enough to do the job.

When I hooked it up I used a 3/8″ ID hose, because that was all I had fittings for. I had a 1/2″ ID hose, just no fittings for it. So today I went to the hardware store and bought the necessary fittings and adapters to connect the bigger hose to the unit.

Voila! It works like it should now. 30% more air volume did the trick. The compressor is big enough to keep it full, but the little hose was choking it down. Now the unit will stay at about a constant 70psi, which is enough to do a decent job of blasting. I will eventually replace the fittings with American units of better quality, and maybe look for some way to replace the manifolds — which are threaded with straight 3/8″ threads instead of tapered pipe threads, so they don’t seal well. But as a blaster it works quite well now, much faster than before. At some point I might even try upgrading to an even larger, custom-made 5/8″ ID or 3/4″ ID supply hose.

Still, blasting takes some time, and some technique. Adjusting the amount of material that comes through the hose is important for both efficiency and effectiveness. I have learned there is an art to taking off as much material as possible with each pass of the nozzle. The angle matters a lot. And it is still tedious. Even though I believe I have the unit working at full capacity now, blasting a whole frame is quite the undertaking.

It could easily take 5-6 bags of media, which is $50-$60. I don’t know of any way to recycle media when you’re blasting outside. Not to mention the mess that much media makes in the driveway. I will probably just blast all the welds and hard to reach areas, then sand and feather the flat surfaces into the blasted metal.

The Star Blast does a great job. At 100-grit it doesn’t remove much metal at all, and it leaves pretty much a primer-ready surface — not at all the rough surface you see with commercial aluminum oxide blasting. I could basically wipe it down and prime it once I’m through. That’s nice.

So the bottom line for effective blasting is you need lots of clean, dry air. Getting that in a home shop is not necessarily cheap or easy. But it makes the job a lot easier. I have some old CZ engine cases that aren’t good for much so once I finish the frame I will try blasting those to see what it does to the aluminum. I also have some broken magnesium hubs that I might try it on, too. I will post pictures of the blasted frame before I paint it.