Trolling the future.

So when I tore out the trashed wood floor in my upstairs hallway(and the even more trashed linoleum under it), I found this hidden hole in the floor.

This was an old vent to allow heat from the kitchen to get upstairs before the house had steam radiators(the house was built before 1895). Now it is hidden by sheetrock in the kitchen, and was hidden by flooring in the hall.

While working on other renovation projects that needed finishing before replacing the hall floor I pondered what to do with this space. And finally, the perfect idea came to me.

Step 1) Buy teddy bear at Savers.

Step 2) Make the bear a sign.

Step 3) Put the bear and his sign in a bag.

Step 4) Stuff the bear in the weird hole in the floor.

Step 5) Install a quality hardwood floor in the hall, completely hiding the existence of the hole.

Step 6) Let some future person find the bear, and be deeply weirded out.

Given that the floor I pulled up was ~60 years old, there is good odds that I’m trolling someone who hasn’t even been born yet.

Car Show insanity

What you are looking at here is a 1958 Cadillac Eldorado body sitting on a stretched 1972 FWD Eldorado chassis, complete with 500 cubic inches of torque-monster V8 under the flip-front hood.

My favorite part was the owner/builder’s off-hand comment that he built it with “stuff I had lying around”. I envy anyone who has this much Cadillac goodness just lying around.

The first actual repair to the bike.

A prior owner had drilled out the muffler to try and improve the sound, instead it sounded like a bike with holes in the muffler. The pipe on the GS500 doesn’t take a slip-on well as it has a bend right at where the muffler mounts, and used stock exhausts started around $100 for a system with rust & dents. So fixing what I had seemed to make the most sense.

I welded a cap on the end of the muffler, drilled it out for the center pipe and welded that up too. Then it got a quick coat of high-temp paint. Looks a bit lumpy up close but not too bad, and fixed the muffler sound.

Wrapping up my present to myself.

Wrapped the bike in Matte Copper Vinyl

I had known when I bought my motorcycle, that I didn’t want a red bike. But it was too good of a deal to pass up. I wasn’t interested in painting it, because that seemed like more of a hassle than it was worth. Instead I bought a 5’x5′ piece of 3m Matte Copper vinyl, so I could try wrapping it.Wrapped the bike in Matte Copper Vinyl

It took two evenings, and was quite interesting to do. I couldn’t manage to wrap the tank in one piece, and ended up doing it in two pieces. I was amazed at how much it changed the look of the bike.

Wrapped the bike in Matte Copper Vinyl

Wrapped the bike in Matte Copper Vinyl
One unexpected part of the project, the “Suzuki” lettering on the tank had been clearcoated over at some point in the bike’s history. AS I couldn’t remove it, I wrapped right over it. This resulted in an interesting ghost effect on the tank that I quite like.

Wrapped the bike in Matte Copper Vinyl