OK, OK, the title is a bit click-bait-y, but for real, we need you to do something for us. We need you to come to the shop when the weather sucks. March is usually our first month back to “normal” (income), but this year’s brutal weather has just been nasty and it’s killing us. It’s March 18th, and when I woke up at 6:00 am, it was 27 degrees. Now it’s 25, and by the time we open today, it’ll be down to 23 degrees… yuck… And it’s been a gross month for rain/sleet/ice/wind, etc. SO not the best time for mopeds. We get it… Like… we really get it.

BUT because so much of what we do has to do with the weather, we really need you to come in for parts & accessory shopping/consultations/repair drop-offs, etc. NOW. Heck, this is even the best time to send us emails, Facebook DM’s, texts, and phone calls.

We need it to be AT LEAST over 40 degrees, dry, and ideally sunny before we can do a lot of our work.

• Draining Gas Tanks: This always smells nasty, puts off toxic fumes, and often with old gas has a nauseating smell of turpentine. We don’t want to stink up the shop for ourselves nor customers, and we aren’t terribly fond of the idea of dying of cancer in our 60’s. So we need to do this outside. It is the first part of our “Tune Up” service, and frankly, one of the most important parts, but it is often on hold for a day when good weather corresponds with an open workday.
• Cleaning Carbs: Also one of the first parts of the tune-up & extremely important. This also deals with the old gas AND cancerous carb cleaner… So same deal as above.
• Power Washing: It’s the first step in cleaning super gross bikes, getting bikes prepared for sale, and/or in a full detailing job. We can’t even get started with the serious micro-level cleaning until the macro-level cleaning is done. And we can’t do any of it without ok-ish weather.
• De-Rusting: We use Muriatic Acid to de-rust and deep clean quite a lot of stuff. It is super toxic on the lungs so we can’t work with it inside and use quite a bit of water to quickly rinse off the harsh chemical from vehicle surfaces… Again, this means we need to be outside & wet for extended amounts of time.
• Lots of other cleaning: Maybe not as wet nor toxic as the aforementioned services, but still anything wet and/or smelly is best to be done outside.
• Starting Bikes: We can’t start bikes inside because we can’t have a work area full of CO and/or CO2 and/or other carcinogens; Plus, we don’t want to stink up all of our new merchandise. So we can’t start bikes inside. This means no testing our work, no checking for air leaks, no troubleshooting the electrical systems, nothing until the weather is ok-ish.
• Test-riding bikes: Same deal, we can’t safely put on test miles unless the roads are clear & dry. No matter how much we bundle up, it’s kind of not safe to be blasting around in the sub-40 air. The bikes work on the correct mix of usable oxygen to usable gas. How they ride in the dense oxygen-rich frigid air does not tell us how it will run in the “normal” air during the riding season.
• Performance tuning: Again, we are tuning to the correct mix of usable oxygen to usable gas. This is even more important with bikes being pushed to 2-3X their stock speeds. It is just physically impossible to tune the carb when the oxygen in the air is “wrong.”
• Moving Bikes Outside For the Day: Pretty basic, but we are a small shop. In the good months, we come in and roll bikes out for the day to give us room to work. We can’t lock customer bikes outside when it’s constantly freezing rain and/or snow.

SO, back to the point: YOU NEED TO COME TO THE SHOP WHEN THE WEATHER IS NASTY. This time of year when we only get like one good day per week of weather that accommodates all of the stuff above, but that’s also the only day of the week that customers come in for our attention; we don’t get to do any of the stuff above.

Soon enough the weather should break, and we should be able to function “normal” (also super busy), but for now, we really need you to come in on the gross weather days when we can give you good thoughtful attention so that we can use the few breaks in the weather to get the work mentioned above completed.

Also… if your schedule only allows you to come in on good weather days, still do that… because coming out of the slow season, we need all of the business we can get. BUT if you can come on the nasty days, please do. We would really appreciate it.

Thanks!